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September 27, 2005
Participate in an experimental haunting
Haque Design + Research: project participation
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a collaboration with Professor Chris French, Goldsmiths College, funded by a Wellcome Trust, SciArt award.
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We are about to enter the testing phase of a project to synthesise the experience of a "haunted" space. We are now looking for people interested in participating in the experiment at a venue in North London.
As a participant you would be asked individually to spend up to one hour in the specially constructed chamber. Participation may involve periods of exposure to infrasound and/or magnetic fields. You may experience mildly unusual sensations and will be asked to keep a record of these.
"Infrasound" is sound at frequencies below approx. 20Hz, which is generally too low for humans to perceive as sound. The magnetic fields will be generated by electromagnetic coils and will be similar to those generated naturally by the Earth. The levels used in the experiment will be at or below levels detected in the natural environment. These too will generally not be perceptible on a conscious level and are well under ICNIRP guidelines for health and safety.
In some cases, participants will be exposed to neither phenomena, though these participants will not be informed of this until the end of the experiment. In these cases, participants will be given an opportunity to experience the space with all phenomena active, though the results will not be included in the dataset.
By appointment only
Dates: Weekdays, August 29 to first-week October (may be extended).
Place: 1 minute walk from Finsbury Park tube station, London N4
Time: Any time between 10am and 6pm.
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If you are interested in participating please let me know by emailing (event@haque.co.uk) with:
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Your name:
Your availability: Day / Date / Time
Any family history of epilepsy?:
Confirmation not pregnant?:
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I will respond to confirm or suggest an alternative date/time and will include full address and directions for the experiment site.
If you choose to participate, please be aware that you may withdraw from the study at any time and for any reason without being required to provide an explanation. Data will be held securely and in the strictest of confidence. In the final report the results will be presented in such a way that the individual identity of all participants will remain strictly anonymous.
Thank you!
Usman Haque
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haque: design + research
http://www.haque.co.uk/
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Posted by Mark at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2005
Halifax Slasher blogged
Tim Chapman's Haunts of the Halifax Slasher is referenced by Liverpudlian curate John Davies in his blog notes from a small curate
Excellent walk through the town of Halifax in the latest edition of quirky journal Strange Attractor. Tim Chapman's piece reinforces the point in yesterday's blog - it's a great piece of provincial psychogeography (which even references Alan Moore at one point).
Chapman links the milltown's grisly-gallows past to its BNP-fascist present on a walk south-west to north-east via the sites of the 1938 incidents of the Halifax Slasher, 'two weeks of terror of a kind said to have been unseen since the days of Jack the Ripper', forty years ahead of the region's next great terror, Peter Sutcliffe. During this fortnight in Halifax, 'women were cut with razors; right-thinking men patrolled the streets; bystanders who looked a bit odd were beaten up'.
The only difference between Jack the Ripper, the Yorkshire Ripper and the Halifax Slasher was that in Halifax the incidents were largely proven to be false, the self-inflicted wounds of fearful or attention-seeking individuals at a time of mass-panic. 'In 1979, as in 1888, it was real - all too bloody real. In 1938, the verdict was mass hysteria. The Halifax Slasher simply never existed.'
Facinating tale, fascinating walk. Fascinating to reflect on the characteristics of mass hysteria this week, whose domestic theme has been fuel queue madness.
Via Tim Chapman
Posted by Mark at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
Weather Wars?
Forecaster leaves job to pursue weather theories
By Jana Peterson and John O'Connell - Journal writers
From the Idaho State Journal
POCATELLO - To the rest of the country, Scott Stevens is the Idaho weatherman who blames the Japanese Mafia for Hurricane Katrina. To folks in Pocatello, he's the face of the weather at KPVI News Channel 6.
The Pocatello native made his final Channel 6 forecast Thursday night, leaving a job he's held for nine years in order to pursue his weather theories on a full-time basis.
