//The Wire//1500Z February 26, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: POSSIBLE CHEMICAL WEAPONS FACILITY DISCOVERED AT PRIVATE RESIDENCE IN CALIFORNIA. TALKS IN GENEVA CONTINUE AS WAR INCHES CLOSER IN MIDDLE EAST. INVESTIGATION CONTINUES INTO CUBAN BOAT INCIDENT.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Middle East: This morning the USS *FORD* CSG departed port Souda Bay, bound for operational patrols in the Eastern Med. The drawdown of forces at Al-Udeid continues as well, with only a handful of aircraft remaining at this installation. In Geneva, diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Iranian representatives have continued, with reports not really confirming how the talks are going just yet. Analyst Comment: In addition to American aircraft leaving their transponders on for the majority of their flights, China has dutifully been using their own satellite imagery networks to show the world where American forces are being deployed to. This imagery indicates that forces continue staging at bases throughout the region, including F-16's being forward-deployed to Diego Garcia. -HomeFront- California: A possible chemical weapons production facility has been located at a private residence in Irvine. Police responded to a call from a concerned landlord, who had located suspicious items inside a residence just off Irvine Blvd. Local police responded to the residence, and after a few hours, the FBI was on scene investigating what appeared to be a nerve agent that was discovered at the site. Analyst Comment: This incident initially took place some time ago, however none of the inhabitants of this extremely high-income gated community reported the men-in-white-suits investigating a potential weapons lab in their neighborhood, until prompted by journalists who were first alerted to the scene by the Irvine Police Department's post on the matter last night. Since this neighborhood has controlled access, the local news crew had to fly a helicopter over the scene, which revealed the CBNRE teams that are still on the scene processing evidence. Geolocation of this static image (via the solar panels on the roof and the landscaping arrangement) confirms the address as being 77 Cartwheel Street. Orange County property records indicate that this residence is owned by Yu-Ting Huang and Allen Lee. A cursory search of business affiliations in California confirms that both individuals are the CFO and CEO (respectively) of Genetex Inc, a major biotechnology business which allegedly provides reagents for medical testing. Overall, details are very sketchy at the moment, however local media stations have interviewed some of the neighbors who have been willing to talk. According to these reports, various teams of federal agents have been observed on site, to include military service members wearing insignia of a Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team. Considering the link to Genetex, so far this incident is nearly identical to other Chinese-linked biolabs, such as the facilities in Reedley, California and in Las Vegas, Nevada. Both of these facilities involved super-sketchy businesses which were supposed to be making test kits or reagents for medical testing, however in reality this was merely a front to conceal the manufacture of biological weapons. Regarding the site in Irvine, there is no link readily identifiable to the other sites just yet, beyond the circumstances of the operations being nearly identical. Of note, Genetex has links to Taiwan, not China, however more information is needed to determine exactly what these links are and exactly which individuals were operating the site. More investigation will be needed to discern what was really taking place at this facility, but as of right now, it would be prudent to categorize this as a potential nerve agent production facility, just in case. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Regarding yesterday's Cuban escapade, the situation remains just as clear as before, which is to say not much. Cuban forces are attempting to frame the incident as a Bay of Pigs Part Two, and have stated that the 10x people onboard the vessel were attempting to invade their country. The nationalities of the people onboard the vessel are equally a mystery. Some reports state that they were Americans, while other reports state that they were Cubans who had originally fled the nation, only to return later on. Cuban authorities have identified most of the people they have detained, and all of the names are of Cuban origin, however discerning exact nationality is difficult. For context, Cubans who escape the nation have been known to steal boats in Miami, and pilot those boats back to Cuba either to help others escape, or to run drugs back and forth. Coyotes also prefer to extort Cubans who pay to smuggle themselves into the United States, in a similar manner as was common at the southern US border. On the other hand, Cuban border guards are also known to shoot Cubans who attempt to flee the island by boat without permission, so right now it's a wash as to what this was all about. The boat itself being registered in Florida is probably a clue, as it was reported stolen recently. The United States has not claimed the four KIA as being American yet, and very few statements have been made by American officials, as the investigation continues and all of the evidence is in Cuba. 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 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.

//The Wire//2300Z June 18, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: MOU SIGNED BY IRAN AND THE UNITED STATES TO BEGIN THE PROCESS TO END THE WAR. UKRAINIAN DRONE ATTACK STRIKES PETROLEUM INFRASTRUCTURE IN MOSCOW.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Middle East: Last night President Trump and President Pezeshkian signed the Memorandum of Understanding to start the process of ending the war. The agreement was signed early, while President Trump was participating in a state dinner with President Macron in Versailles. Two different physical copies of the document were signed, one in English and one in the Persian language of Farsi. Analyst Comment: President Pezeshkian also signed the document on camera in Tehran, and provided scans of the document he signed, and so far the terms themselves are identical to what was disclosed by CNN yesterday, or at least they appear to be. The American copy of the deal has not yet been published by the White House. Strait of Hormuz: This afternoon CENTCOM announced the lifting of the American blockade, and some merchant traffic is moving, with one French LNG tanker, and a few Saudi tankers exiting the Strait overnight. A few dozen other ships have continued to enter/exit the Persian Gulf over the past few days (mostly local or Iranian-aligned traffic), and all shipping has so far used the new Iranian route to the north of the traditional traffic separation scheme. Russia: Overnight, Ukraine conducted a large scale drone attack on Moscow, targeting petroleum infrastructure. Ukraine conducted the attack with hundreds of long-range drones, with most being intercepted before reaching their targets. However, several drones successfully evaded air defenses, striking the Kapotnya Refinery to the southeast of the city. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: The strikes in Moscow are the latest escalation this fighting season, with both sides trading attacks on major cities over the past few months. Russia has been hitting Kiev with hundreds of drones each week, and Ukraine has likewise been targeting Russian oil infrastructure throughout the nation. This is no different than how the war has been fought so far, but at this late hour, the ferocity of the efforts on all sides has become intense. Both sides seek to make as much progress as possible before winter, with the Russians looking to continue their advances on the Eastern Front, while the Ukrainians want to strike deep into Russia to pressure the Russian population and economy. Time will tell how this develops over the next few weeks, but with alleged peace ideations being present on both sides of this conflict, both sides will continue tradition, and try to take ground before approaching the negotiating table once again. 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 April 12th through the 18th, 2026. Good grief, it has been a crazy week, crazier than usual, and of course, the focus this week has been on the Middle East due to the ceasefire between the United States and Iran, which has resulted in a lull of the targeting efforts. However, just because the shooting has slowed down somewhat, it doesn't mean that this is over, and there have been some major escalations to be aware of this week, which we'll dive into in a minute. Otherwise, the main focus this week has been on the sharp increase in extremely brutal crime throughout the United States, and also protests within the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Protests remain fairly constant in Dublin due to the energy crisis brought on by a combination of local issues as well as the conflict in the Middle East. Over in the UK, the Epsom protests have become more widespread as more local Englishmen have continued to rise up in response to the extremely brutal crime becoming common throughout the nation. Both of these situations continue to develop by the hour, but these are the main hotspots and issues that we're watching this week. So, all in all, not a whole lot of new stuff, but the situation has really gotten quite tense in the Middle East, which has kicked off unrest around the world either directly or indirectly. In the case of Ireland, a lot of the local tensions are being driven by fuel prices, same thing in Australia. And now that the war has been going on for 7 weeks, the chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak, and all of those more long-term or indirect second and third-order effects are starting to be felt around the globe. And based on the strategic movement for this week, it doesn't look like this is going to be ending anytime soon. Taking a look at the strategic resources that are being staged around the world, we have a better picture of what platforms have been dedicated for this fight, and how the rearmament efforts are being undertaken during the brief ceasefire. Most notably, the more interesting observation is the deployment of the George H.W. Bush carrier strike group, which is slated to replace the Lincoln, which is operating in the Arabian Sea. A few days ago, the Bush was observed to taking the long route around Africa, which is a very odd choice when the Suez Canal is the typical route. Officially, there is no explanation as to why she is taking the long route around Africa, but this diversion is likely due to the security threats that are present while transiting a choke point where the ship is constrained somewhat. And the normal route takes the ship through the Suez Canal and also the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is where the Houthis are located. So, when the Ford was moving off station due to the fire damage she sustained in the northern Red Sea, she had to take the risk and transit the Suez to get out of there, but the Bush does not appear to be willing to take the same risk for some reason, probably the Houthis. One caveat that popped up this morning is that the Ford herself might actually be transiting back south through the Suez again to rejoin the war. This is not confirmed at the moment, but a US Navy P-8 Poseidon was observed doing a little advanced recon in the northern Red Sea just a few hours ago, and this kind of track is usually indicative of the anti-submarine reconnaissance efforts that are conducted ahead of a carrier moving through a waterway like the Red Sea. But again, we'll have to see how this goes. Most people thought that the Ford was pretty toasted as far as the war goes, and she's already been on deployment for much longer than the average deployment is supposed to last. And remember, the Ford took part in the Venezuela campaign and immediately shifted to the war with Iran without taking a break. And after that laundry fire, it looked like she was being pulled offline. But maybe not, I don't know. If the war is going to be re-ignited soon, which looks pretty likely at this point, the Navy will need everything they've got in theater. Otherwise, some other notable platforms to be aware of are the expeditionary sea bases, which have been a hot topic to follow in the maritime community for a while now. These vessels are kind of new, they've been around for a few years, but they've really just started getting uh some pretty heavy use throughout the fleet because they're essentially mobile sea bases for special operations, and they serve as more or less a mobile helicopter base that can be used for staging a lot of special resources in a forward area. As I mentioned yesterday, the John L. Canley is moving from PACOM into CENTCOM, which might be an indication of something. It's too soon to tell, but this is the most clear example of resources being moved into CENTCOM from the PACOM area of responsibility, and that's usually not an indication of peace anytime soon. Again, there are a handful of these expeditionary sea bases or ESBs, and I'm pretty sure there's already one in CENTCOM, so I'll track down some of these other hulls and see where they're at. But, on the naval front, there are a lot of resources just pouring into CENTCOM right now. Another clear example of resources being staged comes to us from the always famous Diego Garcia, the small and mysterious island base in the Indian Ocean, which became the focus of international attention last year when this base was heavily relied upon as a staging base for Operation Midnight Hammer. As we all know, B-2s were forward deployed to this island for about a month or so, but eventually they decided to change the mission and to launch from home like normal as Operation Midnight Hammer was just a one-and-done fight instead of a more prolonged campaign. During this current war, this base has served as a logistics hub due to around 13 US bases throughout the Middle East either being completely evacuated or otherwise damaged by Iranian targeting. So, that's the strategic movement for the Middle East, but there are other movements being made to be aware of. Moving closer to the American homeland with strategic movement, there are two other regions to be aware of where military operations are being carried out. For one, Operation Southern Spear continues as before with daily strikes on narco vessels being carried out mostly in undisclosed regions of the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Sorry, I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly where the uh Eastern Pacific Ocean strikes are being conducted. The Pentagon has been very, very tight-lipped about where these strikes are actually taking place because I suspect they're taking place off the coast of Ecuador along some known drug trafficking routes between Ecuador and Panama or Ecuador and Colombia. The United States is in partnership with Ecuador, and we actually conducted one of the very first drone strikes in Ecuador to target a narco base or some vague target the Pentagon never really explained, but even though we have a somewhat positive relationship with Ecuador, we do not have a positive relationship with Colombia. And though this is complete speculation on my part, it is possible that these strikes are being conducted pretty close to Colombia, or maybe the drug traffickers are transiting to Colombia and we're striking them in the Eastern Pacific Ocean before they get there into Colombia's territorial waters. I don't exactly know. No one really can know because SOUTHCOM is really just saying Eastern Pacific Ocean. Well, what does that mean? The Eastern Pacific's pretty big, but this has been the way things have been conducted for a long time now. We're bombing a lot of things down south, and we have no idea where it's taking place. This is going to be important to consider considering the other rather concerning strategic movement to be aware of, which is the potential conflict with Cuba. This week, surveillance flights began picking up with an MQ-4 being observed conducting a reconnaissance flight off the southern coast of Cuba, which has coincided with a sharp increase in Cuba rhetoric from the White House and other senior officials. Of course, this surveillance flight was conducted with the drone's transponder turned on, so clearly the Pentagon either did not care that the world was tracking it, or it deliberately wanted to send a message. In either case, the preparations to shift to Cuba are starting to look more possible, at least in terms of some sort of contingency planning taking place. There aren't any indications of resources being staged in the public eye just yet, but there probably wouldn't be since we could launch an invasion of Cuba from Florida. In any case, I'm going to start the IPB process for Cuba next, and slowly start to get ready for that just in case it starts looking more like a serious endeavor over the next few weeks. Right now, it's too soon to tell if any decision's been made. Maybe it already has been made, but in terms of what we're seeing in the real world as far as raw data goes, it's too soon to tell if we've decided to invade Cuba of all places. But, considering how things are going, I'm going to plan for it just in case. On the home front this week, the common theme has been crime. Exceptionally graphic crimes committed by the usual suspects remain a chief concern for many areas with multiple gang shootings and murders being reported around the nation this week. I try not to focus on regular street crime so much because there are literally hundreds of shootings and gang-related crimes that take place every day, and it's just it's just too much to track. But, I did want to highlight that the violence has sharply increased around the country. So, we're definitely in the keep your head on a swivel season. In Washington, D.C., a citywide curfew has been reinstated for all juveniles who must be off the streets by 11:00 p.m. throughout the entire city. Separately, there are additional curfew zones which have an earlier curfew time of 8:00 p.m. These areas are the Navy Yard, an area over by Kingman Park and the Kennedy Stadium, and also the area to the north of surrounding Tacoma Field. These curfews are being enforced by the National Guard, which has continued their persistent mission around Washington, D.C., and all of these areas are in the legendarily high-crime areas. So, we'll see how it works out. My guess is that we're uh we're definitely in high-crime season. And for those of you who want to track a lot of these crimes that I can geolocate and find out where they took place, some of the more high-profile ones are the ones that actually we have some information for. I try to put them on my maps online, but again, we're talking hundreds of shootings a day at least nationwide. So, it's a pretty tall order. It's a pretty big task, but we'll cut through it this summer as best we can. And segueing into the Middle East, things have been happening very quickly in the region over the past few days, with the situation changing by the minute in some cases. So, chances are things will have changed by the time this gets uploaded. However, at this snapshot in time, this is the situation as it stands. Overall, the war in the Middle East, or technically both wars, the Lebanon War and the Iran War, are in a state of pause. No American bombing has been observed in Iran over the past week, and the Iranians have not launched any drone attacks on American bases or third- party nations either, such as GCC states. The Israelis are kind of doing their own thing as usual, but I haven't seen any ballistic missiles impacting in Israel from the Iranians at least over the past few days. Hezbollah took a while to kind of calm down after the ceasefire was announced, so we'll see how that holds. But again, this is very much developing at the moment. So again, the war on the Lebanon side of things remains important because these conflicts are linked to each other, and this week the Israelis were carrying on with their ground invasion up until possibly yesterday. At the moment, it's hard to determine if this is true, but allegedly the Israelis have agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon as in a stop to their ground advance and a stop to their bombing of Beirut in order to achieve some sort of diplomatic leverage in the Persian Gulf. It's hard to say how all of this is working out and it's hard to say if this is going to last longer than 5 minutes, but that's what's being conveyed by the diplomats on all sides at the moment. Otherwise, most of the focus this week has been on the Strait of Hormuz and its status of being open or closed. I know we may have Hormuz fatigue at this moment, but this is what's driving a lot of the consternation here in the United States. So, we've got to be aware of the insanity that's going on over there. There has been a lot of back and forth between the United States and Iran and the Strait itself has been the biggest point of contention. And the word contention has been a huge understatement. The situation's changed so radically over the past few days that it's very challenging to follow the timeline of events. So, please forgive me if I get some of these details wrong. It's It's been really tough to follow because what's happening in the real world does not matching what's being said by diplomats. Initially, I think yesterday or the day before yesterday, President Trump announced that the Strait was open and available for use by anyone, but the American blockade will remain in place. Shortly after that announcement, the Iranians stated that there were conditions for opening the Strait and as it turned out, shocker, those conditions were exactly the same as what was already in place. Yesterday evening, a few dozen vessels attempted to transit the Strait before being turned back by the Iranians. A few ships did make it through the Iranian side of the blockade and as of right now, all of those vessels that made it through were sanctioned vessels by the United States. So, once they made it through the Iranian blockade, they got turned around by the American blockade and had to go all the way back. As if this wasn't complicated enough, the Iranians decided to close the Strait again this morning and they did it in the most kinetic possible way. Two merchant vessels were targeted this morning in the Strait of Hormuz. One was engaged by small arms or crew-served weapons from two Iranian gunboats and another vessel reported being shot at with some sort of cruise missile or something that did not appear to have impacted the vessel, but it was targeted. Radio chatter from at least one of these vessels suggests that the vessel had been given approval by the Iranians, but it was engaged anyway. So, there's no telling what is going on because as I'm recording this, this incident was just confirmed by the UKMTO. So, I don't know what's going on. Based on a few tweets that I've seen come out in the past few minutes as I have this while I'm recording, it looks like the Iranians are indeed closing the strait again. This will very likely change even before I'm done uploading this video. So, things are so crazy that quite literally nothing might happen. We might just go back to the way things have been for the past month or so. Or if the United States so chooses, we might be back to dropping bombs in Iran by this afternoon. That's how wide the window is regarding our potential courses of action. We simply don't know how this is going to work out. This is why confusion abounds regarding the impacts of the war. The core of the global energy supply is located behind two naval blockades, both of which have been described in questionable terms to the point that vessels are not sure if they're allowed through or not. Right now, the world is watching individual hulls. That's what we're That's what we're down to now. We're tracking individual ships either transiting or attempting to transit the strait because each individual hull is being treated on a case-by-case basis. Insurance companies, they're not going to get down into the weeds this far because the situation is so variable. And if the Iranians are starting to shoot at vessels again and they're closing the strait once again, this is what we might call a minor setback. In terms of things getting back to normal, there's probably another angle to all of this, which is China. The uncertainty regarding at least the American blockade is definitely not helping matters, but if we're thinking about the China angle, which again is probably being way more gracious with this than we probably should be, but we're trying to be well-rounded and not as biased as normal, we have to think of the China angle to this and implementing a blockade to open the strait, you know, closing the straits to open the strait. That's That's That's insanity. That makes no sense. Unless one possible possible very loose theory is that maybe the true goal of the American blockade is just to prevent China from benefiting from Iranian oil while the US is embroiled in the war. Maybe the American leadership doesn't really care about the Middle East in terms of whether or not we get the oil. They just don't want China to have it. Kind of a scorched earth thing. This so the blockade might be more of a scorched earth tactic. I don't know. This is not the openly stated goal by American officials, but reading between the lines, this is the This is the only plausible explanation for a blockade to be implemented in the first place and implemented in the way that it is. So, that's the only theory I can think up in terms of why we would even start this blockade in the first place. But anyway, it's probably a moot point because as of this morning, the real world impacts remain exactly the same as before. As of this morning, the strait is still closed by both the Americans and the Iranians who have reclosed it after a few of their sanctioned vessels made it out. Global fertilizer availability, fuel prices, and the manufacture of plastics, and all of the previous concerns that have come about since the war began, these are still in place. So, there's been no change over the past 7 weeks. And if the Iranians are shooting at vessels again and closing the strait completely, the fat lady has most certainly not sung just yet and this conflict is not yet over. So, that's where things stand right now and that's that's all I've got for today. Sorry to cut things short, but I'm trying to get caught up with some of the more educational stuff I'm working on at the moment and I really need to make some progress on that. So, I will continue to monitor the situation as we say and hopefully we'll have a better picture for how the Hormuz crisis works out. The various clocks are ticking down with Europe and Australia running out of gas and the US is also suffering due to both the fertilizer and fuel crunch that is now beginning to take effect a full 7 weeks after the war began. So, that's all I've got for now. I'm going to cut it here and transition to writing the next report because things are happening rather quickly and we might see another flare-up of conflict over the next few days. So, stay frosty, everyone. Take care and remember that the events overseas are a big concern because they drive our society and they drive a lot of the unrest here in the US, but all of us here at home are more likely to be impacted by routine crime or just crazy times in our day-to-day lives. So, let's keep at it, do the best we can, 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 July 19th through the 25th 2026. It's Groundhog Day once again with the war in the Middle East ramping back up and civil issues here in the US flaring up again as well. So let's get right to it. Around the world this week, conflict is the theme once again. Within the Middle East, the war is back on and escalating with the Houthis now bringing the war to the Red Sea. Over in Europe, the war in Ukraine is continuing to expand to threaten new areas with the nation of Kazakhstan halting the flow of oil through their pipelines that transition through Russia to the Black Sea. On the home front this week, there is one item of note I wanted to mention in more depth as this has a potential to be a very serious problem in due time. In Minnesota Thursday night, the Shiloh Hendrick's case came to a conclusion as she was convicted of one count of disorderly conduct for calling a Somalian man a name while being harassed on a Rochester playground in May of last year. Of note, the Somalian told her to call him the name, and she was acquitted of calling the child the name. As a reminder of the details of that case, the child, who was originally claimed to be 5 years old, but was actually 9 years old, was discovered by Hrix to be digging through her diaper bag on the playground, which prompted her to confront the child. The child had a history of being unruly to the point that the 9-year-old child was already wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor. The incident devolved into Hendrickx calling one of the Somalian men accompanying the child a name before a second Somalian man intervened, recording the now viral video that resulted in the 4-day jury trial for a misdemeanor. This case is worthy of note as this case effectively decides whether or not white Americans have the right to freedom of speech. There was no violence. There was no harassment. The only person being harassed was Hendricks on the playground that day because she actually was stolen from. Theft is a bigger crime than speech crimes, but not in Minnesota. Apparently, this ruling effectively decides that a Somali can harass an American mother in a playground, and another Somalian can also chime in and record a video of himself harassing her, telling her to call him a name, and she be the one who potentially goes to jail for this. And that man, by the way, the star witness in the case, who was called the name, is not even in America anymore. He fled back home to Somalia immediately after the incident last year. This highlights the fact that we as a nation have a problem that cannot be solved by conventional means, but this case is more serious than speech. Sharmake Ble Omar, one of the two Somalian men at the center of this case, was actually at the park under questionable means in the first place. Omar had previously been arrested and charged for his role in kidnapping and raping a child in 2022, but the charges were dropped with no explanation once the victim aged out of the state's foster program. The victim has not been heard from since. If Omar had been held accountable back then, he would not have been hanging around a playground to get his feelings hurt by a word. As always, I will be keeping a sharp eye on this case because in the US, the word precedent only ever seems to work in one direction. So, I will expect a lot more people to be rounded up around the country for saying words now that this is on the books. Using extreme restraint to avoid fed posting on this uh scandal, I will just say that this case is a reminder that our justice system is utterly broken and the civil strife that results from this base fact is going to be hard to predict moving forward. So, I'll just leave it at that. Jumping over to Europe this week, the war in Ukraine has continued to escalate by land and sea. Ukraine has continued to strike warehouses belonging to wildberries throughout Russia. And so far, a total of nine logistics hubs have been struck by Ukrainian forces over the past week or so. This is Russia's version of Amazon. And though Ukraine is using the excuse of Russia using this ecosystem to support the war effort, the Ukrainians are claiming that since Wildberries sells like toy drones or like commercial off-the-shelf drones that this is now a military target. That's what they're claiming at least from the Ukrainian side. The truth of the matter is that this is mostly a civilian target that is meant to put the squeeze on the civilian population. This is Ukraine trying to punish the average Russian populace and that is very hard to deny. It's also more of an economic effort because a lot of very powerful Russian businessmen will now be lobbying Putin for missile defenses for their warehouses. So, at the wavetop level, this is a major indicator of how the war in Ukraine is sliding into more of an unrestricted warfare situation. Unrestricted warfare again is a very dangerous term to be waving around because it usually means total war. We're not quite there yet, but Russia and Ukraine have both been observed to strike civilian infrastructure, civilian targets, either intentionally or unintentionally. It's going to be hard to say, but generally speaking, this is not good. Due to a variety of factors, the targeting of civilian infrastructure has been carried out around the world more regularly to the point that it's now normalized. Now the headlines read out that Ukraine has started striking Russian Amazon and nobody gives it a second thought. The escalation trap takes over and the war gets really really nasty really quickly. And for anyone in the United States who thinks that the war in Ukraine doesn't affect you directly other than tax dollars being involved, it affects you now purely due to one word, petroleum. Oh, how history rhymes this week. NATO's version of Army Group South has now begun to threaten the Caucus oil fields. And I would bet that David Glance, the famous military historian, has sensed a disturbance in the force this week. This week, Kazakhstan has also shut down their network of pipelines that transfer crude across the Russian step in the vicinity of stop, excuse me, Vulgar on their way to the oil terminals in the Black Sea. It may be too soon to tell, but it certainly looks like within the next few weeks or even months, Ukraine is probably looking to expand the drone war at least to more and more petroleum infrastructure throughout the Caucus region and beyond. This matters because Kazakhstan is now involved in the war and they are a major producer of oil at least for the region. I'm not sure about the whole world export of Kazakhstan's oil supply, but these pipeline networks which have now been shut down due to the threats posed by Ukrainian drones actually provided the world with 1.4 million barrels per day. In terms of the Middle East, that's a drop in the bucket. But in terms of all the other oil supplies around the world, it's not insignificant. Just for context, the United States has touted Venezuela as being a source of petroleum for the United States during the Hormuse crisis. Every time a White House official gets hit with the oil question, they always say, "Well, we've got plenty of oil and we've got Venezuela, too." But Venezuela only produces around half a million barrels of oil per day. And that was before the major earthquake. Kazakhstan just shut down three times that amount from the global energy market. And no American media seems to have picked up on it yet. Or if they have, they don't care. But they should care because we now have two smaller wars that have become effectively three wars with the addition of the Houthies which now involve a section of the Earth from Poland to India. I am now having to zoom out so far on my maps I might as well be using a globe at this point. Just looking at this from the altitude of halfway to the moon. We can see the scale of what's going on here. For almost half a year, we've been watching these little explosion icons crawl across the screen, expanding to strike new locations every day. Just looking at the map, we can see that this is not a special military operation or a minor excursion. With these two conflicts becoming linked together by petroleum, we may need to start re-examining how we define this series of conflicts. And now that the Middle East conflicts continue to expand, this is growing more serious every day. Drilling down to the events in the Middle East this week, the situation is not looking good. American bases throughout the region have been hit regularly, almost every single day this week. And the main targets for the Iranians have been the American positions in Jordan, which have been hit more regularly for a few reasons. For one, Iran knows that their targeting effort is effective there. And if it ain't broke, they don't fix it. So they know that Americans are staged at these bases because of the second reason, which is that the US has had to reduce their presence at many of these bases due to targeting. The United States only had really a couple dozen bases in the Middle East at the height of the wars over the past 20 years. And since the war began with Iran, all of these bases have consolidated down to a few positions. Fewer positions means fewer targets. The Iranians have to hit maybe five bases, whereas the United States has to hit 10,000 launch points in Iran. It's simple mathematics and probability at that point. This consolidation of forces means that the Iranians don't actually have to get any better at targeting. There's some evidence to suggest that the Iranians have gotten better at what they're targeting. They've learned quite a lot and they're using better missiles now. But pushing that aside for a moment, they don't even have to get any better if you're consolidating forces at fewer and fewer bases. Fewer targets to hit means fewer things that can go wrong, means more missiles you can mass on one base, which is a problem. To show how this happened, let's go back in time to the early phases of the war when the US pulled out of bases like the fifth fleet headquarters in Bahrain and Aludit air base in Qar. The United States famously pulled out of these locations or relocated personnel out of these bases right during the early phases of the war because the Iranians were hitting these bases quite hard. But where did they go? Well, they mostly relocated to Jordan and deeper into Saudi Arabia. At the time, the Iranian targeting did occasionally strike these bases, but most of the Iranian drones and ballistic missiles targeted the American bases decently close to the Persian Gulf itself. So now, what's happening? Well, the American bases in Jordan are getting hit hard. So the US is having to move aircraft from the eastern bases in Jordan all the way to the west and to the south all the way down to the region of Akaba to bases still in Jordan but just on the border and also bases in Israel. This is definitely a case of they all rolled over and one fell out, right? Because the Iranians are progressively pushing the United States back farther and farther from the actual combat zone. Instead of taking four bombs on the wing, now fighter jets which are carrying out the bombing are having to carry three bombs and a drop tank. This has been the case since the beginning of the war because this has been a long range war for much of the aircraft carrying out the strikes in Iran. But now it's even worse and we seem to be escalating this war even though we are at a tactical disadvantage here. But there is one thing that we forget when we look at blurry satellite photos trying to track down aircraft. There are people here too. In most cases whenever we say something like uh Aluded is empty, what we really mean is that the airframes have moved but there are still a lot of troops at these bases. Remember, most of the aircraft that the US has been moving around are refueling tankers for the heavy bombers. These are flying gas stations, not troop transports. So implying that the US has quote unquote pulled out of some random base is always a bit misleading because we don't really know how many ground troops, support staff, and logistics personnel are still on the ground at any one location. We can just see buildings and large aircraft, but we can't see people on satellite imagery. Generally, at least with the resolution that we have, we can guess because we would see a lot of transport aircraft in and out of the region. But we again don't really know because these transports could be moving bombs in on the inbound flight and taking troops out on the return trip or they could just be bringing cargo in. It's impossible really to know in the open source world. So, this is not really a data point that we can use to form our analysis on something. This is an important detail to note because of the scale of the destruction. It is substantial. Just to put this into perspective, the US military has never, I say again, never, faced our troops being targeted with missiles as large and as substantial as the missiles our bases are being hit with during this war. The Iranians are hitting us with the largest munitions any soldier has ever been hit with. Many people during the Giwat have a concept for what it's like to get hit with a 107 mm rocket or maybe even something as big as a Scud going back to the, you know, the OG Gulf War days. Well, when it comes to the Iranian missiles, they're much, much larger. The Iranian missiles that are hitting our guys over there are no joke, and they make a 107 look like a party popper. These missiles are leaving craters that are 50 to 80 yards across, similar to a Scud in terms of the explosive content, but these are much more substantial due to the kinetic energy alone, and the guidance package is miles ahead of what any Scud could possibly have. Right? So, I should have mentioned that more regularly throughout this war because this is an important data point. But now that the Pentagon is confirmed to have lied about casualty numbers using the testimony of Assistant Secretary of War Sean Parnell himself, this is more important to note. And I suspect this is why we are starting to see more troops leak videos and photos of the damage. I will not be showing the footage uh of this one particular video because it can be used to geollocate the exact bunker on the exact base, but one video circulated on social media this week that confirmed what we already know. American fortifications throughout the region are woefully inadequate and a lot more people are going to get killed because of the combination of the inadequacy of bunkers and the high failure rate of missile defenses. These are not really combat bases in the slightest, but now they are. This is now the front line. And even though we fought the Giwat for 20 years, we did not really consider these bases to be targets in any way. I don't know how or why, but that's just the way that it is. And even though we have been fighting a war for almost half a year now, we still have not taken any measures whatsoever to fortify some of these bases. We've moved missile defenses in that we can see on satellite imagery and we can surmise based on the footage we get. I'll just leave it at that. But these defenses are not adequate at all. But as of this morning, the American bases are not the only concern at this point. Last night, the Houthis and Saudis began shooting at each other once again with the Saudis conducting strikes at the Houthi port of Huda. This is their major port facility. It's one of the Houthi strongholds throughout the western part of Yemen. And this morning, the Houthis retaliated in kind by striking the Aramco refinery north of Jazan, which is a major oil refinery really close to the Houthi border. The Saudis seem to be students of the Sunzu practice of always picking a fight and starting a war when your own nation's critical infrastructure is within striking range of the enemy and you have no defenses for them. Unlike the port of Yanbu, which has a nearby American Patriot battery, the Jazan refinery complex doesn't really have any uh missile defense at all. So, it was really easy to target. They may have moved in a couple of short range uh SAM sites, but what they would have had to have done it really recently. And even at that range, the Houthis can launch very short-range drones. They don't need to launch any highle missiles, even though that's what they hit the uh refinery with this morning. So, we'll see how that works out. But the Houthis can uh pound the Saudis for quite a while and there's not a whole lot the Saudis can do about it. Similarly, several Saudi tankers have been struck in the southern Red Sea by the Houthis and the Houthi blockade of the Saudi trade route continues and has been shown to have teeth. Even as of me recording this morning, air strikes and missile strikes alike and continue around the region at large and everything is snowballing into a much bigger problem. How big this will become, we don't know, but it's not looking super great as the danger of a wider escalation is rearing its ugly head once again. And with that, I think that wraps us up for today until the next major development occurs within a few minutes. But continuing the tradition of not ending on a cheery note, I also have some bad news for my endeavor to grab screenshots from the Ghost Net this week. As many of you know, the Ghost Net is our own little shortwave radio network, which is intended to bring more resiliency to the world of information sharing. The ghost net is set up on the principle of if we do not physically own or control the wires that information flows through, we will always be able to be affected by the entities that do control communications infrastructure. So the ghost net is a way of relying on point-to-point radio communications to share information over the airwaves all around the world. And this week I failed because a thunderstorm brought down my antenna once again. And by the time I got it fixed, the uh the net was over. So failure on my part, but despite this, the net continued on because everything is decentralized. I don't actually run anything. I'm just tuning in like the rest of you guys out there. So, many of you were able to get on the air and share a lot of information, which is good. Otherwise, I am desperately trying to work as hard as I can to get some of the more radiocentric tutorials set up. As always, literally every single thing these days takes much longer to complete than I thought it would. Uh, but I am excited for some of the newer stuff I've been trying out, such as Reticulum and some of the other radio networking options, which have turned out to be much easier than I thought to set up. More to come on that later on. Lots of cool stuff is coming soon. There have been a lot of really interesting developments in the world of technology that we can take advantage of to be more prepared in these strange and confusing times. So, that's all I've got for now. Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for the support. And I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for June 21st through the 27th, 2026. Just when we thought the war was over, we get pulled back in, at least to some degree. This is of course no surprise, so let's get right to it. Around the world, it's been a busy week. The main focus this week has been overseas as the earthquakes in Venezuela have caused widespread devastation throughout the most populated cities, including the coastal areas to the north of the capital, as well as the capital itself. Mass casualties have been reported in all of the hardest hit areas and the death toll is expected to be in the thousands. Over in the Middle East, the war has reignited to some degree, though the full-scale targeting campaign has not returned just yet. These targeting efforts have substantially increased the danger to civilian mariners as disputes regarding the administration of the routes has been complicated by the targeting of merchant shipping. Here on the home front, there have been two items of note for this week which I've been tracking. First of all, has been the severe weather and flooding throughout the American South and East. Flooding has continued throughout the hill country of Texas and the following collapse of the weather system has spawned hundreds of storms throughout the eastern half of the country. On average, this is not really out of the ordinary for this time of year, but some areas have been hosted to more severe weather than is normally expected as many storms have swept through the nation. Also in Texas, a different crisis is developing as the spread of new world screwworm has continued to expand significantly. Right now, the total number of cases is still small, a total of 26 confirmed cases so far, but as with all parasites, this can greatly expand without anyone knowing. Considering that the screwworm larva is so small and hard to find on an animal, sometimes this can get out of control really fast, which is why we've gone from one case to 26 in just a couple of weeks. Just south of the border, where much of our beef supply comes from, the USDA has stated that there are over 30,000 confirmed cases in Mexico. This is why things might get a little busy here pretty soon. Concerns are also emerging that highlight some of the more illicit activity that might be going on throughout the region. It's extremely early, so data is limited and this is mostly gut suspicion more than anything else, but it's possible that illicit cattle practices might be contributing to the spread of this disease. For many, many years now, Central American cartels have relied upon diversifying their portfolios by trafficking not just drugs and people, but also beef cattle. Since cartels are not really inclined to follow safe animal handling practices, these cattle tend to be very prone to catching parasites like screwworm. And since they tend to launder cattle through legit businesses for import into the United States, it's impossible to tell if the cheeseburger you're eating came from a wholesome family farm in Oklahoma or a Mexican cartel. This is demonstrated by cases being reported at the same time in different places. The cases in New Mexico popped up at the same time as ground zero in Texas, and these locations are too far away from each other for the fly to have flown that far, which strongly indicates that it's not spreading from the point of detection in Texas, but rather infected cattle are probably coming across the border separately and going to many different places. I suspect that the spread of screwworm is far worse than anyone knows right now because all of the efforts within the United States to combat the disease, while certainly the right thing to do, it's going to not be as effective if it's running rampant throughout Mexico. Having a significant percentage of our food supply originating from the third world is not great for food security, but we're here now, and there's not much that can be done from our end other than monitor and isolate and try to get ahead of it. We will certainly keep an eye on it for sure. It's not worth panicking over, but definitely do not sleep on this crisis, either, since this has the potential to severely impact our beef supply later on this year. Moving now to take a look at the situation in Venezuela, it's not good. I have been trying to use a lot of the helicopter and drone footage to geolocate damaged or destroyed buildings, and it's been rather tough because a lot of these cities are just completely destroyed. All of these points that you see on the map are damaged buildings that are hand-picked by me as best I can and assessed to using the standard building damage assessment guidelines created and used by FEMA. Red are buildings which are totally destroyed, orange is heavy damage, yellow is minor damage, and green is mostly untouched. Most of the damage has arisen from the heavily populated areas along Venezuela's northern coast, which has been legendary and infamous for contracting companies using very poor construction materials to help build government housing projects in this region, which surprise, surprise, turn out to not be very stable. The geography of the terrain also adds to the vulnerabilities as mudslides have been a common observance here over the years with many tragedies taking place here due to this soil substrate not being very conducive to building large structures. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people lived here in the Catia La Mar area because it was cheap housing with ocean views close to Caracas. This turned out to not be a super great idea as nearly all of these high-rise apartment buildings have collapsed and killed thousands of people. Speaking of the casualties, as with all natural disasters, the true number is hard to assess right now, especially since most of the response is centered in heavily urbanized areas where the population density is extremely high. Complicating factors also include landslides and terrain deformation from the earthquakes making roads impossible to transit outside the main cities, so a lot of the more remote towns are now cut off from major transit routes. Additionally, several aftershocks have continued throughout the area over the past 24 hours, which has made many of the barely standing buildings even more unstable, so it is very, very likely that many of the structures that still remain will probably collapse over the next few weeks. Since people are still living in many of these halfway destroyed buildings, the chances of more fatalities occurring is extremely high. A lot of people simply have nowhere else to go, so they live in what remains of their house even though it's very much a death trap. Venezuela was uh obviously not in super great shape before the earthquakes, and extreme levels of poverty and improvised housing efforts were common throughout the epicenter region for decades. The recent unsettling within the nation after the leader of their country was arrested by the United States also will be a complicating factor because on the one hand the national government is basically in shambles, but there also would be zero chance that the US would have been allowed in to help victims if Maduro was in power, so maybe that will balance out. I don't really know, but either way US Southcom is moving assets to help coordinate the response in the hardest hit areas. Just as a brief digression for a moment on the damage assessment efforts, there are a lot of people touting the use of AI for stuff like this, and I agree this would be a good tool for the job if it actually worked. But sadly in this case, it's just not good enough and produces so many false positives that it's not helpful. And just to show that, I will load in an AI-driven geospatial product that was compiled for this purpose. This is something that Google and I think Microsoft put together, and we can use this to compare and contrast what the truth really is. And just looking at the comparison between what the AI has given us and what I have assessed myself using helicopter footage of the damage, we can see that the AI is hallucinating pretty hard on some of this. Some of the buildings that are utterly pancaked are only listed as minor damage, and some of the places that are marked as destroyed are still standing. So in this case, it was a good try, it was a really good effort, but the AI models that are being touted and being used and and kind of circulating on social media for this, they're really only as good as the data that's put into it. And in this case, a satellite data with more precision would be needed. Preferably synthetic aperture radar, which would cut right through the clouds and make this a lot easier, but those images are very expensive, and in the case of extremely urbanized terrain, it's debatable as to if it would help anyway. So again, good try, but nothing beats the Mark I human eyeball. And even though the boom in AI has really kind of tried to motivate people to use some of these tools a little bit more more commonly than they've been used in the past, coherent change detection has actually been around for a very long time, and that's not an AI-driven thing. Some of these more AI-driven models are not actually that helpful. I just wanted to put that out there because as I was working on this last night, I saw a lot of people like trying to push a lot of these AI-driven models, and it just turns out, well, they're not that accurate. So I foresee this becoming a problem for the disaster preparedness and disaster response community over the years. So, hopefully things will either get better or we'll learn to not rely on tools that we cannot verify ourselves. So, this little digression shows us an important lesson. Just because we have data displayed in a way that looks cool, it doesn't actually mean that it's accurate or even helpful. So, for the products I'm making, the the few products that I can make, I'm trying to use evidence from the ground to assess the damage. And right now, the biggest intelligence gap, the biggest unknowns are the status of Caracas itself, as well as some of the more remote, but still heavily populated towns throughout the countryside. I have high-resolution imagery of Caracas after the earthquakes hit, but there has been cloud cover over much of the city for a couple of days, which has made it hard to geolocate anything. For me, my plan is to do what I can to get a good picture of the situation on the ground, so that any volunteer groups or agencies can be as prepared as possible if they start heading down there. Even though the sort of governance situation with Venezuela is kind of weird right now, I'm sure that there will be some groups heading down. I'm just not plugged into any of them just yet. But, for anyone who knows anyone heading down there who might benefit from some of my geospatial products, as always, everything I'm building is publicly available in three different ways. You can review my ArcGIS maps online just by tapping the links below, which will open up these maps on your phone's internet browser. And if you need more offline access, I publish these layers as KMZs for use with A-TAC or CalTopo, whichever platform your agency uses. And for the researchers who already use ArcGIS, you can pull my layers into your project if you want, because these are published They're published feature classes on ArcGIS online. For me, this is not just a worthwhile effort due to the mass devastation in the region, but it's also a good way to get those training reps in and get more experience in managing disaster situations, even if we might not be able to go to the physical area. So, definitely going to be keeping an eye on Venezuela over the next few weeks, because this disaster is probably one of the worst that that America has ever experienced. Jumping around the world to the Middle East for this week, the situation has deteriorated as Iranian forces have demonstrated that they control the Strait of Hormuz, and they are willing to enforce their tactical advantage with explosives. Over the past few days, several merchant ships have been hit with various munitions by Iranian forces as these vessels were taking the unauthorized Omani route to the south of the normal traffic separation scheme. When the MOU was signed and the strait was truly opened up to merchant traffic, many ships just went for it, and an administrative and organizational disaster rapidly emerged, and the experiences of every ship is individual and unique. Some ships were given permits and continued transiting just like they have been doing since the ceasefire went into effect. Some ships took any route that they could to get out of the Gulf. Some ships kept their transponders off and tried to sneak out between other ships, and many other vessels have remained at anchor as their owners have deemed the situation still too dangerous for them to make the crossing. 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. However, continuing tradition, this operation was paused almost immediately due to the increase of Iranian and American targeting throughout the region. Turns out the Iranians did not really like the ships which were acting unilaterally and taking the Omani route instead of getting a permit and taking the Iranian route. And after about a week of this being tolerated and warnings being issued that the strait is closed, the Iranians' patience wore out and they started striking vessels which were doing their own thing on Thursday night. On Friday, yesterday, the United States retaliated by striking essentially an abandoned dock on Siri Island, also called Sirik Island. And even as early as this morning, it looks like another vessel was actually hit in the Strait of Hormuz once again, bringing the total to, I think, three ships hit over the past 24 hours within the strait. So, the escalations are continuing for the time being, but the good news is that this is unlikely to kick-start more serious bombing efforts because the United States has been drawing down resources from the region. This drawdown effort actually started last week, but I wanted to wait for definitive evidence that the US is actually moving resources back to Europe and not just pretending to move resources around. Most of the assets that have been relocated are aircraft as the US Navy still remains on station in the Gulf of Oman, but earlier this week the Air Force moved a bunch of KC-135s back to Al Udeid Airbase, which we can see on the satellite imagery of the base. This is a big indicator that the large-scale shooting is probably over because this base has been a fat juicy target for Iranian missiles and has been hit many times. So, the fact that the US Air Force is moving these airframes back to Al Udeid is a sign that the US does not expect a return to the more widespread targeting, which is good news. Honestly, this is a message that also works both ways. The Iranians clearly see this too and know that the war is pretty much done aside from the occasional strikes against each other's equipment. How this develops from here is going to vary by the day, even by the hour. And the biggest points of debate moving forward will be around the Strait of Hormuz and whether or not an arrangement can be worked out regarding the transit of the strait. But once again, the Strait of Hormuz is only one half of the equation at this point. The other side of the coin is Lebanon. So, aside from the situation in the Persian Gulf, there have also been some developments with the other main conflict of the region, the war in Lebanon. Yesterday, the White House announced the signing of a document between the United States, Israel, and the Lebanese government to establish a security zone in southern Lebanon. Just to cut right to the chase, this document appears to effectively legalize the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and allows the IDF to keep all of the terrain that they have taken so far and even take a new terrain with this amorphous security zone label. Now, if you think this sounds rather surprising and rather unfortunate for the Lebanese, rest assured quite a few Lebanese are also extremely upset about this and mass protests and riots have been ongoing throughout Beirut for the past couple of days. As you are perusing the photos of the signing of this document, the more astute among you might realize that someone is missing from the table, most notably Hezbollah. Yeah, of course Hezbollah did not agree to this. For those who are unaware, unlike in Gaza, the Hezbollah organization is not the actual ruling government of Lebanon, but Hezbollah does effectively control most of the terrain in southern Lebanon. Lebanese politics is always incredibly difficult to describe, but in general, the Lebanese government has always generally at every single step withdrawn to let the IDF invade their country over the past few decades, simply because they're just a small military. They're a small government. Hezbollah doesn't necessarily call all of the shots throughout the entirety of Lebanon. That's That's not true. Hezbollah has certain areas in which they operate and control. They certainly have strongholds, but to say that they control the entire country of Lebanon is is inaccurate. And the Lebanese government is kind of like the third wheel, to be honest, who doesn't get a lot of discussion these days because most people tend to think that Lebanon is simply just a failed state where Hezbollah runs supreme. And that's not true. The Lebanese government actually does wield most of the control in the northern parts of the country, certainly in Beirut. But down in the south, the Lebanese government, the Lebanese army, has mostly withdrawn from a lot of these southern border outposts and checkpoints, simply because they don't want their soldiers getting killed by the IDF, and they know that they're powerless against the Israelis because the Israelis have the American backing, right? So in fact, the signing of this document is the Lebanese government signing along to a deal that they can't enforce on their own. And they're essentially handing over terrain that they don't even control themselves. The people who actually control this terrain, Hezbollah, did not sign on to this deal and have not agreed to stop fighting the Israeli invasion. As a result, this alleged agreement is probably not going to mean much. So Lebanon is still popping off, no matter how much we want to, you know, declare victory and move on. It's still pretty hot. It's still going to be a point of contention. What the Iranians do in response to the signing of this document, how they treat it, and how they sort of feel about the Lebanese government is going to be very interesting to see, but all in all the Middle East is still on fire as always and even though the MOU has been signed, things are not getting back to normal fast enough. This was always on the menu. We have been saying this and expecting this for weeks now. Even during the height of the war, we knew this. But it is helpful to remember that once we transition from crisis to recovery, the process is still going to take a lot of time that the world simply does not have. And honestly, we have not even transitioned into recovery yet. It's still in kind of the amorphous pause between active fighting and recovery. The crisis is still going on and there really hasn't been a super solid solution for it yet. Now granted, this is what this 60-day period of negotiations is for. This is for ironing out the details of a more solid plan, which at the end of that 60 days, then that plan can come into fruition. But for right now, the crisis continues and unless there were 100 ships transiting the strait per day, this the very day that the MOU was signed, we're simply not going to catch up with the demand, so the crisis still continues. Going from 0% of normal traffic to about 10% of normal traffic certainly does not mean that the crisis is over. And since the shooting took place last night on both sides, both the Iranians and the Americans, it's not really clear where we go from here. The MOU is signed and in effect, but things are not returning to normal and only a tiny fraction of normal has been seen so far. And that's where we find ourselves at the end of month four of this conflict, a lukewarm peace with the occasional missile strike, very tepid traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil production remaining stagnant and everybody pretending like the impacts of the war are over. When in reality, we're still more or less in a similar spot as before the MOU was signed. Thankfully, some progress is being made, even though it's slow. But if the Iranians are correct in their assertions, it's unlikely that the global flow of energy will return to the way it was before the war. And now that some limited strikes are taking place once again, it's going to be hard to keep that fraction of global maritime traffic going over the next few weeks. So, wrapping things up today with the Ghost Net reports for this week, I have picked up quite a few transmissions on our little off-grid information exchange system. Lots of people, as usual, transmitting informational reports about their local area, which is fantastic. Summertime is usually the more popular time for radio stuff, and after the past couple of weeks of severe weather around the world, it's good motivation to make sure we are as ready and as prepared as we can be for whatever uncertainties lie ahead, whether it's severe flooding or earthquakes or even ballistic missiles. Maintaining contact with the outside world when an entire region is either devastated or locked down or both is incredibly useful. So, let's get at it and do what we can to have capabilities and options, no matter what happens. So, that's all I have for today. As always, all of my research and geospatial products can be downloaded at the links below. However you wish to visualize the data, there are different options available. Thanks again to all of you on Patreon. I could not do this work without your help, and thanks to all of you for watching. I really do appreciate it. 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, and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 3rd through the 9th of 2026. So, let's get right to it. At the more strategic level this week, the insanity continues with events in the Middle East mostly remaining in a state of chaos. At home, multiple domestic issues have been brewing for a while as both the summertime crime and immigration issues remain impacting for many Americans, which has been exacerbated by both the reforms within EBT benefits around the country coming into effect over the past few weeks, but also the international fuel crisis, which is beginning to hit some parts of the globe rather seriously at this point. For us Americans, our canary in the coal mine for the fuel crisis is Europe, and I'm afraid our friends across the pond are feeling the effects of roughly 20% of the global energy supply remaining mostly offline. All of these issues are exacerbating all of the pre-existing conflicts that are going on around the world, and I've made an actual slide this time for tracking some of the conflicts that I'm keeping an eye on that are going on around the world at the moment. Just so that we don't forget that there are a lot of different conflicts that are currently being fought around the world. First off, we have the situation in Venezuela, which has reached a point of sort of stability, although it's still kind of dubious as to what's actually going on. We snatched Maduro, and then that's all we heard from it. There really hasn't been any update on the status of the governance of Venezuela. There have been a few people step up to kind of take control, but this has really become more of a vassal state situation for the United States to export Venezuelan oil. This is what the United States has openly stated, so I don't know how this is working out domestically within Venezuela, but I guess we'll have to see how it works out. I just wanted to remind everyone that Venezuela still is a thing. They still exist, they're still around, and that's still a planning factor for things moving forward, especially with the chaos in the oil markets. Similarly, in the same area, but kind of a different conflict, are the narco strikes, which continue to take place in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. I suspect, again, I don't know, but I suspect off the coast of Ecuador or Colombia. Once again, US Southcom continues to post videos every day of themselves hitting narco boats and fast boats trafficking drugs, and there's really not been a whole lot of explanation as to what's going on here because again, a lot of the justification for the targeting for narcotics vessels in the Caribbean Sea is that Maduro was the technical leader of the cartel of the Sun and because of that, these are combatants now. That was kind of a loose justification at the time, but most people are not going to lose any sleep over drug dealer boats getting, you know, hit with Hellfire missiles. So, it just kind of went from there, but now that Maduro is gone, the strikes continue, right? So, they're not striking things in the Caribbean Sea, they're striking things in the Eastern Pacific. This is kind of an interesting campaign. It's a long-term bombing campaign that is going on that not a lot of people know about. So, that's worthy of consideration. Same thing in Somalia. We are indeed conducting air strikes in Somalia on a fairly regular basis and have been doing so for many years now. So, just want to remind everybody, yeah, that's going on. We're bombing Somalia. It's not very much, but it's still going on. So, you have to kind of account for it. As to why we're doing this, I don't really know. The AFRICOM uh PR pages have mostly just said this is due to, you know, trying to crack down on insurgents who may be eventually potentially supporting the Houthis at some point. I don't know. It's kind of a loose explanation. We may just be bombing stuff just to bomb stuff, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering that there's an active shooting war going on in Mali right now with a civil war underway there. So, that's something to keep an eye on. Africa is definitely pretty hot these days. It's probably not going to matter too much for the United States like I mentioned before, but American tax dollars are going to be funding something one way or the other. So, something to be aware of. Similarly, in the Middle East, we of course have the war in Iran, which we'll of course talk about in great depth, but we also have a war in Lebanon. A lot of people have forgotten about the war in Lebanon is continuing to go on. The ceasefire there in Lebanon kind of just went away. I don't know if it ever really went into effect, but the Israelis are continuing to push into Lebanon to secure their buffer zone or maybe it's more accurately described as living space. I don't know. But, that's that war is continuing on for sure. There was a strike the other day in Beirut. The large-scale bombing of Beirut has largely ceased or largely kind of tamped down a little bit, but they are conducting precision strikes in Beirut, allegedly precision strikes, right? That's definitely going on. And also, of course, we have the war in Ukraine. So, we still have a land war in Europe going on. It has reached a point of stability, I think. It's hard to say with these sorts of things. The war in Ukraine tends to tends to change its nature once a year or so or once every 6 months, depending on how the war has gone so far. And right now, there's currently a ceasefire going on for the uh Victory in Europe uh Day, VE Day. Russia and Ukraine have called a bit of a truce for a couple of days here uh to just, you know, celebrate that holiday, and then they're going to get back to it, but hopefully we'll get close to a peace deal. Again, there has been uh quite a bit of talk with regards to securing a peace deal over the years. We've gotten really close to seeing the end of this war a few times uh right before veering away. So, that can always happen. It's not over until the fat lady sings, and the war in Ukraine is certainly not over just yet. Similarly, in Iran, the war in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf War, whatever you want to call it, is still going on and has mostly transitioned into what I think should probably be called the Hormuz Crisis, because that's basically where a lot of this hostility is uh remaining for now. The larger war, the bombing campaign within Iran, has largely come to a point of pause due to this ceasefire. However, things in the Strait of Hormuz, uh the only thing that really matters in this entire conflict at this point, are still very much uh at a point of contention. So, that's kind of going on. And then also, in Southeast Asia, briefly wanted to mention the Burmese Civil War is still going on. It's been going on for many, many years. It's been a lot of interesting uh combat data coming out of that for those of you who like to study uh the the way of modern war, uh the Burmese Civil War or the Myanmar Conflict or Myanmar Crisis, however you want to phrase it, that is a factor as well, because Southeast Asia is looking at a large-scale famine situation because of the Hormuz Crisis. So, fertilizer can't make it out of the Middle East to Southeast Asia for the rice planting seasons, and that's a bit of a problem. And there's already a hot shooting war in Burma, which the United States, by the way, is supporting like we are supporting the rebels in Myanmar. Publicly, we're not supporting them with military aid, but we are providing them with non-military aid and material and stuff like that. So, again, something the United States is involved in. It's probably not that big of a deal outside the area, and it's not something that's going to spill into a wider region. I mean, it's South these Asia, so it always could, but it's probably not likely. What's more likely is that is that this is going to be a complicating factor as food shortages and food insecurity becomes a thing over the next couple of years due to the planting seasons being thrown off due to the Hormuz crisis. So, again, everything is a domino. Things are coming into fruition that we probably did not expect or, you know, the second and third order effects are starting to rear their ugly head, and they're probably likely to do so over the next few months as well. Hard to predict, but we'll do the best we can with it. Taking a look at the strategic movement for this week, a lot of the assets that are staged around the world are do reflect a lot of these conflicts. So, the biggest change is the departure of the Ford Carrier Strike Group from the Middle East this week. The Ford is going home to conclude her very, very long deployment to the region, and I think she's planned to undergo long-term repairs from the fire that she suffered a few weeks ago. There is no replacement for the Ford right now because the Lincoln and the Bush are operating together as part of the unified command effort that is the American blockade in the Gulf of Oman. Maintaining this blockade is a gargantuan effort, which requires a lot of resources, and since the hostilities are mostly confined to the Gulf of Oman right now, the US forces in the region are concentrated in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, as well as in the Indian Ocean, which is mostly serving as one big interdiction zone for Iranian ships that either run the blockade or otherwise are strategic targets or stateless vessels. So, that's the force allocation that I'm tracking around the world for this week. A lot of hardware, a lot of steel is in the water, and and it doesn't look like there's going to be any change on that anytime soon. So, before we get into the homeland concerns for this week, let me briefly take a moment and recap the tactical situation on the ground in the Middle East, just because a lot has happened and things are starting to become more active after a couple of weeks of ceasefire. There has been a lot of shooting in the Strait of Hormuz over the past 48 hours with skirmishes being reported between Iran and the UAE, as well as between American forces and Iranian gunboats. There's not a whole lot of information on any of these sporadic engagements, but I am working on plotting these as best that I can. Just know that out at sea, it's impossible to know for sure where anything is hit, because unless we see a boat sinking in real time, there's just there's not really a good point of reference for stuff like this. So, it's a lot more challenging uh when there's uh combat on the high seas as opposed to on the land where we could get a satellite image to confirm stuff uh and local eyewitnesses are actually physically there to record this stuff. So, it's been really complicated to plot stuff this week. I'm still waiting on some clean satellite imagery to figure out what actually was struck in uh the UAE and also on Qeshm Island. These things are not exactly uh easy at this point because the stranglehold on information is definitely tightening around the region. On the more diplomatic side of things, two major initiatives have come to a head. Project Freedom from the United States and the Persian Gulf Strait Authority from the Iranians. Details on both are pretty sketchy and hard to verify, but Project Freedom was the short-lived effort to force open the Strait of Hormuz and essentially provide top cover and missile defense for merchant vessels to get out of the Persian Gulf. This effort lasted about 24 hours because the Iranians had struck three of the first five ships that attempted to make a run for it. At least that's the number by my account. It could be more, it could be less. I don't know the exact hour that Project Freedom officially began. Either way, this project is over or at least halted for the foreseeable future, which might be for a variety of reasons. Mainstream media is saying that the US stopped uh Project Freedom because the Saudis and the Emiratis banned the use of their airspace for this operation because they saw it as a sharp escalation that would only result in retaliatory efforts targeting them. I can't confirm beyond all doubt that's what happened because a lot of this is just conjecture and, you know, rumor and stuff like that. But, either way, what's clear is that Project Freedom is over or at least paused for now. In response to this effort, in response to the Project Freedom scuffle, the Iranians formalized what they are calling the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which is basically just a web portal and an email system that ships can use to apply for permission to transit the strait. How this is going to work out is anyone's guess, but the general consensus is that the GCC states are probably not going to accept the Iranians controlling the strait because it was an international waterway before the war. However, again, easier said than done, right? And removing Persian control from this waterway is proving to be way more complicated than anyone in the US