I don't really understand how there can be so much back and forth on this issue. We already know directed-energy weapons are possible [0], what are the challenges in exploring the space until you're able to build an approximate match for what people report having experienced?
The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, it could be used to attack people working for rival organizations as well as general harassment. Imagine a tool that lets you disrupt someone's sleep, using that over months would be enough to drive them insane or at least seriously hamper their productivity and performance. For example: if a rival sports team is visiting and you're able to disrupt their sleep that might be enough to give your team an edge. How far are people really willing to go in order to win?
Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic.
It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.
I don't like the false dilemma of "either a directed-energy weapon, or mass hysteria".
I think we should at least consider hydrogen cyanide, especially given that a known adversary (Iran / IRGC) has claimed that Mahsa Amini killed herself with cyanide, whereas the video imagery show 2 government employees simultaneously turning their back before she faints and starts collapsing, indicating prior knowledge of what would happen. They also like to take a step or 2 away of any diluting plume they seem to know to be poisonous (presumably hydrogen cyanide).
It looks like either dosage testing, or training for possibly foreign operations.
Directed energy weapons already exist, they are called guns and rifles. Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense. If you want to secretly kill someone, just get them drunk and have them have a car crash. This is spy stuff 101.
Havana Syndrome always struck me like they had people working too close to a secret transmitter by accident.
> Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense.
We all have fairly compact devices in our kitchens which, if you were to put your head in them and press the start button, would literally cook your brain.
Why wouldn’t a directed version of that make practical sense? Just because it’d be bulky compared to a gun? But that would depend on what you were trying to achieve. Killing people with polonium or ricin isn’t the most efficient approach either, but it’s been done.
Note that I’m not saying that’s what happened in the Havana case. Just questioning the statement I quoted.
It's weird to me to think that you could beam hundreds to thousands of watts of some sort of energy at an American embassy and not be detected. That's what has always made it seem rather outlandish. My suspicion has always been some sort of burnout/anxiety as the actual explanation, but certainly there could be another possibility.
Again, I wasn’t proposing this is what happened in the Havana case. It’s not clear to me that what happened in Havana wasn’t just a panic of some sort, much like the recent drone panic. If it were some sort of attack, it raises a lot of questions about what the purpose was, why Cuba, why we haven’t seen anything like it since, why all the victims of the attack are still walking around attending meetings in Washington DC, etc.
That all said, I still don’t see why a microwave beam weapon is implausible in principle. It might not be the most practical thing ever - that’s why I compared it to polonium and ricin. But for example, using a parabolic reflector you can focus microwaves over the kind of distance between two buildings perhaps across the street from each other. If the beam only has a diameter of a few feet at the target, and only used for a short period, how is that going to be detected? You’d aim it at someone’s head visible through a window, for example, and the source of the beam could be behind a closed window with a curtain.
Btw this subthread seems to have been removed from the OP page at this point, apparently because the comment I replied to was flagged.
You are drawing a false equivalence and being willfully obtuse. It's clear and obvious that the conventional sense of the term refers to technology like lasers and microwave. Please don't try to split hairs over semantics. Unless you are one of the spiritual nuts who claim "we are all creatures of energy" just because of the mass energy equivalence. Unless you are building a nuke in your kitchen, there's a clear difference in meaning in the conventional usage of the term "kinetic" weapon and "direct energy" weapon.
The point is that matter is by far the most concentrated form of energy we’re able to manipulate. The original comment seemed to be saying something along those lines, although it seems to have been flagged and I can’t check it now.
> [...] urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, [...]
That's obviously bad, but it's not really terrorism. There's no one universally agreed on definition of terrorism, but instilling terror is commonly a big part, and for that you want people to notice.
Perhaps you want people to notice for overt action, but deniability is useful for covert action. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be considered a hostile act, and if it results in what would otherwise appear to be a psychosomatic illness that causes distress in order to muddy the waters to conceal the affiliation of the actors involved, I think it’s fair to call it a terror attack.
I think many people would go along with dragging anyone responsible for funding or terrorizing people with this stuff out into the streets by their hair.
Not sure I’m expecting an “oh yeah haha, about that-“ anytime soon.
At least not until everyone’s welded inside their homes like China.
Speaking from the point of view of other idiopathic chronic conditions....if it doesn't show up in a blood test or a scan, many doctors will just call it psychological.
If they expected such a weapon after the reports, they'd have sensors for all kinds of emissions up the wazoo in those buildings. And yet, they still haven't recorded anything.
I think having a long range explosives laden drone hit that sports stadium is way more scary. And more likely to come to an urban center as urban terrorism. Unfortunately. My 2c.
This is one of my biggest concerns for our future. What happens when the costs of drones or 3D printing become so cheap, and the learning curve shrinks to the extent that a terrorist, crazy person or school shooter can semi easily deploy their own deadly drone swarms.
Cars are really deadly and readily available without raising any suspicion.
(And only fairly recently have we really seen anyone use cars for terror attacks. And they are still fairly rare, considering how ubiquitous cars are.)
The curious thing about the two recent attack events in New Orleans is that most reported the trump tower one as an “exploding cybertruck” but very few even mentioned that the other incident involved an electric ford truck. It should have been absolutely newsworthy and raise questions: evs are actually more dangerous to a crowd. They don’t require space to accelerate. And they don’t make a lot of noise (and one could probably even disable the artificial movement sound). This is kind of a new danger.
Yes, it would be, if homicidal people were actually held back by the limitations of ICE cars. But they aren't even really brushing against them. They seem to be mostly limited by their own incompetence. Fortunately.
I believe we’ve passed this point many years ago. These are already extremely cheap and accessible to anyone, you can buy 20-30 small drones for less than the price of one firearm.
In reality there are hundreds of other ways someone could devise attacks like these, technology doesn’t really matter that much.
That time is here. I'm not all that smart and have made several quadcopters from parts. These do not have the geo restrictions that the commercial ones like DJI come with. There are thousands of people across the country doing the same with FPV drones. I live very close to a base that it's not uncommon to see Air Force One lands. I've often wondered if they have some sort of jamming software.
It would be very easy to cause problems in a crowd and it's just a matter of time.
well, we did just see a 3D printed weapon used, but the stories about the perp's looks shouted over the other details. I'm sure the gun lobby was pleased with that. so to the idea of school shootings, drone swarms would probably be too much for that, but a kid printing up their own guns to use is definitely something I could see happening. drone swarms would to me still be limited to a more well funded group to achieve instead of a lone wolf scenario.
Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER.
A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.
> a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic,
You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening.
A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage.
You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you.
And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.
The technology could also be used by oppressive governments to harass dissenters (and anyone else they might target). Essentially modern, high-tech COINTELPRO.
Yes, I could, but I'd have a 90% chance of hurting myself. Ditto for giving some cancer with radiation, many covert poisons, and similar. I can name a dozen ways I could kill or harm you, but:
1. I'd need to be wacko enough to want to harm you
2. I'd need to be sane enough for a major engineering project
3. I'd need to be competent enough to succeed without hurting myself
The set of individuals with all the traits required is small. It's not zero -- we had Ted Kazinsky -- but very small. Most major crimes are also never solved, and many more people can just take a gun and shoot someone. That's probably even harder to track down since a lot more people have guns than labs and PhDs. Esoteric technologies make for easy investigations.
So in the end, I think state actors have these. They also make good plot lines for a novel or video game (I have about a dozen I came up with in the context of a half-baked creative project).
But for real life individuals, I don't see how they'd become prolific. We'll probably see a crazy someday, but nowhere close to gun homicides. They just don't make much practical sense for an individual.
Yes, and you don't even need to dig into the dangerous bits (microwave transformers are some of the biggest killers of electrical hobbyists), just remove the door and defeat the interlock.
The top of my “I’m surprised it’s allowed” list is large lithium batteries in airplanes. If phones weren’t already so ubiquitous, they would have been mostly banned.
My guess is there would be a strong selection against impulsive non-experts. That’s on my “No-MacGyver” list with garage door springs and AC unit capacitors .
You don't have to use it just for winning - consider sports betting, you can definitely place multi-million dollar bets, on the team that isn't a favorite, then use your Havana Ray to disturb a couple key players - make millions, repeat.
Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite. When the news comes out, you'll make millions.
There's no chance this is disinformation muddying the online argument to prevent people from intelligently concluding that this is a directed energy weapon, of course.
I read it was caused by pesticides that were being applied extra heavily in the areas around the embassy, inside the embassy, and even in the “victim’s” homes due to concerns about zika virus which were hyped at the time
The link below includes results from a study which included brain imaging and comparing the results with other victims of neurotoxicity poisons
I believe it was hydrogen cyanide, and I believe it was Iran.
> Starting about a decade ago, a small number of Americans, mostly federal employees and many of them working in intelligence, reported similar experiences in Havana. In an instant, they heard a painful ringing in their ears, followed by intense pressure on their head and disorienting vertigo, which was often followed by nausea. Some of the victims developed long-term problems with fatigue or mobility. Other officials later reported similar symptoms while in Russia and other foreign countries, and many concluded that they had been the victim of a deliberate attack with some kind of acoustic weapon.
ototoxic, vertigo, nausea, brain damage
A close inspection of the video evidence released by the morality police concerning Mahsa Amini is quite damning. It appears the morality police allowed some intelligence branch to operate / exercise on their premises but refused to be the scapegoat once things went south. So they released video of her walking healthily into the building, of her searching a seat, but not before quickly glancing back (presumably in response to her name, called out for target lock-on by a trainer / observer "O"). This scene as she selects a seat is also important because the girls are being processing FIFO. Compare the women who are seated right before Mahsa sits down, with the women who are seated as Mahsa stands up. Except for the observer "O", all the women who sat down earlier have been processed and are no longer there, and all the women sitting down as she stands up again were not there before. Except this observer sitting in the midst of the arrested women of course.
Pay close attention to unnecessarily early starts or unnecessarily late endings of the segments: what is it that morality police is showing and why? They are threatening the higher-ups that they have already shared the evidence (minus the explanations) to implicate higher branches of government.
An unnecessarily early start is when before Mahsa stands up (presumably there is a number display). She seems scared and impatient: instead of a morality police officer coming for her, 2 such morality police officers "Bossy" and "Postpony" are seen in discussion. Certain arm movements are seen (extending one arm, while hiding the other hand, presumably to hide a trigger / squeezing bulb). Annoyed "Bossy" is seen demonstrating the things-to-be-done presumably for the umpteenth time (she is clearly impatient with Postpony's stalling behavior). It looks like this would have gone on for quite a while more, were it not for Mahsa spontaneously arriving. I believe she was afraid of the hypothetical situation where she patiently waited until her number was explicitly called out, out of fear that if the morality police accidentally skips her processing, that she might end up in deeper trouble than she already is: they might accuse her of fleeing the morality police to avoid processing. Apparently Postpony was stalling, now that the target has arrived we will quickly see that when thrown in the water Postpony didn't need further instructions to swim. Some quick admonishing of clothing follows, during which suddenly the same arm movements we saw being demonstrated before are executed. Right after the hand or wrist passed close to Mahsa's face. Mahsa has a pain reaction (presumably the eye irritant intentionally added to hydrogen cyanide intended for disinfecting ships/factories/... which usually serves to warn end-users that they need to ventilate the closed space longer before entering). Immediately when Mahsa has the pain reaction and tries to cover her face with her hands, Bossy and Postpony turn their back long before she collapses, and they also take some steps away from any hydrogen cyanide cloud diluting in the air. This is not the body language of authoritarianism. It illustrates Bossy and Postpony knew exactly what could or would happen after administering the dose. Replay that scene and look at the behavior of observer "O". The hospital reported the girl was brain-dead, and the father responded weird pink spots on her skin (just like observed during the holocaust).
I suspect at least observer "O" works in a different branch (aking to Iran's equivalent to CIA training or possibly a chemical weapons scientist, gathering data for dosage setting). It's unclear if Bossy and Postpony are real morality police employees, working under direction of "O", or if they are from the same branch as "O", and pretending to be morality police, who would in that case have been instructed to let the 3 work freely using the facility as a training ground, with Bossy and Postpony pretending to be morality police.
The cochlear amplifier (the cochlea is a mechanical amplifier) is extremely sensitive to drugs. A lot of substances are ototoxic. Imagine unknowingly suffering a non-lethal dose of brain damage, involving ototoxic tinnitus. A cluster of victims emerging above the spontaneous incidence background could share many symptoms, and in the absence of help could erroneously conclude an "acoustic directed energy weapon". Then this is cross-referenced with the symptoms of known directed energy weapons, and promptly considered to be mass hysteria.
During WWI the British developed hydrogen cyanide bombs to launch at German positions. Clearly some chemists in the British army didn't want to be involved in chemical warfare and chose a lighter than air poison gas, so that it would quickly evaporate and diffuse, as opposed to the other trench war chemical weapons.
Hydrogen cyanide may not be effective in trench wars, it seems Iran still considers it effective for assassination, debilitation.
Sometimes "edit" button disappears, with Bossy I refer to the woman on the right, and Postpony is the woman on the left.
The observer "O" is sitting on the 5th row, right at the corridor, black pants, black and white shoes, her coat (?) is black and white checkered pattern. She is constantly looking at how Bossy and Postpony are interacting with Mahsa, only looks away shortly as Mahsa collapses from vertigo and systemic failure. She is also suspectly close as Mahsa was searching a place and momentarily looks back as if interrupted (probably her name was called). She is also the only one who remained seated even though the rest of the detained women are processed FIFO.
In it is described how the regime at a certain point tried to claim she was a member of the kurdish Peshmerga, and used cyanide to kill herself to avoid interrogation.
So we have a brain-dead body of which the state coroner agrees no blows to the head etc. The IRGC then claims she killed herself with cyanide, and that she was a trained member of the Kurdish Peshmerga. This is debunked as described in the last URL (the image is much older, and Mahsa would have been a child at that time).
It is unclear to me if they intentionally chose to make the provably false claim that she was a Peshmerga soldier: if so, the above explanation could be broadcast domestically, while globally this explanation would be dumped in the trash, causing any claim of cyanide poisoning to be associated with this provably false story in an international setting, basically discrediting the correct cause of cyanide poisoning internationally. Mixing truth and fiction.
So IRGC at some point decides that the safest explanation of death is to stick to objective cause of death (cyanide poisoning), but to mix this truth with disinformation: she supposedly administered this to herself (provably wrong, since Bossy and Postpony turn away in advance of her collapsing; are they telepathic?), because she was supposedly member of kurdish Peshmerga (provably wrong: age of picture and age of Mahsa don't correspond).
Feel free to ask questions (in case I forgot to note insights, or forgot to mention alternative explanations which I ruled out other ways), and also certainly feel free to add insights.
Then there is this Iranian national detected and arrested in a timely fashion, who was procuring cyanide and ricin in Germany:
A suggestion for the US agencies involved with investigating the Havana syndrome:
take the subset of employees affected who objectively visible brain damage (not to separate the "false" and "true" victims, but to enrich that fraction for investigation purpouses, alternatively accept all self-reported victims with potentially lower signal to noise ratio as a result).
next take a subset of unaffected employees with similar task distributions as a control group
then for each person (affected or control) check the origins of all mail, check scheduled appointments with Iranian nationals, ask if they recall ever experiencing something being spritzed close to their face (they may have interpreted as something innocuous like perfume), allow them to make as many entries as possible, then ask the same question (any dates or times of occurence, especially before onset of symptoms) but for specific odors (cherry odor = control, vanilla odor = control, bitter almond odor = scent of hydrogen cyanide, mint odor = control, eye irritant = added to disinfection hydrogen cyanide for repelling human end-users, ...), then for each type you take the difference between time of symptom onset minus odor exposure event and convert to same units (floating point days for example plus or minus estimated error), convert these time intervals to reciprocals for rates ( floating point "per day"), then for each type of odor, or for each type of meeting with Iranian, or for each parcel from Iranian nationals, make a grand sum of that rate once for the affected group, and once for the unaffected control group.
then compare the mean rates between control group and affected group, and use hypothesis testing statistics to calculate the likelihood for the observed rates in the affected group given the rates from the unaffected group, if the null hypothesis of mere random clustering can be rejected you have detected that it is unlikely to explain by random chance, and those Iran associated links are proven significant (not in size of correlation, but that the correlation however small or large can not be explained away by chance).