"I'm going to miss that broadcast, but I'm not going to miss not getting home until 11 p.m.," Stevens said. "I just don't have the hours of the day to take care of my research and getting those (broadcasts) out and devoting the necessary research to the station."
It was Stevens' decision to leave the TV station, said KPVI general manager Bill Fouch.
"When Scott signed his current contract, he told Brenda and me at the time that it would be his last contract," Fouch said Thursday. "We knew, but the timetable moved up because of all the attention (he's been getting.)"
Since Katrina, Stevens has been in newspapers across the country where he was quoted in an Associated Press story as saying the Yakuza Mafia used a Russian-made electromagnetic generator to cause Hurricane Katrina in a bid to avenge the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. He was a guest on Coast to Coast, a late night radio show that conducts call-in discussions on everything from bizarre weather patterns to alien abductions. On Wednesday, Stevens was interviewed by Fox News firebrand Bill O'Reilly.
Stevens said he received 30 requests to do radio interviews on Thursday alone.
Fouch said Stevens wanted to leave as quickly as possible because his "plate is full," and he needs to take advantage of the opportunities that exist now.
Stevens said he's received offers that he's not at liberty to discuss.
Stevens, 39, who was born in Twin Falls, plans to remain in Pocatello, where his family remains. He said his family wishes him the best in his future endeavors.
It costs him hundreds of dollars each month to run his Web site, weatherwars.info, but he said that's a price he's willing to pay.
"There's a chess game going on in the sky," Stevens said. "It affects each and every one of us. It is the one common thread that binds us all together."
Although the theories espoused by Stevens - scalar weapons, global dimming - are definitely on the scientific fringe today, there are thousands of Web sites that mention such phenomena.
"The Soviets boasted of their geoengineering capabilities; these impressive accomplishments must be taken at face value simply because we are observing weather events that simply have never occurred before, never!" Stevens wrote on his Web site. "The evidence of these weapons at work found within the clouds overhead is simply unmistakable. These patterns and odd geometric shapes seen in our skies, each and every day, are clear and present evidence that our weather has been stolen from us, only to be used by those whose designs for humanity are rarely in alignment with that of the common man."
However, Stevens never discussed his weather theories on the air during his time at Channel 6 - an agreement he had with the station management. What the meteorologist chose to do in his off time was his business, said his manager of eight years.
Fouch said he would miss Stevens, whom he described as energetic, easy-going and enthusiastic about the weather, but he is supportive of his decision to pursue his passion.
"His theories are his theories," Fouch said. "But, if you think about it - of all the TV weather people, he continues to be the most accurate. It isn't his theories getting involved with his professional job."
For Stevens, however, the recent attention to his theories has been somewhat of a distraction from work.
"When there has been so much attention, it gets in the way of them doing their jobs and me doing my job," Stevens said.
Find out more:
To learn more about Stevens and his thoughts on manipulated weather, check out his Web site at www.weatherwars.info, or go to www.journalnet.com/articles/2005/03/06/opinion/opinion04.txt to read the story that Journal City Editor Greg McReynolds wrote about Stevens in March.
Posted by Mark at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)
Psy Ops Media
You Can't Handle the Truth
Psy-ops propaganda goes mainstream.
By Sharon Weinberger
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 3:31 AM PT
LONDON—Over the past 24 hours, seven people have checked into hospitals here with telltale symptoms. Rashes, vomiting, high temperature, and cramps: the classic signs of smallpox. Once thought wiped out, the disease is back and threatening a pandemic of epic proportions.
The government faces a dilemma: It needs people to stay home, but if the news breaks, mass panic might ensue as people flee the city, carrying the virus with them.
A shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception. Rather than alert the public to the smallpox threat, the company sets up a high-tech "ops center" to convince the public that an accident at a chemical plant threatens London. As the fictitious toxic cloud approaches the city, TV news outlets are provided graphic visuals charting the path of the invisible toxins. Londoners stay indoors, glued to the telly, convinced that even a short walk into the streets could be fatal.
