//The Wire//2300Z December 22, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: US SEIZES SECOND OIL TANKER IN CARIBBEAN, THIRD TANKER SEIZURE IMMINENT. AUSTRALIA INCREASES SECURITY AT POPULATED GATHERING PLACES.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Netherlands: This evening a vehicle ramming incident was reported in the town of Nunspeet, to the east of Amsterdam. 10x people were wounded during the incident, which involved a vehicle ramming into a crowd during a Christmas parade. Analyst Comment: At the moment it's not certain as to if this was a deliberate attack, or an accident. The parade itself was taking place in the dark, as it was organized around the viewing of Christmas lights. Since this took place in the Netherlands, it may take some time for more details to come to light. Caribbean: The Tanker Wars have continued to expand in scope as the US targets multiple tanker vessels throughout the region. On Saturday, the United States seized the M/T *CENTURIES*, a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) flagged out of Panama and registered to a Chinese company. Sunday afternoon the US Coast Guard was observed to be in pursuit of a third vessel, the M/T *BELLA 1*, a stateless tanker vessel illegally flying the flag of Guyana. This vessel is well-known to smuggle crude to the Iranians in violation of US sanctions. Australia: Fortification efforts have been observed at Bondi Beach, which have been emplaced for the memorial event that was held in the park over the weekend. Analyst Comment: Emplacing obstacles at a site that has already been attacked is a strong indicator that the threats are not over yet. Granted, it's cheap to move around blocks of concrete with a forklift, so it makes sense to put them up for the holiday season. However, both of the threats presented to Bondi Beach have been related to small-arms attacks, and not vehicle ramming threats. This indicates that either the threats of further attacks are genuine, or somebody thinks they might be. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Caribbean, it would seem as though the tanker wars have begun. However, the situation might be a bit more complicated than simply conducting a heist for oil, and the target vessels themselves have pointed to the reasoning for the interdictions. Firstly and most importantly, the pretense of this mission being solely about narcotics trafficking has been dropped; the White House has shifted into also targeting oil vessels without much comment, so at least they're being more honest now. However, even though it's about the oil, there's a bit more to the story. Though Venezuelan crude is quite high-grade, the US doesn't actually need it as the oil that's been seized is negligible in terms of our own domestic production. As such, it's probably less about the US getting the oil, and more about making sure that China doesn't. The war in the Pacific (which looks increasingly more likely to take place within the next few years) will 100% be a war largely decided by energy: Just like WW2, the Pacific Theater is big and logistics and fuel are the name of the game. Straight-up stealing Venezuela's oil is one way to impact China's logistical supply lines before a war ever begins, and this doctrine is very similar (in many ways) to what transpired between the US and Japan before the war kicked off back in 1941. This history may seem irrelevant, however the seizure of the M/T *CENTURIES* gives us a clue. The *CENTURIES* itself was not a stateless vessel, nor was it a sanctioned vessel. Everything about the paperwork for the *CENTURIES* was completely legal and above board...it was the oil onboard that was the illegal part that was subject to US sanctions. This is very telling as the US has altered the deal of the blockade, and Venezuela is probably hoping that they don't alter it any further. Regarding the other vessel that is being sought right now, the *BELLA 1*, her status is less clear. However, doctrinally speaking all nations that have a substantial naval force would agree that the *BELLA* is up to no good and in violation of not just US sanctions, but the standards of maritime decorum generally agreed upon by everybody (stateless vessels with no registration are a big no-no in the maritime community). Some reports state that the USCG attempted to board her at least once, but somehow failed. Right now that's just a rumor which is probably inaccurate. What's more likely is that the USCG hailed her via radio and she refused to stop her engines to allow boarding, and is attempting to make a run for Venezuelan waters. If the US Navy and the US Coast Guard so desire to board a vessel, it shall happen regardless of the opinions of those onboard. So it's likely that the USCG is shadowing her for the time being, until a higher-tier of military unit gets in position to conduct a more kinetic interdiction. Of note, the *BELLA 1* is currently transmitting distress calls over the radio, wanting fellow vessels to save them from being boarded. This is the maritime equivalent of calling the cops on your own drug dealer because the deal went bad, so it's unlikely that anybody is going to help them evade pursuit. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the Underground. This is the Intel update for March 15th through the 21st, 2026. We are officially 3 weeks into the war to stop the spread of Iran and the threats at home and overseas are starting to stack up. So, let's get right to it. Overall, the main focus has been on the expansion of the war in the Middle East due to entering a new phase of the war. The United States keeps bombing targets in Iran and the Iranians continue sending drones to attack American positions throughout the region. Down in the Red Sea, the Houthis have announced that they are now joining the war and will be opening up a southern front soon. They haven't done anything yet, but this is another threat to be aware of as the overall map of this war starts to expand around the globe. Around the world, another series of events that are underway right now are the second and third-order effects, which are starting to become more significant. This morning, the Times of London reported that government officials are working on plans to implement fuel rationing in the UK if the Strait of Hormuz continues to remain closed for much longer. Of course, these are just initial plans. Nothing is going into effect so far. However, this does go to show that what happens in the Middle East immediately impacts Western Europe and the United States at some point. All the way over in Southeast Asia, fuel rationing is already underway, and equally as important are the fertilizer shortages that are expected to impact the region during the upcoming rice planting season. It is still a few months away. However, even though this war has gone on for just a few weeks now, we're starting to have to think about famine potential here in the next few weeks. Separately, the United States has lifted some oil export sanctions on Iran so that they can export the oil that they have loaded onto their ships before the war began. Yes, you heard that right. We are actively bombing a nation every minute of the day, and at the same time we are allowing them to export oil for the first time in many years. This doesn't really matter anyway, I guess, because before the United States lifted sanctions, the Iranians were already carrying on business as usual with well over a dozen tankers meandering through the strait from Iran to the international market, mostly China and India, after the war began. In fact, even after President Trump announced the largest bombing raid in the history of the Middle East, his words not mine. The petroleum facility on board the island is operating just as it has since before the war, and tankers have been unloading oil at the terminal and departing even after the island was bombed. So, at the very wave top level, these are the concerns that we are looking at over the next few weeks. Economic instability and logistical challenges that we can't really predict ahead of time, but also the diplomatic complications that come about after the United States has torpedoed our relationships with everyone in the Middle East except for one country, which makes all kinds of international cooperation difficult in the long run. We are bombing Iran, and Iran is targeting our allies' oil facilities, and we are unsanctioning Iranian oil. So, suffice it to say that the situation is complicated at best. Concerning strategic movement for this week, like I mentioned, we are witnessing some major movements. In the Red Sea, the Ford carrier strike group is maneuvering north towards the Suez Canal after a laundry fire caused major damage to the ship. Initially, a fire was reported in the ship's laundry a few days ago, which is perfectly normal on board ship, and at the time it wasn't really worthy of mention. However, after a few days it became clear that this was a 30-plus hour firefight that actually had quite a bit of the crew involved in it over a period of almost 2 days. And then, the US Navy came out and said that the propulsion system was perfectly fine, which immediately raised eyebrows because that's kind of like sitting on an airplane and the pilot hopping on the intercom to state that the plane has a slight problem with the beverage cart, but engines 1 and 2 are perfectly fine, and there's definitely no problem with the fuel tank. Why would you even say that unless the situation was far worse than you had initially stated, which is the case with the Ford because this laundry fire, or whatever it was, was so serious that she is now combat ineffective, and she is being pulled off station to pull into Crete to conduct repairs. So, strategically, 50% of the aircraft carriers dedicated to this mission are offline, which is suboptimal. Likewise, other task forces are inbound to the Middle East. The USS Tripoli is almost in CENTCOM just a few days out from her journey from Japan, and the USS Boxer departed San Diego a few days ago. Both of these amphibious ready groups have Marine Expeditionary Units on board and both are scheduled to fall under CENTCOM's command in a few days with combat operations being possible probably by the end of next week at the earliest. In addition to the flat tops moving around, indications and warnings are mounting that the 82nd Airborne has been placed on some level of pre-alert to deploy. I do not know for sure if the warning order has been issued just yet. I do not think it has been and right now this may just be a general preparation rather than a more deliberate deployment. Honestly, if I were in command of a unit like the 82nd right now, I would be doing the same thing and wanting to make sure that things are good to go without any explicit order from higher up the chain. So, it could be that, but time will tell how this develops. Switching gears to focus on the home front for this week, indications and warnings are mounting of the threats to the homeland becoming more significant. Although, I must say we are really mostly grasping at straws because we really cannot say that X attack will take place at X place or at X time. And a lot of the events that have been made public over the past few weeks, we cannot really do much with. Again, the intelligence gaps are very, very large with nearly all of the terrorist attacks that have happened over the past few weeks. So, there's not a whole lot we can do other than just remain vigilant. Nevertheless, there have been a few incidents impacting the homeland this week worthy of mention. Last night, reports hit the mainstream media regarding a growing threat. Drones. Several instances of drone swarm incursions have been reported at American military bases over the past few months, but a few weeks ago when the war began in the Middle East, these drone incursions kicked into high gear. Instead of seeing one or two quadcopter style drones, we're starting to see drone swarms at American military bases and other sensitive sites. I have many anecdotal reports that I cannot publicly share regarding these drone sightings, but based on what has been reported in the mainstream media, these are starting to become more significant. The PAO at Barksdale Air Force Base reported many drones in their airspace last week after the war began. For context, Barksdale is a facility that is known for hosting the bulk of our B-52 fleet. These probing reconnaissance efforts have been reported at many other installations, and apart from the drones, we have also seen an increase in IED attacks within the United States over the past few weeks. This week, we had the IED that was discovered at the visitor's center of MacDill Air Force Base, which was in place to the day after the memorial service for the service members who were lost during the war. This timing was probably intentional, but again, there is not really a whole lot of information in the public sphere on this incident at the moment. Hope to have more next week, though. Concerning the more indirect impacts of the war within the United States, Americans have been slow to feel the impacts of the war on the other side of the planet, but nevertheless, those impacts will be felt in very unique ways. For instance, many people are saying that we don't need the strategic oil reserves, or all that oil goes to China anyway, or some other political message to state that whatever is happening in the Middle East doesn't actually matter here at home, which is really just misleading because the situation is vastly more complicated and more nuanced than that. So, these claims are not only false, but they're misleading in terms of what it means for commodities. It turns out that introducing scarcity of a commodity impacts that commodity, no matter where it is on the planet. So, even if the United States produced 100% of the oil and gas that we needed, and if we could refine it all by ourselves with no outside help, since oil is a global commodity, if it becomes scarce in one part of the world, the price of our oil goes up, too. A lot of people right now are debating on whether or not we can actually make up the difference for the production of our oil here in the homeland, and people can argue about that if they want, but we but we have to really remember is the opportunity cost, which impacts commodities a lot more than one might think. So, we're going to start feeling the effects of the war over the next few days and weeks as these impacts begin to be identified. Of course, the early and easy one that's that most people can understand, or at least the way that most people will be impacted by the war, is gas prices. Gas is up a dollar over what the national average was before the war began, so people may not understand why this is happening, but it is. So, this is how global markets work. Just like the COVID era when it comes to logistics, we're playing with things that we don't really understand because we simply cannot predict the trickle-down effect of bringing chaos to any part of the world. In other words, we don't know what we don't know. And as the war continues, we're going to start identifying exactly the things that we're not really going to miss until they're gone, right? And