You could redo (or simultaneously do the same exercise with different nationalities).
1. Just look at the completely made up fears about ODing from fentanyl just by touching it or even just breathing in the fumes. There is absolutely no truth to these dangers [1][2], yet the myth persists. It's so pervasive that cops actually have panic attacks; and
2. US authorities and the intelligence community has a vested interest in exaggerating the risks of foreign actors to get more funding. You see this everywhere, even in domestic affairs: the "crime panic" of recent times that is completely made up, completely overblown fears of looting in the aftermath of the LA fires (while there's little to no attention on the price gouging and profiteering that's going on) and so on.
Those domestic manufactured panics are copaganda to justify further militarization and funding for the police.
My point is that there is a significant part of the US government gearing up for and wanting an escalation of conflict with China in particular. Cuba of course has been a bogeyman for decades.
So my money is still firmly on "Havana Syndrome is completely made up".
> Just look at the completely made up fears about ODing from fentanyl just by touching it or even just breathing in the fumes.
It's not really made up, it's a case of mistaken identity. Carfent is potent enough that accidentally disturbing an open container of it and breathing in the dust kicks up will knock you out cold. LD50 in the hundreds of micrograms range.
Carfent and fent are different molecules, but it's not really reasonable to expect the average person to know they're different. They will however know that fentanyl is particularly potent (which it is, albeit not quite a chemical weapon like carfentanyl) which compounds this misunderstanding.
Regarding #2, then why would US intelligence agencies state that these incidents were not caused by foreign state actors? You'd expect the opposite given your hypothesis.
The main possibility, I'd say, is that organizationally there's a push and pull of wanting to have the fear of secret weapons programs existing (for funding) and not wanting to seem incompetent. For example, if the CIA doesn't come out and deny these weapons, your geriatric boss calls up and says where are our secret sound guns? Why don't we have countermeasures?
In general, I think intelligence agencies are not monolithic and probably have many different factions etc. vying for funding, power, and control. It seems reasonable that many in the CIA would benefit from denying this, and many would benefit from exaggerating it.
> completely overblown fears of looting in the aftermath of the LA fires (while there's little to no attention on the price gouging and profiteering that's going on) and so on
I’ve seen news mention both looting and price gouging. I didn’t feel any fearmongering or lack of attention related to those issues.
I'm skeptical there ever was much of a consensus. From the start there have been first hand witnesses say there seems to be some sort of attack and government bureaucracies, not on the ground saying they are probably just imagining it, so we don't have to do anything about it.
I wouldn't really say that was a great consensus. Maybe a consensus amongst the bureaucracies that they'd rather ignore everything? But it's only a consensus if you exclude everyone who's a witness.
A key point I feel, is that psychogenic illnesses are illnesses. People who get them should be treated as ill, and should be entitled to support and respect.
Putting it into the "not a real illness" bucket is why people with ME, and Long covid are so deeply unhappy with the state response to their problems.
I have had a theory this is a "blowback" effect of counter-intel functions inside US diplomatic and related facilities. The amount of RF, sound and other burdens inside the suspended secure communications facility, and the ubiquity of these facilities inside US state functions operated in potentially adverse economies.
Like EMP, you protect to the level you can afford, and demonstrate inside your own testing it's operationally feasible to prevent, not the actual scale an attacker can elect to deploy. It's a variant of the 'look for your lost keys under the lamppost because you can see' problem: to protect secure communications you need to do work, in the radio and sound spectrum, at least as energetic as the attacks you have hypothesised, and you probably wind up injecting TWICE the effective energy overall, if an attack happens: their energy, and your mitigation.
If these defences are purely passive, I'd be deeply wrong. I doubt if anyone who knows what active defences are deployed would be able to say so.
edit: if this is potentially caused by US counter-intel efforts, they'd probably seek to deny it, but that heads to a conspiracy theory place. A lot of Iraq veterans can testify to how much the forces seek to minimise the damages of service, I would be totally unsurprised if state department and foreign affairs doesn't want a multi-million dollar health claim on their books. No matter what, they have one, but for now it's without associated damages. If they admit to it being their own fault the class action lawyers will have a field day.
I also think that some sort of embassy-operated anti-eavesdropping emitters being the cause is the most plausible explanation.
Embassies are typically espionage stations, i.e. they're almost certainly full of equipment that monitors every measurable aspect of the EM spectrum and probably various other things too. Covertly deploying any kind of electromagnetic weapon near an embassy sounds like an impossibility to me.
But if the embassy's own security hardware caused it, it's very likely that it would be kept secret (also to protect the secrecy around such hardware). It would also explain why it happened in multiple locations.
As an aside, I’m rather tired of every discussion being implicated as some grand conspiracy or coverup. It’s possible that things simply move from “we have almost no evidence that this happened” to “we have some evidence to support that this happened”. That’s not admitting some grand mistake, that’s just the normal progression of the facts.
Respectfully, the issue here was not that intelligence agencies were saying "we have no eveidence of this".
first few sentences of the article shows the reality, these agencies were vehemently stating that it was not possible that the Havana Syndrome was caused by bad foreign actors, full stop.
The narrative might have started with electric fields from the grid stressing people if not causing cancer. Then moved to radio, wifi, the so called biological radio frequency spectrum. Etc
It was always an engineered argument between one camp advocating absurdly human fragility vs the other camp pretending we are indestructible supper beings and no form of radiation could harm us - ever!
It sets up the perfect climate to prevent a honest objective scientific discussion.
Saying "we have no evidence that directed energy weapons caused this syndrome," is not the same as emphatically saying, "this syndrome was not caused by directed energy weapons," which is what the reporting in this piece indicates was said. The latter is an affirmative statement intended to eliminate doubt and which has the effect of denying the experiences of those affected.
Nailed it! The right stance in most cases is "I don't know, I'll wait until more information is available". Doesn't seem too popular in the social media era, but this should be the default.
"we have almost no evidence" / "we have seen no evidence that" / "there is no evidence that" phrasing, without reference to the extent of investigation incurred or not incurred to ascertain the evidence base, I treat by default as go-to institutional gaslighting until verified otherwise.
No, you should read the article. They cite the previous review by seven intelligence agencies. That had been publicly reported, so for folks who had been following it, the consensus was most recently that it wasn't a mystery weapon.
Another part of this is that these agencies by temperament hedge their answers and were remarkably unequivocal, noting "new evidence could change their mind" -and they have become less unequivocal. This strongly suggests new evidence, but since this is in the secrecy-strategic space, we're not going to know.
It could be somebody senior said "change tone of voice" or it could be something new was found. We can't know.
Nope! Most people think this is a conspiracy theory.
Maybe it is maybe it isn't, but it's interesting for both sides to keep in mind the actual state of play as this continues to develop.
For you, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a weapon", it's interesting to know that no, your perspective is being skewed somehow, probably by the media you consume.
For me, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a paranoid conspiracy theory", it's interesting to follow the actual investigation into it, because maybe we're wrong.
"Science fantasy" was coined to discern between "hard sci-fi" (The Martian) and make believe (Star Wars), right?
How about:
Conspiracy -
- fact: stuff we know, like nicotine and climate crisis
- theory: likely but as yet "unproven", like a RICO case going to trial.
- fantasy: ancient civilizations, flat earth, X-Files, QAnon, etc.
- bullshit/lies: stuff we know is bullshit, like Holocaust denial
- mystery: we just don't know (yet?), like maybe Havana Syndrome
Acknowledging that "conspiracy theory" was coined to (successfully) cast "conspiracy fact" as "conspiracy bullshit". Like COINTELPRO.
Acknowledging that misuse and abuse of terms is the norm. Like how "hackers" morphed from tinkerers and inventors to criminals.
But at least when I say something is "conspiracy bullshit", my people will know what kind of conspiracy I'm talking about, without further explanation.
My completely unfounded wild ass guess is that its some form of remote monitoring that has the noted side effects (that is, the harm to the personnel affected is unintentional).
> The geopolitical consequences are profound, especially as a new president prepares to take office: If Russia, or any other country, were found culpable for violent attacks on U.S. government personnel, Washington would likely feel compelled to forcefully respond.
