Paul Raven @ 12-08-2008
When I first heard the news about Russia’s invasion of Georgia last Friday (not coincidentally via Twitter rather than the mainstream media), my immediate thought was “well, you timed that neatly, didn’t you?”
I then shrugged it off as paranoid cynicism on my part, but it appears I’m not alone in suspecting that Russia quite deliberately waited until the world was busy watching the Olympic Games before launching their strike on Georgia. [Via Sentient Developments]
And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems - after all, DDoS cyberwarfare is part of the military game-plan now, so why not use current events to enhance the fog of war a little bit?
Listening to this morning’s typically vapid radio news bulletins here in the UK (fifteen seconds on Georgia, two minutes on the Olympics, two minutes on soccer) it appears to be a pretty effective tactic, albeit one that exploits our natural tendency to ignore bad news unless we feel it affects us directly.
The only remotely pleasant side to this line of thought is the possibility that one day wars will be fought entirely through media channels, obviating the need for the death and displacement of thousands of innocent people. Yeah, so I’m a dreamer. Sue me. [image from Wikimedia Commons]
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Paul Raven @ 02-01-2008
Jamais Cascio has been having some unsettling thoughts about the potential of geoengineering technologies to provide nation-states with subtle yet powerful alternatives to conventional warfare:
“Geoengineering as a military strategy would appear to offer a variety of benefits. Research can be done out in the open, taking advantage of civilian work on anti-global warming geoengineering ideas. If my argument that nuclear weapons and open-source warfare have made conventional warfare essentially obsolete is correct, climate-based warfare would offer an alternative non-nuclear weapon, one that would be out of the reach of non-state actors. And the more we learn about how human activities alter the climate — in order to alter those activities — the more options might open up for intentionally harmful manipulation.”
Yikes. How’s that for taking the edge off your new year optimism, eh? 
Still, it strengthens my theory that nation-states are a root cause of a lot of the challenges we face. Call me a hippie if you will, but isn’t it high time we got over this arbitrary geographical factionalism and realised we’re all in the same boat? [Image by Cikaga Jamie]
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Paul Raven @ 26-11-2007
Biological warfare would appear to be a much older idea than we thought. New translations of ancient Middle Eastern texts suggest the Hittites had hit upon the idea of weakening their enemies with diseases by sending them rams “cursed” with a bacterial infection called tularemia - over 3 millennia ago. Tularemia is still a potentially lethal agent today … whether or not a sheep would be a successful delivery system in our modern age is an unknown quantity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were parts of the world where it could still be very effective. [Image by Dave-F]
On a lighter note, I can’t help but be reminded of the Sheep Cannon from the hilarious and addictive Worms computer games.
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