CIA doctor hit by Havana syndrome
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Wouldn't be shocked if the fact they see themselves as different from normal people is contributing to it.
There are a lot of perfectly healthy people out there receiving 100% VA disability because they just had the inclination to play the system.
There are no clinical scans, blood tests, there is no way to rule out these conditions. They are not illnesses but they are clusters of symptoms that have been labeled so as to medicate or "treat" them without promising cures or healing.
Therefore all you need to do is convince a few psychiatric clinicians that your mental processes and behaviors are sufficiently non-standard and boom, you've got a mental illness that will never be cured, never be healed, and makes you a highly-valuable repeat customer up to and beyond the hour of your death.
And that's how you get 100% VA disability. Congratulations!
I personally never saw someone who was determined to be 100% service connected purely for PTSD, but I am also not a psychiatrist so it's possible that there is a selection bias there.
If the system had 0% fraud rates, then it kind of implies that many real people have been denied because they failed to jump through the hoops.
And we have collected data on humanity for 20 years in Google and FB. If science goes were the data is, the true neuro-science/psychology today is proprietary and sold in chunks as a service to governments.
Might aswell ask Palantir directly about what humanity is really like without the grand illusions of a surplus of resources spend on postponing the eternal crisis that is our home.
No need to take Freuds last standing followers serious, just because they perpetuate a "Can-do-fix-all-things" illusion, we cling to while drowning in the things we can't fix.
Also, if this is a legit shadow practice in the US military, the issue isn't people claiming disability, but our collective lack for caring for them.
The suffering that they have is real, whether or not we debate the appropriateness or usefulness of the labels that have been placed on that suffering. Attempting to shame people for discussing those labels (even extremely negatively) as if the discussion itself damages the sufferers is darkly ironic, because the suppression of the discussion of that distress will result in a failure to improve the treatment of that distress.
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edit: I do understand the sentiment, but it's one that has long been cultivated through patients' groups that are founded and funded by pharmaceutical and other medical companies, and push the treatments that their funders push. Their funders are generally deeply invested in the status quo and cast objections to current received wisdom as attacks on the sick, unless they're trying to push a new drug, which is when they push change.
A patients' group can atrophy into an organization with no members, a single funding source, and a lawyer who spends an hour writing a press release every few months, and hires someone to update the website once a year.
I was quite perplexed by the width of severity of who was eligible for the class.
There was certainly a overprescription of needing to go in that class -- or maybe the diagnosis itself.
For instance, if you have erectile dysfunction then it's a 10% disability claim. They take you at your word, no "proof" needed. Same with 10% for tinnitus (ringing of the ears).
For PTSD there is a screening process but if you were verifiably in combat, something that less than 5% of the military ever experienced even when the wars were actively going on, then the screening consists of a single session talking to a psychiatrist. It's known in the community what you need to say and do during that interview to get 100% rated.
Similar with you're a woman who claims you were sexually assaulted during your service. Basically, the only hurdle is you being willing to lie.
For chronic pain claims the process is more drawn out but essentially if you're willing to persistently lie then you can get a 100% rating. It will take a year or two of going to doctors' appointments and insisting that you're in pain regardless of what tests they run who but eventually you'll get a diagnosis of some unknown condition with a 100% rating.
I've never done this, but I know a few people who have to varying degrees of legitimacy. For what it's worth the 100% claims I've seen are far closer to exaggeration than outright fabrication. Someone who probably actually should be 60% rated or whatever working the system to get up to 100%. You hear stories out people completely faking it but I don't know them personally. That could just be my cohort though, I was in the Marine Corps Infantry on combat deployments during my time do pretty much everyone I know has something legit wrong with them.
And I will say the VA is an absolute nightmare. I feel some incredibly blessed to have a software career where I don't need to rely on the VA. I've never seen a better argument against socialized medicine in the US than just experiencing the VA firsthand.
> if you have erectile dysfunction then it's a 10% disability claim. They take you at your word, no "proof" needed.