on the diplomatic front, China is all happy to sit back and start developing new relationships as our own partners start questioning which horse they hitched their wagon to. So, at the very strategic level in terms of diplomacy and economics in the Middle East, the situation is most certainly not good, and it's only going to get worse the longer this war goes on. Moving to the more tactical situation on the ground, we arrive at the grand question this week: How goes the war? This week, several high-profile incidents have taken place. The Israelis targeted the South Pars gas facility, which sparked a major international incident due to the Qataris being dragged into this war more directly. And as a result of that attack, various messaging has been undertaken by the White House, which is honestly confusing, and I don't really know how to read it at this point. In the Persian Gulf itself, a humanitarian crisis is developing among the merchant vessels that are currently stranded and unable to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Many of these vessels are starting to run out of food and water, and many port authorities around the region are not letting merchants enter the ports to top off their supplies, either because they just don't have the supplies or because of the risk of a ship being sunk pier-side. Other vessels are too big to enter the shallow water ports anyway, and so they're having to go get food and water in crew boats. It's It's utter madness at this point. Considering targeting efforts on all sides, we are starting to see the effects of what we sometimes refer to as changeover. This is a rarely discussed phenomenon that occurs in warfare, which in this case is an example of basically running out of ammo with one weapon system, and therefore having to switch to another. What makes this a phenomenon is that there is an equal and opposite reaction depending on whether or not you were the aggressor or defender in a particular situation. The United States began the war using expensive standoff munitions, but the Iranians retaliated. They started their counterattack by using their more old and obsolete missiles. Similarly, on our side, we began the war using our brand new PAC-3 missiles in the Patriot batteries, but the Iranians began with their cheapest and least capable munitions. So, when it comes to purely an analysis of the munitions that have been used, the United States started with our best, and the Iranians started with their old and busted. Now, after the Iranians have caused us to expend our best, they can transition to their best. We saw this in Israel in particular because Israel got hammered a lot by a lot of those missiles on the very first day. But, after about a week or so, the Iranians had started using cluster munitions. Why is this? Well, if the Iranians have oversaturated your missile defenses and you're running low on THAAD missiles, you're running low on Iron Dome stuff for more of the the low-level drone attacks, and if you're running out of high-level interceptors, now the Iranians can start using their best munitions both to increase lethality and also to oversaturate the missile defenses that remain. Likewise, the United States is starting this changeover process in many regards as well, which you can read in two different ways. CENTCOM has stated that they are now beginning to use AH-64 Apache and A-10 Warthog gun runs along the Iranian coastline, engaging targets as they come up. Now, these weapon systems, both attack helicopters and low-level closer support aircraft, these are low-level assets. These are going to be targeting things very close to the ground, not from a thousand miles away. Now, you can read this as the United States is so awesome that we don't have to use the more expensive munitions anymore, and we're just mopping up the Iranians from close range. Or, you can read it as this. CENTCOM is having to assume more and more risk, throwing anything and everything at the Iranians at breakneck pace, simply because it is a question of volume. This is how I personally read the situation because of two things. For one, the photos coming out of the B-52s departing on bombing missions indicate that they are still using standoff munitions, in this case JASSM cruise missiles, and I believe the JASSM ER or extended range variants as well are also being used. Also, the successful targeting of the F-35 a few days ago is a huge tell, not just for the F-35 platform itself, although I'm sure some Lockheed guys are getting ripped over the coals right now, but also because it confirms that 3 weeks into this fight, the US has not achieved one of their stated goals, which is uncontested airspace. Pete Hegseth directly stated that this was a goal, and it has not happened yet, which is not an indictment of any kind on the US Air Force. It's just stating the obvious, which is that this is a hard fight, and the US is nowhere near mopping up the Iranians like the White House has been indicating. Remember that F-35 platform has been touted over the past decade as being an indestructible, next-level, completely amazing platform that is immune to all this kind of stuff. So, you can't really fall back on the classic argument that might have been made saying, "You know what? Even under the best of circumstances, one or two planes are probably going to get shot down. It's a war, things are crazy, stuff like that." Well, no, you can't really make that argument because you explicitly made the argument that the F-35 was invincible, and the Iranians proved that it's not because the Iranians hit it with probably a very low-level or a very old SAM system. Now, granted, the F-35 is clearly an amazing platform because it ate a missile and it still was able to fly, but still, we now see the risks that are coming to light. Three weeks into this war, the US has blown up a lot in Iran, but has this been enough to reduce combat power in Iran enough to where we feel safe enough to send a carrier through the strait? Absolutely not. Hard no on that. In fact, at this point, I would be very hard-pressed to believe that if this war ends anytime soon, as in it ends diplomatically and not militarily, I would doubt that the US would send a carrier through the strait ever again. Bottom line, this war, like all wars through history, is not going as well as expected for the aggressor based on the Pentagon's own metrics. And we can prove this very easily. The fact that not one, but two Marine Expeditionary Units are being deployed for this war is a strong indicator that things are not going to plan because if they were going to plan, why were these units not on station already before the war? And this is something that is not unique to the United States. Any nation which starts moving strategic assets after starting a fight clearly did not expect those resources to be needed. Likewise, evacuations of American positions around the region continue because once again, the United States did not expect the Iranians to target their bases in the region, which sounds hard to believe, but that's exactly what President Trump stated. He said this openly. And it does align with what has been observed over the past few days. Suffice it to say, American positions in the Middle East are getting hit harder than they have ever been hit before, and the damage that has been done to American positions throughout the Middle East is substantial. Now, the 64,000 lb elephant in the room is exactly what those two Marine Expeditionary Units are supposed to be doing in the Middle East. And I have been racking my brain trying to figure out exactly what we're trying to do with these here. My first gut feeling was that the triple-E was either a bluff, or it was for maritime security, or some other low-level task because you can't really do much with just one MEU. I'm sorry, guys. I hate to break it to you, but Iran is a big country. Even if we were to just avoid the Persian Gulf, avoid the Strait of Hormuz. Let's just take those two out of the equation. The coastline of Iran outside of the Strait of Hormuz is about 500 mi. So, you've got to go past 500 mi of Iranian coastline before you even get to the Strait of Hormuz. And then you've got hundreds more miles past the Strait of Hormuz before you get to the end of the Persian Gulf. Again, Iran is much bigger than it seems on the map. It seems like a small country on the map, but it is very large. Qeshm Island, for example, which has been in the news a lot lately. This is the main island in the Strait of Hormuz, and it's one of the main Iranian strongholds within the strait that kind of overlooks down onto the waterway there. Many of the drone attacks are being launched from this area, and there's a pretty good coastal defense contingent on this island. There's a lot of nooks and crannies to hide drone launchers and stuff like that. The only problem is this island on the map, it looks pretty small, but just for scale, it's roughly the size of Okinawa. In 1945, it took about 180,000 troops to seize Okinawa, and Qeshm Island doesn't even have a coastline suitable for an invasion. Most of the island is complete sheer like Cliffs of Dover cliff face. Another theory I've seen being talked about by pundits on a lot of the mainstream media that I have unfortunately had to watch regarding this conflict are are what about the smaller islands? Okay, so Qeshm Island is too big, what about the smaller ones? Well, let's take Larak Island for instance. This is another island in the strait that the IRGC use as a kind of a stronghold. It's more of a more of a recon base than anything else, but it does have coastal defenses. And it looks kind of small and cute on the map, right? Wrong. This is actually the size of Iwo Jima, which took about 80,000 Marines to seize back in 1945. So, hopefully now the the concerns are quite clear with the littoral considerations here. The White House is openly lying about how much they have devastated the Iranian coastline. Showing individual strikes on old generation launchers does not really paint the full picture. If we're showing clips of one missile or one bomb hitting one launcher or one target, how much do you think that pans out over 500 miles? Even if you were to just look at the map that I have right here, all of the points that you see by my lightest count in terms of the common intelligence picture map product that I have made, all of these red points on the map, all the sites that all of the potential targets that could be bombed, 95% of what they have militarily is not on my maps. Similarly, for American targeting efforts, I've mapped about a 15 to 1800 points that have been hit or struck that we can confirm have been hit or struck via satellite imagery or video from the ground. And if we're talking 15 to 1800, that's quite a bit less than what the United States has claimed, which is a well over 5,000 strikes. So, the White House has claimed 5,000 strikes. I've got on my maps 1,500 to 1,800 or so. So, we're not getting the full picture here. I just want everyone to be clear about that. We're not getting the full picture when we're looking at this stuff, but it's the best that we can do for now, best I can do for now. So, one of the main things that we just don't have a whole lot of fidelity on is the Iranian army. Like, what is the Iranian army doing right now? They have a ground force. They have a ground army of about 700,000 troops. And if you call up the local police forces, the militia, and all the other forces, you can probably get to like 1.1 to 1.3 million. Figures vary, obviously, and there's going to be quite a few casualties so far, but nobody's mentioned them at all. Nobody's mentioned the Iranian army at all. And the White House is pretending that they are bombing everything into oblivion. And personally, I don't think they're doing too much at the strategic level. Yeah, they are hitting missile launchers. And a missile launcher that's blown up can't be used again, right? That looks really cool. But at the strategic level, there are questions as to what the capabilities still remain, because the Iranians are still launching missiles. They're now launching their good missiles. They're now launching their good drones. And they're able to launch fewer and fewer of those because defenses have been degraded throughout the region. The United States has said that the strait is open, right? Trump has got his advisers on television saying telling merchants to, you know, have courage and go through the strait. Like, what are we doing here, you know? The president's telling people to sail their ship into a potential minefield here, a literal minefield in some cases, with no guarantee for their safety whatsoever. The White House is trying to to call the merchant mariners who are not sailing through the strait. He's trying to call them cowards, which is just baffling. If the strait were open, if that were true, then why is the American aircraft carrier in the region too scared to even get close to it? If Trump wants maritime shipping to feel safe about transiting the strait, then why don't they send their carrier through? Or the five American warships that are currently in the Persian Gulf that no one seems to remember are there. Why is it that the United States is still loading up B-52s with JASSM stand-off munitions, which are launched from hundreds of miles away from Iran? Clearly, there is enough risk that makes stand-off munitions a major requirement for this fight, at least for some targets. And if we are using stand-off munitions, I have no idea why are we are even remotely considering a ground combat element at this point, because this goes against all military doctrine. And I'm not saying this because of any kind of personal feeling towards the war, although we all have personal feelings towards the war, right? I'm saying this because I am utterly aghast at the potential for us to even think about a ground combat element when we're still using stand-off munitions. Bottom line, I'm quite concerned that the Pentagon is counting their chickens before they're hatched, and I think that they think they might have a shot at it. I think the Robert McNamara LBJ era of thinking is definitely in play in the White House, and I think they're getting high on their own supply, and throwing out most strategic doctrine because politicians and generals alike are being force-fed the drone strike footage, and thus lay they are making high-level strategic decisions based on low-level tactical data. I genuinely think that they don't know that even if we were to use nuclear weapons, Iran could probably eat a half a dozen nuclear detonations before they would be softened up enough for a ground invasion to be possible. And the media has been pushing the idea of taking Kharg Island hard over the past few days. As unfortunate as it is, you really have to look at Fox News every now and then, unfortunately, to figure out what the neocon war establishment is trying to push in terms of military strategy here, and they're pushing Kharg Island right now, which to me is sheer and utter madness. We cannot even get an aircraft carrier within a hundred [snorts] miles of the strait, much less transit it. So, Kharg Island is completely off limits unless they