Mission Statement - De-Spinning the Pro-Taser Propaganda

Yeah right, 'Excited Delirium' my ass...

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The primary purpose of this blog is to provide an outlet for my observations and analysis about tasers, taser "associated" deaths, and the behaviour exhibited by the management, employees and minions of Taser International. In general, everything is linked back to external sources, often via previous posts on the same topic, so that readers can fact-check to their heart's content. This blog was started in late-2007 when Canadians were enraged by the taser death of Robert Dziekanski and four others in a short three month period. The cocky attitude exhibited by the Taser International spokespuppet, and his preposterous proposal that Mr. Dziekanski coincidentally died of "excited delirium" at the time of his taser-death, led me to choose the blog name I did and provides my motivation. I have zero financial ties to this issue.



Monday, May 25, 2009

And this just in: 'They Don't Know...'

Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman [WIKI] was very clear that 'naming' and 'knowing' are two different things.

Some of the most muddled thinking on Earth comes from people that don't distinguish between putting a more-or-less meaningless name on something, and actually knowing how it really works. It's a point I've mentioned before: [LINK]

Once you understand what Feynman is on about, you see this sort of fundamental confusion all the time. By keeping this 'naming/knowing' distinction clear in your own mind, you'll be much better prepared to be able to see what things are really known, and which are merely named.

There are a lot of people that are 'experts' with the names of things, but are otherwise completely inept technically. Such so-called experts are sometimes even found in the witness box. The trick to detecting them is to carefully monitor the ratio of technical names to actual explanations.


There's an old joke about such technically-inept people:

Q: What time is it at their house?
A: Twelve O'clock, Twelve O'clock, Twelve O'clock, Twelve O'clock...

(They've incapable of setting their digital clocks which blink "12:00" endlessly.)


Here's today related news:

Despite the Taser being one of the most heavily researched [only because Taser International has been plugging-up the plumbing...] less-lethal weapons in the world, its operational mechanism remains a mystery, a conference on non-lethal weapons was told.

Explanations for the electro stun weapon's apparent ability to stiffen the whole of the human body without (usually) causing any physiological damage remain unclear, inconsistent and contradictory, and it might be that psychological factors play a more important role in its effect than previously thought. These were the conclusions of researchers at the Bundeswehr Medical Centre, who presented their research at the 5th Symposium on Non Lethal Weapons in Ettlingen, Germany earlier this month.

In a special forum on Tasers, scientists from the University of Military Forces in Germany reported that published research into the Taser’s effect on heart tissue was also inconsistent.
[LINK]


In other words, the minions at Taser International have put the rather-meaningless name on the taser mechanism "Neuromuscular Incapacitation", and they even toss out the 'essential' Three-Letter Acronym "(NMI)" because having an acronym tends to mask the obvious fact that they just made it up.


But, apparently, they can't explain how it actually works.

And there's a strange tendency to provide computer models that understate the complexity of the human body by an approximately ratio of 100,000-to-1 (my guess).

Ding Ding Ding - Warning bells for lack of 'knowing'.


This point also ties back into another previous point where I suggested that they combined some taser experiments with some evil-minded acupuncture. [LINK]


Once everyone agrees that the so-called "science" of tasers is ill-developed and being 'used' for legal purposes, then the actual ignorance of the subject becomes more clear.

And that reveals who to put more faith in...

Do you believe those that claim that something is impossible given the state of ignorance?

Or those that are still struggling to connect the dots to provide a rational explanation that would match the real-world results.


Once you've through the grind of such debates many times over, it all becomes perfectly obvious what's going on.

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