A stamp technique was developed to detect complete nocturnal erections for the evaluation of impotence. The test correctly detected complete nocturnal erections in 22 potent men and absence of complete nocturnal erections in 11 impotent men (P value under 0.001). This is a simple, useful screening test for organic impotence. https://www.goldjournal.net/article/0090-4295(80)90414-8/
edit: and getting a diagnosis for something real is probably a lot harder.
That's playing the system.
Where there's free money, there will be people who find ways to get it. Was ever thus.
Then you also have the fact that damage to their vestibular system can be seen.
The UK certainly had many cases of outright "fraud" (whereby you should consider a claim fraudulent if the person is clearly exaggerating their inability to work). That's why at the start of the re-assessment there were over 7,000 people claiming they were unfit to work because they had sexually transmitted infections, and 10,000+ because they were too fat. Huge numbers of people voluntarily stopped receiving disability payments rather than be assessed at all!
Looking it up, the overall rate at which decisions in the UK were appealed against was ~40%. About 60% of appeals were denied. If you wanted to you could therefore consider that the fraud rate was 24% towards the end of the program. But in the earlier days the fraud rate was more like 75%! That's a high fraud rate by any definition, but even so is certainly an under-estimate. The people in question are unemployed, they've got time and there are no downsides to appealing. Meanwhile the appeals authority is, again, entirely un-incentivized to deny applications beyond the fact that if they never did they'd be replaced. We should expect a massive false negative rate on denials.
The original system ATOS used was check-box and computer driven for that reason: it's much easier to design an objective and fair system when you're not in front of someone who's crying and saying they're in pain. It would take a heart of stone to deny people "free" money which is what benefits creates at the point of individual assessment, so you can't rely on individual's subjective judgements. They will almost always side with the complainant, especially if they have to do it in person. There's tons of psychological and emotional downsides to being the "bad guy" and zero reward.
> The system's own claims of fraud rates can't be taken seriously; claimed fraud rates were low before the big re-assessment but abuse was sufficiently widespread for it to become a major political issue anyway.
The system's own claims of fraud rates should be taken much more seriously than widepsread political opinions, the history of the UK wrt "Benefit Street" etc mean that there's a big juicy voter wedge there, the numbers from the actual institutions tell the story much more evenly than the politicians do.
> Looking it up, the overall rate at which decisions in the UK were appealed against was ~40%. About 60% of appeals were denied. If you wanted to you could therefore consider that the fraud rate was 24% towards the end of the program. But in the earlier days the fraud rate was more like 75%! That's a high fraud rate by any definition, but even so is certainly an under-estimate. The people in question are unemployed, they've got time and there are no downsides to appealing. Meanwhile the appeals authority is, again, entirely un-incentivized to deny applications beyond the fact that if they never did they'd be replaced. We should expect a massive false negative rate on denials.
The rate that the appeals pass or reject does not map to the fraud rate, some applicants lack the agency to appeal and those who can appeal often can't do so repeatedly. The profoundly disabled are screened out at this point - this is where those "My dad was ruled fit to work and died of cancer the next week" stories crop up from.
> The original system ATOS used was check-box and computer driven for that reason: it's much easier to design an objective and fair system when you're not in front of someone who's crying and saying they're in pain."
This was widely, infamously abused to deny people benefits.
This "objective and fair" system marked my husband as capable to work a full time job because he could climb a single flight of stairs with my assistance, ATOS staff were encouraged to deflate scores and deny benefits. It was not objective or fair in the least, it was a rigorous exercise in accelerating toward the minimum number of people receiving benefit awards from that ATOS examination site.
And what would be gained?
Here’s the problem is conspiracy theories: when you divorce yourself from needing any evidence to draw a conclusion (nothing that could go before a court of law or a scientific paper), then anything is possible. No means to confirm or refute it! Why not claim that actually the CIA agents are working for Cuba and trying to reduce moral for the rest of them? That’s equally plausible as a generic psyop, but would at least have a more clear outcome. And I just made that up… or did I? Maybe I’m working for the CIA! I mean Cuba! No Russia!
