Tag Archives: war

Blog

South Ossetia: tell me what to think

11 Comments

I admit it: I hadn’t heard of South Ossetia before the events of the 7th August. Like so many things I was previously ignorant of as soon as it makes the front pages suddenly everyone has an opinion.

I am curious though: is anyone in the right here? Is it an act of foolish aggression, as the Foreign Secretary is saying, or is it the result of a strategic mistake on the part of Georgia? Any ideas?

The War Nerd is as callously insensitive as ever, but suggests that Georgia started it:

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty of the video clips that have already come out of this war. I’m in heaven right now.

On the other hand, David Miliband, UK Foreign Secretary is saying that the Georgians were provoked:

Since the early 1990s the frozen conflicts of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have been the subject of international mediation aimed at peaceful resolution. In the first week of August South Ossetian provocation prompted a Georgian military response.

So who do you trust to be correct – a shady Internet personality, or a high-ranking British politician?

[The Exiled analysis via Ken MacLeod]

Blog

Testing Drugs on Troubled Veterans

rxSounds like science fiction, or maybe soon-to-be-an-episode-of Law ‘n’ Order.

Somebody’s thinking went like this: Let’s test Chantix, a stop-smoking drug with possible side effects that include suicide and “neuropsychiatric behavior,” on Iraq war vets already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. What could possibly go wrong? Former US Army sniper James Elliott “snapped” months after he began taking the drug for $30 a month, left home with a loaded gun, and was stopped by police responding to a 911 call before he could do any harm.

It wasn’t until three weeks later that the Veterans Administration advised the veterans in the Chantix study that the drug may cause serious side effects, including “anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide.”

[Image: Mike Licht]

Blog

Virtual reality and PTSD

virtual reality tape One of the little-recognized horrors from the Vietnam War was the amount of soldiers coming back from duty, only to be unable to reintegrate properly back into society, often leading to drug use and homelessness (at least, this is the stereotype I’ve grown up with – it may or may not be true).  As a child, there were always rumors of someone-or-other’s father or uncle or who was a vet and would jump at loud noises and always checked their surroundings for ambushes.  Of course, we also believed that the woods nearby was a secret testing ground for mutant animals, but hey – we were kids.

Now, in a bid to prevent this from happening to returning Iraq veterans, the US Department of Defense is attempting to treat Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with virtual reality as one of the main components.  The treatment is called “prolonged-exposure therapy,” meant to help people deal with traumatic memories by exposing soldiers to an environment similar to what they experienced in Iraq, but without people actually trying to kill them.  The details in the article explain it better than I can.  It’s not the first time this has been tried, but computing power is better now, and results seem promising. 

(photo via entro_py)

Blog

The real-life "Mad Max" will be about water

10 Comments

The original “Mad Max” was about a post-nuclear war Australia, where the war had been caused by countries vying for dwindling oil supplies. But what if the same could happen, only the precious substance was water? Many people seem to think so, and the number’s growing. The largest-growing area of the US is the Southwest, the area with precisely the least amount of water to go around, though by far not the only region of the country with water problems.

The kicker is that, unlike carbon emissions, if one person conserves x amount of water, and another person on the other side of the world uses a surplus of x amount of water, it doesn’t even out. If I in Japan – a country with a high amount of rainfall – conserve water, it doesn’t do an Australian sheep farmer a lick of good. They say all politics is local, and water usage is the same. It’s up to each local to use its supply wisely. Some people have said that Darfur, if not the Rwandan genocide, was the first of the 21st century water wars. We’ll see if it turns out that way.

(photo via brtsergio)

Blog

India Plans Robotic Military

2 Comments

The armed forces of the world, as ever, are dead set on using technology to gain an edge on the battlefield. Hence the Indian Prime Minister’s announcement that his country is starting a program to develop “cutting edge technology weapons in sensors, robotics, propulsion systems, stealth and fighting wars through use of remote technology”. I guess anything that means less people have to die is OK by me.