Douglas Rushkoff on IN OTHER NEWS

Recommended Listening:  On January 28, 2019, Douglas Rushkoff appeared on Geoff Brady's IN OTHER NEWS RADIO and discussed his latest book, TEAM HUMAN.  Listen to the entire interview right HERE.

Mystery Object Over Las Vegas

What follows is the opening paragraph of Tyler Rogoway's 3-17-19 TheDrive.com article entitled "Air Controller Wowed By Pilot's Ability To See Mystery Object Over Las Vegas With Night Vision":

"Around 9pm local time on Saturday, March 16th, 2019, an air ambulance helicopter was flying roughly 15 miles west of central Last Vegas when something odd caught his aided eye. During an exchange with an air traffic controller, the pilot of Mercy Air 21, an Agusta 119 Koala helicopter, noted spotting an unidentified object some distance from his position and only he was likely able to see it in the darkness as he was wearing night vision goggles (NVGs). The controller responded that he had nothing on radar in the area where he was seeing the object, but when he heard the pilot could only see it through his NVGs, he responded with amazement." 

Skipping down to the end of the article:

"We can also positively ID the helicopter. It is an Agusta A109, registered N238AM, belonging to Air Methods. We also now have better positioning information. According to this, MA021 would have been roughly nine miles from the South Hills Hospital, the approximate area where the pilot thought the object was flying over at 7,000 feet, when the radio exchange occurred.

"A nine mile visual ID of a party balloon or something like that at night using NVGs seems really questionable. So size of the object and its exact configuration is the big question at this point. We also know that the A109 was flying at 7,000 feet. So, the pilot would have seen this object at eye level from his perspective.

"Update: March 18th, 2019 @ 6:19pm PST—

"We finally talked to the Mercy Air operations base where the helicopter flies out of and they informed us that Air Methods headquarters has told them not provide comment or access to the pilot who was talking on the radio and spotted the object. They told us Air Methods wants any inquiries sent to their headquarters. The problem is that I had reached out to them and have heard nothing back in well over 24 hours. I will keep trying to contact them directly, but at this point it looks as if they are actively trying to avoid discussing the event with us."

Read Rogoway's entire article HERE.

Scott Pelley's "Brain Trauma Suffered By U.S. Diplomats Abroad Could Be Work of Hostile Foreign Government"

What follow are choice excerpts from a 3-17-19 article entitled "Brain Trauma Suffered By U.S. Diplomats Abroad Could Be Work of Hostile Foreign Government" by CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley:

"In 2016 and '17, 25 Americans, including CIA agents, who worked in the U.S. Embassy in Cuba suffered serious brain injuries causing impaired vision and memory loss among other persistent symptoms. Now, we've learned that at least 15 American officials in China suffered unexplained brain trauma soon after. The FBI is now investigating whether these Americans were attacked by a mysterious weapon that leaves no trace. Over many months we have been collecting evidence of what appears to be a hostile foreign government's plan to target Americans serving abroad and their families."

Skipping down further in the article...

"The State Department declined an interview, but in a statement to 60 Minutes it said, 'We will continue to provide our colleagues the care they need, regardless of their diagnosis or the location of their medical evacuation.' A State Department official told us that the Cuba patients are victims of an attack. But State hasn't made the same determination for the China patients. The department has asked the National Academies of Science to assist in the medical investigation.

"The FBI is also investigating. Intelligence sources told us that in addition to Cuba and China, Russia is a suspect. But if microwaves were used, the technology is not rare. It could be more than one country is using it. U.S. Intelligence is still debating what caused the injuries."

To read the entire article, click HERE.

The Cricket Conspiracy

Back on 8-14-17, in a post entitled "Covert Sonic Weapons Deployed in Cuba," I first mentioned a series of unexplained attacks in Cuba that "left a group of American diplomats in Havana with severe hearing loss attributed to a covert sonic device," according to journalists Matthew Lee and Michael Weissenstein. In January of this year, USA Today reported that the solution to these mysterious assaults was none other than... crickets. Yes, crickets induced "severe hearing loss" in at least five U.S. diplomats despite the fact that all firsthand descriptions of these attacks indicate they were caused by the same type of nonlethal weaponry used by covert American operatives to torture my friend Dion Fuller in San Diego back in 2003 and 2004. (For a detailed account of Dion's experiences, see my 2015 nonfiction book CHAMELEO). Here's an excerpt from N'dea Yancey-Bragg's 1-8-19 USA Today article entitled "Remember That Mysterious 'Attack' on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba? Scientists Think It Was Crickets":

Beginning in late 2016, a mysterious illness befell U.S. diplomatic personnel and family members in Havana.

Specialists said the symptoms, described by those afflicted as “buzzing, grinding metal, piercing squeals and humming,” were similar to the brain dysfunction caused by concussions.

Some U.S. officials suspected the “health attacks” were intentional, perhaps perpetrated by the Cuban or Russian governments, but new research has implicated another culprit: Very loud crickets.

Scientists analyzed a recording of the sound released by The Associated Press in 2017 and found it matched the chirp of the Indies short-tailed cricket Anurogryllus celerinictus “in duration, pulse repetition rate, power spectrum, pulse rate stability, and oscillations per pulse.”

