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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.