Authors of the new Springer book identify mass psychogenic illness as the likely cause of Havana Syndrome, a mysterious condition affecting American and Canadian diplomats stationed in Cuba between 2016 and 2019.
Dozens of embassy staff reported an array of complaints that have baffled the medical community, the most prominent being concussion-like symptoms without head trauma. U.S. Government physicians have promoted the theory that the diplomats and their families were the victims of a sonic attack. Studies of the embassy patients have been inconclusive. In their book Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria, the authors Robert W. Baloh and Robert E. Bartholomew observe that the outbreak is notably similar to the appearance of 'shell shock' and other combat syndromes. The two medical experts conclude that neurological complaints from an overstimulated nervous system have been misdiagnosed as concussions and brain damage when the real cause is stress.
[Source]: Springer Book
However, I think this mystery is far from solved. For example: Why were diplomats & embassy staff, predominantly from the US and Canada, affected?, Why not other American citizens? Why only between the years 2016 and 2019? Why not before or after? What do you guys think about this?
[Ed Note: Fixed date in last paragraph. Thanks c0lo!]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @12:06PM (3 children)
The cause is the secret weapon used by the lizard people.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:51PM (1 child)
Only on Americans. Because they're exceptional.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Friday July 10 2020, @04:09PM
Well they are certainly subject to mass psychogenic illnesses.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @05:49PM
The cause is the secret weapon left behind by the lizard people.
There, FTFY.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @12:09PM (1 child)
Cuba has water tanker trucks spraying pesticide along the sides of the streets which was being inhaled by everyone.
(Score: 5, Funny) by RS3 on Friday July 10 2020, @02:50PM
When in reality the trucks were filled with Gringo repellent.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday July 10 2020, @12:17PM
If there is a place and time to downplay the influence of radiation on the health, it is here and now, so, screw whatever happened, official investigations are unlikely to go anywhere.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday July 10 2020, @12:20PM
no.. "stress beams"
usually created by PHBs and MBAs, now available for select embassy staff.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @12:33PM (2 children)
Good question!
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday July 10 2020, @01:49PM
Some cicada species have long life cycles [wikipedia.org], spanning years, most of which is underground.
See periodical cicadas [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @04:08PM
The year 2109 is less than a hundred years from now.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Friday July 10 2020, @12:43PM (9 children)
Odd editing; I read the top half as it boils down to toxic boss syndrome, a well known problem, and the bottom half as "who knows".
I was motivated enough to look up a list of Cuban ambassadors and things were stable until 2017-ish with some relative of Giada in charge, then things went insane and they had a new boss every three months and apparently the staff melted down from the stress, then they got a normal dude in late 2018 and things have been stable (and apparently lower stress) since then.
The current boss has had a scandal along the lines of she's merely a CIA operative handler. Which apparently is lower stress for the staff than having a new boss every couple weeks. I suppose having one boss consistently picking long term fights "us against them" would be lower stress for the staff than seagull managers flying in, crapping all over everything, and flying out every couple weeks.
Of course the question is why a new boss every couple weeks? Chicken and Egg, maybe it was the ESP radiation space alien area 51 death ray after all as the cause, and revolving door of mgmt was an effect causing hyper stress among the staff...
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by VLM on Friday July 10 2020, @12:45PM
Normal woman as in the modern sense of acting dude-ish. I suppose she's said "duuuuude" at some point in her life. I suppose "CIA operative handler" is its own new gender now a days anyway, just like identifying as apache attack helicopter. Whatever.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 10 2020, @05:16PM (6 children)
> why a new boss every couple weeks?
That is, of course, a huge sign that the office was extremely dysfunctional. Under the current administration, dysfunction is the norm.
