A relative whos been sailing around the Caribbean on a catamaran sent me an email the other day. She has no complaints, other than the music targeting tourists. Wherever she and her husband go, It has been generally hideous.a terrible blend of Euro-rave with calypso. At first it sounds OK but after five minutes it wears on you.
Different notes for different boats, I say. For every form of music, from bluegrass to Bhangra, theres an audienceand one persons music is another persons Muzak. With that in mind, last month saw the release of nearly 500 pages of citizen correspondence with City Hall about Occupy Vancouver, as reported in the Courier. Please spare the court injunction, one correspondent wrote by email. Bring a loud P/A system to the art gallery site, and play Don Hos Tiny Bubbles non-stop until they all leave. I do believe this will work.
Im sure that could be arranged for future protests. Sound is one form of ammo thats endlessly renewable, and the infamous LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) is available for law enforcement agencies to address everything from occupy encampments to sports events gone sideways. The LRAD can emit bursts of painful sound that induce headaches or nausea faster than a Don Ho boxed set.
After purchasing an LRAD in 2009, the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Police Department quickly announced it intended to use it solely as a public address system, and had disabled the noise function. So far the LRAD has not been used locally for crowd control, unlike the situation with G20 protestors in Pittsburgh in September 2009. In any case, even this piece of sonic bling is already old school. For the full-on, Peter Weller/Robocop look, law enforcement agencies may soon have a Raytheon-patented, acoustic riot shield with attached low frequency speakers. According to a cheery report on the tech blog Gizmodo, the defence contractors non-lethal pressure shield creates a pulsed pressure wave that resonates the upper respiratory tract of a human, hindering breathing and eventually incapacitating the target. In other words, it can suffocate the protester.
Raytheons patent notes that police officers standing in a line can network the shields together to amplify the range and effects. The targets might drop from a lack of oxygen to their brains, but their eardrums wont be damaged. Thats reassuring.
The illustration accompanying the patent show the pressure shields being deployed against what appear to be young, white, middle-class demonstrators. I was reminded of a 60 Minutes segment from 2008, on a microwave cannon that can create localized hotspots hundreds of metres away. In a Pentagon field test, volunteers played the part of placard-carrying protesters. They scrambled the moment the non-lethal, 100,000-watt beam hit them. But the wording on the protesters placards caught my eye: World Peace, Peace Not War, and Love for All.
This microwave weapon is supposedly intended solely for trouble spots like Iraq and Afghanistan, but the field test suggested otherwise. According to a December report from Businessinsider.com, the Pentagon is now offering free hardware to police forces across the U.S., including military robots, helicopters, armoured vehicles, grenade launchers and even amphibious tanks. About $500 million worth of military gear was given out in 2010 alone. (Hmm... its almost as if the Powers That Beam are anticipating waves of domestic dissent.)
Beyond the shores of the North American security perimeter, even rock music can be wielded as a weapon. New York University professor of music Suzanne Cusick claims that the U.S. militarys LRAD was deployed to prepare the battlefield in the siege of Fallujah in November of 2004. The device was armed with AC/DCs Hells Bells and Shoot to Thrill. (Shades of the surreal scene from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, of helicopter gunships blasting out Wagners Ride of the Valkyries on raids against the Vietcong.)
The militarization of North American police forces is troubling to say the least, as is U.S. President Obamas passage last week of a bill that allows the president to indefinitely detain any American without trial. So I say this to the nameless correspondent who semi-seriously advised City Hall to scatter the Occupy camp with Don Ho music: In a time when sound and music is weaponized, and the Harper-Obama border agreement includes integrated cross-border law enforcement teams, be careful for what you petition or pray for.
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