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The World's Spookiest Weapons
DesScorp writes "Popular Science has a piece on some outrageous ideas for weapons; some came to fruition, and others didn't. And while some of the weapons (atom bombs, chemical weapons, bats with bombs strapped to them that seek out homes and buildings at night) are truly frightening, some of them are also kind of silly, such as the Gay Bomb, and the Frisbee bomb that was labeled the 'Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition.'"
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Maybe it's just me, but what I think is the spookiest is not the weapons as such but rather how many of these appear to be explicitely intended for "crowd control".
Now of course, using non-deadly force to stop riots etc. is better than using deadly force. But at the same time, the fact that something isn't deadly - not intended to be, anyway - will also take away people's inhibitions to an extent and make them more likely to actually resort to it.
We're seeing this with tasers already, for example. And in fact, tasers are a good example insofar as that while the manufacturer would like to position them as non-deadly, they in fact are quite so.
What about a lead pipe or a carpenter's hammer? These aren't inherently spooky or scary, they're just tools - but I sure wouldn't want someone to enthusiastically apply either to my skull.
Can you imagine how much pain you could inflict with a standard dinner fork (provided the subject was sufficiently restrained)? Nobody would classify this as a weapon - and it certainly wouldn't inspire fear, until one had been used to pry your fingernails off.
I guess it just goes to show, it's not the weapon you're wielding that counts, it's how you use it...
How would you classify those things in a lion's mouth, those things on a bear's feet or that thing a scorpion carries around? They ain't musical instruments, that's for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Even though many militaries of the past have been particularly successful because of it.
There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.
Ander
@=
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but I get tired of the whole 'man is the ultimate evil' thing, especially since a lot of the people who believe that back it up with baseless information. Plenty of animals, like bears, kill each other (even their young) under the right circumstances. Animals war with one another (amongst their own species) just like us. In fact, Planet Earth has a segment that shows two tribes of gorillas fighting over territory. Likewise, plenty of different species will fight over things such as food or mates.
Of course, a lot of these conflicts end with one party surrendering rather than death, but the same is true of humans. On Killing does a pretty good job of showing how humans have a natural aversion to killing members of their own species (even in times of war) just like any other animal. And plenty of animals other than humans have been known to use tools. I'm too lazy to find the article, but I remember reading, about a year ago, an account of an ape using a bone to test the depth of the water in a river. It's safe to say that they animal kingdom has the same capacity for 'evil' as man. We just happen to be the dominant species and are very self-centered so no one pays attention to what the other creatures of the Earth are up to.
I was once a horse.
Imagine the horror! I'm not saying 9/11 wasn't tragic for the people involved, but you Americans did far more damage to yourselves afterwards out of fear than the terrorists could ever do. To put the dead toll into perspective, each half hour all over the world more children die of malnutrition, lack of medical care, disease. Imagine that.
We could annihilate 5 billion people on the planet, but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected
No, we couldn't, because the US has moved most manufacturing overseas and is completely dependent on Europe and China economically.
I'd quite like to see George Bush fight a war on malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care rather than a war on 'terror'..
which is totally what she said
Oh, what pitiful long-haired bullshit is this? Humans are not the be-all and end-all of violence in nature. Sure, we have the intellect to come up with very dangerous things. Sure, there are those dope-arsed enough to use these things. But as general violence in the animal kingdom goes, we're really quite the softies.
Take dolphins, the poster children of New Age flakies, often put up as these supposedly peaceful, gentle, intelligent creatures that could teach us a thing or two about being in harmony with nature. Bollocks. Dolphins are psychos: murder, violence, gang rape including bestiality and that of their own young --- you name it --- are all staples of dolphin behaviour. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near one of these fuckers without someone standing at the ready with a charged harpoon. Where are the dolphin justice mechanisms? If they're so peaceful and moral, where are the dolphin courts and prisons?
Ducks are just as bad. I was sitting by a pond the other day with about 20 or so ducks there. In the space of about half an hour or so, about six fights broke out, half of which were sexually motivated. In the same amount of time, over a hundred humans must've passed by --- a population in whom not one case of violence or sexual harassment broke out.