This scenario may sound like a rejected plot twist from a mediocre Bond flick, but one company is dead set on making this fantasy come to life.
Strategic Communication Laboratories, a small U.K. firm specializing in "influence operations" made a very public debut this week with a glitzy exhibit occupying prime real estate at Defense Systems & Equipment International, or DSEi, the United Kingdom's largest showcase for military technology. The main attraction was a full-scale mock-up of its ops center, running simulations ranging from natural disasters to political coups.
Full story over at Slate
Thanks to Gyrus
Posted by Mark at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)
Ghosts of New Orleans
Video clip from CBS 5 USA
Interesting both for its phenomenological aspects - shades, spirits, coincidences - and for the Revelation of just how deeply immersed in Fundamentalist Christian superstition the soldiers interviewed here are:
Soldiers spooked by New Orleans Spirits
Posted by Mark at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2005
SAJ2 Guardian Review
Obscure and gloriously odd
Travis Elborough on Strange Attractor
Saturday September 17, 2005
The Guardian
Strange Attractor: Journal Two (ISBN 0954805410) £14 (inc p&p) UK, £15 elsewhere
Any journal in which the contributors feel at liberty to drop in similes such as "like Madame Blavatsky's Akashic Record" or to confess to "an uncomplicated, youthful curiosity for the world of teenage public schoolgirls" is bound to be a bit odd. And Strange Attractor is very odd indeed - gloriously, frequently maddeningly so, in fact.
To call it esoteric, in the usual pejorative sense, would be both inadequate and to miss the whole point. This is a periodical that revels in the "unpopular" and the obscure - the arcane for arcane's sake. Although I'll admit that midway through an abstruse slice of woo-woo nonsense on Loki, the Norse god of trickery and sexual aberrance, I was gripped by a sudden, irrepressible urge to firebomb every new age emporium in the land, it is a beguiling and beautifully fashioned cabinet of curiosities.
Aside from pieces on those occult old chestnuts - alchemy, shamans, Peruvian psychedelic temples, homunculi and, er, Halifax - there are reappraisals (excavations almost) of the lives and works of the French writer and jazzman Boris Vian, the voodoo priestess and filmmaker Maya Deren and I Ching pioneer CF Russell. An associate of Aleister Crowley, Russell was, even by Strange Attractor standards, "a very peculiar gent"; until his adolescence he apparently preferred to defecate in his trousers rather than use a loo. Lovely.
Posted by Mark at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
Italian Medium Locates Body
(Though how, of course, is another matter...)
Debate rages as medium finds body in lake
John Hooper in Rome
Thursday September 15, 2005
The Guardian
In a country where plaster Madonnas weep blood, it is only to be expected that the supernatural should be on everyone's minds. But even miracle-hardened Italians have been taken aback by the affair of the medium and the body in the lake.
The body of Chiara Beriffi, who disappeared three years ago, was found in her car in Lake Como in precisely the area indicated by a medium, Maria Rosa Busi, who had been approached for help by Ms Beriffi's parents in March. A police source said it was a "million to one chance" that the vehicle would be found in the area marked by the medium.
Since Sunday, when volunteer divers found the car, the case has been debated on radio, television and in magazines. Divers initially balked at the venture because the spot identified by Ms Busi was 500ft from shore. Detectives were yesterday trying to work out how the four-wheel drive came to be so far from the lakeside.
On Tuesday the dead woman's father, Francesco Beriffi, watched as the dark red vehicle was hauled 400ft from the bottom of the lake by a ship-borne crane. "I hesitate to believe in voices from beyond", he said. "But I really cannot be sceptical."
Critics, however, accused Ms Busi of working out the spot from known information. On Tuesday the medium broke off a heated exchange with an interviewer in a live television show.