want to do a helicopter assault force or like a half raid, which would be a bloodbath in every single scenario that anyone can dream up. Over the past week or so, I have been sitting at my desk trying to figure out what angle they might be able to press, what how they might be able to prosecute this war. And honestly, I can't figure out where they would want to get a foothold. You can definitely get a foothold in many places along the Iranian coastline. The question is, why would you want to? Like, what's the point? What are they going to do? If you could put 4,000 Marines on the Qeshm Island airfield, the Qeshm International Airport, former International Airport. If you could do that, go right now, and you could do it without taking any casualties, what would be the point? What would you do? You're going to go door-to-door looking for Iranian soldiers to deliver right? Like, what's the point? So, I don't understand what they're trying to do because again, the strategic vision for this war has not been conveyed clearly to the American people. No one really knows what we're doing here other than just causing a lot of destruction, and that's basically it. Which is If that's what they want to do, fine, but with a ground force, I don't know, man. I don't know what they're trying to do here. Venezuela was easy to call. Operation Midnight Hammer, again, was easy to call. But again, this situation now where we're in this, and we've been fighting for 21 days now, we've got 21 days of combat experience. We have got 21 days to lean on of what's been going on in the war, and so far, I don't know how this is going to work out. As all of this is developing by the minute, I'm going to do what I can to help map this out because I have a feeling that not only is de-escalation not on the menu anytime soon, but I think that we might be getting into a bit of a pickle here really soon when it comes to a ground force. I don't think it's too late to call it off. I don't think that the final decision has been made just yet, and there haven't really been that big many movements other than of course the the Navy vessels with the Mew on board, but I certainly hope we break the trend, and this is actually a bluff. But at this point, I would personally be very surprised if some sort of ground combat element is not utilized. However, once again, things are changing rapidly, and everything is happening by the hour, right? And we have at least a week before any potential ground combat element is in position. So, we're going to have a few more days to go on the hunt for more indicators. I cannot definitively say we are going in just yet. I don't want to make that call at this at this point, but everyone can see that the indicators are stacking up. In addition to the tactical situation on the ground, this war has now expanded to include two combatant commands. This is no longer CENTCOM's baby alone as INDOPACOM is now involved due to Diego Garcia being targeted overnight. Last night, mainstream media reported that the Iranians tried to target Diego Garcia with two ballistic missiles. One missile splashed down on its own shortly after launch and the other was intercepted by the US Navy in the Arabian Sea. The reason this is so significant is that Diego Garcia is roughly twice the range of the max range that Iran was supposed to have. For those that don't know, Iranian missile range is basically just Israel. Their missile core, which is an entire branch of the military, was set up more or less with the goal of building missiles for combating their biggest threat, which is Israel. And you've got to respect that the Iranians are the ultimate haters because whenever a new missile came up on the drawing board, they'd basically say, "Can it hit Israel?" And that would be the main criteria for designing their new long-range ballistic missiles, at least. Their short-range stuff is obviously for more regional threats, but you get the general picture here. The Iranians were definitely not trying to do a North Korea and try to build an ICBM. They're not interested in hitting San Francisco or anything like that. The Iranians are not interested in hitting the United States, which is why the Diego Garcia shot is pretty interesting this morning. Now, it must be noted, and this is a very big pump-the-brakes moment. It must be noted that the reports that we have seen do not explicitly confirm that the Iranians actually have that much range. We do not know how far this missile flew before splashing down. And speaking theoretically for a moment, if I were the Iranians, I would definitely do it for purely deception purposes. I would lob a couple of ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia knowing full well that the missiles would land a thousand miles short, but also that the US would intercept them. So, the missiles fly out over the Arabian Sea, and then Navy dutifully intercepts them, and Iran claims that their missiles would have hit if it weren't for the meddling US Navy, right? Even if that wasn't the case, even if those missiles would never have gotten close to Diego Garcia. So, I guess the main distinction with this attack is whether or not you think that the Iranians would burn a couple of missiles to get everybody up in a tizzy, or if this was a legitimate attempt. That I do not know, and I guess the proof is in the pudding. The evidence on the other side of the aisle is also quite compelling, too. Why would the US Navy burn a missile if they detected that that Iranian missile was never going to hit anything anyway? Why would they try to intercept it at all? So, the fact that they tried to intercept it, and they did intercept one of those missiles, the fact that they did that is a pretty strong indicator that that missile would have hit something. Otherwise, they would have just let it pass and save the missile and make the Iranians look foolish, right? The other more obvious theory, which is kind of a blend of these ideas, is that maybe the Iranians are doing a little bit of live-fire testing. Maybe they Maybe they don't actually know their true range, right? Maybe they've built a missile, but they haven't actually tested it before, and they're trying to see how far they can really just send that sucker out there, which is probably the more likely theory. It could have been uh one of their existing missile systems that they set up to go farther. I don't know. Maybe they took the warhead out and replaced it with a smaller one so it could go farther. I don't know. This is all speculation, right? Either way, the Iranians are stretching their legs and trying to flex a bit now that the star of the show, their missile core, is starting to increase their attacks. So, that's where things stand right now. The war is only continuing to expand. The Iranians are getting better at their targeting efforts, and we are starting to dig to search for harder targets as time goes on. This is how all wars go, especially air wars. You kill all the dumb ones on the first day. You take out all the low-hanging fruit on the first day, and now we're starting to reach up to the top of the tree and trying to find the the cream of the crop. And that's a lot harder to do for us, and it's a lot easier for the Iranians to do. So, again, inverse relationship here. As time goes on, the United States will have a harder time, and the Iranians will have an easier time. They have proven that their government did not only did not collapse after the initial strikes, but they probably planned for those strikes to occur. And also, they have been able to maintain command and control elements after this war began. So, in terms of how this war is going, I can't really say for sure. It's not really accurate to say someone's winning or someone's losing, but I can say that the United States is struggling to meet objectives. Whatever those objectives are, we don't really know with 100% certainty. But, when it comes to the Iranians, their goal of just surviving, their bar is so low it's on the floor. You know, just to survive. They're obviously very much able to meet that. And they are able to carry out increasingly more aggressive attacks and increasingly more pinpoint precise attacks as time goes on. So, that's something to think about as time goes on, and it's not something to degrade the United States military. This is just something that goes on in every conflict around the world, whether it's Russia and Ukraine or South Korea, North Korea, China, Taiwan. These are the concerns that are now playing out in real time in the Persian Gulf. So, again, this is nothing personal against any of the belligerents involved in this. This is pure reality. This is how warfare doctrine works. And we have to acknowledge the truth of the matter because none of the sides, none of the belligerents involved in this conflict are telling the truth, and we're seeing some some rather impressive propaganda being spread around on all sides. And we just got to cut right through it to get, you know, to the truth of the matter. So, while the conflict remains a central focus to the region, while we're kind of focused on the bullets and bombs of the region, extremely serious developments have occurred in Jerusalem, which I would like to touch on. Israeli forces, citing alleged security concerns, have closed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem. This church, one of the holiest sites in all of Christianity, has never been closed since its founding, shortly after the Lord Jesus Christ walked the earth. Even during the Muslim conquest of the city, even during the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic caliphs placed the church under custodianship and protected the building from harm. And even during the brutal Crusades, the church remained open. The church itself began operating internally with enhanced security posture since February 28th, since the war began, but as of this week, the church has been completely locked down by the Israeli government during the most significant time of the year for Christians, Great and Holy Lent. Right now, the church is preparing for the ceremony of the Holy Fire next month, a yearly miracle which occurs in the empty tomb of Christ inside the church. This closure would be a major incident even during the best of times, but during the lead-up most important yearly event for Christians, this is a clear case of deliberate persecution of the highest order for which there is no defense or justification, and is a very big deal when it comes to international relations. Similarly, Al-Aqsa Mosque has also been closed for some time for similar reasons, security, general security concerns. Al-Aqsa Mosque has also been closed several other times before by Israeli forces since times became a little bit more kinetic in 2023, but this year it was also closed directly before Ramadan. So, I did want to point that out. The Muslims have been impacted as well. It's just that Al-Aqsa being closed has happened before, and the two holiest sites in Islam are actually Mecca and Medina, so not exactly in Jerusalem. But again, Al-Aqsa is a major facet of the Old City of Jerusalem, and it's important to note nevertheless. I have also seen some reporting that the Western Wall has been closed as well, or at least had access restricted, but I'm not really sure about that, and all of the synagogues throughout Jerusalem, of course, remain open. So, regardless of whatever security threats exist, the decisions to close holy sites were made unilaterally by the Israeli government in violation of the complex administration of the Old City, which is jointly managed by a complicated arrangement of authorities throughout the city. I know we probably don't want to talk about this so much. Personally, I would really prefer it if there wasn't a holy war component to this conflict, but at this point it is painfully obvious that a good chunk of this war is actually being fought for the purposes of attempting to fulfill biblical prophecy, at least for some people and some of the major belligerents here. And honestly, guys, I I really don't know what to do with that. Similar story with the strategic military doctrine at play here. I mean, I I have a whole bookshelf of warfare publications going back detailing every armed conflict since the Napoleonic Wars, going all the way back to ancient warfare as well. And not a single student of the history of warfare would ever say that a ground invasion of Iran would be a good idea at this juncture. And right now, the White House and the dozen or so advisors around the president think that they have a chance at a ground invasion. They're floating this idea in the public sphere. Are you high? I don't know. Maybe I'm just stupid here, and I just have uh more of a pigeonhole view of the conflict than I thought I did. So, if anybody out there has a good explanation or a good uh ability to explain the military merits of putting the these specific units on the ground in Iran, and how those units would achieve a strategic goal, because again, that's the whole point, right? You can put 4,000 Marines, 6,000 Marines, you can put 10,000 Marines on the ground in Iran. You can do that, 100%. I've got uh hundreds of HLZs they can use. But, what's the point? How would that help achieve the end goal of the war? That I don't know. Now, if you were to change the numbers and say 4 or 500,000 troops, I would say, "Okay, well, now we're talking about a about a military objective actually being met." But, 4,000 Marines and the 82nd, I'm sorry, guys, I just don't see what the point of this is in terms of achieving a strategic goal. So, moving forward over the next few days, my general plan is to continue monitoring the situation uh overseas, and especially here at home. I know that most people are vastly more concerned with what threats are present to the homeland, and I am concerned about this as well. That is my chief concern with all of this, the homeland. Civil unrest over immigration has seriously simmered down after uh President Trump pulled out of Minneapolis. And personally, I think that was the height that was the peak of uh immigration and deportation efforts. I would very much like to be wrong about that. I would love for uh deportation and uh immigration law enforcement operations to continue personally because it reduces the threats to the homeland. But, I personally think that we're we're really done with immigration being a focus uh by the White House for right now, for sure. Same with Epstein. No one in any position of power is even going to go through the motions of pretending to care about seeking justice on that front. So, it'll have to be us. It'll have to be the little guy. It'll have to be us, the average taxpayer, who are trying to to make sure that we don't forget the crimes that have occurred and also the crimes that are probably still in progress. So, I'm sorry to say that domestically it's a little bit of mixed news when it comes to civil unrest. The far left is still protesting. Uh protests may or may not get kinetic. But, for the most part, they're not really upset because they got what they wanted. So, that will be something to be aware of as we move into the summertime. And on that front, let's wrap things up for today