[Music] [Music] with everything going on in the world today a lot of people are asking a lot of questions most of which kind of come back to the same overarching question what is going on today we will attempt to provide one answer to that question i say one answer because there is no one answer to the world's problems but maybe one answer might help us identify some solutions to the problems at hand and that answer could lie within the idea of fifth generation warfare if only the idea itself wasn't so much of a paradox so what is fifth generation warfare well that's the trouble isn't it you can pause the video and go google the term fifth generation warfare and you might find some information or a wikipedia article that does a poor job at explaining what it is chances are you're not easily going to find a good definition for it so we will have to come at this topic indirectly by first talking about the first four generations of warfare and be advised a lot of this stuff is really hard to understand it even gets right down to the philosophy of the universe itself so thinking about this topic is not for the faint of heart for the first four generations of warfare we can think of these topics as different ages of warfare all separated by technology and innovation more or less the first generation of warfare is pretty simple it's what we think of when we think of ancient warfare first gen warfare is characterized by certain tactics like the phalanx or line and column attacks of large armies clashing together on open battlefields this is the first real categorization of warfare in which nation states or groups or societies acting as nation-states fought against each other over time as technology progressed and allowed humans to kill each other more efficiently the second generation of warfare was born technologies such as rifled weapons machine guns and significant developments in the field of artillery for this era of warfare think world war one this is really where the term modern warfare comes into play where technological developments forced radical changes in the field of warfare gone were the days where large long lines of troops advanced over open ground welcome to the trenches but as we know following the carnage of world war one we have the interwar years the years between the first and second world wars during this time humanity experienced yet more technological growth and again developed a third generation of warfare we went very quickly from the sopwith camel and the zeppelin to the messerschmitt and the b-17 flying fortress and the technological developments of the inner warriors were quite astounding and occurred very rapidly even within the field of aviation this the bristol f2 became this the spitfire in less than nine years but in this era of warfare we also have developments on the ground namely by a little thing called the vegans creek maneuver warfare also called blitzkrieg by those who find bevegan's creek unpronounceable using speed and maneuverability to rapidly reach objectives in conjunction with a highly mobile infantry and further developments in combined arms warfare the third generation of warfare gives us world war ii but in the final days of world war ii a new war was building the nuclear weapon and its use in combat was one of the most important events in human history and as a result the cold war developed conflict in an atomic age in which conflicts existed but took the form of proxy wars this is when technological developments change the nature of warfare yet again this is the era of stealth instead of using brute force using precision guided munitions instead of carpet bombing campaigns remember we're still in the third generation of warfare still in the world war two mentality for conflicts like korea the vietnam war the persian gulf war and even the later iraq war the third generation of warfare encompasses the winning hearts and minds concepts we know all too well new toys like stealth bombers and satellites changed a lot but the end goals and the strategy used to achieve those goals was very similar as to how the majority of world war ii was fought but one of these wars is not like the other again hinting at the academic squabbling that occurs when trying to define these things so to explain that let's jump to the fourth generation of warfare the fourth gen of warfare can be defined in a single word insurgency and this is where things start becoming political and the amateur historian starts running into some problems with the research for instance one of the first academics to talk about 4th generation warfare is william s lind lind who is the most prolific writer on 4th gen warfare even has his wikipedia page slathered with politics we see that on his own page he is defined as a conservative why does that matter if we're talking about warfare doctrine he is defined by his politics first in his work second and scrolling down the page under the criticism section we have the very first complaints from the southern poverty law center so yeah there you go can't really get any reliable information from wikipedia anymore an idea which is thick with irony considering the topic interestingly enough it looks like most of his criticism comes from him linking his thoughts on warfare doctrine to cultural marxism which explains everything can't talk about communism or marxism in today's world or point out its problems without being labeled as a far-right extremist which is exactly what seems to have happened here too but anyway if you dig deep enough you will find one of len's thoughts on 4th gen warfare in which he defines it as when the state loses its monopoly in war he goes on to say that all over the world state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents such as al qaeda hamas hezbollah and the revolutionary armed forces of colombia almost everywhere the state is losing fourth generation warfare is also marked by a return to a world of cultures not merely states in conflict we now find ourselves facing the christian west's oldest and most steadfast opponent islam of course linde wrote this in the context of speaking about the then current u.s wars in the middle east but the interesting thing to note is that these wars have been occurring for a long time like i mentioned when explaining third gen warfare there is a bit of academic squabbling that goes on for instance take the vietnam war here you have a conflict that exhibits two styles of warfare in the years since vietnam has become the infamous poster child for that deadly eye word insurgency a disturbing number of people do not know that the vietnam war was far more conventional than we think we think the word vietnam and images of the vietcong come to mind u.s soldiers patrolling through the jungles and getting ambushed around every corner but there was this thing called the north vietnamese army which was a legitimate conventional military force no one knows about this more than the military aviation communities entire generations of military aviators have been trained with doctrine developed from the forgotten air war of vietnam the entire concept of the wild weasels and the doctrine of the suppression of enemy air defenses is a massive part of modern warfare from iraq to bosnia to right now in ukraine but at the same time the conventional third generation war was raging in north vietnam in cambodia and laos some dudes in black pajamas were defining the fourth generation of warfare which at last brings us to the fifth generation of warfare and here's where we start running into problems again because academics cannot agree on whether or not fifth generation warfare even exists up until this moment warfare has been defined by what some have called the theory of sequential emergence which is just a fancy way of saying that the first generation of warfare led to the second and the lessons learned during the second gen led to the third and so on daniel abbott came up with this graphic which indicates that the generations of war build upon one another and exist at the same time each progressive generation of warfare does not totally replace the generation before it but rather builds on it which allows for lesser developed styles of warfare to exist and be conducted at the same time in other words if your primary military operation is counterinsurgency you can still have conventional third or even second generation conflicts occurring simultaneously but the fifth generation of warfare seems to break this mold it seems like most people who talk and argue about fifth generation warfare are at least united on one thing fifth gen warfare does not really adhere to this progressive generation model so let's address some of these theories and try to piece together what fifth generation warfare actually is like i mentioned most academics sort of agree on the first four gens of warfare however that's where the similarities end a few academics such as william lind have stated that the fifth gen of warfare is really just a collection of tactics that should be nestled under the fourth or even third generation of warfare so it really doesn't have a definition as a separate field of warfare which makes sense because he's the guy who literally wrote the book on 4th gen warfare remember history is written by humans humans which have opinions make mistakes and have other faults that's why history lies in the heart of the debate and why we need to crack open another book if we take a look at daniel abbott's book adequately titled the handbook of 5th generation warfare he states that 5th gen warfare is a war of information and perception which sounds about right but that's a really broad definition but we'll come back to that in a moment others such as the us air force see 5th generation warfare is simply an extension of the air war they see it as a sensor problem and that a military aircraft that is capable of waging 5th gen warfare will have certain sensors communication suites and other various electronics and capabilities to operate in highly contested battle spaces hmm not quite what we're going for is it this is great and all but not really what we're talking about with regards to fifth generation warfare itself this is defining the fifth generation of fighter aircraft which is not the same thing but this is important to note because the term fifth generation was first coined in this context which is why a lot of military strategists think of fifth generation warfare in terms of technology or sensors which is again not the right way to think about it in fact the people's liberation army of china figured this out a long time ago in 1999 a book or really rather a white paper which became highly controversial throughout the defense community in the early 2000s two colonels of the people's liberation army wrote a book called unrestricted warfare in which they examined this topic particularly in the context of a conflict with the west in their book they state that what we are referring to are not changes in the instruments of war the technology of war the modes of war or the forms of war what we are referring to is the function of warfare so again this hints at the fifth generation of warfare not simply being a new sequential progression of war this is also noted in a very short paper published by the think tank 360 isr which mentions that we are no longer fighting a defined adversary in a defined battle space for a defined period of time instead the 5th generation mission space is a continuous global battle of narratives that will play out over both virtual and physical space and encompass a range of violent and non-violent actions and effects that's a pretty solid definition of fifth generation warfare however we again are reading this from a perspective of nation-state warfare this paper goes on to say that nations will seek to defend their borders through the extension of military influence examples include the deployment of double-digit sams and iskander missiles in kaliningrad or the build-up of defenses on hitherto unhabited islands in the south china sea therefore the experiences and lessons of third and fourth generation warfare still have great utility militaries still need to maintain and develop the capability to defeat a more traditional adversary in a technologically complex environment all of this i would agree with in the context of a nation-state's concerns with the changing nature of warfare it makes a lot of sense for defense officials to think along these lines however i'm not a cadet writing term papers at west point and though the two topics are heavily linked by the very nature of fifth generation warfare itself we here are more concerned with the civilian implications of this changing style of warfare especially considering that it is in the civilian space that this war is being fought and here the elephant begins to appear in the room this paper literally just stated that in a fifth generation war we will not be able to define our adversaries and by default the other side of that coin is that we will not know who our allies are either and so we begin to plant the seed of what very few academics want to talk about us marine corps lieutenant colonel stanton kohr got a little closer to what we're trying to get at in the marine corps gazette from january 2009 he takes a more boots on ground approach to describing the symptoms of a fifth generation warfare he writes that the battlefield will be something strange cyberspace or the cleveland water supply or wall street's banking systems or youtube the mission will be instilling fear and it will succeed lieutenant colonel core's idea is a common one among fifth generation warfare theorists and one that you often see online by various websites claiming that fifth generation warfare is simply a war of propaganda or a war for your mind or something like that and i think that that simple definition is quite accurate but not totally remember the tactics used in warfare sometimes do not reflect and are oftentimes counterintuitive to the end goal for instance psychological warfare uses various means to get a person to think a certain way about something but is that the final goal no the final goal is to get a person to act a certain way actions are more devastating than thoughts in warfare but since thoughts lead to actions we see a lot of tactics being used to affect thoughts so all of this considered we can cobble together a rough list of some characteristics of fifth generation warfare as it applies to civilian and military communities alike first up is mass cyber attacks not attributable to an actor or a nation-state this one is kind of easy as many people have stated over the years the impact of cyber warfare on everything will be extremely significant very little has been done over the years to combat the rising threat of technologies on our critical infrastructure we have already found the vulnerability of somewhat invulnerable scada systems when it comes to pol or petroleum oil and lubricant production and the massive waves of cyber attacks at the commercial and at the consumer levels have proven the vulnerabilities in these areas as well very very little can be done about cyber attacks at the consumer level especially considering the interconnected nature of everything these days but we will address this when we talk solutions so this characteristic is pretty short just think matrix level cyber stuff that you have no idea where it's coming from a major part of fifth generation warfare but still pretty easy to think about something a little more complex is mass social engineering which if conducted by a nation state the social engineering might be conducted on their own citizenry again this is not a surprising tactic as societal norms and skills change social engineering becomes a much more significant threat than in years past some could make the argument that people today are simply more stupid than in years past so social engineering works quite well whereas people in the past would never fall for the social engineering tricks of today while i myself fight the urge to agree with the cognitive decline of modern societies and cultures i begrudgingly admit that it's not as simple as people being stupid in our modern world what's more accurate is that people in today's world are vulnerable to social engineering that is different from people in the past our modern world has made many comparisons to the past akin to comparing apples and oranges which is something that militaries nation states and especially non-state actors have taken note of and that's why social engineering is a critical tool for waging a fifth generation war another attribute of a fifth generation war is that conflict will exhibit a lack of us versus them nature rather the conflict itself is often observed to be spontaneous much like with cyber attacks kinetic actions when they do occur in a fifth generation war are often seemingly random since we cannot observe the lead-up to the conflict conflagrations might pop up over a social event and might even be egged on by silent actors who seek to capitalize on the destabilization never let a good crisis go to waste right but the conflicts that do occur will not look like your normal conflicts of the past you might have some actors strike back against an adversary by targeting a third-party group to the bystanders this will make no logical sense but to the belligerents this makes perfect sense in the context of a fifth generation war that does not play by the classic us versus them mentality that's a lot of funny words so what does this mean in plain english well due to how globalization has severely warped our logistical networks it means to get ready for some weird stuff russia invades ukraine well we're gonna fight back by pouring out government purchased alcohol that taxpayers already paid for medical tyranny no longer working congratulations physically exercising at home is now white supremacy oh our economy is failing oh i know what will fix it putting uniformed u.s soldiers in elementary schools of course a lot of these examples are more accurately explained by the state seeking to increase their influence and control over the american people rather than the strange nature of 5th generation warfare but you get the point at the end of the day this illustrates the complexity and the self-fulfilling nature of a fifth generation war school teachers start teaching extreme political ideology and utter perversion in schools which makes parents upset which makes the doj upset and they start labeling parents as terrorists which makes the parents even more livid and brings people who don't even have kids into the fray along with social movements which impacts the economic sector and brings in career politicians with their own egotistical and tyrannical goals so now you've got a multi-front war going on which just keeps churning on its own because everyone is fighting everyone else and all originating from a single point of origin points of origin which are sometimes linked to the next point which is that non-state actors are becoming primary belligerents another main characteristic of fifth generation war that separates it from even fourth generation war is the nature and power of non-state actors and no we're not talking about a terror group or cell that's covered in fourth generation warfare remember 4g warfare is insurgencies right fifth generation warfare takes it to another degree by including private companies just look around the world today and we can make some pretty interesting observations with regards to so-called private companies and their relationship with other non-state actors or even the state itself i know that we keep harping on the biden regime but this is actually a very fascinating example of the unique nature of the relationship between private companies and a nation state in a 5g war for instance a lot of people have noticed the extremely overwhelming support from private companies to protect the biden regime even when the vital regime didn't really explicitly ask for it a great example of this is the media and again it's utterly fascinating right now it's pretty obvious that the biden regime is directing all mainstream media sources at some point they've openly admitted to such in the past but it's not total control it's influence the regime wants remember there is not a white house representative sitting in msnbc's studio directing the show no we now live in a world of fact checkers who have been delegated the power to broadcast propaganda and push content that supports the regime sometimes they guess right and sometimes they accidentally go against the regime thus the thousands of news articles that have been changed this is a major part of fifth generation warfare not necessarily the propaganda itself but how private companies will seek to prop up nation states and political regimes with fervor that even the regime themselves thinks is surprising in a traditional political structure or even a traditional dictatorship you would think that propaganda is directed from the top down that the nation-state is totally controlling and directing their media organizations but there's the difference in a 5g war it might be the other way around governments themselves might be the ones with the training wheels and private companies the ones with their hands on the seat saying good job obviously this is not the case everywhere but the bottom line is that in a fifth generation war the nation state is no longer the big dog in town and due to all of the information warfare that is also present in a fifth generation war governments might not even know that they aren't top dog in certain circumstances that's why people are now talking a lot about the new world order and other similar stuff in the open now because it's quite plain to see that there are non-state organizations entities and lines of effort that appear to be transnational is the world economic forum more powerful than a nation-state i don't know i guess it would depend on the nation-state i think that that organization specifically is not some kind of james bond spectre group despite the fact that they desperately want to be i think they're just another player and interest group on the board of globalization they might want to be the puppet masters of the world but they're still fighting to achieve that goal just like everyone else the great reset being their front line in this global fifth generation war of course this is all debatable but what is certain is that these guys and other non-state actors like them wield a lot of influence and though their success is not explicitly guaranteed their mere existence is exactly the type of thing that you would expect to see in a fifth generation war another unfortunate characteristic of a fifth generation war is nation states or powerful actors possessing the wrong tools for the job in other words nation states will fight the fight that fits one's weapons the united states has built a military centered around fighting insurgencies and though the pivot back to a more traditional near-pier fight has become more pressing following the pacific pivot to counter china and even the current ukrainian war the fact of the matter is that the us is best equipped to fight insurgencies so it is an insurgency they will fight even if that is not the right tool for the job this is kind of linked to what i was talking about when it comes to the lack of an us versus them nature right you're going to have nation states or powerful actors or non-state actors fighting against each other it's not really like a proxy war situation it's more like an innocent bystander or a non-affiliated group or society gets impacted by this conflict seemingly out of nowhere but due to the 5th generation warfare model it kind of makes sense like china is getting handsy in the south pacific or the insurgencies are kicking up in north africa again or russia has invaded ukraine well the solution to that is launch a counter insurgency mission here in the u.s like that's seen that's kind of like the the way we're going to see this being manifested remember ever since the military occupation of washington dc in the days leading up to and the months after the 2020 inauguration the united states government has increasingly leaned on skills technology and doctrine that was learned and developed during the global war on terror it might not be as simple as like russia invading ukraine and the us can't do anything about that so we're going to target our own people because that's what we know how to do it's not really that simple but it sure seems like it tactics like crowd control checkpoints aerial surveillance and urban warfare have already been weaponized against the american people in short the us military is already a mile down the dangerous path of treating the national mall like baghdad and treating american citizens like iraqis of course this is not happening everywhere just yet but the fact that it happened in the first place breaks the illusion that it can't happen and the undisputed fact the undeniable reality that we have already seen certain states using armed soldiers to set up checkpoints on highways and checking the identity papers of citizens well i guess we are much closer to being treated like iraqi citizens than we thought and since these comments will invariably result in a lot of discussion let's briefly follow that rabbit hole a bit further if all you have is a hammer every problem is a nail and right now the us military law enforcement and federal agencies are the hammer and the nail is the citizenry just trying to live their lives with as much freedom as possible which is the antithesis of most political regimes regardless of the political party i know a lot of military folks out there might not want to hear this because people do not want to think that they might be the bad guy after all most military service members sign up to do good things and serve their country and for the men and women that are still dedicated to that despite fighting a losing battle those service members should be an inspiration to us all for those who are fighting back and actually living up to their oath we have nothing but the highest respect but from the civilian side of things we have to acknowledge that some of their compatriots and most of their commanders and leadership do not have the same dedication to the oath they swore right now there is a sort of reckoning within the us military there is an increasing number of people in the military especially senior leadership that care nothing about service and only care about the paycheck or their stock options there is also a disturbing number of military leaders that have more sadistic motives i can only speak about my own experiences and reference the experiences of the team here but in my own career working in an s2 or s3 shop i can confidently say that the majority of commanders i have worked with i would want nowhere near a domestic u.s mission of any kind in years past it would have been out of the question to suggest that most military service members would do the wrong thing and commit immoral and illegal actions against u.s citizens on u.s soil that used to be unthinkable but these days clinging to that mentality is not the best move i'm not trying to throw shade at the us military and i don't hold animosity towards service members especially considering the hardships that they have had to go through with regards to the medical mandates but for many those medical mandates are very illuminating most service members are jabbed and because of that what am i a us citizen supposed to think about service members prospects of refusing even more serious orders if they won't fight back against the one that just requires some paperwork i'm sorry but the soldier who takes up arms to prevent me from traveling between states or prevents me from getting within a mile of the house of the people that soldier is not my friend no matter how they might feel about the mission they might complain they might know that what they are doing is wrong in every conceivable way or they might only realize that what they are doing is wrong after the fact then i empathize with soldiers in that tough situation i really do but at the end of the day they made not just one choice but a series of choices and those choices result in shifting the nature of the relationship between the citizenry and the military we can no longer let our extremely high respect for service members cloud our judgment when it comes to holding people accountable for their actions and i understand why people don't like to talk about this stuff like it's perfectly fine it's perfectly socially acceptable i guess to lay criticism at senior dod officials we can rag on lloyd austin and joe biden all day long and you know of course some people will be upset at that but for the most part those are safe targets right those are safe things to talk about where people won't get upset but don't you dare talk about cousin timmy in the national guard he's a sweet boy he's a good person and he would never do anything wrong he was just following orders actions like this make us realize that there needs to be a healthy distance between the power of the institutions and the monopoly those institutions have on violence and the citizenry and despite that the dod clearly wants there to be an adversarial relationship there there doesn't necessarily need to be there just needs to be a healthy respect between the military and the citizenry and the fact that the institutions are changing the way that we have to think about things the us government has segregated itself from the citizenry in every conceivable way but especially judicially so we would do well to recognize that so sorry for the digression i know that we're supposed to be talking about fifth generation warfare but that's the interesting part we have been talking about it this entire time i know it may not seem like it but examining the relationship between the citizenry and the institutions that are causing problems is a critical part of fighting back in a fifth generation war it was the department of defense not me that started this the dod and the current political regime brought warfare into our living rooms and onto our streets and though the price for this has yet to be paid a side effect of these actions is that people like me now have to look at this which leads us to attributing these actions as a characteristic of a fifth generation war being waged on u.s citizens it's uncomfortable it really is but at this point my own state's national guard has restricted my freedoms more than any foreign nation ever has and ignoring this fact because it makes military leadership uncomfortable or trying to provide excuses for service members choices out of respect for their service is negligent on our part remember there are a lot of other non-5th gen wars going on right now and there are a lot of threats we have to face in the world today and we need a strong military but we are not going to win those conflicts if we are stuck fighting a 5th gen war here at home which is why these uncomfortable conversations must happen so we can see how this is an insanely difficult problem to define especially with other conflicts occurring that are muddying the waters a lot of people in the field of warfare academia have struggled to define this every few years someone comes up with a new way to try to categorize it remember the whole small wars theory from a few years back this was the theory that in a post-nuclear post-mutually assured destruction age we will not have large devastating global wars but rather smaller more frequent proxy wars in far-flung regions of the earth well the ukrainian war is kind of disproving that theory right now but if you boil it down it seems like the small wars theory is really just a re-categorization of the nature of insurgencies and how technology has aided them sprinkled with a few fifth generation warfare tactics that nation states have been using since the great bog down of g watt we've got a lot of arguments here on how to define and categorize the tactics and characteristics that we observe but there's a huge problem what if we do not observe the tactics if you go up to a vending machine and it takes your dollar without giving you your bag of chips you wouldn't think anything of it yeah you'd be annoyed but you wouldn't look at it like it's a hostile action against you you wouldn't treat that as a hostile action against yourself by a nation-state or other malign actor it's just something that happens now what if it was a voting machine ah now we might start attributing a bit of malign action to something like that due to the context that's a bit more clear to define and academics can argue over what box to put election tampering in but you see our perspective on things and our historical ability to recognize what is a hostile action is heavily affected by this new age of warfare something bad happens to us and we want to attribute it to an adversary but if we can't we just suck it up and go without our bag of chips or even worse we shove another dollar into the same machine again hoping the result will change something else to consider is that a lot of people or really just the four people who care about these kinds of topics tried to apply the debates we've seen in the world of artificial intelligence which i think is interesting for instance a lot of people have been thinking about artificial intelligence and have had a lot of thoughts on it for instance elon musk is well known for his really serious thoughts on ai that do not reflect a bright future for humans stephen hawking was also well known for his views of ai stating that whereas the short-term impacts of ai depends on who controls it the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all the same line of thinking the same philosophy and reasoning can and in our opinion should be applied to this new style of warfare that's what makes 5th generation warfare something unique and not just a technological progression following 4th gen warfare here's what i think a 5th gen war will be over or it will have transitioned to something else before most people even realize it has even begun i think that we're currently fighting a global 5th gen war right now and i'm not really so concerned with what box it goes into call it 6th or 7th gen warfare i don't care and the symptoms of this war will make no sense when compared to the previous lines of thinking like how many of you out there have gone through your day and just suddenly felt anxious for no apparent reason or you psych yourself out with just your own thoughts about something or experience symptoms of depression or apathy again for no reason whatsoever or even just the feeling that something isn't quite right but you can't figure out what it is i'm certainly no psychologist but i can tell you that all of the above is exactly what i would expect a 5th generation war to look like and we are not alone in these observations i think this is why so many ideas are coming out right now ideas that used to be labeled as ridiculous conspiracy theories now the general theory is becoming that the only difference between an outlandish conspiracy theory and undisputed fact is about six months can you have a war without conflict a war where there are no enemies and no allies but casualties everywhere a war in which actual combat isn't really the main attack but you standing at a vending or voting machine is you see how philosophical and weird this stuff gets it goes way over my head and it drives me crazy it really does i don't think you guys know how hard it was to write this script because man i tell you this stuff is really freaky to think about and put into words on paper and thinking along these lines illustrates where most academics who have discussed 5th gen warfare have gone astray every single person who has discussed fifth generation warfare has done so from the perspective of a military strategist or a military historian which is not inherently bad that actually makes the most sense you would expect the same guy who spent years writing about 3rd or 4th gen warfare to naturally talk about the 5th gen of warfare and how technology has affected the history of war however we think that a milestone has been reached we think that 5th generation warfare is just as much a concern to civilian academics as military strategists after all we are not fighting this fifth generation war in a lecture hall at west point or in a conference room full of majors and colonels we are living this war in our grocery stores in our schools and in our homes this is not some issue that can be philosophized over mahogany conference tables this is our life now so at last after taking all of these ideas and putting them together we can piece together our definition for what fifth generation warfare really is fifth generation warfare is defined as a global war of ideas and narratives this style of war is primarily fought in the information space however the actions undertaken in the information space are not intended to be the final goal but rather a way to affect the physical kinetic battle spaces cyber warfare is a critical part of fifth generation warfare but these tactics do not supersede the overall function of fifth generation warfare rather actions in the cyber battle space are a tool to both supplement traditional forms of military warfare while simultaneously serving as a tool that certain actors can utilize to further their war of ideas the ambiguous nature of this cyber realm most clearly illustrates the uncertainty present through this style of warfare and the struggle that is present through societies as citizens try to make sense of their world around them this ambiguity is key the perfect crime is the one that no one ever knows has been committed and as such a perfect fifth generation war is one that the target never even knew occurred so what do we think are we currently fighting a fifth generation war without knowing it and what's the end result if we soak up all of this information in these theories can we get to an answer to the primary question what is going on i think that united states political and social groups in their lust for power and control have stumbled into starting a fifth gen war in some cases this appears to have been unintentional due to gross incompetence and negligence but in other cases fifth generation warfare tactics have been used to intentionally target opponents we know that this fifth generation war is not perfect and ripe with incompetence because we are talking about it in the first place echoing rene descartes we think that fifth generation warfare exists therefore it is not a perfect exemplification of it however there is a great danger in simply dismissing world events or domestic us policies particularly economics policies due to incompetence u.s politicians and oligarchs far too often fall into the trap of the dunning-kruger effect so we the american people cannot afford to overestimate our abilities or underestimate our adversaries regardless of what style of warfare is occurring even the dreaded indefinable and mystical fifth generation war humans can only really use critical thinking skills to determine the best ways of fighting this war which is what we can try to do right now every problem has a solution and even if the solutions we've come up with don't exactly work at least they're not terrible ideas and it might be a good way to move in the right direction so let's go down the list here's how you win a fifth generation war number one is take care of your weapon remember this war is a battle of wills more than anything else and the attempts to psych you out and make you think and act a certain way are the main weapon against you in a fifth generation war your primary weapon is your mind in conventional warfare a good soldier takes care of his weapon cleaning and lubricating it to ensure that it is ready for the fight at any moment this same exact dedication is absolutely crucial in a fifth generation war when your weapon is not a rifle but the square foot of real estate between your ears and doing everything possible to preserve your primary weapon and ensuring that it is in tip-top shape at all times is crucial gas lighting is a primary weapon in this war and you will not be able to fight back against that if you are not in the right mindset take the ukraine situation for instance yes it is true that the ukrainian war is a major conflict that has already had lifelong devastating effects for the ukrainian people and the russian citizenry as well but here in my living room the war for me is people or bots on twitter warping reality so much that it's not even recognizable that's partly why we've had little success in providing updates on what's going on in ukraine the war on ukraine is certainly real with real artillery and real molotovs but for me at home the 5th generation war rages on and while the team here is trying to track down tweets our gas prices are climbing higher food is becoming scarce rationing is going on all around fertilizer shortages are making gardening more difficult and the issues that we need to care about first on the home front take a back seat to the 5th generation war and that needs to stop i'm not saying to completely ignore everything that goes on outside your living room the conflict in ukraine has proven what people have apparently forgotten over the years that a war halfway around the planet can and usually does affect your life here at home so pay attention but do not let it run your life do not let it become part of your identity and if things get crazy remember to keep your head on straight reassess what your priorities are and what's important to you finding ways of reducing stress physical exercise nutrition finding religion or some other form of assured moral value system are all extremely important aspects of keeping your mental state in fighting condition in this same category of keeping your mind in the right place it would be wise to re-examine other lifestyle habits this is something that i'm actually surprised that i haven't seen a lot of people talk about to me this is just a natural line of thinking but for many this is a subject that not a lot of people want to hear so i'm just going to come out and say it if someone is known to drink alcohol to excess or consume copious amounts of narcotics i'm not likely to want them on my team this has nothing to do with religious moral or legal reasons or even with the vulnerabilities that come with such lifestyle choices but rather the dedication to helping us fix problems yeah sure people can bring up their rights to consume whatever they want and that's fine obviously i'm not speaking to those fighting addictions there's always room at the table for those who are fighting to make themselves a better person i'm really referring to those who have social addictions or those who think that their behavior in this regard doesn't matter because it certainly does and here's why if someone is constantly trying to alter their reality escape the world for some time i am not likely to listen to them for solutions on how to fix the world we live in or to fight in this 5th generation war their solution is to leave the world my solution is to try to fix it people can do what they want and i don't necessarily fault people for consuming drugs or alcohol for any number of reasons but at the same time i also need people on my team that do not need these things to function i need lean mean and efficient warfighters if someone is known to get plastered or high every weekend i question their dedication to helping fix the world if they are constantly trying to escape it no matter how popular their podcast is a lot of people will not agree with this opinion and that's fine but what is undeniable is that if we want to fix the world or even just a small portion of it we have got our work cut out for us and we cannot spare any brain cells in this endeavor we need excellence or at least the dedication to the attempt to achieve excellence and if you are trying to be a leader in your community anything less will be a disappointment number two is take actions to make the tools of 5th generation warfare irrelevant to you if the government has the monopoly on violence take actions to not meet that violence head-on but make it irrelevant make the us government deploy 65 000 troops in and around the us capital and not a single protester or target to be seen let them put up their fence around the houses of the people let them besiege themselves and isolate themselves from the american people because last time i checked weed and corn has not grown anywhere inside the city limits of washington dc when thinking about fifth generation war globalization has made it really hard to think of in terms of a regional conflict most 5th gen warfares will be global in nature but if we take the slice of the pie that is the conflict here in the u.s we can clearly see the things that have already been weaponized against the american people the past two years have been a free preview of what is to come and now that the jig is up it would be wise to look back and remember what the architects of the 5th gen war that took place here at home did to the american people energy food employment interstate travel access to medical care the right to raise and care for your own child the intentional lack of policing in certain areas access to defensive tools and countless other tactics have been used against the american people over the past two years sure we can define this as tyranny or totalitarianism and that would be accurate but what would also be accurate is defining these events as tactics in a fifth generation war that is using tyranny and totalitarianism in order to win prepping in this scenario is good because it allows you to have capabilities when others don't if and when your local government tells you that they will shut off your power and water supply because you disagreed with them if you are prepared you will be able to say right back to them bring it on by preparing you are reducing the power that others have over you number three is raise your children to have good values and not the values that the state wants them to have we keep harping on this one because it's so important in the field of warfare we all know the importance of seizing the high ground but what about the human terrain clearly the world elites have identified your children as key terrain and they are doing everything they can to take them from you on an ideological and sometimes physical level this was a huge realization for me personally over the past year or so looking back over the years it's not really that hard to see how things work when it comes to most federal agencies especially when it comes to who they persecute but what has been quite surprising is the level at which parents have been persecuted at school board meetings that hammer coming down with such ferocity has been crazy i don't think i've seen the us government be so dedicated to anything else in recent years with the exception of the medical tyranny of course but man watching federal agencies go crazy over this and persecute parents this much is suspicious like why is the fbi using the patriot act against this particular target they could have gone after anybody else like the pro second amendment lobby or the pro-trump crowd or the anti-biden crowd why go after this target so hard the fbi pulling out all the stops and publicly using every asset at their disposal to target parents at school board meetings is very suspicious why do federal agencies care so much well because they realize that if we take back our children from the control and or influence of the state we will have the upper hand when those children grow up but again there was a pattern to this remember how many children informed on their parents to the fbi that they were at the rally on january 6 children even young children turning against their parents should have been a wake-up call as to the brainwashing for lack of a better term that is occurring in public schools and unfortunately there is no reason to believe that this brainwashing will not continue into the future now i know what a lot of you are thinking this is a garbage solution this is a big decision and it is really difficult to take your kids out of school not because it's particularly hard to teach children but because a lot of times both parents or caretakers have to work full-time jobs just to pay the rent and single parents are infinitely challenged in the same way as well so deciding to take your kids out of school is not a decision that is quick or easy this is a long-term strategic decision however if you want our recommendation here it is if you are on the fence or even remotely have the capability to take your kids out of public school i would seriously recommend it at this point of course decisions must be balanced and if a child is better off in the care of the state than with their parents nothing is more unfortunate but that's the way it is in a lot of cases however i would argue that at this point there are very very few children in the entire country that are benefiting from their public school education and most of those benefits are not related to education if nothing else recognizing this keeps us honest we can point the finger at everyone else but if we put our own kids in situations that we woul

