Wow, as if hearing voices is bad enough, this sort of thing could make other psychotic people have a whole new level of delusion if they saw such allegations. A delusion about your delusion.
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Merged US may close Cuba Embassy over 'health attacks'
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Wow, as if hearing voices is bad enough, this sort of thing could make other psychotic people have a whole new level of delusion if they saw such allegations. A delusion about your delusion.
Some of the Targeted Individuals are clearly psychotic and think that nothing's wrong with them, that they're perfectly normal, if it weren't for the voices that the FBI is v2k'ing into their skulls:
It's a far cry from the U.S. officials in Havana: Their delusions were merely false interpretations of things they actually did hear (crickets) and feel. I think it would help the community of TIs immensely if a couple of those 'targeted' diplomats and/or CIA agents made up for their appearance on 60 Minutes or the podcast series from earlier this year once (if) they come to their senses. I can see why it may be embarrassing for them to admit openly that they got scared of their own shadows, but no more so than it is for people who share their experiences about how they became followers of a cult.
I have tried googling some of the people who appeared on 60 Minutes (YouTube) and/or ProjectBrazen's podcast series, e.g. Karen and Kevin Coats, Kate Husband and Doug Ferguson, Tina Onufer, Olivia Troye, Marc Polymeropoulos, but so far nobody seems to have recovered to the extent where they are able to be overt about having been deluded. And except for the latter, they seem to have all gone awfully quiet about the 'syndrome' since the ODNI report, which makes me think that at least some of them may have started to doubt their own interpretation of 'The Sound'.
Polymeropoulos is very much out there to the extent where he ought to question his own idea of ever having suffered traumatic brain injury from directed energy weapons:
He had the courage to come clean about the art therapy he received as a victim of an anomalous health incident, so it would be great to see him come forward and give lectures about what it's like to suffer an anxiety attack in the line of duty, which is what his description of what happened to him in Moscow sounded like.
I think that similar stories from the other 'syndrome' victims would also help people in the TI community.
I don't expect most of the researchers, people iike Giordano, Hoffer, Relman and Golomb, to ever come clean and admit that they were wrong when they persuaded many of the people in the Havana cohort, for instance Kate Husband and Dough Ferguson, that they were victims of a directed-energy-weapon attack.
James Randi often stressed that the arrogance of scientists tended to make them unable to admit when they were wrong, no matter how obvious their delusions were.
It's a far cry from the U.S. officials in Havana: Their delusions were merely false interpretations of things they actually did hear (crickets) and feel. I think it would help the community of TIs immensely if a couple of those 'targeted' diplomats and/or CIA agents made up for their appearance on 60 Minutes or the podcast series from earlier this year once (if) they come to their senses. I can see why it may be embarrassing for them to admit openly that they got scared of their own shadows, but no more so than it is for people who share their experiences about how they became followers of a cult.
I have tried googling some of the people who appeared on 60 Minutes (YouTube) and/or ProjectBrazen's podcast series, e.g. Karen and Kevin Coats, Kate Husband and Doug Ferguson, Tina Onufer, Olivia Troye, Marc Polymeropoulos, but so far nobody seems to have recovered to the extent where they are able to be overt about having been deluded. And except for the latter, they seem to have all gone awfully quiet about the 'syndrome' since the ODNI report, which makes me think that at least some of them may have started to doubt their own interpretation of 'The Sound'.
Polymeropoulos is very much out there to the extent where he ought to question his own idea of ever having suffered traumatic brain injury from directed energy weapons:
Guest lectured today at the venerable Naval Academy, 3 classes with incredible students. Talked about critical role of HUMINT in ‘23 and beyond, including challenges and opportunities. No, espionage involving humans is not dead. We just need to adapt. Thanks @NavalAcademy !!!
Marc Polymeropoulos (Twitter/X, Oct 25, 2023)
He had the courage to come clean about the art therapy he received as a victim of an anomalous health incident, so it would be great to see him come forward and give lectures about what it's like to suffer an anxiety attack in the line of duty, which is what his description of what happened to him in Moscow sounded like.
I think that similar stories from the other 'syndrome' victims would also help people in the TI community.
I don't expect most of the researchers, people iike Giordano, Hoffer, Relman and Golomb, to ever come clean and admit that they were wrong when they persuaded many of the people in the Havana cohort, for instance Kate Husband and Dough Ferguson, that they were victims of a directed-energy-weapon attack.
James Randi often stressed that the arrogance of scientists tended to make them unable to admit when they were wrong, no matter how obvious their delusions were.
WARNING - Mass shooting from the POV of the rabbit hole
This is scary stuff!
In post 2,059, I mentioned how TIs embrace some mass shooters - not as shooters but as fellow TIs who have succumbed to the pain from being victims of directed-energy attacks and/or gang-stalking and now act it out.
I just discovered that this is not at all a new thing and even predates the 'syndrome'. There was Myron May in 2014:
I don't remember hearing about Myron May before - maybe because he didn't kill anybody. He 'only' wounded three: 3 shot at Florida State University before gunman killed by police (CNN, Nov 20, 2014).
I came across his story because a TI linked to May's confessor/suicide-by-cop video on YouTube:
David A's introduction to Myron May's video takes up the first eight minutes. It has already had 436 views. David A has 1.340 subscribers. (Is it even allowed to post videos like this on YouTube?!)
Myron May mentions two alleged TI mass murderers. One of them was also mentioned in a quotation in post 2,059:
Washington Navy Yard shooter: Aaron Alexis (Wikipedia). He killed 12.
The other one is Birmingham shooter: Jiverly Wong (Wikipedia). He killed 13.
Several TIs are currently writing about Robert Card's killing spree.
The main concern for many of them is that the voices in their head aren't psychotic symptoms. Their therapists are ignorant and don't know about v2k:
This is the already existing mass delusion that the JAMA studies and David Relman's NAS study and 'Expert Panel' helped TIs give credence to. And people like Hoffer, Giordano and Golomb continue to do wo when they claim that the U.S. officials in Havana were harmed by directed-energy weapons.
And let us not forget the politicians who supported the idea and haven't done anything to make up for it after the ODNI report. For instance, it might have been a good idea if Susan Collins had told her constituents in Maine that they aren't being targeted with directed-energy weapons. Now would have been a good occasion, but instead:
This is scary stuff!
In post 2,059, I mentioned how TIs embrace some mass shooters - not as shooters but as fellow TIs who have succumbed to the pain from being victims of directed-energy attacks and/or gang-stalking and now act it out.
I just discovered that this is not at all a new thing and even predates the 'syndrome'. There was Myron May in 2014:
I don't remember hearing about Myron May before - maybe because he didn't kill anybody. He 'only' wounded three: 3 shot at Florida State University before gunman killed by police (CNN, Nov 20, 2014).
I came across his story because a TI linked to May's confessor/suicide-by-cop video on YouTube:
David A's introduction to Myron May's video takes up the first eight minutes. It has already had 436 views. David A has 1.340 subscribers. (Is it even allowed to post videos like this on YouTube?!)
Myron May mentions two alleged TI mass murderers. One of them was also mentioned in a quotation in post 2,059:
Washington Navy Yard shooter: Aaron Alexis (Wikipedia). He killed 12.
The other one is Birmingham shooter: Jiverly Wong (Wikipedia). He killed 13.
Several TIs are currently writing about Robert Card's killing spree.
The main concern for many of them is that the voices in their head aren't psychotic symptoms. Their therapists are ignorant and don't know about v2k:
This is the already existing mass delusion that the JAMA studies and David Relman's NAS study and 'Expert Panel' helped TIs give credence to. And people like Hoffer, Giordano and Golomb continue to do wo when they claim that the U.S. officials in Havana were harmed by directed-energy weapons.
And let us not forget the politicians who supported the idea and haven't done anything to make up for it after the ODNI report. For instance, it might have been a good idea if Susan Collins had told her constituents in Maine that they aren't being targeted with directed-energy weapons. Now would have been a good occasion, but instead:
Continued: Robert Card, the Maine shooter, from the POV of the rabbit hole
Other conspiracy (and gun!) nuts are already doing numerology and applying a Jesuit number-and-letter code to connect the random dots in the Maine mass shooting case, for instance that Robert Card killed people at a bowling alley and Michael Moore made a documentary about a mass shooting called Bowling (!) for Columbine:
Miller claims to have a psychology degree, and yet he denies the existence of late-onset schizophrenia:
"Onset can occur between the ages of 40 and 60, known as late-onset schizophrenia." (Wikipedia).
According to Miller, "that doesn't happen. That's not how schizophrenia works. You get it in your teens or your early 20s. People don't get it when they're 40. It's the NSA doing this, putting voices in people's head."
Other conspiracy (and gun!) nuts are already doing numerology and applying a Jesuit number-and-letter code to connect the random dots in the Maine mass shooting case, for instance that Robert Card killed people at a bowling alley and Michael Moore made a documentary about a mass shooting called Bowling (!) for Columbine:
Miller claims to have a psychology degree, and yet he denies the existence of late-onset schizophrenia:
"Onset can occur between the ages of 40 and 60, known as late-onset schizophrenia." (Wikipedia).
According to Miller, "that doesn't happen. That's not how schizophrenia works. You get it in your teens or your early 20s. People don't get it when they're 40. It's the NSA doing this, putting voices in people's head."
If anybody interested in the 'syndrome' happens to be in Boston: The conversation with Nicky Woolf takes place today. (See post 2,044.)
I hope it will be uploaded to the EU for You channel on YouTube.
I hope it will be uploaded to the EU for You channel on YouTube.
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Are YOU TOO a Targeted Individual? The TEST.
The Targeted Individuals have now come up with The Popcorn Test to determine if they are targeted:
The video ends with the graphic of another, more elaborate 'test' from Targeted Justice.
Only one of the YouTube comments is on to something:
It's an ingenious way of creating more believers. It works much like kinesiology diagnostics: You make people experience something that they have never noticed before and combine it with what appears to be an explanation of the phenomenon. Kinesiology uses "the arm-pull-down test, or "Delta test," where the patient resists as the practitioner exerts a downward force on an extended arm." (Wikipedia). It's pretty easy to pull down an extended arm using just two fingers and thus persuade the patients that their 'weak' muscle shows that they are allergic to, for instance, grass pollen in a plastic bag (!) that they are holding in one hand. I've seen it used on Danish TV to make a scam allergy diagnosis (Wikipedia).
In the TI 'popcorn test', which I just carried out on myself, it is actually possible to hear a 'popping' sound if you hold your hands just right. For some not-at-all-surprising reason, the pop corresponds to my heartbeat: "pop pop pop pop pop." And in spite of my impaired hearing, I could make it work without hearing aids, so it should work for everybody.