with the Ghost Net reports for this week. We cannot control what our nation is doing at the national level, but we do have enough control to do what we can to improve our own skills. We can moan and complain on the internet and we can doom scroll all day long. But, what are we doing each day to better ourselves? What are you doing to improve the world around you as it falls apart? Let me tell you, friends, there's plenty of work to do on that front. One line of effort is to make sure that we can keep in contact and share information in an off-grid manner, no matter what happens, whether it be internet communications outages or censorship alike. Maintaining that link to the world is very important, and this week the Ghost Net has been fantastic with many users providing helpful information on their local areas, which is always a good thing to see. So, that's all I have for today, everyone. Thank you for sticking around as I desperately try to get more organized with all of my data and make things easier for all of you to have on hand. Because that's what it's all about, right? Having access to information that you can use to make your own decisions. And if the data is hard to access or not really easy to understand, it's of no use. So, please continue to bear with me over the next few weeks as I try to figure out ways of balancing how much information is useful and how much is really just the chaff that isn't helpful. So, we'll get to it to do the best we can, and I hope all of us can do the same. So, thank you 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 intel update for June 14th through the 20th, 2026. It's been quite a busy roller coaster of a week, so let's get right to it. Of course, the main focus this week has been the signing of the memorandum of understanding to start the process for ending the war in the Middle East. Are we getting back to normal? Is this insanity over? Well, not quite, because the subsequent and immediate escalation of the war in Lebanon, while the least surprising development in human history, still has complicated the situation and as of this morning, the fighting in Lebanon continues as the IDF remains on the offensive. Over in the first world, there have been several developments to be aware of throughout Europe and also here in the homeland. In the United Kingdom, barely an hour has passed without a ground-breaking and horrific story coming to light and in the United States, the domestic threats at the national level are elevated due to events in the Middle East, but we'll get to that in just a moment. In the United Kingdom this week, our friends across the pond have been dealing with quite a lot. In Northern Ireland, the unrest has continued with limited riots popping up randomly in Belfast over the past week. More peaceful protests have also taken place fairly regularly throughout the city, even though media coverage has been fairly minimal. Overall in the mainland proper, the bombshell news this week has been the release of the rape gang inquiry report, the privately funded effort to use parliamentary access to investigate the official documents on the rape gang crisis in the United Kingdom. If you are so inclined, you can read the report yourself. I will link to it below, but I will sharply warn you that it will probably be the worst thing you have ever read in your life, full stop. I myself have spent a couple of years coming through the Epstein files to find actionable intelligence and the absolute worst things in the Epstein file are not as bad as the least bad survivor testimony in this report. It is that bad. 250,000 British girls were raped and tortured over the past few decades with the assistance of government who not just covered it up, but actively directed and organized the rape gangs themselves. Since most of the victims had dozens, if not hundreds of perpetrators, we're looking at potentially millions of people that need to be handled. You can look at the appendix and look at the sourcing materials where all of these references are made and they are backed up with other sources. A lot of the testimony in the report is actually from people who are remaining hidden due to the British government prosecuting people who come forward as a victim. So you come forward as a victim, say "Hey, I'm a victim of a rape gang." And guess what? You get thrown in prison. So they're trying to cover it up because the people running the rape gangs are still in power. For us here in the US, if you have the stomach for it, the parts of the report that are not just a record of the atrocity are quite informative because a good chunk of the report details how and why this came to be, and the appendix is handy for name-dropping the entities that were involved in the scandal. Now, I would expect much more detail to come to light now that the true scale of this crisis is known. I would be willing to bet that a lot more people are going to come forward and a lot of whistleblowers are probably going to come forward as well who know exactly where the documents are stored. So there's probably going to be quite a few more reports written. And it's going to be important for us Americans to understand our connection to all of this as well. There is absolutely zero way that a scandal this big is just confined to the United Kingdom when the US and the UK are so heavily intertwined on pretty much everything including culture, banking, powerful people, all of that stuff. That is something to be aware of, right? We are very heavily intertwined with the UK and when they have something this damning coming out of their country, it does affect us as well because it's we're probably implicated in it somehow. In this case, most of the scandal in the UK is confined to mostly enclaves of multiple generations of migrants. And the report specifically states that up to 95% of the perpetrators were Pakistani. Here in the US, we have similar problems, albeit with our own national flavor. So over the next few weeks, it will be important to keep these issues at the forefront of memory because these kinds of issues are what undermines civilization itself. When we allow crimes of this scale into our society, it makes everything worse and erodes away at our very being. Witnessing how the British handle this over the next few years will be helpful for us because if we can't protect the innocent from foreign invaders from within our own borders, then what's the point of having a nation-state anyway? It may sound harsh, but deportation is really in the best interest of these people because everyone who reads this report will no longer be in favor of mass deportations, if you know what I mean. So, it would be wise for those engaging in this behavior to depart the United Kingdom and the United States while you still can. Here on the home front, there have been a few items of note this week, which I have not had much time to dig into. The most substantial of which is the alleged plot to target the UFC event on the White House lawn last weekend. According to the criminal complaint released by the DOJ, this was an effort by five men to use drones and explosives to target the UFC event at the White House, which would prompt an evacuation of the venue, and the would-be terrorists would conduct sniper attacks on the crowd leaving the White House grounds. These individuals were arrested before they were able to carry out their plans, and the FBI announced their great success early this week. Now, the headlines make this seem like a pretty substantial attack, but digging into the details as provided again by the DOJ, it becomes clear that these guys were not exactly playing with a full deck. For one, what happens every single time that an attack takes place at the White House? They lock down. Nobody in or out. This literally happens at least once a month, and these idiots apparently did not know about the very public security measures at the White House. If they had carried out their plan, nobody would be evacuated from the White House grounds, they would have all stayed inside, and the attack would never happened. This is very easy for anyone to see. There was literally a shooting at the White House like a couple weeks ago, and that's exactly what happened. So, I don't know why these idiots didn't know that, but anyway, just to cut right to the chase, ever since I saw the evidence photos of the gear that these guys were alleged to have staged for the attack, my gut assessment was that this was either a bunch of idiots, feds, or both. I mean, even Trantifa does not have so little self-respect that they would conduct a sniper attack with a bullpup shotgun. I mean, come on, guys. This entire plan was so hairbrained that it's honestly laughable. They had planned to conduct a sniper attack from what looks like the Jefferson Memorial, which is hilarious because you can't see the White House from that side of the Tidal Basin. And even so, the area that they had circled on their map was about a mile and a half from the White House. So, these guys were completely inept. But anyway, the grand question remains, how close did they get? After all, an idiot with a rifle can still cause a lot of trouble. So, even if they actually got to DC and found out that all of their plans would not work, they could still have shot somebody. The details that the DOJ released do not indicate whether or not these guys actually traveled to Washington. They were supposed to rendezvous in Fredericksburg, but it sounds like they never made it. It looks like all of them were scattered around the country and they were picked up by the local FBI field offices. So, I don't know if these guys actually planned to travel around at all. It could have been a case of five guys having this story of, "Oh man, I wish I could make it, but I can't." and canceling all on each other at the last minute. I don't know, but the plot was actually discovered because the mother of one of the suspects found out about the plot and turned her son in. So, all in all, I don't know about this one. It's not out of the question for this to be a legitimate attempt, and the evidence provided by the DOJ indicates that the would-be assassins did indeed try to plan the attack. They planned something, even if the average paintball game is much more well thought out. Maybe it was a real thing, maybe it was just an average Redditor on the internet being edgy. I don't know. More generally, though, right now is probably one of the most risky times for domestic terror attacks for one exclusive reason: the events in the Middle East. And let me explain by recapping what has happened so far over the past few days. As we all know, 2 days ago, the memorandum of understanding was signed by both Iran and the United States going into effect immediately to solidify the ceasefire as official, but also to set in motion the planning efforts to work out the details of a more permanent peace deal. The MOU has been published to much outrage all around because even though it's written rather vaguely, the vast majority of the points favor the Iranians very heavily. Immediately after this was signed, the Israelis expanded their bombing campaign in Lebanon, and several armored columns of the IDF have continued their advance along the eastern front to push north and west deeper into Lebanon. Hezbollah has, of course, responded in kind, mostly with anti-tank guided missile, or ATGM, attacks, which are their favored targeting method in this particular region, although FPV drone attacks are starting to become more popular, as well. Yesterday morning, the Qataris announced that they had succeeded in talking the Israelis and Hezbollah into a ceasefire that was to uh take place at 4:00 p.m. local time yesterday, but of course, the Israelis just ignored that and kept shooting. As a brief aside, this is why when we say it's an Israeli-style ceasefire, that's only partially a joke, right? They literally do not believe in the concept of a ceasefire. The Israeli Channel 12 news station literally said that a ceasefire does not mean to cease firing, it means just no major advances or offensive pushes. So, to the Israelis, it's really a foreign concept because they operate on a different set of norms and mores than the rest of the world. They treat themselves differently than everyone else, to include in warfare, especially in warfare. Anyway, cut to this morning uh when the large-scale bombing of Lebanon continued. Bombs have been going off for at least 24 hours now in Lebanon, and they've been uh they've been cratering quite a lot in southern Lebanon between the Litani River and all the way up to Beirut. I'm seeing some reports of munitions hitting uh maybe that far up in some of the suburbs, but still trying to pinpoint where all these bombs are landing, but suffice it to say, it's a pretty big bombing campaign. Now, of course, uh this morning, as I am recording this right now, I see on my screen that the Iranians have announced that they have closed the Strait of Hormuz due to the United States failing to constrain Israel, which is a direct violation of paragraph one of the MOU. Maybe there's a reason why Lebanon is literally the first thing in the MOU because it's the most important thing, and it's the thing that's going to get violated probably the soonest. Well, that's exactly what's happened. Again, this is a developing story right now, so the things are probably going to change by the time I edit this and get it out the door, but this appears to be what's happening right now. The strait may or may not be closed. It's going to probably take if the Israelis keep bombing and the Iranians want to close the strait because of that, it may take several hours, may take a full day for traffic to stop transiting through the strait. I don't think the Iranians are going to hit all the vessels that are currently in the strait right now. They may, I don't know, but right now there's a few dozen ships that are trying to move as fast as they can through the waterway. So, I don't know. They're trying to apply diplomatic pressure and we'll have to see how it works out tonight, but very busy day. Things are moving pretty fast, too fast for me to cover them and then have it out the door pretty quickly. So, that's the more tactical situation as it stands right now at this snapshot in time, but at the more strategic level, there are always more complicated details to be aware of. I myself have had a rather foreboding feeling about this whole thing as it comes to a close and this week has kind of reminded us of how high the stakes are in Washington when it comes to an agreement being signed. The day after a peace agreement is signed is sometimes more dangerous than the day after the war starts. There are a lot of very powerful people that are very, very upset that this MOU has been signed granting Iran so many leniencies. And due to the rather interesting position that the United States finds herself in, anytime big moves are being made with regards to the direction the nation is heading, very mysterious and very coincidental things tend to happen, especially if one particular entity is involved. In short, the war playing out in the shadows continues on and occasionally pops above the surface for the general