Victims of Mystery Attacks In Cuba Left With Anomalies In Brain Tissue (arstechnica.com) 233
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: American victims of mysterious attacks in Cuba have abnormalities in their brains' white matter, according to new medical testing reported by the Associated Press. But, so far, it's unclear how or if the white-matter anomalies seen in the victims relate to their symptoms. White matter is made up of dense nerve fibers that connect neurons in different areas of the brain, forming networks. It gets its name from the light-colored electrical insulation, myelin, that coats the fibers. Overall, the tissue is essential for rapidly transmitting brain signals critical for learning and cognitive function.
In August, U.S. authorities first acknowledged that American diplomats and their spouses stationed in Havana, Cuba, had been the targets of puzzling attacks for months. The attacks were carried out by unknown agents and for unknown reasons, using a completely baffling weaponry. The attacks were sometimes marked by bizarrely targeted and piercing noises or vibrations, but other times they were completely imperceptible. Victims complained of a range of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, balance problems, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech and vision problems. Doctors have also identified mild brain injuries, including swelling and concussion. U.S. officials now report that 24 Americans were injured in the attacks but wouldn't comment on how many showed abnormalities in their white matter.
In August, U.S. authorities first acknowledged that American diplomats and their spouses stationed in Havana, Cuba, had been the targets of puzzling attacks for months. The attacks were carried out by unknown agents and for unknown reasons, using a completely baffling weaponry. The attacks were sometimes marked by bizarrely targeted and piercing noises or vibrations, but other times they were completely imperceptible. Victims complained of a range of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, balance problems, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech and vision problems. Doctors have also identified mild brain injuries, including swelling and concussion. U.S. officials now report that 24 Americans were injured in the attacks but wouldn't comment on how many showed abnormalities in their white matter.
Fraud (Score:2, Insightful)
No matter how hostile and immoral in their spying the Cubans and Russians might be, there is so little factual basis to this story, and it's so absurd that no radiation is sensed, etc., and people have visible brain pathology.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There isn't any.
Re:Fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There isn't any.
Doesn't a fair number of people with similar and rare brain abnormalities constitute exactly that? I wasn't sure myself if anything was really going on, but this fact makes it seem much more compelling that something real was going on.
Put it the way - why do you have reason to doubt what they are all saying?
Re: (Score:2)
First of all, it's a claim that they have experienced issues and that there is brain damage by some unspecified doctors. Until the actual report comes out and someone actually peer reviews it, there isn't much that you can say about it.
Second, some white tissue abnormalities is normal in humans, especially those with a more physical background will have more abnormalities. I don't see a claim of lesions, concussions, or traumatic brain injury in the news article, only, again the unspecified field doctors di
Re: Fraud (Score:2)
There always was, always is and always be doubt in all that mattes (in this case, science).
That's how material knowledge work.
Crazy to bring Trump into this at all (Score:5, Insightful)
You seriously think that in less than a year Trump has utter control over an array of army doctors such that they would outright lie to this extent? Come on man. He doesn't even have full control of the state department or pretty much any other department for that matter.
Or what about the notion that Trump could coerce this many doctors to lie about this, and even if that WERE true why would the embassy staff all be sick? Do you claim that the entire staff of the Cuban embassy is making THAT up? I refer you again to my first point re: Trump and the state department - not to mention the actual timeframe in which they got sick was back in 2016 before the election. Was Trump masterfully convincing the entire Cuban embassy staff to claim they were sick at that point? To what end? I mean Scott Adams claims Trump is a master persuader but even so I'm not going to buy into Tump being that clever...
Now I'm not willing to agree it was may not even have been an attack, maybe just some natural cause of the building. But to claim there is nothing going on at all is seriously out of whack even for the paranoid among us (which I count myself in that group). There is obviously something more to the story that is not understood at this point.
Re:Crazy to bring Trump into this at all (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd suggest you pull your head out of your ass and take a look at reality, but you've shown in the past you're not capable of that.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, turns out Hillary wasn't indicted because the FBI is corrupt as hell. [thehill.com] I thought the investigation was supposed to be about collusion between Trump and Putin. And what they have done is they have taken a campaign manager who was with Trump for three months and apparently gone back all the way to 2012 and indicted him for income tax evasion and things like that.
