There are a number of tutorials on making microwave guns/weapons on youtube. For better or worse they only seem to test them on things like circuit breakers rather than embassies. eg https://youtu.be/80kDn4vit_w?t=485
Just means they failed to find evidence with the information they had access to (which sounds like not a lot)
> Dr. David Relman, a prominent scientist who has had access to the classified files involving the cases and representatives of people suffering from Havana syndrome, said the new studies were flawed. Many brain injuries are difficult to detect with scans or blood markers, he said.
It's a bunch of money being spent on on a silly story by three outlets who hoped they'd be fed enough nonsense by three letter agencies to dominate the news cycle with it for a week or two, being frontrun by a comprehensive study showing, yet again, that nothing happened to these people. So they rushed this out.
If anybody finds any factual claims about this device and this supposed syndrome, buried in the innuendo, please post it. But the boldfaced faux-abstract at the top doesn't indicate any new information at all.
The gist was members of some GRU unit have been seen at the location of several Havana syndrome events, mainly experts in Russia have been affected, and the Russian government has reportedly given awards for the creation and use of such directed energy weapons. The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.
I would add that this is not just some random unit - the same unit has previously engaged in acts of sabotage and assassinations abroad including use of chemical agents. Pretty big smoking gun to say the least
Yet somehow this was not known beforehand for years and somehow only became "apparent" when Russia became the public enemy.
> The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.
This article makes it sound like military industrial complex fat cats don't get their pockets filled with tax money fast enough, so plebs need some pushing.
Retroactively changing the past to accommodate the present day narrative is a common political trick, similarly to how Radio Free Europe's reports on Ukrainian ultranationalists challenging the monopoly on violence had suddenly become "Russian propaganda".
Another tiny step closer to the hot phase of WWIII, I guess.
You're too quick to dismiss things. There's without doubt a phenomenon here (a multitude of anecdotes of sudden symptoms, with some victims "medically retired from government service"), with two theories to explain it: a) there's no underlying physical cause, but it's basically random incidences in conjunction with selection bias, or b) there's an underlying physical cause, such as outlined in the article.
These are both possibilities. The article outlines "new evidence — in the form of intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, and call metadata, along with eyewitness testimony". They don't claim to have the device itself, or direct information about it.
Next, there are some studies that find differences, and some that don't find differences between the affected and a control group. If the studies look at different markers, that is consistent with non-obvious differences being there. The absence of evidence sometimes is evidence of absence, but not always.
I think the proper response for now is to suspend judgment.
It's the same disease that people got from unpowered 5G towers. If you go around asking people do you have headaches since the new tower is there, you will find people who do.
Amplifying this by the seriousness of 3 letter US agencies and whatnot and you get people medically retired. (And this is ongoing long enough that probably even some Russian agency has sent there someone to check, and then it got picked up by intelligence leaks. Or they leaked it to fuck with them.)
(And of course psychosomatic things need treatment too, and the investigations are warranted, it's not like US chanceries are the safest places in the world.)
This doesn't address the coincidences that the GRU unit is consistently at the place where the "headaches" happen, get identified by the victims, and work with one of the only people (Russian professor) researching the rare disease that was diagnosed for one of the victims. There are documents in the article that link the group with the researcher, which explicitly mentions acoustic non-lethal attacks.
There were ~1000 cases reviewed, and these GRU gremlins were only at a few places, no?
So most likely is that there are a few true positives, and the vast majority of them are false positives. (And of course good luck telling this to anyone who works next to someone who just met a GRU operative, or works in a high-stress job and regularly feels that there are people out to get them.)
> ..the symptoms began as an intense feeling of pressure, which started in the torso and radiated up to the head and neck. Then there was nausea, followed by a “high-pitched squeal.” Taylor raced to a bathroom to vomit before collapsing unconscious on the floor.
> Once back in the United States, Taylor was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury.
>Taylor remembers confronting a tall, muscular man with a military bearing acting suspiciously across the road from the consulate residential complex. After a brief exchange with Taylor, the man responded with a strong Russian accent, shutting down the encounter and running off.
>Taylor did not hesitate in confirming that Gordienko was the suspect skulking around outside U.S. consulate housing.