Seeing how Trump has repeatedly praised Putin and criticized Zalensky, it's doubtful there'd be any consequences if Russia really turned out to be behind all this.
It'll just mean that China is behind this, which means the tariffs are actually benign and justified response, not kickstarting a trade war. It'll be the truth, some new kind of Truth (Social.)
I don't want to sound apocalyptic, but I think the media and political narratives of the mainstream lost all reality checks in the past few decades (not for the first time - historically, it happens ever-so-often), which means that there's no point trying to reconcile them with facts mentally. It's tiring and pointless - politicians, commentators, and the public allowed their Overton windows to slide way too far from the reasonable. It'll pass - meanwhile, we can only hope the effects won't be as pronounced as if ImageMagick finally broke for good.
It sounds mysteriously like the American medical and health insurance systems:
"disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills."
Maybe the US should inflict it's medical and health insurance systems on foreign adversaries as a "mystery weapon" to inflict disability, pain, and medical bills on them.
WWIII was ended when the US dropped the world's first beauracracy bomb on Brussels, followed by an assault of, also unprecedented at the time, regulatory-capture missiles.
It's not expected that the Brussels that existed prior to the war will ever be seen again. It is expected that it's populace will continue to decline for the foreseeable future.
I seem to remember that Russia has significant expertise in building powerful and compact microwave sources to control and heat plasma in tokamaks. Nizhny Novgorod is a known centre of expertise in such technology. It wouldn’t be such a stretch to imagine that Putin’s thugs have commandeered it to build a crude, nasty means of messing with their perceived enemies in a deniable way.
While I think you may be right, I wish you could find a way to say it which is evidence based, and something we can look at more deeply. Because right now, what you said carries the preface: "In my personal opinion"
I read the atlantic precisely because I am sure it doesn't align with my non-US, world view. I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think. I don't mind reading things I may disagree with. I'm tired of reading things grounded in fantasy which is what Fox sells. At least the atlantic is grounded in a version of ground-truth I can usually get behind, and is clear when its opinions, or reflecting opinionated sources.
I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think.
Wow, that's wild. I don't think you are reading the right magazine for that. Atlantic is vaguely left of center, middle of the road oligarchic old school Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ish. It's a good read! But will tell you nothing about the right. If you want that, just read National Review, or The Dispatch for something a little more modern.
If its "left" I'm a dutchman. It's as middle-of-the-road as it can be, and for me, thats right of center. National Review is foaming at the mouth.
Remember I said I'm not an american, I don't regard "liberal" as a slur of the right against the left, in Australia the "liberal" party are the rightists.
Your relative liberalness is irrelevant if your goal is what you said it was, " I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think."
Do you want to understand the center left in the US? Then read the Atlantic. If you are trying to understand the center right, you are going to get nothing from the Atlantic.
Was standing "Against Trump" foaming at the mouth, or was that center right?
I guess this just depends what you really want. The Atlantic is a good magazine that will have articles that may challenge some of your views from a left of center American POV. If you want right of center you need to go to places like National Review or the Dispatch, WSJ editorial page, or maybe Commentary. These are all center right publications, that are still middle of the road enough to voice opposition to Trump, which puts them left of the majority of the country.
At one point, the narrative (2021) landed on this native insect whose frequency was so loud that you could "hear it from inside a car while driving [40+] mph down the highway" (paraphrased).
Was this debunked or just another conspiracy™?
edit:
> The heavily redacted report notes that “many” of those reporting symptoms described hearing “unusual sounds” but states that in only one instance someone experienced medical symptoms immediately after hearing the sounds. The report goes on to say that JASON could identify “no plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) [that] can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects.”
Instead, the scientists wrote that the most likely source of the sound heard in the recordings is the Indies short-tailed cricket, whose call, it says, “matches, in nuanced detail, the spectral properties of the recordings from Cuba.” Still, the report hedges, saying that “other hypotheses are plausible,” including that the sounds were created by a mechanical device or “structure-borne vibrations.” [0]
Only wishful thinkers GenZ, pro cubans Biden's functionaries will rule out Russia's or Chinese directed attack with the authorization of Castro's dictatorship. They are explicit enemies of the U.S, allways conspiring and spying against it.
In Cuba if you fart, the CDR, UJC, PCC, MTT, FMC and several other communist organizations to control the people will know and assign spies to you. The USA embassy in Cuba is the main target of the Cuban intelligence and has spies all around the buildings and where the functionaries live, what they ate, who they talk to, what they poop, everything!. They are constantly been watched by the cuban government. Do you really think this will go on unnoticed?
Watch Jack Kruze on Robert Breedlove's podcast (near the end of Pt II will blow your mind blown right out of your skull.) A medical revolution? -- perhaps something much more.
https://archive.ph/qb4E2
I don't really understand how there can be so much back and forth on this issue. We already know directed-energy weapons are possible [0], what are the challenges in exploring the space until you're able to build an approximate match for what people report having experienced?
The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, it could be used to attack people working for rival organizations as well as general harassment. Imagine a tool that lets you disrupt someone's sleep, using that over months would be enough to drive them insane or at least seriously hamper their productivity and performance. For example: if a rival sports team is visiting and you're able to disrupt their sleep that might be enough to give your team an edge. How far are people really willing to go in order to win?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon
Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic.
It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.
Intelligence agencies minimizing effects of deployed secret technology, that would be a first
I don't like the false dilemma of "either a directed-energy weapon, or mass hysteria".
I think we should at least consider hydrogen cyanide, especially given that a known adversary (Iran / IRGC) has claimed that Mahsa Amini killed herself with cyanide, whereas the video imagery show 2 government employees simultaneously turning their back before she faints and starts collapsing, indicating prior knowledge of what would happen. They also like to take a step or 2 away of any diluting plume they seem to know to be poisonous (presumably hydrogen cyanide).
It looks like either dosage testing, or training for possibly foreign operations.
See my analysis at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690702
Directed energy weapons already exist, they are called guns and rifles. Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense. If you want to secretly kill someone, just get them drunk and have them have a car crash. This is spy stuff 101.
Havana Syndrome always struck me like they had people working too close to a secret transmitter by accident.
> Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense.
We all have fairly compact devices in our kitchens which, if you were to put your head in them and press the start button, would literally cook your brain.
Why wouldn’t a directed version of that make practical sense? Just because it’d be bulky compared to a gun? But that would depend on what you were trying to achieve. Killing people with polonium or ricin isn’t the most efficient approach either, but it’s been done.
Note that I’m not saying that’s what happened in the Havana case. Just questioning the statement I quoted.
It's weird to me to think that you could beam hundreds to thousands of watts of some sort of energy at an American embassy and not be detected. That's what has always made it seem rather outlandish. My suspicion has always been some sort of burnout/anxiety as the actual explanation, but certainly there could be another possibility.
Again, I wasn’t proposing this is what happened in the Havana case. It’s not clear to me that what happened in Havana wasn’t just a panic of some sort, much like the recent drone panic. If it were some sort of attack, it raises a lot of questions about what the purpose was, why Cuba, why we haven’t seen anything like it since, why all the victims of the attack are still walking around attending meetings in Washington DC, etc.
That all said, I still don’t see why a microwave beam weapon is implausible in principle. It might not be the most practical thing ever - that’s why I compared it to polonium and ricin. But for example, using a parabolic reflector you can focus microwaves over the kind of distance between two buildings perhaps across the street from each other. If the beam only has a diameter of a few feet at the target, and only used for a short period, how is that going to be detected? You’d aim it at someone’s head visible through a window, for example, and the source of the beam could be behind a closed window with a curtain.
Btw this subthread seems to have been removed from the OP page at this point, apparently because the comment I replied to was flagged.
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Direct matter is directed energy.
You are drawing a false equivalence and being willfully obtuse. It's clear and obvious that the conventional sense of the term refers to technology like lasers and microwave. Please don't try to split hairs over semantics. Unless you are one of the spiritual nuts who claim "we are all creatures of energy" just because of the mass energy equivalence. Unless you are building a nuke in your kitchen, there's a clear difference in meaning in the conventional usage of the term "kinetic" weapon and "direct energy" weapon.
The point is that matter is by far the most concentrated form of energy we’re able to manipulate. The original comment seemed to be saying something along those lines, although it seems to have been flagged and I can’t check it now.