Once you go down that rabbit hole, you throw away everything. So the baby goes with the bath water. You’re totally ungrounded, and at that point you’re totally manipulatable to whenever wants to create a conspiracy for their own agenda, even if that agenda isn’t very clear or sophisticated (eg aliens are doing X).
A healthy amount of skepticism is important. Too much and you’re wrong most of the time yet no logical argument or lack of evidence convinces you. If this happens at the societal level, it’s devastating.
I'm not saying that I KNOW this is X plot with Y intentions (most probably it's just mass psychosis) It's just that I do not take what a CIA operative says at face value.
Someone (a doctor, so an especially credible reporter) is claiming a miserable, debilitating medical condition.
For the sake of the scenario, let's assume the doctor is correct.
With that assumption, if they're being told that they're probably either imagining it or lying, isn't that adding insult to injury? And maybe slowing down whatever help they could get with the condition?
But I guess we should go after those disability queens right? Screw the warfighters who signed up to take incoming rounds for the promise of a dodge charger and a communications degree.
I love that you scoff at PTSD being a mention it and get 100% condition. You must be smoking the good stuff.
IMHO, many disabled veterans not getting all the help they need, which the US could muster, seems to be a real and unconscionable problem.
As well as there being tragedies of veterans who the US can't help enough. (Recently including a friend of a friend, who died young, believed due to burn pits.)
This context is another reason we should be careful about vocal speculation of benefits/aid fraud. Dismissive-sounding talk risks making a terrible situation even worse, for many genuinely injured people.
I’m only snarky about this to avoid just losing my cool, to hear someone talk about disabled vets like some kind of freeloading liars, just sucking off the system drives me up the wall. I can’t imagine a more evil and cynical way to talk about people who were willing to lay down their lives so people on here can live a cushy existence, in the peak of empire, wrapped in the warm blanket of safety and security that our overwhelming military force provides these “titans of industry.”
This statement I responded to casts doubt on every PTSD or sexual assault claim made, ignoring the difficulty in making these, glossing over the idea that going to a foreign country and killing people, watching your friends die and be dismembered, or being assaulted by people that you were supposed to trust with your life, has on someone’s mental health. I find it maximally disgusting, and I stand by what I said.
I am a combat veteran, and I think it's ridiculous that the guy who was such a behavior issue that we wouldn't let him off the FOB now pulls in $4k/mo for his "PTSD" from making sure the MREs were accounted for.
Funny enough, I posted 3 comments about this in the span of 8 minutes and Hacker News is saying 'You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.'. Tinfoil hat ON!
Makes perfect sense to me they can't detect what these people were hit with.
It's obviously some kind of tunneling beam that goes though anything like a pinpoint.
this same line of argument caused a lot of people not to be vaccinated for covid, mind you.
"The technical result is achieved by the fact that it is proposed to use directional radiation modulated by amplitude of the microwave electromagnetic waves. The impact on the intruder is due to the occurrence of painful mechanical thermoelastic phenomena in individual elements of the human auditory apparatus at their resonant frequencies"
https://patents.google.com/patent/RU2526478C2/en http://www.gbppr.net/mil/havana
That said, it's hardly everyone who thinks Havana syndrome is fake. The CNN article treats it like it's real, said article got enough votes to end up on HN's front page, and many other discussions about Havana syndrome that have taken place here have been heavily in favor of it being real.
There was a time when I was pretty fearless about some things that seem right/just. I suspect it came from formative upbringing: that the person in front of you who needs help, is just something that you do -- this is your purpose in the moment. (Being in one's 20s, perhaps with judgment not yet fully developed, and not many data points, seems also good for fearlessness.)
Well, although I imagine that this thinking might have its moments, of the power of force of will, and of being on the right side of deity/universe/humanity, when others will instinctively join you, and you'll find a way or die trying... at some point, I realized that I'm actually not willing to incur the smackdown that can come from adversarial situations with the truly underhanded/evil.