No, it doesn't. And there are probably true positive cases of some hostile attack (and it's unsurprising if we will not be the first to get details on the exact nature of those, and how many, and where and when), but in general the "Havana Syndrome" is likely not that.
(2022 CIA: Foreign involvement was ruled out in 976 cases of the 1,000 reviewed, and ... In March 2024, the National Institutes of Health published two medical studies evaluating people reporting Havana syndrome symptoms, and found no evidence of brain injury, irregular blood biomarkers, or vocational impairment)
I don’t understand why the imaging done in these studies isn’t more focussed on the inner ear. Maybe it’s already been rules out, but I can’t find anything that suggests it has.
Things like Ménière’s disease are a PITA to image, but it’s possible.
It wouldn't be surprising if the CIA knows or suspects as much but they are protecting some other, possible long held, classified tech. That is usually the priority and given it was gov workers/families then it may have been deemed worth keeping it quiet.
Otherwise there's little incentive to not find another reason to go after Russia.
I'm curious what Spain will take any real consequences or it will just be some marginal outrage like in Canada w/ the Indian gov hit job, then just kind of falling out of the news cycle and everyone forgets.
Oil isn't worth invasions anymore. We have shale oil in the Bakken, and EVs / alt energy / decarbonization will make it much less important.
Think about if you'd fund a major new oil project. Most don't get going for 5-10 years, meanwhile there is an army of investment and forthcoming techs in EV batteries and perovskites in solar.
A war is big money. Yeah, it's not the shadow corporation's money, but the Washington people do some math too, it will bring temporary high gas prices and war isn't popular. It's why all the "invade Iran!!!" stories have fallen flat in the last 4-5 years, they get laughed out of the building.
We’ve been a net exporter of oil since the 1970s, but global oil price is massively important. Think of how much is made and transported using petroleum.
Your argument is missing how important oil price stability is to fuel consumer and industrial consumption.
I get it. The petrol dollar is the basis of global currency and trade and has been longer than we've been alive.
When the value of oil collapses, and it will collapse: when not if, what replaced that? Batteries?
In the near future it is likely that sodium and sulfur will be the fundamental ingredients of a battery 2x the density of todays. So there won't be nickel, cobalt or even lithium holding up EV scaling.
Solar and wind isn't a shippable substance. Perovskites solar panels will likely be manufacturable practically anywhere.
Energy/oil being intimately tied with economic and economic output made for a stable cross-cultural currency.
From a realpolitik perspective, you have to ask what Spain has to gain from kicking up a fuss here. It’s not like any Spaniard is at risk here, nor does Spain promote itself as a major military power with the means and will of projecting power.
Compare this to the Salisbury poisonings, where a bunch of Brits got caught up, the target was an intelligence asset, and standing up to Russia plays very well with the electorate… there was a coordinated, significant, non-military response across several allies
Suspension of all high-level diplomatic contact UK/Russia, UK law changed to make it easier to confiscate Russian assets, 23 diplomats expelled from UK, 60 from the US + consulate closure, 33 from wider EU, 27 from other allies (in total ~150 constituting “the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history”), Russian banks sanctioned under the US CBW act (although Trump didn’t implement them), and personal sanctions against assets of GRU leaders.
What would you have considered to be a significant and proportionate non-military response?
I live 30 km away from a Belarussian border (so, for all intents and purposes Russian), so I am biased towards extreme measures, as Russia historically does not respond to anything else.
However, after multiple UK citizens were harmed on UK soil calling that response "significant" anything is frankly a joke.
You said there was significant response, I have commented on that to say that response has been anything but.
As I already said, personally I am afraid that we're beyond the point where any non-military response would be proportionate, but that is not what my initial comment was about.
Havana Syndrome. So what is it exactly? Nobody really knows, nor do we know what causes it.
So called "anomolous health incidents"
Are they caused by pesticides, toxins, ultrasound, microwave weapons? Are the Russians behind this?
Or maybe it's psychogenic in nature?
>in 2022, psychogenic explanations became predominant, for several reasons: no known weapons that could cause only the reported symptoms, no evidence of hostile attacks, the spread to numerous unrelated locations, and absence of damage to brain or body.[20][4][21]
This article mentions multiple people with traumatic brain injuries, backed up by neurosurgeons. That isn't psychogenic, that's is pretty physical. The article even addresses that.
