Home » Posts tagged 'crickets'
Tag Archives: crickets
Try 2021
Henri Rousseau The Flamingoes 1907
Regularly a few hundred are shaved off, and then they slowly revert back to just below that number. I don’t even care anymore. No more than I care about Facebook shutting down our account without any explanation. Let them be. We should not depend on these people, that’s just a bad idea.
Anyway, so Dave was reacting to a mail I sent him of the October 26 Debt Rattle -he’s always remained on one of my mailing lists- and that’s how we started talking again. Dave:
I have never spent a year so completely baffled by the world as this year. Nothing makes sense to me without invoking some seriously bizarre thinking (which I am not averse to doing.)
My reaction:
The game hasn’t even started yet. We’re still just warming up. Still, baseball is not the right analogy, that’s a civilized sport, this will feel much more like gladiators in the Forum fighting to the death. Biden has neither the energy not the -killer- instinct for that.
Yes, Dave, like Jim Kunstler, and like me, and many other people, have changed our views and positions on American politics quite a bit over the past 4-5 years. Mostly independently of each other. We just recognize the same patterns. I think it’s fair to say that we all realize that there may be a million things wrong with Donald Trump, but there’s a lot more wrong with collusion to unseat a fairly elected president.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
‘State-of-the-Art Weaponry’ Turns Out to Be Crickets
‘State-of-the-Art Weaponry’ Turns Out to Be Crickets
What was purported by the Trump administration to have been widespread illnesses of US diplomats in Cuba resulting from the use – by some nefarious state actor – of advanced acoustic warfare weaponry, turned out to be caused by the mating calls of crickets. In response to accusations that a sonic weapon was targeting US personnel in Cuba, the Trump administration withdrew half of its staff from the US embassy in Havana and expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from their embassy in Washington, DC. During 2017, some 26 US diplomats complained of nausea, headaches, vision problems, cognitive disorders, and other maladies brought about by a high-pitched drone sound they experienced at their homes and hotels.
In fact, a detailed study of the phenomenon revealed that the culprits were not the Russian, Chinese, or Cuban intelligence services but Indies short-tailed cricket, scientifically known as “Anurogryllus celerinictus.” The male mating call of these pesky nighttime creatures is at 7 kilohertz, just the right frequency to cause discomfort and sleeplessness for some humans.
Two biologists – Dr. Fernando Montealegre-Zapata of the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom and Alexander Stubbs of the University of California – ran comparative studies of the recordings taken of the suspect sounds affecting the Americans in Cuba and those of the Indies cricket. The result is that the acoustic pulse repetition rate, frequency harmonics, and duration matched almost completely with those of the Indies short-tailed cricket. The slight variance between the sounds was due to recordings taken outside and those taken indoors, with echoes caused by walls and floors accounting for the slight difference. The two scientists’ initial findings received favorable peer reviews from their academic colleagues.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
