Update on Havana Microwave Attack

From Ana Swanson and Edward Wong's 12-5-20 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Report Points to Microwave ‘Attack’ as Likely Source of Mystery Illnesses That Hit Diplomats and Spies":

The most probable cause of a series of mysterious afflictions that sickened American spies and diplomats abroad in the past several years was radiofrequency energy, a type of radiation that includes microwaves, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has concluded in a report.

The conclusion by a committee of 19 experts in medicine and other fields cited “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” as “the most plausible mechanism” to explain the illness, which came to be known as Havana syndrome, though they said that they could not rule out other possible causes and that secondary factors may have contributed to symptoms, according to a copy of the report obtained by The New York Times.

The report, which was commissioned by the State Department, provides the most definitive explanation yet of the illness that struck scores of government employees, first at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016, and then in China and other countries. Many of the officers suffered from dizziness, fatigue, headaches, and loss of hearing, memory and balance, and some were forced into permanent retirement.

C.I.A. officers visiting overseas stations also experienced similar symptoms, The Times and GQ magazine reported in October. The officers were traveling to discuss countering Russia covert operations with foreign intelligence agencies, a fact that adds to suspicions that Moscow is behind the episodes.

Though couched in careful, scientific language, the new report reveals strong evidence that the incidents were the result of a malicious attack. It attributes the illnesses to “directed” and “pulsed” — rather than “continuous” — energy, implying that the victims’ exposure was targeted and not the result of more common sources of microwave energy, such as, for example, a cellphone.

It also said the committee found the immediate symptoms that patients reported — including strange sensations of pain, pressure and sound that often appeared to emanate from a particular direction, or occurred in a specific spot in a room — were more consistent with a directed “attack” of radiofrequency energy.

The committee considered other causes, like chemical exposures and infectious diseases, but said they appeared unlikely.

The report said that the variability of the incidents, which appeared to affect people in different ways, left open the possible influence of “psychological and social factors.” And it said that some of the victims may be experiencing a condition called “persistent postural-perceptual dizziness,” a nervous system disorder that produces a prolonged feeling of vertigo or unsteadiness.

The episodes have been the subject of much speculation and controversy. Many of the victims, as well as some government officials and outside scientists, have long argued that radiofrequency energy was the most likely cause, potentially the result of a weapon wielded by a foreign power.

But since 2018, the U.S. government has declined to speculate publicly on the cases, and some scientists have promoted alternate theories, like a kind of psychological illness that spread in the stressful environment of foreign missions.

Amid the controversy and confusion, some of the afflicted officers have complained that the United States has failed to support them. In several cases, the government initially refused to grant leave and provide the necessary medical care, the officers said. And with the government silent on the possibility of a foreign attack, many of the victims were left feeling that the public believed they had made it all up.

Several of the victims have accused Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other Trump administration officials of downplaying the issue in an attempt to avoid disrupting international ties. They now ask how President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his nominee for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, will respond, especially given the new scientific findings.

After lawmakers pressured the State Department for months to release the report, the agency gave it to some congressional officials and others on Thursday and Friday, asking them not to share it. The Times and NBC News separately obtained the report on Friday, and NBC earlier reported the findings. The National Academies publicly released the report Saturday evening.

“We are pleased this report is now out and can add to the data and analyses that may help us come to an eventual conclusion as to what transpired,” the State Department said in a statement on Saturday.

The department also said that “each possible cause remains speculative” and that various factors, including the committee’s lack of access to some information because of potential security concerns, “limit the scope of the report,” though “they do not lessen its value.”

For the Trump administration, acknowledging that the incidents were the result of a foreign attack could have necessitated evacuating American missions in China, disrupting an important economic relationship. The administration did take a harder approach in Cuba, which aligned with its larger goal of reversing President Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening with Havana.

The question of Moscow’s possible culpability is a thorny one, given the sensitivities around President Trump on any matters involving Russia or President Vladimir V. Putin. Moscow has denied any role, and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, has not concluded the Kremlin was responsible. But some C.I.A. analysts who are Russia experts, diplomats and scientists contend that evidence points to Moscow, which has a long history of experimenting with the technology.

The report does not point to a perpetrator, though it mentions “significant research in Russia/U.S.S.R.” on pulsed radiofrequency technology, as well as the exposure of military personnel in Eurasian communist countries to microwave radiation. The Soviet Union bombarded the American Embassy in Moscow with microwaves in the 1970s and ’80s. In a 2014 document, the National Security Agency discussed a microwave weapon used by a hostile country, which people familiar with the document said was Russia.