> There is a reason why the Havana Act only came into force in 2021: for the past eight years, Havana Syndrome has been the subject of intense controversy. Sociologists have suggested it is little more than a mass psychogenic illness, or perhaps the outbreak of mass hysteria. Such arguments have been undercut by multiple medical studies, including one conducted by an expert panel convened by the U.S. intelligence community. The final assessment of that investigation found that AHIs had “a unique combination of core characteristics that cannot be explained by known environmental or medical conditions and could be due to external stimuli.”
US intelligence community says they are there, the NIH does not seem to agree. The NIH doesn't dispute a possible weapon, just that there is visible brain damage.
I know nothing, at all, and am probably trivially wrong.
But their symptoms remind me vaguely of concussions in the NFL, and my understanding is, there is no way to find out if someone has CTE until after they're dead.
So I find it somewhat distasteful that the NIH brain scans were/are cited as a proof one way or the other.
I'm probably completely wrong on a possible hidden injury, and the "cited as proof" I'm complaining about is almost certainly that it was dryly included in a report, that they tried some scans, that didn't have any positive results: and that, of course, is the right tone and absolutely should be included in the report.
> So I find it somewhat distasteful that the NIH brain scans were/are cited as a proof one way or the other.
What the scans were matters too. Eg an MRI brain might be ‘normal’, but would a scan targeting the inner ear? A report from an MR looking for evidence of Meniere’s would be interesting.
Plenty of things can be a “real condition” without measurable physical sources. That’s just practical/pragmatic medicine. Ala chronic fatigue syndrome.
The difference between those and more fringe stuff like chronic Lyme disease is much more of a grey area than most doctors would ever admit publicly without a huge amount of well organized backlash that largely can be summarized on “you just don’t care about sick people”. So the alternative is much more palatable to just to quietly treat them, play the game by kicking the can and deferring with “I hope science will one day advance to finding a real cause”. Wikipedia is always going to play this same game by the nature of it being a public forum attempting to appease a wide audience, it’s almost always going to play it safe.
Ultimately these are people, for the most part, who are legitimately unwell and may legitimately need care regardless, but that doesn’t make it the same as having cancer or HIV. Nor does it mean going to a doctor will give you the medicine you need.
The point you are making about mass hysteria is appreciated, but often patients really do suffer from something that turns out to be real. I am a "Havana syndrome" skeptic, but I do think the other examples are cut from a different cloth.
The first two examples that you've cited are great. Those people were dismissed at the time — only for scientists to find evidence decades later after many deaths.
re: gulf war syndrome
> Studies have consistently indicated that Persian Gulf War syndrome is not the result of combat or other stressors and that Gulf War veterans have lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than veterans of other wars.
> In 2022, researchers led by Robert Haley, MD at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that exposure to sarin nerve gas in soldiers who had a particular genetic mutation that prevented them from breaking down the nerve gas is likely to be responsible for the syndrome.[18] The findings and an editorial by two leading epidemiologists were published in Environmental Health Perspectives.[19]
> More people have died from illnesses caused by 9/11 than during the attack itself.[3][4]
> Much of the thousands of tons of debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers was pulverized concrete, which is known to cause silicosis upon inhalation. The remainder consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants,[7] more specifically: 50% non-fibrous material and construction debris; 40% glass and other fibers; 9.2% cellulose; and 0.8% of the extremely toxic carcinogen asbestos, as well as detectable amounts of lead and mercury.[8] There were also unprecedented levels of dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from the fires which burned for three months.[9] Many of the dispersed substances (asbestos, crystalline silica, lead, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) are carcinogenic; other substances can trigger kidney, heart, liver and nervous system deterioration
> Greg Edgreen, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, set up the working group investigating Havana Syndrome for the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, from 2020 to 2023. The role gave him access to classified intelligence compiled not just by the Pentagon, but by other agencies within the U.S. intelligence community. In response to this investigation, Edgreen told 60 Minutes: “If I'm wrong about Russia being behind anomalous health incidents, I will come onto your show. And I will eat my tie.”
