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Journalist Test Drives The Pain Ray Gun
Fantastic Lad writes to tell us that journalist Michael Hanlon recently got the opportunity to experience the Army's new not-so-secret weapon, dubbed "Silent Guardian". The Silent Guardian is essentially (even though the creators prefer you not refer to it as such) a ray gun, emitting a focused beam of radiation similar to your microwave tuned to a specific frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. "It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile. Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury. But anyone in the beam's path will feel, over their entire body, the agonizing sensation I've just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn't bear thinking about. "
Secret deals for largely secret projects costing largely secret amounts, and the taxpayer pays everything, blindly, or goes to jail. It's effectively a dictatorship of the Military-Industrial Complex, as President Eisenhower warned.
To me, the scary part is not when the general population is scared of police, but rather when they become disinterested in their government. This is exactly what the current policy makers want... Keep you loaded up in debt and working to pay those bills, and unintereested in what they are doing... Did you notice the 11% approval rating in congress?
This reminds me of the neuronic whip in Issac Asmov's foundation series, the pain it produces could kill a person, it had 10 settings 10 being the highest and 1 the lowest. He also used it in many of his other works. The idea is the same, but the implementation is a bit simpler, Who said Sci-Fi never becomes reality? Whoever they are, they lied.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. - Issac Asimov
Coincidentally, it was Raytheon who invented the microwave oven. They sold commercial products under the Amana brand.
Same with this... they'll say its a less lethal way of incapacitating enemy troops, or maybe quelling a riot. But eventually since its "safe," they'll start using it on peaceful protests that got out of the "free speech zone" and dangerously close to coming within cable news camera range.
This space available.
Nah, it's the one-two combo. Some care but are powerless, whereas the others don't care--ironically making those that do care powerless!
More seriously, it's very easy for a person to off-handedly say to a pollster that they don't approve of Congress; it's quite another for that person to know what Congress is doing in the first place. That disapproval is more probably an expression of general malaise, distrust, or cynicism towards the government in general than it is any sort of appraisal of Congress as an acting body. I'd say of those polled (if past stats hold up) barely a third of respondents even know who their reps in Congress are, probably barely a half could name any rep. Most Americans would be hard pressed to name one piece of legislation passed in the last session, and even fewer to correlate that piece of legislation with its supporters and detractors correctly. Those that care are outnumbered by those that don't, and in that circumstance it is awfully difficult to take statistics that purport to show a true measure of the American people's approval or disapproval of Congress with any more than a grain of salt.
More evidence--in case you needed it--even when Congress' approval rating drops into the doldrums, as it has on several occasions, re-election rates for seated members rarely drops below 90%.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Have a peek at the article. It's a small box that looks somewhat like a computer power-supply. Sure, it's too big for holster-duty yet, but compared to the initial version I saw (which I assume is for making sweeps of a crowd at a larger distance) it's definitely gone down in size.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/eastsidenews/2002984005_suspend10e.html
http://www.waxahachiedailylight.com/articles/2007/05/20/dailylight/news/01-05-20-taser.txt
In at least every state and territory in which I have lived, the public libraries are definitely free, as are the books being lent. They're very often used by the homeless as a place to stay, and in many cases it offers them a way to learn while they're getting out of the cold, which I'm all for.
The UCLA tasering was not a public library in the same sense, since it belongs to the school rather than the community at large, so they were within their rights to demand an ID and ask people who couldn't show that they were using the library with the school's authorization to leave.
What happened after that I find horrific, and I don't in any way mean this post to excuse it, I just wanted to clarify that the ID requirement doesn't cover general public libraries, and in fact pretty much all of the universities I'm familiar with voluntarily keep their libraries open to the public and just require an ID to check out books, or in many cases now to use the internet, due to new federal legislation which requires them to monitor activity and keep extensive backups if they allow open public use of the network.
