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Riot Control Ray-Gun for Use in Iraq
team99parody writes "An 'Active Denial System' weapon that 'fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds'
is scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006
according to CNET and the print version of New Scientist. It was recently tested on people playing the part of rioters at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico where they asked the subjects to remove glass and contact lenses to protect their eyes. Hopefully real rioters will get the same courtesy. Police and the Marines are working on portable versions. Sandia Labs also has a nice writeup on this system with pictures of smaller versions of the weapon."
It's only logical. Our right to peaceably assemble is in the process of being eviscerated, which means that future efforts on the part of the citizenry to protest the increasingly hateful policies of this government will become more and more confrontational, and which in turn sees the government resorting to ever more punitive policies in response.
Prediction: the ray-gun is on the streets in America in time for the 2008 Republican National Convention.
I can't wait to hear what they consider to be acceptable levels of casualties as the result of using this thing on people.
The thing I regret most in this life is that of all the science fiction movies I loved watching as I grew up, Soylent Green ends up being the one that most closely depicts the future.
(I'd rather take my chances on the Nostromo.)
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Why didn't you know?
I Wonder whether its usage can contribute to cancer down the track?
"The problem with our economy is that our budget is balanced by people who aren't" - A.E.N.
That's the way to win "hearts and minds" of people angry at the US occupation forces: zap them with rayguns. We'll teach them how the 21st Century US welcomes them with "compassionate conservatism", by frying them with rayguns. After sizzling whole towns, there's no way they'll ever listen to insane jihadists telling them that the Great Satan has burned them with hellfire, that we're all better off in a medieval fiefdom under god. Yeah, sticking Iraqis into a microwave oven is exactly the way to get them to calm down, stop their civil war, and break out those flowers they're supposed to be greeting us with.
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make install -not war
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
by tin foil?
Wait, isn't that terrorism? Using this thing could increase terrorism? Fucking wonderful.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Nonlethal weaponry is a horseshit myth.
The term they should have used (and what law enforcement uses now, after more than a few wrongful death lawsuits, is the term of "Less lethal". Did any of the Kirtland Air Force Base participants have a pre existing heart condition? I bet they didnt let pregnant women participate.
Im so glad that when every time one of these proportedly nonlethal weapons pops up its run under a FULL and accurate barrage of labratory and set up tests, which almost never reveal the compounding issues that lead to death in real world enviroments.
The news.com article asks a few of the many lurking questions to this system. We all know this device is going to Iraq to go through real world testing before its used here in the US. Someone is counting on all the "little kinks" that are more than likely deadly will be ironed out under the public eye.
I find it highly ironic that our testing of this indescriminant weapon will be used in our even more indescriminant war.
Terrorists dont use large crowds as weapons, if you stop and think at why this weapon would be needed, its ultimately crowd control on our home front. Now why would we need that? Lakers winning again? I highly doubt it. Someone had a plan when they initated and funded the development of this, and it doesnt look like a good one.
There is truth in humor.
Why the heck are mods modding this flame-war up!?!
What could be more on-topic than a flame-war?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
No, they'd rather people not shoot protesting crowds. If the crowds are using lethal force or threatening the position of our troops, our troops will use lethal force back with or without our magic ray gun.
Seriously, from a practical standpoint, what will happen the first time we fire this thing into. say, one of al-Sadr's regular 10k+ angry-mob protests? Everyone with glasses risks going blind; everyone with metal on them gets burns. Everyone with a pacemaker risks getting their heart stopped. It'd be almost a guaranteed new Sadrist revolt, plus easily increasing other Shia and widespread Sunni insurgency recruiting, while not killing any insurgents. Of course, the effects don't apply just to the crowd; beams keep on going.
But lets take this further than the obvious anger that the US using some sci-fi style technology on a country that has no ability to resist it would inspire. Everyone who gets cancer within a few months of such a usage within half a dozen blocks of the site will blame it on the US's new "pain-ray". Everyone who miscarries? The same. Everyone who gets a headache, who has a heart attach, who comes down with a nasty disease... it'll all get blamed on the device.
Strategically, this is an awful decision.
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
with all our technology, science, power and resources, all we seem to do is come up with more and more fucking evil disgusting ways of hurting people? This is fucking sick.. Does nobody else see this?
Yeah! tell me about Quake, and Doom, and Half Life, and Counter Strike, and Halo, and Unreal...
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
This will nicely wrap up our hearts-and-minds campaign.
Government, as an institution, is supposed to exist to solve (or at least mitigate) the people's problems.
The average person, when placed in a position of power, wishes to use that power to improve his own situation. Such a person, in a government position finds that the best way to increase his personal power is to increase the size and importance of his domain of power -- which, as we've seen, is based upon "solving" some problem that the people have.
The best method they've found so far is to create the problem with one hand while solving it with the other. Move more responsibility from the people to the government, and justify more work. Create more complications and loopholes in the tax codes, and work harder to bust tax evaders. Make more things illegal, and make law enforcement look good. It's a justification to do more, to take more of your money for your own good. It is evil. It's a million acts of small, petty evil in the guises of kindness and service.
As to the bit about the Republicans -- it's been said before that the US is run by two parties: the party of Evil and the party of Stupidity. I agree with that assessment, but I think that the roles change day-to-day. Neither one is any better than the other.
I have anti-globalization activist friends who were in Miami in 2003 protesting the FTAA meeting going on at the time. They tell me that the cops (other than having their own embedded journalists, getting extremely favorable corporate media coverage, beating people senseless and blinding some people with pepperspray) used some sort of microwave weapon on them and it made them throw up. For more info on that protest, check out a movie called the Miami Model http://www.ftaaimc.org/miamimodel.
Tinfoil. Tinfoil hat, dungarees, under your normal clothes. And you can carry tinfoil placards that reflect microwaves back to police.
Dyslexics have more fnu.