This particular kind of cricket is typically found in the Caymans, Florida Keys and Jamaica, but researchers Alexander L Stubbs of the University of California Berkeley, and Fernando Montealegre-Z of the University of Lincoln in England believe they may also be present in Cuba.

The researchers noted that the pulse structure of the AP recording initially didn’t match outdoor field recordings of the insects, but when the cricket call was played indoors, “the interaction of reflected sound pulses yields a sound virtually indistinguishable from the AP sample.”

They said their research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, provides “strong evidence” that crickets produced the sound on the recording. However, their findings highlight the need for more rigorous research on what caused the diplomat’s ailments and does not rule out the possibility of another form of attack, according to the report.

To read the entire USA Today article, click HERE.

Jennifer Senior on "The Perils of Cancel Culture"

I'd like to offer a special tip of the hat to Elizabeth Hand (author of GENERATION LOSS, AVAILABLE DARK, and HARD LIGHT, and many other excellent novels) for alerting me to Jennifer Senior's illuminating 3-8-10 New York Times Opinion piece entitled "Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture," which Hand describes as "an excellent piece [...] on social media's disturbing call-out culture and its power over publishing, in particular YA novels."

Here's a key quote from Senior's article: 

"The die-hards in this army of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite: If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors."

To read Senior's entire article, click HERE.

"Dymaxion Love" in HYPNOS MAGAZINE

My latest crime against humanity, "DYMAXION LOVE" (6,400 words), has just been published in the new issue of HYPNOS MAGAZINE (Volume 8, Issue 1).  

As you can see below, "Dymaxion Love" is the penultimate story in this issue.  (I must say, I never thought I'd be sharing a Table of Contents page with Oliver Onions!)  

If you want to read my twisted new tale "Dymaxion Love," I urge you to purchase a copy of HYPNOS by clicking right HERE! 

More information about HYPNOS MAGAZINE:  

"Founded in 2012, HYPNOS MAGAZINE strives to promote the best weird fiction in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Machen.

"Dismayed by the state of contemporary weird fiction and the lack of respect it has fostered, we seek to encourage bold, thought-provoking literature that looks beyond the vampires, werewolves, and goblins that have become the staples of the genre."

Lyndon LaRouche, R.I.P. (1922-2019)

Lyndon LaRouche, the Weird Uncle of Late 20th and Early 21st Century American Politics, passed away on February 12th.  What follows is from Richard Severo's 2-13-19 New York Times obituary: 

Lyndon LaRouche, the quixotic, apocalyptic leader of a cultlike political organization who ran for president eight times, once from a prison cell, died on Tuesday. He was 96.

His death was announced on the website of his organization, La Rouche/Pac. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.

Defining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

He was fascinated with physics and mathematics, particularly geometry, but called concerns about climate change “a scientific fraud.”

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

Some called him a case study in paranoia and bigotry, his mild demeanor notwithstanding. One biographer, Dennis King, in “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” (1989), maintained that Mr. LaRouche and his followers were a danger to democratic institutions.

Mr. LaRouche denigrated a panoply of ethnic groups and organized religions. He railed against the “Eastern Establishment” and environmentalists, who he said were trying to wipe out the human race. Queen Elizabeth II of England was plotting to have him killed, he said. Jews had surreptitiously founded the Ku Klux Klan, he said. He described Native Americans as “lower beasts.”

Even so, Mr. LaRouche was able to develop alliances with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents. Acolytes kept Mr. LaRouche’s political machine going by peddling his tracts and magazines in airports, and by persuading relatives and friends to donate large sums to help him fight his designated enemies.

He operated through a dizzying array of front groups, among them the National Democratic Policy Committee, through which he received millions of dollars in federal matching money in his recurring presidential campaigns. His forces also sponsored candidates at the state and local levels, including for school board seats.

His movement attracted national attention, especially in 1986, when two LaRouche followers, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively, in Illinois.

Adlai E. Stevenson III, the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois that year, was appalled. He denounced the LaRouche group as “neo-Nazis” and refused to run with Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart, organizing a third-party bid instead. He, as well as the LaRouche supporters, lost to James R. Thompson, the Republican incumbent.

Some voters said they had voted for Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart because they had been endorsed by Mr. LaRouche’s National Democratic Policy Committee, which they thought was affiliated with the mainstream Democratic Party.

Critics of Mr. LaRouche said he had used that committee to deceive people abroad as well. In 1982, he managed to arrange a meeting with President José López Portillo of Mexico, evidently because Mexican officials thought Mr. LaRouche represented the Democratic Party.

“I’m as American as apple pie,” Mr. LaRouche once said.

To read Severo's article in its entirety, click HERE.  To hear LaRouche in own words, see below.... 

LaRouche Discusses the 9/11 Attack As It Unfolds

(The following interview was conducted on September 11, 2001, between Jack Stockwell, morning radio host on K-TALK radio in Salt Lake City, Utah, and 2004 Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. It was on the air from 7:15 to 9:00 A.M., Mountain Daylight Time.)