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Sonic 'Lasers' to be Deployed in Hurricane Region
MacDork writes "Wired News is running an article about high powered acoustic technology to be deployed in the hurricane Katrina disaster recovery. Apparently, the technology will allow authorities to communicate with others up to a mile away along with providing a non-lethal means of crowd control. No word on additional busses and shelters..."
No word on additional busses and shelters...
*sigh*
I am having a hard time with this one. I think the camel's back was broken sometime last week. What person in their right mind would decide that shooting out the eardrums of an already broken people would be of any tactical use at all?
What a clusterfuck NOLA has become. Buncha dimwit politicians can't wrap their heads around the value of human life, the need for expidited aid for refugees (and how not to treat a refugee like a criminal), so they figure it's best to simply treat it as a run-of-the-mill race-riot.
Good luck with that situation, Uncle Sam, you're gonna need all the luck you can get at this point.
With the response thus far, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole south broke into complete chaos. Might not happen this time, but the water is starting to boil, as is the blood of every American, uniformly.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This is ridiculous. We're the richest nation in the world, and it takes us over 7 days to evacuate 100,000 poor people from a disaster area?
We don't (or didn't) need high-tech toys to control the crowds. Simple, common-sense, things like on-going airdrops of food and water, combined with convoys of buses, and temporary shelters at schools, etc, would have prevented major losses of life in this fiasco.
Sure, news photos of helicopters rescuing people look cool, but helicopters are 100 times as expensive as simple, tried and true tech like small boats.
We had advanced warning (36+ hours) that this was going to happen. Where were FEMA, the NG, Homeland Security, etc?
I'm disgusted and depressed at the bureaucratic mess that allowed this situation to get so out of hand.
But in all seriousness, take a look at what's going on down there. There is an insane amount of looting and anarchy, stores are being looted, people are hoarding anything they can find. Hell, even reports of horrible crimes such as rape have been going around, because there is no way to control a mob the size of a city...
The government *is* doing what it can, which isn't much really, the city is flooded, and we're trying to fly as many people out as we can, but in the meantime, we need some order, and a nonlethal method of maintaining order seems very appropriate.
If the USA could manage disaster recovery at least at the rate of a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY they wouldn't need some fancy 'non-lethal' (yeah right) crowd control.
They don't want to evacuate the remaining residents of New Orleans until they absolutely have to. That much is clear. It is also clear that there are certain prejudices that still exist against those who are poor and those who are black.
What is surprising is that this is actually news to people. This situation regarding the class divide and the racial divide has been a reality in America for hundreds of years and it takes something like this for people to wake up.
What is happening down in New Orleans right now is a tragedy of the highest order. But lesser tragedies of a similar nature occur in all major cities in the United States every single day. The fact that nobody normally bothers to care about such things and are generally ill-informed about them is, perhaps, the greatest tragedy of all.
To me, the people still stuck down in New Orleans represent everybody that America would just as soon forget. Shame on us all. And let us not forget from now on.
Tell me why the idiotic democrat mayor of NOAL did not use the city's buses to evacuate his people?
Why are they sitting half submerged in water?
Oh yeah, it's all Bush's fault.
Why is it that it seems the US is so keen to send in troops: "They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will," Kathleen Blanco said., and test out it's latest anti-civilian weaponry?
It's easy enough for the US to get thousand pound bombs to Iraq, but saving people in its own country seems to take a back seat. Why not use all that money, and technology for good, and help the poor, the elderly, the pregnant, the disabled.
Get your own free personal location tracker
short answer:
the people that matter were already out of there.
that's also the reason why more resources are spent on protecting property and chasing "looters" than actually helping people.
Mobilizing a Relief-force for 1 million people+ is a lot harder then we've been led to believe. Especially when the damage was so widespread.
A large percentage of those people down there really had no way to get out but walk, and so chose to stay. Yes we should have tried getting all the busses and such there sooner, but I think in all reality we're doing as much as we can.
Sadly there are cases of people shooting at the relief helicopters and looting in a time like this. With relief on the way some of these people are looting guns leaving the food and shooting at the people there to help.
Then with the news coming out about the forced rape situations down in the Dome, I'm starting to wonder if a small minority of stupid people is ruining the press for this.
Its sad to think, but it may be possible with all this bad publicity, and the cries that we're doing nothing may end up becoming a self-fullfilling prophecy.
I assume this is a joke as disaster recovery is one of things the government is good at. Look at the previous hurricanes in Florida and the response they had. Joe Scarborough with MS NBC who went through several hurricanes is Florida was aghast at the ineffectiveness of the response. Please tell me about the free market disaster response alternatives.