Investigations are continuing into whether Ms Beriffi, 30, who suffered from depression, took her own life or drove off the road accidentally on the rainy winter night when she vanished. An autopsy on her body was due to be carried out last night or today.
Posted by Mark at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2005
Evil ABBA
CATHI UNSWORTH will be reading from her new book "The Not Knowing" at THE HORSE HOSPITAL, Russell Square, London on Friday 23 September, alongside LYDIA LUNCH, MARTYN WAITS, TOMMY UDO and with music from the great TERRY EDWARDS. Plus the DJ skills of PETE WOODHEAD and JOE McNALLY.
The Not Knowing, available now from Serpent's Tail (and I should add, a damned good read):
"London, March 1992. Nearly a year after the release of Brit noir sensation, Bent, the capital is still in the grip of its cultural and stylistic impact. Diana Kemp, journalist on the alternative arts magazine Lux, is dismissive of the film's cult following but admires the technique of its debut director, Jon Jackson. In fact, some of her admiration has a more personal nature and when Jon disappears following a triumphant Guardian lecture, she feels the loss, acutely. Two weeks' later, Jackson's body is found in a condemned lock-up in the arches behind Camden market. A victim of his own success? Perhaps - the murder site resembles the particularly bloody final scene of Bent. But why would anyone want to destroy the golden boy in such a way? Attempting to put a lid on the past, Diana buries herself in work. But an assignment, at the ICA's Crimewave festival, leads her on a voyage of discovery where not knowing might be the only thing that saves her."
Posted by Mark at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2005
The Ghost in the Darkroom
September 4, 2005, New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY
THE PERFECT MEDIUM: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE OCCULT
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, Sept. 27 through Dec. 31.
IT is not a place you would normally expect to find a curator preparing for a major photography show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But a few summers ago, Pierre Apraxine was camped out on the third floor of a rambling town house on West 73rd Street near Central Park, the headquarters of the American Society for Psychical Research, a 120-year-old repository of the paranormal whose founders included the philosopher William James.
In the world of photo collecting and scholarship, Mr. Apraxine is nothing less than an institution. For almost two decades, he served as the eyes, ears and auction proxy for the philanthropist Howard Gilman, who built a collection - recently acquired by the Met - that is widely considered to be one of the most important in the world, thanks largely to Mr. Apraxine's expertise and globe-trotting tenacity.
On this particular day, however, Mr. Apraxine was working in the service not of photography but of the sixth sense, of that great invisible interchange that the Russian spiritualist Mme. Blavatsky described as a kind of astral post office. He had folded his lanky 6-foot-3 frame into a small, steel soundproof booth illuminated by a red lamp. Halves of Ping-Pong balls were taped over his eyes and headphones hissing white noise were placed over his ears. In a room nearby sat a fellow curator and friend, Sophie Schmit, who was given a randomly selected image on a piece of paper. The goal was for Mr. Apraxine, sealed in his chamber - lulled into a deeply relaxed condition known as a ganzfeld state - to receive the image that Ms. Schmit was sending.
As it turned out, he performed fairly well, describing several images that corresponded to the ones Ms. Schmit was holding. (In the interest of the research, the society asks that the images not be made public.) When the positions were reversed, with Ms. Schmit in the chamber, the pair did even better - Ms. Schmit described with sometimes eerie accuracy the image he was mentally willing her to see.
None of this was particularly surprising to Mr. Apraxine, who grew up on a family estate in Estonia where supernatural goings on often seemed to be part of the natural course of the day. According to stories his mother told him, a vaporous woman in white who may or may not have been the specter of an old aunt appeared regularly, sometimes fluttering over Mr. Apraxine's crib.
"She was a benevolent spirit, in that she was watching over me," he explained. "On the other hand, she did not like one of the maids and she terrified other members of the household, especially if someone was stealing. She was a watchdog."