If you already fear that you are being targeted, it will be very convincing proof that you are. You have already been told by the TI advocates how the sound should be interpreted - much like the U.S. officials in Havana when they had been told that the sound of crickets was a sign that they were being attacked with directed-energy weapons.
An alleged MD like Len Ber should be aware of this. Maybe he is ...
The Targeted Individuals have now come up with The Popcorn Test to determine if they are targeted:
The video ends with the graphic of another, more elaborate 'test' from Targeted Justice.
Only one of the YouTube comments is on to something:
@ThePaleKingDFW should continue to blame his arteries!
It's an ingenious way of creating more believers. It works much like kinesiology diagnostics: You make people experience something that they have never noticed before and combine it with what appears to be an explanation of the phenomenon. Kinesiology uses "the arm-pull-down test, or "Delta test," where the patient resists as the practitioner exerts a downward force on an extended arm." (Wikipedia). It's pretty easy to pull down an extended arm using just two fingers and thus persuade the patients that their 'weak' muscle shows that they are allergic to, for instance, grass pollen in a plastic bag (!) that they are holding in one hand. I've seen it used on Danish TV to make a scam allergy diagnosis (Wikipedia).
In the TI 'popcorn test', which I just carried out on myself, it is actually possible to hear a 'popping' sound if you hold your hands just right. For some not-at-all-surprising reason, the pop corresponds to my heartbeat: "pop pop pop pop pop." And in spite of my impaired hearing, I could make it work without hearing aids, so it should work for everybody.
If you already fear that you are being targeted, it will be very convincing proof that you are. You have already been told by the TI advocates how the sound should be interpreted - much like the U.S. officials in Havana when they had been told that the sound of crickets was a sign that they were being attacked with directed-energy weapons.
An alleged MD like Len Ber should be aware of this. Maybe he is ...
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The 'popcorn test' serves its purpose. TIs are convinced by the 'proof'. From the comments on YouTube:
An Unexpected Turn of Events
I wasn't sure where to put this, in the Whaledimir thread, the Global Warming thread or here:
When the link appeared in my Google search, it was with the sentence: "Immediate necropsies have shown the inner ears have been damaged, most likely due to the debilitating Havana Syndrome where sonar weapons were used to disorient our diplomats abroad."
I expected to see an article based on the autopsies of 'syndrome'-stricken diplomats.
I wasn't sure where to put this, in the Whaledimir thread, the Global Warming thread or here:
When the link appeared in my Google search, it was with the sentence: "Immediate necropsies have shown the inner ears have been damaged, most likely due to the debilitating Havana Syndrome where sonar weapons were used to disorient our diplomats abroad."
I expected to see an article based on the autopsies of 'syndrome'-stricken diplomats.
Fact-Checking PolitiFact's Fact-Checkers
In post 2,049, I mentioned that Nikki Haley "accused China of using “neuro-strike weapons” — devices allegedly used against military and government officials resulting in “Havana Syndrome.”"
On Nov 1, 2023, PolitiFact rated it "Mostly True" when Nikki Haley stated that China is “the largest developer of neuro-strike weapons, weapons engineered to change the brain activity of military commanders and segments of the population.”
But PolitiFact's fact-checkers are jumping to conclusions when they say: "We rate Haley’s statement Mostly True."
This is what their conclusion is based on:
Do PolitiFact's fact-checkers Samantha Putterman and Louis Jacobson actually believe that a combination of social media and traditional psychological warfare is anywhere near actual "weapons ... designed or adapted to affect the central and peripheral nervous system"?!
It is fairly obvious that it is nothing but old-fashioned psy-ops using social media - no matter what James Giordiano has told them. It also doesn't sound much like Schamiloglu's claim:
It is obvious that digitalized propaganda uses energy from a power source that has been converted into electromagnetic energy, and the propaganda is focused on a target, i.e. the users of social media, but it isn't radiated into their ******* skulls by means of microwaves or DEWs the way 'NeuroStrike' weapons are supposed to be.
As for the 'Havana Syndrome', PolitiFact claims to have communicated with Robert Baloh:
"Email interview with Bob Baloh, emeritus professor of neurology at UCLA, Oct. 25, 2023"
However, there is no other reference to Robert Baloh in the article, not even in the paragraphs about the 'Havana syndrome':
So three references to David Relman's two 'expert' groups, no references to the two JASON reports, no reference to the only book about the 'syndrome', Baloh's and Bartholomew's, and the one reference to the ODNI report claims that it complicated rather than clarified "the understanding of Havana syndrome," which is probably why it is mentioned but more or less ignored.
The only other link in the 'syndrome' paragraphs is to this (pre-ODNI report) NPR podcast:
In other words, PolitiFact's alleged fact check is a biased as it could possibly be!
In post 2,049, I mentioned that Nikki Haley "accused China of using “neuro-strike weapons” — devices allegedly used against military and government officials resulting in “Havana Syndrome.”"
On Nov 1, 2023, PolitiFact rated it "Mostly True" when Nikki Haley stated that China is “the largest developer of neuro-strike weapons, weapons engineered to change the brain activity of military commanders and segments of the population.”
But PolitiFact's fact-checkers are jumping to conclusions when they say: "We rate Haley’s statement Mostly True."
This is what their conclusion is based on:
Do PolitiFact's fact-checkers Samantha Putterman and Louis Jacobson actually believe that a combination of social media and traditional psychological warfare is anywhere near actual "weapons ... designed or adapted to affect the central and peripheral nervous system"?!
It is fairly obvious that it is nothing but old-fashioned psy-ops using social media - no matter what James Giordiano has told them. It also doesn't sound much like Schamiloglu's claim:
It is obvious that digitalized propaganda uses energy from a power source that has been converted into electromagnetic energy, and the propaganda is focused on a target, i.e. the users of social media, but it isn't radiated into their ******* skulls by means of microwaves or DEWs the way 'NeuroStrike' weapons are supposed to be.
As for the 'Havana Syndrome', PolitiFact claims to have communicated with Robert Baloh:
"Email interview with Bob Baloh, emeritus professor of neurology at UCLA, Oct. 25, 2023"
However, there is no other reference to Robert Baloh in the article, not even in the paragraphs about the 'Havana syndrome':
So three references to David Relman's two 'expert' groups, no references to the two JASON reports, no reference to the only book about the 'syndrome', Baloh's and Bartholomew's, and the one reference to the ODNI report claims that it complicated rather than clarified "the understanding of Havana syndrome," which is probably why it is mentioned but more or less ignored.
The only other link in the 'syndrome' paragraphs is to this (pre-ODNI report) NPR podcast:
In other words, PolitiFact's alleged fact check is a biased as it could possibly be!
Speaking of Nicky Woolf, Vivien Schmidt's conversation with him at Boston University earlier this week (see post 2,044) can now be accessed online:
I haven't listened to it yet, so I don't know if Nicky Woolf has come to his senses since the ODNI report put a rather embarrassing end to his podcast series.
I haven't listened to it yet, so I don't know if Nicky Woolf has come to his senses since the ODNI report put a rather embarrassing end to his podcast series.
The Conversation with Nicky Woolf, part 1
4:03: "There's now maybe 5 or 6 thousand."
I.e. five or six thousand 'syndrome' cases, which is a much higher number than I remember hearing.
5.04: "Unfortunately, after about 10 months of research, I can't say that I don't think there's something real at the core of it, which is a really, really unfortunate position to be in as a conspiracy misinformation reporter."
It is very bad indeed to contribute to conspiracy misinformation when you are a conspiracy misinformation reporter.
6:47: "It [MPI] can't make you bleed out of your eyes."
I thought he had given up on the idea that a case of retinal bleeding disproves that the 'syndrome' was psychogenic. Unlike what the 'syndrome' sufferers claimed, retinal bleeding isn't uncommon and nobody ever claimed that this particular ailment was psychogenic. However, hypertension may be a symptom of anxiety, and anxiety may cause retinal bleeding. I have mentioned this several times in the thread, e.g. posts 1,661, 1,677, 1,678, 1,683, 1,684, 1,689, 1,756 and 1,806, and I actually thought Nicky Woolf had stopped using retinal bleeding as an excuse to dismiss mass psychogenic illness as the cause of the 'syndrome'.
7:03: "Some of the symptoms could not be explained entirely by psychogenic spread."
People get sick all the time with various ailments. Why assume that each and every big or little symptom is MPI? Or caused by DEWs? It is not a choice between either MPI or DEW. The ODNI report mentioned many other environmental and medical causes.
8:09: "So, yeah, I think there is an energy weapon of some kind." (He mentions American companies having made them, China, Russia ... and even Australia having bought one from Lockheed Martin.)
Yes, he thinks so because energy weapons do exist, so it doesn't matter that no such weapon was ever found, seen or detected. The only actual piece of evidence of anything at all were the cricket tapes, which obviously proved that the sounds heard by the 'syndrome' victims were crickets.
9:50: "Whatever kind of mysterious, you know, energy war is going on between Russia and the US, the side effect has been the complete destruction of Cuba as an economy."
The story about the 'mysterious energy war' did indeed damage the Cuban economy considerably because it was used as an excuse to tighten the U.S. blockade. And for some reason, Nicky Woolf wants to keep the story alive.
10:30: "If it's designed to cause fear, it's been a huge success at that."
The story probably wasn't designed to cause fear, but once the 'syndrome' had been created, it worked wonders for guys like Trump, Rubio and Bolton in their attempts to make Congress back up their hard-liner approach to U.S.-Cuba relations. And it currently comes in handy in attempts to paint Russia and China as particularly evil adversaries.
11:21: "The rates of cancer for people who served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the '80s are sky-high, I mean, arrestingly high."
The alleged rates of cancer are sky-high exaggerations if what Woolf is thinking of is the three ambassadors he mentioned in the podcast series where he also lied about one of them having died in "his mid-50s." He actually died at 66, the two others in their late sixties! (See post 1,716.)
11:46: "So, yeah, or second to last episode, the Director of National Intelligence tried to screw us by releasing a study which they said at the time was, 'This is the absolute final answer; this is not happening. (...) 12:42: They essentially tried to screw us and ended up screwing the Washington Post, because we said, 'No, we stand by this reporting.' And then they walked it back two weeks later, leaving the Post completely high and dry. We were, like, 'Bad luck, guys'."
At this point, Nicky Woolf gives in to a hilarious exhibition of paranoid megalomania. He actually seems to believe that the very expensive studies leading up to the ODNI report and beginning before he ever got started on the podcast - the so-called interim report was published in January 2022 - were begun to discredit him and his podcast.
I have no idea what he is thinking of when he claims that "they walked it back two weeks later." The ODNI report was never 'walked back'. He may be thinking of David Relman's 'expert panel' report from 2022, which was declassified later that same month.
His presentation of himself as an investigative reporter who speaks truth to power is pathetic: 'No, we stand by this reporting.' In spite of being a CIA-targeted individual! That's courageous!