government seems to know. So, for now, the situation is kind of a hot shooting stalemate. It's hard to describe. The Iranians control the strait or at least influence it enough to prevent free travel through it. Mines are still a problem. The minefield's still there, and the US Navy can't begin to clear them in earnest until the situation is over. And the merchant traffic through the strait is not looking good and has trickled down to basically nothing. Only local ships and a handful of Chinese and shadow fleet tankers have transited in and out of the Gulf. So, traffic is not anywhere near normal. Quite a tough spot we seem to find ourselves in in the Middle East, but on the home front, things are becoming a little bit more serious as well. On the home front for this week, right now, the biggest factor for the United States is the fuel crisis. Specifically, not just the high prices, but also sheer availability, which might become a problem at some point. For those of you who are looking to plan ahead, and if you're looking for an indicator to start thinking about fuel and preparedness terms, now is the time to start thinking about that. This is a pretty big topic, and it would take far too long to flesh out all of this. But, the short version of what to pay attention to is that there's no real way to know how high gas prices will get before the availability itself is cut off. And there are competing ideas on this from a preparedness perspective. I don't know which one's right. I'll just explain the general idea here. Right now, there are a lot of people who are talking about oil rising to $200 or even $300 per barrel because those are the numbers that President Trump himself said would be acceptable. He clearly stated that even if oil got to $200 a barrel, the current war would be worth it. Now, what might this mean in terms of gas prices? Well, most people expect this to be about 7 to $9 per gallon for regular unleaded. Of course, this figure is going to vary by state quite a bit, but $7 is a general figure that is cited by most journalists. However, this figure is based on an economic model and not really a national defense model. Again, there's competing ideas here. So, economists will tell you the math because they have the spreadsheets. So, if you ask an economist, "Hey, how much could gas prices become if the Strait of Hormuz were to be closed forever?" And they'll dutifully give you a figure. I mean, it's you're going to some high, you know, astronomical number or something like that. But if you ask me that question, I'll tell you that question is kind of a farce because if it's planned to be closed forever, we're going to use strategic resources on Iran, and this is going to be all kind of a moot point. Just to cut right to the point to pay attention to, do not assume that gas prices will just keep getting more and more expensive forever. For as long as this lasts, there is a zero barrier, right? At some point, we're going to be using strategic measures, and gasoline itself will be measured mostly by availability and not its market price. This point is indefinable and unknown because there's just there's just too many factors to know how this is all going to work out, but what is certain is that gasoline is not going to get to 20 or $30 per gallon because long before it gets to that point of scarcity, price alone is not going to be the most important factor, and we'll probably just have a large-scale war before that. Personally, again, I don't know which theory is correct. I just know that a lot of people hop on the news. All the talking heads get on there and say, "Okay, oil is going to be $150 a a if this happens. Oil is going to be $200 a barrel if this happens. And if it goes on for this long, it'll be at $300 a barrel at this date or something like that if something doesn't change. And I think that that is probably not the best way to think about it because long before that, we're going to have issues with availability. And the reason for that is because in terms of what's going on in the Middle East, there are more factors than just the White House and Iran and the Israelis. It's not just about turning the tap on or off. There are complications within the oil production cycle as well. For instance, oil is not just like a spigot that you can turn on and off. There is a ramp up and a ramp down process that takes time. And maintenance is a problem, too. If an oil rig is shut down for too long, things get clogged up from methane hydrates or something, and everything corrodes. It's not something that you can just turn back on in many cases. And when it is turned back on, it might not produce as much oil as before due to these problems. Just to add a little bit of context on this for what a lot of the talking heads are saying, there's an interesting relationship between pumping oil out of the ground, refining it, and then storing it. For instance, Kuwait. Kuwait has produced exactly zero barrels of oil for export for the month of April. So, they're exporting not a single barrel from their from their country during the month of April. But, they're still pumping it out of the ground, and they're filling up their storage slowly. Why are they doing this? Why are they still pumping oil out of the ground to fill up with their storage, you know, fill up their storage tanks, when they know that they can't get a tanker out through the Gulf? Well, it's because you can't exactly turn that stuff off. If you shut down the pumps hard, you know, shut them off completely, then the whole system gets out of whack. So, basically, you have to just turn that turn that production down to a minimum. What that number is is going to vary by refinery, right? You can't really know. If the storage starts filling up, then they then they have to shut that stuff hard down, and it's going to become even longer of a process to start their infrastructure back up again. Before the war, Kuwait was producing 2.5 million barrels of oil per day on average. So, you go from 2.5 million barrels to zero barrels exported. That means that either you've cut production all the way down and you're just trickling the oil out of the ground to keep the keep the pipes warm, so to speak. But, it's got to go somewhere. It's got to go into the storage, otherwise very bad things happen with regards to the machinery and maintenance and stuff like that. So, getting back to that 2.5 million barrel per day production level might take a lot longer than we might think, especially if production has been halted or reduced sharply for such a long period of time. OPEC in general, the GCC states, are well known for ramping up and ramping down production for both economic and political purposes. So, there is a little bit of elasticity there, or a lot of elasticity there, in terms of how much they produce versus how much they export. So, there's a lot of flexibility in the system. So, this effect may be negligible. I don't know. But, if we just take the UAE into account, another factor which must be considered is the straight-up destruction of refineries. I've said this many times before, so I'm not going to beat a dead horse here, but several Arab nations have stated that many of their facilities have been damaged to the tune of billions of dollars. And what's more, a lot of these facilities will take years to repair enough to get back to full capacity. So, once again, it's not just an issue of the strait itself being closed and exporting being a problem. It's also on the production side of the house. There are production problems as well. It's going to take many, many, many years to get back to the level, if we are ever to get back to the level of oil production that existed on February 27th of this year. In one day, it all came crashing down, and I don't know how this is going to work out in the future. And, as luck would have it, the destruction or damage of facilities in the Middle East is not the only factor to consider because a lot of refineries have been destroyed or damaged around the world either by industrial accidents or due to armed conflict. Like I mentioned last week, the war in Ukraine starting to involve the targeting of Russian oil refineries is something that is easily forgotten because it's a different war, and it's targeting Russian oil probably won't affect Europe as much because years of sanctions have largely stifled the market for Russian oil in the Western world. But Russia sells a lot of oil to China and China also gets their oil from the Middle East. So China is going to be heavily affected if this continues on because they're getting the double whammy of Russian production being affected. We don't know how much it's affected, but it can't be zero, right? Having 18 or 20 of your refineries being hit by drones and taken offline for a while, that's not nothing. It's got to have some level of impact. But their other main suppliers are also being hindered in the Middle East. So China is definitely paying attention to what's going on. And if everybody who says, "Oh well, it's worth it if we're affecting China." Well, the United States is going to be affected, too. Maybe more so in some areas because the United States, by comparison, is also being heavily impacted because we also import a lot of oil from the Middle East for domestic production and refinement. The US does produce a lot of oil, but it's a different product altogether. This is a gross oversimplification, but the US mostly produces a lot of light sweet crude, which we export around the world. The actual refineries in the US are built to handle the heavy crude from the Middle East. Even though the US does export a lot of oil, a lot of what we need for domestic production actually comes from the Middle East. Thus, our current high gas prices. Why are we exporting so much petroleum if our gas prices are so high? Shouldn't we just keep that here? Well, yeah, probably, but we can't refine it here. So we sell what we can and we buy what we can. And we refine what we can here at home. And what we need to refine here at home is the Middle Eastern oil. That's one of the reasons for the craziness. I've gotten a lot of messages and emails from people asking like, "Why are we sending our oil overseas if we need it here at home?" Well, it's because we can't refine it here. So we sell it to the customer who can. Again, this is a gross oversimplification, but that's kind of the general gist of the how complicated things are at the moment. In the context of refineries around the world being impacted, we're also not immune to problems with domestic production on our end. Just taking a look at the map, we can see the recent problems at domestic US refineries over the past couple of weeks. There have been several fires and maintenance problems that have impacted production, which is undeniable. What is definitely harder to get a bead on is whether or not these incidents are the result of malign action. On the one hand, it's quite the coincidence that the Middle East is cut off, Russian refiners are being taken offline due to the war, and now refineries all around the world from India to China are catching fire. On the other hand, this is exactly what I would expect because when one major refinery is taken offline, all of the others have to take up that slack. And how do they take up that slack? They run to the red line, don't they? Many refiners are being pushed to their limits and beyond in the US right now, and a lot of mothballed units are being brought online again because the US is desperate to produce and refine as much petroleum as possible. So, it's a tough spot because everything's being run at the red line, and things break all the time. Personally, I'd wager that we will continue to see a sharp increase in legitimate and verifiable industrial accidents at refineries in the US over the next few months. So, that's going to be something to be aware of and keep an eye out for as the situation in the Middle East remains in a state of, well, I guess stagnation is still the best word to describe it. Taking all of the words and statements by officials out of the equation and just ignoring all of the talk and rhetoric, the events will speak for themselves. The strait is still closed to Western tanker traffic. The US Navy has not yet been able to ensure freedom of navigation in the strait, therefore supply is down. Demand in the US remains the same and is going to go up as the summertime arrives. And because of that imbalance, prices climb higher, and the official policy of the White House, as it stands, is that $200 a barrel is an acceptable price to pay. Of course, that may change if we ever get close to that. It may just be words right now, but President Trump has given us a number that he says is acceptable. And so, we have something concrete to plan on, for better or for worse. Might not happen tomorrow or ever, but starting to think about the practical ways to insulate against these problems would be a good idea. I was just trying to think the other day, what would I do if gas got up to $9 a gallon? Like, how would I be able to maintain operational readiness if that's the case? Well, it's complicated because it's not just about price, but planning for long-term disruptions would be wise at this point, and I myself am digging down right now to start organizing my mapping products to help wherever possible. There's no need to panic, there's no need to start stock piling fuel at the moment, although I mean, you certainly could if you wanted to, but regardless of what happens in the Middle East, the energy crisis in the homeland is already beginning to happen, and the question is how serious it's going to be. Hopefully, it won't be too bad, but we'll do the best we can no matter what. And with that, that's all I have for today, but I did want to close today by reminding us all that no matter what happens in the Middle East, we still have a lot of problems here in the homeland that are more serious and more impacting to us on a daily basis. One of the biggest problems that has shifted out of the news cycle is the issue of both illegal immigration and the sharp increase in crime around the country. Many of you know that earlier this year I wanted to create a segment just for reminding us of all of the important incidents that took place, but have just become memory hold and forgotten about. And today, I wanted to highlight just one case among many, which is the case of Marco Villanueva Gonzalez. Back in 2018, this individual killed Jordan Huguely by driving 86 mph in a 35 mph zone in Midvale, Utah. This led to a crash which killed Huguely, and at the time Gonzalez was arrested. As he was a juvenile at the time, he was sentenced to only 6 months probation by Judge Tupac Renteria. And from there, he was just basically let go. Jumping forward to last year, since Gonzalez is an illegal immigrant, he was picked up by ICE in Salt Lake City on drug charges and held in ICE detention. This arrest was publicized by the ICE social media page at the time, and everyone just forgot about it and assumed that he got deported. That assumption was incorrect because somewhere along the way ICE let him go. What he has been doing between May of 2025 and now is not known, but it turns out that it is not good because he was just arrested again. On May 4th, he was released from the Salt Lake County Jail to ICE. So, he's back in ICE custody and completely off the grid. We don't know if he's been deported for real this time or if he's been released back into society again. It is hard to make general assumptions based on a case study, but accountability at ICE when it comes to actually deporting criminals has been lacking over the past few months after attention has shifted away from this issue. I don't know how many deportations are happening because ICE stopped publishing the numbers, but I can prove beyond all doubt that at least one person who was in their custody somehow not just evaded deportation, but remained in the United States committing crimes. And I wanted to mention this because it is so incredibly easy for us to forget that there are victims here. A father lost his son by an illegal who suffered no meaningful consequences for his actions. Not only did Gonzalez not show any remorse for his actions, but he continued to be a menace to society for years because Tupac Linteria gave him a slap on the wrist and ICE failed to deport him despite parading around his arrest as a PR victory. All the while a father has been trying to get the tiniest gram of justice for his son. ICE now has the chance to do the absolute minimum and finally deport this individual and it would be a very good idea for them to do so because at this point with tens of thousands of victims like this being murdered every single year, deportation is the moderate, loving, and kind option and the option that allows this individual to evade justice to be honest. But in polite society, this is the option that we have at the moment for handling these types of people and this delicate balance might not be in place forever. So, we'll keep Jordan and his family in our prayers and do what we can to not forget these cases even though the latest shiny object might distract our attention. It's a hard thing to keep a good foundational perspective on events these days because we're constantly dragged from one headline to the next, but we have to remember what the end goal is, which is to do good things, help stop the civilization decline, reverse the bad things, and hold bad people accountable, and do so from a place of honor and magnanimity. We are not going to get out of this mess without everyone putting in their part and going above and beyond to improve the world around them. Many times we don't have a direct way to do this, but we can help in indirect ways at minimum. Picking up trash, keeping yourself clean and physically fit, and learning a lot of new skills that might be helpful are all things that we can do on the individual level. We do not have a chance at tackling these big things until we can do the little things right. For me, one of those little things is building maps and awareness and also working on communication stuff. I know it's boring, but think about how you would have known any of the information I've covered today if a platform goes down. Sure, you might hear it from somebody else or in some alternative way, but I think that strengthening our lines of communication are a basic requirement for moving forward at a time when everything from censorship to technical outages are becoming more of a headache. And that makes for a good transition into the Ghost Net reports for this week. As many of you know, the Ghost Net is a radio net which hopes to provide some level of both emergency preparedness and also everyday use. Back in the day, we used to get the news over the radio, which is a shocking concept now, but this is our attempt to rekindle old-school reliable ways to exchange information around the world no matter what happens. And this week, the net was fantastic once again with many people sharing a lot of information about events and incidents in their local areas around the world. I myself have been trying out the Android version of JS8Call, which is the software package that we use to control our radios, and it seems to be working out quite well. I've heard some reports from people saying that the Android version doesn't decode as well as the desktop version, but I can't really tell a difference on my end. I will say though that it is harder to send longer messages, at least on the version that I have, I can't send more than just one standard block of messages on JS8Call on Android, but the app is continually being updated, so hopefully this will be a good analog to replace a lot of the capability we have from our laptops on our phones at some point. Right now, I've been testing this with my own field radio setup, and I've been trying to streamline the experience as best I can. More to come on that later, but for everyone who might be hearing of the Ghost Net for the first time, you can check out the handbook I've written on it, as well as the entire playlist on the project that's on my YouTube page. So, that's all I have for today, everyone. As always, all of my research can be found on my Obsidian page, and my mapping data can either be found at the links below or on my GitHub page, where I provide updated KMZs for my work as I make updates, which is pretty much every day. So, thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

//The Wire//2300Z June 22, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: TERRORIST ATTACK REPORTED IN MONTREAL AS SHOOTER CONDUCTS MULTIPLE ENGAGEMENTS THROUGHOUT RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOOD. KEIR STARMER RESIGNS AS PRIME MINISTER. SITUATION IN LEBANON REMAINS TENUOUS AS ISRAELIS REFUSE TO HALT ATTACKS. STABBING ATTACK REPORTED IN SCOTLAND.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Qatar: Last night an industrial accident was reported at one of the main natural gas terminals in Ras Laffan, which was in the process of being restarted to resume production after the war. The Qataris claim that this was not the direct result of combat action, however the incident killed a total of 13x people, and injured roughly 50x others. United Kingdom: This morning Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister. This resignation is not immediate, and is expected to result in some form of leadership contest later on. Analyst Comment: Andy Burnham is likely to be his replacement, but this process will take a few months to develop as the formalized party efforts to select their new PM continue over the next few weeks. Scotland: Over the weekend a stabbing attack was reported in Edinburgh. One assailant attempted to conduct a stabbing on Lieth Walk, near a row of shops and businesses. Initial reports claimed that a total of 5x people were wounded during this attack, but this remains unconfirmed at this time. Analyst Comment: Due to the nature of the attack, the media coverage has been extensive, although very few details are known regarding how the attack began. Of note, several photos appearing to be AI-generated have circulated following this attack, so it is challenging to determine which photos are real and which are "AI-enhanced". More details will undoubtedly come in due time, which may clarify what actually happened. Canada: This afternoon a shooting was reported in Montreal, as one assailant attempted to conduct a mass shooting in the vicinity of the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood. One gunman equipped with an SKS-type rifle and web gear, began the attack by engaging police along one of the streets of this community. Eventually, this skirmish transitioned to the Westbury Supermarche PA at the north end of Av. de Courtrai, with the shooter taking up a position inside the supermarket. As police advanced on this location and began breaching the supermarket, the shooter egressed two blocks to the southwest, where the shooter made contact with the police cordon at the corner of Av. de Courtrai and Decarie Boulevard. At this location, a close-range small arms engagement broke out between the shooter and two officers, which resulted in one officer being killed in action. During the fray, the other officer accidentally shot a bystander, who was attempting to seek cover from the shooter. After shooting the civilian, the officer broke contact and maneuvered to a different position away from the shooter, and in doing so was shot in the back. A few moments later, the shooter was neutralized by other officers who were maneuvering south down Courtrai avenue, from the grocery store. Analyst Comment: The circumstances of how the shooting began are unclear. The initial footage of the incident begins at the grocery store, however SWAT was already chasing someone on foot in the residential neighborhood several blocks to the east of the shooting site. Also, the only victims of the shooting so far appear to be the officer that was shot by the suspect, and the civilian that was erroneously shot by police. The reasoning for why police (and especially tactical units such as SWAT) were already on the scene is possibly due to the shooter sending his manifesto to media groups before the attack began. More details are expected overnight as the shooter's identity and the sequence of events become more clear. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Middle East, the status of the tentative peace deal remains uncertain, but in Switzerland, the talks appear to be continuing to some degree. The Iranian delegation did walk out after President Trump threatened to kill them during a phone interview with Fox News. Specifically President Trump threatened to kidnap/kill the negotiating team if Iran closes the Strait again in response to Israeli advances in Lebanon. Upon these remarks being broadcast, the Iranian delegation walked out of a photo op that had been planned with VP Vance, although they did not completely halt the talks. Concerning Lebanon, PM Netanyahu has stated many times that Israeli forces will not depart Lebanon, and over the weekend the IDF continued to consolidate the gains made so far. No withdrawal of the IDF has been noted in any way, which is a non-starter the peace process, but the reason for this is probably not just about politics and attempting to assert dominance. The tactical situation on the ground is not great and the sudden signature of the MOU (ahead of schedule) appears to have caught the IDF in a predicament. If the IDF were to halt their forward progress right now, they would be at a military disadvantage as they mostly occupy the low terrain in Tabieh, northward along the Litani River basin. The IDF has just barely gotten a foothold on the northwestern side of the Litani, infamously capturing the historic Beaufort Castle last week, which serves as the only real tactically-advantageous terrain along this eastern front. As a result, the IDF knows that they will get pounded by Hezbollah's rockets if they stay where they are, especially since they have overextended themselves to the point that a salient (or bulge in the lines) has emerged, exposing this spearhead to attacks from three sides. This vulnerability has been noted by the attack on the armored armored column a few days ago, which was advancing north in Nabatiyeh. The IDF could of course always resolve their disadvantage in terrain by stopping their invasion of Lebanon and withdrawing to their own borders, but this is absolutely not going to happen at this point. What's far more likely is for the IDF to continue pushing until they fully seize and consolidate the high ground east of Et Taher. From there, they will be able to look down on the collection of towns that make up the greater Nabatieh area. How this will work out is anybody's guess, as the IDF is not exactly accustomed to fighting ground advances of several miles from their own borders with a serious and well-equipped adversary like Hezbollah. Bottom line: The situation in Lebanon is messy and very unlikely to be resolved anytime soon due to the military situation on the ground. As Lebanon is a central focus point for the US/Iran deal, the proverbial 'rock' has met the typical 'hard place' and this is going to be a problem for the deal moving forward. 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 May 17th through the 23rd, 2026. It's been a very busy week as usual, so let's get right to it. This week, the flash points from last week continue to build on all fronts. Here at home, domestic crime and general public foolishness has frequently transitioned into a state of civil unrest in some areas, such as the more visible cases in New Jersey. Similarly, riot season is in full bloom this year within the homeland with many major US cities being host to pop-up parties or other similar rioting just for the sake of rioting. Around our hemisphere, the potential for some kind of entanglement in Cuba continues as the rhetoric has been dialed up on that front with American military forces being staged within the Caribbean once again. Overseas, our friends in the United Kingdom have had a rough week when it comes to the details coming out regarding the Henry Doak murder trial, which appears to be another watershed moment for the UK and their two-tier policing system. Around the world, industrial accidents continue to strike petroleum refineries as the global energy crisis continues with no end in sight. In the Middle East, tensions are growing once again as rhetoric from Washington indicates that the United States is interested in reuniting the war once again in an attempt to break Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, in Africa, an Ebola outbreak has been announced in the Congo and hantavirus cases continue to be reported around the world as the previous cruise ship situation has not yet been resolved. All in all, a very busy week once again. A lot of things up in the air and not a whole lot of resolution on many fronts. Moving to strategic movement for this week, there are two main theaters of war that are worth keeping an eye on. Firstly is of course the Middle East where American resupply operations have been conducted as best they can during the ceasefire. All assets and resources are already on station in the Middle East with the exception of the Eisenhower carrier strike group, which is still in the Atlantic somewhere. Depending on when she departed and how fast she is going, it could take a while before she's on station. I know a lot of people are speculating that the war in Iran is scheduled to to again to weekend because there have been some very interesting cases where President Trump has canceled a few functions and rushed back to the White House to be in Washington, you know, just in case national security needs take precedence, which most people seem to think is code word for yeah, we're going to strike Iran again. And especially considering President Trump also said that we are going to strike Iran this weekend. He said that a few days ago. So, this may indeed happen either tonight before this brief comes out or Sunday night or Monday night, who knows? It could happen any day now or it could never happen. We just don't know, so a lot of this is going to be guesswork. But if they are going to reignite the war, they're going to be launching it again without the Eisenhower being on station to protect Israel with missile defenses, which is probably going to be her primary mission if she was supposed to replace the Ford. The scheduling and mission set for a lot of these carrier strike groups is thrown all out of whack because this war has required three carrier strike groups when normally we have only one in the Middle East. So, saying exactly which ones are replacing who is sometimes quite challenging and we don't exactly know what the mission is going to be. If the Ike is replacing the Ford, then she's probably going to be on station in the Mediterranean Sea in the Eastern Med just off the coast of Israel. But if she's supposed to transit Suez and go south into the Red Sea, then that might take a couple extra days. There has been some concern with potential attacks or terrorism or something like that within the Suez Canal because it is again a choke point and a carrier is pretty much a sitting duck when transiting the canal, which is why the Bush carrier strike group when she arrived on station, she actually went around the long way around the continent of Africa. So, the Eisenhower, if she is indeed intended for CENTCOM and she is indeed headed for the Med, she's probably going to stay in the Med. But again, this is really conjecture and just kind of guesswork, but it's still quite handy to know where a lot of strategic assets are located. And right now there are a lot of assets in the Middle East ready to continue the fight if that is the chosen course of action. A little bit closer to home, another potential conflict is brewing, Cuba. And we can see this with the strategic movement once once So, 2 days ago the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group arrived in the Caribbean, taking up station somewhere off the coast of Cuba. This is why it's worth being aware of what high-level strategic military movements are being made, because if we remember, the US parked an aircraft carrier off the coast of Venezuela about 4 months before that operation came to a head. I'm sure many of you were quite annoyed with me for many months talking about how there's an aircraft carrier down there off the coast of Venezuela, but that annoyance actually paid off because we actually did end up launching a little miniature war. Thankfully, it did not come to a full-blown war, and it was really more just a pre-planned raid, but still, that aircraft carrier was an indication. So, this is important in the context of Cuba because right now, basically no one thinks that military action is on the table. No one is seriously considering that the United States might actually engage in some kind of military operation in Cuba. That is not really on anybody's radar, even theoretically. Most consensus seems to conclude that all of this Cuba talk is just talk, and it's really just to satisfy one of President Trump's remaining support bases, the Cuban-American voting block. There is a substantial Cuban presence in Florida, so maybe this is more political rhetoric than anything else to secure votes. I don't know. However, moving an aircraft carrier is not something that is traditionally done on a whim, and based on his term so far, every single time President Trump has moved an aircraft carrier somewhere, he has used it. Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, etc. And since Cuba is 90 mi off the coast of Florida, there will be no observable staging of forces like we see around the world. For instance, we knew Venezuela and Iran were about to pop off almost down to the day because the whole world could clearly see the build-up at forward staging areas. However, in the case of Cuba, every potential target within Cuba is well within range of bases in southern Florida. The combat radius of the standard CH-47 Chinook is about 200 mi, and the MH-6 Little Bird is about 100 mi, so they may need to use the carrier to stage from for whatever they have planned if they have anything planned in Cuba, but at the very very wave top level if the US wanted to launch a some kind of operation in Cuba, there is little chance that we would know about it beforehand unlike the two previous wars we've started this year. So, on the more strategic level, we are working with a total of five active fronts around the world right now that the United States is involved in in some form or fashion and two additional potential fronts that might open up at some point. The United States is involved in the war in Ukraine, the Gulf War, and of course the war on narcotics trafficking in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The US is also somewhat involved in a loose collection of conflicts and civil wars underway in West Africa, and American air strikes in Somalia have been regular and routine for many years now. In addition to these active combat operations, two additional theaters are on the menu, Cuba and of course Taiwan at some point. There hasn't really been any update on either one of these. I'm just giving you the early indications and warnings to keep an eye on Cuba and Taiwan. There's very much debate about both of these locations and what might happen, and it's of course possible that neither of these make the transition to a more active front, but these are the conflicts that could potentially become hot later on. And speaking of the heat here in the homeland, riot season has begun to spread throughout many American cities and suburbs. This is no surprise to anyone who can read between the lines, but this week has witnessed a sharp increase in riots, street takeovers, and general foolishness being undertaken in the streets. Right up front, all of the incidents that have been observed in the headlines this week are not the result of anything specific. This is purely just due to cultural reasons. Most of the mainstream media are calling these incidents teen takeovers, but these are almost always attended by full-grown adults, and the media is just trying to find euphemisms to avoid pointing out the obvious. This week, there have been four high-profile takeover-style events which have occurred in areas not traditionally host to this type of activity. Places like Chicago, Detroit, and the like are generally witness to half a dozen street takeovers every single night, So, it's hard to keep track of them because they just happen so often in these cities, but this week more traditionally upper scale neighborhoods have observed the various exhibitions of churlish behavior such as in Long Branch, New Jersey and also in Narragansett Beach in Rhode Island. Two locations which were at one point staples of wholesome Americana, but lately the neighborhood has gone downhill for obvious reasons. As a result of this rash of takeover events, many towns throughout New England have quietly slipped into full-blown deployment mode with curfews popping up and being enforced with a heavy hand in an attempted to keep the situation from deteriorating into chaos. So, if you are in New England, particularly along the coast, be advised that you will probably see an extremely overwhelming police presence in most public venues, particularly at beaches, over the next couple of weeks. There's a lot of money in the tourism industry up there in the summertime and local towns know that all it takes is one viral video of dudes dancing on top of cars for people to avoid their town this summer. So, spicy times, keep your head on a swivel, be aware of when these crowds start showing up at places and just just be aware. Across the pond, things aren't much better and societal tensions continue to get worse by the day. Just as a bit of an administrative note, the situation has become too chaotic for me to track personally. It's just too big at this point. I try to cover the high-profile crimes and very big incidents that might result in spicy situations, but right now there is literally a groundbreaking major case nearly every single hour in the UK. There are assaults, murders, mutilations, and child trafficking incidents every single hour and I just cannot keep up with all of it. It has literally gotten that bad. Even this week, the murder trial of Henry Nowak is not even the biggest scandal to take place today. Last night, there was a mass stabbing involving six victims in London and there's also another mass rape trial which involves a group of Pakistani men getting very light sentences for the assault and abuse of children. There are around a dozen or so more incidents that I don't have time to get into including a knife-wielding man causing chaos inside a Morrison supermarket, a stabbing attack resulting from a gang initiation, and a handful of other crimes so bad that I can't even give you the approximate details in mixed company. So, suffice it to say it's mass hysteria. Well, maybe not that far, but still quite busy in the United Kingdom. There are many stabbing attacks every day. There are many assaults every single day and it's really hard to pinpoint down where these are taking place for one because a lot of the time, well, not a lot of the time, most of the time the British media has been ordered by the British government to censor this kind of thing. So, we're fighting a losing battle when it comes to the information space on a lot of these assaults and really, really horrific crimes because we just can't figure out that they occur until years later in some cases like the Henry Noak trial. In terms of preparing for what comes next, the United Kingdom is still in the early phases, but some elements might be transitioning to a more active approach to handling this sheer volume of horrific crime. Vigilantism is quite literally the only thing the British people have in some cases at this point, which is unfortunate to realize, but this is the reality of what happens next. In some cases, not all, but some, every option for a peaceful solution has been exhausted. And in some cases there really is no option left. This of course varies case by case, but many British people are finding that out and it kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth. And more than that, the British government seems to be rather oblivious about what happens when the average Englishman gets backed into a corner. So, suffice it to say a mass uprising throughout the UK is very unlikely at the moment at least, but there are increasing numbers of fighting age males who are siding with their countrymen to make the attempt to take back their country from the foreign invaders that have been brought into the British homeland, especially the ones which are just absolutely inconceivably violent. Again, many of you have