January 12, 2023
El Paquete Semanal (‘The Weekly Package’) or ‘El Paquete’ is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans, as Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years. El Paquete Semanal has its own page that is running in the United States, where one could view its contents and is consistently updated every week.
The Cuban Government has also been investing in more internet access for the people, with the use of ETECSA, a service that the citizens could pay 1 CUC (equivalent to an American Dollar) for one hour of internet use. This has become the most popular method for people to become connected to the internet, mainly used to connect to social media, such as Facebook.
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December 21, 2022
Active measures is political warfare conducted by the Soviet and modern Russian governments to influence the course of world events. It includes offensive programs such as espionage, propaganda, sabotage, and assassination.
Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of Foreign Counter Intelligence for the KGB, described active measures as ‘the heart and soul of the Soviet intelligence’: ‘Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.’
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December 13, 2022
Acoustic Kitty is a project launched by the C.I.A. Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s, which intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies.
In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat’s ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull, and a thin wire into its fur. This would allow the cat to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings. Due to problems with distraction, the cat’s sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation. Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, said Project Acoustic Kitty cost about $20 million.
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December 6, 2022
The Ghost Army was a United States Army tactical deception unit during World War II officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. The 1100-man unit was given a unique mission: to deceive Hitler’s forces and mislead them as to the size and location of Allied forces, while giving the actual units elsewhere time to maneuver.
Activated on January 20, 1944, the Ghost Army arrived in Europe in May shortly before D-Day, putting on a “traveling road show” utilizing inflatable tanks, sound trucks, fake radio transmissions, scripts and pretense. Their story was kept a secret for more than 50 years after the war, until it was declassified in 1996. In February 2022, members of the Ghost Army were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, citing their unique and highly distinguished service.
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November 16, 2022
A fatberg is a rock-like mass of waste matter in a sewer system formed by the combination of flushed non-biodegradable solids, such as wet wipes, and fat, oil and grease (FOG) deposits. The handling of FOG waste and the buildup of its deposits are a long-standing problem in waste management, with ‘fatberg’ a more recent neologism.
Giant fatbergs have blocked sewers in London, New York, Denver, Valencia, and Melbourne and are becoming more prevalent with the rise in usage of disposable (so-called ‘flushable’) cloths. Several prominent examples were discovered in the 2010s in Great Britain, their formation accelerated by aging Victorian sewers. Fatbergs are costly to remove, and have given rise to public awareness campaigns about flushable waste.
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November 13, 2022
Tafheet (also known as hajwalah or Saudi drifting) is an Arab street racing subculture that involves repeatedly sliding around on a straight road at high speed, drifting sideways, and recovering with opposite lock, often with little or no concern for safety. It began in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates in the 1970s. The cars are generally non-modifiedand are sometimes stolen or rented cars.
The technique does not involve recognized motorsport skills such as high-speed cornering using power slides. Many videos and compilations of the minor and horrific accidents that result are posted online.
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September 15, 2022
A pretendian (portmanteau of pretend and Indian) is a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by claiming to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native ancestors. The term is a pejorative colloquialism, and if used without evidence could be considered defamatory.
As a practice, being a pretendian is considered an extreme form of cultural appropriation, especially if that individual then asserts that they can represent, and speak for, communities they do not belong to. It is sometimes also referred to as a form of ethnic fraud or race shifting.
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September 12, 2022
Mr. Big (sometimes known as the ‘Canadian technique’) is a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases (usually murder).
Police officers create a fictitious grey area or criminal organization and then seduce the suspect into joining it. They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts (e.g., delivering goods, credit card scams, selling guns) for which they are paid. Once the suspect has become enmeshed in the criminal gang they are persuaded to divulge information about their criminal history, usually as a prerequisite for being accepted as a member of the organization.
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August 17, 2022
In corpus linguistics, a hapax [hah-paks] legomenon [luh-gaa-muh-naan] (sometimes abbreviated to hapax, plural hapaxes) is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text.
The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author’s works but more than once in that particular work. Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek: ‘being said once.’
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July 1, 2022
Knucklebones, also known as scatter jacks, snobs, astragalus, tali, dibs, fivestones, jacks, or jackstones, among many other names, is a game of dexterity played with a number of small objects that are thrown up, caught, and manipulated in various manners. It is ancient in origin and is found in various cultures worldwide.
The name ‘knucklebones’ is derived from the Ancient Greek version of the game, which uses the astragalus (a bone in the ankle, or hock) of a sheep. However, different variants of the game from various cultures use other objects, including stones, seashells, seeds, and cubes.
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June 28, 2022
Democratic backsliding has been ongoing in the U.S. since the late 2010s. The V-Dem Institute’s electoral democracy index score for the United States peaked in 2015 and declined sharply after 2016, for which year it was also downgraded to ‘flawed democracy’ by the Economist Intelligence Unit in its annual ‘Democracy Index’ report. Both V-Dem and Freedom House downgraded the United States in 2018.
Iranian–German sociologist Behrouz Alikhani cites the government following the interests of global corporations rather than citizens and loosening of campaign finance laws, especially the ‘Citizens United’ decision, to enable the wealthy greater influence in politics. Political scientist Wendy Brown argued in 2006 that the United States was de-democratizing because of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. In a 2021 book, historian Karen J. Greenberg argued that policies adopted during the war on terror enabled later democratic backsliding under the Trump administration.
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May 23, 2022
The socialist fraternal kiss was a special form of greeting between socialist leaders. The act demonstrated the special connection that exists between socialist countries, consisting of an embrace, along with a series of three kisses on alternate cheeks. In rare cases, when the two leaders considered themselves exceptionally close, the kisses were given on the mouth rather than on the cheeks.
The fraternal kiss became famous via Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, who were photographed exercising the ritual. The photograph became widespread and it was subsequently reproduced into a graffiti painting on the Berlin Wall named ‘My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.’
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