'Acoustic attack' report on US diplomats in Cuba is flawed, neurologists say
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It doesn't make sense from an Intelligence o Intelligence Gathering point of view. They have cheaper and better ways (like... actual people?), so I don't think that this wasn't some kind of (Cuban) intelligence equipment malfunction. Plus, from the reports it seems that the presumed attacks were taking place on diplomatic personnel residences and hotel rooms. In that environment the attackers do not have much control: what if there's an asset there? what if there's a child?
But what really makes me to think that this was not a Cuban operation or attack, is that Canadian personnel were also reported to be affected. That's a big huge no-no.
Since this whole thing was interesting for me, I have asked several people on their opinions. People from all walks of life and political leanings. Most of them just told me that they did not think it was Cuban behind the attacks, if there were attacks at all. The more cautious just waved off with "We need more information." Not one person, no matter where they stand, thinks we actually did this.
(Sorry for my English.)
could've been any government's agency that had infiltrated cuba.
While the above is pretty far fetched, floor is open for conspiracy theories...
* old cold-war boogeyman
* claims of attacks that leave no physical evidence
* only reported by government officials
If the tables were turned here and the Cubans or Russians were accusing us of a sonic attack we’d be screaming that it’s a disinformation campaign.
I do not follow Cuban politics (and not much Russian), but Russia nowadays are always accusing USA of some evil -- watch the official 1st channel or read gov't radio transcript: planning an overthrow of their government (via supporting this or that NGO), destabilizing an economy, financing a war and killing Russian citizens (Ukraine, Syria), etc. etc.
Much of this is for internal consumption, and generally the reaction in the US from those who can read it and care to is "meh, business as usual". Trying to influence minds, for sure; but this is par for the course for politics.
Our official sources are happy to demur, as they have around claims of sonic attacks - we are still “investigating” and “analyzing data”. We officially keep the claims at arms length.
We’ve figured out that a public-private partnership makes better agitprop.
I think more likely the state department would just deny it and move on.
And yet, there are bad guys. Churchill was a bastard, and no kind of “good guy” yet Hitler and the Nazis were the bad guys. C‘est la vie. Stalin was one of the bad guys, and so was Slobodan Milosovic, and so is Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Pol Pot, etc. Good guy is a tough category to fill, but history is full of inexcusable monsters and we should be careful with our moral relativism.
But I agree with your main point. There is real evil out there and we have a moral prerogative to stop/fight/kill those people.
The USA is hardly spotless, but they have a good reputation of standing up to real evil in the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/14/mystery-of-son...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uzbekistan-incident-raises-susp...
If this was infact a weapon of sorts, it could of been any foreign government which simply decided Cuba was a good testing grounds.
They have walked back liberalization before. After the collapse of the USSR, which had sent enormous amounts of money to support the Castro regime, Cuba entered a serious economic crisis. Castro instituted a period of market reforms, and there was widespread hope for political opening. But as soon as the economic situation improved sufficiently to keep buying off enough people to run the oppressive apparatus, it was all rolled back.
Please don’t confuse the interests of the Cuban people with the interests of the Cuban regime. The latter cares about one thing only: stay in power.
In one car that I owned, if I opened one of the rear windows while driving on the freeway, the buffeting was so “loud” as to be almost painful to everyone in the car. It wasn’t exactly normal sound so much as some kind of oscillating pressure wave.
If diplomats are describing the sonic attack in terms of a buffeting car window then that raises the chance in my mind that these really were sonic or pressure attacks of some kind. I’ve never heard anything produce sound like that naturally.
When Encounters of the 3rd Kind was released with aliens as little grey men with big heads suddenly most of the subsequent reports of alien abduction switched to grey aliens with big heads.
It's human nature. It's not evidence that the phenomenon is real just because people say it's like a phenomenon that exists.
That's exactly what sound is.
I don't know how this could possible be related, as I've never heard of groups of people getting sudden tinnitus together, but I do agree with you that the explanation sounds similar to what I experience.