If the FBI knew that Manafort was a Ukranian money launderer in 2014, why wouldn't they tell Trump unless they were going to blackmail him w
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The FBI has no say over who Trump hired for his campaign, and unless you're admitting that Trump is a complete fucking idiot that can't do a damn thing right without his hands being held, you probably shouldn't suggest they should have any say. Trump fucked that up. He was an idiot that
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Obama knew Russia was engaged in bribery ($500,000 to Bill Clinton), kickbacks ($145 million to the Clinton Foundation) and extortion in order to gain control of North American atomic resources â" yet still approved the 2010 deal to give Moscow control of 20% of America's uranium.
So what you're saying is... you can't sit and watch FOXNEWS for 6 minutes as they tell you what you are peddling is an outright lie? You are fucking delusional. http://video.foxnews.com/v/564... [foxnews.com] Try watching it, and then seek mental health help.
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The fact that the Trump administration is susceptible to indictments shows that they aren't truly corrupt.
Ok, I've seen sophistries in my life, but this one takes the cake.
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I don't particularly trust this administration to be telling the truth. Their record on that isn't very good.
I'd like to see information from independent doctors rather than ones who work with the state department and are publishing their paper with state department input.
I'm not a fan of Trump, but your position is incredibly obtuse. In this case, your skepticism is not logical.
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Well, it's based on the understanding that most forms of attack using ionizing, electromargnetic, optical, and sonic radiation are heavily monitored around our embassies and their staff, starting from the exposure of the Great Seal Bug in 1952. So, those are out as causes or someone is really not doing their job. The US is pretty good at detecting chemical and physical attack methods, too. So, we are
Re:Reversing symptom and effect (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be a bizarre pathogen indeed that can make you hear a sound - which can be and has been recorded - in a specific part of the room, disappearing whenever you move just slightly but reappearing when you pass back through that spot. And which only affects workers of the US embassy in Cuba, having never been recorded to infect anyone else, anywhere else, ever.
There's no question that it's a baffling case, but pathogens don't pass muster. I waver between "another type of EM radiation, for which the sound is just an incidental side effect" and "a multispectral ultrasonic audio signal, for which what is heard (and what does the damage) is harmonics between the channels rather than the carriers". But at this point, who bloody knows.
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What if they were exposed to a pathogen; and they (Russians?) also blasted their target with audio, in order to confuse them and dissuade investigators from taking blood samples, doing dna tests, and looking for some kind of weaponized bacteria or virus or something like that?
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Re:Fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
A specific claim like "it was a sonic weapon used by the Russians" might require extraordinary evidence.
But if there's a bunch of people in one place, and then there is credible evidence that they've all got an unusual injury-- isn't it a bit natural to draw the inference that the unusual injury may have been caused by a factor related to that place-- whether deliberate harm, accidental consequences of espionage, or some unknown pathogen, etc.
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I think you can add to your list of criteria for credibility: multiple sources. Not just one group that explicitly works with the state department.
Re: Fraud (Score:3)
Okay, Canadians AND Americans got affected. There're your multiple sources, not in a single state department, but across more than one (that is a multiple.) Now shut the fuck up or produce certifiable proof of medical expertise... oh wait, you aren't a fucking doctor!
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Sure it does. They might as well write it was done by USG, testing some new weapon.. it holds the same amount of credibility as the "Russians did it" popular spin, if not more, considering what the USG is capable of [wikipedia.org].
Until they have evidence (and no, an "IP address" is not evidence) , everybody will choose to believe in some of these stories, most will think Russians did it because they are guil
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Oh oh, of courrse an IP adress is evidence!
The question is what you can prove with it!
My router has a static IP adress, if you get packets from that adress, you know they come from my rooter. That is pretty solid evidence.
What you don't know is: who behind my router has sent the packages.
And what you also don't know: was the router active at a certain time, or was it deactivated and somone else temporarily used my IP adress 'somehow'.
Nevertheless you have a solid starting point to start further investigatio
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Considering there is zero precedent for any kind acoustic phenomenon to cause symptoms like this, I'd suggest that the allegation that it was a sonic weapon is no less of an extraordinary claim than anything else that might be proposed.