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 10th of 2016 2026. Things are getting crazier by the day, and we're going to be a little bit more spicy today with the topics we have to cover, so let's get right to it. This week, the more serious consequences are starting to emerge as we arrive at today 77 of the war in the Persian Gulf. Shortages of petroleum products and distillates are beginning, and multiple companies are issuing warnings of impending supply chain outages. Throughout Europe, the migration crisis has come to a head once again with high-profile murders and new migration centers being implanted throughout the continent to the sharp disapproval of native populations. Right now, as I'm recording this, throughout the United Kingdom, large-scale protests and counter-protests are underway throughout the nation as the United Kingdom demonstrations bring large crowds to London. Within our own hemisphere, Cuba is on the menu once again, and high-profile diplomatic endeavors have taken place this week just off the coast of Florida. And within the homeland itself, the governance situation is not going super well, and disapproval is high on a variety of issues. All the while, violence from the usual suspects continues to be the norm around the country. Moving to strategic movement for this week, most major deployments continue from last week, with the biggest change being that the Ford Carrier Strike Group has arrived home in Virginia from her long deployment. Just as a bit of context for how long the Ford has actually been at sea, I'll have to check the actual numbers, but I think she's been at sea for well over 300 days, which is the longest deployment that any American aircraft carrier has seen since Vietnam. So, she was definitely stressed beyond her max, and she suffered a lot of catastrophic damage from the toilet situation in Venezuela to the laundry fire situation in the Middle East, the Ford has had one very arduous deployment. So far, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group is slated to replace her in the Middle East. I don't know if they've departed port yet and formed up or not. It is interesting, though, that the Ford did not wait for the Ike to get on station. Usually, they conduct handover in region, but I guess the Ford said, "We've had enough," so they came on back early a little bit, or rather late, because this was a long deployment. But But any case, the Eisenhower is uh to take up station somewhere in CENTCOM. However they want to work that out is up to them. But either way, there will be a total of three aircraft carriers in the region once again in a week or so. Bottom line, there has been no cessation of American assets in the Middle East at the present time. Everything has been in a state of resupply, reconfigure, all that kind of stuff. And everything is still in place and ready to resume fighting if that is the chosen option moving forward. Around the homeland this week, there are several items of note to be aware of from a risk management perspective. A lot of the time we may be tempted to ignore a security concern because we don't want to get called names or get slapped with a label or some kind of ist or ism or whatever. And since nobody else wants to talk about this stuff in public, I will because it has very real security implications. You know when I caveat stuff like that, we have to read between the lines quite a bit. And this week there have been many potential flash points that may or may not escalate into something more serious over the next few weeks. But nobody in the counterterrorism or security space wants to talk about it. For one, we have the Chud the Builder scandal, which took place in Tennessee a few days ago. For those of you who don't know what this is all about, fear not. I'm also late to the party, but Chud the Builder is the screen name for Dalton Eatherly, who is a social media influencer, content streamer sort of figure who is infamous for conducting what is being described as like rage bait style content, street interviews, confrontations, uh stuff like that. A lot of his content is either political or mostly racial in nature or focused on that issue. So, a few days ago he was involved in a defensive shooting outside the Clarksville Courthouse in Tennessee after a black man attacked him, resulting in Eatherly shooting the individual. And let me just say, details on the whole incident are really sketchy. I don't think that any content was being made at the time, so I don't think this was one of those confrontations gone wrong kind of situations, but again, I don't know. Right up front, nobody wants to say whether this was a good shoot or not because of the kind of content that this individual makes, I guess. I don't really know. I don't really watch live stream stuff myself. So, I'm kind of in the normie camp myself with this, I guess, but I haven't seen the evidence, but I can guess because of what happened afterwards. So, the judge set the bail really high despite the fact that Eagley did not kill the guy and the courthouse surveillance tape of the incident has not been released. There was also a police officer right there during the entire incident and his body cam is apparently not available or something like that. I don't know. So, regardless of anyone's feelings on Eagley personally or on the style of content he creates, this is now a huge racial thing that's kind of in society now. So, and I think that the multiple videos of the incident not being leaked yet is quite telling because, well, we all know how this goes, right? It's also a free speech sort of thing now. Uh there's that angle to it as well because this is now an issue to answer the question of whether or not insulting speech justifies a physical attack. That's the question that's being asked. So, the risk assessment part of this trial is to decide whether or not minorities have the right to attack someone because they thought they overheard a racial slur. That's really what we're dealing with here. Nobody wants to say it. Again, people get offended by everything nowadays. Even conservatives get really offended about stuff like this, but that's kind of the issue that's on the table and the court's going to have to decide that and I don't think it's looking super great, but again, this just happened a couple of days ago. The complicating factors are his own social media posts, which are going to make it very, very easy for the prosecution to put him away or secure a conviction. So, in effect, if you want to think of it simply, this is like a very high stakes version of the Shiloh Hendrix case. The issue here is that we're not entirely certain that this guy, Chud the Builder, did anything wrong. He might have just been randomly attacked. We just don't know. He also could have instigated the thing. Again, we don't know. There's 15 different video angles of this and nobody seems to have any of them, and the the one video that has leaked is extremely blurry. It's like a Bigfoot video, right? So, I think we know how this is going to work out, but the bottom line that I wanted to mention this today is because it's setting conditions. So, this is going to set conditions for a lot of rhetoric, a lot of tensions, a lot of other problems that are going to compound this summer. This is also just the first landmine that we have to know about today because in a similar vein, there are two other big trials on the menu for the next few weeks. In North Carolina, the De Carlos Brown Jr. situation remains unresolved for the time being after Brown has been found incompetent to stand trial for the murder of Irena Zaretska. No hate crime charges have been filed, and Brown has been determined to be incompetent to stand trial on the charges that do remain. So, it's not really clear as to what's going to happen to him. There are still a few competency hearings, and the next one I think is on June 9th, but it's not really clear how this is going to work out because the defense is literally trying to get him released from custody into psychiatric care. I don't know if that's going to happen, but this is the uncomfortable truth that we seem to be living in right now in the United States, and from a risk management perspective, people might scowl and click their teeth, but the fact of the matter is that if you're a minority in this country, you can kill a white guy or a white girl on a train, a judge labels you incompetent to stand trial, and then you just get out. That seems to be a very common thing from murder one all the way up at the Irena Zaretska level all the way down to smaller crimes. So, this whole trend of oh, they're too mentally unwell to go through a trial, well, let's just let them out. You know, that's the alternative solution that's selected, and I think they're trying to go for it. I think they're trying to go for it with this situation in Charlotte. I think they're going to do it. I don't know if they're going to succeed, but I think they're trying for it, and if that occurs, if De Carlos Brown gets off for the murder of Irena Zaretska because he's too mentally ill to stand trial, I think that's going to be kind of like an O.J. Simpson situation times a million. So, once again, is another political topic that nobody wants to talk about, but look man, I I got to warn you guys if your city is going to be burning down here, and I think that that might actually happen if some of these trials end up with a lot of these criminals walking even after conducting very brutal murders. And I say that not because the victims in this case are going to riot or anything like that, but because when these criminals get off, when they're let off by a judge or, you know, something you know, you you basically get away with murder, other murders are going to happen because now they know that murder is legal as long as you say you're crazy first. That's the kind of situation we find ourselves in, and we're just kind of tiptoeing around it, you know? Uh and sometimes we just got to got to say it like it is, and this is the way that it is, especially with the situation in Texas. In a couple of weeks, the Carmelo Anthony trial is set to begin, and this one is also not looking good, either. So, this is the trial for the murder of Austin Metcalfe, who was murdered by Carmelo Anthony, who stabbed him in the heart during a track meet at Memorial High School in April of last year. Note that I did not say allegedly murdered, because Anthony has confessed to the crime. He himself specifically said, and I quote, "I'm not alleged, I did it." Even though his lawyers have claimed self-defense on his part, so this is now a self-defense trial to begin in a couple of weeks. And we'll see how it goes, because once again, this is a huge racial thing at this point, with Anthony's family setting up a massive GoFundMe campaign for him, the killer. A lot of very high-profile and prominent attorneys and social media figures in the black community have rallied behind Anthony, saying that that this was a good thing, and supporting him for killing this kid at the track meet. So, I've covered all of this abhorrent behavior before, trying to be as neutral as possible, but this was a very public event. It's captured on video. There's a thousand witnesses to this crime, and the killer confessed to it right then and there. Again, seems fairly open and shut, you know, at face value on a societal level. Again, that's what trials are for, to, you know, iron out things that are not so open and shut, but still, this one's pretty pretty clear as to what's really the driving factor behind this. So, that's on the menu to be aware of over the next few weeks because this has really stirred up a lot of racial hatred all around, and of course, that drives up risk. Since we're basically jumping on top of landmine topics today, I also wanted to mention that many states have revamped their food stamp programs over the past 2 months to delist a lot of foods and products from what is eligible to purchase by EBT cards. Now, this is another hot-button issue, and I'm not bringing this up to examine the entire program itself. The whole, um, idea of welfare in the United States, that's a big issue. I'm specifically talking about one component of it because this could be a factor moving into the summertime. So, we've got the perfect storm for what I'd call cultural violence, uh, because a lot of people are being told that they can't buy certain foods with their EBT cards, which is a problem for a major fraud scheme that many people might not be aware of, which is the selling of plates on Facebook. Many of you may have seen this parenthetically or seen people talk about this. This has been going on for quite literally decades. Uh, it's not all fraudulent, but a lot of it is because this is a major way of laundering EBT money. The scam works by someone going to the grocery store and buying a lot of food with their EBT card, and they take it home, they package it up, and they resell it for a profit. Once again, the scale at which this is occurring is staggering. One woman in Michigan was arrested on fraud charges a few months ago because she was using her EBT card to literally buy supplies for her professional brick-and-mortar bakery. She was running an entire storefront where the stock and supply for her business was paid for by EBT. It's pretty easy to be a small business owner when you have exactly zero overhead and free supplies being provided by the taxpayer. And now that a lot of goods have been delisted from EBT in the first place, this is now a major income source that has taken a huge hit over the past few months. So, in isolation, this doesn't really matter a lot, right? But you couple this with gasoline prices getting super high and you've got the perfect storm for crime because a lot of this income is fixed, but gas prices take money out of the pockets of Americans universally. But at the state level, you might say, "Okay, you're getting a thousand dollars worth of EBT per month and because you're delisting a lot of products, now you're saying that that person can only launder half of that, so $500. And now you're spending double the money that you normally would on gas to ride around town." So, again, gas prices complicate everything. Same with drug dealers and human traffickers, high gas prices are serving as an unofficial tax on everybody. And now that we have not one but three high-profile, highly racially motivated criminal trials on the menu, things are not looking super great on the civil unrest front and the natives are a bit restless, if you get my meaning. Once again, I want to add another closing caveat. There's always going to be this angle to push a lot more of the societal division and a lot of this is being done intentionally, I think. I think that the the the tensions are intentionally being stoked by a lot of people, parties, media figures, stuff like that. So, I don't want to don't want to make this out to be like a complete apocalyptic Armageddon here for the summertime, but I'm saying that the conditions are starting to line up for that eventuality. Some of it's organic, though. Some of it's just tensions that have been there for a very long time. Some of it is probably being stoked. I don't know. All I can say is that the dominoes are stacking up. Will the Will those dominoes fall over? I don't know. I can just tell you that the dominoes are stacked up, right? So, it's up for you to decide what to think about this sort of stuff from a planning perspective. So, So, bottom line, everyone's asking, "Does this mean we're going to have another summer of Floyd again or another summer of love?" I don't know. I don't think so unless something major happens. It's more likely that a lot of these gas prices are just going to drive people crazy and you're going to have a lot more low-level crime, organized stuff like the whole BLM riots of the past few years. That's going to take a lot more organizational effort and that's That's not materialized just yet. But, for those of you guys who have to rely on public transit or you have to walk, you know, to work through a city and it's not a super great area, uh keep your head on a swivel. Just be careful. All right? So, you know, situation normal. Just be careful. So, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Talked about this too much already, but this does lead into another growing concern that is becoming more realistic with every passing day, which are the supply chain disruptions that are coming about from the war in the Middle East cutting off a good chunk of the global energy supply. This week, several companies and automotive groups have warned that they are having to cut back on oil changes because there is a growing shortage of certain weights of motor oil. Some companies are dealing with a 40 to 50% drop in the availability of some petroleum products, which is staggering. It is far too early to panic, but it would not be a bad idea to start thinking about what your needs might be if this conflict continues for much longer, which I think it will. You all know how panic buying sets in super quickly and in this case, once the word gets out to the normies, it's going to be on like Donkey Kong, possibly quite literally, and store shelves are very likely to be wiped out by people who think that they need to buy 10 years worth of oil changes all at once. So, that's going to be fun to deal with over the next few weeks, but the petroleum sector is is slow to change and shortages take a very long time to materialize because we're dealing with a slow drip problem set. 20% of the world's energy supply being offline due to the war is a big deal, but it's also not 100%. So, that means that there's a bit of elasticity to the markets, and the biggest impact that the war is having right now is high prices for everything. But, motor oil and other distillates coming into short supply is definitely a canary in the coal mine for more serious logistical problems later on. Right now, it's still in the early stages, though. Another canary in the coal mine to be aware of on the forefront over the next few weeks is Cuba. Since the war in the Middle East slipped into more of a long-term problem, increased rhetoric has been issued by the White House regarding American aspirations for Cuba. In short, a lot of talk was circulating, mostly originating from remarks made by President Trump himself, indicating that the US might seek to conduct some sort of military operation in Cuba to obtain control over the nation in a similar manner as to how the operation in Venezuela worked out. Maybe not the operation itself, but the follow-on effect, as in Venezuela becoming a puppet state for the United States. Well, the United States wants the same thing for Cuba. Weeks ago, this was just talk, and nobody really took it seriously, kind of like the Greenland aspirations. Um, and right now, it still looks fairly unlikely, but less unlikely than before. American delegations of diplomats have visited Cuba to conduct talks, and the American blockade of Cuba is a very strong move to tighten the screws on the Cubans. Once again, the United States has completely, full stop, shut off all the energy supply to Cuba. That is not an embargo, that is a straight-up blockade. If you want to be doctrinally correct, you can crack open your textbook and say that this is an act of war, but we don't really care about terms and words and things anymore, so I guess that doesn't really matter. Either way, the Cubans are hurting right now. Most of that is being done by their own government over the past few years, but a lot of that is now starting to be more directly uh, result of American action. So, the Leeden Doctrine is most certainly at play with Cuba, which is the idea that every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show the world we mean business. At least that's the quote, which is the origin of the doctrine. So, whether you agree with it or not, this is most certainly a good chunk of President Trump's mentality towards foreign policy, especially when it comes to smaller nations. It's what we did in Venezuela. It's what we're trying to do in Cuba. It'll have to look a lot differently, but in any case, just want to set the groundwork for me dropping a lot of red diamonds on Cuba in the next few weeks because as we all know, Sun Tzu always said that when you're in a war with multiple nations on multiple fronts, it always helps to open up another front. And that definitely seems like our plan. So, we'll definitely see how it goes, but I'm going to start preparing for that like I said a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to actually do it for real this time. Going to start preparing for Cuba just in case the United States seems to be interested in that sort of thing. So, moving overseas to the United Kingdom, tensions remain rather high due to the revelation of a rather grizzly murder that took place a couple of years ago coming to light this week. So, what happened back in 2023 and why is this case both so interesting and also so incredibly tragic? In December of 2023, Henry Noack was stabbed by Vikram DeGua on the street in Southampton. At first glance, this appeared to be a rather routine uh, stabbing attack with neither the victim nor the perpetrator knowing or really interacting with with each other before the incident. Noack, being stabbed with a ceremonial Sikh dagger, was severely wounded and called for police while trying to escape. DeGua continued to pursue the victim. He followed him down the street, stabbing him multiple times, and eventually when police arrived, DeGua, the stabber, told police that the victim had made a racial comment toward him. The responding officers promptly arrested Noak, who was still bleeding rather profusely from the stabbing and placed him in handcuffs. Over a period of several minutes, Noak bled out on the street. The entire attack was captured on video on the victim's phone, which had been found in Deeg's pocket as he robbed the victim after stabbing him. Due to the nature of the British legal system, in nearly all high-profile cases, the fact that a crime occurred in the first place is obscured so the general public is not aware of crimes when they take place, and in this case, the crime occurred 3 years ago, but the details are just being known now. The reason for talking about this incident now, years after the fact, is twofold. For one, if we don't talk about it now, then we never will, and this could be another Southport moment, and more unrest is possible due to the horrific details of the crime. Secondly, this crime is bringing about very specific cultural considerations that are tough to talk about, but must be noted purely from a threat analysis perspective. This information is useful for you if you live in the United Kingdom, but it also will benefit you if you live in Canada or the United States. So, the Sikh community has a very particular reputation around the Western world, as the Sikh culture is not just a religious sect or movement, but there is also a very strong nationalist movement which seeks to use violence to achieve their goals, or at least it has since the 1980s. Within India itself, many major terror attacks have been conducted by the Sikh community, and many notable Sikh political leaders have actually been exiled from India, having been convicted of terrorism at some point during the Khalistan uprising incidents back in the 1980s. These guys did pretty much everything. They brought down civilian airliners with explosives, small arms attacks, hostage stuff, all kinds of violent attacks throughout India, mostly in their own region they were trying to seek autonomy within. So, this is kind of like India's version of the PLF. If you guys remember that from the 1960s and 1970s, all that violence and the airline hijackings and bombings and all kinds of stuff like that that was occurring in Europe and the Middle East. Well, India was dealing with that within India itself from the Sikh community. Cut to today and many of this organizational leadership has actually ended up settling down in the Western world such as in Canada and the United Kingdom, both of which are nations that require this back pocket knowledge to be conveyed in hushed tones because it's in effect illegal to know this information in public. It is unfortunate to talk about because it's a very complicated issue and because you're dealing with this sort of religious aspect to it. You don't want to re- you know, insult somebody's religion, right? That really gets you nowhere, but this information is critical for one's survival because as angry as Britons are about this case, the Sikh community is starting to rally around their own flag. Tensions have been growing among the Sikh community throughout Europe for a while and the details of this case are likely to cause further confrontations and incidents. Also, the officers which helped to murder Noac, if you want to phrase it like that, which I certainly would, it's possible these guys are still on the police force and therefore public interest remains in figuring out if the officers who handcuffed a man and let him bleed out to death were of the same national origin and culture as the attacker because if that's the case and it may be, I don't know, it's speculation, but if that's the case, if there's a link there, yeah, this could get even more ugly than it already is. Unfortunately, these cultural aspects are a major part of the case because in the United Kingdom, Sikhs have been granted a religious exemption for the ban on carrying knives and Kirpan, the murderer in this case, was open carrying an 8-in ceremonial knife at the time at which he used to conduct the murder. So, while everyone else in the United Kingdom has to go to extreme lengths to comply with UK knife law, the Sikhs have been granted permission under a religious exemption that allows them to carry long daggers known as kirpans. That alone would be a very, very hot button topic in British society and even in like Canadian society where the same kind of crackdown on, you know, weapons and stuff like that is a big concern there, too. The other issue, and I think the main issue, is why does this religious exemption exist? Again, this is one of the articles of the Sikh faith because all Sikhs are required to carry a blade on their person. And in their religion, this dagger is exclusively intended to be used as a weapon. To put this in context, imagine if Pope Leo said that all Catholics had to carry around a Beretta and shoot anyone who is perceived to be in violation of the Vatican's policies. To us, the first part sounds kind of entertaining, but the second part, the idea of carrying around a weapon for the exclusive purposes of hurting people for religious reasons, that's absolutely insane. We don't do that here in Western society, but within the Sikh faith, which is heavily centered around violence, and since the 1980s, they have linked their cultural aspirations with their religious aspirations, to them this is normal. So, if you Google this, they try to say that it's for self-defense and that the five K's of Sikhism are all about defending the weak or something like that. But, if you scratch away the paint, you see that this is really just a bit of word play because they have the concept of Dharam Yudh, which loosely translates to holy war or war for justice. This concept within Sikhism is the reason for why India has had a problem with counterterrorism in Punjabi territory. And if you read a lot of internal Indian politics, I know nobody really wants to do that, but it's very interesting from a counterterrorism perspective. If you read a lot of their internal news about internal counterterrorism and and policing stuff, they're having a really big problem with this, and they've had a big problem with this over the years because the Sikhs use this belief system to justify terrorism as part of the Khalistan independence movement. So, in the West, this {quote} defending the weak and self-defense aspect of their faith, these guys are not the Mandalorian, okay? These guys are not just trying to immortalize like the second amendment in their faith. This is really just a cover that allows them to carry knives and be ready at all times to carry out attacks against anyone who they subjectively perceive to be against them. So again, anytime we talk about defense and self-defense, it gets kind of cagey because everybody has a bunch of different views on that sort of topic, which is understandable. However, we have to look at this through the context of this specific region on earth and the belief system that came from this region, which again is not it's not universal to all Indian people. It is not It is not Hinduism. This is Sikhism. This is a different thing. And again, even in the United States, this is a big deal because many of you may have been familiar with Sikh culture through our kind of problems we've been having with trucking. So trucking in the United States, Indian dude, you know, runs off the road, kills somebody. There have been a few high-profile crimes like that occur over the past couple of years, which have gotten a lot of attention on the Sikh community and occasionally, as in nearly 100% of the time, what you will do is look at the cab, look at the the photos from the actual crime scene itself, and you'll see the same guy on all the trucks. So again, I went down this rabbit hole a while ago. So just to digress for a bit because this kind of matters in the context of talking about Sikhism. If you see this on the highway, this is what this is. A lot of times you'll see this on a lot of more Sikh truck drivers. They have these decals all over their trucks of this guy this guy with a turban carrying an AK-47. So what is this about? This is a decal. These are images of a guy called Sidhu Moose Wala. He is as a Sikh rapper who was killed in a gunfight a few years ago, and since then he's become kind of a musical or artistic expression of Sikh nationality, ethno-nationalism, that sort of thing. So, that's what this is all about. If you're kind of confused as to why you're seeing do pictures of do the same guy with an AK on the side of a trailer or a truck, you know, a big rig going down the highway, this is probably what you're dealing with. So, think like the Punjabi version of like the Crips and the Bloods kind of arrangement. This is what's going on within India politics. Again, nobody cares. Nobody should have to care about internal Indian politics in a small region in Central India. But, because this culture is literally in governance in a lot of the world now, it's worth being aware of. I've been looking at this for a while now, and again, I have to put the boilerplate statement on there. I don't know if everybody's like this. This could just be a cultural thing. It's kind of foreign to the United States, but it's here now, and you know, it's here to Western Europe. The United Kingdom is, of course, having to deal with it more strongly than the than the United States does. The context from which we're talking about this. And again, I can't say that all Sikhs of, you know, all 20 million Sikhs or however many there are, I don't know if everyone in this culture is on board with this kind of ethno-religious nationalism violence kind of mentality. I don't I don't know if everyone's on board with that. I'm sure there are probably varying degrees of it. However, when it comes to the United Kingdom knife laws and the kid that got stabbed to death on the street, I cannot speak to anything but the data. And the raw fact is that in the United Kingdom, 100% of Sikhs have been granted an exemption to carry weapons in the UK, and 100% of Sikhs are required to do so by their religion. It's not a personal, it's not an insult, it's just a fact that this particular belief system is completely alien to the West. And by their own admission, they do not assimilate, nor are they compatible with Western culture. Because if they were compatible and they wanted to assimilate, they would not get laws changed to accommodate them, and those laws would not involve them being able to carry a weapon everywhere they're going to go so they can kill their political enemies if they so choose. You can bring this into the self-defense space if you wish. I'm not taking it there. I'm just saying that the Sikhs somehow have the right to carry weapons, daggers, machetes on the streets without any question whatsoever. And if you question that, you're going to get arrested. And the ethnic Britons have they they can't even get a Swiss Army knife, right? That's the reasoning before the censorship in this case. It has everything to do with the knife itself, the religious aspect to it, the culture behind all of this, the political stuff, the decals on the trucks. It's all one big mess. This was not a random stabbing attack. It was a Sikh using his kirpan as intended. These weapons are carried by Sikhs for them to kill people with it. So we have hostile intent and hostile action. And they have been allowed to do so via the religious exemption in the UK. Coming back to the actual case itself, which is why I've spent so much time on this today, is there's another factor to this as well, which is honestly the least surprising detail of the case, which is that Diguva is not the only person on trial. His mother took the bloody knife and hid it in the family home, aiding Diguva in covering up the crime. So she's on trial as well for aiding and abetting the murder. Several other family members on that night were also arrested and initially charged, but these charges were dropped over the past 2 years. So you've got people who probably knew about the crime, were trying to cover it up, but they couldn't stick them with anything and they're just walking around. This involvement with the Sikh community closing ranks to protect one of their own, this is likely to exacerbate tribal violence on the streets of Britain for the foreseeable future because right now the Punjabi communities of London are trying to figure out how to keep that kirpan exemption. And as a result, even more adversarial perspectives are likely to emerge. I would expect many Sikhs to start carrying larger kirpans in public throughout the United Kingdom to dominate and flex on the laws being tailored specifically to them. That's just kind of their style. And once again, I'm not trying to dunk on anybody's religion. I really don't want to do that because again, it gets you nowhere. But if your gurus require you to carry a long knife and that you are to use that long knife to carry out a holy war and I also cannot carry a knife myself to defend myself from you, we're going to have a problem. And that problem has manifested in this case for the British people. I know ethnic Britons, everyone who lives in the UK who listens to me are probably fuming about that because you may not know this as an American, but in the UK, intent is a huge part of British knife law. If you're carrying a plastic fork in your pocket and you tell a police officer that you intended to carry that plastic fork to defend yourself with, you go straight to jail because it's extremely, extremely, extremely illegal to carry anything expressly for the purposes of self-defense. If you have a potato in your pocket and you say that's for self-defense, straight to jail. Do not collect $200. You are toasted. But if you're a Sikh and you say that my religion says that I have to carry this machete so that if I think a holy war is justified, I can murder people, the British police will arrest anyone who disagrees with you. That's the That's the level of of seriousness we're dealing with here. So, this case completely revolves around cultural and religious lines and also line of action on the part of the police. And all of this is why this case was buried for as long as possible, years in fact. So, now that the truth is out, tensions will remain palpable while Deegol's trial continues, which is why it's worth getting to the bottom of this cultural issue. Once we go down into the weeds, we can see that there are really four completely separate issues which have a high potential of driving unrest and violence moving forward. For one, we've got the Sikhs being allowed to carry weapons, but ethnic British citizens not being allowed to do the same. So, there's thing one. Secondly, the British police instinctively sided with a murderer who was covered in blood and arrested the 18-year-old kid who was actively bleeding to death. That's your second issue. Thirdly, the reason for why the Sikhs even carry the blade in the first place is very concerning because there's a lot of history and cultural violence behind it. And fourthly, the British government covered all of this up for years. So, once again, many different aspects four flashpoints to emerge, all of which are really tough concerns to even talk about in the first place. So, enough of Punjabi land. I know everyone's tired of of it, but I wanted to get that out there because this is kind of a complex uh canary in the coal mine, I should say, for a lot of the issues going on in the United States as well. So, worth talking about in a long-form format anyway. So, finally, I wanted to wrap up today with a few notes from the recent presidential state visit to to China. As with all diplomatic visits, 99% of this trip was useless banter and tourism, but that last 1% can get pretty interesting. First of all, the objective of the trip itself is not entirely clear. The State Department can church it up with flowery language all they want, but it's not really clear as to why the president and a huge delegation would take a trip abroad while their nation is at war. To me, that alone is pretty interesting because it implies there is a reason as to why a trip to China is more important than the war that we're actively fighting, but anyway, whatever that reason is, I don't know, but it's still interesting. Secondly, by far the most interesting part of the trip came from an offhand remark made by President Trump on board Air Force One as they were heading back to the US Thursday night. I will play the clip just in its entirety because it touches on the Taiwan issue, and this is probably one of the more interesting parts of the diplomatic endeavor, so here's the clip. Would the US defend Taiwan if it came to it? I don't want to say that. I'm not going to say that. There's There's one person that knows that. You know who it is? Me. I'm the only person. That question was asked to me today by President Xi. I said, "I don't talk about that." He asked you today. He asked you if you would send troops, if you would defend He asked me if I'd defend them. I said, "I don't talk about that." He told him that. I know it's a little hard to hear. I'm sorry about that. The audio was not great when it was being recorded, but the gist of the conversation kind of came out. Now, obviously, we cannot put a whole lot of weight on one short clip. That's really a bad idea when it comes to President Trump because he himself is not exactly a man who has hard and fast positions on anything. But, in this clip, a couple of things happened. For one, President Trump stating that he will not reveal as to if the US will defend Taiwan. That's completely normal. In fact, this is a continuation of the very long train of China policy, which back during the Kissinger era was referred to as strategic ambiguity. Meaning that the United States would not reveal whether or not we will militarily back Taiwan. So, we're going to leave that as a question for China to figure out. Will they, won't they? Will they defend? Will they Will they will not defend? If we If the Chinese do this, will the United States do that? Again, strategic ambiguity. No real hard red lines in the sand or in the island chain, so to speak. Anything to deal with Taiwan in the diplomatic spaces has been handled incredibly delicately over the years. And, like him or not, it is undeniable that President Trump often, and rather ironically, acts like a bull in a china shop on pretty much everything he does, for better or for worse. And so, he let slip that there would be a war if China invaded Taiwan. Whether he means that or not, I don't know. It could be a lie. It could be a genuine thing. I don't know. He changes his mind a lot and doesn't really speak plainly on stuff like this, which is fair enough, I guess, but it's still interesting. However, the most interesting part about this short exchange on Air Force One is that President Trump said that Xi asked him the same question directly. And kind of hilariously, you can even see the journalist who asked him the question kind of taken aback by this because if this is true, and I want to stress that this is a big if, this is very surprising. The Chinese, just as a matter of cultural and diplomatic policy, they absolutely never ask direct questions like this, let alone President Xi. So, if this actually happened, we might be closer to Taiwan kicking off than we might think. Granted, this is a huge debate right now, so some say the timeline is for 2027 invasion, others say that China is never actually going to invade. Uh they're actually not going to use military force at all, but rather take over diplomatically, and all of the military force that we're seeing them use is actually for other aspirations throughout the maybe second and third island chains. Hope not on that front, but I, you know, that that's the argument anyway. I don't know what to think personally on that front. It's all in the international space, and it's kind of hard to figure out who's going to do what because there's so many factors to consider, but the bottom line is that the Far East is not looking to stay in their period of peace and tranquility for too much longer. And President Xi directly asking Trump to his face, "Hey, are you guys going to get involved in Taiwan if we go take it?" If he's asking that directly, mhm, that's not a very good sign. But again, we're placing a lot of weight on a very short exchange and personal testimony from one person, not something that we can make a whole lot of decisions off of, but again, indications and warnings are stacking up. So, knowing how the American involvement in Iran has worked out, the Chinese have been taking a lot of notes on that endeavor. They have been very, very interested in how our war has gone out gone on in the Middle East, and this uh situation becoming a little bit of a fiasco here has maybe emboldened them to think that they might have a chance against the United States in the Pacific now since we've depleted our stockpiles for the moment. Their whole defense policy is hundreds of thousands of anti-ship cruise missiles and they already know that the Iranians who only launched a few hundred missiles at us, you know, all total throughout this conflict directly at our ships. China with hundreds of thousands of munitions is that's pretty significant and they know that they probably have the upper hand at least to when it comes to Taiwan. So, so they might attack before we can rebuild our own military stockpiles because they know without a doubt that we cannot defend Taiwan. Taiwan is off the table. It just is. You may not like it. I don't like it, but it is. Uh based on how the war in Iran has gone. But, on the other hand, the Chinese are also looking at how the most technologically advanced military in the world is having a really tough time winning a war against a vastly inferior foe or at least a foe that is vastly inferior on paper. And that imbalance is taking place mostly due to terrain. If Iran looked like Iraq, we would have won the war 5 minutes into it, right? But, it's not. Iran is nothing in the world but hundreds of trillions of tons of granite. So, maybe the Chinese are second-guessing the success that their own operations might have in Taiwan. Other than these very tiny aspects of the trip, not much else came out of the state visit from what I can see. No real commitments to anything were achieved on either side, just very coy statements from the Chinese as you would expect. I'd expect nothing less. And right now, the trip mostly appears to be a giant pile of nothing other than buying a bit of time to focus on things other than the current war that the US is fighting in the Middle East. So, that's where we stand for today. Flashpoints all around both overseas, in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and also here at home with a lot of domestic unpleasantness being plopped on our plates this week. And our friendly redcoats across the seas having to deal with a lot of complicated issues as well. Thankfully, all of this uh rather unfortunate topics that we have to cover sometimes, these have given us some idea of what to prepare for and how important it is to remain situationally aware and keep your head on a swivel. High gas prices make people do crazy stuff all around and right now it is a very high risk time for any of the dozen or so bubbling tensions to reach another flash point. We don't have to do them in gloom, don't ever do that, don't ever black pill, no black pilling allowed, but we have to be aware, we have to be attentive, we have to talk about unfortunate things sometimes even if it's a little embarrassing or culturally inappropriate or we have to talk about it just purely because you need the information to be able to survive walking down the street sometimes. So with that, let's roll it up for today and talk about the Ghost Net reports for this week. Once again, this radio net that we use to exchange information around the world is very, very helpful sometimes. And it was a good net all around from everyone. Now that the summertime weather has arrived for most of us, a lot more people are joining the party, which is always good to see. The more mundane weekly testing and practice sessions are not always super high speed. They're just not. But in our case, this isn't just practice, this is also practical utility, right? So we can find some interesting information that many of us might not have heard before, which is always good to see. It's already been a pretty crazy year and with hurricane and wildfire season upon us once again, it's a good time to dust off the comms gear and make sure everything works. Even if you are not into the world of HF radio or Meshtastic, if you don't want to get into anything like that, if it's too much of an investment, there's always free or low-budget ways to get into this stuff, but even then the the educational barrier is pretty high. Working on that, going to bring that barrier down. There's a lot of other dudes out there doing good stuff to make sure that radio is more accessible to more people. Even so, you can always make sure that your own radios work, make sure that you have good communications plan put together, even if you don't have radios at all. Just make sure that if you haven't heard from somebody in a while, make sure you have a plan for that. Just so that you have a way to know how how get in touch with friends and family just in case regular lines of communication fail. Cyber attack season is also here and constant. That's a yearly thing. It's always going around, but these things always tend to come around when there's times of international tension and conflicts and stuff like that. And you never really know when a server is going to go down somewhere just due to some random hacking group getting a hold of things. So, again, just being prepared, doing the bare minimum to make sure that you know what to do and you have some kind of plan ahead of time. That's going to help out quite a lot. That's all I have for today, everyone. I know things are getting a little heavy out there in the world, but it's going to be okay. We're we're going to take things one day at a time and do the best we can. That's all we can do, anyway. So, thanks for sticking with me and all of my research and geospatial data is all available, all for free at the links below along with all of my source material that I use throughout the week. I'm still working on the A-TAC series. It's It's a lot of work a lot of work to get this stuff done, but I'm going to try to power through a lot of this more A-TAC and communications kind of doctrine and tutorials and educational stuff this summer time and we'll see how it works out. I hope it I hope it helps a lot. So, if you're interested in using A-TAC or communications or stuff, check out the playlist on my YouTube channel and you will be able to find all of the prior content I've made on that in addition to the new stuff that I'm trying to make. So, thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for the 25th of february 2022 and it is being recorded at 0 100 eastern time on the 25th which is also 0 800 ukrainian time so let's get right to it in the geopolitical sphere throughout europe really the theme has been mostly squabbling over the past 24 to 48 hours when it comes to sanctions to put it lightly attempts to sanction russia with anything meaningful have been a complete and under failure i hate to keep ragging on various european agencies for this even though it's quite easy to do but what we have seen coming from the un and the eu over the past 24 hours has been just quite embarrassing with regards to their sanctions attempts on russia so i think that it's again like i mentioned last time kind of laughable to think that sanctions can impact russia in any meaningful way or you can't sanction your way out of an invasion uh which a lot of people seem to think is an option uh but when it comes to the specific issues that have been plaguing europe at this time and really any time europe tries to get together to sanction an entity it's that everybody wants something different most nations in europe want to sanction different things or not sanction certain things in any case nobody seems to want to agree on anything which is a problem a lot of people have brought up the possibility of removing russia from the swift banking system which would be slightly more than a slap on the wrist for russia and that might actually complicate things for them maybe i don't think it'll have too much difference but i'm not a financial expert or really know what ways that would harm russia but my personal guess is that this isn't going to happen i would bet that most nations in europe are just stalling for time on the sanctions front as a side note on the sanctions front whatever slap on the wrist sanctions are going to go through you can bet that this is going to affect your life here in the united states real quick for instance the u.s has tried to talk about sanctioning things like trade and banking well with regards to trade one particular thing that has increased in price over just the past day or so is fertilizer the united states imports a lot of fertilizer from russia so since that trade is likely to be sanctioned or maybe it already has been sanctioned i just haven't picked it up yet prices for fertilizer go up prices for fertilizer have already gone up in the international sphere and as we've been talking about in our other briefs there has been a mass global fertilizer shortage of all kinds of fertilizers so when the prices for various fertilizers go up the prices for your food goes up as well this applies to other things too like energy but my guess again is that europe is not going to touch the energy sector too much with russia uh europe is again simply too reliant on russian natural resources at this stage for any significant sanctions to hit russia's energy sector something that has also raised many eyebrows today has been the invocation of article four of the nato charter so far uh four nations have invoked article four that would be the classic three estonia latvia lithuania and as and uh poland as well for those of you who don't understand or don't know what article four of the nato charter is really it's just a clause within the nato charter that allows members members of nato to hold consultations when they feel that their territorial integrity is in jeopardy basically it's the dinner bell to bring all nato members together in the same room to talk about what's going on because one native member thinks they're about to get invaded so again it's not uh article five article five is the big one which is basically an attack on one as an attack on all uh and that's that hasn't been invoked just yet article four is kind of like the prelude to that and it makes sense at this stage this is not anything to panic about uh for sure it's a little troubling because you know article 4 means pretty big business but it's not something that's like oh my gosh world war iii is starting because of this so uh this is something to be completely expected especially from you know estonia latvia lithuania and poland these four nations are kind of right there they're the first um kind of or really the last bastion between russia and the rest of europe so um it makes sense for them to kind of trigger this uh and talk about russia's actions in ukraine something also that's kind of interesting i saw being thrown around today was the idea of finland possibly joining nato i don't really think that's a serious thought it is interesting and i think that it would be very interesting to see what russia would do in that front because again russia and finland have a very long history they share a border it's kind of an interesting relationship there i don't think that finland's gonna be up for uh nato membership anytime soon but i think that it's kind of interesting that they're talking about that potential so who knows this might be a chance for finland and you know what sweden for that matter to to join uh nato or or join on i don't know if that's again really a serious thing but it's interesting and i i think that somebody's trying to make us think that it's serious because uh both finland and sweden have been invited to the table uh at the the nato um security conference tomorrow so interesting maybe something to keep an eye on i would not be terribly surprised whatever happens either way but i just wanted to mention it because it's kind of interesting also within russia we're seeing a lot of civil disobedience a lot of protests in the streets over russia's launch of this invasion particularly in moscow as well as st petersburg we're seeing really hundreds and hundreds of protesters take to the streets to protest their own country's involvement in ukraine which is utterly fascinating to be honest so what putin is having to deal with right now again this is something he has normally historically been very hypersensitive to but he's having to deal a lot with domestic concerns right now and i would be very curious as to see how this is going to go go down of course protesting in russia especially especially protesting anything that has to do with vladimir putin that's going to get cracked down with you know an iron fist right so that's just the way this is that's what russia has is well known for at this point alexia navalny taught us that right so it's going gonna be interesting to see where these protests go and and how big they get i don't think it's gonna have any impact whatsoever on military actions within ukraine but again it's interesting so i wanted to point it out moving on to the naval updates don't have a whole lot for the north sea so i'm gonna have to come back to that later uh same thing with the med i will say that right now it's there's a lot of russian vessels in the med and in the black sea we don't know exactly where they're at but i'll come back to these russian uh landing ships uh task forces here in just a bit on the grand strategic front here overall russia continues her advance into ukraine on all fronts with some lines of effort making better progress than others which we'll touch on when we get into the specific fronts but one thing that i wanted to mention now because i don't really have anywhere else to put it is an observation that we noticed yesterday but has become more apparent today and that is russia's hesitance to use large percentages of her forces at this time yes we are seeing attacks and advances along all of the front lines right but it's not to the level of an all-out throw everything they've got forward kind of thing this could change in an instant of course but it seems like russia is moving hesitantly and only committing the bare essential forces to meet an objective now of course if you're into military strategy and things like that that kind of makes sense right you don't want to you know waste a lot of your forces up front when you know that there's going to be a prolonged uh fight ahead of you right uh but this this could also be a problem for russia moving forward because russian forces are already starting to face more resistance than they expected along a couple of fronts and if russian forces get bogged down this is going to present problems for them now whether or not ukrainian forces will be able to capitalize on russia's strategic errors that remains to be known but in all honesty that's not very likely on the strategic stage though ukrainian forces have demonstrated that some units have learned from their mistakes in the past and can coordinate to fight and win localized victories which is something that russia is certainly taking note of before we move on i wanted to show a brief map of where most of the major significant air strikes or cruise missile strikes or garage strikes have been occurring uh really it's all over the country and and again like i mentioned yesterday uh critical infrastructure military targets military bases that they don't really particularly need or the home bases for political targets and things like that so we're not exactly seeing deliberate targeting of civilians in a lot of areas but we are seeing that in some areas on the northeastern front most of the activity today has been centered in the towns of kharkiv and sumi russia has been conducting strikes on the outskirts of kharkiv all day and night in fact i have a clip here to show you the kinds of strikes that have been occurring in kharkiv we haven't been able to 100 verify this specific clip so take it with a grain of salt as always this is really just to show everyone what a strike from a multiple launch rocket system or mlrs looks like [Music] foreign [Music] again with misinformation running rampant right now we couldn't 100 verify that this is karkiv right but even if it isn't this is exactly what the strikes on kharkiv have looked like for hours now to the northwest of kharkiv in the village of sumi locals are reporting that much of the city has been encircled by russian forces we've seen russian armor within the city pretty much all day and that large russian armored columns are now bypassing the city and heading to kiev along the eastern front we have witnessed intense fighting with moropol being the major source of information as it is a decently large city with a civilian population which have been reporting on the shelling that has been occurring since the invasion began shelling which has been intense we don't have a super great idea of how the battle for maripola is going but so far it seems quite brutal both ukrainian and russian forces have claimed to have taken the city or retaken the city but right now as with many other locations along the front the city of marpul remains a contested area the southern front has seen the most significant russian advances today with ukrainian forces tactically retreating or just wide open terrain allowing russian forces from crimea to advance from crimea about 60 kilometers north to kerrson city there fighting has been raging all day as ukrainian forces have been able to mount an effective defense again reports are conflicting as to whether or not russia has taken kirsten yet so this terrain is still very much contested at the moment however once russia does take the city they will have an effective bridge over the danipa river and will begin to threaten odessa's flank also something to keep an eye on is odessa and marpol itself with regards to amphibious attacks we still haven't seen the amphibious craft that we know are in the area uh it's really hard to kind of keep a track on where these guys are at but but really we and lots of others are expecting an amphibious assault to occur sometime pretty soon one minor amphibious assault that has already occurred has been the snake island which is so small that it doesn't show up on the map but you can see it to the left of the slide there that is now in russian control it's a very small training base it's been a historical uh training location very small island outpost uh for ukrainian special forces and uh reporting indicates that all uh all uh 13 or 14 of the ukrainian soldiers were killed while defending that island so 100 casualty rate for that particular conflict there along the western front really no major updates from last time still haven't quite figured out what's going on there it appears to be there's a combination of either celebratory gunfire or legitimate gunfire or or something going on there we do know that moldova itself is actually trying to set up humanitarian operations and set up locations for refugees to be staged once they egress from ukraine and that doesn't appear to be affecting anything so i'm not really sure what's going on in transnistria but it doesn't really seem to be significant so we'll skip over it for now along the northwestern front most of the combat we have seen has been in the chernobyl exclusion zone today which we'll get to in just a minute but we've also seen a lot of conflict taking place to the east to the northeast of kiev in the in the town of cherniv in china we have seen significant armored battles with ukrainian forces and russian forces really holding their own against each other pretty much all day and right now it seems like ukraine still holds the city but there has been significant fighting all day and night there before we move on to kiev i briefly wanted to mention what's been going on at chernobyl there have been increased detections of radiation within the chernobyl exclusion zone particularly around the spent fuel storage pools in the vicinity of the actual snowball power plant itself of course none of us here are radiological experts but it looks like based on the data coming out of the remote sensors in the area that radiation levels have spiked quite significantly now i based on the data that we're seeing and a lot of what other people are kind of speculating on at the moment this appears to be for two reasons for one there's an awful lot of shelling going on when you've got an mlrs trying to erase grid squares and you know just basically churn the earth in certain locations you're going to turn up a lot of radiological dust and that's going to trip your sensors of course right so yeah stirring up dust is not good but that's more of a localized problem the other cause for this is what everybody's kind of thinking and what the ukrainian government has it's confirmed as much as the ukrainian government can confirm right now uh because chernobyl is currently in russian hands uh the ukrainian government has confirmed that a waste of radiological waste site has been struck by russian artillery and that is you know that splitting open has uh caused the sensors to to pick up these increased levels of radiation again really hard to say because this up until a few hours ago was and it still probably is a very kinetic combat zone lots of fighting going on up there russia barely took this area from the ukrainians and they currently hold the chernobyl power plant so it's really going to be hard to tell what damage has been done international monitors are probably not going to be able to get in there for a while so yeah best we can do and the best rest of europe can do is just like the first time just kind of monitor sensors and and see how this goes but for right now just so everybody has some kind of number to work with the background radiation in chernobyl the chernobyl exclusion zone right there right beside reactor 4 is around about 3 000 nano sieverts per hour and right now this that same sensor whose average is three thousand is now uh picking up over sixty five thousand five hundred uh uh nano sieverts per hour so yeah not super great i don't really know what this means from from a health health perspective but it does seem like this is largely localized in the area for now but again you know chernobyl has a way of of kind of being way worse than anybody thought right so again we'll be keeping an eye on this as we move forward in kiev most of the combat today has been centered around the antonov airport historically this airport is mostly used for super heavy cargo operations and is you know obviously a primary goal of russian airborne forces who have been trying to take it all night last night and all day today as well earlier today reporting indicated that ukrainian forces had defended off russia's assault and downed as many as six russian helicopters that were taking part in the assault for the airport and subsequently engaging russian forces decisively requiring the survivors of the assault to disperse into the nearby countryside however it seems that at some point russia regained the initiative and retook the airport sometime during the day but then lost it again either way it's really hard to say what actually went down today at the antonov airport but it would be safe to say that the antonov airport has traded hands a couple of times today and since russia has demonstrated that the antonov airport facility is an important strategic objective we will consider this location as contested for the time being out east at the major civilian airport of borgesville there hasn't been much news other than sporadic fighting in the immediate area of the airport presumably by russian airborne forces several russian helicopters are reported to have been shot down during the initial raid on this airport and some video footage indicates this as well but again information is really murky surrounding the boris bill airport right now but again thinking strategically every day that russia has to fight for an objective and loses is a day that they are behind schedule and it seems like most analysts and entities out there ourselves included think that it's pretty clear that russia fell short of meeting her day one goals ukrainian president zielinski is still in kiev though he himself has confirmed that his family is in a safe location additionally he has stated today that russian special forces and saboteurs are within the city this is to be expected uh russian forces would have had to have been on the ground in kiev for many days before this invasion began also another interesting bit of information is a rumor that's been going around surrounding a lone ukrainian pilot flying around kiev in an old mig-29 today who has allegedly downed between four and six russian aircraft again this is just a rumor right now but dozens of people in the streets have seen and photographed this unknown pilot or possibly pilots it might be more than one person so obviously this very well could be just morale boosting propaganda right when wars break out these kinds of romantic stories come out right but this unknown pilot has been dubbed the ghost of kiev so i thought it was kind of interesting so i thought i'd share it moving back to a more strategic view for a moment i briefly wanted to talk about the civilian front or some considerations that civilians are going to have moving forward in trying to egress from the country or being informed enough to stay if that's their choice so far the united nations if you can trust their numbers estimate that roughly 100 000 people have been displaced from their homes but again this has happened so quickly and there are so many fronts that are open all at the same time that it's really hard to guess and that number is almost certainly much much higher than that for those who are trying to leave ukraine there are quite a few challenges uh first up are logistical challenges right uh there is of course a nationwide gasoline shortage this is this occurs because people are of course uh trying to buy all the gas at once and with traffic jams the you know already strained logistics basically come to a grinding halt right so some people might find that they have no trouble finding gasoline to fill up their cars uh but others might find that they haven't had gasoline since the invasion started so really hard to say where these shortages are going to occur at but you can bet that it's probably going to affect the entire country over the next few days as far as russia targeting civilians i want to i'll talk about that here in just a moment but i wanted to briefly on this slide mention that uh civ cas or civilian casualties are being reported in odessa which makes makes a lot of sense due to the close proximity of the port it's very dense densely populated area it's not a very big city but it's pretty dense the military base is kind of cramped there a little bit so it would make sense that russian forces targeting those areas would result in a lot of civilian casualties plus the of course the civilian port city side of things and also in kharkiv we're seeing a lot of residential areas be targeted in kharkiv and that will likely continue uh as as ukrainian forces pull back into the city so far we're not seeing uh too many strikes occur within the city of karki but we are seeing the oddball strike here and there and they're not exactly hitting military targets although military targets were like the first ones taken out so an apartment building here you know another apartment building there that's kind of what we're seeing in car keep but let's move on to the traffic just briefly wanted to show kind of a screenshot of google maps at the moment now of course google maps is highly dynamic and of course using people's smartphones to track where they're at to give us these nice traffic maps right but as you can see the main highway heading uh heading west um highway 40 there has significant portions of that highway closed and that is heavily affecting all of the other secondary roads which are now showing up as orange because they have significant delays moving just a little bit further west we can see again just a sea of orange roads as people try to maneuver their way around either military actions or traffic it's really hard to say if there's a clear route at all to the border right now it's just taking forever to get from one place to another and it's it's going to be a long uh drawn out affair if you try to make it to the border by vehicle and again once you get to the border you face other challenges as well right now pretty much every checkpoint along the polish border looks exactly like this it's backed up for many many miles as people try to make their way into poland right now we don't even know if poland is actually taking ukrainian citizens uh we know that poland has over the past few days said that they're taking american citizens you can get your visa and and stuff right there at the border um that should be no problem for americans i'm not sure about any other nationality though but um really a lot of nations throughout europe are being really hesitant uh on taking ukrainian uh refugees so so you might find that you can get all the way to the border but you have trouble with immigration right so something also to consider is ukraine's martial law and declaring a general mobilization basically meaning that every male aged 18 to 60 are now prohibited from leaving the country so yeah this is uh this is a very tough time obviously so that's something to think about as well for egress so jumping back to civilian casualties for just a moment a lot of people have brought up the idea that russia is only going for military targets and is looking to topple the ukrainian government not really going after civilians our thoughts on that are that this is generally true but we also must remember the unspoken caveats that come with russian combat actions the russian military doesn't really have any regard at all for civilian casualties we have seen this in syria we've seen it in georgia we've seen it in chechnya and we saw it yesterday in ukraine so right now it doesn't look like the russians are intentionally targeting civilians as a whole although like i mentioned there is evidence of this in kharkiv but the russians clearly do not care if civilians are in their way russians don't have to meet the six pillars of targeting they don't have a cat one no strike list and they don't care at all about civ cash or population density estimates so with that in mind if civilians can weather this invasion or are already behind enemy lines staying put might be the better option for now and like i mentioned we also have to remember that as this humanitarian crisis grows fewer and fewer nations will be accepting of refugees so you might travel all the way across ukraine through a war zone just for a polish border guard to not grant you a visa nothing is certain right now and european nations have been extremely hesitant to confirm that they will be providing refuge for displaced persons like i mentioned moldova has stepped up but again they haven't taken that many yet and their tone might change with time for the people who are living in cities or heavily urbanized areas just know that these areas are already targets and as russian forces close in on these urbanized areas where the defender has the advantage the civilian casualties that we will be seeing will most likely rise very sharply as russia begins targeting the civilian populace even more deliberately than they already are so the decision to stay and hopefully make it through an invasion unscathed to eventually become a russian citizen that might be an option for many one thing that people tend to forget a lot of times is that some people either cannot or will not leave their home some people simply do not have the option to flee and resettle to a different country so we are keeping these tough choices in mind as well so that's all we've got for right now everyone uh thank you for your support and thanks for watching remember everything is subject to change and even though russia's advances right now are decently slow or at least slower than russia would like them to be this can change very quickly so remember this is going to be a video that's going to be on the internet for literally ever and we can't change it after it's uploaded other than making some minor corrections in the description box but again we'll update you as time goes on i don't know if we're going to be able to keep up these daily updates we're certainly going to try at least until things reach sort of a status quo but for the moment everybody's kind of doing what we're doing which is watching and waiting so again thank you for your support and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