Rheumatoid arthritis used to be a psychogenic illness. Parkinson’s. MS. Etc. It seems most psychogenic illnesses over time prove to be real. Doctors need to stop using this as a crutch when they can’t explain something, it’s harmful. Just say “we don’t know, this doesn’t make sense to us based on what we know at this time.”
By cherry-picking your cases, you can argue either side of the issue.
There's a lot more science to throw at these issues than was available in the days of some of the other illnesses you mentioned.
You could tell they were going to slant things right from the start when they started first with introducing Bekah and her quirky “witch” and “psychic” beliefs, before even getting to the diagnostics or how they were diagnosed. The documentary makers definitely crossed some ethical lines by cutting in that doctor talking answering general prompts about psychological illness, and splicing that in with patients answering questions about their emotional state, etc.
One thing it was good for though was to see just how horribly taken advantage of desperate and sick people can be by quacks. The show featured a lot of quacks such as Suzanne Kim and the Sophia Institute and that lady on Marthas Vineyard. I really wish I had the hours of material they left out to produce a documentary on what these quacks prescribed and charged their clients.
Edit: I’ll say on the subject of Jamison for example, if you want a better documentary on ME/CFS take a look at Unrest, also on Netflix. (And Forgotten Plague I think on Prime.) But even that science has progressed a long way in the past couple of years since that came out.
This is related to the same epistemological territory people go over and over when debating dark matter, or evolution, or AGW. Observations don't go away just because you question a theory.
Does it? Really? Should I be worried about Korean fan-death?
Tuberculosis in the 50s was still being blamed on psychology.[1]
Ulcers. Epilepsy. Myasthenia Gravis. Hypertension.
Autism was blamed on the mother’s personality!
Celiac disease. Schizophrenia. Cardiac diseases. Colitis.
Oh this is a doozy. Remember AIDS?
"It is argued that (a) AIDS is a typical example of epidemic hysteria, (b) the epidemic has at its core an unconscious group delusion that can be called the group fantasy of scapegoating" [2]
Turns out when people say they’re sick and something is wrong, there is almost always a cause even if we don’t know what. The body is complex. We still have a hell of a lot to learn. And doctors are being really lazy and damaging to patients when to dismiss a difficult to explain illness as psycho-genic/social/logical.
Your example of fan death is a superstition, which is not the same thing as an illness diagnosed as “psychogenic” by a doctor.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/archneurpsyc/article-abstra... [2] http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-14989-001
There are always some denialists or crackpots out there, but I don't think your examples necessarily show that doctors are lazy and default to psychogenic means.
Koreans don't put fan death on some kind of nationalistic pedestal of overdramatic belief systems that make you Korean. If we wanted nationalistic symbols, we already have plenty---starting with Dokdo (a.k.a. Takeshima, but don't utter that word in front of a Korean), the "East Sea" (more commonly known as "Sea of Japan"), and... but I digress.
Koreans believed fan death because their mothers did, and then their mothers did, and also the 9 pm news used to say "Yet another person found dead next to a fan" every summer, because in a hot, humid country of 50 million people someone is going to be found dead in a hot day next to a running fan.
How could it be a "national identity", when the very concept that some people might not consider sleeping-next-to-a-fan as deadly was beyond people's imagination. (Remember, it was time before the internet.) Now, thanks to the internet and everything, (I hope) most Koreans know that "Fan Death" is a silly urban folklore. We even scored our own Wikipedia entry. Nice.
As I said think of it more like regional pride in barbecue. People from memphis don't think their barbecue is their identity, but if you insult it or say that Memphis barbecue sucks they defend it about as much as I have seen people in Korea defend fan death when my friend questioned it.
National identity is great, I guess, but at some point, it becomes actively harmful not to call out stupidity when it presents itself so flagrantly.
If it takes social pressure to get people to stop believing absurd things, then so be it.
Even if you don't agree with that statement, it's what people who prefer imperial units will say, not that there's some mass delusion / patriotic identity.
Isn't "hard-working diplomatic staff" an oximoron?