I've been in an extremely stressful office environment. I know what it's like: Horrible. I lost a lot of weight from all the stress-- and I wasn't overweight to start with. In hindsight, I should have broken the door down running away from those toxic managers who spent all their time feeding everyone around them loads of BS. They make up impossible schedules born of not knowing fundamental things about the business, demand unpaid overtime, lots and lots of overtime, and push employees to make themselves unable to quit the job for fear of not being able to make their car and house payments. On that last, all the better if you've done that to yourself. Student loans are especially useful on that front. They are all too apt to say all your work is a bunch of worthless garbage, you didn't do x right, didn't even do y, whatever, then throw your work in the trash without even looking at it, and accuse you of being a poor employee for not accomplishing anything worthwhile. Yeah, I've had one manager who deliberately erased my hard drive. Gave me bull that my computer was needed for something else. Kinda tough to protect yourself from data loss when even your own manager is against you. Oh, and of course the workplace has rules against bringing in flash drives and copying valuable company secrets to them and all that. Yeah, they got your Internet covered too. No massive uploads shall be coming out of the facility, nope!
You can't please or satisfy such bosses. Nothing is good enough. Even if you did somehow manage the impossible, they wouldn't get it, wouldn't appreciate in the least what you did, and still think you're a lazy idiot, and gaslight you some more about your supposed poor performance.
When you have not experienced such an environment, haven't felt trapped by the need for that paycheck or a good reference for the next job, haven't learned that there really are unbelievably destructive trolls who will cut their own throats to take someone (you) down with them, it's easy to believe you can handle it, you can cut through the crap. You might be wondering how the trolls could possibly be willing to cut their own throats? It's because they've deluded themselves that they aren't actually doing that. That's where they really get you. They're experts at exploiting your fears. Afraid that your career will be ruined? You'll never have another job doing the work you love? Then they've got you.
You got in a car with a strange person, who turned out to be a madman who wants to drive 200 mph, weaving through traffic and leaving paint and dents on other cars, skid marks all over the pavement, and at every corner popping up on two wheels, enjoying seeing your terrified face crushed up against the window just inches above the concrete, telling you that's how you too should drive, because there's no time to waste. Then, in some isolated place several hours hike from the nearest village, they change seats with you, put you behind the wheel, but you're not in control, no. You're taking the route they tell you to take, while they verbally abuse you for being a chicken and not driving fast and furious enough. And what they haven't told you is that the reckless driving has been noticed, and the police are even now on the way to stop that car, and who will they find behind the wheel when they pull the car over? Why, you, of course! Then, if you show proper cowardly, whipped dog behavior, they may "save" you from being hauled off to jail. That's the opening they create and exploit to the max, to fill you with doubts and destroy your confidence, so that you no longer feel confident you can tell up from down, black from white.
One of the hooks they had on me was the moving expenses. They paid my moving expenses. But, there was a little proviso in there that said if I left the job before I'd been there a year, I would have to pay back some or all of the moving expenses. Another hook was the employee ownership program. You would get nothing of that if you didn't last for at least a year, and very little unless you made it to at least 2 years. It was much the same with the retirement funding. There's a lot of stuff of that sort that make the young and poor, with massive student loan debt, very vulnerable to workplace abuse.
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Friday July 10 2020, @06:15PM (2 children)
You took a job in the The Trump Organization? Or where you actually working in the Trump White House? No wonder you were nervous and lost weight.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 10 2020, @07:24PM (1 child)
No, this was working for the government during the George W. Bush administration, which was nearly as bad. I was a defense contractor. The military boys put on a real gung-ho, tough guy act. Pushed us hard to do the impossible. They wanted unbreakable computer security, for themselves only. They wanted everyone else's security to be breakable, preferably only by them, but breakable by a few others might be okay.
Simply could not get through to them that security doesn't play favorites like that. Either everyone can have unbreakable security, or no one can. But they kept weaving and hammering and pushing, bullying everyone to come up with some way somehow, that it could be done. And it was that way, during WWII, but only because the Axis was too arrogant in believing in the supposed unbreakability of their Enigma system.
Tell them it's impossible, and their reply was 1) you're a super genius, you could do it if you really wanted to, doc. Why don't you want to, huh, doc? Do you hate America? Are you a liberal? You voted Democrat, didn't you? Are you, maybe, even a traitor? Thinking of selling out to the Chinese? And 2) if you won't do it, we'll fire you and hire someone who will.