[Music] when it comes to the world of satellite communications choosing between the different options out there can be quite confusing even with a seemingly endless amount of product reviews that are paid for by the companies themselves and that's kind of an issue almost all of the product reviews out there on these devices are from the perspective of a couple of different kinds of people such as the hipster backpacker who wouldn't survive a disaster even with the gps communicator or the weekend traveler aka small business owner who does a product review because they are trying to sell the device to you also most actual reviews of satellite communications technology seem to all kind of fall into the same category of going to some remote and scenic location turning the device on sending a message and marveling that it works in other words a lot of people are impressed with the overall technology of satellite communication or even the physical device itself which is perfectly fine satellite communication in the palm of one's hand is very impressive to say the least and all of the satellite communicators currently being sold on the market right now will function they will work depending on what you're trying to do with them but therein lies the problem trying to match a technology to a capability and not the other way around a lot of people purchase these devices and pick a monthly subscription plan with the goal of making it fit into their adventures people buy a gadget and then try to figure out a use for it and even more dangerously some people change their risk management priorities because they think that having a magic sos button in their pocket makes them invincible we think that a better thought process would be to figure out what capabilities you need and then choosing a technology that fulfills this requirement with as little modification to your mission and your risk as possible and these days when everything is more expensive and people are struggling financially we think a different approach is needed especially when it comes to purchasing expensive products such as these so today we're going to cover a few different options for satellite communications from a perspective of our unique needs now let's begin by talking about why we individually or as an organization need satellite communications capabilities as one can probably imagine we are not the typical north face wearing soy latte swigging ultra light eco hippie backpackers when we go out into the wilderness areas where there are no communications we aren't going there to align our chakras or become one with mother earth we have real work to do training setting up observation posts building off-grid shelters cashing supplies all the while writing and creating content for you guys and gals out there and in addition to making sure that things are okay back on the home front where civil unrest has become a part of our daily lives so we need a communications plan that will function all of the time if we cannot get a message back home within a pre-established communications window we don't sit back and say oh well that gives us more time to unplug unwind and enjoy nature nope we stop what we're doing and we work our way down the plan to make these communications happen also all of us tend to travel internationally a decent bit mostly to nations and locations that aren't particularly friendly i personally have used my satellite communicators in conflict zones more times than i have for hiking or backpacking which is something that's not exactly advisable for reasons we'll get into later but the bottom line is that sometimes we are on the grid but the grid itself is not suitable in a lot of countries one cannot simply call 9-1-1 or their version of it and even if a country has a national emergency phone network that actually works you might find that calling the local government authorities to your exact location might not be the best option for survival which leads into something that's important to point out because it will affect every device that we're going to talk about today which is the concept of what constitutes an emergency in ye oldie worldly times back up just a couple of decades ago before satellite communicators were mainstream we had devices like the ultra simple personal locator beacons basically it was just a small device that when you hit the sos button that signal was transmitted to a satellite which beamed it down to a rescue center where the staff then contacted the appropriate agencies of whatever country or location that you are in so one might be able to see the problem with these early devices they are purely binary either you are having a great time and everything is perfect or it's a life or death emergency that will require the military police fire department's coast guard and everyone else to come get you well sometimes we face issues that are not life and death but they could be if left unaided for too long so for us this is a huge criteria being able to send messages requesting help but not necessarily pulling out all the stops and calling in the cavalry and finally the last consideration and one of the major reasons that we tend to use satellite communicators in on-grid locations is privacy all modern smartphones are built from the ground up for very specific purposes the same devices that were created to connect people in ways never done before are now essentially mini surveillance devices in your pocket the primary function of most smartphones has become to spy on you ounce for ounce and gram for gram smartphones are the most sensor dense intelligence collection platforms on or off the earth and this isn't just something to be concerned about when it comes to general privacy either these days merely having a smartphone presents a clear and present danger to the average citizen remember people have been arrested solely because their cell phones pinged them being in the general vicinity of a significant event i don't know about you but i would hate to have been just a dude walking his dog past the us capitol building on january 6th wondering what the hubbub is all about because if i had done that my smartphone would have dutifully reported back my entire existence to national intelligence agencies and i would have been a part of several investigations now it is true that satellite communicators are not secure either national intelligence agencies can break and crack pretty much anything that has a battery however when it comes to tracking satellite communications we're talking an entirely different set of sensors it would take a lot more than your local police department with a stingray device to even know that your satellite communication took place actually we're not aware of any local or state police agency that can actually intercept satellite communications at all only the highest levels of nation-state level intelligence agencies can intercept these communications but even then the crowd of people that can do this stuff within those agencies is very very small think about it this way what would you rather use to communicate with a device that is being used by literally everyone from walmart and google to every single law enforcement agency in the united states to spy on you or a device which is still being used to spy on you but only a couple of national level intelligence agencies possess the means to do so point is the likelihood of incidental and accidental collection in the average american city is much much lower with satellite devices obviously if you don't want to be spied on by the nsa fbi or cia then don't use any device that has a single line of code or takes a battery that's the general rule of thumb that we analysts live by anyway nothing digital is secure not even your alarm clock or electric toothbrush but when it comes to everyday life in a world of mass surveillance i myself feel a lot more comfortable walking around with my satellite communicator out listening for messages from my family and friends while my smartphone lives inside its faraday bag only coming out if i get a message on my satellite communicator that requires better communications so for me personally and for most of our staff here satellite communicators are not just a tool for the backcountry but an everyday tool for reducing digital signatures in urban environments and having a bit more privacy in a mass surveillance state obviously as satellite communication devices become more and more mainstream the levels at which satellite communications are spied on will become more and more localized but for now this seems to be a pretty good option for at least limiting the total number of agencies that can spy on you so for people who have our specific needs which is increasingly including the average person living in the united states there are a few different options for satellite communicators so let's work our way down the list and talk about some of the considerations for each style of device and to begin with we will be getting the elephant in the room out of the way the satellite phone sat phones are the ultimate cream of the crop when it comes to off-grid communications there is currently no technological device that tops the sat phone when it comes to capabilities and here's why sat phones don't just make phone calls nowadays most of them can send text messages send emails and even surf the web albeit using what's basically a dial-up connection and an interface that looks like the very early days of the internet for some people like us this is a necessity sometimes there's nothing that can replace a phone call and if you engage in risky travel plans in nations or locations that aren't super friendly to include the united states a sat phone is going to be a life-saving piece of gear because you can place a phone call to anyone in the world not just an emergency coordination center and one can easily go down the list of scenarios in which this is far preferable to hitting that sos button on a beacon and one of those scenarios is war if you take a look at the terms of service for most satellite communicators on the market you will find that that magic sos button doesn't work if you're in a certain blacklisted country or in a location that the company that you have service through defines as a conflict zone technically the sos button does work and you will be able to use it to talk to whatever emergency recovery center you pay for usually it will be the iercc but in any case you can contact them with the sos button if you are located in say syria or iraq but they are under no contractual obligation to come get you your policy is null and void if you are expecting rescue services in these locations which kind of makes sense seeing that they are purely a civilian peacetime recovery agency and even then they just contract out the actual rescue to local authorities in your area that's not to say that the iercc specifically will leave you out to dry they will do what they can to help but in these unique non-standard situations there might not be much they can do other than calling the local us embassy and handing things off to them better than nothing but the way things are diplomatically these days good luck but with a sat phone you can actually call a physical person without going through the emergency center and without potentially contracting a several thousand dollar rescue bill when all you needed was a tow truck or directions to the nearest urgent care there are also a lot of situations in which a sat phone is more of a lifesaver than a device with an sos beacon when a person hits that sos button help is not instant it takes several hours or even days away from you depending on where you are but a sat phone could be used to make a quick phone call to an entity that can help you much more quickly for instance let's take the lost hiker scenario if a person is hiking in the back country and gets a bit turned around they can hit that sos button and help will be on the way it will take a while and will probably end up costing a lot of money for the rescue but it will work however if that same person had a sat phone they could call the park ranger office and talk to a ranger in seconds to let them know that they're lost and since all sat phones also give you your gps coordinates you could easily tell the park rangers exactly where you are and they can hop in a truck or a gator and come get you this could be very handy for medical issues if you get bit by a venomous snake for instance you might not have time to wait the several hours it's going to take to come get you if you hit the sos button also what if you are not the one in need of emergency services all of us here have at some point come across a stranded hiker or somebody in need of help at some point or another so it would be great to have a phone that can be used to call for help or a tow truck or even to hand off to a stranded hiker so they can call home and let their friends and family know that they are safe also when it comes to the sos button on your own device some companies are really good about not billing you for a rescue if you hit your button on your device in order to rescue someone else but this is kind of a legal gray area and why i absolutely would hit my sos button to save someone else i might come across i would much rather use a sat phone and spend a couple of bucks on a phone call and avoid that potential issue that is often forgotten about when it comes to wilderness rescue who gets to pay the bill so satellite phones have a lot of benefits and like i mentioned they are arguably the best and most reliable communication device that a person can use to talk to anyone on earth at any instant but there are a lot of cons and the main con for buying a satellite phone is the massive cost sat phones are expensive most sat phones are well over a thousand dollars and that price doesn't include this year's shiny new model no most phones on the market right now are designs that are decades old also most sat phones make old-school nokias look like iphones when it comes to the on-screen options and overall layout of the device so it's pretty depressing to buy a brand new sat phones that cost thousands of dollars only to get a giant brick that looks like they made one design back in the 1980s and just stuck with it and on top of that the monthly fees are excruciatingly expensive as well for instance i personally pay about 60 dollars for my monthly satellite phone plan which includes a us phone number for free which is pretty important and for that price i get about 60 minutes of prepaid talk time that's right 60 minutes for the whole month of course i can go over this limit for a rate of about a dollar 25 a minute but considering that most normal cell phone plans are for unlimited data calls and text messages the off-world option of satellite communication costs a lot more by comparison but also by comparison it is impossible to calculate the real value that a satellite phone can have we know how much it costs we know the exact price of these devices and these plans so we can calculate how much it's going to cost but what's really impossible to know is how much a phone call is worth when you really need to make it such as in an emergency too often we try to equate the price or cost of a technology with its value but based on how many lives have been saved with satellite communications it's not really possible to adequately convey the value of such devices in an emergency they are invaluable or even not really in an emergency situation but in situations where several events occur in which the capability of making a phone call in an off-grid location would be really helpful if you frequently find yourself in situations like this or you place great value on this capability then a sat phone would be a great option for you now up next are the devices at the extreme end of the spectrum the plbs or personal locator beacons these devices are most definitely old school in terms of the more modern options that i will discuss in a moment but old school does not necessarily mean that they do not still have a use personal locator beacons are very simple devices and they have only one job to do these are meant to be thrown into a backpack or vehicle and forgotten only taken out when there is a life or death emergency as a result most of these devices have non-user replaceable lithium batteries which is fine for long-term storage but not so great for constantly testing your device before an outing but these devices do not need a subscription you simply sign up and register your device and that's it no monthly service fee or anything other than the original purchase price which when plbs were popular years ago this was quite preferable to the only other alternative at the time the satellite phone also most plbs don't use the same constellation of satellites that other systems use plbs have their own network of satellites called the kospat sarsat system this was an international collaboration between the united states and russia and a few other nations back in the 1980s with the goal of providing an international search and rescue notification system for all kinds of industries and individuals also most plbs emit a radio homing beacon that can be intercepted by search and rescue aircraft to better direction find you once they get close remember this is older technology and back in the day these satellites and devices didn't have the capability for data so all they did was receive the radio signal from your device triangulated it using other satellites and let the emergency center know that your beacon serial number was activated in this general area since these satellites are government owned and operated the initial rescue efforts are also government controlled an important distinction from other options on the market for instance if you activate a plb within the united states the first agency that would be notified that you need help is the us air force who will then hand off your beacon activation to state governmental rescue agencies or coast guard officials if you are offshore this is a big difference between some of the other options out there that we will discuss next so plbs have their place a device that has a constellation of satellites solely dedicated to search and rescue is pretty handy for redundancy but these days we have other devices that offer different and much more capabilities for around the same price technological improvements and new satellite constellations means that today we have a huge category right in the goldilocks zone between sat phones and plbs satellite communicators these devices fulfill the gap and capabilities between having just a life and death emergency button on a plb and having the high cost of a sat phone and for that reason these devices have exploded in popularity so much so that there are now many different devices in this category when compared to their old school competitors currently there are really only two major companies offering these types of devices garmin and spot which both offer totally different devices an array of devices all of which offer different capabilities so much so that each one of these devices deserves its own video but for now we're sticking with the theme of matching capabilities to a technology so at the bottom end of the satellite communicator range are the one-way only communicators these devices are most closely recognized under the spot brand as the spot company got started with offering these types of devices usually quite small the old school original spot device hasn't really changed that much in terms of functionality over the years which is perfectly fine considering its intended use these devices are meant to be a simple cheap solution to satellite communication in that they don't offer that much they of course have the obligatory sos button which all satellite messengers have these days but also a button that you can press to let people back home know where you're at and that everything is going okay a little check in button the latest generations of spot devices also have a very interesting feature of a help button which spot calls the sov or save our vehicle button think of this as a satellite based roadside service and recovery button if you break down beside the road and you don't have cell reception you can push this button to summon help but instead of going to an emergency center which dispatches rescue personnel this goes to a call center that locates you and calls a tow truck for you of course this requires a small monthly fee of at this moment three dollars but it's an important feature that is absent from spot's competitor garmin another feature that isn't talked about a lot when it comes to spot devices is their concealability spot devices are very small and can quite easily be concealed on one's person no matter what a person is wearing so if you are at the beach or a swimming hole where you're wearing nothing but a swimsuit clothing which is notorious for not being able to conceal or carry really anything at all you can still carry a small satellite communicator like the spot gen 4 and no one will ever notice that you have it and speaking of the spot gen 4 specifically is one of the most waterproof devices there is not water resistant waterproof so i actually take mine in the water with me all the time tucked and tethered away unnoticed in a zippered pocket and considering that with tracking turned on you could literally leave this device on 24 7 tracking your position every hour and just replace the extremely common aaa batteries once every couple months sure this is a very specific use and probably not needed for most people but if you find yourself prioritizing compactness and concealability over two-way communication these types of devices offer some great capabilities however the most common satellite communicators on the market right now offer two-way communication the first devices that did this were made by delorme which was quickly bought out by garmin who took that technology and now puts it in at least half a dozen different devices likewise the other main company that does this is spot again who recently came out with their sort of competitor to the garmin's inreach devices the spot x now inreach and spot devices don't exactly replace plbs the result is the same you can get rescued with both but the chain of events that occurs in the emergency process is very different what is unique is that these styles of devices allow two-way communication which is great because it's vastly cheaper than a smartphone but still has the capability of sending messages that are not of an emergency nature and this is great because it's not just a cost saving thing either in the not so hypothetical scenario of getting stuck in a downtown area because you weren't able to get off work early enough to avoid a riot and the cell phone network is either down or under extreme amounts of surveillance and not an option i personally would feel just fine in most cases with pulling out my satellite messenger and sending off a quick message to the family letting them know what's going on that is an excellent use for these kinds of satellite messengers that is not being talked about at all in the backpacking world because the market for these kinds of satellite messengers is again targeting the group of people that based on their beliefs is actually more likely to start a riot rather than try to save someone from a riot i of course don't intend to paint everyone with broad brush but let's be honest the overwhelming majority of backpacking and outdoor companies are absolutely marketing to people who tend to have a particular political ideology so people everyday citizens that have particular needs can absolutely use these technologies in today's crazy world if you were to tell me that i could purchase a device for a quarter of the cost of a modern smartphone that can't be intercepted or even jammed by my local police department which has no less than three stingray devices permanently being used in my location oh and the monthly plan for such a device is about 15 bucks a month i'd say sign me up immediately now granted one would have to be quite naive to think that the national level spying agencies aren't tracking your every message with one of these devices which leads to our next point of note anonymity it's not possible to register a satellite communicator anonymously actually i take that back technically it is none of the satellite providers that i myself have service with to include sat phone providers asked for any identification when signing up even though they probably were supposed to so in theory you could use a fake name and a burner prepaid visa card to sign up for such services but we would strongly advise against this if you only have one device for life-saving purposes remember the sos function on your beacon is tied to an insurance policy an insurance policy which is sure to be cancelled in the event that you have to use that sos function and the people at the company discover that you used a fake name to sign up and sort of on the lines of anonymity we come to another major consideration or questions that must be asked when it comes to satellite communications is whether or not these devices will even actually be allowed to work in a total or near total societal collapse while pushing past the gaping chasm of unknowns regarding such an event one little tidbit of information is of note in the case of such an event and that is the nature of the first strike attacks and denial of services that will occur should a global war or total societal collapse situation happen remember the us military restricted normal gps receivers abilities to actually have the most accurate positioning data for decades fearing that terrorists or more accurately foreign governments would be able to go to walmart and buy a garment off the shelf and put that gps chip in a missile not bad logic on the surface but considering that russia also built a gps satellite constellation and the fact that this wasn't ever really a genuine threat because anyone who was able to build a gps guided missile certainly had enough outside help to get whatever equipment they needed the pentagon quietly did away with this policy a few years ago but we must never forget the nature of that relationship it is only through the grace of the military-industrial gods in the pentagon that we are allowed to actually even use generic gps satellites in the first place so the logic continues that if one can giveth one can certainly taketh away and considering the dod's recent interest in things like gps spoofing and other space-related weaponry and also considering the current federal governments and pretty much every politician's aspirations of totalitarianism becoming a more real threat to average citizens every day it does stand to reason that one of the more important technologies that is going to get locked down for military or government only usage is satellite communications but that would have to be a truly insane world ending situation because shutting down a satellite constellation has much more consequences than banning an individual from the entire internet or even shutting down an entire website for an entire country not every single person with power in this country and certainly not every single agency within the federal government has a handy encrypted satellite radio in their office a lot of official military and diplomatic communications goes over the iridium network through devices that are registered to seemingly normal everyday citizens so even though the fear of the capability for government agencies to shut down satellite communications is a genuine concern the likelihood that this would happen is also at this point extremely remote too much of the heart and lifeblood of our nation relies on satellite communications from all international shipping and oil production to clandestine military operations the federal government is cripplingly reliant on not just the military side of satellite communications but also the recreational consumer side of things which is something that we mere peasants can take advantage of and that's really what satellite communicators and sat phones can be used for in the context of our modern world yes these devices are intended for a specific set of uses and of course are not as capable as most other communication devices like smartphones however considering the options that are currently out there and considering the comparatively cheap costs of these devices and plans when compared to the capabilities that they provide the field of satellite communications is something that in our opinion is a relatively untapped resource for citizens who are beginning to realize that having their entire lives on a smartphone is perhaps not a great idea i personally use my satellite communication devices every single day for most communications of course i would not expect everyone to rush out and do the exact same thing but i also think that sharing my and our collective experiences when it comes to alternative communications has value and with more and more satellite constellations getting put into orbit the future of satellite communications is much much brighter than it was when the technology was first developed again this of course means that as these things get more popular things like mass surveillance and privacy will become more of a concern with everyday satellite communications but for right now we live in that perfect goldilocks zone in which the devices and technology is reliable enough to fit into one's daily communications needs but also not popular enough to warrant your local health department from using it to spy on you so while we're in this sweet spot for however long it lasts satellite communications are a great way to be more prepared a little more private and have capabilities when others around you do not so if this is something you're interested in stay tuned for our future videos on the subject we will definitely be diving deeper into the world of communications as we move forward and if you haven't already done so check out our previous videos on various communications topics which are arranged nicely in playlists on our youtube channel and thank you again to all of our supporters who make content like this possible until next time fight in the shade [Music] you

