The Havana Syndrome, Venezuela and the Discombobulator

 "Phasers On Stun"
William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, 1966 or 2265

Over the past two weeks, I noticed three news stories that seemed connected, although they were presented separately by the news media. 

1) In an exclusive story, CNN reported that during the final days of the Biden administration, the Homeland Security Investigations agency purchased a working “Havana Syndrome” device from an undisclosed seller for more than ten million dollars.  The device was said to be a pulsed electromagnetic weapon.  The report said that the device was small enough to fit inside of a backpack, and contained Russian components, although it was not Russian in origin.

2) During the Trump administration’s Venezuela raid and abduction of Nicolas Maduro, a Venezuelan soldier reported experiencing sudden, debilitating symptoms during the attack without an apparent cause.  The soldier’s account indicated that hundreds of Venezuelan soldiers had been affected, including the 20 soldiers tasked with protecting Maduro.  Reported symptoms included concussion-like head pain, mass paralysis, bleeding from the nose and vomiting blood.  The Venezuelan soldier believed that US forces had used a sonic energy weapon. 

3) In an interview following the Venezuelan raid, President Trump bragged about using a new, secret weapon.  Trump said, “They won’t let me talk about it”, but he talked about it nonetheless.  Trump called it “The Discombobulator”, and said it prevented the Venezuelan military from mounting a significant defense during the raid.  One interpretation of the president’s rambling statement would be that the US weapon prevented equipment from functioning, but the term “Discombobulator” suggests that it is an anti-personnel weapon. 

Havana Syndrome
The Havana Syndrome is a collection of milder symptoms than reported in the Venezuelan raid. Incidents were reported in over a dozen international locations from 2016 to the present, centering on embassies and nearby hotels.  Victims were generally U.S. and Canadian diplomats and their families, although White House employees also reported similar symptoms.  In all, over 1000 people in a dozen international locations reported experiencing dizziness, balance problems, head pain, cognitive problems and insomnia, often (but not always) accompanied by a loud buzzing sound.  Symptoms sometimes persisted for months.  The reality of the syndrome was widely debated, and U.S. intelligence services published a report in 2023 discrediting the idea that the syndrome resulted from a weapon.

Existing Anti-Personnel Energy Weapons
The U.S. has conducted research and made modest progress in developing anti-personnel energy weapons.  Existing weapons include an electromagnetic weapon which produces heating and skin pain, and a low-frequency sonic weapon of dubious effectiveness.  The reported symptoms would be a step-change in the effectiveness of an energy weapon, putting it into the class of a Star Trek phaser on the stun setting. 

Reliability of Reporting
Both the report from Venezuela and the CNN report on the device acquisition are single-source reports, though they have been widely disseminated.  There is a possibility that the entire story is disinformation.  But the effectiveness of the Venezuelan raid cannot be denied, and the president’s braggadocio seems characteristic of a real thing.

Implications
The idea that the U.S. possesses a broad-beam anti-personnel energy weapon that can potentially strike targets inside buildings has profound implications. Depending on range, such a weapon would be decisive in a trench-warfare situation such as the war in Ukraine; it would allow U.S. forces to conduct leadership abductions in almost any country; it would allow terrorists to access almost any site with normal security, including banks, museums, gold repositories, military installations, and conventional or nuclear power sites.  Such a weapon would give authorities the absolute ability to quell popular uprisings through crowd control. 

Government employees whose claims of harm from the Havana syndrome are now pressing for their claims to be reconsidered. 

If there is any credibility to these reports, I suspect every military in the world is abruptly pouring millions into new research, and every intelligence agency in the world is scouring the world to buy another device.  I’m sure that it would be possible to create shielding for an electromagnetic weapon, but researchers must first know how the device works.  And deploying shielding widely might prove impractical.

Another piece of the science fiction future may have arrived.
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The image of Captain Kirk with a phaser was generated by AI without permission and not for profit.  
The image will be removed upon request. 
References
Device Acquisition
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/13/politics/havana-syndrome-device-pentagon-hsi
https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/havana-syndrome-device-government

Venezuelan Impact
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2026/01/13/epic-win-us-secret-weapon-may-have-incapacitated-maduros-guards/
https://www-wionews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.wionews.com/world/-bleeding-noses-blood-vomiting-mass-paralysis-did-us-deploy-sonic-weapons-in-venezuela-operation-to-extract-maduro-havana-syndrome-lawyer-says-1768296794658/amp

White House Reporting
https://thehill-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/thehill.com/policy/defense/5706502-trump-discombobulator-weapon-venezuela/amp/

"Abundance" Book Review

There is a widespread feeling that the American economy is broken.  Data shows that the percentage of families living paycheck to paycheck has risen from around 30% in the late 1990s to 50% to 60% today.  Rising costs and stagnant wages have lowered the standard of living for working families, even as per-capita GDP has reached new records in a linear ascent.  In many aspects of society, we are acting as if we are impoverished instead of wealthy.  Both federal and state government agencies have laid off workers, services are impaired, maintenance of infrastructure is declining, homelessness is rising, etc.  What is wrong?

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson recently wrote the book “Abundance” to address issues with the broken economy.  The book expresses the core ideas of supply-side progressivism, a movement originating in about 2010 and building momentum until today.  There's a Wikipedia Page for supply-side progressivism; check it out.

The term “Abundance” is now being widely used by Democratic candidates for Congress, though I suspect few of them have actually read the book.  “Abundance” may become the main campaign theme for the 2026 mid-term elections, particularly for centrist Democrats.  Abundance seems an odd choice as the unifying rallying cry for Democrats – because the main message is a confession that Republicans were right when they said that government regulations were strangling the economy.  