From the article, Edgreen's opinion seems to be based off of everyone reporting the syndrome having some tenuous connection to Russia, which is fairly terrible evidence. Maybe he has a better reason for believing it, I can't guess.
And that DIA investigation was presumably part of the House Intelligence Committee's assessment that ruled there was no credible evidenced of an attack.
In 2012 I was hiking in Oahu, Hawaii not far from Downtown. When I entered this dense bamboo forest. I suddenly felt this huge desire to go to sleep and literally fell asleep by a rock for what seemed like ages but lasted only a few minutes. I woke up and was searching for my hiking partner which reappeared shortly after.
It does seem, and not too unrealistically so, a daunting prospect that one could theoretically have their melon remotely roasted if its innerds or deeds defied the right wrong lofty authority -- a slightly more deleterious variation of Van Eckery, or worse.
Improbable perhaps, but shirtainly nay impossible.
The are so many crazy things happening in my country so when I read the titles like this from a reputable source, I just believe them even on the April Fools.
This story is unbelievable to me. It leaves way too many unexplained conclusions.
Russia wants to kill US diplomats (why? All of them? Some of them? One of them?) so rather than doing some botched robbery or fake suicide... they invent a "direct energy weapon" to kill them?
Or maybe they're researching this cool new direct energy weapon and they decide to test it out on... US diplomats? You'd think they could pick a less conspicuous target to test out their assassination laser beams.
Definitely withholding judgement until we learn more.
What is your definition of "demonize"? The "balloon incident" was the exact opposite of hyped by the government, they kept it (and all the previous incidents) completely quiet until some rando with a telescope tweeted a picture of it and the media picked up the story.
And Russia's leaders repeatedly and openly declare their hostile intentions towards "the west" on a near-daily basis, they've been implicated in assassinations and attempted assassinations using chemical and radiological weapons on Western soil, have blown up arms depots in Czechia and Bulgaria resulting in deaths, frequently "question the statehood" of their neighbors including not just Ukraine but Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have state media run pieces where they threaten to nuke the UK, etc.
That's how the nonexistent Iraqi WMDs were sold - by the entire media repeating the State Dept. talking points for years. Manufacturing consent at its finest.
> And Russia's leaders repeatedly and openly declare their hostile intentions towards "the west"
They have warned about nato expansion and the overt, publicized plans of US think tanks and policymakers about destroying Russia for two decades. When the US came to their door, they put their foot down. The US policymakers are STILL talking about how they WILL destroy Russia. All of that talk is a violation of Article 51 of the UN and gives a casus belli to any country targeted in that manner.
> frequently "question the statehood" of their neighbors including not just Ukraine but Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
The US published a map to divide Russia into regions years ago. Russia started talking about Ukraine's statehood after the peace attempts were foiled by the Bojo clown and it turned out that the Russian-speaking regions have no chance of existing as equal citizens in a united Ukraine as they changed the freaking constitution to ban the Russian language and declare them 2nd class people. Russia doesn't question the statehood of the baltic countries - it says that they made them actual countries. So you are literally making things up by deriving on US propaganda.
> not to mention literally flying cruise missiles over NATO territory to attack Ukraine...
The lack of info and arrogance is overwhelming. Its worse than how it was in 2003. Its Nato who went to Ukraine. Not Russia who went to Mexico. This is without talking about how the CIA had been training neonazis since 1991. The people who support a country that has been publishing and then implementing policy about how to destroy a country are talking about the 'aggression' from the targeted country. The bully is the victim. Meanwhile that same bully is already spending $500 million to demonize the NEXT target as its supporters still buy into the propaganda as willingly as they did in 2003. Except this time, the targets have nuclear weapons.
You people are literally worse than how the Americans were in 2003 and desperately need to listen to some Chomsky. He has the patience to explain things. I don't.
“They have warned about nato expansion and the overt, publicized plans of US think tanks and policymakers about destroying Russia for two decade.”
Ah, you didn’t watch the tucker Putin interview!
First question was whether NATO’s threat caused the Ukrainian invasion, and Putin quite clearly said, I’ll paraphrase, “Nope, Ukraine has always belonged to Russia.” Puty’s actual response was 30 minute history lesson on why Russia owns Ukraine. No mention of NATO. Anyway, you don’t know what you’re talking about it seems, or Putin is lying about his intentions, which I suppose is totally on brand for genocidal despots.