> [...] urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, [...]
That's obviously bad, but it's not really terrorism. There's no one universally agreed on definition of terrorism, but instilling terror is commonly a big part, and for that you want people to notice.
It's not terrifying to take EM brain-damage, have no way of proving it even in principle, and alienate your loved ones, employer, polity etc.?
It's the distinction between the terror of the victim, and the terror of the witnesses.
Perhaps you want people to notice for overt action, but deniability is useful for covert action. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be considered a hostile act, and if it results in what would otherwise appear to be a psychosomatic illness that causes distress in order to muddy the waters to conceal the affiliation of the actors involved, I think it’s fair to call it a terror attack.
Yes, it would be a hostile act. But it wouldn't be terrorism.
Not everything bad is terrorism.
I think many people would go along with dragging anyone responsible for funding or terrorizing people with this stuff out into the streets by their hair.
Not sure I’m expecting an “oh yeah haha, about that-“ anytime soon.
At least not until everyone’s welded inside their homes like China.
Speaking from the point of view of other idiopathic chronic conditions....if it doesn't show up in a blood test or a scan, many doctors will just call it psychological.
Mass hysteria should not be ruled out.
If they expected such a weapon after the reports, they'd have sensors for all kinds of emissions up the wazoo in those buildings. And yet, they still haven't recorded anything.
I guess one challenge is you'd have to test these weapons on people to see if it causes the reported symptoms
I think having a long range explosives laden drone hit that sports stadium is way more scary. And more likely to come to an urban center as urban terrorism. Unfortunately. My 2c.
This is one of my biggest concerns for our future. What happens when the costs of drones or 3D printing become so cheap, and the learning curve shrinks to the extent that a terrorist, crazy person or school shooter can semi easily deploy their own deadly drone swarms.
Cars are really deadly and readily available without raising any suspicion.
(And only fairly recently have we really seen anyone use cars for terror attacks. And they are still fairly rare, considering how ubiquitous cars are.)
See also https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror and https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective
Cars are traceable. Poison would be the alternative for those that dont want to be apprehended.
I think many people misunderstand the degree to which society is contingent on the good faith participation of most people.
It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont.
>It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont.
That should give people who want to impose their will on others more pause than it does.
Indeed. As Such, I think liberal democracies need to be based on voluntary positive sum cooperation to be stable.
> Cars are traceable. Poison would be the alternative for those that dont want to be apprehended.
Sure, but if you are willing to give your life 'to the cause', cars work.
I think we need to adjust society so fewer people feel they have nothing to lose than in the status quo.
Drone licence. Drone pilots licence.
already exist. Drones are required to have transponders registered to their owner. Doesnt do anything and is trivial to disable or circumnavigate.
How does that solve anything at all?
Car bombs, and moving car bombs have been around since the 1960s and before.
I'm talking about just using an unmodified car to run over people. No need to learn anything about bomb making.
The curious thing about the two recent attack events in New Orleans is that most reported the trump tower one as an “exploding cybertruck” but very few even mentioned that the other incident involved an electric ford truck. It should have been absolutely newsworthy and raise questions: evs are actually more dangerous to a crowd. They don’t require space to accelerate. And they don’t make a lot of noise (and one could probably even disable the artificial movement sound). This is kind of a new danger.
Yes, it would be, if homicidal people were actually held back by the limitations of ICE cars. But they aren't even really brushing against them. They seem to be mostly limited by their own incompetence. Fortunately.
I believe we’ve passed this point many years ago. These are already extremely cheap and accessible to anyone, you can buy 20-30 small drones for less than the price of one firearm.
In reality there are hundreds of other ways someone could devise attacks like these, technology doesn’t really matter that much.
That time is here. I'm not all that smart and have made several quadcopters from parts. These do not have the geo restrictions that the commercial ones like DJI come with. There are thousands of people across the country doing the same with FPV drones. I live very close to a base that it's not uncommon to see Air Force One lands. I've often wondered if they have some sort of jamming software. It would be very easy to cause problems in a crowd and it's just a matter of time.
well, we did just see a 3D printed weapon used, but the stories about the perp's looks shouted over the other details. I'm sure the gun lobby was pleased with that. so to the idea of school shootings, drone swarms would probably be too much for that, but a kid printing up their own guns to use is definitely something I could see happening. drone swarms would to me still be limited to a more well funded group to achieve instead of a lone wolf scenario.
Then they’ll match the deadly output of states that have killed tens of thousands of people I guess.
The (turrible) Black Sunday novel [1975] made quite an impression on young me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(novel)
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How do you falsify mass hysteria with that strategy?
Maybe you don't, and maybe that's part of the terrorism, even a placebo effect could frighten many.
Maybe by design
> The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism.
A mortar or backpack has a thousand times the potential for urban terrorism.
Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER.
A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.
> a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic,
You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening.
A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage.
You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you.
And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.
There are people already imagining this - look up “targeted individuals”
The technology could also be used by oppressive governments to harass dissenters (and anyone else they might target). Essentially modern, high-tech COINTELPRO.
Look up “Targeted Individuals” - the human mind is an amazing thing
Can’t you make these weapons with the magnetron out of any old microwave? I’ve always wondered why these devices aren’t more prolific than they are…
Yes, I could, but I'd have a 90% chance of hurting myself. Ditto for giving some cancer with radiation, many covert poisons, and similar. I can name a dozen ways I could kill or harm you, but:
1. I'd need to be wacko enough to want to harm you
2. I'd need to be sane enough for a major engineering project
3. I'd need to be competent enough to succeed without hurting myself
The set of individuals with all the traits required is small. It's not zero -- we had Ted Kazinsky -- but very small. Most major crimes are also never solved, and many more people can just take a gun and shoot someone. That's probably even harder to track down since a lot more people have guns than labs and PhDs. Esoteric technologies make for easy investigations.
So in the end, I think state actors have these. They also make good plot lines for a novel or video game (I have about a dozen I came up with in the context of a half-baked creative project).
But for real life individuals, I don't see how they'd become prolific. We'll probably see a crazy someday, but nowhere close to gun homicides. They just don't make much practical sense for an individual.
Yes, and you don't even need to dig into the dangerous bits (microwave transformers are some of the biggest killers of electrical hobbyists), just remove the door and defeat the interlock.
The top of my “I’m surprised it’s allowed” list is large lithium batteries in airplanes. If phones weren’t already so ubiquitous, they would have been mostly banned.
My guess is there would be a strong selection against impulsive non-experts. That’s on my “No-MacGyver” list with garage door springs and AC unit capacitors .
No.
You don't have to use it just for winning - consider sports betting, you can definitely place multi-million dollar bets, on the team that isn't a favorite, then use your Havana Ray to disturb a couple key players - make millions, repeat.
Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite. When the news comes out, you'll make millions.
>Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite
For many companies that would be an improvement
There's no chance this is disinformation muddying the online argument to prevent people from intelligently concluding that this is a directed energy weapon, of course.
I read it was caused by pesticides that were being applied extra heavily in the areas around the embassy, inside the embassy, and even in the “victim’s” homes due to concerns about zika virus which were hyped at the time
The link below includes results from a study which included brain imaging and comparing the results with other victims of neurotoxicity poisons
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-en...
I believe it was hydrogen cyanide, and I believe it was Iran.
> Starting about a decade ago, a small number of Americans, mostly federal employees and many of them working in intelligence, reported similar experiences in Havana. In an instant, they heard a painful ringing in their ears, followed by intense pressure on their head and disorienting vertigo, which was often followed by nausea. Some of the victims developed long-term problems with fatigue or mobility. Other officials later reported similar symptoms while in Russia and other foreign countries, and many concluded that they had been the victim of a deliberate attack with some kind of acoustic weapon.
ototoxic, vertigo, nausea, brain damage
A close inspection of the video evidence released by the morality police concerning Mahsa Amini is quite damning. It appears the morality police allowed some intelligence branch to operate / exercise on their premises but refused to be the scapegoat once things went south. So they released video of her walking healthily into the building, of her searching a seat, but not before quickly glancing back (presumably in response to her name, called out for target lock-on by a trainer / observer "O"). This scene as she selects a seat is also important because the girls are being processing FIFO. Compare the women who are seated right before Mahsa sits down, with the women who are seated as Mahsa stands up. Except for the observer "O", all the women who sat down earlier have been processed and are no longer there, and all the women sitting down as she stands up again were not there before. Except this observer sitting in the midst of the arrested women of course.