14:18: "It's impossible to know now that it's a big thing in the media whether it's... Any case could be psychogenic or it could be real. The only way to really figure it out is to say in whose interest is it? Like, you know, there were reported cases on the White House grounds. I find it very, very difficult to believe that someone near the world's most defended building could point anything at it. That kind of beggars belief. If you are serving in a U.S. embassy in Eastern Europe, I think it's very plausible. There is no way of telling a psychogenic case from a real case. And there's still no real diagnostic criteria to identify a real case."
It is fairly obvious 'in whose interest' the 'syndrome' is: It's in the interest of the politicians who have used it to damage Cuba and rile Americans up against Russia and China. I am not sure that Nicky Woolf's ally in this question, lawyer Mark Zaid, will take kindly to Woolf arguing against his client Olivia Troye's case being legit. At least, she got the same symptoms as the U.S. officials in Havana, and she got them without recording (or even claiming to have heard) the cricket sounds!
Maybe he has heard his other ally, James Giordano, dismiss Olivia Troye's case and yet insist that his Cuba cricket cohort is the real deal.
15:05: "It's targeted enough that at the beginning they were able to hit just the CIA station within the embassy. I don't think, if there is a concerted effort still at an American embassy, that - and let's just go ahead and say Russian because there doesn't really seem to be anyone else whose MO this is - don't think they care all that much who gets hit tangentially."
They were never seen, heard or detected, but let us just go ahead and say that the Russians did it. All it takes, as Woolf has already explained, is to imagine that the 'syndrome' might have been in Putin's interest and ignore the people who used it in their own interest to vilify Cuba, Russia and China. Nobody has ever heard or seen a Cuban, Russian or Chinese 'Neuro-Strike', but it is nevertheless clearly their MO. So Woolf can rest his case.
17:22: "There's a secret conflict going on that no one's got any idea of, really."
And yet, Woolf is convinced that he knows who did 'it', how they did 'it', and why they did 'it'. The conspiracy misinformation reporter strikes again!
At 18:30, the audience is encouraged to ask questions. That's as far as I got. I can't stand listening to more for now.
4:03: "There's now maybe 5 or 6 thousand."
I.e. five or six thousand 'syndrome' cases, which is a much higher number than I remember hearing.
5.04: "Unfortunately, after about 10 months of research, I can't say that I don't think there's something real at the core of it, which is a really, really unfortunate position to be in as a conspiracy misinformation reporter."
It is very bad indeed to contribute to conspiracy misinformation when you are a conspiracy misinformation reporter.
6:47: "It [MPI] can't make you bleed out of your eyes."
I thought he had given up on the idea that a case of retinal bleeding disproves that the 'syndrome' was psychogenic. Unlike what the 'syndrome' sufferers claimed, retinal bleeding isn't uncommon and nobody ever claimed that this particular ailment was psychogenic. However, hypertension may be a symptom of anxiety, and anxiety may cause retinal bleeding. I have mentioned this several times in the thread, e.g. posts 1,661, 1,677, 1,678, 1,683, 1,684, 1,689, 1,756 and 1,806, and I actually thought Nicky Woolf had stopped using retinal bleeding as an excuse to dismiss mass psychogenic illness as the cause of the 'syndrome'.
7:03: "Some of the symptoms could not be explained entirely by psychogenic spread."
People get sick all the time with various ailments. Why assume that each and every big or little symptom is MPI? Or caused by DEWs? It is not a choice between either MPI or DEW. The ODNI report mentioned many other environmental and medical causes.
8:09: "So, yeah, I think there is an energy weapon of some kind." (He mentions American companies having made them, China, Russia ... and even Australia having bought one from Lockheed Martin.)
Yes, he thinks so because energy weapons do exist, so it doesn't matter that no such weapon was ever found, seen or detected. The only actual piece of evidence of anything at all were the cricket tapes, which obviously proved that the sounds heard by the 'syndrome' victims were crickets.
9:50: "Whatever kind of mysterious, you know, energy war is going on between Russia and the US, the side effect has been the complete destruction of Cuba as an economy."
The story about the 'mysterious energy war' did indeed damage the Cuban economy considerably because it was used as an excuse to tighten the U.S. blockade. And for some reason, Nicky Woolf wants to keep the story alive.
10:30: "If it's designed to cause fear, it's been a huge success at that."
The story probably wasn't designed to cause fear, but once the 'syndrome' had been created, it worked wonders for guys like Trump, Rubio and Bolton in their attempts to make Congress back up their hard-liner approach to U.S.-Cuba relations. And it currently comes in handy in attempts to paint Russia and China as particularly evil adversaries.
11:21: "The rates of cancer for people who served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the '80s are sky-high, I mean, arrestingly high."
The alleged rates of cancer are sky-high exaggerations if what Woolf is thinking of is the three ambassadors he mentioned in the podcast series where he also lied about one of them having died in "his mid-50s." He actually died at 66, the two others in their late sixties! (See post 1,716.)
11:46: "So, yeah, or second to last episode, the Director of National Intelligence tried to screw us by releasing a study which they said at the time was, 'This is the absolute final answer; this is not happening. (...) 12:42: They essentially tried to screw us and ended up screwing the Washington Post, because we said, 'No, we stand by this reporting.' And then they walked it back two weeks later, leaving the Post completely high and dry. We were, like, 'Bad luck, guys'."
At this point, Nicky Woolf gives in to a hilarious exhibition of paranoid megalomania. He actually seems to believe that the very expensive studies leading up to the ODNI report and beginning before he ever got started on the podcast - the so-called interim report was published in January 2022 - were begun to discredit him and his podcast.
I have no idea what he is thinking of when he claims that "they walked it back two weeks later." The ODNI report was never 'walked back'. He may be thinking of David Relman's 'expert panel' report from 2022, which was declassified later that same month.
His presentation of himself as an investigative reporter who speaks truth to power is pathetic: 'No, we stand by this reporting.' In spite of being a CIA-targeted individual! That's courageous!
14:18: "It's impossible to know now that it's a big thing in the media whether it's... Any case could be psychogenic or it could be real. The only way to really figure it out is to say in whose interest is it? Like, you know, there were reported cases on the White House grounds. I find it very, very difficult to believe that someone near the world's most defended building could point anything at it. That kind of beggars belief. If you are serving in a U.S. embassy in Eastern Europe, I think it's very plausible. There is no way of telling a psychogenic case from a real case. And there's still no real diagnostic criteria to identify a real case."
It is fairly obvious 'in whose interest' the 'syndrome' is: It's in the interest of the politicians who have used it to damage Cuba and rile Americans up against Russia and China. I am not sure that Nicky Woolf's ally in this question, lawyer Mark Zaid, will take kindly to Woolf arguing against his client Olivia Troye's case being legit. At least, she got the same symptoms as the U.S. officials in Havana, and she got them without recording (or even claiming to have heard) the cricket sounds!
Maybe he has heard his other ally, James Giordano, dismiss Olivia Troye's case and yet insist that his Cuba cricket cohort is the real deal.
15:05: "It's targeted enough that at the beginning they were able to hit just the CIA station within the embassy. I don't think, if there is a concerted effort still at an American embassy, that - and let's just go ahead and say Russian because there doesn't really seem to be anyone else whose MO this is - don't think they care all that much who gets hit tangentially."
They were never seen, heard or detected, but let us just go ahead and say that the Russians did it. All it takes, as Woolf has already explained, is to imagine that the 'syndrome' might have been in Putin's interest and ignore the people who used it in their own interest to vilify Cuba, Russia and China. Nobody has ever heard or seen a Cuban, Russian or Chinese 'Neuro-Strike', but it is nevertheless clearly their MO. So Woolf can rest his case.
17:22: "There's a secret conflict going on that no one's got any idea of, really."
And yet, Woolf is convinced that he knows who did 'it', how they did 'it', and why they did 'it'. The conspiracy misinformation reporter strikes again!
At 18:30, the audience is encouraged to ask questions. That's as far as I got. I can't stand listening to more for now.
The Conversation with Nicky Woolf, part 2
Something went wrong with the YouTube link in the previous post, so here it is again. This time, I've mad sure that it works:
Vivien Schmidt, 17:38: "But, yeah, so one doesn't know, you can't cap it at the moment because there is no equipment necessarily there to ... right. And are we doing it to others? You said that we have ..."
So based on what Woolf has been saying, Vivien Schmidt considers it to be a given that 'it' is an actual thing being done to 'us', a DEW attack or something like that, and she asks Woolf if 'we' are then also doing it to them:
Woolf, 17:58: "We wouldn't know if Russian diplomats started having weird headaches. We just don't know. We certainly can. We know that Britain's bought versions of the devices. Australia has, um, Germany. We know China has their own version. It's kind of everywhere now. So people are deploying it. But Russia wouldn't report it if they were having weird headaches."
So in spite no such neuro-strike weapon ever having been detected, Nicky Woolf implies that 'we' are indeed using such weapons against Russians. We just haven't heard about it because Russians, typical Russians, are so secretive about being hit. And he is doing this with the sole purpose of keeping the idea he proposed in his podcast alive. And he's doing it at a point in time when a proxy war between NATO and Russia is being fought out in Ukraine.
From 18:38, the rest of the conservation is Q&A, the first question from the audience being about the meaning of psychogenic. I won't go deeper into this, but I think that he could have done a better job of it, considering that he has allegedly studied "journalism and neuroscience at Columbia" (1:23).
Woolf mentions, 19:38, that MPI can "cause headaches, dizziness, nausea."
Vivien Schmidt asks how the CIA, the FBI and the State Department have responded, 21:09: "How do they manage this kind of information?"
Her question makes Nicky Woolf start rambling about the ODNI report (he calls it the DNI report) again:
Woolf, 21:12: "... they came out with a report, the headline of which was, and we're talking January this year, the headline of which was, um, 'This is not a thing'. And you read into the report, and what the DNI have done is asked a yes, no, or maybe question of all of the US Agencies, like a poll. But they didn't say which agency is which. They were saying, 'Of the nine agencies we asked, seven responded', of which five said, 'weak no', and two said, 'we don't know''.
And they brought that out with the headline of, 'This is absolutely not happening'. And we're reading that, like, What? Yeah, What? That doesn't, you know, if that was how, you know, 'There's poison in the school food', you would not be ... That's not a high confidence interval. And then we were hearing from our sources that one of the agencies that declined to answer the question at all was the DoD, like, the Pentagon was, like: [whistles]"
This 'summary' of the ODNI report is nothing but absolutely grotesque. The reality of what Woolf here refers to as "like a poll" is this:
And what Woolf describes as, "five said, 'weak no', and two said, 'we don't know'," is actually this:
Does this sound like Woolf's "five said, 'weak no', and two said, 'we don't know'." The seven all said that it was unlikely that the syndrome was caused by foreign adversaries, but two of them said it with low confidence.