Just FYI, the outlet that makes the claim is Russian, and is disputing the "State Dept. propaganda" that is officially not even sure it's an attack, let alone makes any attribution, and that's after several years of investigations that haven't even discovered any physical mechanism of action. (Surely GRU doesn't possess alien magic...)
Who says Russia wants to kill them? Maybe it just wants to render them ineffective. That has been achieved ("Others have suffered such severe long-term cognitive and vestibular aftereffects that they can no longer function on a day-to-day basis and have been medically retired from government service.").
I think it's sensible to suspend judgment for now, but this is clearly one of the two main plausible contenders for an explanation of the observed phenomena.
> Definitely withholding judgement until we learn more.
This is a key point made in the article.
“A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay. The second is that acknowledging Havana Syndrome is caused by a foreign adversary could put a damper on recruitment to the CIA and State Department.”
This misses a third key point. The US government has a complicated relationship with Russia. The Republican Party in particular.
I haven't read the article yet but I think sometimes its good to be loud and good to get caught because you're saying "we can get you" to the people the public don't know exist yet.
The aim seems not to kill, but to severely damage. The article makes a point that American diplomats feel betrayed that noone takes the attacks seriously, and are intimidated to work on Russian affairs.
The tactics of Russian operatives have always been more nuanced than simply "eliminating the adversary". Typically, such extreme measures are reserved for traitors, like Sergei Skripal or the helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine.
In certain instances, they opt for psychological warfare techniques, similar to those employed by the Stasi in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
Guess where Putin was stationed in the '80s during his tenure as a KGB officer?
If you watch the 60 Minutes doc, it is literally taking out of service top people working against Russia.
Killing them would be crazy. This weapon, whatever it is, is perfect. Just enough doubt (by people like you and other Russian plants) to create no clear answer. EDIT: I'm not calling you a Russia shill.
The linked article and the 60 Minutes doc are literally what everyone's been waiting for. I was on the sidelines before, but not now.
> The Moscow Signal was a reported microwave transmission varying between 2.5 and 4 gigahertz
Evil Russians using wi-fi frequencies.
> Bucha
The one where they were totally shooting themselves with artillery (according to the Guardian) and executed people who were collaborating with them (white armbands)?
Yeah, hacker news is going to have meltdown over this, last time most upvoted comment was about "It was crickets". I guess Russian shills are working hard.
most interesting part of the whole article is how a journalist was able to track a Russian mobile telephone being turned on or off in several countries with such fine grained precision of dates and time
107 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadCould be pretty dangerous if they're easy to produce.
Perhaps why this has been suppressed for as long as it has
Check out the “active denial system”.
Given Russia already does that, is this, this doesn’t seem a massive escalation.
"New Studies Find No Evidence of Brain Injury in Havana Syndrome Cases"
This story is from two weeks ago. So which is it?
> Dr. David Relman, a prominent scientist who has had access to the classified files involving the cases and representatives of people suffering from Havana syndrome, said the new studies were flawed. Many brain injuries are difficult to detect with scans or blood markers, he said.
If anybody finds any factual claims about this device and this supposed syndrome, buried in the innuendo, please post it. But the boldfaced faux-abstract at the top doesn't indicate any new information at all.
Yet somehow this was not known beforehand for years and somehow only became "apparent" when Russia became the public enemy.
> The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.
This article makes it sound like military industrial complex fat cats don't get their pockets filled with tax money fast enough, so plebs need some pushing.
Retroactively changing the past to accommodate the present day narrative is a common political trick, similarly to how Radio Free Europe's reports on Ukrainian ultranationalists challenging the monopoly on violence had suddenly become "Russian propaganda".
Another tiny step closer to the hot phase of WWIII, I guess.
These are both possibilities. The article outlines "new evidence — in the form of intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, and call metadata, along with eyewitness testimony". They don't claim to have the device itself, or direct information about it.
Next, there are some studies that find differences, and some that don't find differences between the affected and a control group. If the studies look at different markers, that is consistent with non-obvious differences being there. The absence of evidence sometimes is evidence of absence, but not always.