Pay close attention to unnecessarily early starts or unnecessarily late endings of the segments: what is it that morality police is showing and why? They are threatening the higher-ups that they have already shared the evidence (minus the explanations) to implicate higher branches of government.
An unnecessarily early start is when before Mahsa stands up (presumably there is a number display). She seems scared and impatient: instead of a morality police officer coming for her, 2 such morality police officers "Bossy" and "Postpony" are seen in discussion. Certain arm movements are seen (extending one arm, while hiding the other hand, presumably to hide a trigger / squeezing bulb). Annoyed "Bossy" is seen demonstrating the things-to-be-done presumably for the umpteenth time (she is clearly impatient with Postpony's stalling behavior). It looks like this would have gone on for quite a while more, were it not for Mahsa spontaneously arriving. I believe she was afraid of the hypothetical situation where she patiently waited until her number was explicitly called out, out of fear that if the morality police accidentally skips her processing, that she might end up in deeper trouble than she already is: they might accuse her of fleeing the morality police to avoid processing. Apparently Postpony was stalling, now that the target has arrived we will quickly see that when thrown in the water Postpony didn't need further instructions to swim. Some quick admonishing of clothing follows, during which suddenly the same arm movements we saw being demonstrated before are executed. Right after the hand or wrist passed close to Mahsa's face. Mahsa has a pain reaction (presumably the eye irritant intentionally added to hydrogen cyanide intended for disinfecting ships/factories/... which usually serves to warn end-users that they need to ventilate the closed space longer before entering). Immediately when Mahsa has the pain reaction and tries to cover her face with her hands, Bossy and Postpony turn their back long before she collapses, and they also take some steps away from any hydrogen cyanide cloud diluting in the air. This is not the body language of authoritarianism. It illustrates Bossy and Postpony knew exactly what could or would happen after administering the dose. Replay that scene and look at the behavior of observer "O". The hospital reported the girl was brain-dead, and the father responded weird pink spots on her skin (just like observed during the holocaust).
I suspect at least observer "O" works in a different branch (aking to Iran's equivalent to CIA training or possibly a chemical weapons scientist, gathering data for dosage setting). It's unclear if Bossy and Postpony are real morality police employees, working under direction of "O", or if they are from the same branch as "O", and pretending to be morality police, who would in that case have been instructed to let the 3 work freely using the facility as a training ground, with Bossy and Postpony pretending to be morality police.
The cochlear amplifier (the cochlea is a mechanical amplifier) is extremely sensitive to drugs. A lot of substances are ototoxic. Imagine unknowingly suffering a non-lethal dose of brain damage, involving ototoxic tinnitus. A cluster of victims emerging above the spontaneous incidence background could share many symptoms, and in the absence of help could erroneously conclude an "acoustic directed energy weapon". Then this is cross-referenced with the symptoms of known directed energy weapons, and promptly considered to be mass hysteria.
During WWI the British developed hydrogen cyanide bombs to launch at German positions. Clearly some chemists in the British army didn't want to be involved in chemical warfare and chose a lighter than air poison gas, so that it would quickly evaporate and diffuse, as opposed to the other trench war chemical weapons.
Hydrogen cyanide may not be effective in trench wars, it seems Iran still considers it effective for assassination, debilitation.
Sometimes "edit" button disappears, with Bossy I refer to the woman on the right, and Postpony is the woman on the left.
The observer "O" is sitting on the 5th row, right at the corridor, black pants, black and white shoes, her coat (?) is black and white checkered pattern. She is constantly looking at how Bossy and Postpony are interacting with Mahsa, only looks away shortly as Mahsa collapses from vertigo and systemic failure. She is also suspectly close as Mahsa was searching a place and momentarily looks back as if interrupted (probably her name was called). She is also the only one who remained seated even though the rest of the detained women are processed FIFO.
For some reason it scrubbed my reference url's:
dang please help: the main video:
yt-dlp -f dash-video_2277485 https://www.reddit.com/r/BrothersSection/comments/xphi85/cct...
sha256sum: 809668fbb0a568bb8c923ebdecb0db33cb5837a1f314d371aa0893d1d6aefb57
the extra video:
yt-dlp -f 270 https://youtu.be/GiCSejWJMQU
sha256sum: 4f13245dbd4a6351bfef1d1c4f88e0dc130f3d9c7157a1cf45e441c052747629
Also: I don't understand Persian, but there is this investigative article (author doesn't realize she was killed with hydrogen cyanide):
https://faktyoxla.az/en/news/view/2186/how-did-iranian-media...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250114025320/https://faktyoxla...
In it is described how the regime at a certain point tried to claim she was a member of the kurdish Peshmerga, and used cyanide to kill herself to avoid interrogation.
So we have a brain-dead body of which the state coroner agrees no blows to the head etc. The IRGC then claims she killed herself with cyanide, and that she was a trained member of the Kurdish Peshmerga. This is debunked as described in the last URL (the image is much older, and Mahsa would have been a child at that time).
It is unclear to me if they intentionally chose to make the provably false claim that she was a Peshmerga soldier: if so, the above explanation could be broadcast domestically, while globally this explanation would be dumped in the trash, causing any claim of cyanide poisoning to be associated with this provably false story in an international setting, basically discrediting the correct cause of cyanide poisoning internationally. Mixing truth and fiction.
So IRGC at some point decides that the safest explanation of death is to stick to objective cause of death (cyanide poisoning), but to mix this truth with disinformation: she supposedly administered this to herself (provably wrong, since Bossy and Postpony turn away in advance of her collapsing; are they telepathic?), because she was supposedly member of kurdish Peshmerga (provably wrong: age of picture and age of Mahsa don't correspond).
Feel free to ask questions (in case I forgot to note insights, or forgot to mention alternative explanations which I ruled out other ways), and also certainly feel free to add insights.
Then there is this Iranian national detected and arrested in a timely fashion, who was procuring cyanide and ricin in Germany:
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-police-arrest-iran-m...
It is unclear if this was a lone actor, or Iran foreign agent procuring cyanide with plausible deniability cover of being a lone wolf if caught.
A suggestion for the US agencies involved with investigating the Havana syndrome:
take the subset of employees affected who objectively visible brain damage (not to separate the "false" and "true" victims, but to enrich that fraction for investigation purpouses, alternatively accept all self-reported victims with potentially lower signal to noise ratio as a result).
next take a subset of unaffected employees with similar task distributions as a control group
then for each person (affected or control) check the origins of all mail, check scheduled appointments with Iranian nationals, ask if they recall ever experiencing something being spritzed close to their face (they may have interpreted as something innocuous like perfume), allow them to make as many entries as possible, then ask the same question (any dates or times of occurence, especially before onset of symptoms) but for specific odors (cherry odor = control, vanilla odor = control, bitter almond odor = scent of hydrogen cyanide, mint odor = control, eye irritant = added to disinfection hydrogen cyanide for repelling human end-users, ...), then for each type you take the difference between time of symptom onset minus odor exposure event and convert to same units (floating point days for example plus or minus estimated error), convert these time intervals to reciprocals for rates ( floating point "per day"), then for each type of odor, or for each type of meeting with Iranian, or for each parcel from Iranian nationals, make a grand sum of that rate once for the affected group, and once for the unaffected control group.
then compare the mean rates between control group and affected group, and use hypothesis testing statistics to calculate the likelihood for the observed rates in the affected group given the rates from the unaffected group, if the null hypothesis of mere random clustering can be rejected you have detected that it is unlikely to explain by random chance, and those Iran associated links are proven significant (not in size of correlation, but that the correlation however small or large can not be explained away by chance).
You could redo (or simultaneously do the same exercise with different nationalities).
So I'm skeptical for two reasons.