I can't imagine that Woolf is not aware that the ODNI report was based on an extremely thorough investigation and wasn't merely "like a poll." Nor do I find it likely that he actually believes that "very unlikely" means a "weak no." The only weakness to be found here is in his inability to summarize it truthfully.
Nicky Woolf is doing damage control after his podcast series, in spite of all the resources put into it, came up with a false conclusion.
To some extent, I can empathize with him: He is aiming for a reputation as a serious investigate reporter and is then misled by authority figures whom he chooses to believe: James Giordano, David Relman and Beatrice Golomb. And also the 'syndrome' victims, who were themselves the victims of disinformation: Marc Polymeropoulos, Karen and Kevin Coats, Kate Husband and Doug Ferguson.
He should have listened to other experts, guys like Baloh and Bartholomew, particularly after his preferred experts, the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, dismissed those other experts out of hand. He should have looked into the issue of retinal bleeding instead of pretending that it could have only have been caused by one of two things as he had been told: mass psychogenic illness or directed-energy weapons. He should have looked at EHS: Is it even a real thing? He should have been more careful when he reported the ages at death of former Moscow diplomats.
But he didn't. Nor did his team at Project Brazen.
And at this point, after the ODNI report, he should have recognized that he had been listening to and been taken in by the stories of people who had a vested interest in the 'syndrome' story. It would actually be a very interesting theme for a podcast series: 'How I, a conspiracy investigator, fell for a conspiracy theory, hook, line and sinker'.
But instead, he makes it even worse by coming up with another conspiracy theory, the one already mentioned in post 2,073: That the ODNI probe, which "involved hundreds of U.S. intelligence officers, other officials, and outside experts, and covered more than 90 countries," was just a ploy to get him! That the CIA, the FBI and the others are out to discredit him! Almost as if he were gang-stalked and targeted by some of the world's most powerful entities!
Welcome to the world of Targeted Individuals!
I will stop here, for now, and get back to this paranoid delusion later today.
Something went wrong with the YouTube link in the previous post, so here it is again. This time, I've mad sure that it works:
Vivien Schmidt, 17:38: "But, yeah, so one doesn't know, you can't cap it at the moment because there is no equipment necessarily there to ... right. And are we doing it to others? You said that we have ..."
So based on what Woolf has been saying, Vivien Schmidt considers it to be a given that 'it' is an actual thing being done to 'us', a DEW attack or something like that, and she asks Woolf if 'we' are then also doing it to them:
Woolf, 17:58: "We wouldn't know if Russian diplomats started having weird headaches. We just don't know. We certainly can. We know that Britain's bought versions of the devices. Australia has, um, Germany. We know China has their own version. It's kind of everywhere now. So people are deploying it. But Russia wouldn't report it if they were having weird headaches."
So in spite no such neuro-strike weapon ever having been detected, Nicky Woolf implies that 'we' are indeed using such weapons against Russians. We just haven't heard about it because Russians, typical Russians, are so secretive about being hit. And he is doing this with the sole purpose of keeping the idea he proposed in his podcast alive. And he's doing it at a point in time when a proxy war between NATO and Russia is being fought out in Ukraine.
From 18:38, the rest of the conservation is Q&A, the first question from the audience being about the meaning of psychogenic. I won't go deeper into this, but I think that he could have done a better job of it, considering that he has allegedly studied "journalism and neuroscience at Columbia" (1:23).
Woolf mentions, 19:38, that MPI can "cause headaches, dizziness, nausea."
Vivien Schmidt asks how the CIA, the FBI and the State Department have responded, 21:09: "How do they manage this kind of information?"
Her question makes Nicky Woolf start rambling about the ODNI report (he calls it the DNI report) again:
Woolf, 21:12: "... they came out with a report, the headline of which was, and we're talking January this year, the headline of which was, um, 'This is not a thing'. And you read into the report, and what the DNI have done is asked a yes, no, or maybe question of all of the US Agencies, like a poll. But they didn't say which agency is which. They were saying, 'Of the nine agencies we asked, seven responded', of which five said, 'weak no', and two said, 'we don't know''.
And they brought that out with the headline of, 'This is absolutely not happening'. And we're reading that, like, What? Yeah, What? That doesn't, you know, if that was how, you know, 'There's poison in the school food', you would not be ... That's not a high confidence interval. And then we were hearing from our sources that one of the agencies that declined to answer the question at all was the DoD, like, the Pentagon was, like: [whistles]"
This 'summary' of the ODNI report is nothing but absolutely grotesque. The reality of what Woolf here refers to as "like a poll" is this:
And what Woolf describes as, "five said, 'weak no', and two said, 'we don't know'," is actually this:
Does this sound like Woolf's "five said, 'weak no', and two said, 'we don't know'." The seven all said that it was unlikely that the syndrome was caused by foreign adversaries, but two of them said it with low confidence.
I can't imagine that Woolf is not aware that the ODNI report was based on an extremely thorough investigation and wasn't merely "like a poll." Nor do I find it likely that he actually believes that "very unlikely" means a "weak no." The only weakness to be found here is in his inability to summarize it truthfully.
Nicky Woolf is doing damage control after his podcast series, in spite of all the resources put into it, came up with a false conclusion.
To some extent, I can empathize with him: He is aiming for a reputation as a serious investigate reporter and is then misled by authority figures whom he chooses to believe: James Giordano, David Relman and Beatrice Golomb. And also the 'syndrome' victims, who were themselves the victims of disinformation: Marc Polymeropoulos, Karen and Kevin Coats, Kate Husband and Doug Ferguson.
He should have listened to other experts, guys like Baloh and Bartholomew, particularly after his preferred experts, the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, dismissed those other experts out of hand. He should have looked into the issue of retinal bleeding instead of pretending that it could have only have been caused by one of two things as he had been told: mass psychogenic illness or directed-energy weapons. He should have looked at EHS: Is it even a real thing? He should have been more careful when he reported the ages at death of former Moscow diplomats.
But he didn't. Nor did his team at Project Brazen.
And at this point, after the ODNI report, he should have recognized that he had been listening to and been taken in by the stories of people who had a vested interest in the 'syndrome' story. It would actually be a very interesting theme for a podcast series: 'How I, a conspiracy investigator, fell for a conspiracy theory, hook, line and sinker'.
But instead, he makes it even worse by coming up with another conspiracy theory, the one already mentioned in post 2,073: That the ODNI probe, which "involved hundreds of U.S. intelligence officers, other officials, and outside experts, and covered more than 90 countries," was just a ploy to get him! That the CIA, the FBI and the others are out to discredit him! Almost as if he were gang-stalked and targeted by some of the world's most powerful entities!
Welcome to the world of Targeted Individuals!
I will stop here, for now, and get back to this paranoid delusion later today.
The Conversation with Nicky Woolf, part 3
Vivien Schmidt, 22:53: "So why would the National Intelligence Agency decide to release the report? I mean, is there ... is this about concerns about public responses, public panic?"
The Department of State, the CIA and others scared the **** out of their personnel with the 'syndrome' stories to the extent where people declined job offers abroad. At the same time, the USA antagonized the Russians with the accusations that they were zapping U.S. diplomats with DEWs, which may or may not have been part of the reason why Russia decided to invade Ukraine. Wouldn't that be reason enough to come clean when a thorough investigation (and not a "poll") reveals that there is no sign of any such attack?
Apart from the fairly small community of TIs, the public didn't seem to be about to panic.
Woolf, 24:09: "Yeah, public panic and also the risk of more congressional oversight. That's the other part of the disinformation. It's that the agencies want as little accountability as
possible, so they want everyone to think, 'Oh it's not a thing'. And we were hearing from a lot of the diplomats and a lot of the spies who'd been directly affected who were extremely angry about this, cuz it's sweeping it under the rug, basically. It's saying, you know, 'Nothing to see here. We're not doing it. No one's doing it. Let's stop talking about it'.
And there were the actual victims, who are permanently disabled. I mean, this is a ... If you get a direct hit from whatever this is, um, you're, you know, it's, it's lifelong disability.
Considering that Woolf doesn't know 'whatever this is', it's amazing that he can nevertheless claim that he knows all about the consequences of a direct hit from 'it'. It remains to be seen how "permanently disabled" the "directly affected ... actual victims" will be. Since nothing whatsoever seems to indicate that their brains have been affected by anything other than a panic attack, their recovery will depend on their insight into the cause of this panic attack, a panic attack, which Woolf helps keep alive. Thus he contributes to the main condition preventing the recovery of the 'syndrome' victims: The idea that they were attacked, that their brains were damaged, and that they are now permanently disabled!
The irony!
Vivien Schmidt, 25:13: "It doesn't go away. And what are the symptoms? is it constant headaches, or .."
Woolf, 25:19: "Constant headaches, constant nausea, memory problems, cognitive problems, vision problems, hearing problems."
Remember that Woolf already mentioned (at 19:38) that MPI can "cause headaches, dizziness, nausea." It can also cause dizziness. The hearing problems weren't caused by MPI, but they also weren't caused by microwaves: The impaired hearing had started before they ever got to Havana. (Mine didn't! But in spite of my many trips to Havana, I have no reason to assume that my hearing was impaired by microwaves. According to the specialists, it's age-related and maybe genetic. And I have no reason not to believe them and instead assume that I am the victim of a DEW attack followed up by a Psy-Op in order to protect the real culprits: Putin, Castro† or the CIA!)
Schmidt, 25:28: "Are they still working or did they have to go on disability?"
Woolf, 25:30: "A lot of them on disability."
Audience, 25:35: "Have there been no instances of, has no one overcome it?"
Woolf, 25:40: "Um, because ... So, yes, some people have had the symptoms temporarily and they've gone away. Whether that means that was a kind of glancing hit, like, maybe they walked through some kind of beam. And again, we don't really know that much about what the weapons deployed look like. The latest one that we've seen in development was the early 2000s. So we, sort of, we're making an inference that whatever's out there is more capable than that."
The logic seems to be that since 'we' know absolutely nothing, 'we' are free to imagine absolutely anything!
So let's imagine some more:
26:14: "Or maybe those are the people who have the psychogenic suggestion version of it. But there's no way of telling between the two. It's a it's a mess, honestly, like it's a, it's, as a reporter, it's a nightmare story cuz you, we came away from what 10 months reporting this, and we're, like, we know less about this now than when we started. Except we know enough to be both afraid of the malice of all of these departments, and the incompetence of all of these departments because they, they've been developing these since the, since the '90s, I mean, since earlier than that. Microwave energy has been deployed as part of surveillance, certainly, since the '70s.
You'd have thought someone would be working on counter measures. But if they had successful counter measures, we wouldn't know about it - probably quite rightly so - but also, fewer people would be getting injured.
But, yeah, there's not not a huge amount of of things we know for sure in this, in this world which is incredibly frustrating."