I think the proper response for now is to suspend judgment.
Amplifying this by the seriousness of 3 letter US agencies and whatnot and you get people medically retired. (And this is ongoing long enough that probably even some Russian agency has sent there someone to check, and then it got picked up by intelligence leaks. Or they leaked it to fuck with them.)
(And of course psychosomatic things need treatment too, and the investigations are warranted, it's not like US chanceries are the safest places in the world.)
So most likely is that there are a few true positives, and the vast majority of them are false positives. (And of course good luck telling this to anyone who works next to someone who just met a GRU operative, or works in a high-stress job and regularly feels that there are people out to get them.)
> Once back in the United States, Taylor was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury.
>Taylor remembers confronting a tall, muscular man with a military bearing acting suspiciously across the road from the consulate residential complex. After a brief exchange with Taylor, the man responded with a strong Russian accent, shutting down the encounter and running off.
>Taylor did not hesitate in confirming that Gordienko was the suspect skulking around outside U.S. consulate housing.
Gordienko being "Egor Gordienko named as senior member of cell of Russian agents who tried to kill former Russian spy in Salisbury" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/25/fourth-russian-a...
Doesn't sound like a random headache to me.
(2022 CIA: Foreign involvement was ruled out in 976 cases of the 1,000 reviewed, and ... In March 2024, the National Institutes of Health published two medical studies evaluating people reporting Havana syndrome symptoms, and found no evidence of brain injury, irregular blood biomarkers, or vocational impairment)
Things like Ménière’s disease are a PITA to image, but it’s possible.
Otherwise there's little incentive to not find another reason to go after Russia.
Hell, Russia just brutally killed a traitor in Spain and did the opposite of trying to hide who did it. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/russian-defe...
I'm curious what Spain will take any real consequences or it will just be some marginal outrage like in Canada w/ the Indian gov hit job, then just kind of falling out of the news cycle and everyone forgets.
Think about if you'd fund a major new oil project. Most don't get going for 5-10 years, meanwhile there is an army of investment and forthcoming techs in EV batteries and perovskites in solar.
A war is big money. Yeah, it's not the shadow corporation's money, but the Washington people do some math too, it will bring temporary high gas prices and war isn't popular. It's why all the "invade Iran!!!" stories have fallen flat in the last 4-5 years, they get laughed out of the building.
Your argument is missing how important oil price stability is to fuel consumer and industrial consumption.
When the value of oil collapses, and it will collapse: when not if, what replaced that? Batteries?
In the near future it is likely that sodium and sulfur will be the fundamental ingredients of a battery 2x the density of todays. So there won't be nickel, cobalt or even lithium holding up EV scaling.
Solar and wind isn't a shippable substance. Perovskites solar panels will likely be manufacturable practically anywhere.
Energy/oil being intimately tied with economic and economic output made for a stable cross-cultural currency.
Likely we will simply move back to food.
Compare this to the Salisbury poisonings, where a bunch of Brits got caught up, the target was an intelligence asset, and standing up to Russia plays very well with the electorate… there was a coordinated, significant, non-military response across several allies
>significant
?
https://goodlawproject.org/revealed-the-tories-are-still-rec...
What would you have considered to be a significant and proportionate non-military response?
However, after multiple UK citizens were harmed on UK soil calling that response "significant" anything is frankly a joke.
As I already said, personally I am afraid that we're beyond the point where any non-military response would be proportionate, but that is not what my initial comment was about.
So called "anomolous health incidents"
Are they caused by pesticides, toxins, ultrasound, microwave weapons? Are the Russians behind this?
Or maybe it's psychogenic in nature?
>in 2022, psychogenic explanations became predominant, for several reasons: no known weapons that could cause only the reported symptoms, no evidence of hostile attacks, the spread to numerous unrelated locations, and absence of damage to brain or body.[20][4][21]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome
> There is a reason why the Havana Act only came into force in 2021: for the past eight years, Havana Syndrome has been the subject of intense controversy. Sociologists have suggested it is little more than a mass psychogenic illness, or perhaps the outbreak of mass hysteria. Such arguments have been undercut by multiple medical studies, including one conducted by an expert panel convened by the U.S. intelligence community. The final assessment of that investigation found that AHIs had “a unique combination of core characteristics that cannot be explained by known environmental or medical conditions and could be due to external stimuli.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/havana-syndrome-nih-study-1.71...