Mark Lenzi, a diplomatic security officer who was afflicted with the symptoms while working in Guangzhou, China, in early 2018, said that the administration’s treatment of its employees, including its efforts to “deny and cover up inconvenient scientific and medical facts,” had left him angrier at his own government than the government that injured him.

“My government looked the other way when they knew I and my family were injured,” he said. “This report is just the beginning and when the American people know the full extent of this administration’s cover-up of the radiofrequency attacks in China in particular they will be outraged.”

Mr. Lenzi has sued the State Department for disability discrimination. The Office of Special Counsel has been pursuing two investigations into the State Department’s conduct.

Some family members of the affected U.S. government employees also fell ill overseas, including Mr. Lenzi’s wife. And at least 14 Canadian citizens in Havana said they had experienced similar symptoms.

The report by the National Academies also contains a stark warning about the possibility of future episodes, and the U.S. government’s ability to detect them, or to mount a response. The fact that American government employees reported afflictions not only in Cuba and China but also in Russia and other countries raises questions about how widespread the incidents may be.

The committee was not in a position to assess “specific scenarios involving malevolent actors,” Dr. David Relman, a Stanford University professor who led the committee, wrote in a preface to the report. Yet, he said, “the mere consideration of such a scenario raises grave concerns about a world with disinhibited malevolent actors and new tools for causing harm to others.”

The report recommends that the State Department act now to establish plans and protocols so it can immediately begin an investigation if similar incidents occur.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Xenobots!

From Jonathon Keats' 12-8-20 DISCOVER MAGAZINE article entitled "Part Robot, Part Frog: Xenobots Are the First Robots Made From Living Cells":

The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, typically lives in the streams and ponds of sub-Saharan Africa, scavenging for food that it rips apart with its feet. In January, researchers at the University of Vermont and Tufts University published a report that gave the amphibian a different lot in life. They harvested its embryonic skin and heart cells and reassembled the living matter into robotic devices — transforming Xenopus into xenobot.

Xenobots are the first [???--RG] robots made completely of living materials. They’re designed on a supercomputer running software that emulates natural selection: Algorithms determine possible effective tissue configurations for a xenobot to perform a specified task, such as moving through fluids or carrying a payload. The most promising designs are sculpted with tiny forceps and cauterizing irons, then set free in petri dishes, where the specks of amphibian flesh live for about a week before decomposing. There are no electronics involved. Behaviors are programmed entirely through the structural arrangement of the pulsating heart cells held in a matrix of rigid skin cells.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Biologically Enhanced Supersoldiers

From Dan Robitzski's 12-4-20 FUTURISM article entitled "US Official Claims China Is Testing Biologically Enhanced Supersoldiers":

John Ratcliffe, the U.S. director of national intelligence, says that China is using CRISPR technology to try and gene-hack members of the military into supersoldiers.

It’s a provocative claim, and just one of many topics Ratcliffe breezed through in a Wall Street Journal op-ed he penned to argue that China is the greatest threat to the U.S. and the world. It’s certainly possible that human experimentation happened — the Chinese government likely supported the “CRISPR Baby” debacle from 2018, or at least tolerated it — but NBC reports that the ability to use CRISPR to augment human abilities likely still eludes even top labs.

Ratcliffe wrote that he found the alleged supersoldier CRISPR research reprehensible.

“U.S. intelligence shows that China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities,” Ratcliffe wrote. “There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power.”

But neither Ratcliffe nor the CIA — nor the Chinese government — responded to NBC‘s request for details. And the U.S. military has done plenty of supersoldier research of its own — albeit without trying to create superpowers through CRISPR, as far as we know.

To read the entire story, click HERE.

Scientists Push for Neuro-rights

From Avi Asher-Schapiro's 12-3-20 REUTERS article entitled "'This Is Not Science Fiction,' Say Scientists Pushing for 'Neuro-rights'":

Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday.

A set of “neuro-rights” should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York’s Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards.

Five rights would guard the brain against abuse from new technologies - rights to identity, free will and mental privacy along with the right of equal access to brain augmentation advances and protection from algorithmic bias, the group says.

“If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people,” Yuste said during an online panel at the Web Summit, a global tech conference.

“This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully.”