Yes, it is a mess as a reporter, a nightmare story, and incredibly frustrating, and yet it doesn't seem to occur to him that he may be the one who is incompetent, that he is the one who still, to this day, insists that some of the U.S. diplomats and spies were actually hit by an actual DEW, even though he claims that it's impossible to distinguish between the symptoms of MPI and the alleged symptoms of 'walking through some kind of beam'.
More to come. We are now at 28:00 of the almost 80 minutes. I will skip a lot of his ramblings about the FBI and the CIA, which he doesn't seem to know anything about.
Vivien Schmidt, 22:53: "So why would the National Intelligence Agency decide to release the report? I mean, is there ... is this about concerns about public responses, public panic?"
The Department of State, the CIA and others scared the **** out of their personnel with the 'syndrome' stories to the extent where people declined job offers abroad. At the same time, the USA antagonized the Russians with the accusations that they were zapping U.S. diplomats with DEWs, which may or may not have been part of the reason why Russia decided to invade Ukraine. Wouldn't that be reason enough to come clean when a thorough investigation (and not a "poll") reveals that there is no sign of any such attack?
Apart from the fairly small community of TIs, the public didn't seem to be about to panic.
Woolf, 24:09: "Yeah, public panic and also the risk of more congressional oversight. That's the other part of the disinformation. It's that the agencies want as little accountability as
possible, so they want everyone to think, 'Oh it's not a thing'. And we were hearing from a lot of the diplomats and a lot of the spies who'd been directly affected who were extremely angry about this, cuz it's sweeping it under the rug, basically. It's saying, you know, 'Nothing to see here. We're not doing it. No one's doing it. Let's stop talking about it'.
And there were the actual victims, who are permanently disabled. I mean, this is a ... If you get a direct hit from whatever this is, um, you're, you know, it's, it's lifelong disability.
Considering that Woolf doesn't know 'whatever this is', it's amazing that he can nevertheless claim that he knows all about the consequences of a direct hit from 'it'. It remains to be seen how "permanently disabled" the "directly affected ... actual victims" will be. Since nothing whatsoever seems to indicate that their brains have been affected by anything other than a panic attack, their recovery will depend on their insight into the cause of this panic attack, a panic attack, which Woolf helps keep alive. Thus he contributes to the main condition preventing the recovery of the 'syndrome' victims: The idea that they were attacked, that their brains were damaged, and that they are now permanently disabled!
The irony!
Vivien Schmidt, 25:13: "It doesn't go away. And what are the symptoms? is it constant headaches, or .."
Woolf, 25:19: "Constant headaches, constant nausea, memory problems, cognitive problems, vision problems, hearing problems."
Remember that Woolf already mentioned (at 19:38) that MPI can "cause headaches, dizziness, nausea." It can also cause dizziness. The hearing problems weren't caused by MPI, but they also weren't caused by microwaves: The impaired hearing had started before they ever got to Havana. (Mine didn't! But in spite of my many trips to Havana, I have no reason to assume that my hearing was impaired by microwaves. According to the specialists, it's age-related and maybe genetic. And I have no reason not to believe them and instead assume that I am the victim of a DEW attack followed up by a Psy-Op in order to protect the real culprits: Putin, Castro† or the CIA!)
Schmidt, 25:28: "Are they still working or did they have to go on disability?"
Woolf, 25:30: "A lot of them on disability."
Audience, 25:35: "Have there been no instances of, has no one overcome it?"
Woolf, 25:40: "Um, because ... So, yes, some people have had the symptoms temporarily and they've gone away. Whether that means that was a kind of glancing hit, like, maybe they walked through some kind of beam. And again, we don't really know that much about what the weapons deployed look like. The latest one that we've seen in development was the early 2000s. So we, sort of, we're making an inference that whatever's out there is more capable than that."
The logic seems to be that since 'we' know absolutely nothing, 'we' are free to imagine absolutely anything!
So let's imagine some more:
26:14: "Or maybe those are the people who have the psychogenic suggestion version of it. But there's no way of telling between the two. It's a it's a mess, honestly, like it's a, it's, as a reporter, it's a nightmare story cuz you, we came away from what 10 months reporting this, and we're, like, we know less about this now than when we started. Except we know enough to be both afraid of the malice of all of these departments, and the incompetence of all of these departments because they, they've been developing these since the, since the '90s, I mean, since earlier than that. Microwave energy has been deployed as part of surveillance, certainly, since the '70s.
You'd have thought someone would be working on counter measures. But if they had successful counter measures, we wouldn't know about it - probably quite rightly so - but also, fewer people would be getting injured.
But, yeah, there's not not a huge amount of of things we know for sure in this, in this world which is incredibly frustrating."
Yes, it is a mess as a reporter, a nightmare story, and incredibly frustrating, and yet it doesn't seem to occur to him that he may be the one who is incompetent, that he is the one who still, to this day, insists that some of the U.S. diplomats and spies were actually hit by an actual DEW, even though he claims that it's impossible to distinguish between the symptoms of MPI and the alleged symptoms of 'walking through some kind of beam'.
More to come. We are now at 28:00 of the almost 80 minutes. I will skip a lot of his ramblings about the FBI and the CIA, which he doesn't seem to know anything about.
The Conversation with Nicky Woolf, part 4
At 27:38, Woolf is asked by somebody in the audience why Washington Post accepted the main message in the ODNI report, i.e. that there was no sign of any attack by a foreign adversary:
Q, 27:45: "How could they do that, especially if there were such strikingly obvious glaring holes in validity of the report? What interest would the Post have to so?"
Which is a very good question. (But it's not as if all the mainstream media hadn't already been running stories about the alleged, at first, sonic attacks and then, when that turned out to be an impossible scenario, microwave attacks.)
Woolf and his team were "baffled" by WP's reporting about the ODNI report and asked their friends at WP, who allegedly said that (28:11): "... they were being heavily briefed on background by their sources within the DNI. So someone at the DNI was telling the Post senior reporters, 'Yeah this is not a thing. You can trust us. You can roll with it'. (...) It seems like they just got screwed over (...) But they got screwed, and I don't know why it would be in the DNI's interest to do that." (And thus allegedly ruin DNI's relationship with WP's reporters.)
At 29:24, Schmidt asks if the timing of the ODNI report had anything to do with Woolf's podcast series. Remember that Woolf had already made this claim at 12:42: "They essentially tried to screw us." But now that Vivienne Schmidt more or less makes the claim for him by asking about it, he pretends to be modest and share the 'honor' with other media:
Woolf, 29:39: "I don't want to say for sure that the timing was aimed to coincide with just before our final episode, but the timing was quite suspicious. I think they probably moved something forward that was already in the works, which might have been why it came out so fast. I mean it would be very flattering if our podcast was such that the Directorate of National Intelligence decides to try and screw us so I mean that there must, it must have been in the works already."
We know for a fact that the ODNI report was based on years of investigation. We don't have to speculate that they might have had something "in the works already." We know this because of the CIA interim report from January 2022: CIA assesses it’s unlikely Havana syndrome is due to ‘sustained worldwide campaign’ by a foreign country in interim report (CNN, Jan 20, 2022)
That was more than a year before the ODNI report was released on Mar 1, 2023, so why pretend that it might have had anything at all to do with a couple of podcasts?! It didn't 'come out fast' at all. On the contrary.
Woolf, 30:20: "But we weren't the only report coming out about this at the same time, so maybe they thought the Press attention had got to a a level that they needed to address. But it completely backfired cuz when they walked it back everyone was like ... [Schimidt: "I remember reading it at the time, so it was news, it became news."] ... and then it was news again when they walked it back because, I mean, especially for the Washington Post, who were, like, 'Well screw you guys'."
This is the third time (see post 2,073) Woolf claims that 'they walked it back', but 'they' never did! Woolf never says when or where the ODNI report is supposed to have been 'walked back'. Many people have this impression because David Relman's 'expert panel report' from 2022 was declassified and made public later that same month: Exclusive: Declassified report suggests "Havana Syndrome" could result from energy weapon (Salon, Mar 29, 2023).
People defending the nonsense about U.S. diplomats having had their brains scrambled by Russians with microwave zappers treated the Relman report as if it were a new report debunking the ODNI report, which it actually preceded. If anything was walked back it was Relman's 'expert panel report' being debunked by the ODNI report.
To be continued ...
At 27:38, Woolf is asked by somebody in the audience why Washington Post accepted the main message in the ODNI report, i.e. that there was no sign of any attack by a foreign adversary:
Q, 27:45: "How could they do that, especially if there were such strikingly obvious glaring holes in validity of the report? What interest would the Post have to so?"
Which is a very good question. (But it's not as if all the mainstream media hadn't already been running stories about the alleged, at first, sonic attacks and then, when that turned out to be an impossible scenario, microwave attacks.)
Woolf and his team were "baffled" by WP's reporting about the ODNI report and asked their friends at WP, who allegedly said that (28:11): "... they were being heavily briefed on background by their sources within the DNI. So someone at the DNI was telling the Post senior reporters, 'Yeah this is not a thing. You can trust us. You can roll with it'. (...) It seems like they just got screwed over (...) But they got screwed, and I don't know why it would be in the DNI's interest to do that." (And thus allegedly ruin DNI's relationship with WP's reporters.)
At 29:24, Schmidt asks if the timing of the ODNI report had anything to do with Woolf's podcast series. Remember that Woolf had already made this claim at 12:42: "They essentially tried to screw us." But now that Vivienne Schmidt more or less makes the claim for him by asking about it, he pretends to be modest and share the 'honor' with other media:
Woolf, 29:39: "I don't want to say for sure that the timing was aimed to coincide with just before our final episode, but the timing was quite suspicious. I think they probably moved something forward that was already in the works, which might have been why it came out so fast. I mean it would be very flattering if our podcast was such that the Directorate of National Intelligence decides to try and screw us so I mean that there must, it must have been in the works already."
We know for a fact that the ODNI report was based on years of investigation. We don't have to speculate that they might have had something "in the works already." We know this because of the CIA interim report from January 2022: CIA assesses it’s unlikely Havana syndrome is due to ‘sustained worldwide campaign’ by a foreign country in interim report (CNN, Jan 20, 2022)
That was more than a year before the ODNI report was released on Mar 1, 2023, so why pretend that it might have had anything at all to do with a couple of podcasts?! It didn't 'come out fast' at all. On the contrary.
Woolf, 30:20: "But we weren't the only report coming out about this at the same time, so maybe they thought the Press attention had got to a a level that they needed to address. But it completely backfired cuz when they walked it back everyone was like ... [Schimidt: "I remember reading it at the time, so it was news, it became news."] ... and then it was news again when they walked it back because, I mean, especially for the Washington Post, who were, like, 'Well screw you guys'."
