The LRAD, or long range acoustic device, is a sonic cannon. I posted on it here and here in the last year.
From one of the posts, on a police-vehicle mounted version:
[A] motorized crowd control system, it generates loud screeching noise with the idea that ear pain makes people run away, was deployed in Pittsburgh where it has been mostly just a nuisance.
It came out of the idea that sound could be used to shatter the ear drums of “terrorists” on airplanes, without killing passengers.
If common sense is telling you that such a thing is fairly dubious, you’re not alone. However, that has never impeded the development of such things.
But anything that comes from the non-lethal industry has always been dubious, from machinery to claims about said technology. Exotic non-lethal weaponry has been pushed for military and police use for almost twenty years, getting an extra shove during the war on terror. And it is no surprise that LRADs would have been sold into the NYPD in the last decade.
The LRAD company’s rationalization that the things are for communicating does not stand close scrutiny when considering the nature of the OWS protests.
It is not readily apparent that a beamed highly directional sound cannon, particularly the size shown in TPM photos, would be any good in shouting directions to a large moving crowd determined to go somewhere, a mass not particularly interested in police instructions or warnings. Which would be expected, anyway.
On the other hand, if you want to spray a crowd with random bursts of irritating noise that hits individuals, perhaps with the aim of instilling some manner of trepidation in them — well, that’s just what a beam-projecting weapon would be able to do.
The LRAD manufacturer concedes to TPM that it only sells to military and police force clients. So much for the handful of feeble humanitarian uses described for them. And it’s worth adding that LRADs and similar devices have been shown on American television on shows expressly interested in making entertainments out showing applications in weapons technology. For the US Navy, in addition to the non-lethal role (which is nil), they have also been sold as devices to be used in hailing, which is significantly different than use against a crowd in close quarters.
LRAD can broadcast in any language with authoritative and highly intelligible communication. LRAD provides military personnel with a powerful, penetrating warning tone that can be followed by clear voice broadcasts in host nation languages to warn and shape the behavior of potential threats.
If you read the details, there’s indication that up close — at distances of one meter — the portable LRAD can be damaging.
It also indirectly speaks to the relative ineffectiveness of the devices, other than as purposeful irritants to a few.
The broadcast, even designed to be directional, dissipates in power geometrically at distance. And it can be fought with barriers and ear plugs.
What needs to be understood is the long-term nature of the non-lethal industry in the US.
The purpose of it was to sell to the military and militarized police forces technology for use on unarmed crowds. And the major sales argument for all of it is that it puts into the hands of its users technology that allows them to do something without hurting the subjects being targeted. In other words, it’s always been sold by exploiting military and police force susceptibility to magical thinking.
Right now the LRAD is, at worst, a nuisance. At best, it’s a complete waste of money delivered with the delicious irony that if you were a taxpayer any time in the last decade (before losing your job and going to protest), in a general sense you helped pay for it.
However, a civil unrest propagates and grows in the United States, the potential exists for other more threatening “non-lethal” devices to appear in the hands of those the empire dispatches to quash it.
From the standpoint of the private sector businesses that make these things, it’s a sell-sell-sell time.
An Occupation of Pasadena took place at Lake and Villa last night around 5:30.
I have no idea when it started but ran across the protests when going out for groceries.
Perfectly positioned, the demonstration was at one of Pasadena’s busiest intersections during the end-of-day rush hour.
I estimated forty to fifty people with signs were lined up on both sides of the street. All types from young to old, in front of the fire station on the west side of Lake and in the lot of a Mexican restaurant to the east.
Placards read things like “Tax the rich,” “Republicans pimp people to Wall Street” and admonishments to save the firefighters, workers visible every day here, from austerity.
Governments are supposed to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens. Ours doesn’t pretend to try.
Sick? Too bad.
Can’t find a job? Tough.
Broke? Can’t afford rent? We don’t give a crap.
Forget “e pluribus unum.??? We need a more accurate motto.
We live under a f— you system.
Which is why we are finally, at long last, starting to say “f— you??? to them.