public to observe. One of these little shadow war items, one of these things that has the fingerprint of fifth generation warfare all over it, came from a New York Times article that was released almost 2 weeks ago, which details the internal reaction within the White House to the growing Epstein scandal last year. I have been mulling this over for a couple of weeks now and I wanted to mention this because I think it's related to what's going on right now on the diplomatic front in the Middle East and it might help us get an understanding of the seriousness of what's going on behind the scenes. Again, this is just a hunch. It's not a solid evidence of anything, but it's something to consider. The article itself was a part of a PR effort to promote the upcoming book of the authors detailing and chronicling President Trump's second term, and most of the article focused on the internal discussions within the administration to handle the Epstein issue. Not a rare form of content by any means, and when it was released, it didn't really get too much press coverage because it did not really contain that much new information. And the inside scoop style content detailing internal drama, it's not necessarily something that has implications for national security. However, the importance of this article is not what's in it, but how the information for it was obtained. Some of the quotations in the article seemed a little too specific for just someone having exceptionally good memory. The article described highly sensitive meetings in the darkest corners of the White House about the mismanagement of the Epstein scandal. Meetings so small and with everyone around the table being named that the sources of certain parts can be discerned rather easily. All of this appears to be a fanciful tale at face value, but now that this article has been circulating for a couple of weeks, it's become pretty obvious as in it's more likely than not that they actually have the audio tapes to back up the claims made in this report. Of course, until the raw tapes are leaked, if they are ever leaked, this just could be conjecture to drive book sales. We have to think of that first, right? But at this point it looks like this was a massive security breach that has largely been ignored. For example, the section detailing a meeting in which Dan Bongino resigned directly quotes the conversation in such excruciating detail that there is no way that a tape of this conversation doesn't exist. And since everyone in the room at the time is listed in the article, it doesn't take too much effort to determine who had bugged the meeting. One potential read of the report could be that this is just a political hit job enabled by exceptionally well-placed sources, and that this article is nothing more than that. After all, it's mainstream media, they do hit jobs all the time, they make up stuff all the time. It could just be made up. After all, The New York Times is one of the least trustworthy entities of modern memory. But if you skip right through the standard slop sections of the article and actually read between the lines of what message is being presented, the most dark and pessimistic view of this New York Times report is that it's a shot across the bow. Possibly a warning that other tapes exist on other topics. Following that line of thinking, exactly what's going on can't possibly be known, but the timing of all of this is suspect on its own. They sat on this reporting for over a year only to leak it right now, right at the same time, again, two weeks ago when the White House was internally thinking about signing a peace deal with the Iranians. So, right during a week, the the one time where the world is undergoing profound change, they would have had to have had documents circulating within the White House of this 14-point plan. They didn't just draft it 5 minutes before the meeting with the Iranians. This document has been in circulation probably for a while, maybe about 2 weeks, maybe exactly the same age as this article that was published by the New York Times. And now suddenly everything leaks around the same time. Very interesting timing that. And on the more technical side, I think the significance of the technical surveillance effort can't really be understated either. If a spy can gain an audio recording inside the situation room when the Vice President and other key leaders are there, and they can time that recording so perfectly that someone brings a printed report into the rooms so that the spy can gauge the reaction to that news hitting the the audience there, that is something that the highest levels of nation-state level espionage could not uncover with years of hard work and getting assets in the right place. Just think about this for a second. The Soviets spent the majority of the Cold War fighting tooth and nail to get this level of access. And many spies on both sides of the conflict were tried, convicted, and executed for such endeavors. Nowadays, the gravity of what was accomplished, this technical surveillance effort, is dismissed because talking head journalists who are being fed information have expressed shocking levels of naivety. I do not know why these journalists were so stupid, and somehow they did not understand that they were in very severe danger by publishing very sensitive information. I mean, clearly they did it, and it's going to be interesting to see how this works out, but it's very interesting the timing of all of this and the implications that are made. I don't necessarily believe a lot of the quotes in terms of how they're framed. Maybe there's context missing. I don't know. I'm not really concerned about the content of the article. I, of course, being interested in the things I'm interested in, was mostly focusing on the fact that they got recordings inside the situation room, and we just kind of glossed over that over the past 2 weeks. So, you've got somebody who's controlling journalists or feeding information to journalists proving to the White House that we can get to any of your secret conversations in the very deepest, darkest basements of the White House. Also, another piece of information might be sprinkled on top of all of this to to add a little bit more context. This entire week, most of the Israeli media has been absolutely livid about this MOU being signed. But, more specific than that, Miriam Adelson's newspaper, Israel Hayom, which is a publication that she publishes herself and often writes articles for, that newspaper has been publishing articles condemning the White House in the strongest possible terms for not continuing the war. Of course, understandably, every single Israeli news outlet from the political left, right, and center, these guys are going to be seething at the United States taking concrete steps to end the war. But, in this case, this is the personal family publication of President Trump's biggest donor. And now, around the same time, almost the exact same time, in fact, The New York Times releases this excerpt from an upcoming book that heavily implies that they have audio recordings of some of the most secret White House conversations that have ever taken place. And once again, looking at the very wave top level, what are these conversations about? They're not exactly detailing the President's favorite movie. They're not exactly detailing the secret blend of 11 herbs and spices. This report precisely details the biggest [ __ ] in President Trump's armor, the Epstein files. How this situation will develop is anyone's guess, but right now the stakes are palpably high and the potential for very serious things to happen is extremely great. Very strong flashing neon sign messages are being sent to the White House from a certain demographic and that's pretty concerning. Though it might be out of the news cycle now, I'm sure the right people have a very long memory and have not forgotten the Golden Patriot incident, another major message sent to the White House. And I think that that message wasn't interpreted in the way that it was intended to be sent. So, I would expect that a lot of quiet security measures are going to be in place if they're not already in place or trying to be worked up by a lot of the old hands who know ball, as the kids say these days. The idiots at the FBI, yeah, they're useless, but I would venture a guess that a lot of the older guys at varying levels of bureaucracy know the risks and understand that right now, right when a peace deal has been signed and has angered a lot of people who have a lot of deep talents in the government, this is now a very dangerous time. And I'm very concerned about and security of everybody involved in all this because I I think that that's I just get a bad feeling about it. So, now that we've got the the stage set and with all that kind of insanity and very palpable risk kind of noted, okay, duly noted, why did the United States sign this really terrible deal right now? Because let's face it, whether you support the deal or not, pretty much everybody hates it. The war hawks don't like it because it grants a lot of stuff to Iran. The people who don't really care about it don't really like it because it grants a lot of stuff to Iran and we fought the war for basically nothing. The people who are maybe on the fence are looking and saying, "Wait a minute, we blew all this stuff up. My gas prices went up, my grocery bill went up and all of that was for nothing just for us to pay the Iranians reparations." So, basically no one is happy with the deal. Now, that doesn't mean that we should tear up the deal and throw it away. And why did the US, knowing this, why did the US sign this deal right now of all times? Well, there are a few different reasons. I'll just run through them really quickly. First of all is oil. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has run its course. Uh President Trump himself has said that the US was down to only about a few weeks of oil left before we had to do something, which aligns to somewhat with what everyone has been saying for a while. We drained a lot of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve just to keep prices down, and we still could not um keep up with the demand, right? And I think it's now safe to say that the alleged secret operation to get 100 million barrels of oil out of the Gulf, which we discussed last week, I think that was probably completely fake. As much as I would like to think that the US Navy has super secret ways of handling the situation and can pull off some pretty neat tricks, the US Navy's got some pretty cool stuff they can do. Uh I still think that this was a complete fabrication and that we only smuggled a handful of ships out at best during this entire war. Even if we were secretly paying the Iranians through a third-party mediate mediator to get oil out, it still wasn't enough. In any case, uh the White House has said we're out of petroleum. They said it. So, the MOU was signed to open the strait. It might be as simple as that. And this matters because of the timing for tankers. Uh once a tanker is fully filled up with crude oil in the Persian Gulf and it starts heading toward the United States, it's only going to be moving at about 10 to 12 mph, so it takes weeks, sometimes a couple of months to actually get here once the flow of maritime traffic restarts. And again, if weather is poor, uh it can it can add a month to the to the trip. It's hard to say. Since most of these ships have been sitting still in warm water for a while, they now have a big barnacle problem. And the world it does not have enough ports to fully service a lot of these ships, so they're going to be moving pretty slow. They're going to have a lot of drag in the water. So, again, getting this crude uh flow back to normal is going to take a long time. Another reason why we may have chose to end the war right now is due to the loss of strategic assets, mostly radar sites. For all of the damage that we caused in Iran and have tried to catalog over the past quarter of a year, the Iranians have absolutely wrecked our radar sites, and we can't exactly replace them. The United States uh dropping a bomb on the door of an underground mountain complex is not comparable to the Iranians dropping a drone on a billion-dollar radar system. So, remember those sites that they hit during the early stages of the war? Yeah, those weren't even for Iran. Those were for monitoring Russian ballistic missile launches. We lost enough strategic assets to the point that we did not have as many eyes and ears as we used to in the region on that half of the planet. So, that makes it kind of hard to wage a war and continue deeper offensive options well within Iran. So, I think we lost a lot on the technical side of things. Another reason is logistics. Being forward deployed for so long creates logistical challenges that are hard to encapsulate and they're really hard to plan for before a war. A carrier strike group that has been at sea for 6 months is going to have less capability than a carrier that just arrived on station. Now, normally this effect is negligible in terms of overall combat readiness, but we have to remember that this was an over-the-horizon war. The fighting had to be conducted from such extremely long range and the unknown secondary and tertiary effects of that probably caused a lot of complications. It's a lot harder to fight a war when you can't use most of your military bases that you had put throughout the region specifically for war. But by and large, the reason that the US signed this deal is simply due to us running out of options. We really did not have any choice. This is not something that is specific to our nation. This is something every nation is going to deal with that engages in warfare because as time goes on, the options for military success are much reduced. The longer a war drags on, the less likely you are to have a favorable outcome at the end of that war. This is true going all the way back to the Peloponnesian War, right? And in this case, the nature of the target itself was never really a viable military objective. We just we just did not have the technical ability to wage war in Iran. We weren't ready yet. Now, we could have been had we made decisions 20-30 years ago and we didn't have the G watt to shape a lot of our current doctrine, but, you know, wishing doesn't make it so. Yes, we blew up a lot of stuff. We took out their steel industry. We took out a lot of their factories, we took out a pretty much every military target that was above ground in terms of factories and production and all that kind of stuff. And that's no small feat except for the fact that we're now going to give them $300 to rebuild all that stuff. So, not only did we not have good effects on target, we did not drop bombs on buildings that ended up stopping the war, but we're also going to pay for all the damage that we caused. So, you can't even say at the end of this, well, okay, you know, we may be walking away from this and it may not be super strategic the great, but hey, at least we set back the Iranians a long way in terms of their production and their and their weapons. And they're not they're not going to be a threat for a very long time. No, you can't