This is the third time (see post 2,073) Woolf claims that 'they walked it back', but 'they' never did! Woolf never says when or where the ODNI report is supposed to have been 'walked back'. Many people have this impression because David Relman's 'expert panel report' from 2022 was declassified and made public later that same month: Exclusive: Declassified report suggests "Havana Syndrome" could result from energy weapon (Salon, Mar 29, 2023).
People defending the nonsense about U.S. diplomats having had their brains scrambled by Russians with microwave zappers treated the Relman report as if it were a new report debunking the ODNI report, which it actually preceded. If anything was walked back it was Relman's 'expert panel report' being debunked by the ODNI report.
To be continued ...
The Conversation with Nicky Woolf, part 5
At 30:50, Woolf is asked if there had been previous cases, which makes him talk about the listening device in Moscow:
Woolf, 31:22: "There were things like the Moscow signal which was also a directed microwave, um, energy system. There were loads of reports of side effects coming from things like that, which were surveillance devices. We still don't know fully that this wasn't a surveillance device of some kind. It it's possible it could just be an evolution of a more targeted version of that. It's really hard to say when the first ... because the symptoms are so, um, diverse and kind of nebulous, it's difficult to say, 'Oh, this was one', but it happened before. But certainly, anecdotally, we had people come forward and say, 'Yeah this happened to me in 2011. This happened to me in 2005'. But, you know, it's headaches and nose bleeds. It could be ... it's so hard to know for sure, yeah, until there started to be a pattern."
He should have made it clear that those "loads of reports of side effects" are the ones that he later uses the word anecdotally about. According to the investigators of the 'Moscow signal', there was no indication that it had actually harmed anybody. I don't know why he doesn't mention the cancer deaths he already mentioned at 11:21 (see post 2,073) that were allegedly caused by the 'signal' and now plays it down to headaches and nosebleeds, but he seems to be slowly coming around to most of all this being psychogenic even though he tends to forget it when he is trying to dramatize the seriousness of it and wants to make DEW attacks look like a real thing.
I assume that the "pattern" he is talking about is the Havana cohort after 2016.
At 32:22, he is asked about the people with symptoms, "you said that the majority (!) are, have it are, like, fully (I) disabled."
If Wolf had been interested in getting the facts straight, this would have been the time to point out that the vast majority of cases weren't recognized as victims of any kind of attack. Other causes were found:
But since Woolf still sticks with his idea that this is all a conspiracy against him and other reporters standing up for the poor victims of DEW attacks, he sees no reason to point this out. Instead we get the sob story:
Woolf, 32:37: "Certainly, I think, um, people appreciate the attention is finally being paid to it and that people are taking them seriously, because for a long time, they felt very dismissed. They had to fight really hard to get medical care and medical leave. They had to really fight to persuade the world that what was happening to them because the psychogenic theory was so powerful. They were dismissed very heavily at the beginning."
At a point in time when nobody could be sure what was going on, they fought so hard that they got a leader of the investigation (Pamela Spratlen) cancelled for not dismissing MPI as a possible explanation. The same thing happened to the CIA station leader in Vienna. The "Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks (HAVANA) Act of 2021 was signed by President Biden in October 2021." And it's still valid for the Havana cohort and a few others even though no sign of any foreign attacker with microwave ray guns were ever detected in Havana or elsewhere.
The irony is that the agents and diplomats who got scared by crickets in Havana and had doctors like Hoffer, Giordano and Relman tell them that they actually were victims of DEW attacks were declared official "Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks," without one single neurological attack ever having been documented - unless we count the story about cricket sounds being a sign of a neuro-strike as an actual neurological attack. And Woolf continues to give credence to this story, thus contributing to the conviction of people like Karen Coats and Kate Husband that they were physiologically brain damaged, an idea that has led them to elaborate on their delusion to the extent where they now consider themselves to suffer from the EHS delusion! (See post 1,660.
33:12: "I'll give you an example: One of the sources we were speaking to was this guy in Baltimore who had been in ... He's sort of Dark Ops, like, nebulously spy contractor stuff. And he developed the symptoms in a hotel in Hanoi and spoke to his CIA handler about it and said it was in this hotel room. Or rather, the CIA handler was talking to him about it and was saying, 'Were you staying in this hotel? Because we had someone who also was staying in the hotel'. And this guy who was in Baltimore was, like, 'At room 306'. And the CIA guy was, like, 'How did you know that?' And it had been the same room! And that leads to two conclusions: One is that whoever was doing that, deploying the device, can have set up in the room next to where they know the CIA puts its Black Ops people. And two, why the hell are they using the same hotel room every time? Who is, like. Switch it up a little bit guys! Like, this is, this comes back to the competence thing. There were moments where me and my producer Max were, like, we could run an agency better than better than these guys."
It doesn't seem to occur to Woolf that he is once again reporting anecdotal evidence from a person who is probably not even recognized as a victim of the 'syndrome' and would very much like to be so in order to receive the same benefits as the recognized 'syndrome' victims, the ones in the Havana cohort.
After this, Woolf rambles on about the nincompoops in the CIA - while believing every word that a former Black Ops CIA operative with a vested interest in the question is telling him. I have also never heard him question what Marc Polymeropoulos (who doesn't seem to be "fully disabled" in spite of a claim that he's a "TBI Survivor") tells him. Somehow, whenever they have become victims of what sounds like anxiety attacks and claim that the CIA let them down when they weren't, at first, recognized as victims of combat injuries, Woolf sees no reason to question their testimony. (And let me stress once again: According to what is known about MPI, their symptoms may be real even when their interpretation of what caused them isn't.)
In case anybody is interested, the conspiracy/incompetence rambling begins at approximately 34:10.
At one point, Woolf says that he and his team believe that U.S. officials were the victims of actual DEW attacks in four locations: Havana, Guangzhou, Hanoi and Vienna, but he doesn't really give a reason for deeming those places legit and dismiss all the others.
At 41:28: "But definitely we're talking about multiple states, multiple different deployments of devices for multiple different reasons. There isn't a single campaign by a single actor."
Which is remarkable, considering that he doesn't really give us any reason for this/these new conspiracy/-ies.
After a comparison of the 'syndrome' with QAnon, started by a guy in the audience talking about PsyOps, Woolf explains his methodology (i.e. conjecture) at 47:16:
The way we came to the conclusion we did:
We didn't bust anyone pointing a radar dish at an embassy. right. We triangulated from medical advice on the symptoms of the cases that could be psychological and the symptoms that couldn't, and then, what we found out from documents and sources that we know that the US has developed and deployed. So in in some ways, we went into this and what we were looking at was Americans being targeted in Havana, we suspected by Russia, but the things we had the most evidence of was America's development and deployment of the devices, so the kind of Russia (?) bit was sort of those two things meeting in the middle sour saying, you know,Lockheed Martin makes one, Moscow's got one too, but that was the bit that that we had only circumstantial evidence for."
In other words, it's all circumstantial 'evidence' and conjecture, but from the beginning he seems to consider what allegedly happened in Havana, a microwave attack, to be a fact: "what we were looking at was Americans being targeted in Havana". And this is based on nothing but "medical advice on the symptoms of the cases that could be psychological and the symptoms that couldn't," the symptoms that couldn't being retinal bleeding, which, as I have pointed out before, can't be a symptom of mass psychogenic illness, at least not directly, but can be a symptom of several, quite ordinary ailments like, for instance, hypertension:
For fairly obvious reasons, Wikipedia's paragraph about causes doesn't mention microwave attacks. However, it does mention high altitudes, but that shouldn't be of concern in the Havana area, but may be a (minor) risk on commercial flights to and from.
See post 1,661 where Nicky Woolf claims that Karen Coats claimed that when "a doctor found that her retina was bleeding. She was told they’d “only ever seen this when somebody has a trauma to their head, like a car accident.”
One of the three is lying about this: Nicky Woolf, Karen Coats or her doctor. I don't know which one of them it is, but I do know that Woolf keeps repeating the lie that if it weren't psychogenic, it must have been caused by targeted microwaves, and he has had an awful lot of time to correct it since January.
To be continued ...
At 30:50, Woolf is asked if there had been previous cases, which makes him talk about the listening device in Moscow:
Woolf, 31:22: "There were things like the Moscow signal which was also a directed microwave, um, energy system. There were loads of reports of side effects coming from things like that, which were surveillance devices. We still don't know fully that this wasn't a surveillance device of some kind. It it's possible it could just be an evolution of a more targeted version of that. It's really hard to say when the first ... because the symptoms are so, um, diverse and kind of nebulous, it's difficult to say, 'Oh, this was one', but it happened before. But certainly, anecdotally, we had people come forward and say, 'Yeah this happened to me in 2011. This happened to me in 2005'. But, you know, it's headaches and nose bleeds. It could be ... it's so hard to know for sure, yeah, until there started to be a pattern."
He should have made it clear that those "loads of reports of side effects" are the ones that he later uses the word anecdotally about. According to the investigators of the 'Moscow signal', there was no indication that it had actually harmed anybody. I don't know why he doesn't mention the cancer deaths he already mentioned at 11:21 (see post 2,073) that were allegedly caused by the 'signal' and now plays it down to headaches and nosebleeds, but he seems to be slowly coming around to most of all this being psychogenic even though he tends to forget it when he is trying to dramatize the seriousness of it and wants to make DEW attacks look like a real thing.
I assume that the "pattern" he is talking about is the Havana cohort after 2016.
At 32:22, he is asked about the people with symptoms, "you said that the majority (!) are, have it are, like, fully (I) disabled."
If Wolf had been interested in getting the facts straight, this would have been the time to point out that the vast majority of cases weren't recognized as victims of any kind of attack. Other causes were found:
But since Woolf still sticks with his idea that this is all a conspiracy against him and other reporters standing up for the poor victims of DEW attacks, he sees no reason to point this out. Instead we get the sob story:
Woolf, 32:37: "Certainly, I think, um, people appreciate the attention is finally being paid to it and that people are taking them seriously, because for a long time, they felt very dismissed. They had to fight really hard to get medical care and medical leave. They had to really fight to persuade the world that what was happening to them because the psychogenic theory was so powerful. They were dismissed very heavily at the beginning."
At a point in time when nobody could be sure what was going on, they fought so hard that they got a leader of the investigation (Pamela Spratlen) cancelled for not dismissing MPI as a possible explanation. The same thing happened to the CIA station leader in Vienna. The "Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks (HAVANA) Act of 2021 was signed by President Biden in October 2021." And it's still valid for the Havana cohort and a few others even though no sign of any foreign attacker with microwave ray guns were ever detected in Havana or elsewhere.