A good statement of rebellion, it again goes into the use of alleged concerns in various American bunds over mess and disease as rationalizations for cracking down on civil unrests. On the other hand, mess and disease among the poor, as long as they’re quiet and on Skid Row or on corners begging, that’s OK.
No mystery here that Americans have a bad relationship with science. And the dislike of it has a lot to do with why the country has been so poorly run.
In the recent issue of Rolling Stone the magazine conducts a short interview with the author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, Shawn Lawrence Otto.
Something has happened with the last generation of journalists, who have been taught the postmodern idea that there is no such thing as objective reality. But there is such a thing as objective reality – and we can measure it, and by measuring it we’ve doubled our lifespan, multiplied the productivity of our farms by 35 times, and totally changed the world. By not acknowledging that, reporters end up creating something called, “false balance,” essentially reporting on two sides of a story and letting the audience decide what they think is the objective truth or who is right. That’s really shirking their responsibility to dig and inform people what’s really going on.
How to mend America’s fractured relationship with science
First of all, scientists really need to reengage in our public conversation. Most Americans, when polled, don’t even know a living scientist. That’s got to change. Scientists need to get back out there and talk to their neighbors, speak in churches and talk to people where they go. People need to hear that voice in our political discussion again. The voice of values and religion – those are an important part of our conversation; but we need a plurality of voices and we also need the voice of facts, and reason, and knowledge.
From my personal experience, standard journalism has made it almost impossible to get across anything reliant upon science for understanding.
This has been very true in understanding terror potentials in chemical and biological weaponry. Journalists, like all the people caught with castor seeds, don’t understand what ricin is any more than those backwoodsmen trying to make a weapon out of it.
And it was only by a bit of luck that I was able to spend an hour discussing the matter with Atlanta Journal news reporters last week.
Still, this crept into the news:
“Ricin is a protein … the more you purify it, the harder it is to keep it around. People don’t understand that,??? Smith said, explaining that proteins are easily broken down by heat, ultraviolet light, acids or elements such as lye.
As noted previously, lye was common in US households and high school chem labs when I was a kid. And every college prep student had to take the class. Lye is not an element, it is a compound.
The author is also correct in that scientists have for too long not taken part in public conversation.
And much of the fault of this lies squarely with them. While at Lehigh University and the Penn State School of Medicine, NONE of the scientists I worked with had even the slightest interest in explaining to the public what they did or using their knowledge to help shape understanding of anything in the public sphere.
Add to this the hard fact that many scientists, primary investigators and research directors, are just terrible writers. Being the only person who could write in the labs in which I worked simply resulted in my employment dry-cleaning and working over the research papers and presentations by others.
Writing and good communication were seen as conveniences, tools to be used only for publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
This endemic disinterest has had spectacularly bad results for the country.
At Lehigh University, it resulted in the chemistry and biology departments getting black eyes and besmirched reputations in the residence of Michael Behe, the creationist who packaged his belief in that as the pseudo-science called intelligent design.
Behe could write.
And Lehigh’s hard science departments paid no attention to well after
he’d published Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution , a book that became a bestseller, one that was subsequently used by Christian theocrats to inflict lasting damage on high school biology education throughout the country.
By then it was way too late and now the biology department is stuck with having to put a disclaimer concerning Behe’s beliefs and the actual science at the school, on its website.
And that is only one example of what can happen when a profession doesn’t pay attention, when it, or many people in it, believe that the development of a public voice is of no importance.
The clearing of Zuccotti Park struck a deep blow to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had used the site as its physical and spiritual heart. But as the newly ousted protesters gathered in Foley Square to decide what to do next, many residents, workers and business owners near the park felt deep relief. ” Super ecstatic,” said a young office worker. “Definitely relieved,” said a young woman working behind the counter at Panini & Co., a cafe overlooking the park.
Paul Bruno, 54, who lives in the Bronx but has serviced elevators in Lower Manhattan for 30 years, had lunched daily in the park. He agreed with the protesters’ message, he said, but not their means. “The movement is the right movement,” he said, “but the movement got lost.”