Thalasar
I would agree with you here in the sense that blame goes to the cult of extreme selfishness and disdain for everything "common" or "public" which the neo-cons with the help of libertarians have been instilling in the American public for a few decades now. The result are cowering, frightened local government who consult with lawyers for days before declaring mandatory evacuation because they are afraid of "lawsuits by the casino and hotel owners". Then comes fright of lawsuits by citizens if they are forced to leave on buses. And then there is cost. FEMA is now under these people a "charity coordinator". Dont expect a "charity coordinator" to pre-emptively force an evacuation. And so on and so forth. Weak, and attuned to the rich exclusively, government is the source of all of this. Grover Norquist (one of the chief ideologues of neo-con moement) wants to "get the government to the size where we (neo-cons/libertarians) can drown it in a bathtub". He got his wish, except the bathtub he spoke of is the city of New Orleans.
Outrageous!
How about Sonic Phaser instead. That way we could send in Captain Kirk to help.
Theft is one of the simplest crimes, satisfying a need without physical harm to someone else. The reason that looting is being suppressed is that as the social order degrades, instances where violations of societal norms are seen to occur without punishment become more acceptable. This furthers the breakdown of order, and the level of the crimes will increase as time goes by and nothing is done. Desperation and fear feed the chaos, and eventually it becomes impossible to control without drastic measures.
Enforcing order in a situation such as this is critical in saving lives, because it provides a sense of returning structure to the lives of the affected people. Without that, further restoration efforts, including returning electricity to the area, become impossible, and more people suffer because food and water remain unavailable and hospitals cannot function.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
To follow-up myself:
I repeat, blame falls at all levels. The Mayor failed to evacuate his people, despite having 300-odd buses at his disposal, laid useless because they were left in a lowlying area prior to the storm. The Mayor failed to organize volunteer rescue efforts. The Mayor relied far too much on the next-higher-up level of assistance.
The Governor failed to evacuate her people, despite having the ability to commandeer every bus in the state. She failed to ensure water and food was delivered to stranded citizens. She failed to call upon the people of the state to take their boats and rescue the refugees. She failed to put her ass on the line and take responsibility for any fuckups from making snap decisions. She passed the buck to FEMA and then failed to recognize they were not helping.
Michael Brown, head of FEMA, is a fuckup from the word "go." One only has to look at his history and how he came to be head of FEMA to recognize the cronyism and stupidity of the entire FEMA debacle. He is a failure.
George Bush, Commander in Chief of the USA, failed to find out that FEMA was useless, failed to call in the National Guard and US Military, failed to call upon the American people to take direct action, failed to immediately invite expert assistance from other nations, failed to do anything useful whatsoever.
I repeat: the US government is broken at every level.
Get off your asses and get it fixed. Maybe this only requires writing to your representative, or maybe this requires overthrowing a dishonest, disreputable, dysfunctional government. I dunno. But the bottom line is pretty fucking clear these days; SOMETHING needs to be done, and it falls upon the American public to do it.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Why send sonic disrupters into the disaster area? Because that way they can be tested without pissing off too many likely voters.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Honestly, it disgusts me how much finger pointing has been going on while there are still people stranded in that hell hole. ALL of these politicians need to get their priorities in order. FIRST, make sure the people stuck there have some food and water to survive on and finish picking up the ones who are stranded (maybe some of those helicopters dropping sandbags on the friggin' levees could be rescuing people still stuck on their rooftops). SECOND, get everybody out of the city. THIRD, plug the levees and start figuring out what to do with this mess. THEN they can all start bickering about who didn't respond quickly enough and who didn't prepare well enough and who should've done something first and should we even bother rebuilding the place. Somebody needs to step up and show some leadership here. It looks like Gen. Honore is the only one who has so far.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Spend much time hungry and on top of a roof?
No, and I don't expect to. Because if I were to live my whole life in a below-sea-level town on a coast that gets hit with hurricanes every year, I'd probably save up the same amount of money it costs to buy one pizza, and put a few liters of water and a couple dozen snack bars in a cheap backpack, along with a $3 flashlight and some toilet paper, and be way, way ahead of the thousands of people in that town that decided not to do anything to help their town have less of a disaster on their hands.
There's no excuse for watching that storm approach for days, and not doing the simplest things to prepare yourself for a Tuesday-through-Thursday wait while the buses and helicopters get lined up. Of course that wouldn't have made everything just peachy for every person - but it would have hugely reduced the stress on the local help that was supposed to be taking care of the local people while other resources moved in. Honestly - it's like being responsible for your own well being is so out of fashion that a little food and water is too much to think about in advance, even as the news and your own city government is screaming at you about it.