heard this before, so I won't dwell on it too much, but the situation is quite serious and we may start to see the the early indications of of more organized attempts to handle the situation. I'll just put it that way. So, it ain't over till it's over and as bleak as the situation looks for the Anglo population of Western Europe and by extension the United States as well, there are ways of handling these problems. And I'll just leave it at that for now and I'll continue monitoring the situation in the United Kingdom to see how our brothers across the sea can get by even when the situation gets tough. I'm confident they can handle it uh one way or the other, but it's going to be a long and hard road to get there. So, speaking of tough situations, the crisis in the Middle East continues to make life interesting for most of the planet as the energy crisis continues to grow by the day. Rumors have been flying out of Washington nearly every day this week regarding President Trump being inclined to restart the war, perhaps under a different name to avoid congressional approval, but nevertheless the war rhetoric has been ratcheted up once again. On the tactical front, if the conflict is to begin once more, the Iranians have been very clear about what their targets will be, which mostly comprises of desalination plants and oil refineries. The Iranians have also managed to resupply and build more drones and missiles during the ceasefire. This is all conjecture because there's no real way to know for sure, but some estimates are saying that the Iranians might have replaced a substantial number of missiles and drones to the point that they have largely recovered from whatever supply they depleted during the opening days of the war. Of course, the raw material production capacity, like their ability to make steel and aluminum, within Iran took a huge hit because the United States and Israel completely destroyed or severely damaged many, if not most, of the factories around the country. However, the most important industry for Iran right now is the defense industry and they have been working overtime since the bombs started falling to sprint towards replacing their stockpiles of missiles and drones. How many they have at this moment is anyone's guess, but going off of everything that's happened so far during this war, the United States has done nothing but underestimate the Iranians at literally every single step, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. So, as much as the Pentagon likes to look down on the Iranians, there is not one single aspect of how they have fought the war so far where the Iranians have underperformed. They have been punching above their weight to this entire time. The Iranians certainly and undoubtedly control the Strait of Hormuz, and they project enough influence over the Persian Gulf to keep everybody's head down indefinitely. So, even though technically the Iranians are under-matched in their fight against the United States, technically speaking, as long as the United States keeps fighting the war in the same way, the Iranians will continue to have, if not dominance, that might not be the right word, but they're going to have enough control over a small area to cause a lot of problems essentially indefinitely. But, once again, in time-honored tradition, we will have to see what happens. Continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is an interesting position to take, but it's also what happens when American leadership is painted into a corner, which is exactly what's happened. And as far as the Israelis are concerned, this is exactly what they were going for. In the world of grand military strategy, many famous military leaders throughout history have been noted for leaving their options open until the very last minute, which allowed them to have flexibility for as long as possible. For better or for worse, this is the complete opposite of President Trump's personality, as he favors a completely different doctrine. He favors decisive and bold moves in nearly every aspect of his administration. Which is a respectable strategy in business, I guess, but when it comes to warfare, he was by far the most susceptible to this kind of trap. Even for people who wanted to engage in this war, even for the war hawks, even for the military strategists who have been looking to fight a war with their own for decades now, the way that this has come about has been less than ideal because it's left a lot of people with a lot less options than they thought they were going to have when such a war were to break out. During the opening salvos to this war, President Trump killed the Ayatollah, which limited his options right out of the gate. And this got messy very, very quickly. If he had not killed the Ayatollah and to most of the military leadership, I have no doubt that a peace deal would have already been signed. We would already be done with this war. But because the United States killed most of the moderates on the first day of the war, the hardliners are now holding out within Iran and taking the position of making this incredibly painful for the United States. So, the exact opposite of what President Trump has said is actually what happened. We did not kill the hardliners on that first day, and now we're dealing with a more amiable regime. Actually, it's quite the opposite. We killed the moderates first, and now the options are limited for getting out of this because the IRGC leadership has basically taken a position of bring it on. Anyone who has ever cracked a military history textbook could see this coming a mile away because this is essentially a very loose correlation with how World War I began. I'm not saying this is going to be a world war again, although you could argue that World War III has already begun in many other ways. But when it comes to the Iran situation itself, it's quite interesting because it turns out that one of the reasons why World War I began and transitioned from a series of smaller wars into one, you know, large conflagration throughout Europe and even Western Asia before transitioning around the world is that a lot of key leaders and key decisions were forced or were not made. For instance, we cite a lot of times the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand as being one of the catalyst for the beginning of World War I. Well, why is that? Why was his assassination so important? Franz Ferdinand's assassination was so critical and so important because he was one of the last dissenting voices, one of the last big voices, that urged the Austria-Hungary Empire to not go to war with Serbia, when thus kick off the war. When he was assassinated, he could not oppose to the war anymore, and so it was on, essentially. This is the short version of it. Same thing happened in Turkey with Enver Pasha. Again, the critical people who were trying to force a war ended up forcing a war. So, we see the same kind of mentality today in Iran, and this has been a very strategic nightmare to manage because the senior political echelons of the United States have made decisions, they have done things, they've committed targeting actions on the battlefield, but also in the political realm that have resulted in having few options later on. So, right now, we're stuck. President Trump has neither a political solution nor a military solution, which is just what the Israelis wanted. And the few allies that we have left are pivoting to China or, in some cases, even Russia. All the while, our strategic petroleum reserve is being drained to sell to Europe to keep global fuel prices low. What's quite interesting about this conflict is that we don't have to wait 100 years to look back uh in retrospect and say, "Oh gosh, now we know what what what started the war." No, we actually know right now. Uh it's quite clear. So, we at least have that going for us. But, in terms of a solution, I really don't know what the US intends to do at this point. There are, indeed, about half a dozen different solutions that would 100% work to end the conflict, but the hard part is getting the ego and foreign influence out of the ear of military decision-makers long enough to actually let them see the light and end this on positive terms. Personally, I think that we're absolutely dealing with a Truman Show situation where President Trump is personally being sequestered from the truth of the military situation on the ground, which is why there's such a huge disconnect between reality and what the White House is saying these days. And breaking this spell is really the only barrier to getting sub $2 gas again, at least within a couple of years. This is most certainly not an apocalyptic all is lost situation. We can get out of this. There are solutions to end this. It just requires our political leadership to get us out of this. I did not declare war on Iran, so I cannot step forward and end the war, right? That's not how this works. Foreign conflicts, foreign wars are squarely in the realm of the executive branch and Congress, but Congress has, you know, shirked their duty on this. So, uh this is now the executive branch's job and because of that, we have to kind of rely on them. This is not something that we can do ourselves or even help with. So, we're kind of at the mercy of the White House when it comes to this war. And they've proven time and time again they're not interested in listening to us. So, that's what makes this hard. That's why we have to kind of prepare for things that are outside of our control. And if the United States goes back to war and the Iranians dutifully respond by blowing up even more petroleum infrastructure, we're probably going to hit that $200 per barrel milestone mostly for zero military gain. So, quite the cliffhanger we end on this week. The stakes are high and potential for another round of war is on the horizon once again. Not only are we not out of this conflict, but we are probably farther away from a peace deal today than we ever have been. This can, of course, be turned around on a single tweet, on a single email. That's all it takes to end this and then we can move on. But right now, we are still in a state of war and seeing as it is Memorial Day weekend, we have the 13 service members who lost their lives while fighting this war. Captain Cody Cork, Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens, Sergeant First Class Nicole LaTour, Sergeant Decklin Cody, Major Jeffrey O'Brien, Chief Warrant Officer Three Robert Marzahn, Sergeant Benjamin Pennington, Technical Sergeant Tyler Simmons, Captain Curtis Angst, Captain Seth Kowal, Technical Sergeant Ashley Pruitt, Captain Ariana Savino, and Major John Kleiner. All of these service members were killed in action during the height of the conflict. I just wanted to take a moment to remember that this war has not just blown up pipelines in the Middle East and dropped a bunch of bombs on caves. It's also torn apart American families here at home. We should do well to remember that and hope and pray that these are the last lives lost and that a peaceful end to this nightmare can come about soon. The solutions are there. We can end this. We can walk away, admit our mistakes, and move forward. But until then, we can remember the lives lost and pray that there are no more. And with that, let's finish up today with the Intercepted Ghost Net reports. Surprisingly, this week's Thursday radio night check-in was absolutely packed with people, which was awesome to see. I guess the holiday weekend gave some people enough time to work on radio stuff, which is fantastic. I know I myself struggle a lot of time to finish up work early enough to hop on the net myself, but anyway, I saw a lot of new people testing things out, trying new antennas, new rigs, all kinds of stuff, and participating in the Ghost Net for the first time. So, that was really great. Learning new things, keeping skills sharp, and maintaining lines of communication when all other means fail is quite a useful skill to have. We want to be problem solvers, not problem creators, and trying to have more situational awareness even in a grid-down or a more censored location, this is going to be very helpful in the long run. So, that's all I have for today. Thanks for sticking with me, and as usual, all of my research notes and geospatial products can be found at the links below. And for those of you who are looking to be a little bit more prepared during this weekend of potential interesting times, you can download KMZ files of all of my mapping products so that you can have a better picture of your local area just in case you need it. So, for those of you nerds out there running A-Tac or CalTopo or some other kind of geospatial app, I've got plenty of KMZ files that you can load in for free as needed, so it's all there. All of this work could not be possible without those of you who support my endeavors on Patreon, so I cannot thank you guys enough, and I hope that the products that I'm building are useful, if not for now in some cases, then maybe for later on. We'll see. If nothing else, more tutorials are coming down the line, and I think that'll be pretty handy and maybe helpful for many others to have options and capabilities, especially while working through these strange and interesting times in which we live. So, thanks again for watching, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

//The Wire//1900Z February 23, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: SECRET SERVICE NEUTRALIZES GUNMAN AT MAR-A-LAGO. BUILDUP CONTINUES IN MIDDLE EAST AS MASS EVACUATIONS BEGIN. CONFLICT REMAINS INTENSE IN MEXICO.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Mexico: Following yesterday's intense fighting in Jalisco, most airlines have canceled flights out of Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. The main hospital in Guadalajara was evacuated for a few hours, after CJNG forces threatened to attack the facility due to rumors that wounded Federal forces were being treated there. The National Guard base in San Juan de Los Lagos was attacked with explosives (possibly RPGs), which resulted in several casualties. Far to the north, schools throughout Baja and Tijuana have been cancelled for all levels of education until further notice, and various Cartel-affiliated social media pages have declared a 10:00pm curfew for civilians, announcing that anyone caught outside after this hour will be shot. Concerning casualties sustained so far, Government forces report a total of 25x KIA as of this morning, most of which occurred as a result of the attack on the National Guard base. For CJNG, casualties are not known, as they usually withdraw with their wounded/dead without disclosing casualty figures until much later (if at all). Analyst Comment: Officially, the position of the Federal government is that absolutely nothing is happening whatsoever. This morning, President Sheinbaum stated several times that no blockades were in place, no engagements took place at all this morning, and everything is perfectly calm. This is mostly a lie, as multiple arson attacks have been reported this morning, but it's the story that the federales are sticking to. It is true that the knee-jerk response yesterday was an intense flash-in-the-pan, however much more substantial resources are staging throughout the nation, as many different cartels get ready for a protracted fight, if that is the chosen course of action. At lower levels of government, officials are not taking any chances. Authorities being concerned enough to cancel classes and close businesses in Baja is interesting as most people thought that this state was entirely controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel...not CJNG. This also means that conflict is likely to spread throughout the country, not just Jalisco where the violence first began. Cross border-conflict has not yet been observed in American border towns just yet, however with the speed at which hostilities have developed, a hot, shooting war can break out in any location at any time. -HomeFront- Florida: Over the weekend, a suspected assassination attempt was reported at Mar-a-Lago, after an assailant armed with a shotgun and incendiary materials breached the inner perimeter of the compound. Sunday morning, the US Secret Service posted a press statement confirming that one suspect had been killed at Mar-a-Lago after breaching a perimeter fence. Analyst Comment: Due to the sensitivity of the site, zero details have been provided on where the suspect breached the fence, or where the individual was engaged within the compound. No information has been posted regarding the shooter's identity or motive for the attack. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Middle East, wartime preparations continue as before. Meanwhile on the diplomatic front, negotiations between the United States and Iran are scheduled to resume in Geneva on Thursday. Over the weekend, the Iranian diplomatic delegation was presented with a letter from the United States, outlining the proposals for limits on the Iranian missile program. As the Iranians have stated from the very start that their missile program itself is not up for discussion in any way, they returned the letter, reportedly unopened. At the time, most surmised that this was the last chance the Iranians had in avoiding war, and considering that negotiations are back on for Thursday, it's quite possible that future diplomatic endeavors are just efforts to stall for time. The USS *FORD* CSG arrived in the eastern Mediterranean Sea this morning, and if her mission is to provide air defense for the Israeli's she should be in position to do so by this afternoon. Similarly, logistical aircraft have continued pouring into the region. Embassy evacuations continue as well, with American diplomatic stations in Lebanon being evacuated of non-essential personnel overnight. Similar drawdowns have been observed at Al Udeid Airbase, though Sentinel satellite imagery from yesterday indicates there are still many aircraft at this installation. This will very likely change by the next time a satellite pass is conducted, and more aircraft maneuver throughout the region without transmitting their position to the ADS-B feeds that the Pentagon knows everyone is watching. Some of the aircraft that were supposed to be at Al Udeid, were observed on the ground in a completely different location this morning, so the shell game is taking place. There are already enough resources in theater to carry out a protracted air campaign, and every hour more resources are being flown into the region. 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 February 1st through the 7th, 2026. The main focus for this week has been a building and brooding of several more long-term issues around the world, so let's get right to it. Starting off overseas, the negotiations with the Iranians apparently went well, or rather not great, but also not terrible. The first day of negotiation was amiable, and more talks are planned. In terms of the likelihood of another round of American strikes, this is always on the table as the United States is really the one that has the final say on whether or not future targeting is carried out. In the short term, there are probably two flash points to be aware of that might indicate when strikes will take place. One, if the United States thinks that the Iranians are stalling or stringing along the negotiating team without actually ever making any progress towards some sort of compromise, the United States will simply strike the facilities that they've been working on more publicly. Likewise, the Iranians are also between a rock and a hard place because even if they agree to a deal, they're probably going to get struck anyway. So, that will be something to watch for, for sure. Also overseas, something concerning in a vastly different way lies with revelations that have emerged in the United Kingdom this week regarding a series of incidents that took place almost a year ago involving Prime Minister Starmer. Since the justice system in the United Kingdom is extremely protective of accused criminals in nearly all cases, we simply do not know what events transpire until many months later. And this case is no exception, so we'll talk about that in just a moment because this case is becoming just as interesting as the revelations that have come to light within the homeland this week. Around the United States this week, the unrest has continued as before. I know the classic line once again. Now that Minneapolis is ramping down and settling in for the long haul, the organization has been continuing around the nation among far-left activist groups. Make no mistake, even though the b-roll is days old and there aren't any flashy headlines to doom scroll when it comes to the unrest, the situation is not just as dangerous as before, but even more so, especially now that a new demographic is involved, children. Nationwide, school teachers are increasingly becoming involved in getting the children in their classes to take part in anti-ICE demonstrations. And quite a few events like this have come to a head over the past week. Please forgive me for this thrown-together graphic, but I'm currently plotting all of the schools which have gotten their students to protest for the political causes of the teachers. So far, I have geolocated protests taking place in the following cities: Seattle, Auburn, Los Angeles, Menifee, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Austin, Fremont, Louisville, and New York City. And that's just a start. I haven't had enough time to actually drop a point on most of these sites because it's quite literally hundreds of schools around the country. So, this map only shows the more kinetic underage student protests which have either caused damage or resulted in a student being severely injured. All of these locations have been hosted to increasingly more serious indoctrination now that Minneapolis is winding down, and the far-left activist groups know with reasonable certainty that the federal government is not going to target them in any way whatsoever. Just like we observed last week, the state and the local and the federal government all working together to kind of reduce tensions in Minneapolis doesn't really matter when it comes to the activist groups. For a lot of these groups, it is becoming increasingly clear that these organizations perceive that they have achieved victory. The far-left thinks that they have won in Minneapolis, and as such, the funding and resources have continued to flow to other cities nationwide. Whether or not they've actually won in Minneapolis and gotten the federal government to back down, that's up for you to decide. It's It's debatable either way, but what's very clear is that the left thinks they won, and that's an important distinction to make. And now, they are more openly getting children to serve as foot soldiers for their cause, which is a development that has gotten quite serious over the past week. The scale of these underage student protests is no more clearly illustrated than in Salt Lake City, where school teachers are actually directly organizing protests for very young children to take part in during the school day, all without the parents even knowing about it. Other schools around the country are trying to conceal the involvement of the teachers and staff, saying that the students themselves came up with the idea for a walkout protest. However, in many locations, this pretense has been thrown out the window and far-left activist teachers are openly stating that they are running these juvenile protests. However, as serious as this is, it gets worse. In Salt Lake City specifically, middle schoolers have been observed throwing rocks at passing vehicles, smashing windows, and otherwise causing property damage during these walkouts. Children have been led on marches throughout the city over the past few days, which are becoming increasingly more dangerous for all involved. In Nebraska week a juvenile student taking part in an anti-ICE protest outside Fremont High School was hit by a vehicle after running out into traffic to harass a vehicle that was displaying a Trump flag. A similar situation also took place at Heritage High School in Menifee, California, which involved a 15-year-old student ramming a motorcyclist with their vehicle during an anti-ICE protest. In most states, even very young elementary school children are being taught to protest in class by their activist teachers, and the children are actively protesting out next to major highways during recess. All of these incidents over the past few days indicate that the next wave of foot soldier has been selected. Far-left activist groups cannot get the numbers that they need, so they go after the population that cannot consent, which is children. It does not take a crystal ball to see that these incidents will continue to expand and get vastly more serious over the next few weeks. As the winter weather season starts to ease up, activism season will become much more substantial now that the far-left groups have no one to stop them. Remember, a lot of conservative parents got put on no-fly lists and were targeted ruthlessly by the FBI because they were upset at school board meetings. There has been no accountability for this and as such, parents are extremely limited in what options they have to redress their concerns about teachers forcing their children to take part in political protests or be recruited like a child soldier into a political movement. So, over the next few weeks, expect more children to be injured or killed while being encouraged by their teachers to protest out in the street. Not a great outlook, I know, but I'm going to do a little a little research on this throughout the week, so we'll see how things develop from here. But, let's move on to the next topic before I fed posts too hard on this one. Overseas, things are not going so well in jolly old England either, but in a vastly different way. This entire case is a rather unfortunate rabbit hole, and I'm going to drag all of you down here with me, so buckle up. Back in May of 2025, a few people threw Molotovs at Starmer's personal residences, uh targeting several locations and properties that linked to Starmer in some way. At the time of the first attack, it looked like a schitzo or just some kind of dis- gruntled citizen, right? After all, politicians get a lot of heat by being in the public eye, and the security details of world leaders are they're keeping pretty busy these days. There's always some kind of incident like this, so as kinetic as it is, it's not really that remarkable because this stuff this stuff happens all the time. However, in this case, it happened again, and again. On May 8th, 2025, somebody set Starmer's vehicle on fire in Kentish Town. It's not clear as to if the vehicle was actually his or one that he had previously owned. Since in the UK, the license plate database is public record, so you can look up a license plate and see who actually owns that particular uh plate and vehicle. So, it's not clear if somebody just looked up an old license plate and found out that that was Starmer's old car, or if there was something more to it. I'll let you decide what the most likely scenario is because of what happens next. Three days after this attack on Starmer's car, the front door of Starmer's old apartment in Islington was firebombed, and the very next morning, the next day, one of Starmer's old family homes was firebombed as well in a similar manner. Again, at the time this was taking place last year, this seemed like a rather simple crime spree, some political targeting effort by a disgruntled citizen, or something like that. And for many months, this was the predominant theory, until the actual arrest reports became public, and a bit of a pattern emerged. So far, a total of five individuals have been arrested in conjunction with last year's attacks, with the fifth suspect being arrested a couple of days ago. So, the most recent mug shot is not available at present and probably won't be available for a few months. The fourth male who was arrested was not identified because he was not charged with a crime. They're still investigating him though, so I've got him on the slide, but something tells me that I can guess with a pretty good accuracy what these two mug shots would look like. Pardon me if this is a bit of a stretch, but I think we're going to have to go on a little bit of gut instinct here because so far all of the arrests that have been made have resulted in a bit of a pattern, haven't they? If you are unfortunate enough to Google these individuals' names and some of the other photos that I will not be showing of these individuals, you can very clearly discern that all of the suspects so far are male prostitutes, all from Eastern Europe, mostly Ukraine. Now, this begs the rather unfortunate question of why five separate gay Eastern European male prostitutes would know the exact addresses of where Prime Minister Starmer lived. Unlike in America where these things are comparatively easy to find, it's extremely hard to find the exact mailing address or street address of where politicians live, especially the Prime Minister. Granted, I am aware of how the internet works these days. One crazy schizo on the internet with a bone to pick can certainly find pretty much anything they want. But I find it far more likely that the reason this band of merry men knew where Starmer lived is because they had been there before. And hell hath no fury like a gay Ukrainian prostitute scorned, I guess. So, this is where things stand. Not a lot of solid information, but this case also keeps developing every few months, at least. And wouldn't you know it, details about this case always seem to come out right when Starmer is having a rough time with public relations. So, I find this very, very interesting. The UK government is not doing super well right now. They've got a lot of immigration issues, a lot of social dissent. Everyone is very upset and they cannot voice it so much because of again, the crackdown on speech in the UK, which we've covered extensively over the past few years. So yeah, things are not going super well throughout the UK and I find it very interesting that this sort of thing comes to light, especially in the context of the other very compromising documents that have been sweeping the internet for the past few weeks. I am of course referring to the Epstein files, which have resulted in lots of heads of state, lots of very high ranking politicians issuing letters of apology and stepping down there from their positions. So I don't know if this Starmer freakishness is related to any of that stuff, but so far just seems like this is one rather unfortunate case to heap on the pile of terrible that is, you know, the daily lives and the social lives of the political elite. I'm sure all of this is linked together, even if it's just tangential. I mean, the the the biggest significant part of this is really just the fact that stuff like this when it hits the mainstream news and when like the BBC, the state-controlled media of the UK is even allowed to talk about stuff like this, it starts it starts the normies asking a lot of questions and interesting conversations will be had all around over this stuff and especially the Epstein stuff, which we'll talk about next. But we're having to explain this to people who are now just starting to become aware of some of of how the world works in these ways. And a lot of this is very clearly illustrated by the Epstein documents. So what can we say about the latest round of Epstein documents? Well, I'm sure a lot of people have a lot to say about it and a lot of information has been released by the DOJ, but most of it isn't really that useful. Right now, there's also a lot of very misleading information that is saturating the overall database as the Department of Justice released any and every outlandish report that was sent in to the FBI's tip lines regarding Epstein. Many of these reports include very wild claims which are then screenshot by influencers and posted online for engagement farming purposes. So this is a really tough battle we're going to have to wade through for a bit. Same thing with a lot of the other verbage which is being assumed to be code word for something far more sinister. Now there are of course code words in these networks. We got a lot of these code words from the Podesta network from a few years ago, which heavily used a lot of code words and phrases and trigger words and things like that in a lot of those communications, right? And in the Epstein emails, the emails directly to Jeffrey Epstein himself seem to include a lot of these words. For instance, the phrase pizza with grape soda appears a lot in the database, right? And this appears in a very odd context if you read the full email chain where it's mentioned, right? So, you can clearly see that they're talking about something, right? What these code words exactly mean is well, I mean, generally we know what these things mean, but specifically, like combinations like pizza and grape soda, we don't actually know with 100% certainty what Epstein was using that for. We just know parenthetically what the rest of these horrific communities tend to use these words for, right? So, yes, these networks do use code words. We've known this for many, many years. This is a common knowledge kind of thing, right? However, not everything in the Epstein emails is a code for something. As an example, this one email was circulating a few days ago on social media talking about Epstein referencing muffins or the the word muffin somehow being a code word for something. But, if you actually search for more context throughout the database, you can find out that turns out the freak actually likes real muffins for breakfast. And thus, this line of inquiry is probably not worth more investigative effort, especially now with other more damning stuff in the files. The more ridiculous and out of context reports are absolutely diverting attention away from more concerning and legitimate information in the database. I think they're doing this intentionally. They dump all the files, millions of pages of things that don't matter so as to obfuscate the stuff that does matter in the files, such as travel dates, names, and associations that can be cross-referenced with other prior court documents, all of which will take some time to investigate. Due to Epstein himself being barely literate in his own emails, which could be intentional, it's it's going to be challenging to use advanced tools to fully analyze this this data set. And millions of pages of documents are going to take years to investigate by hand. Otherwise, releasing millions of pages of documents all at once results in a few different scenarios taking place in the short term, right? Everyone now treats the Epstein files like a crystal ball. They see what they want to see, and everyone sees something different. Supporters of one particular politician will look at the documents and say that the files exonerate them, while opponents will say that the same documents implicate them. This has already happened with one of the bigger names in the Epstein files, President Trump, right? President Trump himself says that, "Hey, we released all these Epstein documents, and these documents prove that I'm innocent of of any of this stuff." Whereas other people say, "No, these documents directly implicate you in a lot of stuff, right?" I have not dug into that enough to where I would feel comfortable pointing fingers in very specific ways at the moment. I just generally think that every elected official is going to be implicated in some way with this. I don't care how innocent they seem. You got to understand, this was an intelligence operation. This was not just, you know, an entertainment weekend. This was a very substantial network, and I think everybody's got their hands in it, right? Irrelevant and misleading documents aside, once most of serious investigations get underway, they don't rely on simply hitting control F and searching for keywords in the database, the picture's going to become much more clear. As it currently stands, an awful lot of people are implicated or compromised in some way at this point, to the level that even the normies are out there starting to understand to just how compromised very high-ranking politicians are. In exactly what manner, by whom, and with what evidence, and what what blackmail is is being used specifically, we don't know yet. We may never know in many cases, but the investigations continue nonetheless. We have to remember the larger context here, right? This guy, Jeffrey Epstein, and his staff ran a vast degenerate empire that the world will never forget. And if we hope to shut down other similar networks to the Epstein organization, hanging on the every word of social media influencers for what is important or damning is probably not a wise move in the long run. The Epstein files are a lightning rod topic. So, you're not going to see say the RAND Corporation come out and write a report on Epstein. You're not going to see CISA come out. You're not going to see any of these big think tanks come out and conduct and fund more investigative efforts that the FBI is not doing because the Epstein network, well, for a lot of that, everyone got away except for Epstein, right? Well, even that's debatable these days because everybody's thinking he's still alive. But, you see the idea here. But, anyway, this is why you're seeing most of this being run by the internet annons because they're the only ones with any sort of ability to actually talk about this stuff because, well, guess what? A lot of people who are in the public eye, their friends are were friends with Epstein. That's what makes it very hard to investigate. It would be very, very nice to get some six-figure funding behind any kind of investigative effort on looking into what Jeffrey Epstein's network did after Epstein stepped aside from the operation either by incarceration or death or whatever. That would be very, very interesting to do, right? You've got protesters in Minneapolis that are being given five, six figures to go stand in the street with signs, but yet anybody who wants to look into the Epstein thing is it's all hushed tones and private DMs from people who say, you know, I'd love to help you, man, but I can't have my name associated with anything Epstein because uh this, that, or the other, right? That's why this Epstein thing is such a big elephant in the room because a lot of people are implicated in it and everybody who's implicated in it who's powerful got away with it. We've got a lot of work to do because as disturbing as some of these Epstein emails are, especially knowing what's behind the emails and what they're talking about and what they're setting up, just looking through the looking glass at this organization and the horrific stuff they did, just know that the really horrific stuff probably wasn't written down in his email account, at least not this email account. Text messages, private couriers, names, dates, odometer readings, thermal heat signatures of Epstein Island that can be detected with agricultural satellites. All of this other stuff that's not being released by the DOJ are critical parts of understanding how Epstein's network operated after this hit the media and the rats scurried to create their own networks. From my wheelhouse, I'm focused on my own investigations on the more national security angle, such as the politicians and military decision-makers that are being blackmailed by foreign governments or actually most of just one government. But anyway, we'll see what names, dates, and locations will come to light over the next few weeks. It's been a really heavy week all around. A lot of very heavy data stuff, not a whole lot of way of encapsulating this in a very succinct way today, I'm afraid. And as a result, that's pretty much all I have at the moment. I'm sorry, I wanted to talk about a lot more because it's been a really crazy week and it's just it's just been too overwhelming too much to handle, honestly. Just with the amount of stuff that's happened. Even working really long hours every single day barely scratches the surface with most of this stuff. And I've also been working a lot of overtime to get some of the more educational content produced for those of you who don't really like the more current event news report kind of things. So, things take a lot of time these days and time is in short supply. But that's okay. Better some limited progress than no progress at all, right? And speaking of running out of time, I was only able to catch the tail end of the Ghost Net this week as I was tied up with a bit of video editing, but I was still able to get a few of you out there exchanging information and keeping the net going. The more routine and mundane stuff like working on radios often elicits a lot of groaning from those who don't enjoy such topics. I know I'm that way myself. But at the end of the day, having a nationwide network of people all linked together over the airwaves at all times, even during a crisis, that's a very powerful and reassuring foundation to lean on. So, let's keep at it and continue to do good stuff with it. We may not be able to do very much about the horrific news of the day, but that also doesn't mean that we can do nothing. Sometimes, when there isn't any favorable course of action that is feasible, the best option is to buy time, learn new skills, build new things, and most importantly, keep as many options open as possible for as long as possible. Right now, we may not be able to do very much at all as a citizenry about what's in the Epstein files, for instance, but I can certainly learn how to work a radio. I can certainly plot critical information on a map and start mapping out some of this stuff. I can certainly go for a hike with a heavy backpack, and I can certainly hit the gym every day. That stuff may seem meaningless right now, but over time, these skills will be needed. We're in it for the long haul, and there's plenty of work that needs to be done. We cannot hope to tackle the big issues if we can't handle the little issues first. So, let's work on that stuff, and over time, let's raise the bar of expectations for the average American. We can't expect things to get better if we don't raise our expectations of what it means to be an American, and we can't raise our expectations of others unless we raise the expectations of ourselves first. So, let's get after it and do the best we can. And on the research and data side of things, all of the source material for everything I've mentioned today can be found on my Obsidian page, where a bunch of other links can be found as well. I know it's kind of difficult to find my work sometimes because I work on a lot of separate projects that are hard to put in one place, but I'm making some improvements on how to more easily get the resources that anyone might need. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for sticking around. I really do appreciate it, 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 Until Update for August 17th through the 23rd, 2025. Things are moving forward at quite a rapid pace, so we've got a lot to cover this week. And let's get right to it. The flavor this week has been immigration, both at home and overseas. Around the United States, there have been many developments in the field of legal and illegal immigration and the challenges that the United States is working through on that front. and our friends across the pond are also coming to grips with some of the issues that they face that are very similar to what we're working through here in the United States with regards to legal immigration. The issue of legal versus illegal immigration is a very hard topic to broach. A lot of people are very much in favor of legal immigration but are not in favor of illegal immigration. Some people support legal and illegal immigration and other people don't support legal or illegal immigration. So, it's a hard topic to broach. It's it's kind of a a very divisive issue obviously and the one thing that unites both sides of the argument unfortunately is narcotics and crime. So the United States is doing what they can to try to combat that sort of thing. And we'll dive more into this highly divisive issue in just a moment. Similar story in the United Kingdom. The UK is facing, I would say, more more of an advanced civilizational crisis with regards to population shift and population displacement. So, we'll have to get more into that in just a moment uh to kind of understand why some of these flagging operations are very very important in the United Kingdom. But suffice it to say, a lot of these immigration problems are coming to light. And the seriousness of immigration issues, as they are very very closely linked to counter narcotics operations, has been very sharply demonstrated this week. Once again, the classic line must be uttered. The past 48 hours has been host to significant naval activity. Over the past few days, the US Navy has deployed significant naval assets, all with the goal of taking up station off the coast of Venezuela to combat drug trafficking. Originally, the US Navy, the White House, and the Pentagon all announced this effort as being really just a task force of three destroyers, which is a fairly common thing. It's not really a new thing. The US Navy, and the US Coast Guard have been conducting patrols of the Caribbean Sea and, you know, down off the coast of Narco land for a long time. So, that's not really new. What is new is sending an ARG or an amphibious ready group. Whenever a few thousand Marines embark on a MW and head down south, well, we should probably pay attention to this quite a bit. Now, this deployment by the Euima ARG has been sort of up in the air. The Euima was originally scheduled to go to sixfleet AO, which is the Med and uh Europe, right? So, she was supposed to go on a regular deployment there, but now recent statements over the past couple of days have made it sound like she's going down south to Central or South America. So, this is exactly the kind of deception operation I would expect if we are trying to put boots on ground in Venezuela, for instance. Again, right now, that's speculation. There's been no talk of that whatsoever. But, you can't ignore a few thousand Marines on board a flattop going down to uh Central America. So, we've got enough resources down there to uh put up a pretty good fight if if a war were to kick off. It could just be intimidation. It could just be a standard routine deployment kind of thing. So, I don't want to raise any alarm bells unjustly. However, we've got to keep this in mind. Uh, she was supposed to go to Europe and now at the last minute, all we're changing deployments, right, to go down to South America. And if you're trying to keep the cartel guessing, right, then that's exactly what you would do. Also, what you would do is send a task force of three destroyers down there to, you know, allegedly in heavy air quotes combat uh ships at sea, right? conduct a visit board search and seaure or VBSS operations when really the Eegis ships are down there to provide missile defense. We saw the exact same thing happen in the Middle East. Remember a couple of months ago we saw that oh there just so happened to be one day like three or four aircraft carriers right within range of anything that might go wrong. So the same kind of flavor certainly appears to be undertaken right now in the Atlantic. What is going to happen? I don't know. It could just be a standard deployment or a show of force. The White House loves their shows of force, don't they? So, it could just be a posturing thing, but something to keep keep an eye on over the next few days. You'll probably see me writing quite a bit about this. And I'm going to be extra attentive to look for any signs of largecale conflict or some kind of action down there. So, as we can see from the overall strategic movement, things are getting pretty serious when it comes to counter cartel and counter narco operations and more importantly, how these are tied to immigration issues here in the United States. So here at home in the United States, we have had a lot of kinetic events occur this week, but the one that I wanted to mention is the announcement, the recent announcement by the White House that the National Guard is going to be deployed to 19 states now uh to assist with immigration issues, to assist with crime initiatives and so on. As of right now when I'm recording this, I don't have a whole lot of details on what's going on with this, but I do have the list of states which are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. So again, 19 states where National Guard soldiers are going to be activated federally, I'm guessing, for anti-rime initiatives and to assist with immigration efforts. Once again, very few details. I'm very curious as to see what title orders these guys are going to be on because as we can see these are mostly conservative states. So I don't know if the governors are going to be the in the chain of command here or if this is a federal deployment. I'll know I'm sure by the time this brief comes out but this is just something to keep in mind. The total number of soldiers deployed is going to be around 1,700. So we're not talking a whole lot. But if we remember from the COVID era when a lot of National Guard uh deployments were occurring, what we saw is just a dozen soldiers here, a dozen soldiers there, maybe a hundred tops in this one city, and then suddenly they got a lot bigger. So, same thing with the whole deployment to DC post J6, right? That was a a a thing where they tried to hide the numbers a lot. I'm not saying the two these, you know, really sort of nefarious kind of historical things are linked to what's going on now, but it's something to keep an eye on because 1700 can become 17,000 really quickly and nobody would know because they're going off of the old numbers. So, I don't know. It's something to keep an eye on. It's interesting how we've gone from Washington DC still being a crimeridden hell hole just with a lot of uniformed guys walking around and now we've expanded to the entire United States, right? Things are so much up in the air these days, but for right now, at this snapshot in time, President Trump has stated that Chicago is next. They're going to deploy National Guard to Chicago. And after Chicago, they're going to go to New York. That's the story as of right now. And then now we've learned that it's actually 19 states, none of which include New York or Illinois. So, I don't know if we're going to add New York and Illinois to this list to become 21 states. I I don't know. Either way, we're just going to have to see how this works out, but rest assured, I am going to be watching this quite carefully. Things are changing by the day, and we're just going to have to take things as they come. And speaking of the whole uh immigration issue, I wanted to issue a brief update to the Chadari family uh smuggling operation, human trafficking, child slavery operation in Omaha, Nebraska. So, as of uh yesterday, a couple of local news media groups have discovered that two of the four hotels have been closed down, or at least they had, you know, law enforcement closed for investigation signs on the front doors of these hotels. Zero communication, of course, from the owners of the hotels because the owners of the hotels are in prison right now. But the hotels that were closed were the New Victorian and the American. Uh, however, the other two, they're owned by the same people and the same family. They seem like they're still open. It's hard to say. They may have been closed overnight. If the first two are closed, I would assume the second two are going to be closed as well. But one interesting detail that came out from the local um news media talking about this is of course the news media, local local news stations especially are going to come at this from a specific angle. And the angle that the news media was coming at this story from is the customer service impact to this. So really the local news was focusing not on the fact that children were being held as slaves at these hotels. They kind of ignore that part. But what they are focusing on is the inconvenience of people showing up to check into their hotel room or being evicted from their hotel rooms wi with zero notice. Right? So they're talking about a lot of that, which of course should not be surprising to anyone. But one detail that they kind of passively let on is that a lot of these hotels were used as long-term residences by people who could not get lodging any other way. This by itself is ordinarily not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of people are living in hotels nowadays simply because the situation is pretty dang desperate in some places around the country. So that's not a any kind of nefariousness on its own. What is nefarious is the fact that you've got a lot of long-term customers and a lot of long-term residents at a hotel where there is child slavery taking place. That is very suspicious because this could be a much larger slavery child trafficking network than we knew that it was, right? Surely people who lived there long term would know whether or not there's kids being employed at this place to clean rooms and stuff like that. So much more investigation is needed. So at least the feds are doing something in this case thankfully for once. But again, it's a day late and a dollar short, right? This is almost 3 weeks after the initial arrests, right? The fact that there were not closed signs on the hotel the very day the raids occurred is disturbing. But three weeks later, uh hopefully not that many more children were trafficked in that, you know, 2 or 3 week time frame. And hopefully the other two uh sites that we've identified and the whole world has identified will be shut down fairly soon as well. But no guarantees on any of that. So I guess we're just going to have to wait and see. monitor these kind of things because unfortunately nowadays the average citizen has to advocate and urge the feds to actually arrest someone when a crime is committed. So that's just kind of the way that it is and a lot of times there's not a whole lot the average citizen can do. So getting down to the actual regions today, this is more of a nationwide concern, but I did want to remind everyone that the FDA recall on the radioactive shrimp has expanded because of course it has. This is of course a shell game of food distribution. So the company PT Bahari Makmmore Sajati is actually known in the US as BMS foods which is an Indonesian company and they sell raw shrimp or frozen shrimp to two other companies at least two other companies in this case Southwind Foods and Beaver Street Fisheries and those companies repackage that shrimp as their own brand. Well, this becomes a problem when four shipping containers full of shrimp uh were detected to be radioactive or contaminated with the radioactive isotope cesium 137. Cesium 137 is of course uh produced as a byproduct of nuclear fishision. And it is of course something that you would not typically want in your seafood. Now, just to hammer home the importance of this, I don't really care about the frozen shrimp. The frozen shrimp are irrelevant to be honest because the FDA has stated that the shrimp themselves were not necessarily contaminated. They're potentially contaminated. What was contaminated? The shipping containers that these shrimp were shipped in, which is the more concerning part because four shipping containers were discovered at the same time at four different ports, Miami, Los Angeles, Savannah, and Houston, and all four were radioactive. There could be more containers than that. They're really keeping tight lipped on this sort of thing because this is very obviously a very big counterterrorism concern. So bottom line, a food contamination issue could have just accidentally highlighted the concern that maybe some radiological supplies were smuggled into the United States or at least were attempted to be. There is some debate about this uh quite a bit as to whether or not you would find cesium 137 in say something like a dirty bomb or some kind of radioactive contamination. It's hard to say. There's a lot of back and forth on that, but just speaking very generally, when a shipping container shows up in one American port and it's radioactive, that's a little concerning because you're wondering what was in that shipping container before, what was it next to? But when four shipping containers, at least four, uh, shipping containers show up at four different ports all around the United States, that's a little bit more of a concern. Now, just to balance this out, I know that a lot of people are going to freak out uh once they discover once they actually read the story and find out that it's not the shrimp, it's the containers. Once the social media influencer circle reads the articles for once, people are going to get spun up over this. Uh, and it's interesting, but radioactive stuff tries to come into the United States a lot. So, I don't know. I'm I would be very very interested to hear a press statement by uh Customs and Border Patrol on this to see what they've got to say and what they're willing to say. And I think they should be asked the questions of what's the deal with this, you know, what's the history? What's this company's deal? And so on. I mean, if it's just a case of unsanitary conditions like the FDA is saying, okay, fine. But I want to hear that from the people who know what a dirty bomb looks like, not the FDA, right? They've clearly isolated the isotope, which is not that hard to do. A lot of the handheld scanners that are used by customs to scan stuff for, you know, contamination, they can do this on the fly, but sampling the actual radioactive particles, the dust or whatever is on these containers would would be helpful. And they can definitely isolate where that source came from. So, if it was part of say like the Fukushima leak from a few years ago, just some kind of contamination tied to that, that would be very nice to know. But just be wary about what you see on social media over the next few days because I guarantee you people are going to start freaking out about this. And uh really it's just one of those things where more temperance is needed. Sort of in the same vein of panic is the revelation in Washington DC the other day that there are 55 million visa holders in the United States and the White House is looking at investigating all of those visa holders for potential immigration fraud like visa overstays. That's a really common thing. And as one might imagine, uh, this has really resulted in the general public saying, "How many visa holders are there?" Yeah, it turns out 55 million is kind of a lot. Uh, so the White House has been really kind of trying to avoid this question, I think, because the White House is most certainly all about legal immigration, right? That's what the the Trump administration is very much uh hanging their hat on. A lot of conservative power players are also uh really trying to focus on halting the illegal immigration while bringing forth more legal immigration. And it turns out that 55 million legal visitors to the United States is still a pretty big number. So I just wanted to remind everyone that the US population is around 340 million, at least that's what they're publicly stating it to be based on the last census data. And if you add on 55 million people to that, that's a pretty big percentage as far as what illegal immigration is. I mean, if there's 55 million legal visitors here that could get visas, then you would have to assume that there are more illegal immigrants, right? That's a pretty big revelation. And since that just came out yesterday, I think a lot of people are trying to come to terms with it and figure out what this actually means because yeah, it's a big number. And uh it turns out that this is a probably a much larger problem than we had originally previously identified. And that brings us to Florida, more specifically Mr. Hargender Singh and his recent arrest for his involvement in causing the crash that killed three people on the Florida Turnpike a couple of weeks ago. I have been investigating Mr. Singh here just as a very interesting thought experiment. And it turns out, as you could probably assume very easily based on the story, that Mr. seeing is not at the center of this uh story. So, some of you have already seen it, but I'm not going to show my full homework on this just yet because a little bit of discretion is necessary when tracking some of these networks. But the short version of this is that Mr. Singh is not the center of this. Harender Singh worked for a company called White Hawk Carriers, which can be traced back to one Navnet Cower who is probably acting as a registered agent service. So once you investigate Navni Cower a little bit, you can find out that this individual, which I'm assuming is a female because most of the names I searched came up as female. So I'm just going to call her a she. But this individual, it turns out to be the owner and registered agent of a lot of very similar companies that are nearly identical to White Hawk carriers, all of which are registered at a different address, which is usually a residential address. So what's going on here? Uh, this is seems like an interesting data point, but what's going on here? Well, you might be tempted to think that Miss Navit Cow here is the center kingpin in all of this. That's probably not it. She is probably just the paperwork boss, right? She's probably just the person who is registering these companies for illegal immigrants because even in California, some of these people who may have criminal records don't want to be popping up in LLC databases. So, that's probably what's going on here. I have a lot more evidence to back that up, but it's it's a fairly common thing to see. I know that this link analysis chart here looks a little bit busy and you can kind of see where Harender Singh is in this whole thing and Miss Nav Cower here is the that green dot which is at the center of all these other LLC's and other locations and businesses and things like that. So, there are links between a lot of these and I am currently developing this out. This is just my homework as of a few days ago, but I just wanted to show you that this is much larger than just one guy in a truck, which makes sense at face value, right? But in this case, you might be expecting it to have like a CEO and then underneath the CEO, you've got different branch divi division heads and then maybe underneath that you've got uh different uh parts of the company all with co-workers and it's, you know, a nice neat hierarchy. Well, in the case of a lot of these truck driving networks, they're not you really have to track them using the mentality of counterinsurgency. Now, of course, not all of these people are terrorists, right? But when it comes to tracking them and trying to develop out these networks, you can very clearly see these are cellular networks. There's one group of people that is not connected to another group of people, but they're linked by a common point such as a registered agent. So even if these companies are not talking to one another, they're all still managed by a central point. And who's controlling that central point, right? I want to know who Navnet Cower is working for. She may not be working for anybody. She may just be opportunistic because a lot of these uh companies I'm finding are registered in the exact same building. Like if you were to look at the building on Google Maps, across the street is an immigration services office. So something that helps people get citizenship. So the bottom line is that this is a very interesting investigative line of effort because we want to know who's accountable, right? Obviously Harender Singh here, he's been arrested. He's going to jail for a long time because he killed three people. But the next question you must ask, especially if you live in a society and you want accountability, is who did he work for? Well, he worked for White Hawk Carriers. But did he? This could just be his own LLC that he's got registered through somebody else and he's just acting alone. My own investigation seems like that's not really the case. A lot of these are linked together. But in any case, this one guy's incident has identified and really brought to light just how pervasive this problem is. Now, I don't want to make it out to look like this is some kind of grand new revelation. No, there are a lot of people, especially people who are in the trucking industry, who have been shouting and screaming about this for many, many, many years. It's just nobody's listened to them because logistics is boring, right? And nobody cares about the issues of trucking, even though they absolutely should. So, please don't think I'm stumbling upon something grand and un unrevealed. No, this is this has already been wellnown for a very long time. It's just that now is a good time because we're looking at all of these other immigration issues. Now is a good time to reassess what's going on here because now people for once in their life are actually paying attention to what's going on around them. And unfortunately, I think there's also a lot of information manipulation. A lot of people will point and shout and say, "Oh, look at this guy. Look how evil he is. He's just a terrible, terrible person." Right? But then they don't go the next step further and say, "All right, well, we can hold this guy accountable." Sure, that's easy enough. But can we hold accountable the registered agent who is breaking even California law by registering a bunch of businesses in her name that she doesn't own? You see, it's just a paper mill, right? It's just an LLC paper mill is a shell game. That's what it is. And we we want to hold the guy accountable because we've got a mean looking photo of him. But nobody wants to go to the next step and say, "Well, let's dismantle this network here. Let's look into these addresses. This this guy's address is listed right on the California Secretary of State's website. It's not like it's that hard. And the feds have other databases. You can look and see how many people with visas, how many how many visa holders listed as their mailing address, the same address used for this guy. This is simple stuff. So, we've definitely got to to keep uh keep pressure on this sort of thing because unfortunately there is only so much the average citizen can do. I can sit here and talk all day long on YouTube and I can sit here and show you all of my research, but I have no power at the end of the day. I can't go out and issue an arrest warrant for all of these people I've identified. I would like to, but I can't. I don't work for government. And we are beholden to an attorney general somewhere or a federal agency somewhere to actually do their job. And so far, in most cases, the same people who have been employed in government forever are still employed under the Trump administration, which is why you see a lot of times not a whole lot being done. In this case, one guy was arrested. That is fantastic. This is good. We can give him his due process and we can he can explain himself in court, but I would also personally like Miss Need Cower to see the inside of a courtroom and explain why she's registering so many businesses to illegal immigrants in her state. So anyway, this shows how spicy things have have gotten around the United States, but things have gotten even spicier uh in the United Kingdom across the pond. So I of course mean the flagging operations that have taken place throughout uh England over the past few days. This has been rapidly become a very big social thing that has occurred throughout the country. And for an American audience, I thought I would explain just a little bit. Throughout most of Europe, it's fairly odd. It's fairly strange to see national flags flying really anywhere. Uh the concept of having your national flag displayed like at your front door or something like that, that's definitely an American thing. The concept of patriotism as Americans know it just does not apply anywhere else in the world or actually it does. It's just not Western Europe. So, Western uh Europe, Eastern Europe as well tend to not have like national flags out uh as much as you might expect. And in the UK, things have gotten quite severe over the past few years with regards to what is considered to be a hate crime. So much so that flying the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom, uh displaying that flag at say like a Hindu cultural event, that can actually get you arrested, right? much more so the flag of England which is the St. George's Cross which not only conveys the idea of the English people, right? But also there's a saint involved, right? So a Christian component to this is uh equally uh forbidden in many many circumstances in the UK unfortunately. And over the past few days, a huge and I mean huge effort has been undertaken to conduct flagging operations, which is probably the best way to describe it. And what this is is super simple. It's literally just putting the English flag up in England. That's it. That's what this is. Uh some people have taken to graffiti, so painting what they call zebra crossings, pedestrian crossings, right, with red paint to make the pedestrian crossings look like little St. George's flags. So, you can kind of understand how that's a little bit more secret, but generally speaking, one of the primary ways that the British people are showing acts of resistance is simply putting up their own na nation's flag within their own nation. Now, again, to an American audience, this seems incredibly sad. Uh, and it may be, but I would rather focus on the the good part of this, right? So, there's a lot of people who are trying to do the right thing and inspire and bring a lot of hope to the English people and potentially facing arrest or great violence to do so. A few flagging uh teams have been roughed up pretty bad when they get caught. And one guy was hit in the head uh injured pretty severely last night. And Steven is just north of London where again he's trying to conduct flagging in an area and someone threw a Molotov cocktail at him, but it hit him right in the head. So pretty pretty violent sort of thing. You know, the British people are having to risk imprisonment and serious bodily harm just to put up their own nation's flag. And it's a good thing that we're starting to see this level of resistance come out. I think resistance to what exactly? I don't know if you can even define it. Just just resistance to all the badness of the world. Uh, one of the ways to do that is to bring a sense of shared unity and shared national identity because the United Kingdom, much like the United States, is facing an identity crisis. Theirs is much worse than ours, of course. And one of the ways that you can start to identify what does it mean to be an Englishman? What does it mean to be a Scott? What does it mean to be Welsh? Right? Well, the land of Albon is uh figuring this out right now. And they're going to have to figure it out over the next few years, too. This is one of those things that is within the realm of uh the English to start to bring to the table. It's peaceful, doesn't hurt anybody, and it's less it's less vandalism than is uh has been conducted by official government agencies to plaster rainbow flags and all other kinds of paraphernellia all over government buildings. So basically, there's no way to complain about this that doesn't make you sound crazy because there's the flag of India and Pakistan being flown over government buildings. So, this is one of those things that's very innocent and harmless and even the most hardline uh immigration supporter can't really have an avenue of approach for attacking people who want to put up their own flag in their own nation. So, it's an easy thing to do and it is a point of shared unity which is a good thing to see. So, for once ending on a positive note, maybe not a positive context, but a positive note and I think that's a great thing to see. So, good luck to to our friends across the pond and we will see how this works out over the next few days and weeks. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Let's wrap things up again with the intercepted ghost net reports. Again, another good week. A lot of people uh starting to use the ghost net for exchanging information and doing testing and use a more off-grid manner of communicating. Fantastic to see. These things are very important. Again, the context of uh satellite communication devices such as Starlink and a lot of the direct to cell satellite stuff that's being worked on by major cellular carriers. All of that stuff is good and and absolutely uh necessary to see. But we also want to have a backup, don't we? And radio is one of those ways, especially HF radio is one of those ways to communicate over very long distances with potentially hundreds or thousands of people with nobody in between and nobody really practically being able to jam it either. The ghost net, for example, uh has been jammed quite a lot, both intentionally and unintentionally, and the network hasn't really suffered that much for it. It's still quite effective. It still works. And it may not be perfect. It may be very antiquated, very hard to use, very expensive, and there's a lot of uh cultural problems too within radio, but this is still one line of effort that we can do, one thing in our lives that we can actually control somewhat. And it's a good way to make sure that we can talk to whoever we want to with nobody being able to stop us. So, thank you for all of you who make the ghost net a great thing to see. It would not be what it is without all of you contributing to it and using it and finding it to be a useful thing. Otherwise, it's just me, a crazy dude on the internet with a frequency, and that's not helpful for everybody. But all of you have taken this project and run with it. And now the whole thing is running semi-autonomously, right? I don't have to issue reminders or do anything myself. It just it just flows, right? And that's a good thing to see. It will get better over time. I'm working on the next version of the plan right now. And I I really hope that over the next year we can incorporate some of the more nonrai-based uh stuff into the plan to make it a little bit easier for people to communicate using different methods. I'll just leave it at that. So, thank you again for all of your support. Uh here are the sources as usual. And of course, you can uh get clickable links and uh more information from my Obsidian page. But that's pretty much all I have for today. Thanks again, and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for April 20th through the 26th, 2025. It's been a busy week as usual, so let's get right to it. Starting off with the global overview here on the home front. Most of the concerns this week have been really related to various immigration issues such as a couple of judges who are arrested for aiding and abetting illegal operations. And the fallout from that will probably be a little bit more concerning as time goes on, but we'll get to that in a moment. Overseas, various diplomatic efforts continue via the pen and the sword, depending on where you're at in the world. Diplomatic negotiations continue with regards to the war in Ukraine. As things are happening rather quickly with that conflict, higher and higher levels of diplomatic activities are being conducted. For instance, President Trump met with Ukrainian leader Zalinski at the Pope's funeral and American diplomat Steve Woodco has been taking part in various peace talks and uh negotiation efforts in Moscow over the past few weeks. Nothing really solid either way though. It it does look like we're entering the final stages of the war when diplomatic activities are starting to become a little bit more common and the restrictions and face saving activities of the past few years have kind of fallen away. Now we're just getting essentially down to brass tax with this. It will probably take a couple of more weeks for things to reach a good point of stability, but right now Russia is at the table, Ukraine is at the table, and the United States is kind of facilitating the whole thing. NATO is keeping quiet as they probably should at the moment and we're actually starting to make good progress by getting all of the belligerents involved in this. So when it comes to things like this, peace is very very close, but it can also be very very far away. So we will have to see how things shake out. But right now things are tenuous at best, but it's uh it's continuing. Diplomacy is continuing which is probably a good thing. Similar story with the Iranians. really nothing of of note has come from the past few weeks of talks, negotiations, rhetoric, all that kind of stuff. There have been some casual remarks and rumors, but for the most part, there really hasn't been any major development there. Same thing in Yemen. The United States is continuing to bomb pretty much everything there is in Yemen. I will mention that there are local rumors uh or at least there are statements being made that the actual Yemeni government as in not the Houthis like the actual elected quote unquote legitimate if you want to call them that government of Yemen is attempting to take on the Houthis with the sort of passive help of the United States along with Saudi Arabia and all the other nations that are involved in this conflict. I don't know how legitimate that is. We're talking maybe 30,000 20,000 at best of uh Yemeni citizens who are not Houthi who are not ethnically Houthi and they don't really control hardly anything. They're just out in the eastern part of the country whereas the capital city all the major ports they're all controlled by the Houthis who control the country. So this really gets way down into the weeds and it's not super critical to understand the the minute details of this to understand the larger picture which is that conflict continues in Yemen. The United States is losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drones because of Houthies keep shooting them down. So, you know, the United States military is learning a lot of defense lessons here and I would be very curious from a more doctrinal standpoint the lessons that are being learned in Yemen. But so far, the status quo remains more or less in the Far East. The various retaliatory actions undertaken by China with regards to American trade and the tariffs that they are potentially facing. These efforts continue. This situation deserves a lot more time than I can give to it today, but both the United States and China might be speaking past each other and not necessarily to each other with with regards to what's actually happening in the diplomatic space on this one. What I mean by that is the United States is speaking to China and is approaching this issue purely from an economic situation, purely from a fairness, from a tax, from a tariff perspective, whereas China is speaking a different language on on their outlook on the world. So the Chinese economy while it is not purely a communist sort of Soviet Union style economy, it's not that it's definitely something different. However, we always have to remember that China is in fact a communist nation. The Chinese Communist Party is running the country, right? So you can't entirely say that the Chinese economy is a free economy. It's most certainly not. Now, it may not be as strict as the Soviet Union was back in the day, but still it's uh it's hard to get any sort of reliable economic data out of China because again, they are a very much closed society. They have a lot of closed cities. It's, you know, they've they've brought the era of secrecy to their modern economy and it's really hard to determine how an economic trade dispute will impact China. People will argue about this till they're blew in the face, but the bottom line for now is that things are not as simple as they seem. I'll just I'll just leave it like that. That China may be approaching this whole trade dispute from a more military angle than the United States is, even though the United States is most certainly trying to treat this tariff situation as a sort of soft embargo. So, there's a little bit of military uh tactics going on here, a little bit of military strategy sprinkled over the top of what most people seem to think is purely an economic thing. And it's not a purely economic thing. And because of that, it's uh complicated. And it's really hard to describe both what is actually happening and what is going to happen. So something to keep in mind for the future, but for now we're just going to have to leave it there. And finally, in India and Pakistan in the Kashmir region, it would seem that war is most certainly on the menu at the moment. Whether or not straightup hostilities will commence again like in 2019 is hard to determine at the moment. But right now the diplomatic situation definitely seems worse than in 2019 when the fighting flared up in Kashmir after a period of lull and a sort of tepid peace. Right now the diplomatic situation is much worse. India and Pakistan have traded much u more increasingly serious rhetoric over the years. So now we're kind of at the moment where we're just kind of waiting to see how India and Pakistan go at it. So that's pretty much all I wanted to focus on this week for the global overview. Let's move over to the strategic movement. Again, very little change. The Truman carrier strike group is still uh cutting circles in the Red Sea along with the Carl Vincent in the Gulf of