Another man, who worked nearby and said he could not give his name because it was against his company’s rules, said it was time for the park to be cleared.
“It started out as a cool grassroots movement, he said, ” and then it turned into a big homeless camp.”
Still residents described a frightening scene last night, with police rushing into the park, bright lights glaring and helicopters whirring above. Mark Scherzer, a lawyer who lives half a block from the park, said he found the clearing deeply upsetting.
“I think the protesters were doing a valuable service,” he said, “And I think it was lawful for them to be there.”
Most notably last week, it was in national news for being proud property of one of the members of the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang.
Rather than a symbol of patriotic American defiance, the Gadsden flag has been adopted as the elegant rattlesnake-emblazoned colors for the worst us.
And as often as not it is the favorite towel of hosts of really unpleasant and often frankly repugnant people: angry bigots, whites who want to re-fight the Civil War, precious metal fanatics who wish to blow up the Fed, local GOP politicians interested in grass roots legislation to allow state secession or nullification orders, removers (violent, if necessary) of the reproductive rights of women, heavily armed survivalists, advocates of laws allowing people to appear intimidatingly armed in public, hoarders of improvised homemade weaponry, pro-lifers, theocrats, militia men …
I could go on. If you’re one who is interested in the roots of domestic terrorism, the Gadsden flag is almost always there, somewhere.
The Gadsden flag is a very visible symbol of a vile part of the 2011 United States.
The “Don’t Tread on Me” lovers have come to be known for their bleak philosophies, usually involving direct attacks or persecution of others not exactly like them. And intertwined with this is a hatred of all government because it gets in the way of waging such a patriotic war.
Naturally, they don’t see themselves in this light.
I have the best song for the new tourism trade association campaign to boost America overseas. It’s “The National Anthem!”
What better way to show off our best side than to indicate that after a long time, yes, some of us still do have a grim but inviting sense of humor. And that we’re able to ridicule ourselves.
Say hello to “the United States of Awesome Possibilities” as it looks to visitors from abroad to help lift it out of the economic doldrums.
By soft-pedaling patriotism, the newly-formed US national tourism board tasked with getting more tourists — and their money — onto US soil is reinventing the nation as a hip new land of diversity and possibilities.
“We’re rebranding America for the first time,” said Jim Evans, chief executive of the Corporation for Travel Promotion, ahead of the World Travel Market that opened Monday in London.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years, people have seen America as unwelcoming as we’ve focused on security …
Central to that message is a pixelated “USA” logo, unveiled Monday in London and a world away from the Stars and Stripes, that is meant to represent what the corporation calls “the United States of Awesome Possiblities.”
“It is not about patriotism, flag-waving or chest-beating,” says the corporation in a capsule explanation of the design. “It is meant to be welcoming, unexpected and inclusive.”
“We have to rekindle the romance with the United States,” Chris Perkins, chief marketing officer at the Corporation for Travel Promotion, told AFP.
“It pains me, as a proud American, but we’re viewed as arrogant and brash …
Of course, in addition to curbing the national image as brash and arrogant, we could do with a lot less of the patently phony and stupid, too.
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary … we all get here, eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich. And we do it right, without no hitch!
Welcome to the United States of Greed. It’s the only country you’ll ever need! If you’re into frauds and useless devices, Uncle Sam — the best of choices.
Welcome to the United States of Security! We’ll check you now for purity!
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell!
The Great Divide (or the new Civil War) quote of day:
“I think (the Occupy movement) makes the Tea Party look a lot better. We’re not playing drums, masturbating on the street, or defecating on cars. I don’t think there’s anybody (out on the street) who is for American [sic] the way it was founded. They are like from another planet or something.”
The feeling’s mutual, although I’d vouchsafe my belief that Tea Party members would never indulge in a bit of a polish in public.
And who says “defecating on cars” in the heartland? It’s “s——- on cars.” Everyone knows that. Elitist snobs.