The possibility of this Havana syndrome being an attack reminds me that I don't have the stomach for a lot of ways that I might help.
If my feelings are ordinary, I suppose that might make such an attack a very effective tactic of the evil: decimating/demoralizing staff who expected to function in a gentleperson's diplomatic/intel environment, or at a distance in some sense.
https://www.guns.com/news/2012/04/06/putin-russia-develop-ps...
Since then the type of radio tech in use everyday has expanded a lot especially the type spies would be around, such as jammers and any exotic stuff.
I'm not saying there's anything there, I'm just asking questions :D
I don't think we'll know much about the real cause of this for another 20-50 years.
𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱.
Here's a retired Royal Navy radiological weapons expert explaining how it's been used on foreign adversaries since the 60s:
Full video: https://youtu.be/v5Tn89I7uic
I took this photo myself the other day. Look at this contrail starting and stopping: https://ibb.co/t2k8fKd
It isn't any specific government or company that is responsible - albeit many are used as front to collect money and influence.
Hacking their devices would uncover identities, as would following the money trail.
Anyone working on this, contact me.
Most of the victims are 'spooks' of one kind or another. Their job entails them getting injured by something at work. Cheaper to blame 'adversaries' than allow them to claim millions in damages from work-place-injury claims.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/langley-f...
Here's a mention of it in this article. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-blood-and-bure...
Another report, or is it the same one as referenced above?
Until a completely new sample of victims with no relation is taken and the study replicated against a completely new control group with no relation, it has very little value. And even if it did, it still wouldn't be conclusive - psychosomatic illness can have physiological effects.
The only way is to prove the mechanism of the attack - which for microwave attacks is readily done with wearable RF devices - and to find a physiologically plausible mechanism for that exact observed attack. Which should be pretty easy to do, and which the CIA hasn't done.
Would make sense if it was an own equipment malfunction.
If you look at something like transcranial magnetic stimulation, it doesn't seem like the kind of brain tweaking that you could do without someone noticing. Anything energy-based (electromagnetic or sound) strong enough to affect the brain should be quite detectable. I suppose there could be chemical ways of doing it but I would think they could be detected as well.
I also remember an interview with one of those suffering from Havana Syndrome who talked about how tough his job was and how he could stand up to nearly any pressure so there's no way this could be a manifestation of anxiety. Which makes me think that it is anxiety in someone whose belief system doesn't allow them to admit (even to themselves) that it might be a possibility.
Just because one doctor says it we have to believe them? Doctors are not at all infallible and are flawed like everyone else. I mean just a few years ago, doctors were heavily subscribing opiates. I’ll remain skeptical until actual evidence is presented.
In fact I'd take anything they refute as proof of existence.
To answer your 'question'- because he is actively going against the CIA narrative.
Since you obviously didn't read the article let me enlighten you with a quote from it '"The narrative just was going the wrong way. And no matter what I did or said to people, that just continued," Andrews said. "In fact, to this day, a lot of things that were done seemed not appropriate to my standards." Some officers who were impacted didn't want to report for fear of damaging their careers, Andrews said.'
This shouldn't need to be said, but let me do so anyways to avoid you muddying the waters further: one doctor from the CIA going counter to his higher-ups' narrative is why I believe 'a CIA doctor'. One doctor blowing a whistle is not the same as the entire CIA.
They sowed this distrust themselves, and your comments are far from helping their current PR push.
Projecting much? You were the one saying don’t trust the CIA (except this CIA doctor). Definitely seems consistent.
Waste of my time.
The only imaging I saw in the subsequently linked case series was conventional structural MRI … that is to say the imaging cited is evidence of absence (granting other aspects of linked assessment demonstrated a symptom burden which could be attributed to CNS dysfunction).
Modern imaging modalities are amazing. Look forward to having the radio imaging finding highlighted.