US intelligence community says they are there, the NIH does not seem to agree. The NIH doesn't dispute a possible weapon, just that there is visible brain damage.
But their symptoms remind me vaguely of concussions in the NFL, and my understanding is, there is no way to find out if someone has CTE until after they're dead.
So I find it somewhat distasteful that the NIH brain scans were/are cited as a proof one way or the other.
I'm probably completely wrong on a possible hidden injury, and the "cited as proof" I'm complaining about is almost certainly that it was dryly included in a report, that they tried some scans, that didn't have any positive results: and that, of course, is the right tone and absolutely should be included in the report.
What the scans were matters too. Eg an MRI brain might be ‘normal’, but would a scan targeting the inner ear? A report from an MR looking for evidence of Meniere’s would be interesting.
Most long COVID is likely not psychogenic.
The difference between those and more fringe stuff like chronic Lyme disease is much more of a grey area than most doctors would ever admit publicly without a huge amount of well organized backlash that largely can be summarized on “you just don’t care about sick people”. So the alternative is much more palatable to just to quietly treat them, play the game by kicking the can and deferring with “I hope science will one day advance to finding a real cause”. Wikipedia is always going to play this same game by the nature of it being a public forum attempting to appease a wide audience, it’s almost always going to play it safe.
Ultimately these are people, for the most part, who are legitimately unwell and may legitimately need care regardless, but that doesn’t make it the same as having cancer or HIV. Nor does it mean going to a doctor will give you the medicine you need.
The first two examples that you've cited are great. Those people were dismissed at the time — only for scientists to find evidence decades later after many deaths.
re: gulf war syndrome
> Studies have consistently indicated that Persian Gulf War syndrome is not the result of combat or other stressors and that Gulf War veterans have lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than veterans of other wars.
> In 2022, researchers led by Robert Haley, MD at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that exposure to sarin nerve gas in soldiers who had a particular genetic mutation that prevented them from breaking down the nerve gas is likely to be responsible for the syndrome.[18] The findings and an editorial by two leading epidemiologists were published in Environmental Health Perspectives.[19]
re: 9/11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_arising_from_th...
> More people have died from illnesses caused by 9/11 than during the attack itself.[3][4]
> Much of the thousands of tons of debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers was pulverized concrete, which is known to cause silicosis upon inhalation. The remainder consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants,[7] more specifically: 50% non-fibrous material and construction debris; 40% glass and other fibers; 9.2% cellulose; and 0.8% of the extremely toxic carcinogen asbestos, as well as detectable amounts of lead and mercury.[8] There were also unprecedented levels of dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from the fires which burned for three months.[9] Many of the dispersed substances (asbestos, crystalline silica, lead, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) are carcinogenic; other substances can trigger kidney, heart, liver and nervous system deterioration
which is completely real and scientifically verified, despite your scare quotes.
I might add that nothing in your link claims that Gulf War Syndrome is psychogenic.
And that DIA investigation was presumably part of the House Intelligence Committee's assessment that ruled there was no credible evidenced of an attack.
Clumsy moves like this are a hallmark of Russian operations, for example, the UK poisonings.
Did you even read what you responded to? He absolutely has "better reasons" for believing it.
Does he? He certainly didn't share them, and I can only comment on what he did share, which was pretty flimsy.
It does seem, and not too unrealistically so, a daunting prospect that one could theoretically have their melon remotely roasted if its innerds or deeds defied the right wrong lofty authority -- a slightly more deleterious variation of Van Eckery, or worse.
Improbable perhaps, but shirtainly nay impossible.
Remember this? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-york-x...
Edit:
-∞ fucktards
Russia wants to kill US diplomats (why? All of them? Some of them? One of them?) so rather than doing some botched robbery or fake suicide... they invent a "direct energy weapon" to kill them?
Or maybe they're researching this cool new direct energy weapon and they decide to test it out on... US diplomats? You'd think they could pick a less conspicuous target to test out their assassination laser beams.
Definitely withholding judgement until we learn more.