Kind: captions Language: en hello everyone and welcome back to part three of our series on escape and concealment so uh we were going to have part three be a continuation of the uh restraint escape and we're going to talk about different kinds of european style russian czech style handcuffs and hand restraints but we've actually hit a little bit of a snag uh it turns out that we in our training exercises you know internally here at the shop have snapped off keys and all of the keyways of our foreign style handcuffs so that's going to have to wait for a little bit while we get some more imported in from europe so yeah that should sort of tell you as to how that episode is going to go but in order to put out as much content as possible we already had this sort of part four ready um but we're going to go ahead and put it push it out as part three and this series this particular episode in the series is going to talk about our sort of seer kit type stuff so this is the episode we're going to talk about um that we think is probably going to get a lot more traffic because everybody likes gear a lot more than you know sort of education or training right so we're going to go over all of the gear and stuff in our sort of seer setup now uh the reason that we're talking about this and where we sort of got our motivation from is a few years ago quite a few years ago in 2013 uh this whole seer kit ideology became very very popular and this happened because a a time magazine article was written about in response to special warfare group navy devgrew seal team six whatever you want to call them they put out a solicitation for a brand new survival kit and it was very intriguing because it was something that had not been well it it was kind of a new generation of survival kit and in that kit were a few things like you know handcuffed keys and handcuffed shims and things like that and that was very unique because that had not been seen uh as a military survival kit for a very long time in fact most of the survival kits from the military looked sort of like this you you know your vietnam era you know um line drawing you know typewriter written survival kits and that's you know that's something that the military had been working on for a very very long time and uh hadn't really sort of jumped past that cold war slash vietnam you know anywhere from the 60s to like the 80s style of survival kit they haven't jumped into a new uh era yet so um you know dev grew was looking for a new type of survival kit and that sort of that solicitation was written into a time magazine article and then quite a few different other entities jumped on board as well and they thought hey this is pretty cool because this has got a lot of new technology in it um so that exploded like i said and a lot of companies sort of created um their own versions and this is where we sort of see the spinoff and the creation of a civilian style survival kit slash seer kit type thing really because seer isn't in and of itself um is not necessarily a civilian uh civilian sort of program if you will and we we talk about this in part one so if you haven't already i forgot to mention check out part one and part two because that talks a lot about why we don't think necessary necessarily is it is a perfect fit for a civilian type setup but like i mentioned there are lots of survival kits on the market today and a lot of them include seer type components so that's where we sort of start to see the birth of this seer it's restraint escape style kits for the civilian sector now here's where they fall short a lot of these searches are based they are that they either have a plastic container or a metal like suma container like on the previous slide um they're they're going to have some kind of physical container all the little bits and bobs are put in this one container and that's your sear kit right well you know what if you know this is not really a sort of you know rabbit hole what if scenario this is a very likely scenario you're not going to have time to get to your kit if you're going to get you know snatched and grabbed off the street you're not going to have time to take those items out of your kit and layer them on your body somewhere you need to have that already pre-staged so we find that a lot of times people are going to go out there and they're going to spend you know 100 hundreds of dollars in some cases on these searches and they're just going to like put them in their pocket and go around like they're like they're perfectly fine they can escape any situation well that's not necessarily true um you know these seer kits are are great and it's better to have one than to not have one but let's be real when we're talking about the the adversaries we're going to be facing we're simply going to be you know grabbed off the street and we're not going to have chance to implement our escape plan right you know in the even worst case scenario uh what if you are uh you know taken and uh put in a a situation where there is no sort of westernized standard of human living right you know you're not going to have a lot of the tools you think you might have and you're going to have a lot more than you you know you didn't think you would have as well so the situation can be highly dependent on where you're at so like this image shows uh an isis prison in i believe syria at the time i think it was right there in the merv on the uh iraq syria border but uh the point is is that we sort of have a romanticized view a lot of times of what seer is going to look like and what a restraint escape situation is going to look like and it might not live up to your you know expectations so we need to to to take some considerations uh when it comes to actually the what the stuff we actually use you know is right so this is why we came up with this sort of system we have conventional survival kits right that are built for survival like solcoa is a company out there that's right at the cutting edge of if you're going to buy a pre-made survival kit you know soulcoa makes the best ones they're the ones who won the the solicitation for the original stuff and they've just been doing great stuff with all their civilian kits so if you buy one of their pre-made survival kits you'll be pretty you'll be sitting pretty right and then there's also dedicated sear kits that don't have quite so many survival components but they are dedicated for restraint escape and things like that well we wanted to kind of merge the two and and not necessarily create just one big kit that's both a survival kit and a sear kit we wanted to incorporate both sort of ideologies into the same thing uh the same system right we're not talking container based we're not talking like uh you know gear based we're talking a sort of survival escape system really is what was what we're looking at and that's how we're kind of approaching it so really um we're looking at not just one container but multiple containers like you know it's the layer throughout our body you know so that if we have you know all of these components together we'll be most prepared but if we can't necessarily take our survival kit with us but we can take our search kit we'll still be sort of okay you know we'll be able to make do and then we have a lot of specialized gear that not very many people are talking about when it comes to even seer kits a lot of people don't necessarily uh think about some of the things that we're going to talk about here in this which is probably going to be a very long video um but yeah that's why our main sort of system is we have a survival kit component um with with some seer tools in it so we have some bare bones stuff in it with that then we have a sort of seer capsule sort of mentality which has some survival tools in it as well so a little bit of each in each kit so that you can function both both ways and then we have sort of escape aids which are not in any container but they are layered on our person in various spots um you know concealed on our body somehow that we're and this is a daily thing so that we're not necessarily relying on the ability to layer these items uh from our circuit on our person you know if we get yanked out of bed in the middle of the night we'll still have stuff on us that's that that's the mentality with it and then finally of course the most important part by far is the knowledge part the knowledge part is most is the most important because not only is it the hardest to find but it's also the hardest to learn very few places and and and sort of government entities are going to talk about seer you know the seer courses that the military has are of course classified and even some of the tactics that are in those classes are classifieds and you know nobody can talk about them really a lot of the technology itself is classified as well so we don't exactly we're not exactly dealing with an open source um sort of system here you know we're not you the culture is not open source when it comes to seer even from seer from other countries like good luck finding any data whatsoever on russian seer courses and we know they exist um we know that you know from our professional atmosphere that they do exist we just you know in the civilian sector you're gonna you're not gonna find any information on them at all um so that's something to to consider is moving forward is that the knowledge part is the most important but it's also gonna be the most hard to find so when it comes to most seer kit contents you know like i said before we we don't necessarily think that seer is a good mentality from or seer as a concept isn't necessarily a good lens from which to view this in a civilian capacity it's not a perfect fit uh but the tools are so you're gonna see you can google you know buy search it or something like that and you're gonna find a bunch of different ones from a bunch of different companies and most of the time they're gonna have these four things inside them first of all you're going to have restraint escape tools next up you're going to have containment escape tools so once you get out of your hand restraints you're going to have to get out of your cell or container that you're in somehow and third up is barter slash trade components now a lot of times these this doesn't exist in a lot of commercial sear kits i can't think of any actually that have bartering tools in them but we'll talk about that in a minute and then lastly survival components things like ferro rods you know fire starters things like that you know those are are quite common to put in kits because they're quite cheap and very small to to put in there so that's what most sear kits have and it's kind of roughly the the categories from which we approach um the the sort of search it concept right so let's go through each of these categories and let's talk about some of the specific tools that we keep in our seer kit specifically now first up is restraint escape so handcuff keys like we mentioned before absolutely crucial there's two main kinds that we personally use there are many out there but these two are the are the really the two big ones for one on the left is the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key and the one on the right is the uh the delta key the one on the left uh the the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key really the only selling well there's two selling points for it one it has it has a clip on it and that allows it to be clipped into things like underwear t-shirts and the rolls of fabric all kinds of in your sock and you'll never know it that's a huge selling feature that not many handcuff keys have because the attachment point is really the crucial part you know you can have you know 50 different handcuff keys on you but if you have to sew them into your clothing every time that gets tedious and you're not going to do it unless you leave them permanently sewn in your clothes but then you have to buy an awful lot of handcuff keys whereas this one you could buy three or four of these and just clip them in your t-shirt clip them in your underwear as you go about the day and you know just continuously you know when you take your clothes off you know and change clothes just move the key over to this new set of garments and that works quite well and it's pretty cheap to do the other handcuff key is the delta key and for obvious reasons it's preferred in some areas because it works on a lot more cuffs than the than the plastic one however it's also metal now granted it is titanium so it is very metal detector resistant but it's not completely irresistible to metal detectors whereas a plastic key is so that's something to keep in mind we keep both we use one we have one or two of each in the little survival capsules that we use um but yeah it's just something to keep in mind is that if you're trying to go for a zero metal content that's you know the delta key is is kind of it's gonna have to go out and then uh another type of key which we have not seen anyone at all talk about is the um the the sort of uh and hua if that's how it's pronounced anhua cuffs from oscar oscar delta they met oscar delta is i believe a british company that makes these keys and these keys are the only ones on the market that work for the chinese police handcuffs now we had of course planned to show these handcuffs in you know part three but that's going to have to come later so we'll show you how these handcuffs work specifically but the short version is you can't use a normal american handcuff key on them you have to use this tube-like thing because the key is actually has to be a try hollow triangle shape now so these uh handcuffs are obviously the only thing on the market that work for these handcuffs so you're if you're in you know southeast asia most southeast asian nations use these handcuffs and a lot of middle eastern nations use these handcuffs as well and you cannot shim them the only way to get out of them is using this type of key now that being said you know oscar delta is is doing a great thing by offering this the only company that offers it so far but keep in mind is that their keys aren't quite perfect so if um as you can see here on this image the key on the left has been used one time and the key on the right in this image has been used not at all as you can see the one on the left is rounded out quite significantly and that's because the turning force the torque needed to to actually open these chinese police handcuffs is quite significant it is double or triple the amount of effort required to turn the key on an american style set of handcuffs and that's important because the key is made out of copper this uh delta uh you know oscar delta and hua key is made out of copper and it's basically a one time use tool and in some cases like these two keys here that i have that i'm showing you right now they didn't ever open the handcuffs so as you can see on the image on the right where the three keys there on the on the coin the one on the left we took a pair of pliers and bent it into more of a triangle shape and those work fine uh those work a lot better than you know just crimping it just a little bit into more of a triangle permanent triangle shape uh that works out quite well on these chinese police handcuffs so if you buy these and put them in your kit just recognize that you're going to have to do that because these keys as they come from oscar delta some of them work some of them don't some of them work flawlessly on certain chinese handcuffs but the as you know as we were going to talk about in the video on about these specific handcuffs their machining tolerances vary widely like some of these handcuffs like we have a pair of these handcuffs that the key that comes with the handcuffs cannot open like that's how bad these are manufactured and so if you're trying to cover the most tolerances the the most different kinds of of these chinese police handcuffs you're going to have to adapt your keys to do that so that's just kind of an aside you know we wanted to talk about this in a different video of course but that's going to come out a little bit later but yeah a a dedicated key for chinese police handcuffs is crucial if you spend a lot of time in those areas not so much a concern for america but these are used widely around the world and then up next is of course the um the the ubiquitous handcuff key shim now this is just an example one that we have sort of it's the key style handcuffed shim where it's got a little bit of a little bit of a grip to it and we bent it so that it can fit in a kit a little bit better you know you can buy these you can use these you can use the split paul kind of the russian kind depending on where you were taught um they uh those work as well actually those are the ones i use in my own personal kit but this is just an example of a handcuff shim or our hank of shims are quite crucial especially if you are you know sort of uh using up against a blue box type system it's really the only thing that's going to work you know you know if you can take advantage of the fact that nobody can you know double lock the cuffs right so uh take a look at um parts one and two for talking about more about shims but yeah shims go in the kit um also um extra kevlar cordage and i have this as an example a size reference next to this sort of crushed up dollar bill and kevlar cordage is a great escape tool now you can put this in your kit you can also sew it into your clothing very loosely so that you could just pull it out like i've got it on a couple of pairs of pants i've just got it you know wrapped around the inside of the waistband so that i can reach around behind and pull it out from inside the pants it's just like pulling a you know the thread loose on a sweater but instead of pulling the pants loose it pulls the kevlar cord out so that's a good way to do that as well if you didn't want to store it in the kit and then up next is something that not a whole lot of people well a lot of people talk about the normal ceramic razor blades but you can also buy ceramic razor blades are becoming very very commercially popular and this company called slice makes like holiday gift wrapping you know cutting tools and things like they're a craft company and they make a great escape innovation tool which is basically their version of an x-acto knife but it's all plastic now it must be noted that on the inside of where this razor blade is held in it's held in by a metal spring but you can you can pull that out quite easily and make this entirely plastic and this is great because a lot of people are used to buying these little six dollar ceramic razor blades with little hole in them and things like that and those are those are good there's work but why not have why not have a tool with a handle on it because a tool with a handle on it uh can fit inside the small survival capsule we're going to talk about in a minute and it it greatly greatly expands your capability so that's something to keep in mind and it can also function as an improvised improvised defensive tool if need be has a cap on it and things like that so that is a great tool to use if you're in if you're looking to get into it it's expensive it's quite expensive the razer blades are roughly double what uh normal razor blades normal ceramic razor blades cost um and i think the whole tool itself is like gosh i hate to quote a price on film that's going to change let's say you get anywhere from 15 to 30 bucks one of these um razor blade tool x-acto knife things and it comes with a couple of blades uh so depending on where you get it from so yeah that's that's something to to look into ceramic razor blades non-metallic absolutely uh crucial for a kit like this then up next are lock picks now these are the absolute smallest lock picks that i would consider using and these are the the bogota i think nano i think that's what they're called we have a few the minis the micros or whatever they're called and we have all different sizes of these bogotas they're expensive they're very expensive uh tools but they are titanium they're low they're they're not made of a ferrous metal which means they're harder harder to detect with a metal detector once again um and so yeah that's why they go in our kit because these are the smallest ones that we can use um physically right there are smaller ones out there smaller lock picks but they are made of steel which is you know quite magnetic and very easily detectable via a metal detector and they also don't quite have the capabilities these have so um you know this is about as small as we go with with the lock picks and they fit easily on the survival type capsule and then up next is something that not very many people talk about because it's kind of expensive is an escape saw now this particular escape saw i think we got from shomer tech but there's now a couple of different brands out there um and they we put the price here on the screen as 20 bucks because that's i think what the msrp is but we got this one for eight dollars um i can't remember from where i think it was shimmer tech but i'm not entirely certain and we got a few of these and this saw is like you you would you don't quite understand how sharp it is until you get it and i've never seen a saw like this before not even like a small like jeweler's little saw this kind of saw is amazing it will cut through everything so this saw is worth way more than its weight in gold and i would highly recommend getting one of these little escape saws like this and also it functions as a handcuff shim it's the right size to work as that and it's long so it will work on a lot of those uh handcuffs that like we showed before those rigid cuffs where it has a re you need a really long shim to get in there and bypass those locking poles this one will work it will work quite well in fact and the saw blade doesn't get in the way when it's used as a handcuff shim so this is one of those tools where it's like you're hesitant to buy it because it's like ah that's kind of expensive for such you know tiny little saw there's better saw blades out there right um but we pulled the trigger on it we bought it and we bought a few of these and they have been amazing i would not hesitate to buy uh quite a few more of these so that's the so you and this saw blade goes by a few different names [Music] but you can generally just google escape saw and you'll find it it's a very small little saw blade like that then up next are a couple of more you know more like containment escape tools like for padlocks so we've got a quick stick and an easy decoder once again they're bent to sort of fit the round container you can leave these in or you can take them out i personally don't rely on these i take them out because they're um they're steel spring steel and it i'm trying to get i personally my personal one is trying to be as as as have as little magnetic signature as possible and these really don't grant me a whole a whole heck of a lot of capability considering i have a saw blade i have you know lock picks themselves things like that i can get i can fashion a way to get through a padlock um without using this type of tool so put them in if you want i think a few guys have them in theirs here but yeah that's something to consider these are fairly common component in a lot of search kits and then up next is barter slash trade items now this is one where we kind of want to explain what we're talking about here because a lot of people get bent out of shape when it comes to talking barter goods now i will admit that bartering in a stereotype scenario is probably not a good idea it's not a super great thing um it usually most seer doctrine like anybody who's been through a normal seer course will tell you yeah bartering is it that went out of the window you know back in the 50s right we don't barter anymore we avoid civilians as much as possible and because usually a civilian population means we're going to get turned in you know the united states military learned that very well from vietnam and subsequent conflicts uh throughout the middle east is that basically yeah you're not going to have a population that is on your side this isn't world war ii anymore the world has changed quite significantly now that being said we also have to remember though that in the civilian sector we might have that option you know we are not you know like downed aviators you know where most seer courses are you know um meant to sort of portray we're civilians right we're in our own communities so bartering might be an option if nothing else we're talking about like bribing guards and things like that and that might be a better option and gold is very very small it's very lightweight if you keep a gram or two on you um and it it's relatively cheap for what you can get out of it see these little one gram bars are very very small you can see how they fit there but two of them fit on a quarter and you can fit these very easily pretty much anywhere and they have a lot of value so you can use them to easily trade you know the the uses for these are quite literally endless in a civilian sphere type scenario not so much useful in a conventional military sense but we do have to remember the origins right these did exist in the military sort of history right there were such things as barter kits as you can see here on the slide you know aviators throughout the pacific and in some parts of the european theaters mostly the pacific theaters as far as we know but comment below if you know where these were used more often these barter kits are sort of a lesser known part of history where they are a kit of of valuable things that could be used with a native population to help get a downed aviator to back to american friendly lines right so this one on the right here contains a very nice mechanical watch with a little watch band you know watches aren't typically that hugely valuable to you know westernized society but to you know a sort of pacific islander culture back in the 40s they you know a very you know um very tribal like culture a timepiece might have a lot more value than a gold coin would um you know likewise a lot of these you know small shiny baubles and things like that going back to the you know quasi-offensive you know era of of um you know colonists you know trading with you know native americans and things like that they weren't trading things that had particular value um to the to the you know the westerners but to the natives they had great value so things like that you know a little copper or uh you know so you know very low carrot uh gold um very ill-fitting uh pressed you know rings things like that might have great value and that's where sort of where we're coming from now in a modern day society we of course are going to use these little gram pieces little gram bars of gold because they're easier to carry and you know things like that but you know just keep in mind is it bartering while it has come out of the the doctrine for most of um you know american societies it might be willing to put in it might be worth putting in your circuit um just on your you know out of your own considerations so um to think about that is something to think about you don't have to do any of the stuff we're saying of course but it's you know a lot of people um put down bartering or a lot of people of course overestimate the power of borrowing like they're going to be able to walk up to a guard and say i'd like to be led out of jail please here's one one gram of gold like no it's not going to work like that but in a situation where you might have the opportunity to barter you want to have something to barter with so that's why we include gold now another barter tool that we use is uh diamonds now diamonds historically have been quite bad for currency they have very little resale value they they cannot be divided easily like gold can and they are very very uh different every single diamond is different which means that it basically checks all them uh you know checks all the boxes for not becoming a currency so diamonds are not a great shtf's currency it would not be a good idea just stockpile diamonds or anything like that now that being said we do include one diamond one little .23 carat diamond in these kits because as you see look how small it is it is so small and it cost us around 250 bucks to buy it from a certified american vendor now if you've ever been to a foreign country like afghanistan and you try to buy some of the jewelry that's you know on base or um you know come this stuff that comes through the kyber pass and stuff like that you can get non-certified almost certainly illegal diamonds for a lot cheaper and um that would probably be you know an option for some people if you're not too concerned about you know u.s laws you know if obviously if you're in the u.s you have to obey us laws and those kinds of diamonds are illegal but if you're in afghanistan if you're in a country that doesn't necessarily care about the diamond trade that might be an option for you and you can get it for a lot cheaper you buy a two carat diamond for like what 50 bucks or something like that you know off some kid in a foreign country and it'll be a perfectly fine you know perfectly fine diamond of course it's you know morally questionable but you know that's just how the diamond trade works in other countries but we might have a future video talking about that kind of stuff but yeah sorry we're going to leave it kind of vague for now but the point is is that diamonds can serve as a last currency and that's because a lot of like i mentioned a lot of terror groups use diamonds to finance their terrorism to this day even though they're not a good currency they don't necessarily have a whole lot of resale value they're very hard to tell what value they have um you'd need a very special you'd have to know what you're looking at to tell how valuable a diamond is and even then it you know it might mean something to some you could have two you know diamond uh you know you could have two jewelers look at the same diamond and give you a different price for it so that's not admit that's you know basically rules it out as a currency unless you're dealing with like a terror group or something so if you're held you know if you're held captive by a terror group or if you've you know you've gotta uh you know pay your way through you know a dirty guard or some kind of border checkpoint in a foreign nation which we may or may not have had to do many times in the past um diamonds work that ones work quite well so keeping one around you see how small it is it doesn't hurt anything it takes up no space in your kit and if you can do that you know it would not be a bad thing to do and then moving on to a more conventional barter thing you can just keep cash on you like um we have this uh um dollar bill here which is a 50 bill a 50 american dollar bill and then we also have a 50 euro note that we can cram up and uh shove in um our kit so that works out quite well um you can use you know spend money no matter where so euros obviously europe you're not going to find any place in the united states it takes euros but that's so that's why we have the american dollar bill and the american dollar bill functions in a lot of it works in most countries on earth i haven't i don't think i've ever been to a country that did not accept american dollars at some place now a lot of places of course within europe don't accept american dollars in the countries but you can always find some place that does i haven't been to anywhere where you have to use america you have to use the local currency with the exception of places like war zones where um the local population does not want to get caught with american currency because um that mean that they might get labeled as a collaborator with americans right so like in a lot of places in you know iraq and syria you're not going to find you're going to find that the locals don't want to take american cash they want to take their local currency or something else in trade because they don't want to get caught with the american dollar bills at least that's the way it was a you know a few years ago but yeah keeping cash on you in your little survival cat capsule is very very important then up next is sort of the sort of survival components and the first one up is this little thumbtack compass compasses like this are quite amazing i think the very first uh first time that we heard about this was a little nato 40 millimeter compass a little dry cell compass that i think they're still made nowadays but they work quite well these are i think thumbtack they're labeled as thumbtack compasses from county comm it's the only place i've been able to find them but they are very very small as you can see by how small it is compared to that quarter and they fit very well inside the lid of the survival capsules or uh if you don't want to glue them to the inside of the lid uh you can just stick them in there they also fit very well in little you know pico containers as we'll talk about in a minute um but yeah these these compasses work quite well i will note though that somehow or another we've got like i don't know 15 or 20 of these laying around and so at some point in time uh they become demagnetized now some of this only happens with a with a couple of the ones we have like they they no longer point north and i don't know how or why but it's just kind of a reminder that if you're dealing with something this small and it's a dry cell you might want to might want to keep checking it every now and then to make sure that it actually does in fact point north and you haven't de-magnetized it in some way because the needle is so small um and you know so yeah that's something to keep in mind and then up next this is something that we know we don't really see a whole lot of people talking about but water treatment tablets in a survival capsule um and this is something that you like our personal experience sort of came out and i'll show you an image and this image was from nepal when we were there a while ago and this image is taken from about 300 kilometers from the nearest town so this road is the only part of the road that goes through this part of the country it's down um a little bit further south than uh kathmandu uh the main the capital there and it's in the middle of nowhere um quite literally there is nothing uh except for this road um there's no humans there's no villages there's there's nothing in this particular part of the country for you know a couple hundred kilometers around and there's garbage everywhere there is trash everywhere you would be surprised um at how much garbage is in places around the world that like where no humans should be or go like i remember going to um going to indonesia and just going to the beaches there and just walking the beaches and you cannot take a single step without stepping on some plastic garbage so suffice it to say the world today in is polluted it's polluted as heck and it is not a um place that i want to drink water from you know this is not the kind of thing where you can go back and um look at you know survival guides and survival manuals from like 50 years ago and say like oh you know you can drink water that's clean coming out of a mountain or things like that you know that's really it's really going to be hard to find a spot of water on planet earth that has not been contaminated by human beings even in some of the most remote areas on the planet so that's why we want to carry water treatment because water treatment tablets can prevent you from getting very very sick and if you're on the run and you get some kind of thing like giardia or you know crypto or something like that uh you could quite literally be dead within a couple of days um if nothing else you're gonna be sapped of all energy uh within within 24 hours and that's not good and if you're in some kind of you know escape and evasion scenario right so that's why we talk about water treatment tablets and we keep them on us no matter what now these are the um uh potable aqua tablets no they're the mic they cated in micro pure tablets there are some other ones called from israel card called uh tahar mayem i think is how you say it you'll notice the packaging has you know hebrew lettering all over it when you google like water purification tablets they are a lot smaller and they might fit in these survival caps a little bit more but these were micro pure tablets that we had um and we just you know shoved them in there because it took up a little bit extra space and prevented the the kit from rattling so much so that that's why we have those in our kit all right and up next is something that i don't i haven't seen anybody talk about at all and this is a micro sd card now this is one of those things where we're gonna have to be kind of cryptic again about why we have it um but we we always all of us here um separately and independently carry a micro sd card and you know sometimes multiple ones um and on that micro sd card we have three partitions so the first partition is unencrypted it is just a normal you plug it into a usb adapter plug it into a computer you can read it normally and that thing in that that partition has our identity documents you know scans of passports drivers licenses things like that visas you know entry paperwork um [Music] if you're traveling in a country that requires it a lot of times you know vaccine paperwork things like that medical records if you know if we get injured and you know we're unconscious somebody finds this you know capsule on our person they plug in this micro sd card they can get our medical records and things like that if they need them um we also have on their sort of information arc you know like we've mentioned before um sort of like a you know like a noah's ark of information you know information that's likely to be banned so a couple hundred survival manuals you know all kinds of things that are likely to not be available in a lot of places so we keep that you know on the unencrypted part because so it's easier to get to so on part two i'm afraid we're gonna have to be you know even more cryptic about that um part two is gonna also be encrypted and it is going to have a negotiating tool a small bit of information that we can give people the password to we could tell them the password to allow them to install the encryption software and decrypt partition 2 and that can serve to verify our identity if we needed to we don't want that unencrypted because we want people to have to interact with us at some point in time so so we get picked up for something and we need to verify our authenticity but we can't we don't want to have it on an unencrypted drive we could physically tell our captors slash interrogators right okay open partition 2 on the hard drive here's the password for it that should verify our identity or it could be used to barter so we could say hey this is the information we have if you want to talk about negotiating for our freedom we can do that too and then partition three is essentially our insurance policy it is um another partition where we can have a whole host of information that might be valuable to any government agency on earth and um if you know part two partition two can serve to verify the authenticity and verify who we are verify that we do have the access to the information that we do have and part three is the um is the full on sort of information that can be used to ensure our freedom or if nothing else it can be used to um ensure our our authenticity right so uh that's that's sort of what we keep on the micro sd cards hopefully people out there who are in the know who might need this sort of setup will recognize what we're talking about because every analyst out there has an insurance policy once you've seen enough stuff out there to make sure that you you know a lot of times intel analysts and people not necessarily analysts this is more of an ops thing but people who get involved in special programs or things like that oftentimes realize that in order to make it home in one piece they need some kind of insurance policy to make sure that their government comes and gets them and doesn't just leave you know drop them like third period french right so you know incidents have happened over time and um you know i'm just going to leave it at that so microsd cards uh are very um very very important especially when it comes to information and then sort of along those lines is a more thing that we can talk a little bit more freely about is is a blood now this is something that is more of a governance and government thing only but you can make your own and essentially a bloodshed you can read about it on your own it's fascinating to read the history of these but essentially what it is is a document it's a document that has one statement on it or a series of statements and it is written in most languages on earth most common languages certainly the language is in a specific area so if you're operating in say like southeast asia every language spoken in southeast asia will be on this bloodshed and essentially it's a document that says hey i'm an american i'm in trouble uh if you help me if you help me my government will pay you a certain dollar amount and um yeah hell you know help me get back here take this take you know rip off a corner of the document that's your receipt essentially that you helped me and you can go to the embassy and claim your reward right um these were very popular in world war ii they came out they arose actually out of the very first bloodshed i believe was uh from a balloonist in france from like the 17th century or 18th century or something like that don't quote me on that but this go this concept of a bloodshed goes back hundreds of years quite a long way really to the very first time you know the very first air travel with balloons is how far back they go and they're still used today although nowadays they look more like this this is what bloodsheds look like in today's modern military they're mostly the same piece of paper you know durable tyvek paper um but they are uh put in belts um so they call they're called blood belts nowadays now of course we can't show what one like looks like for real because you know there aren't any pictures of that on the internet and they are heavily serialized um so you you sign these out these are controlled items you sign these out just in the military when you're issued one you sign these out just like you signed up for night vision goggles or weapon uh catalog because it has currency value each corner of that document is worth ten thousand dollars i think is the going rate um so if that gets into the wrong hands you could potentially be paying terrorists up to forty thousand dollars of hard american dollars no questions asked so that's why these are kind of a sort of a not really a taboo item to talk about it's just nobody really knows about them so if you wanted to make your own um you can i would advise doing this actually it'd be quite good quite good to have you know put it on some type of paper print it out on some really durable you know paper right in the ring pipe or something like that and you just keep it around um because that's a really good part of a survival kit you know so it's a sort of bloodshed now obviously you can't really make one that is you know valuable you know uh has value to it like you know tear this corner off and it's worth ten thousand dollars that would be kind of not really doable but you can write on a piece of paper in a bunch of different languages as you know a phrase like please help me get back to the nearest you know american embassy or something like that and that would be good you know that's what we do a lot of times um so yeah bloodsheds are very very useful and then so the next concept is switching gears quite quite radically here um this is the next concept that we wanted to talk about because it has more of a pop culture reference than anything and uh so this is also by the way the part where you know we're going to be talking about some kind of adult topics so if you've got you know kids around listening to this you might want to hit pause for a second or skip past it um not to say you know we're you know going to get particularly vulgar it's just you know this type of stuff is not quite pleasant or for mixed company and this is the idea of the plan d evasion plan of you know evasion or plan simply and this comes from a movie because people remember movies more than they remember us classified documents right this comes from a movie called papillon steve mcqueen movie from you know way back in the day oh really good movie they did a remake of it here recently but the original is of course always always better but there's one particular scene right at the beginning of the movie where steve mcqueen's character is he's got this little capsule in his hand and for those of you who don't know you know without spoiling the content of the movie the movie is about a guy who is sent to um devil's island um and he is basically the worst prison in the world and for a crime he didn't commit of course right and it's it's about documenting his journey to escape and things like that so that's the plot of the movie if you haven't seen it before but suffice it to say very harsh conditions right and the only possessions he has in his possession are in this little capsule and the movie sort of explains it to try to explain to a civilian uh audience what is exactly going on because it's a key part of the movie and um steve mcqueen his character is kind of an expositional moment within the movie he's being observed by a fellow inmate and a hammock on board the the transport ship and he's observed um putting money in this little survival capsule right and he and he remarks you know as he's putting the money into the capsule um he makes our mark of you know oh you know the things we have to do you know for survival you know i'm shoving things up one's uh rear end right so it's a sort of rectal capsule um that he keeps money in and as most people know this is very much a thing in u.s prisons today so um skipping out of the fantasy land because we don't want to ever do anything survival related you know based on a movie right this actually is a real thing in fact this is an example a 3d model of a of the oss the office of strategic services developed this what they quite literally called a rectal tool kit and it is a metal capsule that has all bunch of these little tools and stuff in it for escaping and evading and a little handle for all these tools as well and uh it's quite big if you look at the look at how big the capsule is it's quite significantly quite quite large in fact much larger than i think anyone would would want to put it delicately but it's also press fit together there's no threads in it at all it's press fit together and it's meant to you know go right up inside a person and uh for retrieval later so that you could pass a strip search and so that if you're in captivity you could still have access to some tools now the uh the the british our friends from across the pond are not to be outdone they have their own version as well this is a more more modern version from our friends over at mi6 they created one as well and this is the only photo we could find of one and it is we don't know how big it is um but as you can see the knurled surface there has got to be sort of painful um you know going in and coming out from its hiding place um but yeah so this is a this is a real thing this is not something that that's just you know in movies or whatnot and then we also have to remember the prison example everyone knows about the you know the old um to put it crudely the prison pocket right that everybody uh knows about so this is the modern day version this is a very mysterious product that appeared on schumer tech's website a few years ago and it's um it has a quite obvious usage now as you can see one is quite tapered there's no hard surfaces anywhere on it there's no you know jagged surfaces and it looks like it has one very specific use now the shimmer tech capsule is very very interesting because it sort of unscrews in the middle right there it has an o-ring on it so it's waterproof um so the contents inside don't get soiled and sometimes you'll find these being sold with a packet of lubricating jelly right there so there's really only one one possible usage for this capsule and the capsule itself is interesting because it's made out of magnesium some additive normal metal it's made out of magnesium so that if you had a ceramic razor blade on the inside of that capsule you could shave the capsule itself is a fire starting tool which is interesting um it's a great concept there are a few you know a few cons to it though um but yeah the shimmer tech capsule is quite interesting now one thing that we we must talk about is uh this is the you know like i mentioned the the very crude term the you know prison pocket right um this is something that modern day corrections is very much prepared for people have been shoving things you know up the rear end for quite literally forever as long as prisons have been around so they've gotten quite good at detecting that sort of stuff now this is where you know sort of non-magnetic stuff comes into this is the boss too this is what most county what pretty much every christmas department in the world or at least in the united states in europe they have these and these are designed to detect all kinds of metal inside a person ri