make that argument if you're giving them hundreds of billions of dollars because we're just going to rebuild their stuff bigger and better than it ever was. And we're doing that because we have to because we have no other option. So, again, very frustrating experience, I know. I know that a lot of people are kind of upset with the way that this turned out. I'm sorry that this is the way that it turned out. It is unfortunate. It gives me no pleasure in saying these things. It really doesn't because again, my country lost a war. And I don't really like that fact. It's not pleasant. Even though I did not support the war at all, I personally thought that I I really hoped that we would win it or at least not lose as much as we have. So, there's that just for the record. But that's kind of where we're at right now. And once again, the fat lady has not sung. The the MOU may be torn up by this afternoon by the time I'm done editing this, who knows. The things things are changing by the day. All I know is that right now it seems like the US has run out of options. The Iranians, how many options they have? I don't know. It's probably not unlimited but they have more options than we do. And they have more control over the situation than we do. And since that's the case, every day that goes by and the Israelis continue their situation in in Lebanon, that's just going to make it much more costly for the United States. So, the Israelis are directly hurting the United States with their war in Lebanon because now we're having to give up. We're having to increase the number of zeros on the checks we're giving to Iran. We're going to have to sweeten the pot to get them back to the table. And all of it is just because the Israelis want to make a point of how much they control us. So, yeah, not super great. So, all of that out of the way, and uh all of the past past and present kind of covered, let's move into the future and talk about what's going to happen next. Well, we can't ever really know, uh but there are a few things that could be on the menu over the next few months, weeks, whatever, which would be good to know about. The first one is, of course, Cuba. Uh obviously, the White House is going to need a pretty big win, uh but Cuba is probably going to be re-examined after July 4th, probably once the 60-day uh ceasefire agreement thing is over. Once the United States and Iran sign a full-blown peace deal, then I think we're going to start pivoting to Cuba. Because the White House is going to need a win, and to just purely basing this off of the gut assessment of the personalities involved in all of this, it would make perfect sense. Just as kind of a way of starting over and getting some kind of military victory, some kind of trophy. Now, what that might look like, I have no earthly idea. Cuba is not Venezuela, Cuba is not Iran. Cuba is not what I would call a great military power, either. It's not something that they're going to have a whole lot of say about, but if the US wanted to occupy Cuba or something like that, even more so than we already have with Gitmo, then we probably could do that. And it's going to be uh something to look out for in the future. The next one's China. China, uh dear friends, as you probably can imagine, has been very busy, and they have been taking a lot of notes. For one, they have been able to gain a lot of valuable combat data on the systems and weapons we use, and we used a lot of developmental technologies during this war in Iran. Just as an example, we dropped land mines uh in Iran that have only been ever seen in line drawings. And now the Iranians have given us photos of what they look like, so there's that, you know, weapons technology, dud missiles, uh all the Tomahawks that didn't go off. Yeah, those are going right to Beijing, probably, or Russia. Although Russia probably already has a lot of this stuff, but also on the information warfare side of things, we released dozens of video clips uh from the official CENTCOM account, which should probably have been censored for reasons, but in any case, the Chinese noticed and have probably gained a lot of combat data from the stuff we've actually released officially. I would also be willing to bet that a few of these shoot-down incidents that we have been made aware of during this war were probably carried out by Chinese MANPADS. Just my guess, no evidence on that at all, but that's probably happened or at least some of the missiles that the Iranians have fired are probably Chinese, too. That would be my guess. That would probably be a very sensible thing for the Chinese to do because where else are you going to be able to test your missile systems against a Patriot battery, right? Then in the Middle East. I'm sure the Chinese were all up in that, right? And trying to figure out what they could do. They probably fronted a lot of those missiles for the Iranians. But, apart from the military side of things, the economic response was actually much more interesting and I I'm going to have to dig more into this too because the main reason, not the only reason, but the main reason that oil did not hit two to $300 a barrel is because China cut their imports by over 40% and they started drawing from their own strategic reserves basically as soon as the war started. And personally, I want to know why. Maybe it's purely economic for them, but this decision has been puzzling me for a couple of months and now that we know with a little more clarity that they cut imports by a lot, I want to know why. They could have easily screwed us over, but they didn't. Well, they kind of did a little bit uh because their ships were able to get through sporadically throughout the war, but still, they could have made this a lot more painful for us and I suspect it's because we've told them that they can have Taiwan. I mentioned this back during President Trump's state visit, but at that point, China had already cut imports, so maybe there was something there, I don't know. Something for me to dig into later. Maybe there isn't really a deliberate answer. Maybe it's just Maybe it's complicated. I don't know, but still, kind of interesting. China is always making plans. Some nefarious, some not so nefarious, but they are certainly making strategic moves of their own to dominate their region. Another uh region to watch over the next few weeks is is to be Turkey. Many people seem to suspect that the Israelis and Americans will pivot to Turkey as Turkey is the next big power within the Israelis sphere of influence. I'm not so sure about the Israeli pivot to Turkey just yet because I don't think they're done with Iran yet. And since Iran has come out of this affair drastically more powerful than they were at the start, I don't think the Israelis are going to want to take on Iran and Turkey at the same time. Nevertheless, Israeli politicians have already pivoted toward Turkey. They're already starting to make uh speeches in the Knesset. So, we'll see what they say. Usually, Israelis are pretty pretty open about what they want to do. Uh we just don't tend to take them very seriously, but if you just listen to what the Israelis say in their own uh Knesset, you'll be quite radicalized, I think. Uh but anyway, so Turkey is on the menu and uh finally, another thing to watch out for is the military industrial complex. This is again something I don't need to state too much uh obviously, but domestically, the military industrial complex will be in overdrive to build and sell a complete overhaul of weapons, strategic defenses, base building materials. Everything is going to be on the menu for purchase. And right on the front page of the brochure is going to be a sales tagline that basically says, "You want to avoid getting your rear end kicked in Iran again? Buy our missiles." So, expect some seriously large budgets and continuing resolutions to fund defense-adjacent technologies, probably stuff like AI weapons development, experimental stuff, you name it, right? Bottom line, all of the lessons learned when it comes to munitions and targeting will be approved upon by increasing procurement. But all in all, just to wrap things up for today, it must be noted that this might not be over. It is possible, I don't know how likely it is, but I'll mention it anyway, it's possible that this is merely a brief pause and it's not the real end to the war. It's pretty clear that all sides, like I mentioned earlier, the far left, the far right, the Zionists, and the warhawks, and everybody else, all of the demographics involved look at this deal as it's been signed and say, "This is a bad deal." That is just undeniable. You can call it a surrender document if you want, or you can soften it however you wish, but the deal is certainly not balanced. It favors the Iranians by a wide margin. Now again, I argue that, well, yeah, that's unfortunate. It really is, but we didn't really have any other option. But, there are other thoughts. There are other ideas that this might actually just be a ruse, and that the United States is signing a bad deal intentionally because we have no intent of going by that deal later on. As it stands, the MOU is just that, a memorandum of understanding. It's not a treaty that has been ratified by Congress. So, just like the president signed it, he can equally rip it up, and there will be no legal consequence. I do have to be careful, though, because even though I am personally skeptical about this deal being signed as it has, there is also the motivation to keep the snowball rolling because of the sunk cost of the coming involved in the war. I mean, even for me, uh I have spent months of my life chronicling the war, finding every single bomb crater and missile strike that I can find, in addition to mapping out as much of Iran's military infrastructure as I could find. And now that the war is theoretically over, it was really all for nothing. Now, personally, this doesn't really bother me. It's just kind of the way the intel world works. 90% of what you do never ends up getting used or is a waste for later. That's okay, I'm used to that, no problem. I'm very, very happy that this situation, this war, is being resolved, but the past 6 months have definitely been a whirlwind, and I'll tell you, it doesn't feel super great to have the president himself say things that I personally took a lot of flak for at the time, during the heat of the fighting, when a course correction could have saved lives. The president is saying things that we were saying weeks and months ago, and he's saying it now, but when we were saying it, it could have saved lives if he had admitted to it. In the past 24 hours, President Trump said that it's okay for Iran to enrich uranium, and it's okay for them to have missiles because it's not fair for them to give up their missiles if everyone around them has missiles. J.D. Vance also said that the Israelis better be careful with their words because President Trump is the only head of state in the entire world that is sympathetic to their nation, which is a shocking bit of honesty that I was genuinely surprised to see because it prompts the question of, "Yeah, why is that? Why is it that the entire planet despises them? Could it be due to their actions, particularly their behavior during this conflict?" I don't know. I'm just finishing the question that the vice president himself prompted. Anyway, it would be very, very foolish to think that things have changed on this front because it's very clear that the elephant in the room is going to have to be addressed at some point. Maybe the best thing to come out of the war is that just highlighting who actually is running things. The good news is that the Iranians know how hard of a challenge this is. They are not stupid. They know who runs things here in the US, and they know that signing a document is not likely to change things on that front. So, my guess is that the Iranians will probably be willing to grant a lot of slack on the Lebanon issue for the time being, and they are probably going to play things cool with the Strait of Hormuz as well. I know, not a super popular assessment, I guess, but if they're smart, that's what they're going to do. Now, they have a lot of internal infighting, uh which is obviously uh a factor, but they are certainly not going to shut the strait down anytime they get a hangnail. The Iranians have been very, very calculating and deliberate this entire time, and there's no reason to believe that they won't continue to do so. Remember, they have a new Ayatollah and a relatively new president as well, both of whom are very new in their roles. So, they're playing things very carefully for now. However, the IRGC is simply not going to allow the situation to remain the same in Lebanon. There is an element within Iranian society that wants war. They've said, "Enough is enough," and they want to keep going. Lebanon makes it hard to stifle these elements within Iran, and maybe there's the maybe that's the reason for that. If it was Gaza or the West Bank, that's that's a little bit more complicated, and the Iranians would probably address those issues more indirectly than just launching missiles into Israel every every time some IDF soldier does something in Gaza. They're probably not going to do that. But, Lebanon is a full-blown nation-state that has a way longer history of independence, and they are being straight-up invaded. The Iranians are not going to tolerate a sovereign nation state being invaded in their region. They're just not, because it has the potential to affect them. The Israelis can always one day just decide to bomb targets in Iran, and the US will dutifully provide the subservient aerial refueling that we are legendary for. The IDF, by the way, does not actually have very much long-range aerial refueling capability. They only have uh older, I think, Boeing 707s that have been converted to be aerial refueling platforms. They have had the opportunity to invest in the KC-135 program, if I'm not mistaken, uh but they prefer the US Air Force to do it. Uh they prefer to make us do it for them when they carry out attacks in Iran. It's It's just kind of a domination thing uh that they like to do to us a lot of the time. Sort of like how Netanyahu, when he comes to Washington, he brings all of his laundry, like his entire family's laundry, to take advantage of the diplomatic laundry services in DC. You should look that up if you're interested about that. It's more of an insult to us uh than than anything, but that's kind of what they do. I would say they're not the only nation to do it, but I'm not aware of any other nation that they kind of treats us this way. But, anyway, when the Israelis get us to refuel them when they carry out attacks in Iran, that means we're now involved in the attack in Iran, and guess what? Now, we're back in it again. So, that's how the US will probably be dragged into this again as if the Israelis carry out long-range bombing attacks in Iran, we're going to have to refuel them to do so. They can probably carry out one or two smaller attacks with drop tanks. Again, the Israelis put two secret military bases, two secret airstrips in Iraq for this war. Uh I don't know if they're still there, but they just don't have that