I briefly touched on South Sudan’s new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there’s been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud?…
Read More Pyramid schemes in DarfurThis story from Rajiv Chandrasekharan about two rival approaches to sorting out Kandahar’s electricity supply is informative, but not just about its apparent topic. Basically, the US Army wants to go for a quick fix, installing a lot of mobile generators and trucking in the diesel fuel, in order to get the lights on as…
Read More it’s called “power” for a reasonJamie Kenny mentions Thailand’s “black clads”. Who they? Reuters has an excellent article that gets into this question. WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE MEN IN BLACK? Witnesses and grainy video footage revealed armed men with assault rifles and M-79 grenade launchers appeared under cover of darkness on April 10 during a heated standoff between…
Read More they’re protecting us, but we don’t know who they areThere’s a new strategy blog about, this time a French one. They have an interesting discussion about the suggestion/rumour/story that Hezbollah might be trying to acquire Scud missiles. They’re dubious about it, although open to the suggestion that the organisation might be developing its own inter-service politics, with the big rocket people perhaps constituting the…
Read More French bloggers, Scud missiles, etcSo you might remember that Thai demonstrators invaded the brand-new airport there a while ago, establishing a huge Ballardian protest-camp among the glass walls and retail space and soft-xray terrorist detectors. Their movement went on to spray the prime minister’s house with their own blood, collected in buckets by their medical wing. Clearly, they have…
Read More Further adventures in globalisationThe new Shadowserver Foundation report is out; everyone has ooh’d over folk stealing the Dalai Lama’s e-mail, etc. Others have pointed to the concentration on the Indian military establishment. Technically, all that’s interesting here is that the attackers used mass market Internet services, like Yahoo! Mail, as transports for their botnet command-and-control messages, and that…
Read More exporting Chinese chaos, importing Indian chaosSome data points relating to my last Sunday SDR post and specifically the points about the way in which some forms of advanced technology are becoming much more evenly distributed. Here’s Armscontrolwonk getting the wrong year, but more importantly, linking to India experimenting with hit-to-kill antiballistic missile/antisatellite technology. Here’s DARPA starting an app store for…
Read More Sunday SDR data pointsOK, so it’s time for another chapter of the Strategic Defence Review as a Blog. Chapter 2 begins as follows: The use of force as an option is becoming more complicated. It is likely to become more difficult to use force in the way in which we have used it in the last two decades.…
Read More Sunday SDR: Chapter 2Well, this is unusual; Londonstani confirms that the Pakistanis just arrested 50% of the Taliban high command, in so far as such a thing matters. Not only that, they’re willing to extradite one of them to Afghanistan. First of all, Pakistan and Afghanistan even talking is rare. Secondly, extradite? What is this, Germany? Don’t they…
Read More this diplomacy stuff seems to work…for someThis has done the rounds and been roundly done for all the right reasons. There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists…
Read More Authoritarianism Does Its Thing