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the briefing for wednesday the 18th of november and as always it is being recorded the day prior on the 17th of november so let's get right to it because we've got a lot of stuff to talk about today but first kind of a quick heads up we've noticed that based on a lot of the dms and emails that we've gotten that a shocking number of people don't actually check out the description box on these videos and we tend to put a lot of information down there we have chapters if you don't want to hear me ramble on about a specific topic you can just click to the section you want to hear we've also started to include lots of other information and any corrections that we have once this video goes out because obviously we can't edit this video once it goes out so it's going to stay on the internet forever and the only way that we can kind of make slight changes is in the description box right we're certainly not perfect so if there are any little minor mistakes we will correct them there and finally we also have links to other stuff as well like our website the number of people who email us and say that the link doesn't work is kind of astounding because they either don't read the the line literally right above it which is that the link requires the tour browser to work or that people don't realize that youtube shortens links so you have to right click on the link save it and then drop it in your tor browser and then once you do that you're good to go so just a little heads up on that we also have other stuff like our reading list and other things like that so if you're looking for books to read or if you are trying to get into the field of intelligence analysis yourself we have several reading lists that will help you get started and finally kind of a short announcement we just created another youtube channel for our war kitchen content so if you like those kinds of videos that we put out on that just stay tuned because we've got a lot coming out uh that's going to be on the other channel i haven't we haven't decided if we wanted to do dual posting over here on this channel and the other channel just yet we may at first i don't really know just yet because the war kitchen as anybody knows a new youtube channel has a hard time getting started and even if you were as of right now i literally just tried to search for the war kitchen in youtube and it's not even coming up even though it already has several thousand subscribers so youtube doesn't like new channels so we might have to see how that goes but i just wanted to let everybody know that we've started this new channel because the war kitchen stuff is just different enough from the actual like intel stuff we do that it kind of warrants its own thing so that's what we did so let's get right into this with the weather winter is definitely upon us for at least for isr weather concerns uh for most of the country with really uh heavy with cloud cover and things like that so lots of different uh aviation concerns for any kind of aerial operations and also right now we're we are in a green illumination cycle so it's going to be a really full moon 97 percent illumination gonna be a really bright moon and also moon's going to start rising a little bit earlier in the night so at least for today for the next 12 hours the moon's gonna be rising in the afternoon at 4 35 pm and continue to grow and get above the horizon and get really bright as the night goes on and for winds for the next 18 hours as you can see pretty powerful winds up in the northern regions as that winter weather starts to creep in and like i mentioned mostly the eastern u.s is going to have most of the warnings and things like that moving forward for the next couple of days moving into no tams really there are only two of note of course they're both presidential this time around uh the first one being the standard vacation no tam at over biden's house in wilmington delaware and also uh biden is planning to go uh to detroit michigan actually as of the recording of this i should already be there so uh by the time this video goes out the snow temp will of course expire on the 18th uh but yeah i just wanted to point that out for anyone interested as far as civil unrest goes really the flavor of the week is of course the issue that everyone's talking about the kyle rittenhouse trial so i'm not going to delve too much into the trial itself but as of the recording of this there has not been a verdict so really everybody's just kind of on pins and needles waiting to see what happens a few people are saying that it's there's going to be violence no matter what because there have already been decently violent uh demonstrations so far and the trial wasn't even over yet and also a lot of very famous people with a lot of influence on social media have been encouraging violence in the local area as well as other major u.s cities it's not just kenosha that's that's a huge problem or where the threat exists so so far uh really we haven't done the analytical leg work to kind of figure out what the threat assessment for this is because it's just really unknown we've got winter weather creeping in and usually colder weather prohibits people from demonstrating slash rioting slash looting but that will almost certainly occur on some level no matter what happens the national guard has already been activated as i'll as i'll mention here in a bit uh for this but again they're not really being staged in any productive manner at least from what we can see for right now and it's really just kind of wait and see mode and see how see how the rioting goes and then i guess everybody will kind of assess things once that happens so we'll talk more about that in a minute let's move right into logistics all right so moving on to logistics a pretty big change to this slide i've just finally decided that it's a lot simpler and easier to put an actual legend on this slide because far too many people could not read and uh it was just getting in the way of things so i finally made the the column on the left hand side of the slide an actual legend for what's on the screen it makes it a little easier for people to screenshot if they wanted to share it and things like that and we'll talk about the national level concerns here in a minute but as far as events from last time school bus driver shortage continues however massachusetts their mission for their national guard driving kids to school that mission is complete and we'll talk more about that in just a bit again when we get to the national guard slides as far as the water shortage out west that continues to be a problem as a matter of fact here is the recent drought monitor chart at least as of november 9th it was again released just a few days ago on november 11th and as you can see the western united states is still very much in a state of drought a severe drought so we're going to have to see how that plays with the winter weather coming into the area over the winter season also the microchip shortage has gotten quite a bit worse manufacturers are it's gotten worse but it's also gotten a little bit better and by better i mean you're not getting your money's worth so for for instance tesla has stopped incorporating a few uh charging options with some of their devices like they've left out the usb chargers and things like that general motors is removing the heated seats and the heated steering wheels from their crossover vehicles and pretty much all of their pickup trucks so a lot of these vehicles manufacturers are simply leaving parts out that they can so they can get these vehicles out the door and they will either plan to have you come back into a dealership to install for free when they get the parts back in or it might not ever happen who really knows you know this chip shortage we're still projecting it to last for at least two years of course varying in severity but we really don't know likewise the tire shortage in montana continues uh in localized areas there's really not much more to add on that we're just seeing a few more news stations essentially do circular reporting and talk about that one article we found from last time so just because you're seeing more reports doesn't necessarily mean that more shortages are occurring it just means that more news stations are buying that article and affiliates are starting to talk about it because they purchase the rights to that story so that's why these shortages things it's really hard to track and then new for this cycle are snow plow and salt truck drivers being in quite severe shortage at least there you can see in the northern states and in the parts of the midwest that is a severe shortage in a lot of areas they're doing things like recruiting for the first time they've never had to recruit for a snowplow driver but some states are now other states are increasing or trying to offer bonuses or increasing their hourly rate rates and wages and things like that again it it's hard to say if it's going to work or do anything or or have any kind of impact at all but if you're in the northern area and you get a lot of snow and you regularly have to get your roads plowed this is something you should be concerned about even places down here uh in the mid-atlantic region or even further south with those places in the south they get like a quarter of an inch of snow a year you know you guys know if you grew up in those areas where you get one snow day a year and it's only like a dusting the entire state will shut down like that's what i remember growing up and you still have people plowing the roads for like a dusting and that's a huge concern as well so you have the volume issues from the northern states where there's literally so much snow on the road that you cannot drive and there's a shortage of snowplow drivers to physically clear the roads and then there's also the cultural cultural thing of some of the more warmer states not getting as much snow but snow snowplow drivers and salt trucks are so much more important in a lot of these areas because people are just not used to the snow so the impact can be quite high in a lot of these states when it comes to uh the winter weather creeping in also before i move to the next slide the liquor shortage has kind of expanded we're seeing connecticut uh being uh impacted by the liquor shortage as well texas we're still seeing articles pop up here and there and people you know posting pictures of liquor store shelves being empty this is kind of a thing that's hit or miss because we're getting into the holiday season uh the whole pandemic thing made everybody start drinking a little bit more so demand has gone up sharply and production hasn't uh been able to keep up with that so the liquor shortages are kind of a hard thing to track as well so let's move into the next slide and we'll talk about the national level shortages that are kind of prevalent throughout the entire country now i know this slide's pretty ugly and looks kind of empty right now but trust me this is going to fill out sadly it's going to fill out quite significantly over the next few weeks and months but for now this is what we've got when it comes to the things that we know are in national level shortages where basically you can go to anywhere in the united states and find a shortage of this kind of stuff so really the biggest one or one of the bigger ones is christmas trees obviously christmas trees are highly seasonal and christmas trees take forever sometimes decades to grow so it makes sense that there would be a shortage of that around this time of year there are shortages of christmas trees in some areas in the united states every year because of a drought you know 10 years ago that's just how this works with the christmas tree market so higher demand this year you know problems with production and of course shipping and things like that are going to mean that some parts of the country are going to have a hard time finding christmas trees but really the biggest one that i wanted to touch on is fertilizer so for the fertilizer shortage specifically diamonium phosphate really in the united states we're just seeing rument at this point writing a rumor intelligence right of certain fertilizers being in short supply this kind of makes sense because around the world this is a huge deal china is cutting down on exports a lot due to a coal shortage in china which has caused an electrical power shortage in china which is directly impacting the ability to process fertilizer in china which reduces supply and with india's increasing demand for fertilizer we're essentially having a case of world events killing the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that america built right so we have all this stuff lining up and it's going to domino effect into the united states not having so much fertilizer at least that's what makes sense it makes sense that these fertilizer shortages will reach the united states at some point but again nothing is set in stone and honestly like most of the shortages that i'm mentioning it's probably not even worth talking about because it's pretty much impossible to determine when and where shortages will strike especially considering the fact that we also make fertilizer here in the us but just like always our intensely complex globalistic logistical networks make it impossible to track these things with any level of real satisfaction but i did just want to mention it anyway and again on the slide as well we are experiencing a nationwide shortage of medical personnel police officers firefighters and more of your trauma emergency personnel like emts paramedics ems transport drivers and things like that so i'll talk more about that in just a bit but i did want to touch on it here as well and sticking with the theme of logistics let's talk a little bit about a trend that is occurring in grocery stores all over the world and that trend is stores attempting to conceal their supply chain issues with photographs or selectively staged products so this has always been a practice in most grocery stores from an advertising standpoint and just one of the things that you do as a like a grocery store manager or owner a lot of grocery stores at pretty much every grocery store i can think of they do things like back filling the shelves when they run out of items so that instead of having an empty shelf for a customer to look at customers receive full shelves but not the normal products that they normally might see most stores did this with the toilet paper shortages from last year like think about it toilet paper is a very big bulky product and it usually has an entire aisle dedicated to it so rather than have an entire aisle empty they put things like bundles of firewood or other large products on the shelves that normally held toilet paper so that customers wouldn't see empty shelves so why would a company do this why would a company want to make sure customers don't see empty shelves well it's pretty simple market research consistently proves that people tend to shop more when the shelves are full and products are correctly fronted and faced meaning that products they're not at the back of the shelves right they're moved right up forward right right up front near the edge with all the labels aligned forward towards the customer so i say all of that to hopefully shed some light on these practices yes deception is a factor all advertising is deception but there is a huge leap between a company wanting to fill a void on a shelf to make it look better for a customer and a company actively concealing a supply chain shortage because of a political reason the latter scenario is something that is straight out of the soviet union and despite what the experts on twitter will tell you this is not usually the motivation for doing this which is why i am showing you these two images both images were taken in a tesco in the united kingdom as that grocery store chain has been observed to do this kind of a lot lately so they have the best examples and in the image on the left empty produce containers are being filled with cardboard cutouts of artistic photos of oranges and on the right empty laundry detergent shelves are holding pictures of the product rather than the actual product itself these two images are very different in motivation in the image on the left it's obviously supposed to be artistic it's supposed to be a nice thing to look at rather than an empty plastic container the oranges are the size of soccer balls and obviously even like cut open in the picture how often do you see soccer ball sized oranges on the shelf that are actually cut up like when it comes to this photo the deception factor is quite low right there's not a whole lot of intentional deception here it's just something nice to look at rather than an empty container yes the store could have just left the boxes empty and not put a cardboard cut out but all in all in the image on the left this is really just for aesthetically pleasing reasons but let's take a closer look at the other photo this photo is a much different story in fact when i first saw this image myself i had to do a double take because the optical illusion was so good these photos are actually of the proper containers on the shelf scaled appropriately and with the right lighting conditions to make it look like the shelves are full in other words you might literally walk past this shelf and not even notice anything is wrong of course looking at a two-dimensional image is obviously different from looking at this shelf with your two eyes in person but these images are quite clearly meant to maintain the illusion that there is something on the shelf plus combined with the normal pricing signage and the disclaimer that these products can be purchased they're just behind the counter so they can be rationed this image has a lot more perceived deception than the other image and i say perceived deception because there's really no way to tell this could be just some super stellar rock star work by an employee who took the time to photograph these products in the right lighting and then print out a two scale oversized image on photo paper and put it in a frameless low profile plastic holder that's almost invisible that's possible but as an analyst i know good camouflage when i see it and my assessment is that this specific practice in this specific image is intended to conceal a shortage as for the reasons for that concealment who knows it could be financially based or it could be political taking the north korea approach to trying to pretend like everything is perfectly fine when the store is empty it could be any of these reasons i don't know i just wanted to point this out because to me it's utterly fascinating and i would urge everyone to pay attention to these kinds of camouflage efforts this stuff is pretty crazy and often done in advance of and in preparation for an impending shortage so you might notice that if a grocery store is trying to hide something and you detect these camouflage efforts early enough you might be one of the last few lucky ones to get that product from behind the counter while they still have it and before most people even discover the camouflage and notice that there is a shortage of something and moving on to kind of going back to uh what we had last time when it comes to the mandate update so we're not legal experts i'm certainly not a lawyer so i don't understand a lot of this stuff but i can read pretty well i think and it seems like there's a lot of stuff going on here so let's let's tackle it so this first mandate right the one in green up at up on the top with that every private company with 100 more employees must get uh the employees jabbed right that actually came out so osha officially ordered that mandate and pretty much instantly a court put it on hold likewise the federal contractor mandate that was expanded a little bit or at least i guess the wording was changed slightly and despite the fact that several federal judges have over the past few months since the beginning of october the beginning of november uh they have declined and refused to put that order on hold another federal judge appears to have put this one on hold as well so really the the question is what is going on uh when it comes to these mandates now when it comes to you guys in the military you guys are still screwed um yes we know about the things like the kubernetes shots not actually available for anybody so technically all of these mandates all of these orders are illegal orders and you can get into the weeds on that as well but as far as for our guys in the military who are being faced with this kind of stuff really there's not a whole lot of new information that we have and others are doing a far better job at covering it uh than than we can do uh the point is is that a lot of these mandates are coming on hold but companies are still kind of going forward like you know the regime said hey doesn't matter what the court says go forward and go ahead and still order these mandates well what this isn't the soviet union you know at least not yet so it's really hard to say if companies and even if the federal regime is going to go by a court and clearly the federal regime has made it quite clear that they are not going to abide by a court's regulation so i guess we'll have to see on that but i just wanted to let everybody know that what we briefed last time is kind of on hold for now it went into place and then now it's on hold so we'll see how it turns out hopefully we'll be able to roll back some of this authoritarianism but you never really know so that's enough on that let's roll into critical infrastructure concerns so a lot of interesting stuff this time uh really the first one to kind of get it out of the way because it's the one that we know least about and that is a us defense contractor was hit with a cyber attack a few days ago this cyber uh this cyber attack was uh implemented on the systems of a contracting group called electronic warfare associates uh and basically was a data breach at least what the what the company's publicly said it seems like it's financial in nature i like they just wanted to steal some credit card numbers and birth certificates from the employees but you never really know because literally the name of the company is electronic warfare associates i wonder what kind of stuff they do those of you that have a couple of brain cells to rub together can imagine that they do things like a build radar they build uh communication setups and satellite communication suites and simulators and other kinds of training equipment and things like that and a lot of electronic warfare packages and softwares and things like that for the us military so you know this is the second time they've been hit with a ransomware attack they were hit uh last year as where as well and that was a ransomware attack this was when the ransomware attacks were kind of gaining traction amongst the defense community so something to keep an eye on really not a whole lot any of us can do from a you know average citizen you know standpoint but i did think it was kind of interesting and really the most interesting one on the slide interesting interesting that the most interesting one on the slide is point two when i literally have smallpox on the slide last uh point two there is the first i say first uh domestic uas attack on electrical substation so the u.s intel community released uh some details to a few different journalistic websites and this photograph actually of an a uas system a dji drone that was used to attack an electrical substation so this is allegedly the first time this has been done i know personally this is definitely not the first time this has been done this has been done many times before but this is the first time that the us intel communities actually come out and said yeah this was a this is a legitimate attack now the attack was a failure because the drone actually didn't make it to the electrical substation however whoever did this attack is one smart cookie because this is exactly the kind of technology that the us military still uses and used very famously during the iraq invasion to take out saddam's electrical substations basically there's this electrical substations obviously have a lot of exposed wires so the the us military doctrine or at least the doctrine that was used at the time was to use stealth fighters to get in there launched some i think there were tomahawk missiles that actually trailed behind the missile a very thin carbon uh filament and that wire would then fall through the air and land on top of electrical substation cause a shortage and that's your uh that's your attack on the substation you end up taking an entire neighborhood uh their entire neighborhood's electricity offline without ever killing anyone at all and that's kind of the the goal of that kind of military munition now this uas system used almost the exact same thing it was a simple as you can see in the image the very blurry image that the us government provided it was a drone system with a trailing copper wire or some kind of some kind of wire that was intended to cause a short at the electrical substation again very smart very smart level attack so whoever did this has some knowledge of how this stuff works or at least has google or maybe a history book in any case i thought it was very interesting that this kind of thing is now occurring we've seen similar things with a bunch of antifa guys putting coat racks and things like that or coat hangers on um railroad crossings and things like that there have been a lot of attacks on critical infrastructure that nobody really reports on because guess who does it it's antifa right so the you know mainstream media doesn't want to talk about antifa because well many reasons i guess but this is an interesting thing nobody really knows who who did it um or at least they're not publicly saying who did it or and no group has claimed responsibility so it could just be a lone lone guy but as you can see a loan guy with a couple hundred dollar drone and you know 20 feet of wire can certainly uh cause a lot of problems for you for the united states and moving on to number three there our strategic oil reserves are actually down now this is something that a lot of websites are actually just picking up on this has been a thing that's been going on for months now so i'm not quite sure why anybody suddenly starts reading the eia's website but really our our the report was released this morning uh or i think maybe yesterday morning that our strategic petroleum reserves are currently at they're sitting at around 433 million barrels which is seven percent below the five-year average so our strategic oil reserves are down our gasoline reserves are down our um gasoline blending components levels that's doing okay which makes sense because it's only on demand of gasoline and things like that so our our petroleum products are not doing super hot right now as far as why or what this means well you can you can talk hours about this with people who are vastly more intelligent than us on this topic but basically one of the problems one of the reasons for these problems in the oil community is demand demand went down and then it came back up sharply and production has had a lot of problems you also have medical mandates uh people walking out and things like that so now you've got a supply issue so you've got some issues on the supply side of things you've got issues on the demand side of things and the nature of how our logistics work in this country mean that if there's a problem at any level that problem is going to spread quite quickly so something to keep an eye on definitely need to figure out or start thinking about alternative energy methods which is kind of something we've talked about before but i don't know about you but i can't make gasoline in my garage right i can't go into my backyard and pump petroleum out of the ground and then put it in my car it doesn't work like that so the federal government controls a strategic oil reserves the federal government has the ability to turn a pipeline on or off as we learned quite quickly a few months ago so the the the bottom line i guess is to start thinking about your energy needs because this stuff is important and uh it can it can come up on you sneak up on you really quickly and speaking of sneaking around uh number four there is a apparently now we have to deal with smallpox this is a story that just came out a few days ago but a worker in a america research facility uh discovered they were cleaning out the freezer and came upon i think 15 vials of that were they were labeled smallpox um and for those of you who might not understand this is uh probably one of the biggest deals that's going to hit the world this year because smallpox is kind of a big deal smallpox has been eradicated since uh 1980 officially there have been zero cases of smallpox on the planet since 1980 there have been mishaps and there have been accidents where people get smallpox researchers working with it but but here's the kicker there are only two places in the entire world that are allowed to have smallpox one of those is the cdc center in atlanta and the other one is the state research center of virology and biotechnology in russia's siberia also known as the vector institute so you've got the cdc and some random secret squirrel probably run by the fsb facility in siberia and it's a little bit out of place for smallpox which is again been eradicated globally since 1980 and only two places on the planet can even possess it it's a little weird for smallpox to pop up in a freezer outside of philly and that's so yeah kind of a problem uh i don't know what this means i'm sure that our i'm sure our conspiracy theory brethren are freaking out over this right now but as of right now there's no data there's no data to analyze so we just know the vials were found the fbi is investigating if you know and of course the fbi investigating anything these days is probably a strong indicator of some kind of nefarious activity based on what the fbi is currently interested in which we'll talk about again in just a minute but who really knows there's no there's really no telling as to what this means or or anything like that this could just be a colossal colossal mistake there's no it could be intentional who knows there's no data to say either way um i just wanted to point out that it did in fact happen mostly for posterity's sake i guess so let's go ahead and move into significant governmental actions android to start with is an event that really isn't something that occurred even in the united states but i thought i'd mention it because it kind of matters a lot so this is this occurred in australia and the australian government discovered that the store chain as 711 actively collected hyper accurate imagery for facial recognition purposes called you know face prints so i know kind of ironic that the australian government out of all the governments on the earth is the one that's concerned about overreach and spying and things like that but i did want to mention it because it's kind of interesting because there are kind of a lot of 7-elevens here in the united states and you never really know what the system is going to be doing right the way that this collection worked in australia was there was a sort of like an ipad kiosk station set up for customers to take surveys and things like that and they were capturing people's facial images uh several times during that so i don't know if it's just some kind of uh in the united states i don't know if if this is a factor or not i did just want to point it out though because it's yet another company that is going above and beyond to spy on people in the corporate uh world so i thought it was kind of interesting to note moving on to number two there the biden regime's nomination for the comptroller of currency uh solely omrova has been revealed to be a very radical choice as one might expect from the biden regime at this point she has made statements in the past which of course you'd expect conservative mainstream media to pick up some of these quotes are that she wants quote the complete migration of demand deposit accounts to the federal reserve um meaning that she wants you to not have a savings account she wants me to not having savings account or a checking account and quite literally the federal reserve will decide how much money you get that's what she wants she's also made statements that she wants to quote bankrupt the energy sector for climate change purposes and things like that she's also she's of course as you might expect an unabashed communist in her doctoral thesis in college was titled karl marx's economic analysis and the theory of revolution in das capital marx's book or ghost written book however you want to define that um so yeah she's a very extreme choice this is going to be not super great as one might expect look economics is one of those things where if most people figured it out the whole system would collapse if even just a percentage of people figured it out the entire system would collapse if anybody actually knew what the federal what the federal reserve did this country would be very different but i'm not hanging my hat on any hopes that people might do this do this research and figure out what this stuff is the point is is that now would be a very good time to reassess your eggs and make sure they aren't all in the same basket i find it very hard to believe that the us government is going to start sucking money out of personal savings accounts tomorrow but clearly they have the capability and as this regime has shown us and i suppose other regimes as well other regimes around the world and even other prior presidential administrations if it can happen it will happen so that's the thing that i guess we should be prepared for as far as specific things to do i'm not an economics expert so i don't feel comfortable uh really telling people what to do all i can say is be smart diversify do all the good things that you know are economically sound and we can research this a little bit more and figure out what to do later but by and large the system is is not as secure as we were led to believe like i grew up in a world where it was perhaps a false hope i guess but you put money in a bank account and you were going to be sure that it was going to be there when you retired that's not the case anymore i don't think that's been the case for a very long time probably since before even i was born but the point is is that we're here now and if you don't understand even the basic economic structures of how this country works and how it's supposed to work and how it actually works you should probably start researching that that would be a good idea to to do moving forward so i'll just leave it there at that and we can talk about that more later but moving on to number three uh this was kind of an inflammatory one that came out on social media this was a video that occurred that that kind of came out in which in in texas a a certain antibody treatment for a certain um viral infection right was denied based on purely racial criteria right the the antibodies are not available or at least the video in the video the hospital worker says that the options for this antibody treatment are not available to white or asian patients as ordered as written into the criteria by texas's department of health and human services so as of gosh i think actually as of this morning you know greg abbott's office has not yet responded to this event but it seems like texas's department of health and human services has started denying treatment based on racial means this comes if if this is true again we don't really know anything this is one social media post one guy's video we don't really know what the deal is however many journalists of of course again untrustworthy mainstream media or journalists have physically called the department of health and human services and they have confirmed it at least to the journalists so i don't know how much more confirmation you need for that but it seems like this is definitely the practice at least in texas um and i guess we'll have to see how that how that works out it's not really any particular surprise uh from us because we've been tracking medical groups denying treatment based on race for wow gosh two years now i guess but i just wanted to point it out that if you're in texas i would look into this a little bit more or if you're in really any state look into this more and see what your local hospitals are doing moving on to number four there um man new york city is just i don't know what to even say about it it's gotten to the point to where it's it's beyond any kind of fantasy novel we can try to try to compare it to and really the flavor this week is bill de blasio wants five year olds to show uh show papers right when they're entering businesses so this has already been a thing in san francisco and some other parts of california as well and now you new york is kind of getting on this train and and look um really the only thing i have to say on that is we here all the staff here recommend leaving new york city and other cities like it as soon as you can yes it's not as easy to move these days and job uncertainty is at an all-time high and even amongst ourselves here uh most of our staff here cannot afford to move to a more remote area uh just yet because it's just too expensive and um yeah but if you live in some of these more dystopian cities like new york anywhere in california right like i myself have never been one to recommend moving away from a problem right because that problem is just going to follow you look at texas right texas a lot of as a whole right dallas and austin extremely politically nut cities now and that's because people were leaving california for texas so we know and i know in myself that this cancer just kind of follows you however um you also have to do what's right for you and your family and i can't even imagine how it must feel to have your your five-year-old child show papers to a police officer um i i just can't i can't fathom that and um yeah so our recommendation here is to try to find a place where you can rest and recoup regroup you know someplace cheaper new york expensive place to live and see what you can do to help get this country out of the gutter we're in so i'll just leave it at that and we can move on to number five which is equally cheery in that uh the main p company there um i'm self-censoring this one because i have no freaking clue as to what algorithms youtube is using to listen to what i'm saying right now but in any case the big company the big p company we all know about that makes uh alleged medicine um has been confirmed to falsify data to indicate that not as many people suffered from adverse reactions during the trials shocker i know it's almost like we said we and hundreds of other thousands of people have been saying this for literally years now um and it just turns out that the truth is that more people died after getting the jab than died unjabbed at least during the clinical trials of pfizer but don't take my word for it please don't go and check out the sources we have you can check the links research the the peer-reviewed articles there or the articles that are currently being peer-reviewed and you can research the data yourself it's pretty easy to do at this point um so yeah i just wanted to point out that that did occur and then before we move on to anything else i did briefly want to touch on this so this is a letter or at least the first two pages of a letter that was sent by jim jordan to the attorney general of the united states merrick garland and i'll just read the first paragraph to kind of give you the abstract of what this is about so dear attorney general garland last month during your testimony before the judiciary committee you testified that the department of justice and federal bureau of investigation were not using federal counterterrorism tools to target concerned parents at local school board meetings we are now in receipt of a protected disclosure from a department whistleblower showing that the fbi's counterterrorism division is compiling and categorizing threat assessments related to parents including a document directing fbi personnel to use a specific quote threat tag to track potential investigation this new information caused into question the accuracy and completeness of your sworn testimony so you can read the full letter yourself there's page one and two here is the third page and here is the actual evidence so these are the screenshots of the email that pretty much indicates that uh senior fbi leadership uh is in fact collecting intelligence on u.s persons uh with regards to parents and school board meetings this email from senior fbi leadership references quite clearly that merrick garland quite literally and openly lied under oath and that the fbi is using their intelligence collection tools to spy on and specifically target investigations towards parents who get slightly upset at school board meetings so yeah i don't think this is a surprise to anyone because but i think that it's pretty clear right now what the fbi's intentions are um and again just for those of you who don't know merrick garland the the attorney general um for those of you who don't remember is the father-in-law of alexander tanner alexander tanner is the co-founder of a company that has very large contracts we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contracts to provide critical race theory propaganda curriculum to school systems so there's quite literally the most clear of conflicts of interest in this case and you know again i don't want to be just some other guy that's shouting about this on the internet but man like you've got to talk about this kind of stuff and kind of get a feel for how dystopian we are and uh that's pretty dystopian so got the fbi openly targeting parents at school board meetings instead of the islamic insurgents that are running around this country because i don't know if anybody remembered or not but the virginia state police and about 30 different law enforcement groups were saying that there were isis militants running around virginia planning an attack um a couple weeks ago and uh didn't hear anything back from that so um they didn't announce that they caught the guys uh they did not they did not announce that anything had happened so i guess we have to assume that those isis militants are still in this country and still at large but again the fbi is more concerned about parents not wanting their children to learn critical race theory in school so again quite dystopian but let's go ahead and punch forward into the national guard deployments for this cycle so here is your reference slide and let's move right into the northeast so the biggest one for this cycle is the mission accomplished so for massachusetts massachusetts their mission to drive children to school is officially over they had by their own admission over 500 soldiers doing this i don't think that anybody liked that and if anybody sort of liked the idea of what that precedent was what that precedent became i'm pretty sure they haven't read too many books in their life but in any case you should not be seeing any soldiers driving children to school in the state of massachusetts anymore at least for now until when they put this mission back on again because that's how uh that's how things work right so there's there you go on that also we don't have much more information about new york they're keeping that very tight lipped as to how much how many soldiers are actually deployed to new york area hospitals we know the deployment occurred we know the deployment is currently occurring we just don't have numbers and we don't have units so something to something to to keep in mind moving forward and also no real update on connecticut uh doing the same so i guess we'll have to wait and see on that likewise moving forward into the southeast absolutely no change here we're seeing numbers fluctuate wildly so as time goes on and as we don't make any changes to these slides become more inaccurate but we don't have any information to put on them so um yeah there you go earliest we don't have any information that can be talked about and can be verified in an open source manner i should say that that way but moving forward into the big one uh for the cyclist midwest obviously the wisconsin national guard has been activated in kenosha um for domestic policing actions and things like that so those guys are going to be on the ground for a while um following this verdict whenever it comes out and see how that works out but no no other change so far also the southwestern region a lot of troops still on the ground the border mission is expanding every day and it's getting a little bit more hairy down there at the border but i haven't really had time to sit down and do the bean counting and figure out how many units are there and how many more people are there so sorry this slide hasn't been updated in a couple weeks but that's pretty much what i've got on this one and then very similar situation out west i do know the oregon mission is winding down mostly because that letter that i mentioned last time was sent i ruffled some feathers so as it will as it rightly should so the oregon national guard air national guard is reducing that mission quite significantly so that's really all i have on that and moving forward into the school mass mandates i do have one change and that is tennessee unfortunately a judge has blocked the mask mandate ban so this is kind of confusing here a judge didn't outright block it but the judge said that both parties in the lawsuit have to maintain the status quo until it can go to court which is in practicality this is like we're having people are having to interpret well what does a judge actually mean so this effectively means that the mandate ban has been blocked and he but again this gets more complicated because not really many people know how to interpret this court order and a lot of school districts are saying yes that yay the jud the judge blocked the mask mandate ban now we're going to require masks for school so now it looks like a significant number of uh school districts in tennessee are now requiring masks for school now again it there's a difference between endorsing a mask mandate and um not allowing a mandate ban there's a difference there right that's why they're different colors on this slide here but in practicality it looks like a lot of a lot of school districts are going are using this court order as kind of a de facto victory and in using that as a way to institute mask mandates remember like i mentioned last time a lot of companies a lot of entities around the world they're just waiting to use that excuse well we were just following orders right the classic excuse from a certain political party in a regime during the 1930s and 40s right we were just following orders we didn't really do any of this stuff ourselves well look at look around the country there are so many hundreds if not thousands of places that are chomping at the bit to use that excuse we were just following orders and school districts are one of those so they saw this did they saw this order and they're saying okay they're using that as to to stomp on the gas when it comes to mass mandates so huge problem for tennessee i'm sure that it will probably get ironed out here soon because all these lawsuits are actually finally making it to court now but we'll see as far as the jab of mandates themselves really no major change here california is still doing stupid california things and i'm sure other states will probably follow suit soon but you never really know really what i want to do is push forward into this slide the overall resistance tracker because there's one major change over where the wind comes sweeping down the plane that's right in oklahoma the national guard adjutant general there has ordered that national guard members in oklahoma will not be mandated to get the jab as long as they stay on title 32 orders if they federalize they go on title 10 as in if the president federalizes them they will be required because the federal government has a different thing but the adjutant general has said that he is taking his orders from the governor as long as they are on title 32 orders so gold star to oklahoma this is great this is the first state that we're aware of where a a state national guard is actually going against the federal government and this is a huge deal i don't think people realize how big of a deal this is for a national guard unit a national guard for a state to go against a federal mandate that's just completely unheard of and it's it's good to see and oklahoma's national guard is not super big so it kind of makes sense but i think that's a very good metric to track so actually moving forward i wanted to end on some good news uh before we hit the international stuff for once right talking about some good news right so i built this slide to show which companies and entities are being forced to go against the mandates because they can't afford to lose their employees so this is obviously not a complete list but this is a fantastic way to measure the effect effectiveness of resistance efforts remember being able to assess resistance effectiveness is very important because it