long-range targeting capability. They rely on us for that, and we never tell them no. So, when this eventually happens, the Iranians will know for sure that the US was involved in it. We can claim, "Oh, we didn't know the Israelis were going to do anything." Well, our refueling aircraft are off the ground, then they know the the Iranians know that we helped them do it. So, the Iranians are not stupid. If I can figure this out with Twitter, then they can figure this out with the nation state apparatus behind them. And the Iranians, they don't want to live in a status like that. They would prefer to settle a lot of this hostility right now, rather than peeling this band-aid off slowly over the next few years after they inevitably get hit again and again and again and again, every 6 months or so. So, the bottom line is that if the Israelis continue their war in Lebanon, there really is no hope for peace. And right now, there's really no hope for restraining the Israelis, even though it would be very easy to do so. And around and around and around we go. Not a super great way to wrap up the week, I guess, but there's on the one hand hope that we might get back to normal. The the strait maybe opened. Maybe we can get into the into the situation where we have cheap gas again and cheap grocery bills. It's looking hopeful. Uh this time last week, it was not looking hopeful. This time last month, it was definitely off the table. So, we are making progress. This is good. This is a good thing. It's just that these last-minute derailing things are just so completely typical. And nobody really wants to address the elephant room. So, this might be a point of contention that kind of drags out farther. I very highly doubt that the Iranians are going to go back to the full-blown war again unless the US does. I think everybody has a lot to say with this. They may They're probably going to close the strait, though. How that's going to work out, I don't know, because the Israelis are essentially uncontrollable. They're just kind of a rogue actor in all of this. And that's going to complicate things moving forward. So, that's really where we're at right now. And we're going to have to see how this plays out over the next few weeks. For now, that's all I have for today. So, I'll cut it here and we'll finish up with the Ghost Net reports for this week. Great work all around as usual. Lots of good reports. I had a pretty significant thunderstorm hit my location right at the moment that the net started. But even though my own antenna was being whipped around quite a bit, I was still able to engage and pick up quite a few offline news reports from around the country. Seeing as how things are going around the world with regards to news being either censored, outright nonexistent, or difficult to access due to data security concerns, efforts like this help us to have other options available just in case. I have also been experimenting a bit with Reticulum over the past few weeks, and I'm starting to get spun up on plugging all of this stuff together. For many of you who read my news reports throughout the week, how cool would it be to one day get these reports completely offline via radio, even if the entire internet and power grid were to go down? I think that would be pretty cool. Uh I've also been working on trying out the Nomad Net, which is kind of a system for hosting primitive web pages that can be accessed via radio if need be. I think that's pretty cool as well, and I look forward to experimenting with this stuff even more, and really improving our resiliency so that no matter what, we can always stay connected. So, that's all I have for today. More to come on a lot of this stuff later on once I get more experience with it myself, and hopefully things can calm down in the Middle East, and a point of stability can at least be reached for a while. Either way, we'll keep an eye on it, so thank you for all of your support. Thanks again to those of you on Patreon who keep the project cooking along, 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 intel update for May 31st through June 6th, 2026. The summertime is already cooking pretty quickly, so let's get right to it with the events that mattered this week. Around the world this week, the Anglosphere has been working through some domestic issues with both the Henry Noak and Austin Medaf murders being the catalyst for the English-speaking world being fed up with the stuff and because of how things are developing, civil tensions will remain on the menu for the next few weeks. Otherwise, the familiar aroma of tear gas and body odor has wafted down from New Jersey. As the usual, suspects have remained protesting at the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark and generally trashing the place more than it already was. Overseas, the Israeli style ceasefire remains in place with kinetic engagements remaining daily occurrences throughout Iran and the Persian Gulf this week. In Lebanon, the war continues as before with the IDF continuing to push north into Lebanon and air strikes have remained common throughout the Lebanese countryside as well as a few targeted assassination strikes in Beirut. Otherwise, the Russians have been fighting a pretty hot war down in Mali and the General Sahel region of Africa with FPV drone attacks being used by various insurgent groups. This week, the Russian Africa Corps has also started to use FPV drones to take the fight to JNIM insurgents. Likewise, JNIM and the FLA insurgent groups are also learning quite well with JNIM militants starting to use drones for real-time forward observation to walk mortars onto Russian positions throughout the country. So, the wars in Africa remain pretty hot and a lot of al-Qaeda linked groups are learning how to streamline the use of drones for offensive attacks. All of the current conflicts taking place around the world continue to heat up, which is to be expected this time of year. But the global energy crisis and the oil shock that is originating from the war in the Middle East is raising the stakes for all of these different conflicts. Here at home around the United States, things are just as spicy as last week, both on the civil unrest front and the political front. I've not mentioned it throughout the week because I didn't have a good spot to put it in a report, but this week, legislation has been introduced within the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act to allegedly merge the Israeli military with the United States Armed Forces. Section 224 of this bill is the problem. And I've been trying to figure out how bad this really is because it sure sounds like Congress is trying to unify the Israeli military industry with our own. As in, when it comes to military technology and intelligence, they will be considered the same as America. Once again, I have not had enough time to look into this myself. And to be honest, this is completely unsurprising and probably not that much different than how things are right now. But I did want to mention it for those of you who want to do some more research on your own. It looks to be another step towards the United States losing a lot of autonomy at the behest of a much smaller foreign nation around the world. And that's pretty concerning, especially considering this involves military technology. So, we don't have to worry about the Israelis stealing our military secrets if we just unify them and make them part of the US armed forces apparently. So, that's the concern with this and I'm going to look into this a little bit more. But, they've been trying to do this for a few years. A few representatives have been trying to uh put this in various NDAAS over the years. Either way, something to keep an eye on. I did want to mention it because it's kind of important. Otherwise around the country, the other main concern this week has been the discovery of new world screwworm in the southwest, which has been spreading throughout South and Central America for many months now. This disease is known to absolutely devastate cattle herds as the flesh-eating parasite causes festering wounds that usually lead to the death of the cattle due to infection, blood loss, and all kinds of bad stuff. So at the wavetop level, this leads to pretty harsh economic losses, potentially in the billions of dollars if this hard to eradicate disease spreads throughout the American cattle herds. Right now, there's not much that can be done uh by the average person to mitigate this disease. But being aware of what's going on in the agricultural community is important, especially since beef prices keep going up. And if this disease spreads more widely, this is going to cause a lot of losses that drive beef prices up and availability down even further. So definitely something to be aware of as we await the latest data from the USDA regarding how bad this crisis is. Right now, a lot of smaller farmers are trying to get a federal disaster declaration regarding this disease. I don't know if they've actually made that happen just yet, but they're trying to pressure the White House to make that happen. Texas has already declared this to be an emergency and various forms or other to unlock funding and research bandwidth and all kinds of resources to try to combat this disease. But again, hard to say how this is going to work out. This is more of a strategic concern. Of course, we first mentioned this uh last year, actually. So, now that there have been two confirmed cases as of this morning, we're going to have to see how this works out over the next few weeks. Also, around the nation this week, civil unrest has been a concern for two locations. The Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark and also the ongoing Carmelo Anthony murder trial that began this week in Texas. In New Jersey, the civil unrest surrounding the Delaney detention facility has continued to escalate as activist groups have begun to organize riots more effectively and persistently. The New Jersey State Police have been deployed on and off at the site. However, over the past few days, it's really just been the ICE erro teams which have been defending the compound. Riers have begun attacking vehicles entering and exiting the facility and generally causing mayhem as usual. They're actively trying to get ICE agents to shoot them as most of them are screaming uh to be like Renee Good, the woman who was shot in Minneapolis for hitting an ICE agent with her car which contributed to the riots there. So, they are most certainly trying to take a lot of the tactics, techniques, and procedures that they learned in Minneapolis and apply them to Newark. Whether or not things are going to escalate that far is anybody's guess. Uh, right now, Delaney Hall is certainly progressing toward that level of riots. Though, for now, these riots are mostly confined to the area immediately adjacent to the detention facility. So, we're going to have to see how this works out over the next week. But, this is most certainly a war zone around this little area in the industrial part of the city. So yeah, not looking good on the civil unrest front when it comes to anti-ICE riots and demonstrations. Back in Texas this week, the Carmelo Anthony trial began earlier this week, much to the anger of local groups. Jury intimidation has been a mainstay with efforts being made to stalk and track down jurors during the initial selection process. This is to be expected to some degree by journalists who are rather unscrupulous sometimes with the ways that they try to figure out who's on the jury and is mostly confined to the fairly low-level attempts at the moment. But it's something to be aware of because a jury has not been sequestered during this case and the crowd outside the courtroom is already calling for the murder of white people. So that's not super great. Not to be unexpected, but still not super great considering the security threats that are present. And this could get out of hand pretty quickly. Right now, there are a few different factions on the ground getting rowdy outside the courthouse. So I'll just mention them now. The first main faction are various Pan-African elements, which is more of an ideology than a strictly organized group. Along with them, uh, various Black Hebrew, Israelite organizations have been observed on site. They're mostly confined to blowing horns in the parking lot of the courthouse, but they're definitely on site. A few of you remember these, uh, groups, which have become rather interesting over the past few years, but the black Hebrew Israelites are there. And these guys are much smaller in numbers, but they're also more organized. And this is also more of a national group as well. So again, it's it's more of a militant style organization. usually pretty harmless and just strange, but you never know because adding fuel to the fire, Jake Lang has arrived on scene. Yes, the infamous Jake Lang is in Texas uh causing a little bit of a ruckus. He showed up to do what he always tends to do, which is further stoke up the unrest and the overall situation remains tense because the clashes between his group and the black separatist group, well, that didn't go so well and they're pretty much the standard textbook definition of a powder keg waiting to be ignited. So, based on the trial beginning on Thursday, uh, and the evidence presented so far, it's hard to say when a verdict will be reached, but I'm guessing that it will probably be this coming week that we enter into the period of more potential for unrest. I think riots are going to happen no matter what, but if Anthony is found guilty, this is probably not going to go over so well. So, two big points of potential unrest on the horizon in New Jersey and in Texas. And depending on how this next week goes, these hotspots may stay localized or there may be more concerted efforts to expand to other areas. It's really too soon to tell at the moment, but we'll be on the lookout for any unrest popping up as usual. Moving to the Middle East this week. My oh my, it has been rather busy. Bottom line, everyone has been shooting at each other, but it's not as severe as before. Almost immediately after I released last night's report, more engagements took place, which at the moment appear to be the most significant strikes since a ceasefire, alleged ceasefire went into effect. Throughout the week, the United States has been conducting routine strikes on Keshum Island as well as on the mainland up and down the eastern side of the street of Hormuz. This targeting has mostly continued the trend from last week where the US strikes something and the Iranians retaliate and then the US pretends like we never started it in the first place. So, they retaliate to the retaliation. All the while, Sentcom is starting to lie a little bit more openly about Iranian munitions being intercepted because there have been several instances this week where Sentcom claims that the Iranian missiles were intercepted, but we have highresolution imagery of impact craters. So, just to recap, let's go through the list of targets that have been hit this week, which should help illustrate that the war is actually back on and everyone is just lying about it. On May 31st, an American MQ1 