I don't know what it is... Nobody who's investigated this has any idea what it is, because these symptoms have never been seen before.
I'm not claiming that anything extraordinary happened here either, only something unknown.
Probably not acoustic (Score:2)
Considering there is zero precedent for any kind acoustic phenomenon to cause symptoms like this
Considering they have brain abnormalities it seems like whatever happened may not have been acoustic. It could be what was "heard" was a side effect of trauma to the brain, which would also explain why some people heard nothing if the brain was affected in differing locations.
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I've considered that possibility, and it's always struck me as realistic. But it would also require that this be wrong [businessinsider.com].
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I would think very narrow beams of microwaves would be more likely than ultrasound.
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Re:Fraud (Score:4, Interesting)
There was zero precedent for people being killed by bullets until the gun was invented and used to shoot people.
In many ways, what is described strongly resembles ultrasound except that ultrasound reflects from density gradients (and thus, for example, the skull). A signal with multiple carriers however sounds like a more interesting possibility, as then you can get harmonics between the two waves at frequencies which are much better transmitted into the body. You'd also get second and third and so forth harmonics, which is exactly the sort of pattern you see in the embassy recording [businessinsider.com] believed to be of the attack.
But that's just a hypothesis.
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As in x +/- y
x +/- 2y
y +/- 2x
2x +/- 3y
2y +/- 3x
etc etc
It might be just a hypothesis but please explain more clearly.
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Considering there is zero precedent for any kind acoustic phenomenon to cause symptoms like this ... most wales, Orca, Dolphine can stun small enough prey with as an ultra sonic pulse ...
Do you live behind the moon or under a rock?
We have sound effect weapons since the 50s
There are infra sonic riot control weapons that make every one womit in its influence area.
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I didn't suggest that acoustic phenomenon could not produce debilitating results, not did I suggest that sonic weapons don't exist. I said there are no known kinds of acoustic phenomena that can produce the precise combination of symptoms that are being seen here. Especially the brain damage.
Are there things that can cause this kinds of damage? Obviously... but caused by sound? Not so much.
I have been saying it ever since this story broke... it is a mistake to presume it is a weapon until you can
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Why, precisely, is it immoral to spy on the Russians and Cubans? Do you think they don't spy on us? Everybody spies on everybody, sometimes it's the only way to really know if you can trust each other.
Considering these mystery weapons, we need to up our spying.
Plausible explanation: microwave guns (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a plausible explanation for this mysterious attack. Currently, Microwave guns [wikipedia.org] that are being used for riot-control have their frequencies tuned to be absorbed by the skin, but you can lower the frequency (longer wavelength) to make the microwave penetrate deeper, literally frying the victim's brain. When the microwave cooks the auditory region, the victim hears a phantom sound.
There is no actual recording of the sound. What the AP released is just a synthesized simulation of what it might sound like to a victim under attack.
Tinfoil Hat (Score:2)
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And even if it didn't work, it would look totally awesome.
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The charge won't build up more than electrostatic does and tends to dissipate quickly in a humid climate like Havana, so sure it's uncomfortable but it sure gets your attention that you may be under attack.
I think the more scary thought is that the weapon is low-tech enough that any random hobo could make one by tearing apart an off-the-shelf microwave oven. It doesn't take state sponsorship to do that.
Re:Plausible explanation: microwave guns (Score:5, Informative)
That's not at how the AP described it [apnews.com].
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the US figures out exactly how the attack works, but don't disclose the fact. If the US says "We've confirmed it and have reproduced a weapon which causes these symptoms", then every government on Earth will attempt to do the same.
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Not just that, but if they confirm that Cuban agents attacked US diplomats at a US embassy, that is an act of war on US soil, and demands a response. I don't think we really want to go down to Cuba and wipe them out, but that is what the evidence would demand, even if it was only a rogue wing of Cuban intelligence that actually committed the attack.
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No idea abiut the recording, but there are two ways to produce perception of sound: fake signals in your nerves, that is what you suggest, or side effects in your head from the damage, which would be real sound you hear.
Just touch your head with a microfone, and it will record that same sound your, if it is real sound.
