Georgia Conflict is

"death and ruin for multitudes who have nothing to do with the violent aggression of corrupt elites on every side." From here.

via cursor.

Wikipedia wars: Herzog, Dokdo and Israel

Here's an interesting page on wiki wars. Note the entry on Herzog:

Werner Herzog

Born in Germany, supposedly of a German mother and a Yugoslavian father, and raised in Bavaria, Germany. Does that make Herzog: a) Croatian or b) Serbian? How about the fact that the relatives live in Bosnia-Herzegovina? Use edit summaries to publish interviews that you conducted — or heard rumors about. Mirrors and forks are great sources too. After consulting a printed source, it turns out that it was the mother who was from Croatia. Ouch.

Ouch indeed!

Here's the list of wars on wikipedia (that happened in the real world not on wikipedia.) I love lists.

And here's a real war being waged on wikipedia by some right-winger Israel Nationalists.

Operation Paperclip and The V-2 Rocket: The Spoils of War

I was never aware before of Operation Paperclip, the US operation to collect Nazi scientists for own use. I was never a good student of history, but I just can't believe I never heard of this, or I hadn't retained it if I had. This is from the V-2 article:

The V-2 rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2) was the first ballistic missile and first man-made object to achieve sub-orbital spaceflight,[3] the progenitor of all modern rockets and a direct precursor of the Saturn V moon rocket. Over 3,000 V-2s were launched as military rockets by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets in World War II. As many as 20,000 slave labourers died constructing V-2s compared to the 7,000 military personnel and civilians that died from the V-2's use in combat.[4]

It makes little sense to put Hitler in a class of his own when we have benefited so much by what he started. Just the sound of the last sentence is bloodcurdling, consciously or not, there's a disturbing chord in the tone of the writing: Well, despite the deaths of so many "slave labourers" there was a "gain" of 7,000 enemies killed. Yes the enemy in this case was the Allied Forces; but nonetheless the V-2 showed great promise as a killing device.

I know I'm reading too much into a wikipedia article. And I know that the technological advances of Germans were mutually sought out by the Soviets because we had to keep pace with one another. There's something about the idea of reaping benefits from the most vicious of legacies ever that is so...despairing. But maybe I've watched too much Star Trek; maybe it's my naïveté. It would be better if I looked at the continuum of human history as one giant war. There has never been peace, and there may never be peace. As I write these words people are dying, have been dying, will be. Satellites are been shot up and out of space. The US corporate-military structure is building up its arsenal for the next wars with the world. It will never stop in my lifetime.

The Economics of Robot Warfare

Why are they building robots to carry away troops? Doesn't this put the entire genre of Science Fiction to shame? Robots are supposed to fight our wars...or does that put a limit on the political value of war? I have always been a fan of robot wars, and I always predicated my fandom on the idea that the future would be nothing but a robotic holocaust. But now I guess we have to wait for robots to develop feelings and genitals so that we have a real attachment to them and that way they would be worth sacrificing to a "political" cause, whether it be the so-called spreading of "democracy", or a strategic land and oil grab. (Need I say it?) Are we afraid of creating mindless killing machines? (I didn't think so.)

As a former scoutmaster explained to my scout troop the scout meeting before a skeet shoot, every time a man is wounded in combat, we lose a total of three soldiers because two men have to haul the bleeder back. So if you take the total number of wounded in the current Iraq conflict, officially 23,000, you can times that number by 3 for effective loses. I know my estimate doesn't equate to actual loses in soldiers because after the men haul the bleeder back they probably quickly or somewhat quickly return to the front, depending on the situation. But even if my estimate is wildly off, economically, you can see that it is probably more efficient to build a robot that hauls troops rather than one that kills them. First of all, any soldier that goes down the other soldiers can leave for dead. No interruption, just pure fighting--that increases the efficiency of the total fighting force at any one time by what, say 150%? (I'm just an English teacher, I have no idea.) Second, a robot-killing machine would have to be taken care of by robot-repairers, so there you go, the same old problem. Of course, if a robot has an arm blown off, it can still go on. Unless it has the aforementioned feelings and genitals, then it may feel real pain and unable to go on and eventually have to be rebooted in the robot mental ward.

So, you see, those military guys really know what they're doing.