Aiden. And the Nimits is somewhere in the Pacific just like usual. No change from last week. Everyone's still kind of doing their their thing. The new addition this week is of course the Indian aircraft carrier, the Vicrant. I'm not sure if it would qualify as a carrier strike group. It it appears to doctrinally be so, but I'm not entirely sure about their capabilities. Either way, they're off the coast of Pakistan right now. We could see them via satellite imagery and but yeah, it seems like there are military drills, very serious military drills underway in Pakistan and India along the border. That's kind of how this conflict has worked out for the most part over the past few years. So, I'm not entirely certain if the Vicrant is on an operational deployment or if this is just a show of force. So, it's one of those things where India can easily one up Pakistan in that regard with regards to military force. So, that's pretty much it for strategic movement. Moving to the kinetic activities tracker for the past seven days. I'm just going to start covering the past week or so we don't overload with all of the icons on the map. For those of you who have not uh checked it out so far, if you're wanting a deeper dive into what I'm doing with this mapping project, I just put out last night a video explaining all of the little details or at least most of the major details that I'm kind of working on with regards to this mapping project. Those of you who watch the video will also know that I launched a tipline system so that you can contribute to this data project if you wish. There are a series of tip lines. If you want to submit a report of something, you can do so. It's very easy to do. It may be a little bit longer than you you might be used to. But for those of you who want to send me something, make me aware of a situation or maybe something that I didn't see or didn't cover. You know, I'm I'm only one person here, right? So, I can't have eyes and ears everywhere. So, if you see something that I maybe missed or think I might be interested in, you can certainly submit it to me via the tip lines. But again, a longer explanation is in that video I dropped last night. For this week, most of the new icons are clustered in New York City, specifically Manhattan. So, let's go ahead and jump to the specific regions and let's talk about what happened in New York this week for a bit. It's been fairly kinetic. It's again protest season, so we're starting to see some of these uh climate groups, these uh anti- Doge or anti-Eon Musk groups come out. Uh I don't know how well funded they are, but they are starting to conduct a few more operations this time of year. And this week is no exception. And in this case, it's rather interesting. Something to to take note of is that a lot of these protest movements are not entirely easy to determine what exactly they are protesting. So just running down the list, the Trump Tower was vandalized by a guy going in spray painting something, getting his picture taken as usual. There was a protest on Billionaire's Row, specifically outside of Bill Aman's apartment building. He has been targeted by a few groups over the past few weeks. It's been more along the lines of a long-term siege kind of thing, but every now and then they'll go and they'll protest at his uh his residence along with a few other people. It's a much larger effort than just one guy, but he's kind of the the main face of this. And finally, in Midtown Manhattan, there was a Tesla showroom that was vandalized in a variety of ways for a variety of means. Like I mentioned, all of these incidents are kind of tied together, and you can see this based on the graffiti that they leave behind. The vandalism at the Tesla showroom was not simply just an anti-D Doge, anti-Eon Musk thing, but it was also a climate thing and also a anti-Trump thing. So, all of these things are kind of getting lumped together. The climate issue, the anti-Trump thing, the at this point, I'm just going to have to call it pro-corruption because they're it's very hard to argue against the Doge idea. And now people can argue about how it's like being done, but anti-corruption efforts in government are very I mean it's a hard thing to to protest against, but they're making an effort, right? So a lot of these groups are protesting multiple things. They're they're bundling all these ideas up together in a general uh political left bubble kind of thing. And a lot of times it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. And a lot of times when it comes to some of these demonstrations, you'll see people target each other at the same event. So we saw this more palpably when it when it came to the whole Israel Palestine thing a few months ago when it kind of heated up at some of these places after you know before it got shut down really you would have protesters showing up to like say a climate protest you know to protest against global warming or climate change or whatever right and they would want to bring in their like support for Gaza and then the other people who are pro-Israel would clash at the same event so they're there to protest some sort of climate issue but their other interests are conflicting. So, we're starting to see that a little bit more with regards to some of the protests and things that are kicking up. But, you know, whenever you bundle together a lot of very different issues into the same protest crowd, it's a hard cell uh to kind of get everybody on the same page when you've got radically different ideas all the way around. So, all of that is to say, this will be a very interesting summer for kinetic activities. Also in the northeast region, the New Jersey wildfire, the Jones Road fire, has reached 60% containment as of I think last night. The cause of the fire has been announced as arson and one arrest has been made. One Joseph Clling, a local who lived in the area. So, this does highlight the risks that arson brings this time of year especially. One detail I wanted to mention because I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information on this and this pertains to the nuclear power plant. So, Oyster Creek nuclear power plant is well, it was in the fire zone. So the fire uh went right up to this nuclear power plant. This is a defunct power plant. It's not used anymore. So it's it's shut down, but there is a lot of nuclear material at the side. There are spent storage pools there. So there was a concern at a certain period of time that this facility would be at risk for this wildfire. So saw a lot of hysteria about that, but it was mildly concerning for a little bit there. But of course, firefighters prioritized defending this particular structure and this this compound really. So, it was never really in any very serious danger, but it is something to think about. You know, some crazy guy uh setting fire to the woods can cause a very severe incident or complicate things quite a bit. So, something to keep in mind. Moving to the Midwest, a comparatively rare instance this week of a judge being arrested was reported in Milwaukee. A Milwaukee County judge was arrested on charges of obstructing justice for her role in helping an illegal alien escape custody. Details of this incident are hard to verify, but the general gist of the story and and perhaps hinting as to why this arrest took place. This was a little bit more brazen than normal, especially considering the context of what actually happened that day. So, once again, details hard to verify, but the general gist of what happened is she had an illegal alien in her courtroom who was facing charges of assault. A guy who uh beat his roommate, his roommate's girlfriend, and one other person. He put three people in the hospital uh by beating them so severely. and he was subsequently arrested on assault and battery charges and that's what he was doing in the courtroom. So, it wasn't any kind of uh immigration thing. However, the feds found out about it and showed up with a lawful warrant to arrest him in the courtroom on federal charges. This is a very standard thing for the feds to show up and and and nab somebody in court. U it's just a common place for arrest to take place. Either way, uh once the judge learned that the feds were outside, uh she had what can only be described as a mental episode. So, she took it upon herself to leave her courtroom and started verbally abusing the federal agents out in the hallway, shouting at them and forcing them to leave out, you know, leave the hallway. She went back into the courtroom and took the defendant back into her private chambers and allowed the defendant to escape from the facility down a hallway that led to an outside door. So, once again, this is a trial taking place, right? So the prosecution had no idea what happened. The defendant just disappeared along with his attorney. And once everybody figured out what was going on, the judge had let this guy escape. Uh the guy was uh on foot. So there a foot pursuit took place outside the courtroom and the feds ended up nabbing him immediately anyway. So he didn't get very far, but this is one of those situations where left, right, or center, this is very, very illegal. So this is probably why the charges took place. This has happened several times before in the past by several other judges as I've noted before, but this one was a little bit more brazen and of course there's new uh leadership in town with regards to the federal agencies. So these are starting to be cracked down on a little bit more. Similar story down in the southwest this week. The infamous judge Keno, Joseé Luis Keno, he goes by Joel Kano, but his real name is Joseé Luis. He and his wife were arrested on federal charges for again aiding in abetting not just an illegal uh who they let they let an illegal alien stay at their guest house. So he was living at the at their home with them but also he was a known uh trenda member or TDA member and they also provided uh this individual with firearms. So the local uh neighbors uh report that the known TDA member was observed handling firearms several times on social media and also by neighbors. So most citizens who live in these areas are not surprised in the slightest. My guess and this is just just pure speculation, but my guess is that the feds probably have something on this judge with regards to his own membership in some sort of organization. So it's probably not just because he harbored an illegal alien, even though that is of course illegal. can't do that sort of thing even though you're a judge. I find it very very hard to believe and most people who uh are in the region find it very hard to believe that a judge would get rolled up for something like that. Now maybe forced into retirement, sure, removed from the bench even that might happen. Sure. But getting rolled up and arrested is something that would only normally happen if there's a little bit of a story that we have not seen yet. So it may be surprising for some, it may be completely unsurprising for others, uh such as myself. It's not surprising at all. The most surprising part for me is that he actually got arrested, which makes me think that there's probably a little bit more to this story than meets the eye. But either way, we will see. So that's all I have for the United States. Let's move over to India and Pakistan and briefly discuss what's going on there because as one might imagine there there's a lot of information flowing and not a lot of it is particularly helpful. Anyone who has spent any time on social media anytime soon, especially on uh platforms like Twitter, will know that a substantial portion of internet traffic on these platforms comes from India. Right? So since that is the case, it is very hard to determine what is true and what is untrue. Uh but I can generally uh use statements by officials, government officials in both nations, both India and Pakistan to determine essentially what has happened so far. So earlier this week, there was a terror attack in Pahogam up in the Kashmir region. This is a resort town, if you want to call it that. I'm not sure it qualifies as a resort town, but either way, it's it's definitely a tourist destination for Indians in particular. So, there was a small arms skirmish. I have not been able to pin down exactly where the skirmish took place. Again, we're seeing a little bit of manipulation of information here, which may be a clue as to what's going on. But what is relatively certain is that government agencies and government officials have stated that 26 people are dead from the attack and there are many uh wounded. There were quite a few survivors from this attack and uh the testimony has been hard to verify. So verifying any of this is challenging. Similar story with figuring out who actually conducted the attack. There are several insurgent groups at this point who have claimed to have conducted the attack. Some of these groups are more traditionally Muslim terror groups. Some of them are Kashmir groups that are solely uh really supportive of Kashmir independence from both nations. Some of them are Indian groups which are ethnically Hindu but they don't like other uh casts. So it's a cast system thing. So I don't know who actually conducted the attack. Pakistan claims that it's a false flag attack that this really was the Indian government who shot up their own people as a way of justifying a war with Pakistan. Again, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's it's it's impossible to verify either way at the moment. In a larger sense though, in this part of the world, it it honestly really doesn't matter who started it or who's legitimately behind it because what's happening is happening. Very significant events have taken place on both sides of the border. So here are the things that I have been able to track down and verify that both nations have done to each other. Both nations have closed their borders to each other. There have been some exceptions on both sides for the seek population which is kind of an interesting development. Both nations have closed their airspace to each other's commercial airlines which is kind of a big deal because there's a lot of aviation traffic between India and Pakistan. Uh commercial aviation that is when that tends to happen it's not necessarily for a trade thing but it's to keep civilian airliners out of the way in case missiles start flying. Likewise, both nations have canceled all of the visas for each other's population, and they have issued deportation orders for each other's population. How likely are they to carry this stuff out? I very strongly doubt they're going to deport each other's citizens. There are just too many Pakistanis in India and there are too many Indians in Pakistan for this to occur like reliably. But either way, they've issued the order. So, we'll see how it works out. Likewise, both nations have ordered their own citizens back to each other. So Pakistan has ordered Pakistanis to return to Pakistan. India has return has ordered Indians to return to India. Same song and dance as always. And continuing the fairly standard tradition in the region. Pakistani and Indian border guards have been shooting at each other with rifles fairly regularly since this thing began really. So that's pretty much what both nations have done to each other. Uh India has has oneuped Pakistan as usual. For those who are not familiar with the region, India is generally considered by most military experts around the world to be the superior uh military fighting force. They've got a larger military, more technologically advanced. They're supported by the west uh such as the United States and Israel. So you can see how they would have the technological upper hand and also India has terrain on their side. So one of the things that India has done specifically that Pakistan can't really do anything about is they have uh cancelled the Indis waters treaty of 1960. Anyway, India has shut down uh the slle gates on roughly a dozen or so maybe 18 or so rivers that flow into Pakistan. For those that are unaware of the geography of the region, India is uphill of Pakistan or at least Kashmir is the Indian uh administered parts of Kashmir and Pakistan is very heavily reliant on the water that flows down from the Himalayas, the Anaperna range into Pakistan. That's where they get most of their water for agriculture. So India just by closing a few sloo gates has shut down 80% of the water used for irrigation purposes in Pakistan which is going to be very devastating. Of course Pakistan has vowed to bomb those slle gates to open them back up again but it's debatable as to whether or not they can they can actually do that. The Indian Air Force isn't actually any better. Uh so far there has been one reported casualty on all sides from this and this came from an Indian aircraft dropping a drop tank a fuel tank from a fighter jet. Uh they dropped it over a city and uh fuel tank landed in someone's house and killed an Indian. So that's why you'll see a lot of proakistan accounts saying that India bombed themselves. That's not entirely true. That's just Pakistan kind of, you know, poking at India. One of the Indian Air Force pilots who's been doing patrols in the area just dropped their drop tank at the wrong moment and that tank landed in an Indian village and killed an Indian. So India is negative one in terms of casualties so far in this conflict. So for those of you who don't know or don't understand why this is both a very serious situation but also not that serious and why a lot of the claims of open war uh on Twitter are probably not entirely that accurate. Let me just explain some of the common tactics that are used. I I'll just call them standard third world warfare tactics. These are things that a lot of these lesser capable militaries to include India and Pakistan tend to do to each other when they go to war. One of the major things that is occurring right now is both sides are shelling random uninhabited areas. So this is something that both nations tend to do. The even the US army tends to do this. we call it terrain denial fires, meaning you're just shelling a random mountaintop to make sure the enemy doesn't go there or in some cases just shelling the a random mountaintop for deception purposes or to confuse an enemy or something like that. Right? So when the western world does it, you know, when when more traditionally western militaries do terrain denial fires, it's more of a doctrinal process. However, India and Pakistan are very well known for the past well since artillery has been invented. Both of these nations will lob artillery rounds at each other, but not really at each other. They'll they'll pick an uninhabited area and just shoot randomly. They're not even they're not even plotting where the shells go most of the time. And this is just something that's very very common. It's you'd only know unless you're like familiar with how these militaries kind of operate, but I I'm not entirely certain if you would classify that as a serious war. But it sure does look good when they video uh themselves, you know, firing artillery rounds. Well, where did that round go? Well, you know, and you can verify that this is what's happening because both India and Pakistan have been shelling each other for 3 days and not a single person has reported a casualty yet. A lot of villages up in Kashmir. They're reporting, man, serious fighting going on, but there's not even any wounded. That's cuz they're not really shooting at each other. They're just shooting at random areas. So, similar story with uh fighter aircraft. So both Pakistan and India are very well known for taking their own, you know, air force and flying their own air force over their own villages to make it look like, you know, from the ground locals look up and see, oh wow, you know, Indian fighters in a dog fight or something like that. And really, they're just doing low passes over their own villages to make it look like they are fighting the, you know, Pakistanis or they're fighting the Indians. So again, it's more of a show of force to their own people than anywhere else. Another common tactic that is going on right now, which is very, very common throughout this half of the planet, is belligerent, soldiers, border guards, whatever, shooting at each other. But they're shooting at each other from so far away that it doesn't matter. Anybody who's deployed to the Middle East knows exactly what I'm talking about here because this is something that happens in a lot of these nations very, very routinely. And I'm seeing this or seeing reports of this occurring up in Kashmir right now. So they will get uh several miles away from each other and just spray and prey the air and they will claim that they got into an engagement with the enemy, but they're so far away that they couldn't possibly hit each other. So this tends to happen very very commonly like on a regular Tuesday up in Kashmir. It's happened like that for decades now. So it's not out of the ordinary. But would you call that a skirmish? I don't know. You know, two, you know, two platoon shooting at each other, you know, five, six miles away from each other. like that's that's not really war. That's just, you know, very dangerous uh uh power projection and things like that. But either way, both sides shoot at each other. They'll loose a few belts of, you know, HMG fire or heavy machine gun fire towards each other miles away. They'll fire off a few, you know, AK mags at each other and both sides will go home and claim they killed the entire enemy force, but in actuality there were no casualties. So, this appears to be going on right now in Kashmir. Now, of course, this isn't to say that at some point this could actually be a legitimate war, but right now it's it looks like it's just a standard power projection. There haven't really been any reports of any casualties yet, and they've been, you know, fiercely fighting. If you follow what, you know, Indians and Pakistanis are saying on Twitter, they've been fiercely engaging in an open war with each other for 2 days now. And there's there no reports of any casualties. So, I don't know. The reports may flow in. It's a very tense time. It's way more tense than in 2019 when they when they engaged in in Kashmere and there were casualties then. So, I don't know. It's probably just going to take a few days for for information to trickle down out of the mountains. But I I just um I'm seeing this really panicking style of uh rhetoric being pushed all over social media because the third world monetization of places like Twitter has really kind of destroyed the ability uh for us to get accurate information sometimes. So one of the bigger impacts which does matter and the reason why I talk about this is that the various diasporas of these populations around the planet are protesting too. So you're going to start seeing because India and Pakistan start fighting each other. You're going to start seeing Indians and Pakistanis in various western nations start fighting each other and that's exactly what's happened. So there were various riots uh outside the Pakistani and Indian embassies in London this morning and it's it's just a mess. So that's something that's going to definitely take place over the next few days and weeks. How bad it will get is anybody's guess, but we all know how this goes. So I guess we'll have to keep an eye on it. So that's pretty much all I have for today. This week I've been really focusing on some of the more historic data, so I haven't had time to dig in as much as I'd like. But uh let's go ahead and roll up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. very good week for Ghostnet. Uh it was fantastic to see a lot of really good information coming out of a lot of different places. People talking about things that I haven't that I haven't seen anywhere else. So very very interesting. Um I'm going to try to start looking at plotting a lot of this information on uh specific mapping layers, but don't want to uh spoil it for when I come out with with something on that front. So yeah, fantastic. Really appreciate all of you who contribute to the ghost net. Uh even if you're just one of the guys who just listens, uh that's a really good step in using one of the more reliable tools that we have just in case there's some sort of communications outage. I know it's not entirely the most entertaining thing in the world and it's not easy to understand a lot of times, but this is a very powerful capability that I hope to improve on in the future. So that's all I have for today. Thank you again everyone for watching. Here are the sources. If you want a slightly easier to click link, you can of course go to my Obsidian page and find all of these links underneath all of the daily wire reports that I have made throughout the week. So, it's already shaping up to be a very busy summer. So, I hope that uh some of these more organizational efforts will will pay off in the future when things start getting a little bit more crazy than they already are. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for watching and I will see you next time. And as always, bite in the shade.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to The Underground. This is the Intel update for March 22nd through the 28th, 2026. Well, we are officially 1 month into the Gulf War, and not only is no end in sight, but this week has been host to major escalations on most theaters of the war. Today, I'm going to cover a lot of the topics that I have not had time to cover throughout the week, and more generally reflect on the strategic nature of the war. So, a fair warning, we'll be digging into a lot of discussion and debatable opinion today, which I hope will be helpful in getting to the truth of what is actually happening. We can bean count impact craters, and we can watch oil refineries burn, but to actually get to the meat of how this war is shaping the world, we have to dig up a lot of uncomfortable topics sometimes. So, we'll get to that in just a bit. But, starting at the very top, the 60,000-ft view, there are many hotspots for conflict around the world, and we are seeing a lot of smaller conflicts breaking out that seem unrelated at face value, but are very significant conflicts nonetheless. The war in the Middle East is, of course, largely centered in Iran. However, this conflict has spread to be a more regional war at this point as Iranian counterattacks are taking place throughout the entire region. Despite what the White House says, drone and missile attacks are continuing, and the Iranian ballistic missile attacks have been extremely devastating for Israel over the past few days due to the early warning radar sites that were destroyed on the first few days of the war. Separately from the Gulf War, the Israelis are fighting a ground invasion of Lebanon, which has made significant advances at significant cost. This conflict has been a little bit more difficult to track, so we'll have to get back to that next week. I'm still compiling a lot of the data for for the Lebanese war, but suffice it to say, that's a pretty hot shooting war as well, and I think this one's going to go on for a while, too. Bridging the divide between the West and the East, Turkey is becoming more involved in either of the two wars. I'm not quite sure. If that's confusing, I understand. What I'm referring to is the targeting of a tanker vessel in Turkish waters a few days ago. Initially, this attack was assessed to be related to the war in Ukraine because this tanker was carrying Russian oil. However, many people have also made the claim that this vessel was actually targeted either by Iran or by Israel as part of the Gulf War. At the moment, I cannot say what the actual truth is. It makes more sense for it to be Ukraine simply due to geography, but at this point, nothing is off the table, and the Israelis have openly signaled that for them, Turkey is next, so they may also be seeking to bring in Turkey into this little excursion in the Middle East. Still too soon to tell, though, so we'll have to get back to that once we get more information. This leads us to Europe, where other conflicts around the world also saw a resurgence this week, such as the war in Ukraine, which brought about an intensification of targeting efforts throughout the continent as the Ukrainians targeted oil terminals in St. Petersburg. Again, drone warfare is making the world a very, very small place, and to be located thousands of miles away from the front lines is no longer a guarantee of safety in today's modern world. Also far away from the front lines, the global impacts of this conflict, especially the war conflict in Ukraine and also the conflict in Iran, are impacting the entire planet at this point as the world tries to start functioning in a manner where global markets are being impacted. Famine potential in Southeast Asia is growing as fertilizer shipments have effectively been cut off, but even taking global maritime choke points out of the equation, we have to remember the transportation is not the only problem here. Much of the fertilizer market revolves around urea, which is created during the distillation of liquefied natural gas. And since many LNG facilities, such as in Qatar, have been totally destroyed to the point that it will take years to repair them, even if the Strait of Hormuz were freely available to travel through, the petroleum, fertilizer, plastics, and gas markets are going to take years to return to normal simply from the production side of the house based on stuff that's already been destroyed. So, again, these are two separate issues. We don't just have the problems with the Strait of Hormuz and getting cargo in and out of the Persian Gulf. That is a problem. Traffic has not resumed to normal levels just yet, and the Iranians definitely control the strait. But, apart from the transportation issues, we also have problems on the production side of the house because a lot of the refineries and facilities and factories, which produce these materials, the raw materials, they've been targeted and they've been destroyed or degraded heavily to the point where it's going to take months to repair them, if not years. So, again, stepping back, these are the hotspots that are worthy of note this week. The war in the Persian Gulf is devastating the region. There's a separate war going on in Lebanon, and of course, the Ukraine war is uh starting to heat back up again, at least in terms of H asymmetric warfare tactics, and all of the above are expanding substantially and escalating every day with no end in sight. So, this is most certainly a very, very busy time. On the home front, we have also had several items of note to take place this week. Out west, several different wildfires have swept through the state of Nebraska, which has reminded us that wildfire season is most certainly well underway. The Moral Fire and the Cottonwood Fire were initially more devastating with the Moral Fire being the largest wildfire in state history. Now, two more fires, the Minor Fire and Ashby Fire, are currently being worked in the central regions of the state. These wildfires in Nebraska have devastated the agricultural community, and a lot of this area is big cattle country. Ranchers from neighboring states have been trucking in hay and feed to donate to farmers in need with many other recovery efforts being underway. So, again, from the very wave top level, this is a good example of how important and challenging it is to balance out all of the concerns of the modern day. Yes, it is important to know about what's going on in the Middle East, but at the same time, a wildfire in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska removes the food sources for cattle, production cycles are thrown off, and suddenly you've got expensive beef or even beef shortages. Now, in this case, I'm not really sure how much the Nebraska fires will affect the food supply. I don't think it'll be that devastating, but these things are always hard to determine. Many people may not notice anything at all, but it's still a good example of logistical frailty that helps us understand which situations to monitor. Around the country, more direct threats have come to light regarding shadow warfare tactics that are being undertaken nationwide. This week, the hot topic on that front has been the indictment of two Chinese nationals who are alleged to be responsible for the attempted IED attack at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida a couple of weeks ago. I don't want to comment too much on this case just yet because there are a lot of contradictory details that don't quite make sense, so please forgive me. I need to do a little bit more research. But right now, this looks like this is probably the classic Chinese sabotage act undertaken during a time of war purely for the purposes of causing chaos within the American homeland. Remember, everybody is expecting Iranian sleeper cells to be activated in the United States right now, but the Chinese also know this as well. So, when we see an IED at the front gate of the headquarters of CENTCOM, we might be inclined to think the Iranians did it, when in reality, it was really a false flag carried out by the Chinese. Or at least, that's what it seems like at the moment. We can never really be too sure about these things. I just wanted to mention this one because it is most certainly false flag season right now, and the whole world knows this, too. So, while we argue on the internet about those pesky and elusive Iranian sleeper cells, what is undeniable and far more likely, in my opinion, are the risks associated with any number of unnamed groups and nation-states alike that greatly profit when chaos is sown in the American homeland. This will be something to watch out for over the next few weeks, and it would be a good idea to pump the brakes on immediately assessing blame for whatever attacks take place over the next few days, weeks, months. So, that's it for the homeland this week. I know, not a whole lot. Please forgive me. I was going to have another investigation that I had hoped to wrap up or at least get to a point to where I can share my findings this week, but I think I'm going to need some more time on that. Suffice it to say, there's a lot of fifth-generation warfare stuff going on in the homeland that I am most certainly aware of and watching. I just need more information before I can start drawing links and performing link analysis and going through all these structured analytical techniques to try to figure out exactly what's going on or draw some kind of causation, right? I love a good internet skitzo theory just as much as the next guy. However, if we're wanting to actually have some tangible effects on targets, so to speak, it's going to take a little bit more time for me to bring a lot of this investigative stuff to light. So, I'll dig into the MacDill stuff a little bit more with the Chinese IEDs. These things are occurring. I just need some more time to kind of scoop them up together in a in a succinct product. So, moving to the Middle East, how goes the war this week? Overall, I want to stress two words above all else, diminishing returns. It is true that the United States is continuing to bomb targets throughout Iran. However, evidence is mounting that they are running out of the easy targets to strike. This is most sharply evidenced by this short video clip of strikes that was posted by CENTCOM the other day. Now, when I first saw this clip, I did a Looney Tunes-esque double take because in less than half a second, so much information was conveyed. This video shows air strikes of at least two construction vehicles, one front-end loader and what looks like a bulldozer. And these short clips are very, very telling. Now, just right off the bat, you can argue about whether or not these are valid military targets all you want. From my experience as an analyst working in a targeting shop conducting strikes just like this, at least during my time, these would not have been considered a valid military target. But again, that's also subject to what the target engagement authority, or TEA, will authorize. So, the legality of it, that's kind of dubious at best. But more broadly, this video clip is, to use quite an ironic term, a shibboleth. This is a tell. This is an indicator that something's not quite right here. Just to let everyone in on a little bit of targeting culture, whenever a targeting shop starts striking bulldozers, they are running out of targets. And the PAO who was given these clips did not know that little bit of targeting culture. Again, when I was working in a targeting unit for some stuff in Syria a few years ago, I would get phone calls from the Marines at an adjacent targeting cell at a at a neighboring base making fun of us. Like, we would get mocked because one of our generals got a wild idea and authorized a strike on a bulldozer. And you know what? My shop deserved all of that teasing because that's how big of a cultural deal this is within the world of targeting. It's just embarrassing. Like, you couldn't find a better target? That's all you could find is some guy's bulldozer? And in the real world, it really does get played up kind of like that scene from Generation Kill where Captain America shoots up that guy's uh with the AK and his guys say, "W- What are you doing?" And he ends up saying something like, "Denying the enemy transportation." or something like that. It's the same idea, right? You could probably pencil whip it and justify it, which is what they're doing CENTCOM's doing in these clips. You could definitely pencil whip it and justify it under a target engagement authority. But again, professional to professional, it's embarrassing. I would not want my name on a targeting package that that had like a bulldozer on it. It's embarrassing. So, hopefully that bit of insider knowledge helps a bit with context and maybe maybe it helps understand how the war is going. Of course, we don't want to, you know, lean on one extremely short video clip compiled by a PAO as, you know, confirmation of anything. It's more of just an indicator, really. And at this point, if the figures are correct and the Pentagon has indeed run 10,000 sorties so far during this war, I understand that they're probably having a hard time finding valid military targets. Like I and many others have been saying since the first few days of the war, all the dumb ones were killed during the first few days. And now that time has elapsed, the targets that remain will be vastly harder to find, fix, and finish, as the Pentagon likes to remind everyone with a phrase that a super motarded lance corporal might write down in the margin of his write-in-the-rain notebook. But that's what they're doing, literally repeating the most ineffective measures of the GWOT. And the Pentagon is unaware that the relationship between bombs dropped and targeting effectiveness is an inverse equation here. The number of bombs dropped does not equal winning the war. And that's exactly what the Pentagon is telling the public, and it's probably what they're telling the president, too. "Mr. President, Mr. President, look how many bombs we dropped today. Isn't that totally rad and cool?" They're dangling the plastic keys in front of every decision maker, and it's working because there are no low-level analysts in the room telling the president that the targets they're bombing now are becoming less and less effective as time goes on. It's not disparaging against the targeting process. This is just how targeting works. Guess what? Put on your big boy pants. Targeting's hard. Finding the enemy is hard, and they're trying to say that just because they dropped some bombs on some guys, you know, goat shack, that we're actually reducing the Iranian military capability. However, let's make no mistake though in thinking that American bombing isn't doing anything at all. That's not true. We have devastated a substantial part of their economy, and it will take a century, probably, to recover from what devastation we have wrought throughout Persia. But when it comes to the real threats, the missiles and the drones, are we able to target the Iranians effectively enough to stop these types of attacks? Can we bomb the Iranians enough to stop the drone attacks and open the strait? The answer is undeniably no, or at least history does not indicate so. Going all the way back to Vietnam, Operation Linebacker 2, we have never really been able to launch a large-scale bombing campaign that bombs the enemy into complete and total submission without a ground force being part of that element as well. There is only so much that you can do from the air, and President Trump can get on TV all he wants and say that we've taken out all of their missiles, but the dozen or so warheads that land in Tel Aviv every single day and night are proof that this is just not the reality of what's happening on the