The irony is that the agents and diplomats who got scared by crickets in Havana and had doctors like Hoffer, Giordano and Relman tell them that they actually were victims of DEW attacks were declared official "Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks," without one single neurological attack ever having been documented - unless we count the story about cricket sounds being a sign of a neuro-strike as an actual neurological attack. And Woolf continues to give credence to this story, thus contributing to the conviction of people like Karen Coats and Kate Husband that they were physiologically brain damaged, an idea that has led them to elaborate on their delusion to the extent where they now consider themselves to suffer from the EHS delusion! (See post 1,660.
33:12: "I'll give you an example: One of the sources we were speaking to was this guy in Baltimore who had been in ... He's sort of Dark Ops, like, nebulously spy contractor stuff. And he developed the symptoms in a hotel in Hanoi and spoke to his CIA handler about it and said it was in this hotel room. Or rather, the CIA handler was talking to him about it and was saying, 'Were you staying in this hotel? Because we had someone who also was staying in the hotel'. And this guy who was in Baltimore was, like, 'At room 306'. And the CIA guy was, like, 'How did you know that?' And it had been the same room! And that leads to two conclusions: One is that whoever was doing that, deploying the device, can have set up in the room next to where they know the CIA puts its Black Ops people. And two, why the hell are they using the same hotel room every time? Who is, like. Switch it up a little bit guys! Like, this is, this comes back to the competence thing. There were moments where me and my producer Max were, like, we could run an agency better than better than these guys."
It doesn't seem to occur to Woolf that he is once again reporting anecdotal evidence from a person who is probably not even recognized as a victim of the 'syndrome' and would very much like to be so in order to receive the same benefits as the recognized 'syndrome' victims, the ones in the Havana cohort.
After this, Woolf rambles on about the nincompoops in the CIA - while believing every word that a former Black Ops CIA operative with a vested interest in the question is telling him. I have also never heard him question what Marc Polymeropoulos (who doesn't seem to be "fully disabled" in spite of a claim that he's a "TBI Survivor") tells him. Somehow, whenever they have become victims of what sounds like anxiety attacks and claim that the CIA let them down when they weren't, at first, recognized as victims of combat injuries, Woolf sees no reason to question their testimony. (And let me stress once again: According to what is known about MPI, their symptoms may be real even when their interpretation of what caused them isn't.)
In case anybody is interested, the conspiracy/incompetence rambling begins at approximately 34:10.
At one point, Woolf says that he and his team believe that U.S. officials were the victims of actual DEW attacks in four locations: Havana, Guangzhou, Hanoi and Vienna, but he doesn't really give a reason for deeming those places legit and dismiss all the others.
At 41:28: "But definitely we're talking about multiple states, multiple different deployments of devices for multiple different reasons. There isn't a single campaign by a single actor."
Which is remarkable, considering that he doesn't really give us any reason for this/these new conspiracy/-ies.
After a comparison of the 'syndrome' with QAnon, started by a guy in the audience talking about PsyOps, Woolf explains his methodology (i.e. conjecture) at 47:16:
The way we came to the conclusion we did:
We didn't bust anyone pointing a radar dish at an embassy. right. We triangulated from medical advice on the symptoms of the cases that could be psychological and the symptoms that couldn't, and then, what we found out from documents and sources that we know that the US has developed and deployed. So in in some ways, we went into this and what we were looking at was Americans being targeted in Havana, we suspected by Russia, but the things we had the most evidence of was America's development and deployment of the devices, so the kind of Russia (?) bit was sort of those two things meeting in the middle sour saying, you know,Lockheed Martin makes one, Moscow's got one too, but that was the bit that that we had only circumstantial evidence for."
In other words, it's all circumstantial 'evidence' and conjecture, but from the beginning he seems to consider what allegedly happened in Havana, a microwave attack, to be a fact: "what we were looking at was Americans being targeted in Havana". And this is based on nothing but "medical advice on the symptoms of the cases that could be psychological and the symptoms that couldn't," the symptoms that couldn't being retinal bleeding, which, as I have pointed out before, can't be a symptom of mass psychogenic illness, at least not directly, but can be a symptom of several, quite ordinary ailments like, for instance, hypertension:
For fairly obvious reasons, Wikipedia's paragraph about causes doesn't mention microwave attacks. However, it does mention high altitudes, but that shouldn't be of concern in the Havana area, but may be a (minor) risk on commercial flights to and from.
See post 1,661 where Nicky Woolf claims that Karen Coats claimed that when "a doctor found that her retina was bleeding. She was told they’d “only ever seen this when somebody has a trauma to their head, like a car accident.”
One of the three is lying about this: Nicky Woolf, Karen Coats or her doctor. I don't know which one of them it is, but I do know that Woolf keeps repeating the lie that if it weren't psychogenic, it must have been caused by targeted microwaves, and he has had an awful lot of time to correct it since January.
To be continued ...
The Conversation with Nicky Woolf, part 6
At 51:15, Vivien Schmidt asks if the 'syndrome' could be caused by a microwave listening device that is "too strong".
Woolf already talked about the 'Moscow signal' and now says that it's possible that since the '70s listening devices may have been developed into something more dangerous.
At 52:34, somebody in the audience asks if there are cases where the U.S. has used 'syndrome' devices against diplomats in other countries.
At 53:17, Woolf answers that, apart from the Canadians in Havana, there have been no reports of other nationalities with the 'syndrome', and in particular no other reports of enemies of the USA having been targeted. He again mentions that Russia, and now also China, wouldn't be open about having had diplomats coming down with the 'syndrome'.
Woolf is asked if there have been other cases in other places than the four already mentioned (Havana, Guangzhou, Hanoi, Vienna), and he answers that there have been several reports from other countries and cities, but he dismisses them as irrelevant, and starts talking about Targeted Individuals:
At 55:26: "A lot of people, it turns out, think the government is using microwaves to beam messages into their brains."
He is then asked, "what kind of messages?"
Woolf answers, "And actually, even more than that. A lot of people think their neighbors are using microwaves to beam messages into their brains. There's a lot of accusations of, what's the word? Uh, just being messed with rather than it being some kind of statecraft. (Laughter from the audience.) We didn't give that a huge amount of cred because that way Madness lies."
So much like the Havana cohort of 'syndrome' victims and their doctors and lawyers, Woolf dismisses the idea that the Targeted Individuals are actually targeted.
At 56:15, Woolf is asked if any attempts have been made to reverse the delusions. (The word used is psychosis, and it is compared to phantom pregnancies.)
Woolf, 56:50: "That tended to be done by longer term studies. Generally speaking, if someone, if you keep track of somebody's, like a cohort, symptoms over 5-10 years, the ones where it's gone away after two years can be guessed as psychogenic. The ones where it hasn't, um, that tends to be the diagnostic criteria. If someone still, you know, eight years down the line, is unable to move, unable to speak, psychogenic illnesses tends to ebb and flow with the information pressure that the psychogenesis is coming from. And when the suggestion stops, it tends to slide. Not always, but but that tends to be how to distinguish between the two."
He doesn't really answer her question, and what he tells her is wrong. Mass psychogenic illness usually goes away much faster than "after two years." If handled correctly, most cases don't last a day or a few days. From what is known, most of the Havana cases that weren't confirmed by the Miami doctors as legit 'syndrome' cases soon went back to work.
But see the quotation from The Guardian in post 2,029:
In addition to gas leaks and hazardous chemicals, microwave attacks need to be ruled out, too. But in the case of the 'Havana syndrome', the opposite happened. Zealous doctors persuaded people with fairly innocuous symptoms that the crickets they'd heard were a sign that were the victims of a brain-damaging microwave attack, which obviously isn't conducive to allowing "fear to subside and anxiety to dissipate."
And many in the Havana cohort did and does, apparently still, "embrace spurious explanations, suspect a coverup, and, faced with having to prove they are ill, fail to get well."
That their symptoms haven't yet stopped doesn't mean that they were caused by microwaves. It is more likely that the continued suggestion, i.e. the "information pressure that the psychogenesis is coming from," as Woolf put it, has helped keep the symptoms alive.
At 1:00:14, Woolf, again, starts talking about his philosophy of the world of espionage, and again he mentions mass psychogenic illness and says, sensibly, that it can happen to everbody, 1:02:12, "a farmer in Iowa (...) or a deputy Secretary of State, like, everyone is just as vulnerable to it."
At 1:02:33, the conversation shifts to being about QAnon, social media, conspiracy theories, the flow and control of information, the spread of misinformation, AI algorithms and TikTok.
It is no longer about the syndrome, except at the end, 1:17:02, when Woolf claims that the Canadian 'syndrome' victims in Havana "weren't incidental. They were directly targeted. Um, I mean, I guess to whichever agency, it just assumed that Canada and the other Five Eyes are essentially part of the same operation, I guess. Or they want to scare the Canadians."
We already know that a CIA official targeted his Canadian neighbors with stories about the alleged attack, so in a way it's true that they weren't incidental, I guess.
At 51:15, Vivien Schmidt asks if the 'syndrome' could be caused by a microwave listening device that is "too strong".
Woolf already talked about the 'Moscow signal' and now says that it's possible that since the '70s listening devices may have been developed into something more dangerous.
At 52:34, somebody in the audience asks if there are cases where the U.S. has used 'syndrome' devices against diplomats in other countries.
At 53:17, Woolf answers that, apart from the Canadians in Havana, there have been no reports of other nationalities with the 'syndrome', and in particular no other reports of enemies of the USA having been targeted. He again mentions that Russia, and now also China, wouldn't be open about having had diplomats coming down with the 'syndrome'.
Woolf is asked if there have been other cases in other places than the four already mentioned (Havana, Guangzhou, Hanoi, Vienna), and he answers that there have been several reports from other countries and cities, but he dismisses them as irrelevant, and starts talking about Targeted Individuals:
At 55:26: "A lot of people, it turns out, think the government is using microwaves to beam messages into their brains."
He is then asked, "what kind of messages?"
Woolf answers, "And actually, even more than that. A lot of people think their neighbors are using microwaves to beam messages into their brains. There's a lot of accusations of, what's the word? Uh, just being messed with rather than it being some kind of statecraft. (Laughter from the audience.) We didn't give that a huge amount of cred because that way Madness lies."
So much like the Havana cohort of 'syndrome' victims and their doctors and lawyers, Woolf dismisses the idea that the Targeted Individuals are actually targeted.
At 56:15, Woolf is asked if any attempts have been made to reverse the delusions. (The word used is psychosis, and it is compared to phantom pregnancies.)
Woolf, 56:50: "That tended to be done by longer term studies. Generally speaking, if someone, if you keep track of somebody's, like a cohort, symptoms over 5-10 years, the ones where it's gone away after two years can be guessed as psychogenic. The ones where it hasn't, um, that tends to be the diagnostic criteria. If someone still, you know, eight years down the line, is unable to move, unable to speak, psychogenic illnesses tends to ebb and flow with the information pressure that the psychogenesis is coming from. And when the suggestion stops, it tends to slide. Not always, but but that tends to be how to distinguish between the two."