And does Mr. Apraxine, 70, a former Fulbright scholar and a sterling product of a post-Enlightenment education, really believe this story? Or in things that go bump in the night? During lunch recently at the Met, he looked up from his plate and stared out into Central Park for a moment. "I have a formula, an answer for that that is ready-made," he said. "I believe you can see a ghost, but that doesn't mean I believe in ghosts."
He paused and elaborated: "I remain a noncommitted observer - that's the best way to put it."
But Mr. Apraxine has been a curious and open-minded observer almost all of his life, consulting psychics, undergoing hypnosis, reading books and magazines about the paranormal and, once, visiting a voodoo ceremony in Haiti. So his involvement in organizing the show at the Met - "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," a fascinating survey of the ways in which photography has been used to try to prove the existence of the supernatural - is more than just a professional or aesthetic exercise for him. At the least, it is one of those coincidences Mr. Apraxine says he decidedly does not believe in.
"There is nothing accidental - at least in my life," he says.
His early adult interest in occult photography grew out of his work as a collector, not a spiritual seeker, he said. In the early 1970's, when he began to work with Gilman to build a world-class photo collection, the strength of the Gilman holdings was in 20th-century work by photographers like Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Mr. Apraxine's mission was to start trolling backwards, buying good pictures from the 19th century, stretching all the way back to photography's infancy in the 1830's. To the surprise of both men, who had assumed that most of the best of 19th-century photography had already been bought by museums, masterpieces were still for sale around the world, and many were being sold for what now seem to be laughably small sums.
As the collection deepened, occult photographs were simply another important piece of the field's history. From the 1870's through the 1930's, the belief that cameras had the power to capture not just the visible and fleeting but also the invisible and ephemeral produced a huge body of images intended as almost scientific exhibits. (They also served as sales pitches for photographers offering Civil War widows a last glimpse of a loved one.)
The 120 pictures in the exhibition are by turns spooky, beautiful, disturbing and hilarious. They are also, by and large, the visual records of decades of fraud, cons, flimflams and gullibility - though there are also some pictures, like those produced by an eccentric Chicago bellhop, Ted Serios, said to be purely from his thoughts, in the 1960's, that have never been adequately explained.
"We don't consider it the real stuff, you know," said Dr. Nancy Sondow, president of the American Society for Psychical Research, which lent several photographs to the show. Still, she added, "I guess it's interesting from the standpoint of the history of photography."
The pictures are a window onto a bizarre, and almost forgotten, period of American and European history, when the camps of spiritualism and strict rationality battled it out on the front pages of newspapers. The 1869 fraud trial of William Mumler, a Boston and New York photographer who was the first known practitioner of spirit photography, became a public spectacle. The mayor of New York himself ordered an investigation into his practices, and P. T. Barnum testified for the prosecution, speaking as the Amazing Randi of his day. But Mumler had many defenders. His patrons included Mary Todd Lincoln, who visited him after her husband's assassination; she took away a photo that shows his ghostly form standing behind her. (Mumler was acquitted at his trial, but discredited, suspected of manipulating photo plates.)
Spirit photography began in a typically American burst of entrepreneurship, and for this reason serious European spiritualists were slow in joining. One wrote that while the United States had taken the lead in many things, it had also "left us far behind in the invention of false rumors." But the practice soon took off in France and England, and produced groups whose names seemed to be lifted right from the pages of H. G. Wells or J. K. Rowling: the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures, the British College of Psychic Science, the Occult Committee of the Magic Circle.
By World War II interest had peaked, but the exhibition makes clear that it has never really gone away. The show includes some of the famous Polaroid images produced by Mr. Serios, who claimed to be able to project his thoughts onto film and whose work remains one of the best documented and most hotly debated cases in the field. Even today, fascination with the practice is widespread, aided by video technology and the Internet - just type the words "ghost hunter" into Google and you can find thousands of examples of contemporary images purporting to show otherworldly emanations.