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for July 20th through the 26th of 2025. Continuing the trend of the past few years. It has been once again a very busy week. But unfortunately this week a lot of these issues I would much rather ignore have to do with national security. So I kind of have to pay attention to it. And as much as I really hesitate to do so, I would encourage everyone to pay a little bit more attention to this stuff this week because the potential for this to get out of hand is rather high. Of course, I am referring to mostly the data breach regarding the T app here in the United States, which we'll unfortunately have to get into in a moment. Also, the Epstein scandal in Washington DC continues to develop, so we'll have to cover that a little bit as well. Our friends across the pond have had a similar rough go of it this week with the online safety act causing a ruckus and mostly because the great British firewall is now online. And of course, we have another war to follow in Southeast Asia, this time between Cambodia and Thailand. And that war is heating up. So without further ado, let's go ahead and start digging into the rather unfortunate story this week, which is the T app data breach. Occasionally, I'll stumble across some information that I really, really wish that I did not learn or know or figure out. And this is most certainly one of those cases. So, what is the T app and what is this data breach all about? Well, this app was created solely for the purpose of allowing women to register for an account, mostly with just the goal of talking about men that they know andor were trying to date. This was mostly created and built and advertised as a dating app, but it was most certainly not. So, the name of the app itself kind of gives it away. Unfortunately, I've learned that the term T is a modern-day slang synonym for the word gossip. So, that should tell you basically what this this app was designed to do from the ground up. So, the general user experience for this app was for women to create an account and only women. I should note that very clearly right up front because that's important. Only women were allowed to have accounts on this app. And what they could do is create profiles like MySpace pages back in the day for men that they knew, all without the men knowing about it. So dudes could have a whole baseball card about themselves on this website and uh all the women in their life that they knew sharing information about them, personal details, rumors, uh unsubstantiated slander, all kinds of stuff. and they would have no way of knowing that that they had an entire targeting profile built about them on this app. That's why this situation is so unfortunate because it's just horrific to imagine that such an app would ever actually exist. But it did and it got around 2 million users uh within the United States to register for this app uh since its launch I think a couple of weeks ago. So, this rapidly became the number one downloaded app in the United States uh for a brief period of time there before the leak. Fast forward to a couple of days ago where a random user on 4chan discovered that this app was mostly written by AI and it was written very poorly at that. And most importantly, every single bit of data, every single line of code for this entire app and ecosystem was stored on a storage bucket that was publicly accessible by anyone on the internet. that all you had to do was have the URL and you could have accessed the entire website and the entire app. And that's exactly what someone did because uh quite a few people rapidly ripped all of the content from this website and found just how big of a privacy nightmare this situation was. So what data was leaked from this app? Well, most of the interesting data that was leaked or not even really leaked, it was just online just there for people to see. Most of the interesting data was user registration data. And this is where things rapidly go downhill. You see, remember how I said that only women were allowed to have accounts? Well, how did the app verify that someone was a woman and not uh, you know, creating an account as a dude? Well, they had users choose one of two options. They could take a selfie of their face and upload it to their servers, or they could scan a copy of their driver's license and upload it to the company's servers. So, all of that data was leaked. And as if that was not bad enough, in 2025, it turns out that many people still do not understand that when they take a photo with their smartphone with their location data turned on, their smartphone will embed in the metadata of that photo their GPS location. And it turns out it's pretty precise most of the time. people have gotten a little bit too comfortable with uh places like social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, whatever everyone's using nowadays because most social media websites will strip the XIF data from a photo that you upload. So if you wanted to post a photograph to Instagram, that user's phone is still reporting your GPS location to Instagram. It's just that Instagram is taking the extra step to remove that private data from your photo on your behalf before they post it to your account. Most people for some reason seem to not understand that this goes on. But when you're using a rather poorly coded app that was probably either written in Tel Aviv or Mumbai, they did not strip any of this data. So the raw photos that these people took to register an account to prove that they were indeed female and not male. All of that private data was still attached to the image. And it's even worse for people who took a photo of their driver's license because if they took a photo of their driver's license, that image itself would have a GPS location and their driver's license would have their mailing address. So then you could cross reference the address that was on the driver's license with the GPS coordinate and see if they matched. Right? So now we're starting to see why this may have been a a pretty big deal here. But we'll get back to that in a minute because the GPS stuff is pretty interesting. However, uh that was not the only thing that was leaked. As if it could not get any worse. It got worse because people noticed that not only were these uh photos of registrations online, but more or less the code for the app itself was online, which means that every single thing, every single user posted is now on the internet uh public. So if someone said a rumor about someone or tried to make some kind of unsubstantiated claim about a man that they knew, that information is now all over the internet. private messages, comments, posts, pretty much everything on this website is now just freely available on the internet. And my personal guess is that in a few days, if it doesn't exist already, is probably a database of all of the dudes that were slandered on this website is probably going to come out along with all of the people and their driver's licenses who uh slandered them. So, again, from a civil like social aspect, this is pretty bad. Uh, however, it could probably get quite worse because of what I'm about to mention in just a moment. But remember, all content on the app was leaked, including possibly potentially passwords. So, we all know how people tend to reuse passwords for things, including websites and uh apps they probably should not be using. So, this has a potential to get pretty bad, especially considering that the immediate fallout is for the company to basically just ghost everyone. Uh the T app itself uh has issued no warning or any kind of notification to any of the users that their data has their whole uh existence on the app has been breached. There has not been any acknowledgement from the company at all that any of this data was leaked. They're just carrying on and they're continuing to register new users. So I don't really know what's going on with this, but it does not appear to be that this scandal is over just yet because it's there's been no real effort to change anything. I don't even know if the owners of this app are are still around. they may have just dropped it and left. Uh to be honest, so so it's hard to say exactly what's going on. It looks like the company just kind of walked away. The the developers of this just kind of left it as we can imagine. That's probably a fairly high likelihood considering the very large lawsuits that are going to result from this. But that's still all a social thing. So, you know, this is it's interesting. It's kind of fascinating, but it's not really like why is it worth talking about? Well, I think it's worth talking about because the national security concerns. A lot of people uh signed up for this app from inside their offices on military bases, legislative buildings, uh government facilities, uh all around the United States. So, very sensitive sites in some cases. People were signing up for this app because they were bored and on their phone at work. And when people are bored and on their phone at work, they submit selfies and boom, there you go. Now you're geo tagged. I haven't seen how many, but a few people, I don't know how many, but at least a few people signed up for this app using a photograph of their military ID, which in case you didn't know, is a huge no no. Uh, that's not a something that's acceptable. But once again, this kind of still stays within the realm of just a really bad data leak, right? So, what I'm trying to get at here rather awkwardly is what makes this any different than any kind of unflattering data breach in the past, right? If we recall a few years ago, I'm not sure how many people remember this, but a few years ago, there was a scandal with the Ashley Madison company, which was, I guess, a company that was set up to be like a social media for people to have an affair online, and they would uh facilitate the infrastructure for doing that. So, of course, it was a very illicit app. A lot of people got very very upset that their credit card data got leaked. But if we recall that that data breach many years ago, what was leaked during that scandal? If if memory serves me correctly, it was things like credit card information, email addresses, and you know, uh, names and, you know, billing addresses and things like that. Not exactly selfies or GPS coordinates. And when that scandal occurred a few years ago, there wasn't really like a centralized like database for people to go in and search to see if anyone they knew had an account with that website. So, it was really hard to for people to kind of figure out who was, you know, implicated in this rather unflattering data breach, right? Eventually, a lot of people did kind of get implicated in this, but it was it stayed mostly on the dark web for a long time. It didn't immediately appear on Google Maps like this one did. And also I would posit that this particular data breach is worse for national security because of the nature of the app itself. The app itself was designed to share gossip, not necessarily to just have an illicit affair. Having an having your illicit affair being documented by a credit card data breach that reveals that you are on a website that you're not supposed to be on. That's bad enough, but what's worse than that in in my opinion at least? Well, the potential for blackmail in this case. So, let's get right down into the weeds of what I mean by this. Uh, mostly because I'm already down here in the weeds and I'm dragging you guys down here with me because it's uh pretty rough. So, the type of data on this website that was leaked is very interesting because well, for one, immediately everyone could very easily georreerence all of the selfies and the data that was on these websites and plot it on a map. And when you plot things on maps, things get pretty interesting, right? So, what you can do is you can take the GPS coordinates of all of the people that were implicated in this uh scandal and you can cross reference it with their mailing address and or their voting records. So, now you can verify as to whether or not a person was actually at the mailing address that they were supposed to be at. Remember the nature of this app? The nature of this app is to rate men like Yelp or like some kind of social credit system for men that they may be dating or affiliated with. So, if you will unfortunately follow along with me for just a moment, a woman has an affair outside of marriage and decides that she does not like the individual that she was having the affair with anymore and she decides to hop on this app, create an account, and share a lot of private details. This guy's a cheater, blah blah blah, so on and so forth, or any other kind of really bad, damaging information about this this person that they were having the affair with. Well, if they took their selfie photo from that guy's apartment because they got upset one time, well, you can see how that data is now on the internet for people to cross reference with their actual mailing address uh if they were so kind as to provide a scan of their driver's license. So, that's bad enough as is, but let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. It gets a whole lot worse if this entire scandal took place located within the base housing of a military base. And it gets even worse than that. If these pens started popping up in the places where general officers are known to live, as in the more affluent parts of military bases around the country, if you know what I mean. And it can get worse, not in just the context of the military threats, but uh powerful people being potentially implicated in things like this. Because what you can do is take the GPS data from this data breach and overlay it on a map and overlay that with US census data for income for instance to find out just how many people living in very affluent areas are not very happy with the people around them. So as interesting as that is uh for potentially very uh wealthy and very powerful people having a lot of pins fall on their personal residences. Remember, again, I'm trying to look at things from a more practical national security angle. And I can tell you that if we're looking at a counter espionage effort, I am sure I am sure that a lot of people would be very very interested in this app's data. I can guarantee you that every single intelligence agency in the world is just having a field day with this already because you can look at the data and see the obvious espionage angle. users who are married to someone, but they had an account on this app uh secretly so their spouse couldn't see it. And because they took uh georreerenced photographs, uh you can now know that they worked on or near a military base. So you can narrow it down, you know, to even more specific uh threat vectors and things like that. These people are ripe targets for blackmail, espionage, leverage from an international spiring, you know, anything and everything. Uh, of course the the the vulnerabilities here are absolutely limitless. I am just only focusing on the the part of the spectrum that lies within the espionage realm because, you know, the the other stuff is is interesting, but I don't want to waste you guys' time by going into the social aspects of this. So, yeah, this is a pretty big scandal. I don't think anyone has realized how severe this is just yet because everyone's focusing on this from the social angle, right? You're talking about, all right, these women created an account on a on an app solely for the purposes of doxing and sharing the the PII of dudes that they know without their knowledge. Oh, look at that. Their own PII gets breached, right? So, the the comeuppance angle of this, you know, and the the tables being turned angle of all of this is what people are focusing on right now. I'm trying to not really get involved in all of that, right? I'm trying to look at things from like, okay, how bad is this? because this app was about gossip and about the social angle of things and you know all this gossipy stuff right people are less likely to take it seriously so for instance I don't even know if like say the army's C is looking into this to identify any general officers wives who were implicated in this uh to find out hey look now you're at risk for espionage so you know be on the lookout kind of thing I don't know if they're doing that I think that you know the internet is you know of course faster than any kind of you counter espionage agency can work of course but I don't know they may just ignore this because well they think that it's about gossip and they think that it's about this you know useless social thing and they don't they don't understand that this man this has some pretty serious national security implications here and I think that this data breach is a lot worse than say if just some sort of illicit or you know embarrassing app leak occurred because of the nature of what was going on on this app this app gained notoriety because of what was happening on it so what was happening on this app. Well, it gained notoriety because it was just a pure vindictive cesspool of rottness. And what I mean by that is a lot of times women would create a profile, like a fake bit of information about a guy that they were trying to date themselves, so that they would basically give him a one-star Yelp rating. This dude's horrible. Stay away from this guy. And then they secretly go try to date that guy. So, they would try to poison the well regarding individual people. And in many cases, the guy had no idea that this was going on. So, say you're in a Fortune 500 company and you really want to date your boss and your boss is dating somebody else. And so, you go on this app and you created a fake report about how all this guy's a horrible person. Here's a bunch of lies about him to ward off potential people from this person. If you're at a Fortune 500 company and that data gets leaked, well, there you go. You could have people getting fired because of the false rumors that are being perpetrated about them on this particular app. And again, looking at things from the national security angle, you could have things like security clearances being impacted by this because I don't know if anyone knows this or not, but a couple of years ago, the US government, when it comes to social media, requires you to give over your social media accounts when you apply for a security clearance. Do you see the problem here? The reason for this is because the US government, if they're going to give you a security clearance, would really appreciate knowing if you are engaging in behavior or posting content online that is very likely to get you in a situation where you could be blackmailed. People do not like to hear it, but I'll mention it now. This is also why people who were openly gay or people who were transgender were prevented in the past from getting security clearances because at the time during the height of the cold war the Soviet Union uh went after these people like a moth to flame because uh at the time it was socially unacceptable for people to be of that persuasion. So you know it would it would be damaging if someone you know came out of the closet or something like that and that was a security risk at the time. Now, you know, one can argue about that in modern society. But you see the the kind of general idea here. The US government from a national security angle, if they're going to give you a security clearance, they want to make sure that you're not engaging in behavior that is easil that's going to get you easily blackmailed by a foreign nation state, right? So, social considerations aside, I know that's a very touchy topic, but when it comes to national security, it's pretty clear. So, now you can start seeing how a man can have a security clearance and a social media profile that is not even his, and he's got a social media presence. Well, now that just got leaked to China and Russia, this is this is just a gigantic mess. And unfortunately, uh there's really probably going to be absolutely zero accountability for any of this. So, uh it really does highlight, especially when we get to what's going on in the UK, it really does highlight the data security concerns, but also the fact that there were 2 million users on this website. At least that's what they reported. I don't know if it was actually 2 million. When I took a look at some of this data, I only looked at 20,000 people. So, this is what the map looks like with 20,000. Can you imagine what 2 million looks like? You know, that's a lot. That's a pretty big number of people. And I just I just feel that because this is this people are going to look at this and they're going to think, "Ah, this is just about a gossip thing. Some kind of internet weird 4chan thing. Not worth not worth looking at." No, I'm telling you, look at it. Like, look into this, you know, and I don't think the agencies are going to do it. There's a lot of threat vectors out there now. And like I wrote in the wire, in two or three days when this whole thing gets forgotten about and everybody kind of moves on and there's some other new horrific thing in the news cycle, people are going to forget about this. But you know who doesn't forget about this? The national intelligence agencies of pretty much every country on Earth who are going to look to exploit this. So just when this exits the news cycle is my bet is when when a lot of this data is going to be exploited and a lot of uh a lot a lot of espionage potential is increased. So sorry for spending so much time talking about this one today. I didn't want to talk about it at all. But when I started looking at it through the lens of national security, I started realizing, oh dear, this is a very big deal. And most importantly, it's worth spending so much time on because it's not just a data breach. It's a data breach that falls right there in that sweet spot where people are not going to care about it. So that's why I think it's worth uh focusing on for a while. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see what information comes from the uh data that was leaked, especially when it comes to what people were saying about uh people on the app. For instance, I saw I haven't verified it for myself, but I found uh claims that uh one user was identified as being an HR manager at a very large company and was actually posting uh negative uh social credit reviews about all of the men that she had interviewed uh for particular jobs and exactly why she had fired them or uh not fired them but refused to hire them. So, you know, you see how this is a kind of a big deal uh when it comes to everything from national security to the economy to the workplace. And oh man, it is just a nightmare that I really really really wish uh I didn't have to care about so much. But anyway, let's let's get off of that and let's talk about something equally concerning, which is our friends across the pond. Our friends in the United Kingdom have had a rather rough week because the online safety act uh went into effect a couple of days ago and the average British person discovered exactly what that law was all about when they tried to visit any website in the United Kingdom. So the online safety act was a rather controversial uh piece of legislation that was pushed through uh the British government and essentially it was originally advertised as a way of preventing youth from accessing adult content. It turns out that this law uh also applies to pretty much any website that hosts content. And the impact of this law, which is dripping with irony, is that pretty much every website in the United Kingdom is now required to make users submit a selfie and or a photograph of their stateisssued government identification. So maybe we can see where this is a little bit of a problem here. Of course, most websites have just shut down services to the UK. And of course, VPN companies have made probably in the sums of hundreds of millions of dollars overnight uh just from new users from the UK so that British people can get around their own firewall for their own country. So I guess we're just going to have to see what comes of it. A lot of British people have noted on social media that immediately this law was used to censor footage of protests at migrant centers uh and uh to to make sure that people can't know about protests that are occurring in their own country. So yeah, this is about as dystopian as it possibly gets. But again, it's it's Europe, so I don't really know in the context of how bad censorship already was. I don't know how bad it's going to get because of this. It'll get worse, but how worse? I don't know. We We're just gonna have to see, I guess. But anyway, I wish our friends across the pond good luck uh in working through that one. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Uh before we roll up with the intercepted ghost net reports, I did want to mention that I am aware of the large-scale war that is rapidly getting underway in uh Cambodia and Thailand. I'm going to have to get some more information on that. I've not built a map yet, and I have not started plotting all of the information on it. However, this has uh become a much larger thing than just a border clash. This is a legitimate war between Cambodia and Thailand. Again, something that not a lot of people tend to care about so much. However, the Thai Navy is now involved. So, this is becoming more of a regional thing and not just a border clash. So, please give me some time to do a little bit more research and uh I'll hopefully on Monday have the ability to get a little bit more fidelity on what's going on there because I'm no expert in South uh Southeast Asia. I have a very primitive knowledge of of the region. So, uh I'm going to have to get up to speed over the weekend here and we'll have to see how the how this goes. But, uh more information to come on that on Monday. But, as far as ghost net reports for this week, it was a good net this week. A lot of people exchanging information. A lot of good uh a lot of good details uh were shared. The Starlink outage occurred shortly before the ghost net uh window. So, I had my radio up and running and a lot of people were sending messages about the Starlink outage, which is fantastic. I think that's you know one of the main reasons for HF radio so that so that users can get you know news from around the country and exchange information around the country when there's like a in in the case of Starlink a global outage. Uh so that was quite handy a very good use for that sort of thing but yeah it's uh coming along very well. Uh it's working fantastically and uh I hope to have some ways of clarifying things and smoothing out the the Ghostn net guide uh here in just a bit but more to come on that later. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. Thank you guys all for sticking with me through this rather unfortunate uh news week and hopefully next week we can get some more fidelity on exactly what's going on in places like Southeast Asia as well as uh the latest developments for the Epstein scandal, which I uh forgot to make a slide on. But anyway, uh things keep changing by the minute with regards to the Epstein scandal in Washington DC. And uh I guess we're just going to have to wait for things to settle down a little bit before we figure out exactly what's going on because things are flip-flopping way too quickly uh for anyone to really make any kind of risk assessment based off of that information. So hopefully by Monday we'll have some more uh fidelity on what's going on and we'll just kind of work it then. So uh thank you guys all for sticking with me. Thank you for all of your support and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for October 5th through the 11th of 2025. The insanity continues again this week, so let's get right to it. Starting off here in the home front, the general state of unrest in many locations continues as before with regards to counter ice operations, most of which is focused in Portland and Chicago as usual, but we'll get more into that in a bit. Also in the United States, mostly in the western regions of the country, the digital surveillance of Christian churches continues at the behest of one particular foreign nation. And also this week there have been several developments with regards to disarmament campaigns. Most notably yesterday California signed into law AB 1127, which is a de facto ban on all Glocks. So, in typical fashion, there will probably be more outrage after the bill has passed rather than the lead up to it being passed and signed into law, but this bill bans any semi-automatic pistol which can accept a Glock switch or something similar to that effect, right? It's not just Glocks, but it's any other pistol that can take some sort of similar device. We all know how this goes, so I'm not going to harp on it too much, but rest assured I would be willing to bet that many other states are going to probably follow in the footsteps of California by figuring out a way of of banning firearms, not because the firearms themselves are illegal, but because they could be made into something that may be illegal. Of course, the majority of Glock switches are not actually used by proper lawful owners, they're used by gang members, and nobody ever really seems to be interested in policing that kind of activity, but we all know why that is. So, but that's the situation in the homeland for this week. And around the world, things have been a happenin' this week. We of course have the peace agreement in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, which has gone into effect and seems to be holding as much as to be expected. Either way, the general rough approximate guidelines of the peace deal that have been agreed to by both sides have been undertaken. There has been a very sharp decline in hostilities between the two main belligerents here in this conflict, so that is a positive development. But once again, we will see if this sort of thing holds for any length of time. As one can probably guess by the way that I'm describing this, I do not have any faith at all that this ceasefire will hold for any length of time. The old rule of thumb is that there's no such thing as a peace agreement in the Middle East. It's just how long is the ceasefire going to last before the war kicks up again. I don't know how long it's going to last this time, but my guess is that this will not end, especially because Gaza still remains, right? That's that was a major strategic goal for Israel is to completely take over the entirety of Gaza and basically just make it not exist anymore as a region and just kind of absorb it into Israeli control and push the Palestinians somewhere else, right? That was a major strategic goal for them as a nation, and internal Israeli politics indicate that a lot of politicians in Israel are not happy that Netanyahu agreed to this peace deal. So, he is facing a lot of internal criticism because he is letting Gaza remain, at least for now. We shall see, but enough on that for now. Moving over to the Far East, that particular conflict has reignited in the form of both China and the United States engaging in a little bit of economic warfare on their own. Things have been rather tepid over the past couple of weeks with regards to China and the United States negotiating their trade deals. Things were looking up there for quite a while, and then China decided to, as of November 1st, implement a whole lot of export controls on things that the United States needs quite dearly, such as rare earth minerals like lithium and a few other things as well. So, that of course angered Washington quite a bit as you could probably expect. So, the White House came out with a 100% tariff on China to take effect on the same day. And the the meeting between the United States and China, there was supposed to be an in-face meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping to take place soon, that meeting may or may not happen. That's really uncertain as to whether or not it's going to go forward. So, things are not really looking super great for the United States and China, but once again, this is economics in 2025, where the rules are made up and the points don't matter. So, in 2 weeks we may find out that things are doing swimmingly well and then all of this kind of goes away. Who knows? The books are being cooked to an absurd degree, so I don't know if anybody can ever really say what a country's national economic situation is at any given time, but suffice it to say that the economy kind of tanked a little bit upon the news that the White House was going to retaliate with the these tariffs once again. There were quite a few mysterious shorts on Bitcoin immediately before the White House announcement on the tariffs. So, there are already a lot of indicators of deception and insider trading and a general state of shenanigans being undertaken with this sort of thing. So, I don't know. We'll see how it works out, but that's the situation as it stands right now. Moving down south to talk about the strategic movement and the general state of the situation with regards to Venezuela, rest assured war with Venezuela is still on the menu, and the US Navy has quietly sent a couple of more destroyers down there to augment the naval forces that are still conducting lots of exercises, training, and a general preparation for war right off the coast of Venezuela. I don't think there was a strike on a narco boat this week, so we've gone a full 7 days without blowing up a cartel vessel, but the general situation still remains as before. The United States has not reduced any presence down off the coast of Venezuela. As a matter of fact, we've increased it quite a bit. So, depending on what the United States is trying to do, depending on the strategic goals, and what the US is looking to gain from any kind of action in Venezuela, we shall see. It may just be trying to strong-arm Maduro into something that the United States wants, which is obviously that's I mean that's obviously the low-hanging fruit of what's going on, but there are ways to strong-arm Maduro that don't involve actually conducting combat operations in his country. The question is whether or not the White House will decide if sending troops into Venezuela is going to be necessary for these strategic goals that we seek in Venezuela, whatever those are. Probably oil, but who knows? Either way, there's a lot of movement going on and certainly a lot to keep an eye on as we move forward. Moving back to the homeland, there have been a few kinetic events that have taken place this week. We'll talk about Portland and Chicago in in just a moment, or rather at the end, because there have been a quite a few questions as to what the overall strategic goal in these places are, and I think I can maybe clarify some things. But when it comes to actual kinetic events this week, there have been two major events. The first of which was the DC church bomber outside St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C. That was a very interesting case because even though IED attacks and just generally crazy people with explosives tends to be kind of an American tradition at this point, this case was hosted to quite a bit of information manipulation, and I think that more eyes should be on this case considering the current threats against churches around the United States. I also wanted to mention the industrial explosion that took place in Tennessee yesterday. I didn't have time to slip it into the wire, but this was a very very kinetic explosion that took place in Tennessee at a major facility that produces explosives for the military. So, there have been many many casualties from this incident, and we'll get more into that in just a second. But the church bomber up first, one Lewis Jerry was arrested in Washington, D.C. after he caused a bit of a scene outside St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C. last Sunday. It took a couple of days for the details of this case to come to light because it was initially downplayed quite heavily by the authorities and by local journalists who don't really don't really care to highlight any kind of threats against Christian churches. Initially, this was reported as just some crazy guy setting up a camping tent right on the front of the church steps here as you can see. This is why there wasn't that much focus on this kind of thing because it just looked like a crazy homeless guy who was trying to cause a scene. This happens in D.C. like every 15 minutes, okay? So, this is not really out of the realm of of normalcy for the area. Even with the, you know, deployment of troops to D.C., there's still a a lot of dystopian elements to the city, and this is one of those things that tends to kind of happen, right? So, the church noticed, or rather local authorities, I'm not sure if the church noticed first or if local authorities, who were kind of policing the area in advance, saw this guy first. Either way, he had set up his little encampment here on the front steps of the church around 6:00 in the morning before the Red Mass for the year. So again, a special mass dedicated to the Supreme Court justices at this particular church. The Red Mass is held more widely, of course, and is supposed to be a special day to pray for all of those who are involved in the criminal justice field and the the court system and things like that. But this particular church hosts the their Red Mass for the Supreme Court justices, and over the years a couple of justices have shown up to attend this mass, which takes place the the Sunday before the court calendar begins for the year. So, DC police, DC Metro Police, initially stated that all right, they made contact with the crazy guy trying to set up a homeless camp on the steps of the church. Obviously, can't do that sort of thing, so they were trying to, you know, get him up and relocate him to another area, and they found a Molotov on him. That's the initial story they told to the media. However, that's not what happened at all. This guy set up an encampment on the front steps of the church, and when he was first contacted by police who were trying to, you know, walk up to him and ask him what it what what he's doing, he said basically stay away from me, I've got explosives. I'll throw one at you if you come any closer kind of thing. So, this was already like a hostage situation, right right up front, right to start with. Turns out what he wanted police to do was read his nine-page manifesto of what seems to be mostly just insanity, which is what they did, and he they were able to get him to surrender and arrest him and move on from there. But the bomb squad showed up because of the IED threat, obviously, and they found 200 IEDs scattered throughout his possessions and inside his tent and backpacks and stuff like that. So, I have no idea what these IEDs looked like, but looking at this guy and the context of this and the alleged contents of his manifesto, I'm going to venture a wild guess that these 200 IEDs were probably Antifa specials, right? Little tiny um fireworks grade explosives which have shrapnel probably glued or taped to the outside of them. We see these a lot. So, they're still explosives. They're still lethal. They're still like a very dangerous terroristic threat, but it's not like this guy had 200 155 shells with pressure plates in his tent here, right? So, these 200 IEDs are probably very Antifa grade, meaning that they're very very small, but you know, they're still very dangerous. They're still like, you know, it's still a terrorist attack, right? And considering that the White House has really tried to sign a bunch of executive orders talking about domestic terrorism and things like that, here is your case. This is exactly the type of guy that you said from the White House that you were trying to target and there's been no comment on whether or not this guy's going to face federal terrorism charges. So, something to be aware of. We know this is not surprising in the slightest, but I did want to highlight it because there hasn't really been very much detail on the nuances of this case and I did want to highlight that. Now, moving down to Tennessee, the very unfortunate explosion at the Accurate Energetic Systems Explosives Factory in Bucks North. This was a major manufacturer for military grade explosives. You can see here from their website, these are all of the things that they manufactured at this facility, and you can see it's a lot of very very heavy heavy military explosives here. And as you can see by the helicopter footage of the blast, the place is gone. It's it was just a catastrophic detonation that occurred there. Whatever the cause was, we may never know as a matter of fact because there's just there's nothing but a crater left. As far as casualties go, officially 19 people are still missing, but looking at the before and after photos blast, I think we can be fairly confident these are all are all going to be fatalities, unfortunately. Once again, there is no indication of what took place here. There's no indication of well, you know, what what happened to cause this catastrophic explosion. This facility does have a history of safety violations, but that's not entirely abnormal for most industrial facilities these days. I mean, pretty much every explosives manufacturer has a history of safety violations at this point. So, I don't know if that's something that would factor into trying to establish causation. I don't know how normal that sort of thing would be at this type of facility. And I also don't know the nature of the safety violations because, again, they're making explosives for the military. It's not like they're really forthcoming with their information on on what exactly they do there and the exact nature of safety violations. This is definitely one of those national security things, so we're probably not going to get the truth as to what caused this catastrophic blast, but yeah, not not a great thing, for sure. And it does highlight every time one of these things happens, it does highlight the importance of being aware, paying attention, and each one of us doing what we can to make sure that we are as safe as possible, especially those who work in the industrial field. It's a very dangerous world out there just in general, and it would be a very good idea to try to make the world a little bit less dangerous, however you can do that. If that means being a little bit safer, being the OSHA stickler, you know, I know nobody likes to be that guy, right? Nobody likes to be that guy on the work site, but look, man, if your work site has the potential to turn into a crater, please consider being a stickler for safety and doing what you can to make sure that everybody goes home at the end of the day. Now, moving out west, something quite concerning that I wanted to mention again. I wrote a longer wire than normal on this topic, which of course is going to get a lot of pushback due to the nature of the nation involved with this, but I did want to mention once again that there is a targeted geofencing campaign underway at many mega churches in the western United States. So, for those of you who did not read the the wire report on this, there has been a major push by the government of Israel, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to increase their image and increase their presence in American Christian churches. So, the Israeli government is trying to teach you about Christianity and how Christian churches need to support the government of Israel, specifically with regards to the October 7th attacks. Again, this is literally the most forbidden topic I have found so far to discuss, so, you know, there's really not much I can say, honestly, about it, but I do want to highlight the geofencing concerns because that's kind of a security thing. You guys can look into the media blitz on your own, but the the geofencing thing is something that's interesting because it's the first time that this sort of thing has happened specifically by a foreign nation-state in the context of targeting a place solely for the Christian faith. Just to get the disclaimer out, of course, targeted geofencing for advertising purposes happens literally all the time. As you're watching this on your phone, you are probably being surveilled by at least Google, who is associating your advertising ID with this particular content if you're watching it on, say, YouTube for example. And geofencing for advertising purposes has definitely been undertaken for a while now, right? How many times have you been in a city or been in a place without a VPN turned on and you suddenly start getting ads on Twitter, for instance, about a specific city policy or something like that? Or if you turn on a VPN and say you're, you know, you start getting ads in different languages from the nation where your VPN is located, right? Some of these are based on IP address, right? So, where your internet service provider is telling advertisers where you're located physically, but other times it is geographic, right? How many times have you gone into a store, for instance, and you go to your shopping at a particular store and then you go back out to the parking lot and you're sitting in your car getting ready to go home and you get in a pop-up ad from like Google Maps or something saying, "Hey, we see you visited the store. Would you like to leave a Google review for the store you just visited?" That is a geofenced advertising thing that links your geographic coordinate with your advertising ID. That's the kind of thing that is happening right now. The reason that I wanted to highlight it is because it's now happening to target specifically Christians who go to a Christian church. So, the way that this geofencing ad campaign is being undertaken, and once again, this is using their own documentation from their FARA registration paperwork. So, please, please, please, please, please look at this document. Do not believe me in my explanation of things. Go read the document yourself and you'll see how dystopian this kind of thing is. But the general gist of how this works is you've got your cell phone in your pocket, you show up to worship services on Sunday morning at a specific time before services begin, and you take your cell phone into the church. Well, now your cell phone, because it has location services turned on and because your smartphone has an associated advertising ID, now the Israeli government is able to discern that your advertising ID is now linked with this establishment. And because you're standing in a specific circle, a geographic circle, around that church, because you're standing there at a certain time, they can push ads to your phone specifically that have one purpose, at least according to their documents. The one purpose is to encourage you to think a certain way about the October 7th attacks. Now, how will this work out in in practice, right? It's not like you're going to get an emergency alert push notification from, you know, like the emergency alert system or something like that. What it what it means is you're going to see ads apps. So, if you were so inclined to pull up Twitter, for instance, at a certain time of day while standing in church, you will probably get an ad that is encouraging you to think a certain way about the nation-state of Israel or about the October 7th attacks. That's what this media campaign is for. Depending on the apps that you have on your phone, it could also be a cross-platform sort of thing. So, a lot of people have a weather app on their phone, right? And that weather app is generally going to request location services. And a lot of people also have push notifications turned on for their weather app a lot of times, and depending on the weather app that you use, you may get ads as push notifications. If you've got like a kind of a more sketchy weather app, right? A lot of the free ones are like that. So, this is just speculating, but this is how I can see this working out in practice is you may get a push notification from your weather app that says, "Hey, by the way, look at this documentation about the October 7th attacks while you're standing in church." That's what this whole campaign is about, and that's what their own documentation states. So, that's why I wanted to focus on this because, you know, this is a foreign nation-state targeting Christians for simply being inside a church. And what are they targeting them for? They're targeting them to get them to think a certain way about a nation-state and to get them to think a certain way about a historical event. That's how you know that the narrative is true, by the way, when you have to get advertisements rammed down your throat when you're trying to worship the Lord Jesus Christ. So, yeah, that's probably the most I can say about this sort of thing. I would encourage you to just check out the primary source documents right from the dot gov website yourself and form your own opinions about what's going on here because there's only so much I can say. Now, when it comes to what to do about this and what to do to mitigate the effects of this strategy, the first thing to do is to check out the list of churches that are being targeted by the Israeli government so far. I will put in this video, I will embed in it so that it makes it onto as many platforms as possible, a scroll, a video scroll, of the list itself. It's a few hundred churches, so I will make sure to to put this in in its entirety. I know it's kind of boring to scroll through, but I'll put it in here anyway just so that you guys can have it for the record. But in terms of what you can do to mitigate this sort of thing, it must be noted right up front that this is not new, okay? This is not a new thing. I'm only mentioning it because it is faith-based and it is a foreign government who does it, and because I have the documentation, right? The Israeli government did what they're supposed to do, and they filed a FARA registration, right? This company filed a Foreign Agent Registration Act packet to the US government. So, we have the documentation. If they were a little bit more surreptitious, or if they went through the effort of cloaking this more in a shell corporation sort of thing, then we wouldn't even know. We would not know about this. We would not have their PowerPoint slides. We would not have any of the data that this is occurring. Again, this is 100% a case of survivorship bias. We have the paperwork in front of us, so we have to make decisions off of the paperwork we have. We cannot make decisions based off of the paperwork that we don't have, but, you know, surveillance operations that are still ongoing. So, maybe, just maybe, this will be a way of encouraging Christians to think in terms of not just them to being targeted because they are Americans, but being targeted because they go to church, because they are at worship services by foreign nations. And, of course, the follow-on effects from all of that, you know. The government says this is 100% legal and is not doing anything to stop this, obviously, because of the nation involved, but also because, well, you know, they've pencil-whipped this sort of thing into being legal over the years. So, in terms of mitigation, there's not a whole lot you can do. You can go all Jason Bourne and put your phone in a Faraday bag when you go to church, or before you go to church, turn off location services, put your device in airplane mode. At the very minimum, that may help. It may not help, but it may help. A lot of times, Bluetooth is also being used to link advertising IDs together. So, even if you are you turn your data off, even if you turn off your location services, your advertising ID is being linked with other Bluetooth devices around you. So, your phone is listening for any Bluetooth devices that are around, and it can be used to associate you that way with your advertising ID. Yeah, this is pretty much squarely in the realm of digital panopticon kind of thing, and it's pretty dystopian, but welcome welcome to the reality of the way the world's been for about 20 years now. It's just getting a little bit more interesting because even foreign nation-states are doing this sort of thing. They're doing it openly with very nice PowerPoint slides on this sort of thing. So, you can do it if you want. You can put your phone in a Faraday bag before you go to church, so that maybe your phone isn't going to know that you're sitting in church. You can turn off location services. You can some depending on which apps you're using and which operating systems and stuff like that, you may be able to go in and reset your advertising ID. I think Google has that as an option, but yeah, there's not a whole lot you can do. This may have happened before in the past. We just didn't know that it was being very subtle, you know? But, there's a big difference between minor surveillance that is being conducted in secret, or the general gist, or the general understanding that all Americans live under that, yeah, the NSA is probably surveilling me, right? Every American kind of operates under that assumption nowadays, but it that's a that's a big difference from that general abstract, yeah, the feds are probably surveilling me for some reason. The Palantir databases, right, are sucking up every bit of data about me, right? There's a big difference between that general gist, that abstract view, and a foreign government openly advertising, proudly so, proudly advertising that they are targeting Christians in the biggest ever geofencing campaign where they are siphoning up your data solely for the purposes of propaganda. They're not trying to sell you a T-shirt. They're not trying to get you to buy a cheeseburger, right? They're trying to sell an idea about a historical event to you. So, maybe you see why I'm a little bit concerned about that sort of thing. Again, because it is a targeting of Christians, there will be very little media coverage of it, and people will generally not want to care about this sort of thing because, again, that's just kind of the way things are nowadays. But, I wanted to focus on it because this is very important to me. Even though the churches that they are targeting are are not my churches, right? They're mostly mega-churches out west, but still, something to keep an eye on, something to be aware of, and something to start prodding people to be a little bit more serious with regards to living daily life. And, unfortunately, that now includes church life. So, now moving over to the counter-ICE efforts in both Portland and Chicago. Let's let's let's dig into this a little bit because this has become quite a complicated thing that hopefully we can discuss and and get to some sort of understanding with regards to what's going on with regards to counter-ICE efforts around the country. I wanted to highlight Portland and Chicago because these cities are both the point of consolidation for counter-ICE efforts in in these areas, but they're also very different, right? So, there's a lot of overlap between the two, but there's also a lot of differences between the two. So, let's start with Portland first. Portland is, of course, Portland, right? Portland is internationally infamous for being a very big far-left, communist, socialist, antifa Mecca, right? And, that's why they're resisting counter-immigration efforts there. Most of the counter-ICE efforts in Portland have arisen from a few different demographics. The first group are the immigrants themselves, which are a smaller group compared to the rest of the country, right? There are far fewer Mexicans in Portland than in Los Angeles, for instance. There are still enough illegal immigrants in Portland to cause trouble, but for the most part, most of the unrest in Portland is coming from the usual suspects, antifa, right? Portland is second to Seattle, a major antifa hub for the region. So, that's where a lot of this unrest is coming from, antifa trying to cause problems because they are antifa. The reason that Portland is worthy of note is because there's just a lot of them there. So, see this image that was posted by the Department of Homeland Security and a bunch of other sources, this was going around on a lot of these anarchist platforms and social media, where, by the way, they just maintain free control, right? If you're a leftist or an antifa member in the United States, you can post terrorist threats, you know, openly in on the internet, and nothing will happen to you, right? Yeah, I know, surprising because Trump's in the White House, and we have a hugely conservative government now, right? Allegedly. Yeah, no, antifa still has been given a pass by the DOJ to do whatever they want. Now, you can argue there's intelligence collection being undertaken. I very strongly doubt that because most of the people who work at the FBI, and most of the people who work at the DOJ, are far-left militants themselves, right? These people physically participated in a lot of these marches for these, you know, causes to show solidarity. So, whether or not the White House specifically, and, you know, Trump's core staff are trying to weed this out, I don't know. All I know is what's happening, which is antifa has no natural predators, which is why they're able to get away with stuff like this. Today, probably by the time this brief comes out, antifa is openly advertising and encouraging people to shine lasers at helicopters, specifically US military Black Hawks and federal and border patrol Black Hawks that are flying over the city to conduct raids. Yeah, very bold move. But, for those of you who think that the military's going to crack down on this, I would probably say probably not. The the laser thing was used in Korea for their protests a few years ago to bring down drones and things like that, and it worked quite well because people are correct in that if you are a lone, single individual, and you shine a laser at a military helicopter with very fancy optics and a laser of its own, you're going to have a bad time. But, if you've got 400 people in the street, and they're all doing it, all at the same time, and no one is interested in arresting these people, guess what? They're going to get away with it. Now, for those concerned about how normal this will become by leftist groups and leftist organizations around the country, there are some tools at the federal and military level that can help mitigate the effects of lasers being used on aircraft, but maybe we'll talk about that at a later time. I'm kind of curious as to how this is going to work out, especially in Portland, because this is the first time that they have openly stated they're going to commit a felony, and I'm curious as to how that's going to work out for them. But, anyway, that's Portland. Chicago is a whole other animal. Now, there's a lot of overlap between the two, but why is Chicago upset with the counter-ICE operations? It's not really antifa in Chicago that's causing a problem, though they do have an antifa presence there. Of course, antifa is going to be in every major city, and even some minor cities around the country, but mostly Chicago is upset for one reason alone, gangs. Chicago is upset because a gangs in Chicago run rampant, and they control the streets, and they control a lot of these places where immigrants are congregating. So, drug dealers are going to get it really upset if you remove their clientele from their ecosystems, and you remove their drug trafficking networks from their systems. So, that's why Chicago is upset, and that's why people are trying to take the fight to ICE officials there. Of course, it's also a political thing. A lot of the attacks on the ICE facility in Broadview have taken place due to the elderly, far-left, but also elderly individuals who don't really have anything better to do but protest and cause problems. That's kind of a nationwide problem, but it's also low-level stuff. The more serious stuff, like vehicle ramming attacks, shootings, snipings, things like that, those tend to be because of straight-up cartels being involved, and they don't like ICE taking taking the fight to their criminal enterprises, or far-left activism, right? So, a lot of these vehicle ramming attacks and a lot of these straight-up attacks on ICE are just due to politics, right? That's really the only way that you can encourage crime to not be policed is due to some kind of political thing, or because you're a criminal yourself. And, that tends to be how things have worked out in Chicago so far. So, Portland and Chicago are two very different cities, and they're taking the fight to ICE. They're conducting these counter-ICE operations. They're learning. They're growing. They're organizing. They're They're getting better funding, but they're two very different cities with a little bit of overlap between the two of them. So, that's why I wanted to talk about this in a little bit more depth because there's a lot of discernment that's needed. Yes, it is a very, very, very hard mission that has no real winning solution that's easy to get to. On the one hand, you've got federal agencies like ICE, which are trying, I think I think they're genuinely trying to do what they can, at least some district supervisors are definitely trying to do the best they can to prevent terrorists from harming American citizens, whereas in some other areas, we're totally fine with a foreign government, you know, surveilling Christians going to church and trying to target them with propaganda because we've pencil whipped that into being legal and we're just perfectly okay with that, right? So, there are some things that are doing good and some things that are not going so well with regards to counterinsurgency in the homeland, but we're here now, right? And we have to do the best that we can. And if we have to talk these things out without exactly knowing the exact perfect answer for things, well, that's what we kind of have to do. So, we'll continue to do that and keep an eye on the situation as we go forward. Now, moving over to the United Kingdom, jolly old England is not doing so jolly these days. There has been a lot of pushback with regards to the straight-up authoritarianism that's kind of underway in the United Kingdom, which is kind of ironic because a lot of the talk of authoritarianism is coming from within Keir Starmer's own party, right? And one of the things that's kind of come to light this past week has been the "no Coke for you" law, which is a new law that was instituted to ban restaurants and establishments who have, you know, soft drinks on tap. They are no longer allowed by law to offer you a refill for certain beverages, right? For your health, right? That's the kind of way that they're framing it. What is it really? What's really going on here? It's the same exact thing that happened in the United States with the paper straws. It has no real impact on anybody because obviously people are just going to go buy another drink, right? So, there if they want a refill, they're just going to buy another one for however much it costs. It doesn't prevent you from buying another, it just prevents a free refill. So, what is this? Well, this is a great example in power dynamics for for governments. And what this is is something trivial that the government can dominate a citizenry with that that impacts the citizenry on a personal level, but it's trivial. It has to be trivial. That's the That's the important part because what they want to say with this is we can we can impact you on such a trivial meaningless way, but we're still going to dominate you, right? The fact that it's a trivial is and has no real bearing on anything is the important part. They want to make sure that you know who's in charge. That's why the paper straws thing, which are wrapped in plastic, right? It's so trivial. It's so meaningless. It's so useless, right? But, it impacts you on a personal level and it's a way for the government to impact your daily life. It's definitely a psyop. It's definitely a The more, I guess, doctrinal term is information operation. Yet, really it's just a a domination thing. So, that's what that's all about, but the the British people have gotten a little bit upset about it. We've seen these psyops in America many times over the years and yeah, that's kind of what what that's about. So, the other thing that I thought was rather interesting is the developments with the digital ID concerns, which have deteriorated since the digital ID scheme has come to light. So, as you might expect, resistance to the digital ID scheme has been rather high throughout the United Kingdom. Basically, nobody, left or right, wants the digital ID scheme to come into fruition because of, well, many reasons. It's not just privacy, it's more of a data security thing. If you put all of your eggs in one basket, when a ransomware thief steals that basket, you've got yourself a bit of a problem. But again, it's often the little and seemingly meaningless details that kind of catch my eye on stuff like this. And this was the case with this article from The Guardian. At face value, all right, fine. You read the headline, it says, "Explainer: Why does the UK need digital IDs and what data will they include? Starmer's proposal has been criticized by rivals and civil liberties groups and campaigners worry about people without smartphones." Okay, so fairly standard mainstream media article from The Guardian, right? But here's the thing that caught my eye. This is how they chose to write this article. So, if you scroll down a little bit on the page, the whole article is is formatted like this section here on the right. And the first section is, "Why do the people of the UK need a digital ID?" And the second question is, "Why is Tony Blair involved?" Now, isn't that an interesting way of writing an article? Isn't that very fascinating? Sometimes the things that they say and the things that they choose to say and the things they choose to not say. This article to me was utterly fascinating because it is a perfect example of how articles are written sometimes, betraying what the article's really about. It's almost like reading a Soviet newspaper from like, you know, the height of the Khrushchev era, where they can't really talk about something directly, but they can definitely talk about it indirectly. So, this article's headline is trying to explain why does the UK need digital IDs and what what's the digital ID thing about. And the first two things they choose to talk about are, "Why do we even need this and why is Tony Blair involved?" The fact that they wrote these in this order and wrote about them at all, you know, why is Tony Blair involved? That shows you who's controlling the marionette strings with this, right? And I find that to be utterly fascinating to the point of hilarity that this is how they wrote this article. It's not like they started with, you know, "Well, you know, there's immigration, right?" Or cuz that's what the British government's perspective is, "Oh, we're doing this because of immigration." No, that's not what The Guardian says. The Guardian is trying to ask a rhetorical question or try to ask a question that the citizens are asking, which is, "Why do we need this and why is Tony Blair involved?" That is hilarious. And it kind of shows you what everybody's thinking about this sort of thing. Even though The Guardian's articles are, you know, it's The Guardian, right? So, anyway, I thought that was interesting that this is going over so poorly that they had to literally ask these questions and try to answer them in the most politically correct way right up front. And that's what the article's about. And I think this is interesting. For those of you who have mentally checked out because this is about the UK and you don't really care, I will I will see your Guardian article and raise you a Fox News article. This was published a couple of days ago on October 9th and the title of this Fox News, again, Fox News article is, "UK faces backlash over mandatory digital ID. Could US be next?" Seems like a fairly standard headline for Fox News, something you should probably would just scroll past, you know, unless you're watching it on TV, I guess. But the subheading betrays what Fox News is trying to push. The subheading reads, "Digital ID expert says controversy stems from fear, poor conception and lack of education." That's why I chose the Fox News article on this because Fox News, which has historically been the conservative alt-right boogeyman news group newsflash, it's not. Even Fox News is trying to push people to accept a digital ID here in the United States. Now, I could pull any other article from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, all of these other, you know, the the the traditionally more leftist groups. Even the AP would probably have something positive to say about digital ID. But I chose this one specifically to show you that this is truly a bicameral effort. This is a bipartisan effort to try to shape perception here in the United States. So, when Fox News, of all places, is trying to get people to accept a digital ID and, "Oh, no, no, no, these fears are unjust. You just need to be educated. You need to be educated about what's going on with this digital ID thing." Yeah, that's something to be aware of. You can kind of see where where the the tides are are shifting on that sort of thing. But we all know how this goes, right? That's why I put these these images on the slide with this article because we know how this goes. We we've heard this before. The United States, guess what? We have had a national ID effort, the REAL ID effort, right? Remember that push from a few years back? In Congress, we had liberal politicians and conservative politicians unite together, uniparty style, to pass the REAL ID Act so that we had all 50 states, you know, all the states which wanted to participate in this program to have REAL IDs, right? To have identification documents, driver's licenses, which would be of one sort of same standard for things like TSA and interstate travel. There was this massive push from a bunch of conservative politicians, a bunch of liberal politicians. They both were talking about how great this was going to be for security and immigration and, you know, counterterrorism and things like that. And what happened? This week we found out that a lot of states were just issuing driver's licenses, CDLs, with no name given on them. These people can get on a plane with no name given driver's licenses because they're REAL ID compliant driver's licenses, right? So, yeah, we all know how this goes. We all know what's going on, but I thought it was very interesting in typical fashion cuz I tend to focus on things that probably don't really matter in the long run, but I found it was interesting, so I wanted to talk about it. But anyway, I find it very interesting that we're going to lock you down, we're going to make sure that you have this digital ID, but I wonder how many people in the UK and eventually in the US when this comes to the US, I wonder how many people are going to have a digital ID on their phone that says "no name given." Probably quite a few because they don't want these people's actual names, they don't want them in biometrics so that when they commit crimes, they have no record, right? Because I mean, you don't even know their name or anything about them, right? So, anyway, I thought that was kind of interesting how the digital panopticon is certainly here. However, that panopticon has blind spots in a few areas. So, some people get surveilled more than others, particularly if you go to church on Sunday. But if you're at an Antifa riot and you're shining lasers at helicopters, there's probably not going to be much that happens to you. So, anyway, selective digital panopticon sort of situation, which contributes to the very interesting times that we live in and the challenges we have to work through. So, so that's pretty much all I have for today and let's roll up with the intercepted Ghost Net reports where we can try to get a little get ahead of the information crackdown and try to increase our resiliency in a more off-grid, more radio-based way. This is the Ghost Net communications plan. It's a ham radio plan mostly, shortwave radio or HF high-frequency radio is a very interesting tool that we can use to communicate with people over long distances without having any sort of infrastructure in between. We created this Ghost Net plan so that we could all kind of get on the same page and have a more resilient way of exchanging information, not just for an emergency use or more of a hobby sort of thing, but more of a practical thing. I have been working on improving the Ghost Net over time to try to integrate some other systems and things like that. So, there is a MeshTastic channel for the Ghost Net. There There are also VHF and UHF options for those of you who just have the ubiquitous Baofeng, right? The infamous little radio that could, right? So, if all you have is a a cheap radio, don't feel left out. You can definitely engage with it. It's probably not going to be very effective for line of sight stuff. This is more of an HF thing so that we can connect people from all over the world together kind of at the same time. And that's kind of hard to do with line of sight, especially if you don't have repeater networks. This is heavily more of an autonomous kind of thing, decentralized sort of information exchange system. And as we can see, there's a lot of information being exchanged every week and even throughout the week. It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it is one way that we can stay connected, especially if if everything goes out, if the internet goes out, if power goes out, if everybody's disconnected from one another, this is how we can exchange information over long distances fairly effectively. So, thank you to all of you who make the Ghost Net great. Thank you to all of you who participate in that and thank you to all you guys out there who are just listen only. Even if you're just listening and you and you don't have a license and so you can't transmit, it's good that you're participating in it anyway and trying to do the best you can to stay informed. So, that's all I have for today. Here are the sources for this week's reports. You can also grab the links and primary source material if I can if I can snag it on each Obsidian page for each wire report throughout the day. So, so even though I'm taking the wire reports from Obsidian and pasting them into social media, right? You don't see the source material on social media, you can click that link and then go to my Obsidian page where I have all of the other links. I have to do it this way because a lot of social media pages simply just deprioritize if they see that I have a lot of links in a in a post, they will just block that post and only I can see it, right? This is the way the world works, unfortunately. That's why my wire reports don't get pushed by Twitter's algorithm too much because even one link is enough to deprioritize this. But my priority is the information, not necessarily reach a lot of times on Twitter at least. And I want to make sure you guys can get access to the the primary source material if you want to investigate further, which you definitely should if you want to look at the primary sources that I use to make each wire report. I do the best I can to try to put those there. So, there's always more research to be had. There's always more ways to verify that information is true in today's age of significant information manipulation efforts, it's always good to try to get to the bottom of the truth as best you can, right? So, thank you to all of you who have stuck around. Thank you to all of you on Patreon who support me there and keep this work going. I really do appreciate it. Couldn't do it without you guys. So, thank you for that and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for July 6th through the 19th of 2025. It's been a busy couple of weeks, so let's get right to it. Starting off with the general overview around the United States, there have been several items of strategic note over the past few weeks. Today I'll be focusing mostly on the wartime preparations that the Pentagon continues to undertake as well as some of the biocurity concerns, which is the best way I can think to phrase it, regarding the potential threats to the American food supply. Over in the Middle East, things have been very kinetic as usual with two ships being sunk in the Red Sea region, civil war flaring up once again in Syria and the conflict in Gaza continuing to escalate. As far as strategic movement, I'm sorry I have not had time to update the slides for this week to track down all of the uh platforms that have been moving around. Just a cursory glance this morning, I haven't seen a whole lot of uh very concerning major deployments from the United States. However, there are several major uh military exercises being undertaken around the world that have that are either underway right now or have already occurred and have concluded. Many nations around the world are continuing to break their own records and undertake very large military exercises around the world. And in the American homeland, things are developing much the same. So, starting off with the Southeast region today, let's briefly touch on what's been going on in Washington over the past few weeks. As everyone knows, it has been very, very busy both in Congress and the White House. things have been changing by the minute. So, it's not really been very prudent to comment on things until things have kind of ironed out a little bit. But just very roughly touching on some of the things that may matter a little bit more than you might think. The 50% tariff on imported copper into the United States is scheduled to start in August, which is going to impact things in two main ways. For one, uh the most obvious impact is going to be copper prices uh skyrocketing, which is to be expected. Anytime you're going to tariff something that is a heavily imported good, you're going to have the price of that good go up quite a bit. However, when it comes to things like raw minerals such as copper, this is going to drive up a lot of copper theft. I'll touch on the reasoning behind this tariff uh in just a moment because I think this will make a little bit more sense when viewed in the context of a national security issue or at least I hope that's the decision-making process behind this and not just some other uh political pork trading kind of thing. But when it comes to the average American, look, it's summertime. The weather's pretty hot. We all know that it is both riot and theft season. The theft of catalytic converters, for example, always increases when there is a sharp uh sharp spike in the price of things like palladium, for instance. So, if you all remember uh from a couple of years ago, there was a a pretty good spike in in precious metals and catalytic converters were being stolen left and right. It was a pretty pretty big crime spree. Well, the same sort of thing may happen with copper. Copper is a lot easier to steal in many cases and copper theft is becoming a very big problem in places like South Africa. That's kind of their crime of choice uh in many cases. So going out on a little bit of a limb, this could become a pretty serious problem once these tariffs go into effect. And if they stay for any period of time, stealing a catalytic converter out of someone's car sitting in the driveway is a lot different than stealing several thousand pounds of copper from electrical switching stations or electrical substation, for instance. So the past few years have also very much highlighted how vulnerable a lot of our critical infrastructure is to malign action either targeting to you know by some extremist group or some kind of uh terroristic kind of threat. But when it comes to the average thief a lot of times the average thief is a lot smarter than a terrorist is. So bottom line just be aware of the impacts that copper theft can have uh on your local area mostly when it comes to things like power generation and stuff like that. So it's going to be a pretty rough time in some areas. I think some areas won't be affected so much, but a lot of areas pretty much everything that you know isn't bolted down is stolen on a regular Tuesday and increasing copper prices are going to make people come back with bolt cutters to get whatever is nailed down. So, just something to be mindful of as we move forward. Also, in Washington DC, the FDA has granted approval for the spike vaccine for six-month-old uh children to children 11 years old. So, there's that. And also in Washington, the Epstein scandal continues. I'm sure a lot of you have already been inundated with a lot of this, but the latest information that we have so far is that President Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to release the grand jury uh files regarding Epstein's earlier trials. I'm not sure if it's all of his uh trial data or if it's just the grand jury uh files. I'm not honestly there's really no telling as to exactly what's going to be released. If we recall, after President Trump was elected, uh this was a huge part of the uh initial few weeks of his presidency just a couple of months ago and the White House made a very big deal about President Trump signing orders to mandate the DOJ to release all these files, right? It was this big press conference. There were uh this is all that was talked about by the White House for several weeks, right? Um but we all know how things go. So, I guess we're just going to have to see if anything comes from this. My personal guess is that we're not getting the files. I don't think anyone is actually uh expecting a physical document to be released. Really, the general sentiment here is is more abstract than wanting a specific paper copy of something. Most people just want to know who was involved in Epstein's network. That's the general gist of what's requested here. There's been a lot of manipulation with regards to uh what people are what the American people actually want to see. But just to be absolutely clear, the sentiment right now is that the American people would really prefer to know who Epstein was trafficking uh people to and who was involved in this grand network. And pushing beyond that, they would really appreciate it if there was some kind of prosecutorial effort taken against the people who were uh clients of Epstein. Right? So I just wanted to mention that just for posterity just so that everyone is clear that as of you know the late July 2025 this is the expectation. Uh this is what uh is kind of on the table right now. And I I wanted to state that right up front because I think that over the next few weeks we're going to see a lot more manipulation than we've seen so far. even though we have talked about it for many many years and this has become kind of the rally cry for a lot of the uh corruption and very horrific things going on at the upper echelons of American society. Even though a lot of this has been talked about for a long time, I have I have a very sneaking suspicion. I've just got this gut feeling that this is about to become a very very dangerous topic. And I think that this scandal, if it hasn't done so already, is about to highlight why it would be very wise to tread carefully. A lot of people have gotten really, really comfortable with the Trump administration and the things that they are allowed to say and discuss. And I uh I think that caution is probably a wise move. I hate to be all mysterious like that, but I think that there's more to this issue than meets the eye, which is very obvious to be honest. But there are now many, many indicators that suggest that that this story isn't exactly over yet. And I don't think that this operation has reached a conclusion just yet. So despite what the White House wants us to do, we will continue to focus on not just Jeffrey Epstein, but also all of the other operations that are currently ongoing. This is not just about Jeffrey Epste. This is just the one sort of rally cry that people have uh to sink their teeth into really with regards to some of these types of operations. But yeah, we're just going to have to keep an eye on it, let it develop, take notes, and don't forget what happened. And speaking of national security concerns, the Department of Defense has also been moving and shaking a lot the past few weeks. A few days ago, SOCOM issued a duty to warn in the state of Florida regarding the uh potential targeting of former service members for their uh efforts in Iraq and Syria. I saw this notice floating around on social media a couple of days ago and uh just to kind of quell concerns just a little bit. These duty to warn notifications are a lot more common than you might think they are. Uh it's just that this one's a little interesting because it's kind of a blanket statement, meaning that they probably have a word of some kind of threat against uh retired service members in Florida or people who are kind of out of the game. They probably picked up some chatter on social media, but they don't have any specific threat uh in mind. So, and they and no specific person was named. So, they probably just sent out a general blanket notice just to make everyone aware that uh uh things are pretty hot. And of course, Florida being a very heavily militarized state. A lot of uh a lot of retirees down there. A lot of service members end up retiring down there. The Sentcom headquarters is located in Florida. You know, it's a pretty big uh military state, right? Uh people may not think of it that way, but but it is. So, yes, this is concerning. It's something to be aware of, but uh really there's not a whole lot more to it than that. My guess is if there are any specific threats, uh they're going to handle that probably in-house and uh inform people individually, which is where most duty to war notifications go. They're usually letters uh sent to individual people. Sometimes you, you know, may get a even a knock at the door, right, if if you're being targeted by a terrorist group, for instance. It's it's fairly common throughout the SoCom community, unfortunately. But yeah, just something to be aware of. Keeping with the theme of the Department of Defense, let's move out west and discuss the activities there before moving on to Texas. And in California, the Department of Defense has become the majority shareholder of a company called MP Materials, which is an industrial rare earth mineral uh company which mostly makes magnets for industry and uh commercial purposes. This kind of slid under the radar a couple of weeks ago when it first was announced, and I couldn't find a good way to talk about it until now. But this is a very interesting case uh because we have to note that this is not just a contract. Yes, the Department of Defense did sign a contract with this company and uh wants to increase their production of magnets in the United States for defense purposes over the next uh 10 years, I think. However, this is not just a contract. This is the Department of Defense purchasing shares in a public company so that they are the main shareholder. That's interesting. Essentially, they're buying the company, right? More or less, they're they're now the majority shareholder of this this public uh company, which is very very interesting. And that's kind of a a new development from the Department of Defense. They've done this before. Uh I'm fairly certain, but it does go to show what the DoD is focusing on now, which is uh disconcerting a little bit. By and large, the bottom line up front, so to speak, with regards to what the DoD is doing is the the Pentagon is now starting to very seriously invest in domestic production of things. This goes back to what I mentioned about the copper, right? Why would you want to put a tariff on imported copper? Copper is used to make munitions, bullets, right? And if you're going to go to war with a country, you don't want to have your bullets made with materials from that country, right? So, the Department of Defense has really kicked into high gear efforts to increase domestic production of things like steel, precious metals, rare earth minerals, right? We've heard President Trump talk about the rare earths all the time, right? Well, this is one of the reasons for that, or at least I think and hope that it is. Of course, there's always a potential for these uh financial decisions to be something like corruption or just helping out buddies or securing, you know, postgovernment jobs and things like that. But for me, my lens of the world is through national defense, right? So when I see things like this, my brain goes into national security mode and says, "Ah, okay, they're trying to secure a lot of mineral wealth for the United States. So that if we go to war with someone, when we go to war with someone, we'll be able to produce a lot of this stuff here at home and not have to rely on overseas production with a country that we probably will be at war with." So from my wheelhouse, this is kind of the way that I'm thinking about things. And generally speaking, in a more abstract sense, this is both for me, going back to what I said a few months ago, I think last year, this is both concerning and a good idea. Right? Anytime you see the defense industry making good decisions to engage in things like national defense and do things that would actually be good to help defend the American homeland, uh you both for me at least I have both kind of a a twinge of hey that's a good idea and also a slight bit of concern mostly because of two words thusidities trap. That is a little bit of homework for you if you have not heard of that term before. But the general idea for those of you who don't want to Google it is that when it comes to nation states and warfare, wishing will make it so. And also more specifically, as the spheres of influence for two nations grow larger and start to overlap, it is not a situation of if they will go to war, but when. This is for many reasons, but we see this going all the way back to Greek antiquity, to World War I, and now uh one might say our modern times with the United States and China. One nation starts arming for their national defense and their neighbor says, "Hey, those guys are arming, so maybe we should arm, too." And then a third nation says, "Hey, why are you guys starting to make a lot of tanks? Maybe I should make some tanks, too." And then the first nation says, "Hey, everybody else is copying us. Maybe we should do more." And then it's an arms race between a lot of nations. And there we go. Uh, that's kind of the short version of how World War I got started, to be honest. But when it comes to the United States and China, when you look at things that are being done in the United States and in China, it's not just the United States doing this. China is doing this as well. Obviously, we have better eyes on the United States. So, it's easier for us to make comments on what the United States is doing on our half of uh this sort of trap. But every time you see a story in the news or see something in the wire report of, hey, the the Pentagon has gotten this new contract for this new cool thing or this new radio or this new uh SOCOM is doing this new aircraft design or something like that, you you think and you see the Pentagon making good decisions, right? For once, if you see them making good investments for national national security, well, maybe if we're arming and militarizing so much, we're just going to make it so. To be perfectly honest, when we say forever wars, we just really mean moving from one Thusidity's trap to another. That's really all that means uh in a more abstract sense. And I think that's generally what people are kind of concerned with, or at least that's what I'm concerned with. So, there's both a good job pat on the back, but also a twinge of maybe this means we're going to war at some point. And that's more or less how I personally view the US defense industry at this point. So, uh enough on that. I know that it's a big topic, but uh we'll move on here to something uh also quite concerning, which is uh the biocurity concerns down in the American Southwest. Really Texas is kind of at the center of this, Oklahoma as well. But again, this is more of a national issue than just uh Texas and Oklahoma. So, there have been over the past few weeks, months, years, uh, growing concerns with regards to biocurity, which I guess is I don't know if that's the right term or not, but it's the best way I can think to describe the threat of things like blight, pestilence, parasites, any kind of bad things that may affect our national food supply. Thankfully, the USDA has reversed their horrifically bad decision to open up the ports of entry for Mexican cattle due to the new world screworm concerns. Uh, everyone said this was a very bad idea at the time, but you know, big cattle is a is a big is a big problem and that's another rabbit hole in and of itself. But anyway, uh the new world screworm concerns are continuing to mount. Of course, halting the spread of cattle into the United States and focusing more on domestic uh cattle production is probably one of the better ways to to monitor and make sure that this uh this parasite doesn't spread. But again, the agricultural community has been getting hit uh left and right over the past few years when it comes to pests and parasites. So, another one that's kind of popped up is the Asian longhorned tick. Now, I mentioned this in the wire yesterday. Uh, again, it's not really something that is uh a new thing. It's certainly not new, but I did want to mention it anyway because it's it's I hesitate to say it because I don't have the data just doesn't exist yet. But this uh this tick may be entering into the exponential growth phase where we're starting to see it rise quite exponentially. So, again, this tick was first discovered in 2017 and spreads a bunch of diseases, but mostly ones that kill a lot of cattle. A few universities have been monitoring it and uh trying to kind of get a hold on it and trying to see how bad it is uh over the past few uh years. But over the past couple of months and couple of weeks really a couple of universities have have really been raising the alarm bells because they're uh trying to conduct a lot of surveys and the very initial unscientific initial results are that it's pretty bad. So, as we can see, these ticks are spreading like wildfire uh everywhere from Texas to Ohio and Pennsylvania. This is most certainly not something that is in my wheelhouse at all, but I did want to mention it because of the national security concerns, which kind of is is what I do. So, like I said in the wire yesterday about this, it it is really really easy to when any kind of biological threat or potential biological threat comes up, it is incredibly easy to stoke fear and panic. But I did want to mention it because this is kind of an important thing to to keep an eye on. Of course, always being aware of the context that these kinds of threats pop up all the time, right? Whether it's some kind of blight that was smuggled into the United States by a Chinese student or some kind of tick that is swarming cattle herds around the country or some kind of curillion death ray. In the world of biological threat concerns, there is always some kind of doom and gloom impending worldending disaster. So, I don't want to make it out to seem like this is some kind of new, oh my gosh, freak out right now kind of thing. But, it is a concern to be aware of because there's just not a whole lot of focus. You would think that after the CO years that there would be this massive push in the CBR&E community to focus on the bee, right, the biological threats, and to kind of really examine what went wrong. What if CO was way worse than it was? Well, from from what I've seen, there really hasn't been that level of frank discussion. And there's been a lot of people talk about, okay, well, the, you know, the social freakouts that that happened, right? There's been a lot of that, but nobody's really sat down and said, you know, what if this was a legitimate bioteterrorism thing, at least not in the open world. There hasn't really been a whole lot of frank discussions on that. But, I don't know, maybe maybe people just want to kind of forget the co years and move on. But either way, this is kind of in the same vein of uh people not really wanting to pay attention to this sort of thing, even though it is kind of a pretty big concern. So, the alarm bells are being raised by various universities on the subject. So, I thought I would uh touch on it at least and hopefully mitigation efforts will be undertaken and we can kind of uh tamp this one down once again. But again, this is just another way of highlighting the larger issue, which is that when it comes to biological threats and things like that, uh I don't think we've really learned our lesson over the past few years. And um maybe maybe we should focus a little bit more on that than we have. So that's pretty much it for the United States. Let's briefly touch on the events of the Middle East. Uh and starting with the Red Sea Horn of Africa region. Two vessels were sunk uh last week, both of which were targeted in complex attacks by uh the Houthi militants in Yemen. I know everyone thought that we were kind of done with the Red Sea for a while, but nope. Uh the Houthies are still there and they're still sinking ships. Uh at least one of these vessels was bound for Israel, which is why it was struck. I don't know about the other one. I've seen a lot of conflicting reports on both of these vessels. So, uh please take all of this information with a grain of salt, but these two targeting efforts really highlight the fact that the issues in the Red Sea are certainly not over just yet. And if we take just a slightly closer look at at least one of these instances, uh such as the merchant vessel the Eternity Sea. Now again for the casualty count, the math is not mathing here. So u the numbers are very wrong. Uh but we have to go off of something. And there were several crew members that were killed by the initial blast uh from the cruise missile and the drones that struck the vessel. But what I found interesting is that a lot of the crew members uh who were rescued from this vessel were actually recovered from the water. And I mean from the water. They were not on a life raft. They were in the water for over 24 hours before they were rescued. So talk about a miracle rescue right there. Uh that's pretty impressive. Now I found that to be very interesting because in the past the Houthis would very obviously target a ship uh in a way that would cause minimal casualties among the crew. Now there were casualties especially when they were targeting things like engine rooms. Uh so engineers down below deck would often get killed uh by strikes uh on commercial vessels. But as as much as people may not want to think about it, the Houthies when this first when this thing first started, they did take some efforts to not uh anger the world too much, right? Uh by just going after the ship itself, but I think with the Eternity Sea, this may not entirely be accurate anymore. Uh things have gotten a little bit more serious. Again, we have to look at things through a lens of public relations. And the Houthis are absolutely, or at least they were in the beginning, absolutely going for a PR victory, right? So they would over dramatize uh how they were gracious towards the crew. They would let the crew get into life lifeboats before finishing off a vessel. Uh they would uh just try to disable the vessel with causing minimal harm to the crew, right? Because killing a lot of crew members, the Houthis don't really care either way, right? But if you kill the crew of a vessel, you're going to uh bring a lot of international condemnation than that you would not otherwise get if you were trying to play the play the role of a gracious insurgent group kind of thing. Well, that seems to kind of gone out the window uh because they did not let the crew get into lifeboats this time. Everybody just kind of jumped overboard and fled for their life as best they could. There were also some reports that the crew were taken captive of at least one of these vessels. Again, I don't I don't know if that's true or not. I haven't been able to verify that independently just yet, but yeah, it looks like uh the Houthis are starting to not be so PR minded anymore and they're just striking vessels uh especially ones bound for Israel that are a lot more brutal, I guess, than efforts they took in the past. So again, we may not want to think about details like this, but again, the world of international shipping, this is a big money industry, right? I know it may not seem like it, but you've got private intelligence firms, you know, producing quarter of a million dollar intelligence reports on this crisis, right? And there's a lot of money, very big money in shipping, and they are taking note, right? The fact that crew members were in the water in their life jackets for over 24 hours before being rescued. From a survivability uh perspective, that's going to be a very, very big risk now. Uh, and I think that that's probably going to uh cause a pretty big wave throughout the uh maritime survivability search and rescue community because that's very that's a very interesting statistic and data point. It probably won't matter to most people honestly, but these these little details that kind of that kind of stand out to me with regards to these sinkings. So, we shall see if uh any sort of shipping increases throughout the Red Sea. I highly doubt it. I think these two were probably trying to sneak through thinking that a change of American policy was worth the uh financial risk of kind of running the gauntlet here and it didn't really work out for them. So yeah, things are going to continue to stay expensive. Ships are going to continue to go around Africa as they have been. Uh which is kind of an interesting note. Not a whole lot of ships resumed their traffic through the Red Sea uh when President Trump became uh president. And I think that's a very interesting thing to note. So anyway, moving up north to the Middle East proper. The war in Gaza continues as before amid a high-profile targeting instance of a Christian church in Gaza City. This has gotten a lot of uh press because of uh how serious it is. If I am not mistaken, there is only one uh Roman Catholic church left in Gaza City and the Israelis just hit it with a tank shell the other day. So uh Israel has claimed credit for it, but they claim it was a mistake and we all know how that goes. But it's increased tensions throughout the region and it just kind of brings focus back to Gaza and the fact that the war still continues there and we may it may be out of the news. It may be financially damaging for most people to talk about even to this day, but it's still there. It's still a problem. It is still a conflict and the war there has no end in sight. Likewise in Syria, things are kicking off uh into high gear once again. I think it would very much be safe to say that a civil war is is underway in Syria. Again, over the past few weeks, the Drews militias south of Damascus has have really consolidated gains throughout mostly the district of Sueda, but also Dar. And there are some very grizzly content on social media regarding all of these forces that are involved in this sort of thing. So again, it's very, very brutal. It's not it's not really the same flavor of civil war as the civil war that the United States was involved in. You got to remember during the initial Syrian civil war, which was uh depending on how you define it, about 15 years long, that conflict wasn't necessarily what I would personally call a true civil war. It was more of a proxy war than anything else. I'm again it's semantics the way you define it but this time there appears to be and I may be completely wrong on this but there appears to be less international uh interest in being involved in Syria. It's really just a few people mostly Israel uh who is invading Syria to the south and trying to expand tour gains but also Turkey in the north trying to do the same. Of course the United States is involved too. Uh we've still got a military presence in Syria and of course we helped topple Assad u a while ago, right? But over the past couple of months, this is really what I would consider to be more of a a true civil war kind of thing. Of course, there are proxies, right? The a lot of Drews tribes are proxies of Israel, right? This is very very plain to see, right? When Israel is striking the Ministry of Defense in Damascus to help out the Drews militias uh down south in Sua, that's kind of clear at that point, but not all of them, right? So Syria is again a very complicated place. It is a very very uh hard conflict to describe. But this time around you're going to see continued brutality from either the Arab Bedawins who are going to be targeting the Drew militias, the Drew militias who are targeting the Arab Bedawins, the Syrian government, Galani's forces which whichever forces he's been able to, you know, gather around himself and his administration to kind of basically just hold Damascus. That's a a tenuous task as well. And basically the Syrian situation is more or less just a wash at this point. Both Israel and Turkey will without question uh take advantage of this fray to basically just let a lot of militia groups kill each other to the point to where they can just come in and mop up forces and take more terrain. Uh Israel in the south and Turkey in the north. It's a lot more complicated than that, but in terms of an American audience, this is pretty much the only thing that anyone would probably care to notice. As far as what this means to the rest of the world, I don't really know what the impact is going to be too much. It's just that anytime there's a a war or a pretty big power vacuum forming in Syria, it inevitably ends up impacting Europe and the United States in some way. Uh either directly or indirectly. So, it's something to keep an eye on. Uh Syria kicking up again, but once again, direct impacts are are going to be pretty hard to determine at the moment. So, bottom line, the Middle East is on fire again. No real uh end in sight for any of the wars that are currently going on there. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Let's go ahead and roll things up with the intercepted ghost net reports. I'm sorry. I've uh been a little bit absent from the ghost net over the past couple of weeks. I've been having really severe weather here uh at my location over the past couple of weeks. So, I've had to rely more on web SDRs to kind of see what everybody's kind of talking about because I didn't want to uh string up my antenna during a very severe thunderstorm. But either way, the the network continues on, which is fantastic to see. There has been an update to JSA call. I have not tried it out yet, but a lot of good things coming for from JSA call, which is always good to see uh anytime there are good developments in the the world of HF radio. So, it's growing. It's continuing on. It's fulfilling its mission. I have been working on some other products to kind of flesh out the the the overall communications plan a little bit more and make things a little bit more clear to understand. But, it's going to take me a while before I have anything ready on that front. But, things are continuing on as before. And uh I really thank you all for making this network a great thing. So that's all I have for today everyone. Here are the sources as usual. For those who don't know, all of these uh sources can be found on my Obsidian page uh sorted by the day. Uh this goes for my wire reports as well. Most of the platforms that I publish the wire uh reports on heavily penalize uh links. So that's why I have just one URL at the end of the wire report so you can go and check out uh the sources for that day. It's kind of a logistics thing. I wish I could just, you know, post all the links in in the report itself, but you guys know how it goes. Most platforms nowadays don't like external links linking off of their website. So, it makes it hard for the reports to kind of get out there. But either way, that's how I kind of handle the research for the moment. But yeah, uh that's pretty much all I have for today. Thank you guys all for sticking with me. Uh thank you for all of your support over the past couple of weeks. Just trying to keep moving forward and uh taking things one day at a time. And I guess that's pretty much uh the best we can do these days. So, thank you guys again for all of your support and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