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I have no real opinion about the topic (don't know enough about the story), however this is wrong:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Evidence is evidence, regardless how mundane, and regardless how extraordinary the claim is. That is a basic principle of science and law.
So you think two administrations colluded (Score:2)
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
Actual attacks happened back in 2016. You know, before the election? So TWO administrations (that absolutely despise each other) both claim something happened and you say no?
HMM.
Not really the question (Score:2)
Let's see...you're asking me if Hillary Clinton and Rex Tillerson are both capable of lying?
No, I'm asking if you believe they are capable of liking each other enough to coordinate the SAME EASILY DISPROVED LIE.
Also You brought up the entirely wrong person, Hillary was not president last year - Obama was. Same point though, are Rex Tillerson and Obama going to be willing to work together on the same lie about embassy workers in Cuba???? Really? Why.
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What evidence are you talking about? Which medical professionals?
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Hell, one time I spent a week in New Orleans in the 80s for Mardi Gras, and I ended up on intravenous antibiotics and bed rest for a month.
You shouldn't have barebacked that tranny.
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Now you tell me.
Soviet tech? (Score:3, Interesting)
Cuba was under the protection of the USSR for quite some time. I imagine they could have been testing and developing some kind of new technology and now the Cubans have it? A lot of experimental stuff was tried all throughout the Cold War by both sides.
Be interesting if we ever learn what caused this. Normally I'd discount such bizzare reports as silly, but a lot of people were affected by this. So I think something was definitely done to them.
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My guess the weapon they deployed was this one, after the US started complaining initially https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] and the Cubans decided to troll them and imagine all sorts of shit.
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The US sounds pretty convinced that the Cubans didn't do it - and Trump has no love for Cuba. I'd wager that the US intelligence has recordings of Cuban officials in private being confused as heck about what's going on and scrambling to figure it out, or something similar.
If Cuba didn't do it, then it's someone who wants to throw a wrench into recently-warmed Cuban-American relations.
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Im not surprised, the whole thing seems a bit too "Dr Evil" for it to be real.
My guess is that there might have been some sort of contaminant or environmental factor thats caused a neurological disorder. There are all sorts of brain injuries that can cause ringing sensations.
Shit, for all we know the whole building came down with a particularly nasty stain of Toxoplasmosis from the embassys house cat.
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It might actually be Russia doing it. These days their main foreign policy objective seems to be to destabilize other countries and drive wedges between nations.
Control group? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not going to propose that there is no mystery here, but when probing something this mysterious and examining people as intensely as they are likely examining these individuals, I'd want to go with a setup that tests both people who were there and people who weren't. I'd also want to hide the identities from those reading the scans.
No human would be without anomalies if tested intensively enough.
Re: (Score:2)
No human would be without anomalies if tested intensively enough.
Yes but a group wouldn't have identical anomalies. Also everytime you go to the doctor do you take a healthy person with you and when the doctor asks you to say "aaaah" do you then say you won't believe him that your throat is red until he checks the control group?
If I touch water and find it is wet, do I also need a control group? When do I get to fall back on the past experience of what the brain looks like, what a normal throat looks like, or what my hands feel like when they aren't touching water?
Re: (Score:2)
On /. you always need a controll group. Because without it is oooouuuu not science! ...
A few years ago I posted my counterexample: you have 50 parachutes, 25 are placebos, the other 25 are real.
Both groups don't know in which group they are, we simply later check who landwd with a placebo and who landed with a real chute.
Obviously without the placebo group we never would know if the real chutes realy work
alrighty slashdotters with medical training (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the list of major infectious diseases in Cuba and see several that attack brain/nervous system and some of which can even cause "brain alteration"
could this "attack" be a natural pathogen? It's the first thing that came to my mind reading the mass media hysteria over it, and after looking at all the interesting nasties that are in Cuba....
Re:alrighty slashdotters with medical training (Score:4, Interesting)
I read the list of major infectious diseases in Cuba and see several that attack brain/nervous system and some of which can even cause "brain alteration"
could this "attack" be a natural pathogen? It's the first thing that came to my mind reading the mass media hysteria over it, and after looking at all the interesting nasties that are in Cuba....
