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. "

Comments

President Eisenhower warned us!

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:Chilling...

[promotheus]

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.

Approval of Congress

[Elemenope]

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%.

Re:Source

[Foobar of Borg]

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.

Corporatism

[lennier]

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.