But how do you follow quote alleging your foes are subhuman aliens who jerk off in the roads and take dumps on cars? Everything you follow it with is anti-climactic.
Like many states and local governments struggling to cut costs, Michigan hopes to replace some government employees with contract workers who will do the same job for less.
Ginny Townsend, a nursing assistant under a state contract, attending to Harold Sundberg at a veterans facility in Michigan.
Ginny Townsend, 41, took a job in January as a nursing assistant in the state-run home for veterans here. Technically, she works for a private company that supplies some employees to the veterans home under a state contract. She makes $10 an hour, about half the wage of the public employees working at the facility.
With the national unemployment rate at roughly 9 percent, Ms. Townsend says she feels lucky just to have a job. But on her low wages, she is barely scraping by. She said she was raising four randchildren under 11 with her unemployed sister and could not support them without the $300 in food stamps she collects every month …
The lower wage, she says, has left her strained to cover $675 a month in rent, along with basics like food and child care. So Ms. Perttu collects $400 monthly in food stamps and child care assistance, programs administered by the state but largely financed by the federal government. She has not been able to buy winter coats for her children, she said, and often avoids calls from credit card bill collectors.
At the veteran’s home, “one check was enough to pay all the bills,??? she said. Drawing on public assistance, she added, “is not helping our economy.???
This is so immoral it is difficult to know where to begin.
First, it deprives people of what was formerly a middle-class living in the name of austerity, rationalized that corporate America can do it better and cheaper by paying labor much less for the same work. And at the same time getting the workers out from under the protections and contracts which they are afforded by working for the government, the last place where unions can still sort-of-reasonably survive.
Second, it shoves the cost of slashing wages to just eking by off on the government, and taxpayer, by necessitating hunger be kept from the door through food stamp subsidization.
Third — corporate America vulture contracting makes its profit on the money the federal government must then make up with increased food stamp enrollment.
There is nothing efficient or free market about this. It’s economic parasitism and the stealing of labor, pure and simple.
And it’s using a bad economy, one in which people are desperate, to make corporate profit by making things worse. When the state slashes its payroll, it also loses more tax revenue, increasing the potentially downward spiral.
It is indeed remarkable that more people aren’t in the street with OWS.
What governments save in salaries and benefits often “ends up on the government books through all sorts of programs,??? Paul C. Light, “a professor at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University” told the newspaper. He meant “unemployment insurance, Medicaid and other public assistance for workers earning low incomes.”
“Outsourcing becomes more popular during tough economic times as states and municipalities transfer the operations of facilities like prisons, school cafeterias and sanitation departments to private contractors,” it continues.
None of this makes any sense. It is merely expedient, momentarily superficially convenient and predatory. Repugnant on so many levels, it merely shows how failed and unfair the United States is at every level one cares to examine.
The census report found that the poverty rate for all groups would have jumped to 18 percent — or 6 million more people — if it weren’t for the earned income tax credit, a safety net program which offers credits to low- and moderate-income families as an incentive to work and to help offset the burden of Social Security taxes. Temporary expansions to that program are slated to expire after next year.
Without food stamps, the poverty rate would have risen to 17.7 percent, which translates to about 5 million more people. That program was expanded in 2009 as part of the federal stimulus plan; the expansions are now phasing out gradually and will expire completely in 2014.
Because of the drive to private contract for workers in state health care facilities engendered a lawsuit stopping it in Michigan.
The Times interviewed the person who levied the suit who explained it in this way:
The lawsuit, filed by Anthony Spallone, a resident, says that fill-in contract workers have, among other things, repeatedly dropped residents and left them in urine-soaked beds, and once fed a resident solid food despite specific instructions not to.
Tim Frain, the chief executive of J2S [the company furnishing the reduced wage contract workers], declined to comment.
Mr. Spallone, a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran who said he had served “12 months, eight days, four hours and 22 minutes??? as an Army engineer, described the state’s caregivers as “like family.??? He suggested the government “drop one less bomb overseas and pay these guys’ salaries.???
“We’re just driving everybody down,” someone adds.