drone was shot down by the Iranians in what they claim is their airspace. Sentcom claims that it was flying over international waters, but the wreckage washed up on the beach in Iran. So, you can decide what the truth is. On the same night, a few hours later, or maybe even a few minutes later, I don't really know. Uh, Sentcom conducted strikes on Keshum Island and also near the town of Geruk on the eastern coast of the Straight of Hormuz. Later on that same night, still on the night of May 31st, the Iranians counterattacked by launching ballistic missiles and drones targeting Kuwait. From here, one whole day elapsed. And on the night of June 1st, the United States targeted a ship in the Gulf of Oman which was trying to run the American blockade. This ship was struck kinetically and disabled. Later on that night, moving from June 1st to June 2nd, another round of targeting took place. The Iranians launched missiles at Kuwait International Airport as well as Ali Al- Salm Air Base in Kuwait. In addition to strikes in Bahrain, which I have not geoloccated just yet. Similarly, the United States conducted strikes on Keshum Island and also possibly on the eastern coast of the street of Hammuz. Once again, I don't know which side fired first on this specific night, but by now the strikes were becoming more routine instead of being classified as an attack and then a subsequent counterattack or an attack and then a retaliation. Things were moving toward a more routine and steady targeting effort even by Tuesday of this week. However, this series of strikes in Kuwait was heavily lied about by the United States, and we've got the receipts. Sentincom directly stated on June 2nd that all the missiles failed to hit their targets and that three were intercepted successfully by the United States. Furthermore, in this post, Sentcom also stated that the US shot down several Iranian drones and also conducted more strikes on Ketchum Island. A few hours later, Sentcom got caught lying because at the same time, they also published one of their hilarious fact checks which confirms that Iran successfully hit Kuwait International Airport. As if that wasn't enough, we also have the actual video of the drone hitting the roof of the airport and the engine of the Iranian drone was recovered from the debris. So, Sentcom is stepping on their own selves uh by confirming that they lied about all of the missiles and drones being intercepted. Even more so, we also have fresh satellite imagery of Ali Oselum air base showing that one of the drone hangers was taken out by the Iranians either by a missile or a drone strike. So, Zentcom is once again caught in another blatant lie which the internet figured out in 5 seconds and they also contradicted themselves on their own social media page within a few hours. Once again, the Iranians knew exactly what they hit. They had pretty good battle damage assessment from their own satellite which they owned themselves. So, the only people that sitcom was trying to fool are the American taxpayer. continuing the trend we've been observing since this war began. But anyway, from this point on, strikes continued fairly regularly, and on June 3rd, the war on the high seas continued as the United States Navy was engaged by the Iranians in the Strait of Hormuz. As usual, engagements that take place over the water are nearly impossible to geollocate. Unless we see a sinking ship or an oil slick in a satellite image, but on the night of June 3rd, the US possibly tried to do something in the straight, we're not really sure what. Speculating a bit, my guess is that the Navy tried to escort some more civilian ships, but the Iranians fired upon them with drones and cruise missiles. Sentcom expressly stated in one of their infamous fact check posts that they were not driven back out of the straight by Iranian missile attacks. So, I'll let you make the decision on what the truth is for this engagement. Nevertheless, this brings us through the night and into the next morning, June 4th, when the Iranians struck the Omani oil terminals at Mina Alahal. According to the Omanis, this caused them to have a bit of downtime before coming back online later that day. I don't know about all that, but that's what the Omanis claim. And finally, we arrive at June 5th, yesterday, when the United States and Iran launched the largest attacks on each other so far during this ceasefire that isn't really a ceasefire. Munitions were absolutely zipping through the sky last night. And I'm not exactly sure of who hit what, but throughout the evening, the Iranians launched several ballistic missiles toward Kuwait and Bahrain. and the United States struck two radio towers, one on Keshum Island and another at the IRGCN base in Giruk. This is the first footage that Sentcom has provided this week regarding the strikes they have conducted. So, we were able to geollocate these two strikes very easily. As for the others throughout the week, I don't know where they impacted exactly. We're just going to have to wait for another good satellite pass that doesn't have so much cloud cover to figure out maybe exactly what the US hit. It also could be that the US hit stuff that didn't really leave a crater. But nevertheless, we arrive at this morning and using the Kuwaiti army's figure, a total of seven Iranian ballistic missiles were launched overnight. Of course, they claimed to have intercepted all of them, but we know how that goes. Similarly, in Bahrain, missile impacts were reported and something is currently on fire inside the perimeter of what used to be the headquarters of Fifth Fleet, which was almost completely destroyed during the early stages of the war 3 months ago. Now, shifting to the more important part of this equation, at least for those of us in the United States who are just trying to get by these days, the status of merchant shipping through the straight. So far, the situation remains pretty tense, and it seems to be a mostly free-for-all situation most of the time. There are conflicting reports on how many civilian ships are trying to make their way through the straight along with the circumstances of their crossing, which seems to matter quite a bit. For example, there are non-American aligned ships which are transiting the straight via the Iranian route. This has been taking place since the ceasefire went into effect weeks ago. And these ships have no trouble. Uh they pay the Iranian toll fee and the cross without being targeted. If they stop in an Iranian port or if they are linked to Iran in some way, maybe even arbitrarily, the US is going to pick them up once they cross into the Gulf of Oman, though. So counting these is a little bit more challenging. But for the most part, the third party uh I guess you should call them neutral maybe vessels, they're trying to get out and they're having no problem as long as they pay the Iranians. Separately, there are American aligned ships which are attempting to transit through the minefield which are actively being targeted by the Iranians. Even today, there are reports that a total of four merchants attempted to make the crossing under the cover of darkness early this morning, but one of them was struck, prompting the other three to turn back. I haven't confirmed that or not. I just saw that this morning uh making the rounds. But this would jive with what we've seen so far throughout the week for throughout the past few weeks actually where there tries to be a small convoy. They try to get one or two vessels out. Some seem to make it through uh but others tend to get targeted. On the flip side, some American aligned merchants have been able to sneak out, presumably sneak out, which we can confirm rather easily, but this does take a lot of time. It's not like a super tanker can just disappear. It's going to be really easy to beam count and figure out where these ships are located eventually. They're not just going to disappear. So, if we have a ship that was supposed to be inside the Persian Gulf by our last tally, but suddenly it pops up off the coast of Malaysia a few days or even weeks later on, well, we know that they made it out somehow. Now, how did they make it out? Did they take the southern route through the Omani waters and sneak out? Or did they go through the Iranian route and pay the toll or did they take the Omani route but secretly pay the Iranian toll in Bitcoin? That I do not know. But I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a little bit of a complicated situation and it's not as simple as toll route, no toll route, or sneaking out or not sneaking out. I think that there may be a little bit of play in both sides to get some ships through, which is perfectly fair enough for a lot of companies and ship captains that are trying to make their way through. They don't want to get hit with an Iranian missile, but they also don't want Marines coming and stealing their boat. So trying to play both sides to some degree and cooperate to the point to where both sides feel that they wouldn't target a ship is this seems to be a conversation that's happening quite a bit throughout the maritime world at least in the region. Again, this is all just a personal guess, but it would make sense for some of the smaller vessels which are trying to keep a lower profile and just get out of the area unscathed. So all of this really results in the war dragging on as before. We're over three months into this and all sides remain very far from a peace deal, at least in terms of the general points of agreement. From all the talk and statements from diplomats on both sides over the past week, it's not like they're very close to a deal. There have been really no direct meetings for a few weeks now, and all diplomatic efforts are being carried out through a grand game of telephone through intermediaries. So, none of this bodess particularly well for the global oil crisis. In fact, things are probably going to get rather serious for us here on the home front rather soon as our fuel prices continue to remain high. Even though the United States is draining the strategic petroleum reserve just to keep prices low. As far as where we go from here, uh the options for the United States are fairly limited. The longer the war goes on, the more power and advantage the Iranians have. This is just a basic fact. I mean, there's really no getting around that, unfortunately. Much like getting involved in a land war in Asia, entering into a war of attrition with Persia is probably not the best idea. But this week, the United States has continued the Israeli tactic of mowing the lawn and conducted regular strikes every few days so as to slowly fight the war without breaking the threshold for a major offensive campaign. This is exactly what the Iranians themselves said that they did not want to slip into. Aragi has talked about this many times over the past few weeks. They don't want to slip into this situation where their nation is subjected to an operation midnight hammer every six months or so just so that the US can keep their thumb on them. From the Iranians perspective, that's perfectly fine. I don't think they're going to be able to avoid that. I think we're just going to continue doing that forever. But they also don't want a peace deal where the Iranians stop shooting, but the US bombs them every month or so, every time BB makes a phone call. Personally, again, I think this is a bit of a pipe dream on the part of the Iranians. And they've already found themselves in a state of getting mowed down, so to speak, for no reason on a Tuesday, which we've even seen during this ceasefire. So, but that's their business to sort out however they want. And how long they are willing to put up with this and whether or not they're willing to cross that threshold and start conducting more serious attacks, well, that's going to be up to them. So, the US is most certainly trying to target them to uh start the war back again. and we'll see if they take the bait and we'll see if they feel like they're forced to take the bait, which they might be. I don't know. We'll have to see. So, that's pretty much where we find ourselves for today. Summertime civil unrest on the menu for the homeland in both terms of immigration riots and also criminal trials that are driving social disscent around the nation. And since high gas prices also have a way of making everybody a little bit more insane, this makes everything worse. And high diesel costs also drive up prices for literally everything. And there's really no end in sight, at least not uh readily available at the moment. So, pretty much a standard summertime situation at this point. Not a whole lot we can do about the grand strategic things, but we can most certainly try to be as best prepared as we can and be aware of the long-term effects of all this stuff coming to a head in a few months. And with that, let's go ahead and wrap up today with the intercepted ghost net reports for this week. This week was fantastic once again. lots of people exchanging information on the off-grid radio network and getting some really good use out of it. I'm working on some things behind the scenes on the communications front which I hope will supplement our more decentralized communication capabilities and help us be a little bit more prepared in the long run. Lots of cool radio stuff has become a lot more feasible and easier to use. But more to come on that. And I hope that in the meantime, we can get some really good use out of the ghost net as a way of not just having an emergency communication plan already built just in case we need it, but also to use that plan in a more routine way to exchange information every week to keep our skills sharp. So, that's all I have for today. Kind of a short week, I think, but that's okay sometimes. Thank you to all of you on Patreon who keep this project going. Thank you to all of you for watching, 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 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

…The International Maritime Organization has advised ships to hold fast until a more solidified plan can be arranged, which is taking some time to coordinate due to the minefield greatly restricting the navigable passages and making…

…The International Maritime Organization has advised ships to hold fast until a more solidified plan can be arranged, which is taking some time to coordinate due to the minefield greatly restricting the navigable passages and making…

…These targeting efforts have resulted in the International Maritime Organization pausing their rescue plan to ensure the orderly evacuation of the Persian Gulf, though as of this afternoon the status of the Strait can only be…

…These targeting efforts have resulted in the International Maritime Organization pausing their rescue plan to ensure the orderly evacuation of the Persian Gulf, though as of this afternoon the status of the Strait can only be…

…Earlier this week, the International Maritime Organization worked with all parties, they even got the Iranians on board to conduct a rescue operation to get many of the stranded vessels and mariners out of the Gulf…

…The *SOFIA* is also known as the "*M SOPHIA*" with International Maritime Organization (IMO) number 9289477.