Emergency! Emergency!

[trickykitty]

The news of today is about a fear that Trump will take his Twits to a whole new level by "planting a Government-controlled loudspeaker in the home and on the person of every American."

Not only is this a system that has been in place for a while now, Japan still has us beat.

In case of missile attack, they 1)set off local sirens (check), 2)send out alerts to cell phones (check), and 3)magically turn on televisions to news alerts (nope, we're not there yet).

[Reference 1:51, The Third Awakening, for the television]

"Being Rudely Awoken by a North Korean Missile" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[siliconshaman]

You know.. I thought sure that was an article from the "The Onion" until I clicked on the link...

Holy shitfire!! What the fuck America?! Even Mussolini never went that far.

[trickykitty]

Ah, but would he have if he had access to cell phones?

As I live in Texas, we already get localized alerts sponsored by the state government on our phones, but I consider these quite important and specific messages, and we can choose to opt out of them on an individual basis. The important thing to note is that none of these are political in nature. In other words, no one should ever think that trying to find a missing child or warning of a potential tornado in the area could have multiple interpretations or detractors against the message.

As mentioned in the first article link, when Obama signed legislation limiting the use of the alert system, it was presumed that the people with the power of sending out the alerts would understand the difference between a national threat and a personal vendetta. The scheduled testing of the system coupled with our current president's penchant for twitter vitriol has reminded folks that there may be a loophole that really needs plugging.

[trickykitty]

PS: The weather alerts come from the National Weather Service, but already one tornado warning via cell phone last year was the only thing that got my household up and moving despite the local sirens going off.


Also, as a completely unrelated comment, I totally can't wait for Sunday's Doctor Who!!! My roommate had only seen through Tennant, so I've been getting him caught up over the past few months, with us actually starting back at Eccleston and slowly working our way through ALL THE WHO.