The central thesis of Abundance is that limitations in the supply of goods and services have driven prices higher and impaired American prosperity.  Klein and Thompson lay out the argument that excessive government regulation has been the root cause of those shortages.  Specific examples include goods and services which have increased in price more than the rate of inflation – housing, health care, higher education, and other key necessities, including energy, food and transportation.  For me, there’s an uncomfortable echo of Reagan-era supply side economics, which proposed that lower tax rates, in combination with reduced regulation, would bring prosperity to consumers and higher government revenue.  The theory is largely discredited by current day economists.  

Klein and Thompson title their chapters Beyond Scarcity, Grow, Build, Invent, and Deploy.  The first chapters examine the impact of regulatory over-reach on particular aspects of the American economy.  The final chapter, “Deploy”, emphasizes the role that government should play in encouraging the development and commercialization of new technologies, after invention.  

Klein and Thompson give short shrift to the societal benefits of the last 60 years of government regulations.  We now have cleaner air and water; fatalities per air-travel passenger-mile have fallen by a staggering 99%; fatalities per vehicle-travel passenger-mile have fallen by about 66%; worker safety is greatly improved across many industries; food and medical safety is far better in the United States than in other nations; etc.   But they are correct that there is a cost to regulations, and those costs have not always been weighed accurately against the benefits.

To use a Millennial idiom, one could say that Klein and Thompson are *not wrong*, damning them with faint praise.  I believe the book is correct that policy choices about some regulations have led to scarcity, which then led to rising costs.  Housing and medical treatment are the best examples.  On the other hand, abundance theory is woefully incomplete in describing or remedying the problems with the economy.  

The primary problem with the economy is demonstrably not on the supply side.  In 2025, Moody's Analytics reported that the top 10% of households by earnings account for 50% of consumer spending.  That means that the demand-side price signal to the economy is to produce more luxury goods, and disproportionally fewer goods for working-class households.  The problem behind the disproportional economic production is wealth inequality. 

Adjusted for inflation, personal earnings (wages and salaries) have increased by only about 12% since 1980, while per capita GDP has more than doubled, according to data from the Federal Reserve Database.  Wage stagnation is the primary reason that working-class Americans are being left behind, not limited supplies of needed goods and services. 

The reason for wage stagnation is also pretty clear.  Over the course of my career (1980 – 2006), I saw computer automation eliminate many good-paying jobs.  Managers were issued PCs to do correspondence and clerical work, and secretaries were re-assigned or fired.  A geologist with a workstation could do the work of three to five geologists working with pencils and drafting tables, so 2/3rds of the geologists were fired.  Workstations produced high-quality graphics, so the entire drafting and reprographics departments were fired.  Enterprise-wide accounting software reduced the number of accountants in my department from 28 to 1; the other 27 were fired.  The Internet and internal information archives eliminated the need for information specialists.  Around 1990, management set a goal of reducing professional headcount from 3000 to 1000 within a decade, and achieved that goal.  There was an aspirational goal to reduce the headcount to 300.  The company has now been sold, so it appears that they achieved that goal as well.  As Thomas Piketty wrote, technology and capital replace labor.  

There is a belief, often cited in articles about economics and technology, that new technologies *always* produce new jobs.  I saw another article citing that dogma two days ago, in an article about AI.  The argument is empirical, and to my mind, began to break down with the introduction of the PC in 1980.  It may be true that the introduction of the automobile created more jobs for buggy-whip manufacturers, but that will not necessarily be true about the replacement of lawyers by AI.  Empiricism is the weakest scientific argument, because it provides no fundamental explanation for why it is true, and it provides no predictive power for situations outside of the envelope of prior experience.  The future is always outside of the envelope of prior experience. 

The goal of many Democratic policies of the past 60 years has been to address the symptoms, rather than the cause, of economic dysfunction.  Higher minimum wage, pro-union regulations, food assistance, rental assistance, child-care tax credits, health insurance subsidies, etc., are all band-aids, not solutions to our economic problems.  Neither party has been able to develop policies that improve the fundamental productivity of all individual workers and the power of those workers to demand greater compensation for their work.  [Edit:  In recent decades, workers have achieved stunning increases in productivity, but that has only resulted in higher corporate profits, not greater compensation.  I'm now writing a new post titled "The Paradox of Productivity".]

Conclusion
The book Abundance focuses on supply-side issues with the economy which hurt the prosperity of working-class Americans.  The authors are not wrong, but neglect very real demand-side constraints.  

The economy is producing goods according to price signals from consumers.  That's how it is supposed to work.  But working class consumers have been left behind in compensation for their work, and the economy is disproportionally serving wealthy households.  The resulting shortages of basic household goods and services (including the houses themselves) have impaired the prosperity of the average American family.  For the first time in the nation's history (excepting wars and the depression), a generation of Americans is worse off economically than their parents.

Assuming that either party produces policies which encourage greater productivity and prosperity for the working class, it will take time to re-tool the economy.  It takes time for the price signal to be recognized, for builders to hire and train carpenters, for factories to be built, for teaching hospitals to be accredited and doctors to be trained, etc.  It will take over a decade to produce results perceptible to consumers, and that exceeds the time-frame of the political cycle.  

In my opinion, there are no clear policy fixes for the problems plaguing the 21st century economy.  Abundance, as a book and as a policy goal, is a good start.  Identifying demand-side solutions must also be part of the policy program.  Those changes need to be expedited as much as possible to deliver tangible results.  But after 2028, Democrats must not fail to deliver on the idea that Americans deserve prosperity, or we will face a return to the populist politics of grievance and blame which characterizes the Trump administration. 

References
Abundance, 2025, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, 304 pp. 

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earners-make-up-half-of-us-retail-spending