So there you go, an additional hook to keep you from leaving the job from Hell. Leave, and you might even be suspected of treason. That possibility was never mentioned. It didn't have to be.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday July 11 2020, @12:38AM
I feel for you. I get a strong idea what happened.
Engineers deal in controlling THINGS and maximizing bang for the buck.
MBA deal in controlling PEOPLE.
Some treat US just like we treat things. So what if I monkeyed up a screw? I simply replace it.
MBA are paid enough they don't have to rely on kindness and compassion to get things done for them, they control money flow to compel what they want. Not much different than my controlling forces of nature to achieve my goals.
Except the stuff I work with has no feelings, emotion, and can be created or destructed at will. That's the thing I liked so much about engineering... I could bend things as I wanted, and not be an ass for compelling others against their will. It's a "God thing" with me... To me it's flat wrong to impose myself on others. You know, that do unto others as you would have others do unto you. And that includes the ignominy of being compelled to make shoddy product.
I was for a while in the MIC industry, where we had an overabundance of MBA, and a dearth of seasoned engineers. We had lots of newbies that did not yet have enough experience and too much debt to stand up to a MBA.
Not all MBA are so destructive, but their privilege of rank puts them in position to destroy any innovation and creativity any subordinate may offer.
I am out of the game now, so I can tell it as I saw it without fear of being blacklisted by the men who are empowered to accept anything I may have to offer.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheReaperD on Friday July 10 2020, @11:36PM (2 children)
Yea, I worked at a job that had over a 300% average annual employee turnover rate. CEO was a crook and because he was a crook, he assumed all of his employees were crooks out to get him. I was young and stupid and wasn't aware they were running a racket at first. When the FTC showed up, I had all the documentation ready to have them hauled off for racketeering and extortion. Of course, the investigators went strait to the CEO's office (how they knew how to get there without asking anybody was rather suspicious) and right back out again without speaking to anybody else and that was the extant of their investigation. They never asked for a single piece of paper (I know because I was the head file clerk). The investigation was dropped due to lack of evidence. Obviously, it's easy to have 'a lack of evidence' when you don't look for any evidence in the first place! Still annoyed by this 20+ years later. The sheer feeling of euphoria I felt when I told my boss "no, I quit" is hard to describe. That job was nothing but 2 1/2 years of pure stress and my most recent boss was the epitome of bitchy emotionally unstable redhead that gives redheads a bad stereotype. The only reason she wasn't fired 6 months earlier, with my help, was because the CEO expected criminal behavior from his employees. So, when I turned her in for criminal behavior (she was the accountant), it was like water off a duck's back to him. The look of pure impotent rage she had on her face when I both told her "no" and "I quit" still gives me joy. Would have felt even better to have her fired, but that wasn't going to happen in that environment. The CEO was more comfortable with the other crooks because he knew their 'angle.' He didn't trust the honest people because he couldn't understand that the average person doesn't seek to stab you in the back. The concept of honesty was so foreign to him, he just couldn't comprehend it.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:46AM
Woof, sounds like a worse nest of vipers than I was in. The managers I had to deal with were shameless liars and gross incompetents who couldn't tell gold from mud and didn't really care as long as whatever they had could be sold, but they didn't step over the line into outright criminal behavior, nor push subordinates to break the law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @06:52AM
Dishonest people hate honest people because honest people not only keep the documents that would hang them out to dry but will cheerfully turn those documents over to law enforcement to ensure that hanging happens.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Friday July 10 2020, @06:25PM
Probably somewhere higher up the chain, they had a whole barrel of bad apples that they couldn't quite document enough demerits on to terminate or shunt to a basement office somewhere so they cycled them through an active post that was disrupted anyway so they could fail in a documented way.
(Score: 4, Informative) by datapharmer on Friday July 10 2020, @01:00PM (2 children)
I have trouble believing mass hysteria as a singular explanation for this. I'm not saying that there isn't a psychological component or that for some it was psychosomatic, but the evidence just doesn't line up with that as the only conclusion.