1. Just look at the completely made up fears about ODing from fentanyl just by touching it or even just breathing in the fumes. There is absolutely no truth to these dangers [1][2], yet the myth persists. It's so pervasive that cops actually have panic attacks; and
2. US authorities and the intelligence community has a vested interest in exaggerating the risks of foreign actors to get more funding. You see this everywhere, even in domestic affairs: the "crime panic" of recent times that is completely made up, completely overblown fears of looting in the aftermath of the LA fires (while there's little to no attention on the price gouging and profiteering that's going on) and so on.
Those domestic manufactured panics are copaganda to justify further militarization and funding for the police.
My point is that there is a significant part of the US government gearing up for and wanting an escalation of conflict with China in particular. Cuba of course has been a bogeyman for decades.
So my money is still firmly on "Havana Syndrome is completely made up".
[1]: https://www.njspotlightnews.org/special-report/fentanyl-myth...
[2]: https://healthandjusticejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/1...
> Just look at the completely made up fears about ODing from fentanyl just by touching it or even just breathing in the fumes.
It's not really made up, it's a case of mistaken identity. Carfent is potent enough that accidentally disturbing an open container of it and breathing in the dust kicks up will knock you out cold. LD50 in the hundreds of micrograms range. Carfent and fent are different molecules, but it's not really reasonable to expect the average person to know they're different. They will however know that fentanyl is particularly potent (which it is, albeit not quite a chemical weapon like carfentanyl) which compounds this misunderstanding.
Regarding #2, then why would US intelligence agencies state that these incidents were not caused by foreign state actors? You'd expect the opposite given your hypothesis.
The main possibility, I'd say, is that organizationally there's a push and pull of wanting to have the fear of secret weapons programs existing (for funding) and not wanting to seem incompetent. For example, if the CIA doesn't come out and deny these weapons, your geriatric boss calls up and says where are our secret sound guns? Why don't we have countermeasures?
In general, I think intelligence agencies are not monolithic and probably have many different factions etc. vying for funding, power, and control. It seems reasonable that many in the CIA would benefit from denying this, and many would benefit from exaggerating it.
Because it works
Once these narratives are disseminated, even if they are later denied, it will only strengthen them.
You just need to build the atmosphere, then people will select narratives
If true, why did the State Department denounce foreign action in 2021?
> ‘Havana Syndrome’ Noises Were Likely Crickets, Not Super Weapons, State Department Report Says [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42679024
> completely overblown fears of looting in the aftermath of the LA fires (while there's little to no attention on the price gouging and profiteering that's going on) and so on
I’ve seen news mention both looting and price gouging. I didn’t feel any fearmongering or lack of attention related to those issues.
Osha's web page about the health effects of radio and microwave radiation:
https://www.osha.gov/radiofrequency-and-microwave-radiation/...
Jet fighter AESA radars can output a highly directional 8KW beam of microwave radiation:
https://autojournalism.com/top-10-most-powerful-fighter-jet-...
Maybe someone can tell us what safety precautions are necessary when working around jet fighter radar systems?:
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/65274/are-there...
I'm skeptical there ever was much of a consensus. From the start there have been first hand witnesses say there seems to be some sort of attack and government bureaucracies, not on the ground saying they are probably just imagining it, so we don't have to do anything about it.
I wouldn't really say that was a great consensus. Maybe a consensus amongst the bureaucracies that they'd rather ignore everything? But it's only a consensus if you exclude everyone who's a witness.
I thought it was already confirmed to not be a hoax and be a true thing.
(kind of sensationalist but still seems to be informative youtube video about it from about 3 months back: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xqE0ltifQ2M)
Like a lot of things, it's been definitively confirmed both ways.
Wasn't the 60 minutes from a year ago enough info to show this was some sort of targeted weapon?
The opposite, actually.
A good book on this syndrome by Bob Baloh, which also reviews psychogenic illnesses.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-40746-9
A key point I feel, is that psychogenic illnesses are illnesses. People who get them should be treated as ill, and should be entitled to support and respect.
Putting it into the "not a real illness" bucket is why people with ME, and Long covid are so deeply unhappy with the state response to their problems.
Who is denying long COVID?
https://recovercovid.org
https://bmjgroup.com/flawed-body-of-research-indicates-true-...
Less so now, I agree. But there has been a denialist tendency just as for ME
Don’t all of these symptoms have really high (>10%) rate of incidence in general population?
I have had a theory this is a "blowback" effect of counter-intel functions inside US diplomatic and related facilities. The amount of RF, sound and other burdens inside the suspended secure communications facility, and the ubiquity of these facilities inside US state functions operated in potentially adverse economies.
Like EMP, you protect to the level you can afford, and demonstrate inside your own testing it's operationally feasible to prevent, not the actual scale an attacker can elect to deploy. It's a variant of the 'look for your lost keys under the lamppost because you can see' problem: to protect secure communications you need to do work, in the radio and sound spectrum, at least as energetic as the attacks you have hypothesised, and you probably wind up injecting TWICE the effective energy overall, if an attack happens: their energy, and your mitigation.
If these defences are purely passive, I'd be deeply wrong. I doubt if anyone who knows what active defences are deployed would be able to say so.
edit: if this is potentially caused by US counter-intel efforts, they'd probably seek to deny it, but that heads to a conspiracy theory place. A lot of Iraq veterans can testify to how much the forces seek to minimise the damages of service, I would be totally unsurprised if state department and foreign affairs doesn't want a multi-million dollar health claim on their books. No matter what, they have one, but for now it's without associated damages. If they admit to it being their own fault the class action lawyers will have a field day.
I also think that some sort of embassy-operated anti-eavesdropping emitters being the cause is the most plausible explanation.
Embassies are typically espionage stations, i.e. they're almost certainly full of equipment that monitors every measurable aspect of the EM spectrum and probably various other things too. Covertly deploying any kind of electromagnetic weapon near an embassy sounds like an impossibility to me.
But if the embassy's own security hardware caused it, it's very likely that it would be kept secret (also to protect the secrecy around such hardware). It would also explain why it happened in multiple locations.
As an aside, I’m rather tired of every discussion being implicated as some grand conspiracy or coverup. It’s possible that things simply move from “we have almost no evidence that this happened” to “we have some evidence to support that this happened”. That’s not admitting some grand mistake, that’s just the normal progression of the facts.
Respectfully, the issue here was not that intelligence agencies were saying "we have no eveidence of this". first few sentences of the article shows the reality, these agencies were vehemently stating that it was not possible that the Havana Syndrome was caused by bad foreign actors, full stop.
Are people really surprised that an intelligence agency's first duty isn't to the truth or accurately informing the public?
ed: sp
Those might be agents too.
The narrative might have started with electric fields from the grid stressing people if not causing cancer. Then moved to radio, wifi, the so called biological radio frequency spectrum. Etc
It was always an engineered argument between one camp advocating absurdly human fragility vs the other camp pretending we are indestructible supper beings and no form of radiation could harm us - ever!
It sets up the perfect climate to prevent a honest objective scientific discussion.
Saying "we have no evidence that directed energy weapons caused this syndrome," is not the same as emphatically saying, "this syndrome was not caused by directed energy weapons," which is what the reporting in this piece indicates was said. The latter is an affirmative statement intended to eliminate doubt and which has the effect of denying the experiences of those affected.
Nailed it! The right stance in most cases is "I don't know, I'll wait until more information is available". Doesn't seem too popular in the social media era, but this should be the default.
"we have almost no evidence" / "we have seen no evidence that" / "there is no evidence that" phrasing, without reference to the extent of investigation incurred or not incurred to ascertain the evidence base, I treat by default as go-to institutional gaslighting until verified otherwise.
“campaign by a U.S. adversary, probably Russia, that left them disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills.”
Yeah, that last bit’s not an adversary’s fault…
What kind of country lets diplomats and civil servants, or really anyone, drown in medal debt when they’re injured on the job???
> What kind of country lets diplomats and civil servants, or really anyone, drown in medal debt when they’re injured on the job???
ooooh oooh ooh, I know this one. pick me pick me!!!
I'm assuming this was rhetorical though
As far as I was aware, "mystery weapon" was the consensus, and this reaffirms it in the first two paragraphs. Looks like a clickbait title.
No, you should read the article. They cite the previous review by seven intelligence agencies. That had been publicly reported, so for folks who had been following it, the consensus was most recently that it wasn't a mystery weapon.