Of course, there were thousands and thousands of people who did take care of themselves enough to not slow down emergency workers with other priorities - but those people didn't make for very dramatic sound bites, and since they weren't as ready to bitch about the government, there just wasn't any Pulitzer-winning spin to extract.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The old saying misses the possibility of malice being combined with stupidity, which is the way I see the Bush Administratiom.
Let me put it this way. Cuba managed to evacuate their people before the last big hurricane hit. Ponder that while you compare their resources with that of the richest country on the planet. Where was their "hubris" and disbelief at the climatologists?
A National Disaster is clearly an excellent opportunity to trial new R&D in the field; harsh environmental conditions, long uptime, contingencies at a maximum - like a 'warzone' really. It would seem Bush has chosen to test future battle tech on his own people at home rather than random foreigners or US folk abroad. He doesn't miss a beat does he?
Anyway, I guess these sonic cannons are cheaper than food, shelter and tear-gas or else he surely would have.. nevermind.
Where in New Orleans are you going to land a C-17? Oh yeah, nowhere.
How many sorties does it take to evacuate 100,000 people with Chinooks? Let's see, if I remember correctly, they'll carry 50 troops with gear. So call that 70 people, assuming some are on stretchers. 70 into 100,000, that's...1400 sorties.
Where are you going to take them? Houston? Dallas? Birmingham? Each of those cities would be about five hours away by helicopter, give or take.
How do you handle the air traffic around the Superdome? That's not trivial.
We've got some transport helicopters, yes...but not nearly enough to solve this problem. And then, can you imagine the flak that would happen when one crashes?
Suffice it to say, the problem is a little bit more complex than "Well, just get some helicopters!"
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Nobody expected things to be fixed in 20 minutes. However, the whole point of disaster response is the response part. There is absolutely no reason why there should be a 5 day period of no response other than pretty words.
The money in the federal budget that goes to homeland security, you know the agency in charge of protecting the homeland, is obviously the biggest shell game in the history of the US govt. If this is what we can expect for a response, is crowd-control weapons being deployed almost as soon or sooner than food and water, than it is a pathetic country indeed. The interstate highway system in this country was developed for EXACTLY this kind of mobilization. Highways and bridges were built wide enough to allow military vehicles to cross the country in an organized fashion.
As far as your 'questions' that you even admit to having no answers to, well they are quite frankly disturbing. Where do you think the money comes to pay the people to drive all those busses around to pick up everyone. Where do you think the money comes from to organize the infrastructure for the eventuality of such a disaster? Obviously you are not aware that the funding stream to enable all of those 'questions' is from the federal govt in the form of 'homeland security grants'. Did New Orleans get any of those? I do know the answer to that, and you should stop being fed your information and learn for yourself. New Orleans did have a plan and countermeasures in place to deal with such a circumstance, however my friend, unless you are paying for these things out of your own pocket it would be to your benefit to realize that these things take a level of financial commitment in order to implement correctly.
As far as 'comparing' disasters, which is woefully innapriopriate, well lets compare them. What was the reposnse time for national guard troops being deployed to all the above incidents you cited? New York, less than one day. San Fran, also less than one day. LA, less than one day. How exactly does this compare to 5 days?
And bush doesnt need anyone to make him look bad. He does just fine on his own. Take some time away from the TV for a few weeks(better months), better yet, go on a vacation to see how people in other parts of the world live. Then come back and watch your TV... unfortunately, the only way for you to see that the government is failing is when it will fail you. I wish you and your family are never in a disaster so catasrophic, that you learn first hand how inept our system of social protections has become. But life is long, and you are just playing the odds if you hope, or think, it cant happen to you.
They probably had plans to test these things somewhere like Iraq, but this situation is even better. Since the feds have fallen down on their job of handling this sort of large-scale problem, they're getting ready to perform the charade of blaming looters and rioters for everything that went wrong, just like they've been blaming terrorists for everything else. Going in waving a big stick is part of that performance, and using it on a few civilians is the perfect "shock and awe" gesture. Bush's zero-tolerance right-wing supporters will be cheering, and ordinary citizens will have one more reason to shy away from any sort of political action that the government might not approve.
Things like water cannons and riot gear are comprehensible threats to protesters, but when the government starts using spooky technology to bring a whole crowd to its knees, genuine sixties-like political unrest will cease to be possible in this country, no matter how appropriate it might eventually become. That's when America will cease to be a "free" country. Because if people are afraid to use their supposed freedoms then they no longer really have them.