hello again everyone welcome back to the underground this is the briefing for sunday the 10th of october 2021 and as usual it is being recorded on october 9th so let's jump right into the weather uh lots of significant weather patterns covering most of the united states over the next 12 hours with lots of cloud cover at very low levels being quite common throughout most regions eent or the end of evening nautical twilight the point in time where the sun finishes setting is at 7 34 pm eastern time but that will be very similar for the rest of the time zones throughout the country and that combined with the low lunar elimination of 14.1 percent means that it's going to be long dark nights over the next few days and like i mentioned we're starting to get the first inklings of winter weather moving down for the year as we have various weather systems creating all kinds of hazards for various spots around the country moving into notams really only one of note and it is the standard uh presidential vacation no tam so biden is spending the weekend as usual at his residence in wilmington delaware for the civil unrest forecast really absolutely no changes uh from last the last few briefs i'm just going to skip right past it nothing nothing major on that front and moving through logistics really quickly really no major changes uh we still have the school bus driver shortages of course that is now a national problem for most school districts around the country but by far massachusetts and ohio have been hit the hardest with this and massachusetts and ohio are the ones that we're starting to see a military response for also we still have water shortage out west still creating a lot of problems out that way as we move forward into the winter season we'll start to see precipitation we'll so we'll start to see how that actually affects things and how the water shortage gets resolved hopefully it will be pretty soon and also we still have the microchip shortage that is affecting essentially the entire country this state at this stage but specifically the states on the slides are are being heavily affected with regards to automobile manufacturing and as far as new additions for this cycle uh we are tracking the chatter surrounding potential gasoline shortages that are a result of the shipping congestion which i'll mention here in a minute so i just did want to briefly mention that potential i myself and none of the other staff here have been able to help me drill down enough to give you a solid analysis on that right now of course a few days after this video goes out i might look like an idiot but right now i just don't know how severe this shipping congestion is going to affect petroleum imports for processing i would venture a guest to say that it will affect things but as far as how much i just don't know right now and moving on to critical infrastructure again from last time the crystal valley ransomware attack is kind of petered off there's really nobody talking about it now including crystal valley themselves so no new information i'll take it off next time but i just wanted to really leave it on there because i haven't had any real change from it but moving on to number two facebook cyber attack that everybody knows about because the vast majority of people use facebook or their services so as far as analysis goes so talking about the actual cyber attack is is kind of a moot point at this point because everybody's already heard about it but as far as the analysis goes again this is something we've been talking about in most of our content any reliance on social media for things like infrastructure or communications is probably not a good idea facebook provides more services than just allowing your cousin to post cat pictures on the internet since the overwhelming majority of people on the planet are plugged into facebook or instagram at some level means that when that plug is pulled the whole planet goes comms dark so again there's a lot of talk and chatter out there about maybe this was intentional on facebook's part don't really have any indications either way so it's kind of a moot point to talk about it a lot of people are also saying that this might have something to do with facebook's um quote unquote whistleblower right the the most non-whistleblower whistleblower that i've ever seen um again really nothing worth talking about on that from because there's just no information sure theory is a theory but until we know more who really knows all we know is that facebook was down which again presents vulnerabilities if we are dependent on facebook's infrastructure for things like communication for number three the shipping congestion that we have been talking about for weeks continues and actually might have been the cause for number four which is that a pipeline off the coast of california was damaged causing a small spill however recent investigation by the pipeline owner has indicated that the breach could have been caused months ago and might not have been the result of an anchor strike at all but right now the details are pretty sketchy it's really hard to rule out anything until more investigation is done in any case with more and more ships sitting at anchor outside of u.s ports and causing all kinds of problems we should expect to see more of this kind of thing not just to include pipelines but communications cables as well which is a vastly important topic that we will have to cover in more depth at a later time and moving on to significant governmental actions the first point there being connecticut is taking a page out of new york's book and doing exactly the same thing that new york is doing they are firing doctors who refuse to jab themselves right and they are replacing them with soldiers so we'll see how this works out we'll talk more about that in just a second but moving on to the second point there this has gotten a lot of press from a lot of conservative media outlets again uh the fbi mobilizing against opponents of crt so here is a statement from the doj i know it's kind of small text but you can either read it in the sources or or in the slides the fbi is directly creating the infrastructure and the task forces and the required logistical planning right to start prosecuting anyone who is going to be opposing the mandates that school boards are coming up with so so this comes right on the heels of just a few days ago a lot of people uh trying to petition the fbi to use the patriot act against those who are opposing the regime that was something that's been circulating on social media for a while now and now we're starting to see the fbi kind of move in that direction which is interesting also it should be noted that this might just be a clay a case of classic corruption because the fbi director is the father-in-law of the co-founder of a company that sells crt school curriculum so it could just be a case of of classic corruption who knows the fbi from their senior leadership has made it very clear that that's the kind of road they want to go down but i guess we'll have to see how this goes but i guess the larger point is that uh the fbi is most certainly coming after normal americans now we saw the pivot right we saw the the writing on the wall when the military started getting uh this whole extremism crackdown right well now it's now it's coming now they're coming for americans so just like we've predicted and just like quite literally thousands of others predicted this kind of stuff is is happening so i guess we'll have to see how this works out i don't know if it's actually going to work out in terms of fbi agents being plants at like pta meetings and school board meetings to arrest anybody who says anything kind of hostile towards the school board i don't know if that's how it's going to work out but it would not be a bad idea to assume that in the worst you know the the most dangerous koa right and uh work from there so sort of along the same lines point number three there is the fbi is uh working to working with google to get warrants for specific keywords um you know when i look at stuff like this it's almost like this entire briefing today is turning out to have a mood of i told you so because there's just so much information today that has either already happened in the past or ourselves and literally again thousands of others have been talking about for years and of course the fbi is headed again with their draconian warrants so i guess everybody forgot when the fbi just a couple of months ago requested the ip addresses of people who read a specific news article right not wrote but read a specific news article so yeah google working with the fbi has not been a surprise since the old days of snowden in the prison program and it's certainly not surprising today i just wanted to highlight this because a lot of people have sent it to us and it's a good reminder that if you value privacy it would probably be a good idea to stay away from google as much as you can moving on to number four there the colorado health care system uc health has issued statements that they will be denying organ transplants to people who are unjabbed quote in almost all circumstances this came to light after a transplant patient received this letter informing her that she had been removed from the active recipient list but yeah our assessment on this development is that this is par for the course and completely in line with everything that we and others have been saying for at least two years now so i'm not going to rant and rave about that anymore it's pretty clear how things are going however this is a great reminder that there are other nations around the world that have completely returned to normal aren't requiring medical passports and aren't withholding medical treatment for political reasons so if you are seriously ill or have a chronic medical condition that requires medical intervention that could be easily denied you might want to consider receiving that treatment in another country at this point or at least start thinking about that start that start that process of thinking about it again this is obviously not medical advice it's up to you to make your own decisions i know shocker right making your own medical decisions in 2021 is is is a rarity i guess but but for me if i needed some significant medical care right now i would be very seriously considering my options because even though this is just one hospital system out of the thousands in the country the fact that this can happen once proves that it can happen elsewhere too and if hospitals are allowed and have the desire to deny life-saving treatment to people for political reasons the entire system is kind of tarnished to a certain degree certainly to the point that we now genuinely have to think about things like is my hospital going to help me if i am unjabbed these are the things that we need to start working on getting answers for right now before this becomes a more widespread problem and moving on to number five there bill gates is uh he's getting a lot of press once more uh his population control quote being confirmed to be true uh and is now being kind of touted as a good thing so this is the same exact mentality if we want to take a step back for a second this is the same exact mentality as the election stuff in which the mainstream media claimed that there was no fraud until a time magazine article came out that framed the fraud as a good thing like they banded together to save democracy or something we all remember that right so also the same mentality with general milley's sort of you know treasonous acts right he doubled down in his testimony to congress and confirm that he did indeed do all of those treasonous things but it was to save the world from you know the evil trump right well here we are with fact-checking sites all over the internet confirming that bill gates did indeed say what he said and that he did indeed mean what he said as in it wasn't a slip of the tongue or an error in his speech which has been the classic excuse for this since his ted talk went viral but now the fact checkers are saying that it's true and these are screenshots of the actual fact checking like statement on this particular quote and the one line that is kind of hilarious is this sentence right here which is kind of funny see what they're trying to do what the fact checkers are trying to do is separate the rate of growth from total number which is definitely two separate things right in mathematics reducing rate of rise does not mean reducing already existing numbers right but here's the problem when you apply that to human beings the population of the earth that still sounds like the dr strangelove approach right so to his statement my question is this how exactly does bill gates intend to reduce the growth of the human population without enacting some kind of global one-child policy to prevent people from being born so yeah i guess that's really there's really not a whole lot of intel value there in just other than just to say that it's kind of interesting and this whole mentality of deny deny deny acknowledge and then tout as being a good thing is definitely a tactic that a lot of people are using these days and when it comes to the actual information right because this is this has gotten a lot of people's attention even though like man i watched that ted talk when it came out like years ago and i was concerned then and i'm you know concerned now about as much like that level of concern has not either increased or decreased so if you want my opinion right there isn't much difference between outright murdering people and not allowing people to have kids right again there is a slight difference on paper right but if the end result is the same lower human population it's very hard to argue that population control is a good thing in any case bill gates is still advocating for governments to determine when a person is allowed to exist so yeah i mean that's that's really all i've got to say on that and since the theme of today is kind of talking about individuals and remembering the past right moving on to this particular issue which is uh this is something that has gone kind of viral again amongst a lot of conservative sites over the past few days sheriff villanueva has gotten this good press because he has stated that he will not force his deputies and staff to get the jab stating that and i quote i don't want to be in a position to lose five ten percent of my workforce overnight on a blank mandate right but here's the problem read his quote and observe what it is not he did not say i don't want to enforce this mandate because it's unconstitutional against human rights and just plain wrong no he didn't say that at all for him it's a personnel issue he knows that his deputies will quit overnight and that loss is not acceptable to him now you might be wondering why am i talking about all this it seems like kind of a non-issue after all we can't exactly go off of words that he didn't say right the words not said you can't exactly hold somebody accountable for not doing something or at least it's very hard to do well here's my point exactly this is the same guy that was chomping at the bit to round up as many american citizens as possible he is the man with the plan when it came to the lockdowns earlier this year and last year and fervently and actively hunted down americans for having the audacity to have people in their homes arresting hundreds and hundreds of people for simply being at someone else's house he created special task forces to raid private residences looking for party partygoers and in the process searched and confiscated dozens of guns he also set up the infrastructure for neighbors to report on neighbors and actively encouraged people to report on friends and family who might be violating the governor's mandates and the la mayor's mandates and let us not forget sheriff villanueva's personal pet project operation homebound this was the highly controversial program in which badged sheriff's deputies would go out into the community to give people the jab in their own home now here's the problem this program got a lot of bad press because videos surfaced of badged law enforcement officers forcibly restraining mentally disabled people and forcibly jabbing them against their will as one might expect a lot of blogs and so-called media websites spun this way up because well history repeating itself is i guess the theme for the past couple of years however the sheriff's deputies were called out by the guardians of the people that were being forcibly jabbed so technically this was all completely legal and above board here's the problem though with this uh it doesn't really look great to have a badged law enforcement officer with a gun sticking a syringe into someone who is screaming crying and doing everything they can to resist it just looks really bad and considering the de facto implications of the officers being armed with weapons it looks even worse even if a court says that that person is mentally incapable of consenting themselves this is raising a lot of questions about what that word consent means i guess plus there's always a problem of what's the penalty for resisting a doctor or nurse's treatment not really anything at all but what is the penalty for resisting a badged and armed law enforcement officer you see how this is now a huge problem and i go out of the way to talk about all of this because it is a lesson that we as a people clearly have not learned right now a lot of politicians are being put up on a pedestal because they are fighting biden's mandates which on a side haven't even been written yet but those same politicians that are fighting biden right now were salivating at the prospect of locking down americans florida and texas were some of the very first states to put up police checkpoints on their borders how quickly we forget these events so i wanted to make this digression in hopes that some of you will not forget what these people did and that is a huge thing to remember for analysis moving forward when we're talking about the likelihood of resistance efforts we've always got to keep these things in the backs of our minds and that just because a politician or a some kind of official is saying the you know good stuff right now we can't forget what they did just one year ago all right switching gears we have significantly changed the conus deployment map so as to be a little bit easier to understand because my own first crack at it was not great and there were quite a few errors so here is a reference slide that helps explain how to read the following slides if you are not familiar with these topics as usual you can pause and screenshot or preferably download the pdf of these slides from our odyssey page so let's get to it in the northeast the new york national guard has begun preparations for deploying to various hospitals as a result of the government firing health care workers and right now we're projecting elements from spencer's 42nd infantry division to be activated to fill these vacancies again not everyone from these units will be deployed we just don't know numbers right now because national guard deployments are usually based on volunteers from random units so as we go through this keep in mind that we will almost certainly be overestimating numbers so for new york we're kind of in the dark right now as to how many volunteers are going to be stepping up to take positions in new york hospitals connecticut is in the exact same situation with their governor terminating doctors and nurses who refuse the jab and replacing them with soldiers this is still in its early stages so we don't really have a good idea as to how yvonne's joint staff is going to be required to handle these deployments so we're just going to have to stay tuned on that and finally for massachusetts small elements of soldiers from the 26th maneuver enhancement brigade continued to be deployed to drive school buses no major change on that from last brief moving on down to the southeast several states have deployed various sized elements to hospitals around their states and we have a really a better intel picture for kentucky and tennessee so kentucky is deploying small groups of soldiers from cavallini's 149th meb to support local hospitals and tennessee is deploying soldiers from turner's 278th armored cavalry regiment and patterson's 230th sustainment brigade to also support local area hospitals again the press reports of exactly how many soldiers are deployed from these units vary widely so when we get a better picture we will provide that update as well and finally the states of alabama south carolina and georgia have also deployed very small numbers of troops we're talking probably a platoon's worth of soldiers in each of these states again within submission of supporting area hospitals moving to the midwest really there's not much going on with regards to national guard deployments we're still waiting to see if ohio will deploy soldiers to help with the school bus driver crisis but press statements by various government officials have confirmed that an unknown number of soldiers are currently in training to learn how to drive a school bus so we are fully expecting this deployment to take place and we will provide an update when we learn how harris's joint battle staff is going to be deploying units out southwest we have quite significant deployments of troops along the southern border with hamilton's 36th infantry division providing most of the soldiers specifically perez's 36 sustainment brigade and rivera's 72nd brigade combat team are the units that are providing most of the soldiers for this mission also we have significant deployments from the texas state guard as well which for those of you that don't know is separate from the national guard it's still a military unit but it's uh they still have military organization but they are a separate command structure right so we don't have any good numbers for how many state guard soldiers have been activated but when we get some publicly releasable numbers we will push that out as well and also we are not counting the thousands of national customs and border patrol forces or the hundreds of other law enforcement figures that have been deployed to support this mission all we have are press statements that indicate that all total there are roughly 1 000 state law enforcement officers and about 2 500 soldiers from texas that are supporting this mission again these numbers are very approximate and a lot of other states have sent troops and police officers to the border as well so we're still trying to count everybody and tie everybody up arizona and new mexico have also deployed personnel to the border but not nearly in the numbers that texas has it's such a small number that it's not even close so when we get a better number for those states we'll update that as well and finally out west we have significant deployments of soldiers and airmen in oregon to support local hospitals in oregon their national guard situation is kind of unique with the air national guard really being the main force so stencil has deployed significant numbers of airmen from unruh's 142nd fighter wing as the main force for providing personnel to local hospitals however the very small army national guard contingent has also deployed soldiers from the 41st brigade combat team mostly just a handful of soldiers from the 1st battalion 186 infantry regiment and for the school attendance mask mandate tracker uh really no updates from last brief except that i corrected an error that's been there for a long time vermont has had a mask mandate for a while now and they extended it to november 1st so and for those of you who are just now finding us every single state in the nation as far as we can tell has a mask mandate somewhere in the state usually it's the largest school district in the state or the school district that is nearest the state capital so that's just something to keep in mind is that there really are mass mandates everywhere uh it's just we're trying to track where the states are at the state level cracking things down or the states where the overwhelming majority of school districts are requiring masks and for the actual jab mandate really no changes from last brief california is still going to mandate it make it mandatory but we're waiting to see how that's actually going to logistically work out because there is significant resistance to that as one might imagine and again really no major change to the overall medical resistance tracker and for international issues really the only two things that i just briefly wanted to mention were sweden and denmark so we're starting to see a lot of resistance to a particular medical substance in both of these countries due to people having heart problems from it so you can research this on your own a little bit more because there's a lot of data that goes with this but sweden has stopped the m uh version of the jab for people under the age of 30 and denmark has done the same for people under the age of 18. so we're starting to see a few european nations a few most of the scandinavian countries in the northern european nations uh push back on a lot of this stuff because they're finding out there's a lot of a lot of health care issues that are kind of coming along with this so again uh you know due to youtube's policies we can't talk about it at all and uh even if we did there's even if we did want to fill out youtube's policies there are still uh there's still too much information to to talk about right so the situation has really gotten very inflammatory when it comes to the actual jab itself on the medical side of things and the studies and the science going back and forth from both sides of the debate so that's really up to you to kind of uh to research that some more but i would suggest taking a look at some of this stuff coming out of northern europe it's uh very interesting stuff to say the least so i'm sure that a lot of other incidents have occurred around the around the world that particularly things like the chinese situation has developed a little bit more but i haven't had time to actually sit down and develop that out into an actual concrete analysis for you guys because we've been myself and the rest of the team have been focusing domestically uh for this brief so for next time we will definitely develop out a lot more international stuff to talk about but for now that's pretty much all i've got so again a special thank you to all of our supporters on patreon you guys and gals out there rock and are actually making it a lot easier you guys are helping a lot more than you know and here are your sources for today again the print is very small i know so if you're watching this on a phone it's probably going to be very hard to see you but i did want to put the sources in here at the end of each video for posterity's sake and just in case uh someone finds this video and doesn't and doesn't see the sources in the attachment or anything like that so there's the first slide there's slide two you can pause it and check this stuff out here's slide three and sources slide four so again the sources for this with in pdf format this whole brief is available in pdf format on our odyssey page so again if you're looking at this in many years in the future which is what seems to happen with a lot of our youtube videos you can find that data and in the unlikely event that our odyssey page is shut down for whatever reason or we transfer to something else you can still at least in this particular video file have the sources so it might be a pain to type it out but again we make videos here for the future not just for right now so again for posterity sake like to include all the sources in the actual video file itself so thank you again for watching we'll be back at it with another brief very soon and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