Only if you believe that it could trick the person into hearing the noise while in a very specific location in their room (like their bed), but then have the noise stop as soon as they moved away from their bed.
And it only applies to US embassy workers in Cuba.
I am going to go with the infectious disease called "Terrorism."
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Those reported sounds could just be people suddenly paying attention because of suggestion and fear after hearing about others. Try paying attention yourself and have fun listening to your own body, ringing in ears, transformer buzzings, slightly malfunctioning flourescent bulb screaming (yes, some do make high pitched noise and they shouldn't), etc. as you wind down for the evening and then lay in bed tonight.
Until biopsy is done on brain tissue I'm voting for pathogen. And note no biopsy done to date,
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Nonsense, because the effects of all those things are well known and inconsistent with the symptoms.
It is well known what the effects of microwaves are, it heats tissues and can cause tumors in the parts of the body without blood circulation: eyes and testes. Incidence of such tumors higher in techs that work around the gear, especially in military. Look it up.
So too effects of ultrasonic, infrasonic sounds of high decibel level.
X-rays, now you make me laugh since I know very well the various effects of
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In 1945 our ambassador in Moscow was given a passive RF bugging device [wikipedia.org] designed by Theremin himself. It was exposed in 1952. Optical passive spying devices such as the laser window bug are also well-known. For that reason, I would expect that electromagnetic/sound/optical wavelengths around embassies and their staff are all monitored. So, it's not that.
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So does chlamydia and syphilis though and Zika actually has very similar neurological symptoms (swelling of the brain (aka concussion), white matter damage). A yet unknown strain of any of them (or something else completely) may be causing all this.
Microwave auditory effect device? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have wondered from the first time I read about these embassy attacks if someone was playing with a device that utilizes the "microwave auditory effect" that this wired article was discussing in 2008 [wired.com].
Perhaps they were attempting to project voices into their heads and had some sort of tuning issue that caused it to have a range of other effects.
Re:Microwave auditory effect device? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, that article is eerily similar to what's been described.
Such a device had apparently already been built and tested by the US. The interesting thing to me is that the sound comes from a shockwave of the beam interacting with the body of whoever is in the beam; it's not a hallucinatory effect of the brain damage. That would mean that interactions with other objects (including microphones) in the path of the beam could also result in recordable sound, which would explain the recordings that are being analyzed.
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The US has been monitoring electromagnetic radiation around embassies and diplomats since the Great Seal Bug was exposed in our Moscow embassy in 1952. Known spy technology using RF, UV/infrared (as in laser window bugs), ionizing radiation (x-rays, etc.) would be monitored. US is also pretty good at detecting chemical agents, other physical attacks. Maybe less good at Prion infection as in CJD/BSD.
Re: (Score:2)
I meant BSE, not BSD. :-)
off-the-record quote from affected U.S. diplomats (Score:2)
"Thanks Obama"
smoke and mirrors ? (Score:3)
Motivation: Who would be motivated to cause this? Does anyone benefit from it?
Dispersion: Have no Cubans suffered from similar symptoms? Has anyone bothered to check?
Location: Were all affected families living in the embassy? What other areas were 'attacked'?
The 'white matter' test evidence seems weak, just as the entire story is vague. Until our own government is honest about what they've found, it just seems like another conspiracy theory. The kind of vague rumor they create when they are contemplating an offensive action against a country.
Same attack performed on Americans in Uzbekistan? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hello,
CBS News reports that the same type of attack may have occurred on USAID workers in Uzbekistan; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u... [cbsnews.com]
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
The lesson of Olympic Games in Rio (Score:2)
Until it was proven irrevocably by the organizing side that they were just lying brazenly.
I guess that at least some part of the American people believe that they are kind of exclusive, much cleverer than others. And that they can get away with about any lie. My point is that one has to look for irrevocable evidences as soon as one hears such unusual claims.
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> (At the risk of being labelled a Russian Sock Puppet/Troll)
The American government has been caught doing abhorrent things surreptitiously often enough that you're more or less a fool if you accept what they say without independent corroboration.
Iraq/WMDs are the first thing that comes to mind (along with the babies and incubators propaganda), but there are plenty of other things that at one time would have people thinking you were late for your tinfoil hat fitting that we now know actually happened.