Another part of this is that these agencies by temperament hedge their answers and were remarkably unequivocal, noting "new evidence could change their mind" -and they have become less unequivocal. This strongly suggests new evidence, but since this is in the secrecy-strategic space, we're not going to know.
It could be somebody senior said "change tone of voice" or it could be something new was found. We can't know.
We’ve really blurred the meaning of: facts, consensus, winning, truth
Nope! Most people think this is a conspiracy theory.
Maybe it is maybe it isn't, but it's interesting for both sides to keep in mind the actual state of play as this continues to develop.
For you, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a weapon", it's interesting to know that no, your perspective is being skewed somehow, probably by the media you consume.
For me, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a paranoid conspiracy theory", it's interesting to follow the actual investigation into it, because maybe we're wrong.
Your comment gave me a notion.
"Science fantasy" was coined to discern between "hard sci-fi" (The Martian) and make believe (Star Wars), right?
How about:
Conspiracy -
- fact: stuff we know, like nicotine and climate crisis
- theory: likely but as yet "unproven", like a RICO case going to trial.
- fantasy: ancient civilizations, flat earth, X-Files, QAnon, etc.
- bullshit/lies: stuff we know is bullshit, like Holocaust denial
- mystery: we just don't know (yet?), like maybe Havana Syndrome
Acknowledging that "conspiracy theory" was coined to (successfully) cast "conspiracy fact" as "conspiracy bullshit". Like COINTELPRO.
Acknowledging that misuse and abuse of terms is the norm. Like how "hackers" morphed from tinkerers and inventors to criminals.
But at least when I say something is "conspiracy bullshit", my people will know what kind of conspiracy I'm talking about, without further explanation.
http://archive.today/qb4E2
Neurowarfare is the next frontier (*we’ve reached a ceiling in the realm of kinetic weaponry imo).
But the only reliable defense for that is gaining enlightenment, which is both very difficult to scale and somewhat ironic given the context.
My completely unfounded wild ass guess is that its some form of remote monitoring that has the noted side effects (that is, the harm to the personnel affected is unintentional).
You mean like mass x-ray scanning? That would be extraordinarily dangerous, but I suppose it might be possible given the right conditions.
I was thinking something more akin to this: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a425750...
But with way more power.
Comments here are an apt reflection of said cracking consensus
> The geopolitical consequences are profound, especially as a new president prepares to take office: If Russia, or any other country, were found culpable for violent attacks on U.S. government personnel, Washington would likely feel compelled to forcefully respond.
Seeing how Trump has repeatedly praised Putin and criticized Zalensky, it's doubtful there'd be any consequences if Russia really turned out to be behind all this.
It'll just mean that China is behind this, which means the tariffs are actually benign and justified response, not kickstarting a trade war. It'll be the truth, some new kind of Truth (Social.)
I don't want to sound apocalyptic, but I think the media and political narratives of the mainstream lost all reality checks in the past few decades (not for the first time - historically, it happens ever-so-often), which means that there's no point trying to reconcile them with facts mentally. It's tiring and pointless - politicians, commentators, and the public allowed their Overton windows to slide way too far from the reasonable. It'll pass - meanwhile, we can only hope the effects won't be as pronounced as if ImageMagick finally broke for good.
It sounds mysteriously like the American medical and health insurance systems:
"disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills."
Maybe the US should inflict it's medical and health insurance systems on foreign adversaries as a "mystery weapon" to inflict disability, pain, and medical bills on them.
Just sayin'
WWIII was ended when the US dropped the world's first beauracracy bomb on Brussels, followed by an assault of, also unprecedented at the time, regulatory-capture missiles.
It's not expected that the Brussels that existed prior to the war will ever be seen again. It is expected that it's populace will continue to decline for the foreseeable future.
Is the US at war with Brussels? Figures, I don't think their sprouts are very popular either.
If by adversaries you mean "allies", then they're way ahead of you.
I seem to remember that Russia has significant expertise in building powerful and compact microwave sources to control and heat plasma in tokamaks. Nizhny Novgorod is a known centre of expertise in such technology. It wouldn’t be such a stretch to imagine that Putin’s thugs have commandeered it to build a crude, nasty means of messing with their perceived enemies in a deniable way.
The Atlantic is simply not a credible source for anything involving Russian influence on the USA.
Anything they print on the topic you think is plausible should be corroborated relatively deeply. The Alfa Bank BS is amazing.
Putin sucks.
While I think you may be right, I wish you could find a way to say it which is evidence based, and something we can look at more deeply. Because right now, what you said carries the preface: "In my personal opinion"
I read the atlantic precisely because I am sure it doesn't align with my non-US, world view. I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think. I don't mind reading things I may disagree with. I'm tired of reading things grounded in fantasy which is what Fox sells. At least the atlantic is grounded in a version of ground-truth I can usually get behind, and is clear when its opinions, or reflecting opinionated sources.
I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think.
Wow, that's wild. I don't think you are reading the right magazine for that. Atlantic is vaguely left of center, middle of the road oligarchic old school Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ish. It's a good read! But will tell you nothing about the right. If you want that, just read National Review, or The Dispatch for something a little more modern.
If its "left" I'm a dutchman. It's as middle-of-the-road as it can be, and for me, thats right of center. National Review is foaming at the mouth.
Remember I said I'm not an american, I don't regard "liberal" as a slur of the right against the left, in Australia the "liberal" party are the rightists.
William F. Buckley was one of the founders of National Review.
Your relative liberalness is irrelevant if your goal is what you said it was, " I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think."
Do you want to understand the center left in the US? Then read the Atlantic. If you are trying to understand the center right, you are going to get nothing from the Atlantic.
National Review is foaming at the mouth.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/01/donald-trump-conserva...
Was standing "Against Trump" foaming at the mouth, or was that center right?
I guess this just depends what you really want. The Atlantic is a good magazine that will have articles that may challenge some of your views from a left of center American POV. If you want right of center you need to go to places like National Review or the Dispatch, WSJ editorial page, or maybe Commentary. These are all center right publications, that are still middle of the road enough to voice opposition to Trump, which puts them left of the majority of the country.
Thank you. I'll consider adding these sources to my reading.
2024 "left of center" media are slightly to the right of William Buckley
It was crickets.
https://coe.northeastern.edu/news/crickets-may-be-the-cause-....
This isn't a joke.
At one point, the narrative (2021) landed on this native insect whose frequency was so loud that you could "hear it from inside a car while driving [40+] mph down the highway" (paraphrased).
Was this debunked or just another conspiracy™?
edit:
> The heavily redacted report notes that “many” of those reporting symptoms described hearing “unusual sounds” but states that in only one instance someone experienced medical symptoms immediately after hearing the sounds. The report goes on to say that JASON could identify “no plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) [that] can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects.”
Instead, the scientists wrote that the most likely source of the sound heard in the recordings is the Indies short-tailed cricket, whose call, it says, “matches, in nuanced detail, the spectral properties of the recordings from Cuba.” Still, the report hedges, saying that “other hypotheses are plausible,” including that the sounds were created by a mechanical device or “structure-borne vibrations.” [0]
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/havana-s...
Anyone remember the "yellow rain of poison" in the Haig years which turned out to be insect shit on leaves?
If you weren't there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_rain
These kinds of things are why people are skeptical when "official sources" tell us things from intelligence sources they can't discuss in public.
I think the Hmong are still mad about being made out to look like idiots
you don't have to listen to anything these agencies say. they don't provide proof of anything so you can ignore them.
Be careful, the Communist sound wave is poisoning our precious bodily fluids
Only wishful thinkers GenZ, pro cubans Biden's functionaries will rule out Russia's or Chinese directed attack with the authorization of Castro's dictatorship. They are explicit enemies of the U.S, allways conspiring and spying against it. In Cuba if you fart, the CDR, UJC, PCC, MTT, FMC and several other communist organizations to control the people will know and assign spies to you. The USA embassy in Cuba is the main target of the Cuban intelligence and has spies all around the buildings and where the functionaries live, what they ate, who they talk to, what they poop, everything!. They are constantly been watched by the cuban government. Do you really think this will go on unnoticed?
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Watch Jack Kruze on Robert Breedlove's podcast (near the end of Pt II will blow your mind blown right out of your skull.) A medical revolution? -- perhaps something much more.