ground. On the diplomatic front, things are tenuous at best, and now that the war is officially 1 month old, let's take a break for a moment and really reassess what is happening at the strategic level. We can take a look at the more tactical level stuff throughout the week, but today we're really trying to get a good beat on what's actually going on strategically, and this week it's been really crazy. President Trump initially stated that Iran had a 48-hour ultimatum to open the strait, otherwise we would bomb their energy production facilities. But the next day he extended this deadline by 5 days to yesterday, Friday. Well, this deadline came and went, and President Trump extended the deadline again by another 10 days. All the while this was going on, the Israelis were striking multiple Iranian nuclear facilities, steel factories, and other targets throughout the country. So, the war between Israel and Iran is definitely still going on, definitely still quite hot. And Netanyahu himself stated that a ceasefire between Iran and the United States does not apply to Israel, so they're going to keep attacking, which is just incredible. That like that's that's that's just something else. But what this mostly does for us is eliminate the chance for peace. And through our own actions, we have made it very hard to achieve any sort of deal without giving up a lot of stuff. Eventually, all wars come to an end, do they not? And you can have peace two ways. You can have peace through a negotiated settlement, or you could have peace by killing everyone on one side of the conflict. Considering the long train of human events, we very rarely end up killing every single person on one side of the war, so there's usually going to be a negotiated settlement. Again, unconditional surrenders, even though the US is openly stated that's what we're going for, unconditional surrender is very rare throughout history. Most of the time there's going to be some kind of negotiated settlement. And when if you know you're going to negotiate your way out of a war, shooting yourself in the foot and giving up a lot of your negotiating power is probably not a good idea. But we did exactly that. Remember, we started this war by using tactics that humanity has normally seen at the end of a war. So, we used late war tactics right at the start. We killed a religious leader and his wife and children during his religious holiday as part of the opening salvos of the war. Militarily speaking, I speculate that some people were able to convince the president the decision to take out the Ayatollah was a low-risk operation. They probably didn't tell him that killing a head of state would have consequences. They probably did not think this through, and even if they did think this through, they didn't really care. They gave him the play school, you know, plastic keys jingling in front of your face kind of answers to things, and we saw this confirmed more or less with the infamous lay down your arms speech that President Trump gave on the day of the strikes. Which in retrospect, now that we can look back on that event, we can look back on that speech, we can see just how utterly insane that was. That >> [laughter] >> That was so utterly ridiculous that they thought that was actually going to work. But anyway, again, you know, hindsight is 20/20, I guess. But even when we were watching these events happen in real time, even even then we knew this was a bad idea. We knew that this was not going to work. So, it's not like we had to wait a whole month of, you know, this this conflict dragging out to know that bad decisions were being made. No, we could see the bad decisions were being made before the decisions were made. Starting a sneak attack during peace negotiations is a low blow that makes it very, very hard to extract ourselves from because now we're trapped. And nobody told Trump that taking out the Ayatollah was a trap. Our diplomats, think about this, our representatives to the world openly brag about pretending to seek a diplomatic solution, but in secret they were really just stringing the Iranians along because they had no intent of seeking a deal. They just wanted war. It is very unpleasant to note these things. This is for sure. Like I don't take any joy in reporting this. But I myself I'm trying to think about what challenges I would have back in my old life as an NCO, right? And adopting that frame of mind, I would be furious that the Pentagon is behaving the way that they are because when you start off a conflict like this in this particular manner, it makes it incredibly hard to fight on the ground. For all of the NCOs and junior officers out there that are having to manage their guys during a time like this, I know that you guys are having a hard time. I really do. I do not relish the thought of having a bunch of PFCs or lance corporals under my wing who are watching what their secretary of war is saying and having to walk back his statements. It's probably quite tough to do that. As a military leader of any pay grade, it is your duty to be magnanimous in victory. Like that's what gets beat into your head and was certainly a very big part of the GWOT. You do your job with honor, integrity, and professionalism. We know that the war is not necessarily being fought on American terms or even for the right reasons in the first place. We know this and we can't ignore it. But you take the part of the war that's right in front of you, and you do the best you can with it. That's what anybody is going to do. You do not seek out atrocity, and you do the best you can to preserve your own honor day to day. You do not double tap rescuers trying to pull people from the rubble. If we are fighting a war based on bloodlust, we have lost the plot, and I am very concerned that a lot of high-ranking military officials have done just that. And my heart goes out to the low-level dudes out there who are just trying to keep their guys on the narrow path and out of trouble. I really do think and pray for you guys every single day because much of our military leadership are acting like psychopaths at this point and behaving in ways that are below the station that they hold. All warfare is based on deception, but treachery is not a virtue. We must remember that, even though our government has forgotten it. We do not worship death on the battlefield. A lance corporal making a crude remark about some drone footage is a lot different than the secretary of war doing it. We do what we have to do, but we cannot lose our humanity, and from what I see, we are in extreme danger of that happening if it hasn't happened already. We are Americans. We stop harm from befalling the innocent without hesitation, using violence to do so if need be. But once that enemy is out of the fight, we show them mercy and compassion. And now the Pentagon is trying to act like mercy is a bad thing in any context. And all I can say to that is, may the Lord have mercy on us for allowing this evil mentality to flourish and for not having the courage to call this out sometimes. We have got to change this, and I just don't know how. I just thought it was important to include these ideas for the record just in case we actually end up going into a ground fight on this because when and if we start putting boots on the ground, all of these ideas, all of these sentiments are going to get dialed up to 11. Right now it's just an air war. There's not that much risk, but when you start putting boots on ground, the risk goes up, and also a lot of cascading other effects start shaping up, too. Things get really complicated, and even right now, when it's just the air war component, when it's just a bombing campaign, we're really not fighting this war on good moral or just terms. And this is not to disparage the guys on the ground. I mean, we can definitely support those guys who have been, you know, put in a tight spot and are doing the best they can. But at the top, all we hear from the war department is death, destruction, and ego. None of that magnanimity that got beat into our heads during the GWOT era. None of that integrity or honor. None of that avoiding unnecessary killing. None of that healthy respect for the enemy or at least recognizing that they are defending their homeland. Even in Afghanistan, when we were getting shot at all the time, no one was considered a Taliban sympathizer, right, for realizing that the Taliban fighters were doing what they had to do. That was their job. We had our job, too. And there's a healthy respect there. And you can certainly have some level of respect for your adversary during a time of war, at least when it comes to the uh things they can do to you, right? And even so, having respect for your enemy is not something that's just a moral teaching. It's not really just a moral thing. It's also a practical thing. Having a healthy respect for your adversary prevents your ego and hubris from driving your own operations. You don't have to like them, but be very, very unwise to just think that they're all just goat herders, right? And the Pentagon is just going crazy, and they're they've lost all nuance with this kind of stuff, at least publicly, right? I don't know what the generals are saying to each other in private. I don't know what they're saying off camera, but I can tell you the media blitz with this is not good. It's not doing us any favors, and it's making everything harder. Of course, I'm not exactly saying that a hearts and minds campaign would work in this case. I don't think that would work. The reason that the Pentagon propaganda is the way that it is, and it's understandably the way that it is, is because really driving this war on a strategic level. We didn't go to war on our own terms, and because of that, their propaganda has to look a certain way, which is fine. That's their prerogative. But what is undeniable is that a kill everything and everyone approach, that's not really good, either. We're turning the whole world against us, and we're going to have nobody to blame but ourselves for allowing these events to take place. Look, guys, I hate it. And I personally have no sympathy for the Iranian regime, just like everybody else. I also have a very long memory, and I do not forget every EFP, every roadside bomb, and every rocket and mortar that the Iranians gave to insurgent groups to target Americans with. And I certainly hope and pray that America wins the war, because this is my country and this is my home. And that's what you do when you live in a place on Earth. But reality is reality, and through the actions of our leadership, we have given the Iranians the moral high ground for this present conflict, and that makes me absolutely sick. Again, I'm coming back to the perspective of the service members actually prosecuting targets during this war. And I'm imagining the targeteer opening up their joint publications, their JP360, to see that we cannot target civilian infrastructure because it's a war crime. That gets beat into your head all the time as a targeting guy. Oh, it's a war crime. That's a war crime. This is not just something the left loves to screech, you know, because they don't understand what a war crime actually is. No, I'm really talking about the CENTCOM targeting guidance, such as things like the CAT 1 or category 1 no strike list, right? All of the list of targets that we can't strike in war because of not just, you know, this frivolous thing called international law. Like, I mean, like our actual like laws that are meant to be adhered to by the United States, set in place by Congress, mostly for the purposes of making sure that we keep our humanity. That's what a no strike list is for. It's not really for international law. We don't care about international law. It's for keeping your humanity. And then the president gets on TV and says we're going to strike civilian infrastructure, the same targets that you could crack open a book and see like right at the very top, no, you can't hit civilian power plants. Can you imagine what that's like to sit there and having to be a targeting analyst where you're looking at targets that are completely war crime targets. Again, not in the leftist way of like, "Oh, war crime." No, I mean like actual like stuff that damages your soul kind of targets. And they're striking these things left and right. I have plotted almost 2,000 impact craters on my maps, and in my opinion, having worked in a CENTCOM targeting shop in the past, I've seen enough to let me know that they've thrown a lot of this doctrine out the window, and they are prosecuting targets against long-standing doctrine. We are dropping land mines in civilian towns at this point, which I don't think has been done since Vietnam or maybe even Korea. Land mines are indiscriminate killers, and the very minute that a civilian gets killed by an American land mine in Iran will be the day that America no longer has the right to complain about IEDs killing Americans. And at this point, we are speed running our way to violating every ideal that we used to hold dear. I don't like it myself, and of course, nobody in the West wants to give the Iranians credit for anything. But from a purely neutral perspective, during the lead-up to this war, it was the United States that breached international norms by pretending to engage in diplomacy while never intending to abide by a deal. And that trust being broken cannot be dismissed by anyone. It's going to take a lot of effort to build that trust back. Now, you can argue, "Well, we've got our aircraft carriers and our submarines and our missiles and our cool bombs and stuff." But look, man, as much as I would love to be a participant in a lot of American exceptionalism these days, there's a little bit more nuance to it than that, right? House cannot blame anyone for not wanting to negotiate with the United States right now, because American diplomacy has now boiled down to do what we want or we'll kill you and your entire family, which is fair enough in some circumstances, right? I mean, that's that's kind of what you have to do in some ways, right? I am a Roman citizen. I am an American, right? You have to bring that mentality to the world to some degree. But again, there is no crying in the casino of war, and the Iranians still hold quite a few cards to play, which means that the war has the potential to continue for some time if the belligerents so desire. The other factor that the Iranians are probably thinking about is that if they agree to any sort of peace agreement, the Israelis will just bomb them anyway, since it has already been demonstrated by the strike at South Pars that the Israelis are acting unilaterally in this conflict. Right now, sushi from a truck stop in Kansas is more trustworthy than an American ceasefire, and the Iranians are completely correct in assuming that our word means nothing. Granted, in a larger sense, none of the belligerents in this conflict are completely trustworthy, either. So right now, when it comes to potential peace talks, it's a wash. Most of the statements made by American officials have been easily verifiable lies, and President Trump has mostly been saying stuff just to calm economic markets. But also, the Iranian messaging is fairly unreliable, as well, because they aren't talking much. I mean, they don't really have to. All they have to do is survive, so they don't really need to have this propaganda campaign. But even so, most of their media, the Iranian media that is broadcast to the outside world, is mostly just the, you know, the low-grade Middle Eastern flavored propaganda that is very common for wars like this. So they're not really putting in that much effort. I mean, again, they don't have to. They're on the defense, right? When you're on the defense, you you have a lot of advantages. And of course, the Israelis are going to do whatever they want, which is fair enough from their perspective, but their targeting efforts will absolutely derail any potential deal the US and Iran want to cook up later next week during the alleged halt to bombing of civilian infrastructure within Iran. Even though, honestly, it's becoming a little bit dangerous within the United States to truthfully and neutrally examine the overall situation regarding the war. The Iranians have actually carried out relatively proportionate and reciprocal targeting during this campaign, with the exception being the first couple of days when comms were down and local commanders shot at basically everything in range. The ballistic missile strike again at Dimona, which the Israelis tried to amplify quite a bit with Prime Minister Netanyahu himself going to the impact crater, the impact sites there. This attack, while it was horrific, you know, it's always horrific anytime civilians get killed, this was actually a reciprocal attack targeting the Israeli nuclear program. Specifically, they were targeting a bunker that was allegedly being used by Israeli scientists, which was underneath uh the civilian city there. And this attack itself was conducted after the Israelis targeted the bunkers at Bushehr nuclear power plant a few days ago. So again, this is a tit-for-tat kind of thing. Similarly, various GCC states, mostly just the Arab nations of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, uh places like that, they've been complaining that Iran is launching unprovoked attacks into their nations. However, CENTCOM themselves frequently publish videos of HIMARS systems launching ATACMS missiles into Iran from these same nations. So once again, it's mostly a wash. You don't get to sit there and complain that, "Oh, the Iranians have hit our airports," when you've got ATACMS flying through your airspace, and you're letting the Americans conduct a war from your terrain. You're in this war. So again, this is just a mess all around. But again, let's not over-romanticize the Iranians themselves by any means. They are in this for the long haul, and they know that needlessly targeting things they don't need to will result in public opinion turning against them. What all of this means is that the targeting continues as before. The conflict, the war, the death, the destruction continues just like it has for four months now. And not only is the White House not looking for any off-ramps, but they are looking to intensify this conflict and escalate it as much as possible for the foreseeable future. I don't really care what they're saying. Our actions speak louder than words, and considering the contradictory words from the White House this week, I can't really make assessments based on what they say, only what they do. And so far, cargo flights have been increasing into the region, and advanced party from the 82nd Airborne is already in the Middle East to supplement the two MEUs, which should be arriving uh they should have gotten there by now. And within the homeland of the United States, there are indications and warnings of more units being deployed, as well. The shining example of pinpoint precise journalism that is the Wall Street Journal has leaked that the Pentagon is slated up to 10,000 more troops, regular army, to deploy, as well. Whether or not that's true is anyone's guess, but so far, the United States is making preparations for a more protracted ground fight. However, there are still a few indicators that I have been watching for that haven't really lined up just yet, so I don't think we're going to be invading Iran anytime soon, at least not within the next week. Or at least I certainly hope not, because the forces on station right now are not enough to occupy a Buckee's is a Friday night. So we have some more time before we freak out about Americans putting boots on ground. Maybe by the end of next week at the earliest, depending on how serious they are, but again, time will tell. So, all in all, 1 month into the conflict, the situation remains just as steady as before. The Iranian regime has not collapsed, and it will not collapse without a total occupation of the country. Whether that happens or not is anyone's guess at this point, but we will certainly be on the lookout for any indicators that may emerge over the next few days and weeks. And with that, that's all I have for today. I know kind of a short day, a little bit shorter than what I was expecting. So, let's wrap things up with the Ghost Net reports for this week. Once again, another fantastic week for taking the information space to the real world and to trying to exchange information with each other in a more off-grid manner. I know that it's a little boring and super niche, but I think this is a huge part of not just preparedness, but also the act of doing something physical helps a lot. This may sound really weird, uh but over the past few years, I've been working with radio, and especially since the Ghost Net has been working well, I have found that the information that I get via HF radio just it seems more real. It seems like the stakes are higher and or or maybe that there's much more investment in finding out the truth or something like that. I don't really know how to describe it. Maybe some of you know what I'm talking about. It's almost like the same piece of information has more weight when I see it coming in through my radio to my JS8 call screen as opposed to when I just doomscroll past it on my phone. It's almost like the physical act of getting outside, touching grass, and actually putting in some physical work to be informed is a major motivating factor for finding out the truth. Of course, we must always trust but verify everything, but still, in the days ahead, I think that getting involved in the world of radio is a good thing to merge a lot of this this online information space stuff with the real world to kind of help us balance out a lot of that stuff because I think that we tend to doomscroll way too much these days. I'm speaking for myself. I know I do it way too much each day, right? So, getting outside, or even if you have like an indoor radio or something, just you know, being involved in this kind of thing helps quite a lot, I think, even if all you do is receive the signals that others are transmitting. So, a very special thank you to all of you for contributing to the Ghost Net project. I think it's working great. I can't wait to see how this develops over time. It will It will get better. It will get a lot more helpful as time goes on, and I'm sure that there are a lot of other endeavors out there trying to do the same thing to bring a lot of informational efforts to the world of radio. So, that's all I have for today. As always, all of my research and source material can be found on my Obsidian page to trust but verify everything that I use to conduct my daily analysis, and the mapping data that you have seen today and throughout the week can be viewed online via my ArcGIS maps or downloaded offline as KMZ files for use in A Tac if you want to replicate exactly what I have here. All of the links are below as usual, and I hope to continually update all of these products throughout the week just like I do every single day. So, thanks again for sticking with me. Thank you for all of your support, and thank you to all of you on Patreon who keep the project going, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight the sheep.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 25th through the 31st, 2025. So let's get right to it. Around the world, the summertime kinetic activity appears to be in full swing this week with many conflrations arising and a few going away over the past few days in Mexico and really throughout North America at large. The cartel violence has continued as expected. Nothing really out of the ordinary. It's just that this week a couple of mass graves have been found or couple of body dump sites that have been a little bit more high-profile than normal. Again, the violence down there is not really uh it's hard to say if it's escalating or not. Most of this is really not that much out of the norm. However, again, due to local focus on things like this and a lot of local activism, there's definitely an increased focus on some of these uh very, very brutal attacks down there. Across the pond in Liverpool, the vehicle ramming attack suspect has been identified. This has been a rather contentious topic over the past few days. Ever since the vehicle ramming attack occurred, vehicle ramming attacks throughout Europe at large is is not really out of the ordinary. This is very much a standard thing, especially with the uh summertime weather which allows uh more cultural events, more you know, open street fair kind of things and uh you know, people trying to go out and enjoy the summertime and enjoy the good weather. Well, this means large crowds and large crowds always bring malign actors who uh seek to cause harm. In the case of the Liverpool attack, however, it is a little bit harder to slap that general, you know, terrorist label on this kind of thing. We will do so for now. We'll definitely call this uh and use language to refer to this as a vehicle ramming attack because that's what it was. And generally, that's considered to be terrorism. However, considering that this wasn't really a planned thing, it doesn't seem like it was. At least the street was just uh full of, you know, soccer fans, right? Football fans. So, I don't know if this is more along the lines of just a very aggressive and violent form of hooliganism or if this is a legitimate terror attack that we might see fairly commonly throughout Europe. Either way, British media has had a field day with this as the attacker's identity has been released as Paul Doyle. Depending on which sources you read, this is very contentious uh because a lot of people I I don't know what the truth is. I'll just state right up front. don't know what the truth is, but a lot of people suspect that the guy that they arrested and have identified as the attacker was not the guy. I don't know about that. Uh there have been some discrepancies with age. A lot of people were saying that the guy who committed the attack appeared to be much younger than a 53-year-old man who was arrested. There are also some indications that maybe a few uh uh rowdy fans uh who were trying to, you know, take the fight to the the terrorist, the the the attacker during this vehicle ramming incident. There's some speculation that a lot of those guys have been arrested as well for trying to get at the asalent. I don't know. It's a very very hard thing to assess right now. British media is no help. The authorities are no help. The authorities surprisingly or in this case very unsurprisingly released the guy's name rather early on uh in the investigation whereas of course people are drawing the the comparison that the Southport murderer his identity was withheld for months. Uh we didn't even we didn't even know what he looked like until after the conviction. So yeah, we're just going to have to see if we can get our hands on more media of the attack, more photographs of the attacker, more photographs of who they arrested, which so far I haven't seen any mug shot. uh haven't I've only seen courtroom sketches and those don't really those don't really help you that much. So, I don't know. Either way, I just wanted to point out that this is not your standard vehicle ramming attack. It it's a little bit more complicated than that and it's being made complicated by the follow on details of what's going on. So, when everybody hears a vehicle rams into a crowd, they immediately think jihadi kind of thing. They immediately think Islamic based terrorism. And so whenever that doesn't appear to be the case, it appears to be some uh what we might consider to be terrorism of some other variety, it's really hard to get a beat on sometimes. And I think that's what's going on here. So we'll see. But right now, there's not a whole lot to go off of. Similarly, much uncertainty remains in Iran with regards to the talks that are ongoing. Just like last week, uh in which I said there's been a lot of talk, but not a lot of action or any kind of verification that this talk has any credence. The same things happened this week. There's been a lot of talk that says that Israel is going to go to war with Iran one way or the other in the next few days. We've heard this many, many times before. I don't know how true this is. There's just not anything to go off of. So, but I'm not sure. All that seems relatively certain is that war with Iran is certainly still on the menu and it probably will be for a while. Uh, but in terms of figuring out, are we really going to do this? Is Israel really going to do this? Yeah, it's anybody's guess. Right now, they've got their hands full with Gaza. So, once that wraps up and they they finally achieved their goals there, uh my guess is that they'll have the ability to open up another front wherever they choose, whether it be West Bank, Lebanon, wherever. And that's probably going to continue for a while. In the South Pacific, things are both heating up and cooling down. Earlier this week, there was a brief border clash between Cambodia and Thailand in a very well-known disputed area. This happens occasionally. This is kind of a thing that's been going on for a long time, but for a few days there, it seemed like they were they were really getting ready to go to swinging at each other. This is something that happens quite often in this particular area. It's really just jungle, you know, just south of the Golden Triangle. So, you know, it's anybody's guess as what actually goes on out there in those jungles. But either way, both sides claimed that the other started it, and that's how border clashes usually go in this part of the world. Either way, both countries sent a few thousand troops from what I can tell to the border region before the leaders of both countries stepped in and said, "Hey, you know, cool it kind of thing." So, that's kind of how it remains right now. It's it's cooled off quite a bit, which is good. Uh, I don't know how much Cambodia and Thailand are are going to feel like going to war with each other. I don't think so. I think it's just a brief border spat, but you never know. Stranger things have happened. And it is most certainly the time where every other Tuesday you're just reading about two nations getting ready to go to war with each other. That's just kind of the way it is in the 2020s. So similar situation in China. Uh this week the United States and well China as well have been kind of trading rhetoric back and forth a little bit. The Pentagon the other day uh Pete Hexath the Secretary of Defense has made it clear that the Pacific pivot is definitely a military aspiration. Still, the United States is still very much considering China to be an adversary, especially when it comes to the use of military force in the Pacific theater. Now, I know that sounds like a lot of DC think tank talk, but this is generally true. Uh the United States is most certainly preparing for some kind of military aspiration on China's part. Mostly when we refer to uh this, we're talking about China invading Taiwan and the First Island chain. Not just Taiwan, but the whole first island chain, which includes parts of Japan, Okinawa, and uh the Philippines. So, is an invasion imminent? No, of course not. China's got quite a long time before that becomes uh viable, but they're working on it. China's getting a lot better at a lot of things, and it's going to sneak up on us. At least that's what the the Pentagon is trying to say. I don't know. There's a lot of rhetoric back and forth on that, but generally speaking, that's the kind of status right now. The dragon in the Pacific is definitely stirring, though uh things are not completely out of control just yet. It's still within the realm of diplomacy. It's still within the realm of posturing, power projection, things like that. We're not really getting into the military operation, operational planning phases yet, which is probably a good thing. And speaking of operational planning, uh strategic movement for this week has largely been relatively benign. The Truman Carrier Strike Group uh returned to Norfolk this morning. I saw they pulled into to port earlier uh today a few hours ago. The Carl Vincent remains in the Middle Eastern theater. That's going to be our carrier for there for a while. But now, if you guys will note, we're down to just one aircraft carrier in the Middle East again, which is a good sign. Generally speaking, for those of you who, you know, don't follow this kind of thing. Whenever the United States puts two aircraft carriers in Sentcom in the Middle East somewhere, that tends to suggest that we're either going to war or tensions are pretty high. It's hard to determine which. Maybe there's a intentionality behind that. But still, for the past few weeks, there have been a couple of aircraft carriers in Sentcom's AO conducting operations in Yemen. And now that the Truman's rather unfortunate uh deployment has come to an end, the Carl Vincson remains uh the only flat top in the Middle East theater for now at least. Similar story out in the Pacific. The Nimttz is conducting her final deployment to the Pacific theater. Really just kind of doing the status quo. So we're we're kind of back to a baseline of uh American aircraft carrier strategic movement around the globe, which is a good thing. So it just means that there's not really an increase in tensions to the point to where we feel like a a second aircraft carrier is needed somewhere. Moving to the kinetic activity tracker, there have been a lot of developments, but mostly on the border crisis tracking map. So you can see uh I've got a few riots in Seattle this week. Of course, it's it's Seattle, so that's kind of thing is going to happen. But mostly what I've been focusing on this week have been the events down in Mexico which I'm generally putting on the border crisis map. So it's a different different data set. So there have been two high-profile in incidents this week. Both of which involve the finding of human remains or mass graves. The more high-profile one that's gotten a lot of uh locals upset occurred in the town of Reosa, a border town right on the Texas border there. A local uh band was found murdered. all four members of the band plus their photographer uh that were found in a body dump site just in in a vacant lot there in Reosa because these guys were fairly famous locally. This has sparked local outrage and you know so we're starting to see a little bit more political activism with this kind of thing. This happens occasionally. Again, it's not out of the ordinary, but but because of this focus on a lot of the the cartel problems down there, we're starting to see this a lot more in local media than we have in years past. So, I don't know if this is out of the norm. I don't think it is. I mean, it's fairly violent down there anyway, but there are a lot more of these stories coming to light from within Mexico, such as the finding of a mass grave down in the small town of Iratau, which is in the middle of absolute nowhere. There is nothing there. Uh, I mean, it's it's a fairly, I don't know, moderatesized uh town for central Mexico. But in any case, if you look at the Google Street View of where I was able to geollocate this this uh mass grave to be, it's kind of in the middle of a town. It's right on the edge of a soccer field, right? So, there are houses built up all around there. Normally, when you see a kill site from the cartel, it's going to be in the middle of nowhere. I mean, occasionally it happens in more builtup areas, but my guess is that this whole town is in on it or knows what's going on or full of people who are terrified, but they know exactly what is going on in that town. So, that's a tale as old as time down there. Again, it's not new. In Mexico, you go to the house next door and find 17 bodies one day. That tends to be how it works sometimes. So there are a lot of indicators to help uh identify and start working the cartel problem but I I can just say it's a very big task. There have been a lot of people who have spent 30 40 year careers and they have not put a dent in anything even in their local area. So it's a big problem set. It's bigger than terrorism. It's bigger than journalism. It's it's a very big investigative line of effort. So, uh, please forgive me if if this is going to take me a little while to start getting a better beat on because right now we're we're not even scratching the surface here with the events that are occurring in Mexico. So, we're definitely not seeing the whole picture. We're looking at looking at the issue through a soda straw. But, I do want to focus on some of these more horrific things. Sometimes it's not pleasant, but I think it's important for us to to be mindful of, especially considering how much the cartel's influence uh runs here in the United States. So, moving to the United States specifically, let's talk about the Northeast region for a bit. Moving around the whole country, the general story is that the summertime fund is here once again. A lot of this doesn't really have a whole lot of intel value, but I'll go ahead and skim through it anyway. So, Pennsylvania, there was a mass shooting. It was probably more of a cultural or gang related thing because it involved this large-scale Memorial Day event in the park 10:30 at night. We all know how this goes. Anyway, multiple shooters. Two were killed, nine were wounded in a city park, Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. Not particularly surprising. Locals probably don't bat an eye at this kind of thing, but something to be mindful of being in a city park at night uh in any city of moderate size in the United States. That's a that's a risk these days. Moving over to the southwestern region this week, rather interesting cases of vandalism at various Islamic related sites. So there were two Islamic cultural centers that were vandalized with graffiti and a third site which was a mosque which is uh to the south of of these two sites. I found this to be kind of interesting so I thought I would mention it. Uh but yeah, vandal vandalisms are definitely going to happen a lot more often this summer. This is a very easy assessment to make. Anybody can guess that. But what I thought was quite interesting is when I was putting these uh incidents on the kinetic activity tracker, it looks like we're starting to build a little bit of a pattern here because both of these sites were located pretty close to each other, which is interesting. It kind of makes sense if somebody's foot mobile walking around with a can of spray paint, they're probably going to tag up any site that they can easily walk to. But more interestingly than that, you can see that this is right around the corner or just down the street from a Tesla dealership in which uh which was targeted with an incendiary device. So, we're starting to see, okay, well, now in this small geographic area, we've now got three vandalism incidents. So, again, it's very simple. I'm missing probably a dozen more vandalism incidents that have occurred in this specific area, but I think that now now that this data set is being built and I'm handpicking a lot of these and putting them on the map that it's not just a general crime tracker, we can start to see some of the some how some of these things are uh in the same area as other things. Of course, this doesn't mean that the same guy did all three, but it doesn't mean there's a link at all. I just find it to be kind of interesting that I'm starting to go through the map now and uh put icons on the map and say, "Oh, wait a minute. I already already got something in this area." Which is interesting. So, this is also very interesting to note when we get out to uh out west. So, for instance, in Seattle, the events this week, it's just been one continuous riot basically for the past week or so. Again, this is Seattle. This is the heartland of this kind of thing. It's not really surprising. A lot of the time it's not even worth tracking. Anyway, this week has been a lot more contentious based on the Christian rallies uh that have been held, protest events, prayer vigils, concerts, whatever. There have been a lot of things that have occurred this week. But anyway, Seattle is going to be working through a state of unrest for a while. I would very much urge caution for any of you out there doing research on the mainstream media with this because they're making it out to look like like these Christian groups are the ones who are, you know, beating people and that's that's not true at all. I have not seen media bias as sharp as this uh in a while, honestly, since uh the the Biden presidency. So, I find that to be kind of interesting. Uh it doesn't surprise me, but it's kind of interesting. Right now, for for those of you who are outside of Seattle, it's not really as as bad as 2020, but it could be. Right now, most far-left groups don't really have a lot of the punch that they used to have. a lot of their funding has dried up and a lot of their manpower has not they're they're just not around anymore or they're doing other things. So yeah, Antifa in Seattle doesn't have the mobility that they used to have. Uh they're they're starting to be able to latch on to things and this, you know, provided a convenient target for them. So of course they're going to be able to latch on to that sort of thing. Same thing in places like Cincinnati, Washington DC, New York City. you know, big places like this are uh are definitely anytime a a target is provided, regardless of funding, a lot of these far-left groups or groups that are have very questionable politics, they will seek to cause harm simply because they can. So, that's pretty much all I have for the United States. Uh before we close out today, I want to show you an image from Diego Garcia. That's right, everyone's favorite island that nobody cares about in the middle of the of the Indian Ocean. It's fairly busy. As you can see, we've got a lot of airframes stacked up there at Diego Garcia. This is actually from May 27th. Uh the latest commercial imagery is only partial. So, I don't have a really good uh paid commercial image to be able to identify these, but you can very clearly see that that F-15 squadron that that showed up to Diego Garcia is still there. And the B-52s are still there. So, so yeah, very very busy out there in the middle of the Indian Ocean and uh who knows what we're up to. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Let's roll through the Ghost Net reports for this week. Again, it has been very very good for propagation lately, which is fantastic. I haven't had much time to get on the air this week, unfortunately, uh due to thunderstorms. So, it's always good to get out and test and make sure you're you're uh you're not just a fair weather radio operator guy, but there's also that fine line between you don't want to, you know, get yourself hurt or struck by lightning out there. they're uh trying to operate in in adverse conditions. But but I was able to make the the calm window this week. And we got some good news coming out of Texas. Uh one one person says that the measles outbreak in Texas is subsiding, which is great. Uh so that's uh good to see. Also, somebody pointed out that there's the new CO variant. I guess we're going to have to see what that's all about. And also somebody who just wanted to see their own transmission on an Intel update. So I thought I would oblige and uh show you that I did hear you. coming in hot from Eastern Pennsylvania. So, appreciate all of you for participating in the Ghost Net. It's going to get a lot better very soon. You will see. And it'll be a lot easier for a lot of you to intercept and process and take in a lot of the the news reports that other people can send. I know there's a very high barrier to entry to HF radio, to high frequency or shortwave radio. I know that there's a long list of things you got to do. It's not easy, but uh I will find ways of ingesting this information a lot better and showing that it is a useful tool. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. Again, clickable links everywhere. Um most of the the best ways to get the uh sources for all the information that I put out there is from my Obsidian page. Uh the link is at the end of every single wire report and you click that you'd be surprised as to how little people uh click that and and do research to look at all the sources and raw information that I'm processing to make these uh reports throughout the week. So so check it out if you want. It's there. This is a tool for you to use if you wish. But yeah, uh that's that's all I have for today. Hopefully next week will be a little bit less hectic than this one. And uh maybe we can get into the summertime and not be as uh kinetic as everybody seems to think it will be. So, thank you guys all for your support. Thank you all for watching and we will see you next time.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for April 6th through the 12th, 2025. It's been a very busy week, like I say all the time nowadays, but in this case, I'm afraid that this week has been a swing and a mess on my part, at least from a research perspective, which we'll get to in a moment. Sometimes Intel work is like that. A lot of times you have to do an awful lot of work to come up with a giant pile of nothing or just get stuck at some step along the way. So, I'm afraid I've been a little bit preoccupied with uh some research that hasn't really panned out. So, I haven't had much time to dig much uh into what has happened around the world this week, but let's go ahead and talk about the global strategic concerns right up front. And in the United States this week, the trade war has continued. So, lots of ups and downs, not a whole lot to sink our teeth into. We're just going to have to wait and see. When things are chaotic, it's probably a good idea to let things pan out and see how it works. As far as the tariffs go, it looks like most of the tariffs uh on on the rest of the planet from the United States have either been paused for 90 days or they have been reduced to 10% uh for 90 days while negotiations are ongoing. At the moment, the big tariff conflict appears to be between the United States and China, both of which are digging in. So, as things stand right now, the United States has a 145% tariff on Chinese imports and China has a 125% tariff on American imports. This has obviously amounted to what is essentially a trade embargo between the two nations. Uh, this is very obviously not something that is economically sustainable in the long run. So, I would expect by this week to have some more information on Chinese American trade negotiations. More specifically around the United States, aviation concerns have continued to grow over the past month or so. Since the election, there have been a lot of shakeups at the FAA and various uh airports around the country regarding personnel and things like that. But the past few weeks have been rather kinetic. For instance, there was a fist fight between air traffic controllers earlier this month in the tower during flight operations in Washington DC. Uh this is coupled with a couple of days ago a couple of aircraft clipped wings in Washington DC. There have also been a few highle retirements. For instance, uh the chief of all air traffic control doctrine and management retired announced his retirement earlier this week. So, it's a fairly kinetic time. Of course, the media is going to focus on things like the the plane crashes and problems with general aviation that are more typical and not really out of the norm. But when it comes to other things like fist fights at airports becoming a huge problem now, even apparently amongst staff it seems, and other things that are adjacent to the aviation community, these concerns are beginning to mount and uh there's been increased scrutiny on the way that air traffic control is handled throughout the country. Moving over to Eastern Europe, the situation with regards to the Ukrainian war continues really without much change. However, this week the United States and Russia have begun more direct negotiations with regards to how this conflict is going to shake out. This is not really new. The United States and Russia have been working on this for a few weeks now. However, the talks are beginning to become a little bit more high level and a little bit more publicly high level. So, this is probably a positive tone for the the how the Ukrainian war is hopefully going to come to an end, but no real public progress has been made. Sometimes that's uh that's the way that it is. And uh sometimes in the world of diplomacy, no news is good news. So uh nothing bad has happened so far between the United States and Russia. So that's that's probably a positive thing for now. Moving down to the Middle East, the strategic buildup continues as before. I know we're tired of hearing about it, but it still continues and it's still continuing to get more and more substantial. The grand questions are starting to be asked on the on the national stage of is this buildup for Yemen or is this build up for Iran or is this build up for somewhere else? Uh who knows? It's really hard to say at this moment, but the the buildup does continue. The United States, more specifically, has continued bombing nearly daily in Yemen, and we'll talk about which assets are conducting that bombing here in a moment. But over in Diego Garcia, where we're going to be spending most of our time today again, there have been a lot of indications and warnings of uh increased logistical efforts. So, we'll talk about that in just a moment. Though, moving to the strategic movement tracker, our fleet tracker for this week, things have remained very much the same as before. The Nimus has arrived in the Pacific theater and is cutting some circles out there in the North Pacific Ocean at the moment. The USS Euima has been in and out of Port Norfolk for a few days now. I think she's conducting some sort of exercise, probably some follow-on training regarding the exercise a couple of weeks ago. No real indications and warnings of a major deployment, but both the Euima and the Wasp have been seen moving in and out of Norfolk a little bit more often than is normal. So, we'll see how that works out. But either way, they are not a factor. Neither of these flat tops are a factor for what's going on in the Middle East. That is squarely on the Truman and the Carl Vincent. The Truman is in the Red Sea and the Carl Vincson was observed off the coast of Oman a few hours ago. We don't have an exact location for either of these carrier strike groups obviously because you know operational security. However, aircraft uh who have been conducting logistics flights to these carrier strike groups have been observed on ADSB. So, we can kind of get a general gist of where they're located. And the Carl Vincson was definitely off the coast of Oman at least a few hours ago. Both of these carriers, their mission is somewhat ambiguous, but it's very very likely that both of these carriers are conducting strikes in Yemen. We've seen a very sharp increase and at least the Houthi is reporting things blowing up. So the SNCOM has announced various bombing campaigns. The White House has been talking about it quite a lot. It's hard to pin the tail on the donkey as to which carrier is doing which bombings, but that's the kind of situation as it stands for now. Moving down to Diego Garcia. I don't want to hyperfixate on this location too much in the grand scheme, the big picture of things, but I do have a lot of satellite images to cover. I've already bought them, so I might as well talk about them. Uh, this image is from the sixth is probably the best image I have this week of the South Parking Apron. As we can see, six B2s are still there. Six tankers are still there. Hangers still may or may not have bombers in them. Probably empty, but you never know. One of the more interesting images this week came from April 8th. Again, this is a commercial imagery, so please forgive the Looney Tunesque distortions on this image. I can't really help it that much, but this image shows that three of the B2s were missing. So, three B2s and three KC135 Stratakers were missing. Now, again, most people might say, "All right, fine. They're aircraft. They were off bombing something in Yemen or doing something." However, a little analytical rule of thumb is that when you're looking at satellite imagery from an intelligence perspective and you're trying to figure out what's going on, sometimes the time of day that the image was taken is more valuable than what's in the image. In this case, we have three missing bombers and three missing tankers. Now, you may say one of two things happened. Either one, those bombers are secretly in those hangers uh hiding and they're doing some kind of something on the bombers that they don't want satellites to see. Very good theory. But a more likely theory is that the three bombers took off and they took each a tanker with them wherever they went. Now again, time of day matters. This image was taken at 0443 Zulu time, which works out to be around about4 to 11 local time. So middle of the day, more or less, around lunchtime. So this image was taken during the daytime. So what? Well, for one, one of the main theories as to why these B2s are here is because of the story, the narrative that's being pushed either by a lot of so-called oent pages on Twitter or by the White House or the Pentagon themselves or everyone is basically saying these B2s are for Yemen and they're conducting bombings in Yemen. And that may be true. That may be true. However, the Houthis have not reported a single daytime bombing at all. uh certainly not with large bombs that are going to be delivered by a B2. Now, there have been hellfire strikes here and there from drones. Uh there have been a few sporadic bombings during the daytime. We have footage of this, so we know these this has occurred, but the Houthis have mostly reported these very large scale bombings. The the large targeting, the large deliberate targeting, not the dynamic stuff, the deliberate stuff, which is what B2s are going to be doing. That kind of targeting has taken place during the nighttime, which makes sense. So, if the B2s are missing during the day and they're not bombing in Yemen, where are they? Where did they go? That I cannot speculate on. I do not know. You can make the argument that it's it was a training flight. These that three B2s took off uh with their tankers and they flew somewhere for training. I don't know why you're going to break multiple world records to land at this place and and conduct a forward deployment like you've never done before just to do some localized training. That's not something that B2s normally do. I don't know. I'm sure there's plenty of theories out there, but I thought it was interesting that it does not make any sense for these bombers to be gone during the daytime if they're conducting bombings in Yemen when no bombings have been reported in Yemen. So, that was kind of an interesting tidbit from the April 8th. Also kind of interesting as we can see there are two C5 galaxies sitting on the runway. And just to show my homework a little bit, you can 1,00% say that these are in fact C5s and not C17s as many people have claimed. These are C5s because I can load this satellite imagery into ArcGIS and do what's called point mineration. Basically, I can measure things with a very very good accuracy. the end. If I were to use my measuring tool here to measure the wingspan of whatever aircraft is on the runway, I can compare that to what the US Air Force says is the wingspan of a C5 Galaxy. And in this case, I'm off by a couple of meters. So, with a resolution, uh, image resolution of 1 meter, I'm off by two pixels. So, sorry about that. But either way, uh, pretty close. So, we can say with a pretty good certainty that these are two C5s sitting here delivering cargo to Diego Garcia. So, pretty interesting stuff. Other images I already got this week are from April 9th. Again, the analyst nightmare of clouds over the target. This has been the bane of existence for most military analysts who look at imagery since uh World War II, and it's still the same today. I can't afford a synthetic aperture radar image to punch through these clouds. And and a lot of the satellite images uh that we can buy images from commercially, they don't have infrared either, so it doesn't help us out too much. But we can still see a handful of B2s peeking through the clouds. And the next day, we also have a free satellite shot. Sentinel 2 imagery from April 10th confirms that all six bombers are back at base along with their respective strat tankers. And we do have one C5 parked on the runway as well. And one of the interesting notes from this image is that one of the B2s appears to be maneuvering. So either she's just taxiing around, testing something, maintenance checks, whatever, or she's returning or departing. Either way, kind of an interesting image, even if it is a low quality rendering. Now, one of the things that we have to be mindful of when it comes to looking at runways and blurry images of aircraft is hyperfixation. A lot of people are looking at this island, and a lot of people are looking at this parking apron here. And the US government knows, the Pentagon, and whoever federal agencies are watching this video right now certainly know that people like me are watching this to get a feel for basically if we're going to go to war or not. And because the national intelligence agencies are watching this, they may be inclined and the forces at this island may be inclined to pull a little bit of a sneaky. So, while we're looking down here at the South Apron, it's easy to forget that this isn't the only parking area on this airfield. There is a North Apron. So, I did get a shot of the North Apron just to confirm. I already had a hunch, but I did get an image to confirm that no, there is nothing going on at the north parking apron. is uh an unused portion of the base normally, but I would have expected maybe a C5 or C17 to park here if the south south apron gets a little bit full. Uh so if we start to see more strategic assets start to stage here, we'll have to keep on an eye on the North Apron, too. But for now, the situation here is Nister or nothing significant to report. A giant fat nothing. And even though nothing is occurring at this part of the air base, this is a good reminder to avoid slipping into the analytical trap of failing to zoom out. And to zoom out this week, I did. If we were to go back to our Sentinel imagery and zoom out quite a bit, there have not just been aviation concerns this week, but also maritime concerns. So, even though you guys have not seen this work, I have been tracking the ships as they have been coming and going from Diego Garcia simply because I'm interested to see if this location is starting to be used more as a jumping off point for very uh long-term military operations. And unfortunately, my research has been rather inconclusive this week. I did find two unidentified vessels that seem to be rather new to me over the past few weeks or so. And I will share with you some of my homework in trying to identify these vessels. So, one of the reasons we may want to be mindful of this is again taking a more holistic approach. Just tracking B2s, as cool as it is, and looking at these very, very expensive aircraft on satellite imagery is is interesting. If we're trying to get a much more bigger picture of things, you're not going to be able to fly in enough bombs on a C5 or C17 to sustain a long-term bombing campaign, right? You're going to need ships. And in this case, these two ships caught my eye. Now, before we jump into what these two vessels are and their true identities, I had to jump back in here after I have recorded this brief. I have edited it. I have even uploaded it. It's all good to go. And in classic fashion, the very minute that I finished the upload for this briefing today here on Sunday, April 12th, I have identified this vessel. So, in short, all of what I'm about to talk about, highlighting my thought processes and all the images and all of the analysis work on my end, all of this is kind of irrelevant now. So, if you want to skip past it, please feel free to do so. But I wanted to leave it in to show you some of the things that I think about and the things I was working toward. And if you want to, you can actually see some of the analytical mistakes that I made going through this. some key assumptions right up front that actually are very very inaccurate. Now, I did start off with this sort of okay, but it really did kind of bug me that some of the data points that I identified never really sat quite right. Anyway, I'll start to go through my process now and kind of jump back and show you what I was thinking and then I'll cut back in at the end and tell you exactly what this vessel is because it's not a supply vessel. Well, technically it is, but not really. Anyway, we'll we'll get to that in a moment. But for now, here's what I started with. Now, the first one, uh, which we'll call composite tanker number one. This was very obviously a a tanker of some kind. Completely normal, not nothing out of the ordinary. It doesn't seem to have visited this location very often, at least based on my um limited research, but it's still going to be delivering fuel probably for the aircraft at this base. Maybe oil, too. Who knows? Probably a variety of petroleum products, to be honest. Either way, we've got a pretty good jumping off point for what vessel that is. The other vessel is a rather unique one. Uh this is very obviously a supply vessel, an auxiliary. And to me personally, uh it looks like a Louiswis and Clark class dry goods auxiliary. Uh that's generally what they're called. Um now I scrolled back through all of the Sentinel imagery and found out when she arrived at this location. That's a pretty good place to start from. When did she get there? That maybe help us figure out which one which vessel it is. And it appears to have arrived between March 11th and March 18th. Some people claimed that she is the USNS Guadalupe on social media. We'll get to that in a moment. But overall, uh, my appointments for this time for this vessel is that she's approximately 213 to 215 m, at least from my rather garbage imagery. So, I'll show you that. Now, one of the reasons I don't think she's the Guadalupe, even though that's what's being claimed right now, is that her whole configuration looks different. Guadalupe has got a pointy bow, and this one has a rather blunted beak, so to speak. It just doesn't look the same. Uh there the folks on the Guadalupe is rather large as well. Doesn't really match. However, if we look at a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary, it looks very similar to that. It looks like the small folks there in the squared off portion of the bow looks a little bit more accurate. And we can even go a little bit further. Go to Norfolk Naval Station, our favorite naval base for getting top- down imagery of US Navy auxiliary ships. And we look at a Henry J. Kaiser class replenishment oiler and our our satellite image of our vessel that's uh in the harbor at Dega Garcia. And you can see it doesn't really match. It's not the same vessel. However, it does look a lot more like uh a Louiswis and Clark class dry cargo or ammunition ship, right? So, you know, this is generally the kind of back pocket research that most of you will never see, but it's being done in the background. Anyway, I just thought I would share this time around. So again, I got multiple images of these vessels throughout the week, and I was really kind of interested to find out what is the name of this auxiliary ship here, and I got way down into the weeds by creating a table of every single Louis Clark class auxiliary ship with a goal of finding out uh through process of elimination which this which vessel this could be. Again, there are easier ways of doing this, but I I wanted to do the hard work this time around. This is some kind of like junior level intel guy stuff. So, I wanted to do this work uh just to build familiarity with where these vessels are located normally. And through my own work, I was able to basically narrow down uh which vessel this could be. If it is a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary, it's got to be one of these three because all the ones in red here, uh it obviously can't be those ships. So, I thought, well, you know, none of these were really good fits either. So, I thought, well, maybe it's not. Maybe it's not a Louiswis and Clark. But I measured multiple times from multiple images and the measurements I was getting are not the best. I mean, it could be a lot of different things. I think probably the image from April 5th is the best image I could get of this particular vessel, but again, not really conclusive. Uh it it does look like a Louiswis and Clark class, but it may not be. Um the tanker, it seems a little bit more clear in this image from April 5th. So, uh, the claims that this is the tanker Stenna imperative that that does kind of match the Stenna line of oilers or tankers, excuse me. Uh, those are very impossible to tell apart on satellite imagery. The only way to tell these apart is again by AIS and uh by really good imagery, much better imagery than we can get from a satellite. So, I did work through, just to show my work, I did work through uh one of the classic ways that we track and uh categorize ships since World War II. So, believe it or not, the US Navy uh specifically the Office of Naval Intelligence still does do this by hand. Uh the they classify the whole configuration and what we call the upright sequence. This is done by hand still to this day. So, I pulled the upright sequence for the STA imperative. I found a side shot of the Stenna imperative and I did the upright sequence myself. Now again, this is really nerdy stuff. It doesn't really help you that much, but this is kind of an interesting little bit of Navy lore. This goes back again to the days of World War II uh when imagine you're a submarine captain in the North Atlantic. You're you're hunting merchants and uh you need to know which merchant you sink, right? How do you for instance on all those History Channel documentaries, how do we know the gross tonnage of vessels that were sunk? Well, I'll tell you how we know. The submarine captain looked through his periscope and conducted an analysis of the upright sequence of whichever ship he was getting ready to shoot a torpedo at. And from that upright sequence, we could then determine what ship it was, especially if it's in the dark. Uh all you see is a silhouette and you see masts and funnels and cranes. And you can uh categorize the hole shape and superructure. Well, if you've got a big database or in many cases just a a book, you know, on board the ship of which vessel it is, you know, you can generally kind of put two and two together as to which submarine sank which ship. And that that research combined with the losses, for instance, during the Battle of the Atlantic, the losses on the Allied side, you know, which ship was sunk, you know, at which location and uh on what day, you can narrow down and figure out which ship it is. But this doctrine carries forward to today. So determining the upright sequence for commercial ships is very very important when it comes to trying to identify commercial merchant vessels. And in this case uh it's a little bit subjective. Uh but I did the upright sequence as mast mast crane funnel crane just identifying the features you can see. Again we're looking for big features on board the ship. There is a little bit of room for debate. Modern ships are not like World War II ships. So for instance, in this in this particular image, you could the analyst could make the argument that that second mass there is a king post. But in any case, this is generally what we're going with. And if we also do the same thing with the hole configuration, in this case, it is a raised one uh hole configuration. Some might argue it's a flushed hole. Either way, it's just more data in our pocket. it doesn't really matter because the the upright sequence and the whole configuration for our ship that we see here in the imagery matches pretty good. Uh so we're going to say with a fairly high confidence this is probably the Stenna Imperative as claimed. Again, World War II, we've made a lot of development since then and we have uh really overly watermarked drone shots of some of these uh vessels as well. And we can compare that to the open- source Sentinel imagery. And we can compare it to the image uh the paid commercial image and it seems to match pretty pretty dang close. So as far as the tanker goes, yeah, it's just an imperative most likely. We can also uh check the AIS data. Again, some of you may say, well, why didn't you check the AIS tracking data? I did. Almost all vessels shut off their transponder before they get within a thousand miles of this island. Again, it's a very decently secret place. And uh there is an AIS transponder or receiver here. And none of the vessels who go to this island turn their transponder on. So it's very much a kind of a blacked out place, which is understandable considering it's, you know, largely military use. So that's kind of where I'm stuck at here. One of the reasons why I can't identify this vessel is uh there are a few theories here, uh which you can read on your own. It could be that I'm just stupid and am missing something completely. This could be a standard thing that maybe this isn't a buildup of resources at Diego Garcia. I went through and I looked through the past four years of Sentinel images. Every single time an image was taken, I looked at it and from my own eye, I can't really I mean, there are routine logistics shipments to this island, but I can't say I can't determine right now. I don't have enough data to determine if what I'm seeing in this image, for instance, is anything abnormal. I maybe it's not abnormal. I don't know. Another thing to remember is maybe I'm just misidentifying this vessel. Maybe it could be something else. Maybe it's uh maybe it's a foreign vessel. Who knows? I measured it. I did all this uh point mineration on it and it matches as best I can to a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary. Another theory is that well maybe the Sentinel imagery is misleading. Maybe they're trying to pull a sneaky on us. Again, coming back to the military deception possibility. Here are uh the past few images where I think this vessel arrived uh at this location and anchored in this spot. And as you can see based on the kind of yellow orange circles, it's been there since at least March 18th. Now, there was a gap of time between March 11 and March 18 where there was no satellite coverage. So, she arrived somewhere between 11 and 18. But maybe she didn't. Maybe that's a different vessel. Uh, it's pretty cloudy. So, maybe she really arrived on the 31st. There's no telling. I mean, maybe they're maybe they're trying to play a shell game here and telling different commercial ships to to anchor in the same spot to make it look like it's been one single ship this entire time when in actuality it's been multiple ships. That's a possibility, too. I say that because if we go back to my chart here of who it could possibly be, uh, based on the images, well, we've got the our three contenders. You can see the dates here. The dates are not matching up. So, something is wrong along here. It's far more likely that I'm just wrong and that I have done something incorrectly up until this stage than than it is for a sort of ghost ship to exist. Ships don't just, you know, appear, right? So, all right. Just to save everyone some time, uh, in the comment section down below, I can confirm 100% that I was wrong. This is not a Louiswis and Clark class dry cargo ship. The entire internet is wrong as well. Twitter is wrong. All of the multi-million dollar think tanks and probably CIA funded naval warfare publications are also incorrect. I have figured out what this ship is. This vessel is the USS Emory S Land AS39. And some of you out there may say, "What in the Sam Hill kind of vessel is that?" Well, my friends, this is a submarine tender. I would like to state for the record that I'm not entirely at fault here, okay? Uh because this ship is not supposed to be here. So, the Emory S Land is one of two ships left of her type in the entire US Navy fleet. There is the USS Emory S Land and the USS Frank Cable. Like I mentioned earlier, it didn't really make a whole lot of sense. There was something a little bit nagging to me about this vessel being called something that it wasn't right to start with. And then the uh actual like AIS data indicated that well, it doesn't it can't really be a Louiswis and Clark vessel either. It doesn't I mean the imagery is kind of bad, but I mean it's almost the same dimensions as a Louiswis and Clark vessel. However, what I was measuring is the helellipad off the rear end. And if you'll see at the very very top image, the the satellite image that I bought here shows a cutout in the uh helipad. So, it's like an offset helipad. And that was the thing that kind of got me going to think maybe this is maybe this is not a Louiswis and Clark class vessel because they they have a helellipad that's obviously uh contained within the hole and it it it just looks different. So anyway, I kind of had an epiphany. It came to me that this is actually a submarine tender, the USS Emory S land, and that's definitely what it is. If you look at all the images you can Google on your own, it's definitely what it is. Now, for those of you who feel a little bit charitable with wasting your time for the past few minutes, this is still very important. So, I was originally concerned about this ship coming to this area to deliver bombs. Well, we know that's not the case now. This ship is here to take care of submarines. This is a submarine tender. So, what does that tell us? So it tells us that the US Navy is going to be running attack subs out of Diego Garcia. Now, now the more astute of you, if you research the USS Emiry Sand and the submarine tender class of ships, you may find that, "Wow, wait a minute. She's been here before." And you would be correct. The USS Emory S Land was stationed in Diego Garcia almost 15 years ago. That's a long time. Right now, here's the kicker with this. There's only two of these vessels left. The Emiries Land and the Frank Cable. Now, the Frank Cable is supposed to be stationed in Guam and the MRA land is supposed to be stationed here in Diego Garcia. Now, here's the kicker. I've got a lot of documentations that state that this ship, the Emory Land, was actually transferred to Guam and the Frank Cable was sent to the west coast of America, back to Seattle, right? So, quite the twist of fate, isn't it? It's not exactly what we were talking about, but in unraveling this mystery of what this ship is, we've actually uncovered something rather new. That's why I couldn't find this ship going back a little ways in the imagery because well, she wasn't there. She was in Guam. And now, at least as of a few months ago, maybe even a couple of years, she's been stationed here in Diego Garcia a little bit more permanently. So, how long has she been at Diego Garcia? I don't know because my sentinel imagery is not that great. During the wintertime, there are sometimes many, many months where I can't get a good image of anything because of cloud cover. So again, I've gone through years and years and years of uh this this area worth of imagery, and I can't find the this this ship here passed a few months ago. So when she got here, she got here in the probably in the middle of March, like I had originally theorized, between March 11th and March 18th. So I don't know. You guys tell me. What do you think? I mean, this is kind of interesting. No, it's not the ship we were expecting it to be, but it is very, very interesting in a completely different manner. So, once again, not particularly new. This is rather old information to be honest, but I think it's kind of interesting and and it does highlight that we're looking at militarizing Diego Garcia a little bit more often because otherwise, why would she be here, right? Again, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is very helpful for running submarines uh out of uh the Middle East, so that you know, the submarines that are accompanying the carrier strike groups don't have to wait so long without going uh with mail and uh things like that. So, it's kind of interesting. I don't know if this is a smoking gun that points to, holy cow, we're going to be having more submarine operations out of Diego Garcia. I don't know, this may be the same baseline. So, it doesn't really help us make any more decisions about the seriousness of what's going on at Diego Garcia, but it is very, very interesting. and I I found it to be uh quite the thrilling hunt to fi find out what this vessel is. So either way, this is kind of the research that I have done this week. These are the the facts that we can sink our teeth into. And unfortunately, you know, this this does highlight the difference between journalism and intelligence. If we were to just talk about just the raw facts, hey, there's two ships in the harbor, right? Uh and we don't go into the analysis of what that means or we don't do any of the research to determine what vessel it could be. we we're not going to highlight any of these discrepancies. So the world of intelligence is of course different from the world of journalism. Uh journalism is supposed to tell you just the facts whereas intelligence is supposed to help you make decisions based on incomplete information. And in this case there's a lot of incomplete information. Sometimes that's that happens but either way it is a very good uh week for learning lessons and kind of getting back to the basics of good intel habits to have. Don't hyperfixate on one thing. I know I've hyperfixated on these ships this week, but don't focus on just the aircraft. Don't focus on just this island. This island doesn't really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. It's all little breadcrumbs. All little breadcrumbs of information we're trying to put together. It's like uh it's like a paint by numbers thing. We're trying to paint a picture here, but we've only got like two colors and we can only fill in 30% of the of the spots on the on the painting. So, not going to be a very pretty picture. And you may have to still look at that picture and make a decision. That's kind of what this is all about. showing my homework to uh detail some of the more in-depth things that that we talk about and work through and some of the conclusions we have to come to uh based on very very incomplete and oftentimes conflicting information. So, I know not very interesting, very very boring, but that's what I have for this week. That's pretty much all I've been able to focus on and and work through with regards to what's going on around the Middle East. Now, I do have a couple of things I'm not going to talk about just yet. I do have a couple of other locations. I have not, as you might be led to believe by what I've talked about so far, I have not been focusing only on Diego Garcia. There are a few other places to watch. And watching them, I have been. So, I will hope to have a little bit more information. We have to start developing these things out. We've got to start somewhere, right? So, I'll hope to hopefully have a little bit more information on that over the next month. It's going to take a while for my my work to come to fruition on this to kind of figure out are we going to war with Iran or not or are we doing something else. But either way, wrapping up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. It's been a pretty light week this week, which is kind of understandable this time of year. It's always pretty light. Everybody wants to be outdoors and uh not playing with radio stuff. But that's the eternal battle, isn't it? It's always a uh challenge to keep from being complacent. And uh we most certainly have to remember to not get complacent. Make sure you know how to use your stuff. Make sure you have a plan for communicating with people you need to communicate with if and when communications goes down. We still have to remember submarine cables are still being cut. China is uh still tapping or trying to manipulate or cut or anchor drag over cables all of the time. It's become a very common thing to do. So again, don't be complacent. Realize that the internet may go out for certain parts of the world and it may be hard to figure out what's going on. So, as we all know, you cannot really easily create a communications plan after a disaster. You kind of have to plan on what you're going to do beforehand. And the ghost net is at least a stop gap measure in that regard. So, that's all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. And thank you guys all for sticking with me today. I know it's been kind of a whole lot of nothing this week. Uh even though there have been definitely a lot of things going on, it's just not a whole lot of conclusive uh activities that we can kind of really get any sort of closure on, I guess. But either way, I'm going to continue keeping a very broad view on things and we'll see what uh see what next week brings. Hopefully, we'll have some more information there. But until then, thank you for all of your support. It really helps when uh when I've got to go through a lot of satellite images and it really helps a lot, too. And uh keeping the mapping project I've got going. So, that that definitely does help quite a bit. So, thank you all for that and I will see you next time.

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