Neurotechnology has the potential to alter the mechanisms that make people human, so putting it in a “human rights framework” is appropriate, he added.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD

I'm very proud to announce that my second novel, BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD (a dark fantasy set in Los Angeles during the late 1980s), will be published by Crossroad Press on April 6, 2021. Here's the pitch:

It’s the late 1980s, and Michael Fenton, editor of Ramboona (a magazine dedicated to forgotten films), is attempting to track down the lost test footage from the 1931 Frankenstein produced by Universal Studios. It’s the holy grail of horror film aficionados: the twenty-minute reel in which Bela Lugosi portrays Frankenstein’s Monster instead of Boris Karloff, who would go on to make cinematic history with his portrayal of Mary Shelley’s creation. In his attempt to locate this fifty-year-old film canister, Mike is led down a labyrinth of blind alleys amidst the topsy-turvy wonderland of Los Angeles and environs.

When we first encounter Mike, he’s making a pilgrimage to Lugosi’s final resting place at Holy Cross Cemetery. This is where he meets Lucy Szilagyi, a struggling young actress who happens to be visiting Sharon Tate’s grave (located only a few tombstones away from Lugosi’s). Lucy, a film buff herself, joins Mike in his quixotic search, helping him track down such curious, real-life characters as Maila Nurmi (an out-of-work actress known more famously as “Vampira”), Bela Lugosi, Jr., science fiction novelist Curt Siodmak, and Manly P. Hall (master hypnotist, mystic, Lugosi confidant, and author of a strange occult encyclopedia entitled The Secret Teachings of All Ages). All of these individuals have valuable pieces of information that could lead Mike to the hidden location of the lost test reel. Lugosi’s grave is also where Mike encounters a mysterious old man who promises him the footage he so desperately desires. But the man offers the item only at a most unusual price….

Bela Lugosi’s Dead is one-third detective story, one-third Hollywood ghost story, and one-third pulp adventure tale….

"In Robert Guffey's latest and greatest novel, dreams of old movies and nightmares of classic horror rack into sharp focus through the lens of a brave film historian, one determined to squint clearly at fleeting grains of film through the shifting sands of time. Never has the truth of Hollywood been so well revealed through fiction. As a result, Bela Lugosi's Dead delightfully and definitively proves that Bela Lugosi isn't dead."

 

--Gary D. Rhodes, author of LUGOSI and TOD BROWNING'S DRACULA

You can pre-order the book right HERE.

MEDIUM: "The Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2020"

If you want some last minute Christmas ideas, head on over to MEDIUM and read my latest article, "THE TOP TEN GRAPHIC NOVELS OF 2020"!!!

Steve Erickson on "Bad Men Making Great Art"

From Steve Erickson's 11-2-20 LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE article entitled "In the Current Political Moment, Richard Wagner’s Influence Is More Relevant—and Problematic—Than Ever":

On the eve of an election where the choice is nothing less than democracy versus neo-fascism, you don’t have to know much more about Richard Wagner than I do to find Alex Ross’s Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) timely. Ross makes a persuasive case that the nineteenth-century German composer wasn’t just the most influential artist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but maybe the most influential artist ever in any form. Wagner’s operas plumbed the primal and dreamy, the heroic and pagan. If you’ve ever been to the movies or watched TV, then you know Wagner better than you think: His music has scored everything from the ride of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation to the helicopter raid at dawn in Apocalypse Now. And his massive productions were so dramatically grand and so epic in scale (up to 15 hours long) that while it might be overstating things to say there would be no Star Wars or Lord of the Rings without them, neither would have the same enduring resonance. Wagner was a towering influence on everyone from Joyce to Dalí to Sontag, and although Ross doesn’t, I would argue that the Beatles’ Abbey Road has Wagnerian flourishes.

Just as Wagner begins to loom as a heroic figure of his own, however, we run up against the complicated realities of Wagner’s shadow and the man who cast it [...].

In the current American Reich, when woke Red Brigades police our collective taste, good faith easily gives way to bad. Alex Ross’s Wagnerism, which might otherwise seem a bit rarefied if not arcane, confronts the moment’s dilemma of how to think about bad men making great art that inspires both more great art and unfathomable evil. It’s a dilemma without an answer other than to embrace the contradictions instead of trying to resolve them. Art doesn’t lend itself to clear-cut conclusions any more than do the men and women who make it or write books about it.

To read the entire article, click HERE.