Mr. Apraxine and Ms. Schmit, who organized the show with three other curators, stressed that the only way to do such a show was to profess official agnosticism. "The authors' position is precisely that of having no position, or at least not in so Manichean a form," they wrote in the exhibition's catalog.
But in a telephone interview from her home in Paris, Ms. Schmit conceded that a strong sense of "what if?" was also a basic requirement. "If I hadn't considered at least the possibility of it existing," she said, "I don't think I would have ever been interested in doing the exhibit." That summer day at the American Society for Psychical Research, where the two curators were sorting through the group's archives to find photographs for the show, they agreed to participate in the telepathy experiment not as a joke but as a sort of curatorial research assignment for extra credit. "We are very open, both us, to that kind of thing," she said.
Indeed, for Mr. Apraxine, it seems to have been at times more than just openness. A charming but private man who combines Old World elegance with an almost childlike enthusiasm, he tells of several encounters in his life that he has found hard to explain. Raised mostly in Belgium after his family left Estonia, he was sent by his family to Ireland to learn English and one night sneaked alone into an abandoned house rumored to be haunted - Mr. Apraxine pronounces it "HOWN-ted" - where he says he heard a clock ticking in a room with no clock and footsteps where there appeared to be nobody walking.
Later in his life, in the 1960's, on the advice of acquaintances who worked at the occult magazine Planète in Paris, he went to see his first psychic, in the countryside near Orléans. "I wanted to see what my life would be like," he explained. He recalled being nervous and feeling a little silly. "I was expecting to see someone clothed in robes with an owl on his shoulder, you know?" he said. Instead the man was wearing shorts, and in his backyard among the clucking chickens, using a pendulum as an aid, he foretold for Mr. Apraxine "all the salient points of my life - and they all happened." And Mr. Apraxine said all this as matter-of-factly as if he were discussing daguerreotypes.
Later, after moving to New York, he regularly consulted another psychic in the West Village and urged one of his reluctant friends to see her, too. "I wanted to destabilize his Cartesian mind," he explained, smiling.
At this point in his life, Mr. Apraxine said, he feels that many of his curiosities about otherworldly things have been satisfied, or have at least gone into hibernation for a while. He reads less about the occult and hasn't seen a psychic in years. Or, for that matter, a ghost. (He sent a follow-up e-mail message to a reporter after the interview, just to make sure that he did not appear as inordinately apparition-obsessed: "I do not smirk at people who tell me of paranormal experiences," he wrote, "but neither do I believe that the silhouette in a badly lit corridor is the ghost Aunt Dorothea coming back to spy on her husband.")
In many ways, he said, the Met exhibition did not develop as an outgrowth of his interests. It simply became another way of working through them, an exploration he hopes that people who see the show may want to take, too.
"I thought, 'Maybe I will learn something by delving more deeply into this subject,' " he said, " 'and maybe I will learn something about myself.' "
Posted by Mark at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)
Sonic 'Lasers' Head to Flood Zone
Sonic 'Lasers' Head to Flood Zone
By Xeni Jardin
Story from Wired (some nice pics here too)
02:00 AM Sep. 02, 2005 PT
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, California -- Air-raid sirens, Frank Sinatra songs and Muhammad Ali trash talk blared over the Southern California desert in a demonstration of new acoustic technology for crowd control and disaster communications.
In mid-90's morning heat at Edwards Air Force Base, HPV Technologies and American Technology demonstrated prototypes of non-lethal sonic devices for a group of military and law enforcement guests, including representatives of the U.K. Home Office.
Representatives of both companies say that within days, they will ship some units of their respective products to areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, so authorities can use the tools for crowd control, aid distribution and rescue operations.
Costa Mesa, California-based HPV showed off three sizes of its Magnetic Acoustic Device, or MAD, a black square panel composed of multiple speakers. The units on display ranged from about 4 to 10 feet across.