IF
Re: The lesson of Olympic Games in Rio (Score:2)
Because, the only general thing which could be said about American people is that they are all different. Undoubtedly there honest individuals among them.
Clearly a case of (Score:2)
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Hehehe, you made my day!
I wouldn't rule out mass hysteria ... (Score:3)
... entirely. Mass hysteria has effects that can be bizarr and creepy to the utmost extent. And as far as we know, nobody is fully immune to it. For one, mass hysteria does spread similar to a disease. Because you need to meet people who have fallen prone to the hysteria for it to spread. Or you need to be primed by some detailed description of it in an environment that emphasises the fact that the effects have a "real" cause.
That scientist find "alterations in brain tissue" could be simply because they were looking for them.
Note: I'm not ruling out some sort of weapon, but right now mass hysteria seems more plausible to me. The story has all the ingredients.
Otto Warmbier (Score:2)
What is the motive? Cui bono? For whose benefit? (Score:2)
It is rather seldom that a crime is being committed without a motive.
Who says it's an attack? (Score:2)
Do you think that, since they don't know what's causing these symptoms, perhaps they could lay off calling it an attack? You know, until they have some evidence. Or is it now US foreign policy to characterise everything that they don't understand that affects US personnel as an attack?
Re: Paranoia (Score:2, Informative)
Lets see you point to a single documented case of someone psychologically inducing actual damage to their own brain tissue. What a jerk. This is nothing like PTSD.
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Anyone banging their head in the wall has psychologically induced brain trauma.
No, that is physically induced brain trauma. Regardless of WHY your head hit the wall, it is the physical impact that did the damage.
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Again, that is the claim but no names about these "doctors" are being given. Also, I do work in neuroscience.
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Hmm, sounds like self inflicted injuries. One thing happened, the professional paranoid got a hold of it, exaggerated the hell out of it and then all of them felt they were under attack. That constant psychological stress, affected their brains sufficiently to affect the senses they are attached to. Don't think of it as a one off but in affect a sustained psychological attack upon their own people, generating a continuous state of high stress, fear, paranoia, all feeding into delusions that created real physical harm.
Hmm, sounds like Aliens.
Think of it grinding on, hour after hour, day after day, for months, the threat of someone attacking you and destroying you mind, the message reinforced again and again and again, have you been attacked, have you heard anything, have you felt anything, every thing a possible threat, fully exposed to the enemy. They drove their own people crazy and generated real physical harm as a result.
Think of exposure to alien mind rays grinding on, hour after hour, day after day, for months attacking you and destroying your mind.
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You are an idiot - http://healthland.time.com/201 [time.com]... and https://www.researchgate.net/p [researchgate.net].... In fact simply do the search yourself https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stre [duckduckgo.com].... Stupid is as stupid does and they have been quite stupid.
I would post studies showing Aliens causing the same damage but it's classified and they would find me.
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Think of the stress of working in an embassy like that.
Think of the literally hundreds of jobs that are far more stressful than being stationed in an embassy, and yet which don't show the same symptoms.
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I don't understand why, when Guillain Barre syndrome was discovered, they didn't just kill Guillain Barre, burn his body and cut the problem off at the root.
Re:Or Maybe Just Bad Pork (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah! And Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease. You'd think he would have seen that coming.
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The inhabitants of Barnsley in the UK, on learning of Parkinson's Disease, killed all the people in the town with that name.
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They didn't get the chat-show host. He buggered off down South as soon as he got a bit of brass. Aye, proper lah-di-dah.
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Yeah! And Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease. You'd think he would have seen that coming.
The old ones are the best.
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Human spies need out of Cuba and into US to spy on groups that are trying to bring freedom to Cuba.
Getting out of Cuba with that real US embassy paperwork is great for a later deep cover story.
The US embassy trusted that person enough to give the needed real paper work.
The spy agency printed paperwork spies tried to use gets detected.
The embassy is one way out. Walk in, tell a good story, get real trusted papers to escape out of Cuba with.
Once in the West find other
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Aiming phased arrays is somewhat non-trivial, so the spot of focus isn't perfect ....
.... Some consular personnel were hit with maxima in the ears, some on the eyes, some on the brain, etc. etc.