hello again everyone welcome back to the underground this is the briefing for thursday the 20th of january 2022. sorry it's been a while since our last brief we have been super busy trying to work on a lot of communication stuff a lot of educational stuff that's going to be coming out sometime soon and of course uh the past at least two to three weeks have been filled with preparation for the ukrainian war which is looking more imminent with every passing moment as a result we're going to keep this brief light today and we're going to go ahead and skip past the stuff i normally talk about and just start with logistics so i really don't have that many specific logistics but if any of you have been to the grocery store over the past week or so you know that this is a common trend these days for whatever reason i don't know if this is a genuine shortage or if it's one of those manufactured shortages where a journalist writes a newspaper article or something on twitter and it starts trending and sooner or later everyone's out of everything but it's most certainly a very tangible thing that a lot of places are having shortages right now we're talking shortages of pretty much everything you could possibly imagine consumer goods meats fresh fresh food products uh all kinds of stuff and some of this in different areas can be attributed to staffing shortages other parts of it other areas of the country is really hard to tell what the logistical challenges are but just know that there are a lot of shortages i i simply cannot name them all you'll see a lot of things on on twitter like the the hashtag bear shelves biden is trending on twitter but unfortunately again these kinds of pictures don't really give us that much information they tell us a snapshot in time that that one specific area if someone even tells where the picture is it only gives us a snapshot and we don't really get a good idea of what's going on so somebody could take a picture like this and circulate it around social media and then you have to deal with man pictures of of things like the earlier shortages people saying oh look at you know look at my local grocery store and it turns out it's a picture from like three years ago it's really hard to tell this stuff um so yeah i hate to just kind of leave everybody hanging on the logistics front that oh yeah there's shortages of of what well everything um yeah so something to keep in mind as we start getting a lot of the winter weather for a lot of parts of the country you know that that normally brings about shortages and speci especially in areas like like where we're at where we don't normally get a lot of winter weather but we get just a little bit you know and everybody gets kind of crazy so something to keep in mind is logistic logistics is going to be a a problem for the foreseeable future at least at least for the next couple of weeks and we can talk about that a little bit when we go to critical infrastructure so one of the bigger items of critical infrastructure news coming out this week is the 5g rollout scandal scenario i don't really know what to call it basically what's happening is a lot of cell carriers are rolling out 5g in a lot of areas and foreign airlines are are actually boycotting flights to the united states so as a as of the past 24 hours we've seen many many many foreign airlines cancel flights to the united states in response to the rollout of 5g in larger parts of the united states so the reason for this is that at least in europe they have found that the radar altimeters or the radio altimeters or or different kinds of systems on board aircraft both fixed wing and rotary wing are being affected by 5g they think nobody really has put out any concrete data on it that i've seen so far it should be fairly simple you know what what bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum does 5g operate on and you know what bandwidth do you know aircraft systems operate on well you know aircraft are different so in any case what is the result of this is airlines are canceling flights so no american airline company has done anything as far as i've seen they're pushing back on it but they haven't actually canceled flights so yeah this has just kind of spun way out of control over the past 24 hours or so and it's become a really big deal really quickly even though 5g has been out in a lot of areas in the united states for a very long time now i mean where we're at we've had 5g for a very long time there's like a you know a 5g tower like like less than half a mile from where i live and you know it's it's been there for at least a year and a half now i think so you know i don't really know what the effects of this are going to be on aviation long term but i can tell you it is causing a lot of consternation within the aviation community specifically when it comes to foreign outside the united states aviation assets trying to have flights to the united states also number two they're keeping in the theme of logistics uh or at least disruptions there has been a rash of or rather i should say a lot of viral videos come out lately regarding los angeles rail theft so i'm sure a lot of you have seen the videos um if i can find a clip that i could think i can get away with putting on youtube i'll put it up but honestly it's everywhere it's on every social media app and platform nowadays you've probably seen the the pictures of these uh train uh derailments there was actually a train that was derailed that a lot of people are thinking is due to people trying to derail the train to stop it to get the consumer goods out of the shipping containers so yeah this is something that's like normally i wouldn't touch because it doesn't have a whole lot of intel value and it's just you know it tends to be one of those really inflammatory social issues it doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on things um but it it just goes to show you the power of looting like you know it it's one thing to talk about you know so you know a lot of people hundreds of people going in and looting like a consumer goods store you know like a luxury goods store like a luxury clothing store or something like that and just running out with stuff well you know that just kind of speaks to the crime in the country or the crime in a specific area but now we're starting like when we're starting to see trains derailed so that people can steal amazon packages that's a big deal and i would i would be very surprised if the larger shipping companies specifically the rail companies themselves from an insurance standpoint their insurance companies might force them to start using different tracks in different shipping hubs so we'll see how this goes um this has been a problem in california specifically los angeles for a very long time i haven't really seen this be an issue anywhere else in the united states there have been a lot of train derailments and terrorist activity up in the pacific northwest i do know that that has gotten almost no press over the past couple of years but there have been quite a few incidences if you can search that on your own but yeah if we're starting to see trains derailed just so people can steal stuff yeah that's going to be a huge liability because trains are very expensive and they you know just because they're carrying amazon packages and on one car they might be carrying medication on the next car or petroleum on the next car or some kind of you know chemical substance you know somewhere on that train so again huge deal something to keep an eye on and yeah i guess we'll just have to watch and see what happens thirdly again something to keep in mind is cellular communication not being reliable now this is a again a very huge deal i feel like this is the brief of very huge deals uh because usually when we when we talk about things like censorship we're talking about things like social media and there's a reason for this because social media has found exceptions to telecommunications laws or different parts of us code that they can use as justification for censoring things for instance a lot of social media apps claim that they act as a publisher and a publisher can choose what content they host and what content they don't however a lot of people are of the opinion that a lot of social media are acting as public infrastructure and that you know kind of changes his rule well well here's the thing stop talking let's stop talking about social media for a second cellular communications telecommunications providers they are public utilities and public utilities that is a big no-no to sensor we're talking going all the way back to like the watergate stuff and wiretaps that's how far back this legislation goes when it comes to specifically telecommunications providers either censoring or tapping or surveilling different kinds of communications so while the you know the social media stuff social media censorship that's relatively new as of the past 10 years or so this uh cellular cellular communication and telecom agencies in general are very much uh have very strict rules when it comes to this so when you've got uh like t-mobile is one of the bigger ones that says hey we have the right to censor your text messages well no you don't there's a whole stack of us you know code that says you can't do that but they're continuing to do that so again this is a a much larger thing that is worth paying attention to because i i really don't think a whole lot of people think about their text messages being you know censored like we we all kind of this is 2022 right we all kind of know that there's federal surveillance on pretty much every communications platform there is but when it comes to a cellular company choosing to not let a link go through that's a big deal and then like i also mentioned number four there wrapping up our critical infrastructure stuff again we're going to talk ukraine in a specific series we're going to launch another series on that depending on how things go but the short version of why the ukrainian conflict matters for united states infrastructure is that in the united states critical infrastructure particularly when it comes to cyber uh stuff that's a vulnerability there are lots of vulnerabilities in the cyber realm and russia may seek to capitalize on those vulnerabilities as a way of weakening the united states even further and kind of using that as a way to you know pump the brakes on us interactions basically russia is very much fond lately at least their senior military leadership is fond of giving warnings and things like that so we might see you know a pipeline go offline we might see an electrical grid go down and uh and that might be russia's way of saying hey stay out or else we're gonna do worse so we'll come back to that i guess when we talk about ukraine a little bit later but um yeah lots of vulnerabilities for our critical infrastructure these days and there's not really a whole lot we can do about it i guess except be prepared on an individual level moving on to significant governmental actions one of the most uh significant events that has occurred has been the supreme court overruling biden's medical mandates when it comes to uh private companies 100 persons or more i haven't read through the actual verdict yet i haven't read the opinion that the supreme court has put forward on it yet but it looks like the mandate for medical workers can stay and the mandate for everybody else has to kind of go away we're seeing a lot of things that are going to affect different communities very differently with this and here's what i mean um what the supreme court has said and i have to look at the wording again to confirm but from what i can tell it seems like of course this is all opinion anyway uh it seems like the supreme court says hey if you work in health care you have to get the jab because of medicare or medicaid funding if you work at an institution that gets that you have to get a job because of that i'm not quite sure how solid that logic is but it's i mean i think that's what they're trying to say again there's an entire field of law dedicated to just just kind of interpreting what the supreme court says because they never really do anything specific they always do broad brush broad brush stuff and lower courts have to interpret supreme court rulings so i have no doubt that this will occur specifically because a lot of health care workers are very upset about this as one might imagine because essentially the supreme court is saying in a de facto way is that depending on your job you have no rights to what to what you want to put in your own body if you work in a certain job you don't have that right to choose and that's kind of a dangerous precedent now again how other courts interpret this i don't know i don't have the bandwidth to kind of figure this stuff out i'm definitely no no expert on the law or or even a novice in the law i'm a complete neophyte when it comes to this kind of stuff but i can tell you that this is going to cause a lot of problems within the healthcare community because hospitals are going to crack down on this and healthcare workers are going to have very little leg to stand on so when it comes to an intel perspective this means that we're going to start seeing certain hospitals in certain areas usually probably major cities are going to have a lot of healthcare workers just leave and say it's not worth fighting this fight anymore so you're going to have a lot of service interruptions as a result of this now on the other side of that when it comes to the private private company stuff we're starting to see a lot of companies uh specifically companies that are sort of in the the the federal sphere like defense contractors and things like that saying okay the supreme court says that the federal government doesn't have to mandate it but they didn't say anything about us mandating it so we're going to mandate it still as a company and you know there you go it's like well what do you you know what do you do what do you do about that and then again also we have press releases from from the white house saying yeah i don't worry about the supreme court's ruling we're just go ahead with the mandates like i don't know i really don't know what to think about the rule of law these days i don't know if if any of it any shred of it exists left anymore so either way something also along the the avenues of the white house is the concrete wall that the white house has put up so again not really a whole lot of intel value here other than this just kind of happened so it's just like like a news note but i do think that when it comes to what the interpretations of why they would have put the wall up uh yeah why would the white house put a concrete wall up well it's because they're scared so they think there's a vulnerability there and they want to patch that vulnerability why did the vulnerability did the vulnerability was it always there or was it is it a new vulnerability i don't know there's a lot of protests coming up uh in at the end of the month here so maybe that has something to do with it i don't know i'm more inclined to think that it's just the increasing of the military-industrial complex uh and the fortification of our public infrastructure when it comes to you know the political elites that's what i really think it is moving on kind of moving back to the jab stuff uh we're starting to see an interesting trend come out of california and as we all know if it happens in california and it's kind of totalitarian sounding it's going to make its way to other places too is it's very interesting a lot of places in california are saying that essentially if you are jabbed and you still get the medical condition right if you're you're fully jabbed you've got however many um doses we're on now if you get that and you're all current on that and you still get get sick you can come back to work but if you are unjabbed um and you know you're healthy you don't have any kind of sickness um clean out your desk essentially so it's one of those things that kind of proves that this has nothing to do with any kind of you know medical science or anything like that it's really just affecting the the economics as a way to conduct economic warfare and starve out political enemies and stuff like that so again something to keep your eye on because every time i look at something and i say man that's that's kind of totalitarian i bet you it'll it'll make its way around the united states pretty soon so we'll we'll be on the lookout for that and then moving down to number four there uh congress uh actually had a report released uh this was um uh this is actually also been making its rounds on the kind of alternate news sites is that a lot of congress people actually beat the market when it comes to trading so essentially what people are saying is that there's a there's an average for what the market does and generally speaking of course again not a financial expert whatsoever here generally speaking if you do better than what the uh markets average is um that looks a little bad looks highly suspect it almost looks like you knew or had some kind of insider trading stuff going on there and a lot of congress people were up were were apparently you know doing that kind of stuff so a lot of congress people both republicans and democrats alike it's very very much equally split somehow miraculously made a lot of money when the market was doing very poorly so again this is kind of just like more homework for later but if you want to check that out i think it's kind of interesting but again not really a whole lot of intel value there except for you know i guess you know check out your politician to see where they rank on the list and then moving down to number five again this is one a a can of worms that i can't really get into much because it would just take too much time and that is has been the testimony regarding the fbi and the j6 congressional hearings uh really i think the most interesting part that has come out of that so far i personally haven't been following that very much because i think it's all just political theater but interestingly enough the fbi has pleaded the fifth uh the fifth amendment they've invoked their fifth amendment rights as an organization regarding their involvement in uh the jace january 6th whatever you want to call it i think that's interesting because uh there it's just it seems like how um it seems like the fbi probably had a larger role than what they're uh what they're letting on and i would be very interested to see what comes out of this months down the line but again right now it's all speculation none of this is really any has any concrete stuff so uh it's really hard to to say what the fbi did or what they had going on but i think that we can all kind of i think it's a softball assessment to say yeah the fbi was probably planning a lot of this so very interesting stuff indeed and continuing on there to number seven uh the biden regime recently as in the past couple weeks has given the taliban government uh of afghanistan 308 million dollars this is actually brings their total up to 782 million dollars since the fall of afghanistan so again it's very interesting to see where the where the biden regime chooses to spend their money they're obviously saying that it's for humanitarian reasons to prevent mass starvation but again as we all know time and time again it you know watch the movie blackhawk down and you know how giving money to a warlord works out uh we've seen a very large contingent of training operations being conducted by the taliban in afghanistan lots of different military academies that they have set up since the fall of afghanistan lots of special forces units being stood up the taliban is most certainly not just a group of dirt farmers anymore and they're taking advantage of all of the resources that we left behind and continue to give them in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars moving on to number eight there massachusetts has uh launched a digital passport for the you-know-what um and i think this is interesting this one caught my eye because it it states that from what i can tell it looks like most of the digital passport efforts are essentially just a digitization of a scan of an actual card right an actual like paper card and that's really all it is for the most part you see a lot of apps in the app store for things like that and it's really just a a a website that brings up the pdf that you've scanned in before however the massachusetts one i need to do some more digging on this because i'm not entirely certain it sounds to me like there's a lot of medical provider support for this as in there might be again don't quote me on this because i'm not quite sure because all of the mainstream news articles i've read on this which by the way is the only sources you can find on this a lot of these mainstream articles are very vague as to where they're getting the information but the reason that it kind of brings us up is a lot of people have found that their records aren't showing up and it's just kind of a sucky app and it doesn't work that well which is no surprise considering it's a government-built app right but the interesting part is that a lot of people are citing that hey you know they should have been able to pull this from my doctor like why is this not working and that kind of makes somebody like me think hmm does this mean that medical providers are cooperating with this and providing hipaa protected documents to an app that you know people might not know about i don't know we'll have to look into it more but i just wanted to kind of give you the heads up and again number nine there really no intel value for this i just thought it was interesting that nancy pelosi's son has been tied to a quite large criminal syndicate you can look into this stuff just you know search for nancy pelosi's son you can actually google it and actually it comes up in google shockingly enough uh but the interesting part about it is that uh it seems like there might be some stuff with nancy in there too i don't know i don't really care when it comes to politicians honestly i just thought it was interesting so if you guys find interesting there you go all right so moving quickly through our national guard slides here in the northeast region we have quite a few updates actually this is the most significant updates for the country i have been for massachusetts and maryland so again if you recall a few months ago or yeah several weeks ago now massachusetts actually declared you know mission accomplished right and they sent everybody home well now they're activating 500 personnel yet again to help with area hospitals for this whatever wave we're on now um of this of this stuff right so again we're not seeing hospitals being overwhelmed we're not finding any evidence of that whatsoever really anywhere in the country to be honest but there we go again 500 personnel in massachusetts have been activated at least according to the governor's office again you know one of the main reasons that we're providing this information is to kind of highlight the normalization of deploying significant numbers of troops on u.s soil for seemingly no reason whatsoever so again if you're in massachusetts just know that a lot of your hospitals are going to have a lot of service members you know working there doing various tasks and stuff like that maryland is a slightly different story i need to do a lot more research on this again not enough hours in the day right but the maryland deployment seems to be a lot more significant i don't have numbers at this time but it seems like it's quite a large deployment we're also seeing a slight change in the wording of the mission and i don't know if this is because of maryland's governor just not um speaking so eloquently when it comes to the mission during press releases or if this is something more nefarious i don't know what the deal is but it seems like the soldiers that are deployed in the state of maryland will have a more active role than just helping out at a hospital it seems like um you know we're getting reports of you know door-to-door efforts potentially we're seeing reports of you know jab stations being set up and all kinds of medical temporary medical facilities going up again i don't really know what the deal is i guess we'll have to wait and see what actually shakes out but it seems like the the maryland deployment is a lot more a lot more hands-on uh the governor himself has stated that a lot of national guard are going to be called upon to physically go out to places like nursing homes and uh offer medication and things like that so we'll keep an eye on it we'll let you know when we have more information i wish i had more right now but that's all we've got down southeast really no change whatsoever several states have activated their national guards for various things but really the numbers are pretty much the same same with the midwest no change there and for the southwest there have been a few incidences with the soldiers in texas so again we're starting to see if you guys recall the incidents with oregon with a lot of national guard service members and senior military claiming that the the the political leadership of oregon was simply deploying the national guard just as a political means and we're starting to see inklings of that right now um actually that's putting it lightly we're seeing a lot we're seeing a lot of complaints from um very junior soldiers as well as commanders and we're seeing a lot of people complaining that this is just kind of a bs mission at this point that greg abbott is keeping people down at the border in very squalid and horrifying conditions just to serve as like a political you know finger right to the biden regime so i guess we'll have to see how this works out but we're getting report after report after report uh from soldiers down there stating that they're basically living in uh worse than incarceration conditions um and we've seen a lot of photos and it's yeah it looks it looks pretty bad so you know again greg have its own numbers state that we're talking roughly 10 000 army national guard slash state guard slash department of public safety guys in this theater of operations for operation lone star and it looks like this is doing a lot more harm than good especially when we start starting to see more incidences between the soldiers and the civilian populace or the cartel down there this just uh we're starting to see a lot more incidents regarding that then moving out west uh speaking of oregon uh like i mentioned oregon has a history of their political leadership abusing the army national guard and air national guard assets of the state for political reasons or at least so the service members have been complaining well apparently they haven't learned their lesson because there is a new push in oregon to deploy soldiers yet again uh to state area hospitals so this actually occurred over the you know past couple of weeks between the last brief and now we have in oregon over 1200 soldiers and airmen deployed around the state to various hospitals and stuff like that and um yeah i guess we'll have to see if if they're treated any better this time but yeah it certainly seems like it's more political than not so again that's our national guard outlook or rather wrap up for this brief moving on to the k-12 public school slides uh there is one update that that i haven't changed on the slide yet but i wanted to speak to and that is virginia so for those of you who don't know virginia got a new governor and on the very first day has signed a lot of executive orders banning mask mandates uh launching inve the new attorney general uh there in virginia is launching a lot of investigations regarding the mistreatment of of thing of children and things like that so i haven't actually looked at what has been done so i didn't want to change the slide just yet so i don't know if how this is going to work out because as we know right this slide is misleading in in and of itself because a lot of states don't have legislation that either bans or mandates masks being worn in public schools but schools do like for instance texas is kind of one of those states where for a time period there remember a couple months ago texas had a a ban on mass mandates and yet like 90 percent of all the school districts in texas were mandating masks so it's like what what what's going on here um you know south carolina's still kind of in that situation and virginia might be in that situation now so we've got to drill down and do more uh work to figure out what's going on in virginia there likewise with the the actual jab mandates no real change there we're starting to see a lot more resistance in california as one might expect so that state might actually be turning a different color here very soon but i guess we'll have to see and then finally for the kind of overall resistance tracker sort of thing that we've got going on here is uh the only thing i changed is virginia i changed that to green just because of again all of the efforts that have been undertaken by the recent state political leadership of virginia to reverse a lot of the stuff that the previous administration did so this might be all a farce i don't know we'll have to see how this stuff works out in the end but right now um you know the commander in chief of the virginia national guard is is doing some pretty decent stuff to reverse a lot of this stuff now again we'll have to see how this works out but as far as on paper goes it seems like virginia's moving in the right direction then moving on to mandate failures i haven't actually changed this slide but there is one update that i forgot to add to it and that is general electric so this is a big one general electric has um in the wake of the supreme court's decision to go against biden's mandates general electric has come to come out and said yeah we're not gonna mandate this stuff anymore and this is interesting you can kind of see which companies you know basically had the metaphorical gun to their head when it came to the mandates because general electric clearly had a workforce that was very resistant to it you know general electric is one of the largest employers in the country and so as one might expect you know in the field of general electric they're not going to be super happy about you know medical mandates and stuff but general electric being a federal contractor and having again a very good chunk of their uh profits coming from the federal government they're you know in a you know between a rock and a hard place and of course you know they chose the side of the government which is telling enough but i also think it's interesting that as soon as the supreme court came out and said anything against the biden regime general electric ran away from the federal government as fast as possible at least when it comes to these mandates you can see some other companies too and see what they want to do the companies that went out and instantly dropped their mandates due to the supreme court's decision those are interesting to look into a little bit more and i also think that the companies that uh haven't issued a statement or they haven't changed or they've doubled down on their mandate since the supreme court uh came out with their decision that's that's also telling as well and moving into international issues i really only have just a handful of stuff because like like i mentioned the past few weeks have just been filled with ukraine stuff um but uh one of the bigger ones is scotland so scotland has um been revoking medical treatment for expectant mothers if they are not jabbed and that has been something that has been rolling through the news outlets in the uk for a while now i'm going to be very interested to see how that works out because it seems like it seems like the united kingdom is kind of backing down from their stuff uh you know old boris uh he's he's gotten himself into a lot of trouble lately uh with what with um being uh confirmed to be at parties and hosting parties right when uh he was you know giving testimony before parliament uh regarding how dangerous and bad and you know winter of severe death and illness or whatever whatever he's been saying to the british population uh so yeah he's uh really having a hard time uh maintaining a a sort of straight face when it comes to all this stuff because it's really kind of obvious that it's just about totalitarianism at this point so we'll see how long this lasts the uk has had some a lot of resistance lately so again we'll see how scotland is able to pull that one out and then moving on speaking of medical resistance italy has also been very very vocal at least the italian people have been very very vocal and uh physical regarding their resistance to medical mandates as have been a lot of places around europe so again we're seeing some places double down like france has doubled down with with their medical tyranny but other countries um have have been quietly like backing off because they they see the power of the people i guess but um and then jumping back to europe for a second like i mentioned totalitarianism huge huge thing in europe these days uh specifically in germany and austria which have become really the poster child for how to violently crack down and hurt as many civilians as you possibly can if you're a government force so the german police and the austrian police have been observed to commit many many crimes against their people uh at least from what we can see just to you know force their tyranny on on people and uh people are uh people are not happy about that now as someone who has um uh spent some time in germany i've studied germany quite a lot i speak german it's uh not surprising whatsoever to see the stuff that is happening uh in germany right now their history um even though from an american perspective we like to make jokes about it right uh it's really it's really a cultural thing at this point i think and it's going to be very interesting to see what kind of resistance efforts come out of germany and austria as well two countries which honestly are very very different when it comes to the cultures of them but their governments as of late have been very very similar uh in the totalitarianism regard but again interesting interesting stuff to look up and then finally north korea our our fun little buddy out of the northern peninsula there has been up to no good with launching lots and lots of projectiles into the sea of japan um as of late so again i think that north korea is kind of a an international case study in just weird stuff right i don't think that you can look at north korea and and think that that's any kind of doctrine it's very it's a very special case study so when north korea launches missiles and things like that everybody looks and goes oh my god you know north korea is you know you know whatever well you know north korea is kind of a case study honestly their their their population is starving to death their political leadership is like the most comical bond villains you could possibly imagine and their technological capabilities while impressive in the regard that they can take old soviet equipment and duplicate it is not really something i would consider a major threat now that being said someone clearly thinks otherwise in the faa because a couple weeks ago there was a a national or i should say it wasn't a national it was just for the west coast grounds stop from the faa which was confusing for a lot of people and again i should point out this is very speculative because right at the time of a north korean missile launch is when the national grounds stop was initiated and a lot of people have been kind of confused by this they were everyone was confused at the time listening to police scanners of local areas and airports trying to figure out what's going on why the faa issue a ground stop has there been some kind of attack or something like that nobody could figure it out well a few hours later we find out north korea had launched a missile right during that kind of time frame so i don't know if this was some kind of emergency u.s military response that we they kind of let the cat out of the bag on or because they thought that maybe based on the trajectory of the missile that it might come close to u.s i don't know north korea is going to be very hard pressed to get a missile that far and even then we're going to have so much warning it's it's crazy um so i don't really consider north korea a direct threat to the united states and most analysts would agree it's you know north korea is definitely a threat to places like japan but you know as far as a north korean nuke landing in my backyard i'm not exactly holding my breath on that one but it's interesting to see the u.s response nonetheless if that in fact was a response and finally before i ended i wanted to talk about russia and ukraine for a bit because uh that has really been on my brain for the past few months now and especially i haven't been able i haven't really been thinking about much else other than ukraine lately as of the past couple of weeks and that's because we've seen a lot of very scary stuff happen let me put it to you this way as an analyst you try to you go through and a lot of times try to think of well what would world war three look like or what would something what would a gl mass global conflict look like what would be the early indications and warnings of such such an event like what would be the worst case scenario of stuff like that and um every analyst does this regardless of whether or not they want to admit it or not everybody has an end of the world plan or thinks about it at least because that's just kind of the you know nature of the job i guess but for me and for the rest of the team here we've seen some really scary stuff and i'm going to start off with the biggest one which is the norwegian communications cable being cut let me just say this is a this is a big freaking deal so for those of you that don't understand most of the communications on planet earth if you're wanting to get we're talking the internet military communications every basically every byte of information that that is um transits around the world has to go through communications cables right maybe not so much in the united states like you can probably send an email from california from a computer in california to a computer in new york and it never transit on a submarine cable a submarine cable meaning it's a cable that's under water like an undersea cable but for the most part these communications cables are the lifeblood of the human race essentially if you want information it's going to come from an underwater cable usually only just a few cables honestly so for instance the united kingdom is kind of freaking out right now because they're an island nation and they've only got a few cables going from the united kingdom across the english channel into europe and just a few days ago or i think a couple weeks ago now norway revealed that one of their submarine cables one of their undersea cables between the mainland and the svalbard archipelago which housed a satellite communications station had been cut um and that it and that not only had it been cut but it was like obviously cut in such a way that it was obviously a a man-made thing the ends of the cable were were many many meters apart it was most certainly not a geologic event because again cables on the literally laying on the sea floor they're heavily armored they're usually got you know many many inches of steel armor wrapped around them because geologic events occur underwater earthquakes and underwater like landslides and things like that can cut cables pretty easily and that happens fairly often um it happened a few years ago as a pretty big incident with the united states if i recall i had one of our cables cut that way and it was it was totally a natural event but this one was is definitely a uh is definitely a man-made thing so so the norwegians say and the reason for bringing this up is that russia over the since the cold war since the end of the cold war has pumped trillions and trillions of dollars into their undersea they call it oceanographic research uh branch of their navy so um we all know how the us navy works right or roughly speaking we have us navy sailors on u.s navy ships and we sometimes have you know merchant marines on naval ships and we have naval support ships like like hospital ships and oilers and things like that well the russians have an entire directorate that's basically like a naval version of the cia and their sole goal is to do secret squirrel stuff on the sea floor now we can get into this a lot further recently uh this has been a very hard topic to talk about or actually sorry in the past this has been a very hard topic to talk about only recently has this been talked about openly before but again this is very much a topic for another time the larger point here is that i personally can't think of any time when the russians would have actually cut a cable they've tapped a few cables they've tried to tap a few cables to tap into them literally like sending little mini submarines down with little arms on them that grab these cables and drill into them to kind of collect intelligence from them they've done that before but i've and they've practiced cutting cables uh because the reason this is all important is that one of the main kind of triggers for world war three or a very global conflict with russia being a major belligerent of that conflict is for russia to cut undersea cables essentially that's how you're going to know that world war iii has started when the internet just dies you have no communications whatsoever because you know 30 or 40 different undersea cables are all cut all at once that's kind of you know worst case world war three scenario um and one of these cables has been cut um very deliberately and this is something that is i'm sure this woke up a lot of dudes in the middle of the night and put them on planes because this is again i cannot state how how big of a deal this is now as far as any other cables i'm sure that other countries navies are inspecting uh their cables at the moment but again this takes months to do and this honestly since it was so deliberate this might have been one of those warnings like you know again to the western world hey don't mess with us in ukraine or else we're going to cut you know all of your cables next time because if you remember russia doesn't need communications cables they're the largest country on earth they you know have land-based systems whereas europe is very much you know has a lot of maritime space that that it occupies and that kind of ties into what i was mentioning earlier about the united states uh the vulnerabilities to the united states is that like hey if russia cut this cable let's just say they're the ones who did it and if they did it to serve as a warning to europe to stay out of its way with ukraine then you know i i can't imagine them not doing some kind of cyber stuff here in the united states so again that's why all of this stuff is kind of important to keep an eye on not just because this you know might spin out of control but also because we have direct impacts to the united states as well also briefly want to mention kazakhstan kazakhstan that that by the time that we had gotten slides together to talk about it it was already over essentially there was a coup that occurred in kazakhstan to kind of overthrow their dictator government and that coup was put down conveniently because russia sent a lot of airborne troops in at the request of the kazakhstan government to kind of help put that down and this matters for the airborne operations in ukraine because now those soldiers are currently free to invade ukraine or provide support for that and then finally with ukraine again i'm going to have a separate brief on this but the one thing that i did want to touch on is the possibility of a false flag attack now this is an important thing to note that i've been looking at a lot of russian media and uh russian sources along with american sources and they both say the same thing both sides both the western world and russia have have accused each other of planning false flag attacks to justify uh some kind of incursion polite word for invasion over the next 24-48 hours now as far as the united states planning a false flag attack to justify the united states backing up ukraine i think that's kind of a laughable concept the united states has done everything they possibly can to openly state that we're not going to support ukraine that is very much something that we have done i think that it's laughable for us to assume that we're going to do anything more than sends us some special forces maybe some equipment maybe um that even then the united kingdom is having to pick up the slack and send a lot of atgms to ukraine right now so again the united states is very much not interested in defending or helping defend ukraine which for whatever reason you know you can argue you can make arguments of of like hey we have this historical agreement that uh we you know said hey we we bought all of ukraine's or or forced ukraine to de-arm at the um with the agreement in mind that we would come to ukraine's aid uh militarily should they should russia get squirrely and you know the time has come ukraine did their part they disarmed themselves which i'm sure they're regretting now and the united states has not held up our end of the bargain but again i guess we can debate that another day when it comes to the actual false flag attacks reasoning uh i think russia has far more motive obviously they have more motive to conduct a false flag attack uh to justify their incursion slash invasion into the rest of ukraine because as we remember uh the question is not is russia going to invade ukraine because russia has already invaded ukraine eight percent of the ukrainian land mass is now part of the russian federation russia invaded ukraine in 2014 and that's just been the way it is since then the question is how much are they going to invade this time they're they going to launch another push to take even more of ukraine a lot of people are saying that these false flag attacks on both sides of the aisle are going to be kind of the go no go criteria for uh this invasion meaning that if russia can't pull off this this false flag attack they're going to wait until next year because the spring thaw is going to make it very difficult to maneuver in the ukrainian countryside once once everything starts getting muddy again and that would give ukraine the advantage i think me personally i don't think i think that was a valid argument a while back i don't think so now because i think that russia has stacked up they've invested too much too many resources now for them to for them to back down so i guess we'll have to see how it shakes out though but another thing that i wanted to mention is the not petya cyber attack now this was a cyber attack that got zero uh coverage in the u.s press but got a lot in the european press because of the uh petya cyber attacks from before so this is again a russian-based cyber cyber group launched a series of devastating cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in ukraine over the past couple of days now these attacks are very interesting because unlike the petya cyber attacks these are not or they were not intended to be ransomware they were intended to look like ransomware so that a person would think oh okay they're just trying to steal money from us while at the same time the the cyber attack was actually destroying stuff so this is one of those hard wartime like cyber attacks like our full you know cyber warfare stuff of destroying systems with no intention of getting money out of it whatsoever so that's interesting and yet yet another indicator that russia they mean business this time so again like i mentioned we're going to have a whole separate thing on ukraine here in just a bit for those of you who want to follow that conflict like i mentioned to the to the folks on patreon earlier uh we're kind of treating this like in afghanistan 2.0 with regards to the fact that there are americans in ukraine that probably would want to get out of ukraine if it were to be invaded by an invading force which is notorious for taking no prisoners so again if you think afghanistan was bad man just just wait because the ukrainian conflict has been very bad so far and we're just getting started so again as to the grand question that everyone's asking will russia do it i don't know nobody knows anybody who tries to tell you they know is lying to you or they're just guessing right now it's a 50 50 shot but i would i would argue that um or i would rather say that we're spending a lot of time making maps downloading imagery putting either products uh stuff like that because it's uh it's looking like it's an impossible uh impossible action for russia to step down at this point from this so it looks like it's it's not an if but when um and we you know again we might be fools and we might uh all look at this differently but hey it's better to prepare and have wasted a little effort making a map than it would be to uh to watch this on cnn so we'll keep moving forward and we'll uh catch you on the next brief um thank you again to everyone who has supported us it really helps keep the lights on here uh with regards to what we're able to do and capa

…military operations using old Soviet maps of an invasion long forgotten or even Garmin base camp or Google Earth even just a few years ago I myself was in a conflict Zone printing out homemade maps…

…And since it's time-stamped, you can play this back on something like Google Earth if you want to create a short video clip of how this movement was observed over time. Again, niche trick…

…It's usable with Google Earth and ATAC. And I th

…my GitHub page just so that you can load it into whatever system you use, be it Google Earth or ATAC or whatever, uh, and you can see all of the the data uh, a little…

…Uh just looking and doing a very rudimentary clicking around a Google Earth train analysis of what's going on here. This is a very high-risisk situation. uh and I very much hope and pray…

…more recent imagery satellite imagery for wintec and attack applications you can also use this imagery in google earth if you're so inclined or any other mapping software but to do this today we're…

the list esri world topo so let's bring that in we're just waiting for a second for it to download because it's downloading the whole earth okay now we can click this little…

…And just for a comparison sake, we can look at what Google Earth has and what Google Maps has for this specific location. And you can see that it was essentially an abandoned air base uh…

…is a map of a flood area not a whole lot of people know and you can google this yourself but fema has a flooding map that you can actually type your address in and find…