"An officer that's shown to abuse people can't keep his job unless an elected official/body allows him/her to"
apparently from your side of the white picket fence it's not plainly obvious that while many regions in the south are upwards of 65% black the majority of police are Caucasian.
now you may not realize this but a Convicted felon Is not allowed to vote... and with 1/3rd of black males having a fealony conviction on their records.... well, it's easy to see how the police represent the needs and wants of the WHITE populace, and think nothing of beating/abusing blacks...
blacks tend to be less afluent and tend to become more involved in crime due to a bad econmy in many southern states... and the culture of black rap artists quite often portray cops as being the White man that's holding down the black man... ans then you get whjole communities who would never trust a cop, and help any black they can to evade arrest even a murdurer.
so you see, while you may on your side of the white picket fensce never experience a cop aiming a can of pepper spray in your eyes because he saw you running on the street... many blacks get accused of being a criminal if a cop sees them running... even if they were trying to get medicine to their sickly grandmother... so um yeah...
there will be flagrant abuses of this weapon, but not on your side of the white picket fence and green watered lawns, with paper boys smiling as they deliver your paper... but meanwhile on the other side of the fence, where crackhouses and gang fights are a nightly backdrop to the gunfire and sirens those on the other side of the fence live with cops who treat anyone with the wrong color skin as a criminal there will be abuse.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Ermey hosts Mail Call on the History Channel. He's referring to Richard Machowicz, ex-SEAL and current host of Discovery Channel's Future Weapons show. While I enjoy Mail Call on occasion, Machowicz is far more hands-on with the technology.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
No, its not R. Lee Ermey. I think the parent post was talking about Richard 'Mack' Machowicz who hosts 'FutureWeapons' which airs on both The Discovery Channel and the Military Channel. If you go here you can find a link to a clip featuring the Active Denial System.
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Actually, if you listen to the end of the video, one of the cops even threatens to tase the guy who was complaining to them. He says "Get back in there or we'll tase you too." So, you're absolutely right. Talk back to a cop, and they break out the taser.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
in the sense that Mussolini used it, does not mean what you think it means. The word "corporation" did not mean "commercial enterprise" to him as it does to 21st century Americans, it was used in the much older sense to mean "body or grouping of interests".
See the Wiki
Mussolini's "corporatism" meant a sort of negotiating council comprising representatives of government, organised labour and industrial capital, which is a fascist/Third Way kind of idea for overcoming the at that time hugely destabilising tension between capital and labour (verging on literal civil war). On the face of it, not actually that bad, except that in practice it was unelected and unresponsive to democracy, the governmental elements tended to end up calling all the shots, and labour particularly suffered. And mixed with the ultranationalist and militarist elements of the weird soup that was Fascism in reality as opposed to in its initial conception, it turned out to be really really bad. But it's arguable that the bad parts of Fascism didn't all derive from that initial idea.
I'm as aware as the next person that commercial corporations are antidemocratic in internal structure, but the scary thing is that many people arguing loudest that "corporatism is fascism" tend to be unaware that the kind of political system they *would* prefer in its place is closer to the initial forms of actual historical Fascism.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Funny how most of the people who say that the US is a police state are Americans who've never actually been to or met anyone who has lived in a real police states.
You're totally right. Those other repressive regimes operate secret prisons where people are whisked away without being formally charged and then they're tortured for supposed information. Nobody even knows how many of those prisons exist or how many prisoners are in them. And then their own government completely monitors all their 'private' communications without warrants or any reasonable cause to suspect them of wrong-doing.
Fortunately, we've got a constitution that protects Americans from living under such a 'police state.'
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
> But we taser people too often, so we're worse.
:)
No, not worse.
But being better than the NKVD doesn't mean jack shit, really.
Comparing to something worse is lowering your standards.
I hope you hold up your police officers to better standards than comparing them to the NKVD
I was not going to mention the circumstances behind the recent death by Taser in my city, but actually I think it is worth mentioning.
A man (who was not under suspicion for a crime at the time) was beaten and eventually Tasered while he was having an epileptic seizure, because he was "not responding" to police orders. Of course he was not responding... he was twitching face down on the lawn in a seizure! Any idiot should have been able to see that something was amiss. Witnesses stated that the police were wantonly brutal and that he had never provoked anyone... he was simply not responding.
The man happened to be at a house (he did not live there) when the police went to arrest the resident on drug charges. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were no charges against him. An acquaintance of mine knew him. She said he was one of the nicest people she ever knew. Wouldn't hurt a fly.