The device uses magnets approximately 6 inches tall and 9.25 inches wide to convert electrical pulses into sound waves, and is capable of aiming sound precisely for thousands of feet -- like the sonic equivalent of a laser, or spotlight.
Its path and reach can be affected by environmental factors such as nearby flat surfaces, hills, bodies of water or strong bursts of wind.
A series of test sounds beamed out by MAD, including gunfire, music and instructional commands, were audible and intelligible at distances of up to a mile.
When a subject is at close range in MAD's sonic path, and it is set to high volume, the sound can be excruciating.
The ability to broadcast instructions or alerts at great distances with minimal distortion could be useful for authorities and rescue crews in areas where other communications systems are unavailable.
American Technology is donating four devices -- three MRADs (medium-range acoustic devices) and one LRAD (long-range acoustic device). The four devices will be shipped out Friday to a Marine military police unit that is deploying to the Gulf States area for disaster-relief efforts.
"We are donating the use of one of our most powerful prototypes, LTPMS-2, for use in Mississippi as soon as possible, because the governor of that state said that the biggest problem they have right now is the fact that they have no communications infrastructure to get information or instructions out to people," he said. "They can very easily put this on a truck and send sound out for a minimum of at least a mile in either direction."
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which hosted the event as a guest of the Air Force base, is considering using MAD to replace conventional public address systems and as a non-lethal "area denial option" -- a way to clear crowds in civil unrest without using chemical agents, rubber bullets or the like.
"You don't appreciate how powerful this stuff is until you stand a mile away and can't see the transmitter -- but can hear every word in a Queen song," said Cmdr. Sid Heal, who heads the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department technology exploration program. "At a quarter mile, it sounds as clear as a car radio; at a half a mile, you have to raise your voice to talk to the guy next to you; at three quarters of a mile, laborers raking up leaves were putting in music requests."
Also on display at Edwards Air Force Base was American Technology's LRAD, a portable device that can be easily mounted on vehicles. Its smaller size and light weight comes with an accordingly smaller reach: The device is generally used for distances from 100 to 600 meters.
The U.S. Navy is currently using 60 of the devices in Iraq and other regions. Several U.S. law enforcement agencies are using or plan to use the device shortly.
American Technology announced today that Boston's police department has signed up for the device, citing its safety advantage over conventional crowd-control agents. In 2004, the Boston Police Department was held responsible when a female Red Sox fan died after being struck in the eye with a pepper gas projectile.
While both manufacturers stressed that their devices were designed primarily to hail, warn or communicate, other sonic technologies have been used by governments as a less pleasant way to disperse crowds.
Vehicle-mounted devices were used by Israeli authorities to scatter groups earlier this year, when Palestinians and Jewish supporters gathered to protest Israel's West Bank separation barrier. Dubbed "The Scream" by the Israeli Army, the device sends out streams of noise in intervals of about 10 seconds. The specific sonic frequencies chosen affect the inner ear, creating dizziness and nausea in human targets.
In a report, AP quoted an unnamed Israeli military official as saying the device emits a frequency that targets the inner ear, can cause damage with exposure for several minutes at close range, and compels humans nearby to leave the area. Exposure for minutes at close range could cause hearing damage. Information about longer-term exposure effects at long distances has not been publicly disclosed.
Both HPV's MAD and American Technology's LRAD are said to excel in mid- to higher-frequency sound ranges where sounds like sirens, alert "chirps" and human speech reside. Products from both companies could be used, at high volume, to harm subjects who do not comply with commands.
Devices from both companies vary in price, depending on quantity sold, size and which agency is purchasing -- but generally range from $10,000 to $75,000 per unit.
Posted by Mark at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)
After the storm, the tribes emerge
French Quarter Holdouts Create 'Tribes'
Sep 4, 11:28 PM (ET)
By ALLEN G. BREED
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor.
As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.
While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods - humanity.
"Some people became animals," Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. "We became more civilized."