There were MRI studies that concluded there were brain differences in those that were affected that were consistent across the individuals that claimed they were exposed: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2738552 [jamanetwork.com]
diplomats in China have also been affected, so you also can't just blame it on one bad boss: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/07/sonic-attack-fears-as-more-us-diplomats-fall-ill-in-china [theguardian.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @04:59PM
That was back when the story was that Cubans were bad and would steal your freedumbs. Now the bad guys are Russian. Or Chinese. Or Iranian. I can't keep up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @02:20PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 10 2020, @01:49PM (2 children)
If it's something that some party actively caused, what motive could they have? Annoy a bunch of random diplomats? If it's a test run for affecting some other target, why not experiment on diplomats from Burkina Faso or some other place that does not have a lot of resources to investigate and (possibly) catch you?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Friday July 10 2020, @01:53PM (1 child)
Sorry, but that's wrong. Americans aren't truly random, as chaotic as they may be. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:17PM
We're actually quite predictable on average.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday July 10 2020, @02:08PM (3 children)
Now, let's do some logic.
Imagine for a moment we already have such a weapon.
What is the most effective method of using it against our adversaries?
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday July 10 2020, @03:38PM (1 child)
Wild guess: use it against ourselves but try to make it look like it was them?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Friday July 10 2020, @03:49PM
Clarification: use it against ourselves but try to make it look like the enemy did it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @12:47AM
"What is the most effective method of using it against our adversaries?"
Hide the emitter in Congressional podiums.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @04:18PM
Maybe because they party, drink and consume drugs together when on a foreign posting?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:16PM (3 children)
People just got all verklempt over Trump
Same thing goes for this "pandemic". It's all mass hysteria
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:31PM
aww da po baybee got downmudded awwww po baybee boooooo
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:05AM (1 child)
Good question... My impotent governor says I am supposed to visit my doctor over the phone.
Yet mandates I show up in person at the DMV to renew my driver license... Despite the fact I have not infracted as much as a parking ticket.
We are killing all these businesses by depriving them of human contact, yet the government exempts themselves from their own law.
I'm still curious how restaurants can survive this.
Some around here have already put up "Closed for Good" signs, and Norms ("We Never Close") still has chains on the door.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:26AM
There are state security considerations at play there.
For the government it is "why don't they eat cake?".
But restaurant finance is a funny thing. A prime location storefront announced they were going to be a West-Chinese restaurant, signs were installed, and the place sat empty with hardly any activity for 2 years. Then it was opened as a Japanese restaurant, under the same management AFAICT. My normal self with university level economics education cannot grasp how one makes lease payments for a prime location for 2 years to then open selling $10 ramen bowls. They could have bought the building, but it still seems a misapplication of resources.
Now with the government idiocy, landlords are forced to eat the shortfall when lessors don't pay. They could move for eviction, but they would have to find a new lessor, and who would want to open a restaurant with this kind of regime uncertainty? Restaurants find less slack with their suppliers though. With the on again, off again carousel of opening for business, much food is forced to be disposed of, and they need to repurchase it when they are allowed to open again.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Samantha Wright on Friday July 10 2020, @06:55PM (2 children)
Stress wouldn't cause brain damage, as others have pointed out. The same thing also happened in China in 2018.
Personally I'm in favour of the 'misplaced or misconfigured listening devices' hypothesis, in which said devices caused hypersonic interference with each other. It's the only theory that actually makes sense in an embassy between former Cold War rivals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @10:07PM (1 child)
I hope you meant ultrasonic. Hypersonic implies exploding Russian nuclear powered missiles
Anyway, I think these people just tried to commit suicide by sticking their heads in the microwave
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:23AM
"Anyway, I think these people just tried to commit suicide by sticking their heads in the microwave"
It's not that easy.
I think all of the " clean" ways of doing this are no longer available, like secobarbitol.
Determined people still do it, but it's messy... But then it also gives them one last chance to even the score with the ones who drove them to do this.