And Russia's leaders repeatedly and openly declare their hostile intentions towards "the west" on a near-daily basis, they've been implicated in assassinations and attempted assassinations using chemical and radiological weapons on Western soil, have blown up arms depots in Czechia and Bulgaria resulting in deaths, frequently "question the statehood" of their neighbors including not just Ukraine but Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have state media run pieces where they threaten to nuke the UK, etc.
This:
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/china-news/21091-a-500-million-...
Leading to things like this:
https://i.imgur.com/2pJlIK3.jpeg
> the media picked up the story
That's how the nonexistent Iraqi WMDs were sold - by the entire media repeating the State Dept. talking points for years. Manufacturing consent at its finest.
> And Russia's leaders repeatedly and openly declare their hostile intentions towards "the west"
They have warned about nato expansion and the overt, publicized plans of US think tanks and policymakers about destroying Russia for two decades. When the US came to their door, they put their foot down. The US policymakers are STILL talking about how they WILL destroy Russia. All of that talk is a violation of Article 51 of the UN and gives a casus belli to any country targeted in that manner.
> frequently "question the statehood" of their neighbors including not just Ukraine but Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
The US published a map to divide Russia into regions years ago. Russia started talking about Ukraine's statehood after the peace attempts were foiled by the Bojo clown and it turned out that the Russian-speaking regions have no chance of existing as equal citizens in a united Ukraine as they changed the freaking constitution to ban the Russian language and declare them 2nd class people. Russia doesn't question the statehood of the baltic countries - it says that they made them actual countries. So you are literally making things up by deriving on US propaganda.
> not to mention literally flying cruise missiles over NATO territory to attack Ukraine...
The lack of info and arrogance is overwhelming. Its worse than how it was in 2003. Its Nato who went to Ukraine. Not Russia who went to Mexico. This is without talking about how the CIA had been training neonazis since 1991. The people who support a country that has been publishing and then implementing policy about how to destroy a country are talking about the 'aggression' from the targeted country. The bully is the victim. Meanwhile that same bully is already spending $500 million to demonize the NEXT target as its supporters still buy into the propaganda as willingly as they did in 2003. Except this time, the targets have nuclear weapons.
You people are literally worse than how the Americans were in 2003 and desperately need to listen to some Chomsky. He has the patience to explain things. I don't.
Ah, you didn’t watch the tucker Putin interview!
First question was whether NATO’s threat caused the Ukrainian invasion, and Putin quite clearly said, I’ll paraphrase, “Nope, Ukraine has always belonged to Russia.” Puty’s actual response was 30 minute history lesson on why Russia owns Ukraine. No mention of NATO. Anyway, you don’t know what you’re talking about it seems, or Putin is lying about his intentions, which I suppose is totally on brand for genocidal despots.
I think it's sensible to suspend judgment for now, but this is clearly one of the two main plausible contenders for an explanation of the observed phenomena.
This is a key point made in the article.
“A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay. The second is that acknowledging Havana Syndrome is caused by a foreign adversary could put a damper on recruitment to the CIA and State Department.”
This misses a third key point. The US government has a complicated relationship with Russia. The Republican Party in particular.
not really that complicated: $$$$$
because corporations are people, and can donate. that means foreign corporations.
...and also the NRA. what was that little red-headed Russian lady's name again?
In certain instances, they opt for psychological warfare techniques, similar to those employed by the Stasi in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
Guess where Putin was stationed in the '80s during his tenure as a KGB officer?
Killing them would be crazy. This weapon, whatever it is, is perfect. Just enough doubt (by people like you and other Russian plants) to create no clear answer. EDIT: I'm not calling you a Russia shill.
The linked article and the 60 Minutes doc are literally what everyone's been waiting for. I was on the sidelines before, but not now.
Havana syndrome is almost a 10 years old meme, but since we are at war with Russia, let's randomly rope in GRU, totally coincidently.
Not that the modern caring sharing Russians who tried to bring peace to Bucha and got awards for it would do such a thing.
Evil Russians using wi-fi frequencies.
> Bucha
The one where they were totally shooting themselves with artillery (according to the Guardian) and executed people who were collaborating with them (white armbands)?
Uh-huh, sure.
https://apnews.com/article/havana-syndrome-diplomat-health-b...