He doesn't really answer her question, and what he tells her is wrong. Mass psychogenic illness usually goes away much faster than "after two years." If handled correctly, most cases don't last a day or a few days. From what is known, most of the Havana cases that weren't confirmed by the Miami doctors as legit 'syndrome' cases soon went back to work.
But see the quotation from The Guardian in post 2,029:
In addition to gas leaks and hazardous chemicals, microwave attacks need to be ruled out, too. But in the case of the 'Havana syndrome', the opposite happened. Zealous doctors persuaded people with fairly innocuous symptoms that the crickets they'd heard were a sign that were the victims of a brain-damaging microwave attack, which obviously isn't conducive to allowing "fear to subside and anxiety to dissipate."
And many in the Havana cohort did and does, apparently still, "embrace spurious explanations, suspect a coverup, and, faced with having to prove they are ill, fail to get well."
That their symptoms haven't yet stopped doesn't mean that they were caused by microwaves. It is more likely that the continued suggestion, i.e. the "information pressure that the psychogenesis is coming from," as Woolf put it, has helped keep the symptoms alive.
At 1:00:14, Woolf, again, starts talking about his philosophy of the world of espionage, and again he mentions mass psychogenic illness and says, sensibly, that it can happen to everbody, 1:02:12, "a farmer in Iowa (...) or a deputy Secretary of State, like, everyone is just as vulnerable to it."
At 1:02:33, the conversation shifts to being about QAnon, social media, conspiracy theories, the flow and control of information, the spread of misinformation, AI algorithms and TikTok.
It is no longer about the syndrome, except at the end, 1:17:02, when Woolf claims that the Canadian 'syndrome' victims in Havana "weren't incidental. They were directly targeted. Um, I mean, I guess to whichever agency, it just assumed that Canada and the other Five Eyes are essentially part of the same operation, I guess. Or they want to scare the Canadians."
We already know that a CIA official targeted his Canadian neighbors with stories about the alleged attack, so in a way it's true that they weren't incidental, I guess.
Is Nikki Woolf well known? That YouTube channel has only just over 1,000 subscribers so I'm hoping this nonsense isn't seen by many.
I don't think he is as well known as Jon Lee Anderson and Adam Entous, who made the VICE podcast series, but he is also younger. The number of subscribers to the YouTube channel probably has more to do with the channel than with Woolf. I think he has left Twitter/X for Bluesky (many have!), but his Twitter/X account has "15.2K Followers," which is not exactly at the level of, for instance, Taylor Swift, who joined at approximately the same time, but I guess journalist versus pop star is not a fair competition popularity-wise.
I had heard about him before his 'syndrome' podcast series. He is better known for his other podcast series: Finding Q: My Journey into QAnon (Audible).
Finding Q — a gripping podcast investigation into QAnon (Financial Times, Aug 23, 2021)
I think that the problem with the 'syndrome' podcast series is that he tried to do it much the same way he did with the QAnon one, which was mainly about the journey. But he couldn't do it with the 'Havana syndrome', which is more about the science, where he appears to have been ill advised almost from the outset. I can empathize with his empathy for the embassy victims and their suffering. (But it does require that I ignore what they were doing in Havana!) Woolf took them seriously, which is good, in principle, but he couldn't keep his cool, step back and stay objective: 'OK, so this is how they describe what they think happened to them, but is their impression correct?' He relied on the same experts as the 'syndrome' sufferers themselves, i.e. on the 'experts' who were the co-creators of the 'syndrome', the experts, who confirmed their fears and backed them up with pseudo-science.
When the ODNi report was released, Woolf was just about to finish his podcast series, and I assume that it would have been difficult to end it on the note: 'Well, what we've told you so far, was obviously entirely wrong, but remember, it was all about the fun we had on the way.' [
"Do not pass Go and do not collect $200." I doubt that his employers would have liked that. But it is what they all should have done: Extend the series with a couple of more episodes exploring their journey into the Havana Syndrome rabbit hole! How the investigative team as well as the 'syndrome' victims were led astray by biased scientists and politicians.
Or as Mitchell Valdés-Sosa put it: How 'Anomalous Health Incidents' in Cuba Sidelined Science (Scientific American, March 6, 2023).
(It must have felt ******* great to write that article in March 2023!)
But remember that he was not the only one making the same mistake, and that is important for perspective: So did the much more experienced investigative journalists Anderson and Entous. But getting back on track requires the ability to step back, analyze how you ended down the rabbit hole in the first place, which is probably easier if you yourself are the one who first notices the tell-tale signs that something isn't quite right with your story: 'Hey, wait a minute. That can't be right. I've got to take a closer look at this.'
Instead, the rug was completely pulled out from under their feet by the ODNI report, and they now looked iike Hans Christian Anderson's emperor.
They should all have done a better job of it, Woolf as well as Anderson and Entous. They should also have had fact-checkers. The should have checked out retinal bleeding, EHS, the age of death of the Moscow diplomats, the cricket sounds and how the story of The SOUND had changed along the way. They were led astray by guys like Hoffer, Relman, Giordano and Golomb and told to dismiss guys like Baloh and Bartholomew, which is exactly why they should have returned to them, 'This is what they say about your idea of mass psychogenic illness. What do you have to say in your defense?'
But they didn't!
As I have mentioned before, it's not the first time journalists have been fooled by a case of MPI and a team of experts who got it all wrong. I saw a similar thing happen when some of the HPV-vaccinated girls in Denmark convinced each other they the vaccine had harmed them, a small group of doctors believed them and TV journalists reported about it without listening to the actual science. The journalists no doubt felt that they were fighting the good fight for the victims against a medical establishment or even Big Pharma but instead of helping the victims, they only managed to make the whole thing worse for them.
Similarly, Woolf, Anderson and Entous were convinced that they were fighting the good fight on the side of the victims against the CIA, the FBI and the whole ******* military-industrial complex - while ignoring the fact that those victims had been working for the CIA, the FBI and the DoD. That they had succumbed to their working conditions and not to any sinister foreign adversary. That they believed their own lies.
Woolf appears to be slooooowly recovering from his trip down the rabbit hole. He is much more open about the role that MPI played in the 'syndrome'. But he is also still clinging to the idea that he was basically right for the most part, which he obviously wasn't and still isn't as his reference to retinal bleeding in the conversation at the Boston U shows.
However, he didn't once refer to any of the 'experts' he relied on in the podcast series: Hoffer, Relman, Giordano and Golomb.
He also didn't mention the crickets, which he obviously should have!
ETA: I stumbled on this new article by Nicky Woolf about something completely different:
Death begets death begets death, until the cycle breaks (JewishNews.co.uk, Nov 9, 2023).
(I am not sure that it's true that 'Israel made the desert bloom' as claimed in the article.)
I had heard about him before his 'syndrome' podcast series. He is better known for his other podcast series: Finding Q: My Journey into QAnon (Audible).
Finding Q — a gripping podcast investigation into QAnon (Financial Times, Aug 23, 2021)
I think that the problem with the 'syndrome' podcast series is that he tried to do it much the same way he did with the QAnon one, which was mainly about the journey. But he couldn't do it with the 'Havana syndrome', which is more about the science, where he appears to have been ill advised almost from the outset. I can empathize with his empathy for the embassy victims and their suffering. (But it does require that I ignore what they were doing in Havana!) Woolf took them seriously, which is good, in principle, but he couldn't keep his cool, step back and stay objective: 'OK, so this is how they describe what they think happened to them, but is their impression correct?' He relied on the same experts as the 'syndrome' sufferers themselves, i.e. on the 'experts' who were the co-creators of the 'syndrome', the experts, who confirmed their fears and backed them up with pseudo-science.
When the ODNi report was released, Woolf was just about to finish his podcast series, and I assume that it would have been difficult to end it on the note: 'Well, what we've told you so far, was obviously entirely wrong, but remember, it was all about the fun we had on the way.' [
"Do not pass Go and do not collect $200." I doubt that his employers would have liked that. But it is what they all should have done: Extend the series with a couple of more episodes exploring their journey into the Havana Syndrome rabbit hole! How the investigative team as well as the 'syndrome' victims were led astray by biased scientists and politicians.
Or as Mitchell Valdés-Sosa put it: How 'Anomalous Health Incidents' in Cuba Sidelined Science (Scientific American, March 6, 2023).
(It must have felt ******* great to write that article in March 2023!)
But remember that he was not the only one making the same mistake, and that is important for perspective: So did the much more experienced investigative journalists Anderson and Entous. But getting back on track requires the ability to step back, analyze how you ended down the rabbit hole in the first place, which is probably easier if you yourself are the one who first notices the tell-tale signs that something isn't quite right with your story: 'Hey, wait a minute. That can't be right. I've got to take a closer look at this.'
Instead, the rug was completely pulled out from under their feet by the ODNI report, and they now looked iike Hans Christian Anderson's emperor.
They should all have done a better job of it, Woolf as well as Anderson and Entous. They should also have had fact-checkers. The should have checked out retinal bleeding, EHS, the age of death of the Moscow diplomats, the cricket sounds and how the story of The SOUND had changed along the way. They were led astray by guys like Hoffer, Relman, Giordano and Golomb and told to dismiss guys like Baloh and Bartholomew, which is exactly why they should have returned to them, 'This is what they say about your idea of mass psychogenic illness. What do you have to say in your defense?'
But they didn't!
As I have mentioned before, it's not the first time journalists have been fooled by a case of MPI and a team of experts who got it all wrong. I saw a similar thing happen when some of the HPV-vaccinated girls in Denmark convinced each other they the vaccine had harmed them, a small group of doctors believed them and TV journalists reported about it without listening to the actual science. The journalists no doubt felt that they were fighting the good fight for the victims against a medical establishment or even Big Pharma but instead of helping the victims, they only managed to make the whole thing worse for them.
Similarly, Woolf, Anderson and Entous were convinced that they were fighting the good fight on the side of the victims against the CIA, the FBI and the whole ******* military-industrial complex - while ignoring the fact that those victims had been working for the CIA, the FBI and the DoD. That they had succumbed to their working conditions and not to any sinister foreign adversary. That they believed their own lies.
Woolf appears to be slooooowly recovering from his trip down the rabbit hole. He is much more open about the role that MPI played in the 'syndrome'. But he is also still clinging to the idea that he was basically right for the most part, which he obviously wasn't and still isn't as his reference to retinal bleeding in the conversation at the Boston U shows.
However, he didn't once refer to any of the 'experts' he relied on in the podcast series: Hoffer, Relman, Giordano and Golomb.
He also didn't mention the crickets, which he obviously should have!
ETA: I stumbled on this new article by Nicky Woolf about something completely different:
Death begets death begets death, until the cycle breaks (JewishNews.co.uk, Nov 9, 2023).
(I am not sure that it's true that 'Israel made the desert bloom' as claimed in the article.)
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