While hundreds of thousands fled the below-sea-level city before the storm, many refused to leave the Vieux Carre, or old quarter. Built on some of the highest ground around and equipped with underground power lines, residents considered it about the safest place to be.
Katrina blew off roof slates and knocked down some already-unstable buildings but otherwise left the 18th and 19th century homes with their trademark iron balconies intact. Even without water and power, most preferred it to the squalor and death in the emergency shelters set up at the Superdome and Convention Center.
But what had at first been a refuge soon became an ornate prison.
Police came through commandeering drivable vehicles and siphoning gas. Officials took over a hotel and ejected the guests.
An officer pumped his shotgun at a group trying to return to their hotel on Chartres Street. "This is our block," he said, pointing the gun down a side street. "Go that way."
Jack Jones, a retired oil rig worker, bought a huge generator and stocked up on gasoline. But after hearing automatic gunfire on the next block one night, he became too afraid to use it - for fear of drawing attention. Still, he continues to boil his clothes in vinegar and dip water out of neighbors' pools for toilet flushing and bathing.
"They may have to shoot me to get me out of here," he said. "I'm much better off here than anyplace they might take me."
Many in outlying areas consider the Quarter a playground for the rich and complain that the place gets special attention.
Yes, wealthy people feasted on steak and quaffed warm champagne in the days after the storm. But many who stayed behind were the working poor - residents of the cramped spaces above the restaurants and shops.
Tired of waiting for trucks to come with food and water, residents turned to each other.
Johnny White's is famous for never closing, even during a hurricane. The doors don't even have locks.
Since the storm, it has become more than a bar. Along with the warm beer and shots, the bartenders passed out scrounged military Meals Ready to Eat and bottled water to the people who drive the mule carts, bus the tables and hawk the T-shirts that keep the Quarter's economy humming.
"It's our community center," said Marcie Ramsey, 33, whom Katrina promoted from graveyard shift bartender to acting manager.
For some, the bar has also become a hospital.
Tryphonas, who restores buildings in the Quarter, left the neighborhood briefly Saturday. Someone hit him in the head with a 2-by-4 and stole his last $5.
When Tryphonas showed up at Johnny White's with his left ear split in two, Joseph Bellomy - a customer pressed into service as a bartender - put a wooden spoon between Tryphonas' teeth and used a needle and thread to sew it up. Military medics who later looked at Bellomy's handiwork decided to simply bandage the ear. "That's my savior," Tryphonas said, raising his beer in salute to the former Air Force medical assistant.
A few blocks away, a dozen people in three houses got together and divided the labor. One group went to the Mississippi River to haul water, one cooked, one washed the dishes.
"We're the tribe of 12," 76-year-old Carolyn Krack said as she sat on the sidewalk with a cup of coffee, a packet of cigarettes and a box of pralines.
The tribe, whose members included a doctor, a merchant and a store clerk, improvised survival tactics. Krack, for example, brushed her dentures with antibacterial dish soap.
It had been a tribe of 13, but a member died Wednesday of a drug overdose. After some negotiating, the police carried the body out on the trunk of a car.
The neighbors knew the man only as Jersey.
Tribe member Dave Rabalais, a clothing store owner, said he thinks the authorities could restore utilities to the Quarter. But he knows that would only bring "resentment and the riffraff."
"The French Quarter is the blood line of New Orleans," he said. "They can't let anything happen to this."
On Sunday, the tribe of 12 became a tribe of eight.
Four white tour buses rolled into the Quarter under Humvee escort. National Guardsmen told residents they had one hour to gather their belongings and get a ride out. Four of the tribe members decided to leave.
"Hallelujah!" Teresa Lawson shouted as she dragged her suitcase down the road. "Thank you, Jesus!"
For Mark Rowland, the leaving was bittersweet.
"I'm heart-broken to leave the city that I love," Rowland said as he sat in the air-conditioned splendor of the bus. "It didn't have to be this way."
Posted by Mark at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)