You haven't seen me sleep. Try aiming something at my head and you might end up warming my feet.
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Well, regarding capturing: you can simply keave your emabassy and capture one outside.
Regarding microwaves, you can aim and focus them probably over a mile or more. Think about masers, microwave lasers, they can be focused probably for dozens of miles.
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Could be surveillance
https://science.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org]
Used by the Russians to spy on the US embassy - they needed to embed a resonator into a Great Seal of the US which they presented as a gift.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also used by the UK and US to spy on Russians. Peter Wright worked out how to do it with the sides of filing cabinets, and hence not need to give Trojan Horse gifts
https://www.schneier.com/blog/... [schneier.com]
The US is quite justified to say to the Cubans 'It's a small island. It's also a police
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https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
Two former US officials with a background in intelligence and surveillance said they had doubts that the health problems were the result of a deliberate attack with a sonic weapon. They pointed out that the symptoms were first noticed in late 2016, when US-Cuban relations were the best they had been in decades, following the visit of Barack Obama to Havana.
CNN quoted a US official saying Washington was investigating whether a third country was involved as "payback" for actions the US has taken elsewhere and to "drive a wedge between the US and Cuba". However, at least one Canadian diplomat is also said to have been affected, suggesting whatever happened did not exclusively target the US embassy.
"You can't rule out harassment, but why do it when you want things to go well, and why the Canadians? Nobody dislikes the Canadians!" said James Lewis, a former state department official and US military adviser with expertise in intelligence and spy technology.
Lewis said it was much more likely that a sonic surveillance device, designed to remotely pick up the vibrations caused by speech, could have been wrongly configured and emitted harmful sound waves as a result.
"We know with 100% certainly that the embassies are under surveillance, and the technology being used could just be crude and over-powered," he added. Although Nauert had said the Cuban incidents was unprecedented, Lewis pointed to a wave of health problems at the US embassy in Moscow in the 1970s thought to be linked to the use of microwave surveillance devices.
John Sipher, who spent 28 years in the CIA's National Clandestine Service, argued that while direct targeting of US diplomats is rare, unintended harm caused by surveillance efforts that go wrong are much more common.
"These efforts, while designed to further surveillance and eavesdropping and not to cause malicious damage, nevertheless risked or resulted in residual physical harm to US diplomats," Sipher said in a commentary on the Just Security website.
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All these people mocking the idea are probably the paid Russian trolls I keep getting warned about. Of course the irony is the same people warning me about Russian trolls are the ones mocking this story.
Every single posting on the internet is either by a paid Russian troll, or about a paid Russian troll, with an infinite regression of bluff and counter bluff.
It's basically a Russian doll of Russian trolls.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Whoa, citizen, careful there! Looks like you've had a little too much to think! I hope you know that our elites are absolutely chomping at the bit for war with Russia right now and will do anything, up and including false flags and false memos, to get it. Remember the Bay of Tonkin? Remember the Maine? Remember the fake WMD memo that led us into war with Iraq? [fas.org] Fun fact: you know who wrote it? Robert Mueller. Yup, the same one investigating Manafort and Podesta right now. These people know how to star
Re: Sock Puppet (Score:2)
Well, reading some of his leaked emails on the dark web, SOMEONE is definitely paying him.
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Four centuries of official denial have not satisfied independent investigators of the Bermuda Triangle. From the time of Shakespeare (The Tempest) to the space age, no official body will admit that the anomalies that occur in that area are of extraterrestrial origin. Even NASA will not acknowledge their measurements and probes showing the shifting and expanding of the Triangle with the ozone layer and global warming.
Is it any surprise that innocent, non-spying diplomats are suffering due to official refusal to admit the influence of alien powers over this area? Expect the zombification to continue.
Finally some common sense.
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Cuba has a lot of spies in the US gov and mil.
The US embassy in Cuba is full of spies.
Spies in place and their cover is holding.
Why do the one thing that would cause the USA to start a spy hunt?
To make the US look at the groups who want freedom for Cuba and find all the well placed Cuban spies in them?
To look at everyone in the US embassy?
To go over all the information that passed in and out of the US embassy and look for the results of spies working from that inform