//The Wire//2300Z July 7, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: EXPLOSIONS REPORTED NEAR HOTEL HOUSING FRENCH PRESIDENT DURING STATE VISIT TO DAMASCUS. MONACO BOMBER FOUND DEAD IN UKRAINE. IRAN RESUMES TARGETING OF UNAUTHORIZED TRANSITS OF HORMUZ STRAIT. CONCERNS GROWING REGARDING STATUS OF SENATOR MCCONNELL'S HEALTH, COMPLICATING UPCOMING ELECTION.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Syria: This morning several explosive devices were detonated in Damascus during French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit. The first device took the form of a Vehicle-Borne IED (VBIED) which was detonated on the street adjacent to the Ministry of Tourism, wounding many people including the Assistant Deputy Minister of Tourism. A few minutes after this device detonated, another device detonated on the street immediately adjacent to the initial blast site. At the time of the blasts, President Macron was staying at the Four Seasons hotel directly across the street from the blast site. Macron was not wounded during the attack, and has not canceled his state visit to Syria. Analyst Comment: This complex attack was very likely targeting Macron himself, or at least trying to get as close as possible to cause diplomatic trouble. Throughout the region, it's extremely common for terror groups to conduct attacks while foreign dignitaries are visiting, so as to embarrass their political leadership. Ukraine: Yesterday one of the lead suspects in the Monaco bombing case was found dead. Anastasiia Berezovska was the individual suspected of dropping off the bomb at the residence of Vadym Yermolaiev a few weeks ago. Berezovska was found at an undisclosed location in Ukraine with multiple gunshots to the head. After her death was discovered, an actively-serving member of the Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian MoD confessed to her murder. Analyst Comment: Very clearly, someone is tying up the loose ends in this case, and doing so very publicly to send a message. Now that the lead suspect in the bombing case is dead, the entire affair is tidied up neatly, and no further investigation can be undertaken regarding who Berezovska was working for. -HomeFront- Washington D.C. - Concerns are growing regarding the status of Senator Mitch McConnell, who has been hospitalized for several weeks. On June 14th, McConnell was found unconscious on the floor of his home in Capitol Hill after suffering an apparent heart attack. CPR was performed at the scene, and he was transported to a hospital. Apart from those initial details, there is currently no indication of his status beyond unconfirmed rumor. Analyst Comment: McConnell's health has been extremely concerning over the past few years, with several viral media incidents indicating that he is not well. In this case, three days after his heart attack, his wife Elaine Chao traveled to China to meet with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng. As a result of the timing of this visit, and the extreme secrecy surrounding the health of a man who has been of ailing health for years, concerns are growing regarding McConnell's status. In Kentucky, election law regarding position appointments has recently changed. Instead of the Governor being able to make an appointment for the seat, if a Senator dies in office, a special election is now mandatory. As such if McConnell passes away before the election, a special election would have to be held to fill the vacancy of only a couple of months, before the general election in November. However, the timing matters. If a Kentucky Senator dies in office (and thus vacates the seat) less than 63 days before the election, a special election would probably not be required and the normal election goes on. In this case, McConnell is not running again this year but the law regarding his seat still applies, so he must remain alive until September 1st, in order to prevent a special election which would allow a third-party candidate to run for his seat. New York: This morning evacuations were conducted after a high-rise building experienced a partial collapse in midtown Manhattan. The former Pfizer building at 235 E. 42nd St was undergoing major renovations/construction this morning, when approximately 5 floors of the building experienced a partial collapse. A perimeter cordon is currently in place around the building, as pieces of the structure have been falling on the street and sidewalk throughout the morning. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Persian Gulf, the Ayatollah's funeral has served as a sort of ceasefire-within-a-"ceasefire", and the United States and Iran took the past week to actually stop shooting at each other. During that time, merchant vessels also took the opportunity to slip through the Strait of Hormuz via the southern Omani route...something that Iran has repeatedly warned against. During the funeral, Iranian forces let this take place, however as of last night patience ran out and the Iranians have returned to striking commercial vessels for taking this route. So far today, a total of 4x confirmed (and probably one more unconfirmed) merchant vessels have been engaged by Iran for trying to sneak through the Strait. This is the most ships that have been struck since the hot-phase of the war, and these targeting efforts were not the result of ship captains unilaterally changing the route. Yesterday, the UKMTO directly stated that merchant traffic may take the southern route without coordinating with the Iranians. This statement was issued knowing full well that the Iranians have been warning ships that they must take the Larak Island route. Exactly who made the decision to issue this statement is unclear, but in effect the UKMTO told ships to take a route that they knew would be unsafe, gambling on the Iranians not conducting strikes during the Ayatollah's funeral. Now, the burning hulls of five ships are evidence that this gamble was ill advised. In response to these attacks, the United States has re-imposed sanctions on Iranian oil exports after granting them permission to export their oil a few weeks ago. Other than the sanctions, the United States is likely to conduct the standard retaliation strikes at random targets near Bandar Abbas over the next few days. 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 ukrainian war intel update for march 2nd 2022. let's get right to it much like last time i don't really have a whole lot for the geopolitical sphere even though a lot has happened uh there's really not a whole lot worth talking about or commenting on i did want to briefly mention something that i thought was interesting and that is in russia there are extremely unconfirmed reports that valeri grassimov was fired by putin yesterday but i think these rumors are untrue firing the chief of staff for the russian armed forces during an invasion is something that is not very likely to happen even if the invasion is going badly so far it sounds like these reports are the result of western leadership trying to cast doubt on russia's leadership and this is a trend that has continued over the past few days because we've heard constantly that russia is losing and that putin has gone insane or that there has been rioting and mutiny among russian forces in belgorod or that a military coup is brewing in russia from russia's invasion failures none of this is verifiable to any degree and all of this is probably false the only way that i can think that putin would outright fire his version of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is if something so egregious occurred that it was worth losing face in the act of firing him and i highly doubt that that has occurred also in ukraine the evacuation issues have become more prevalent as more and more people try to egress to neighboring countries in the west but we'll talk more about that in a bit and in belarus things are heating up as well uh with belarus approving a referendum to give up their non-nuclear status so basically what this means is that belarus could be they they could be host to nuclear weapons in the future meaning that russia could deploy nuclear weapons to their terrain or belarus potentially could even get nuclear weapons of her own this is something that's pretty big when it comes to european politics but again this is just a direct result of russia and belarus trying to expand into the rest of europe any time that word nuclear gets turned around people tend to panic a little bit with this i wouldn't necessarily view it as anything more significant i mean if you just look at geography and how nuclear weapons work it doesn't really matter if there's a nuclear weapon in belarus or not because a nuclear weapon in belarus versus being launched from smolensk or briansk or something like that that doesn't really matter too much when it comes to that sort of thing but this is definitely a political play which we will talk about in just a bit before we go on i briefly wanted to mention a major warfare tactic that is being used in the information war right now by all sides and all players and that concept is called gaslighting those of you who have been downloading our slides should recognize this from several days ago but i've only found it prudent to verbally talk about right now for instance i pulled all of these graphics from various domestic abuse websites because that's how most people are aware of this psychological warfare tactic if you take a moment to read these graphics you might notice a lot of familiarity between these gaslighting tactics and pretty much everything that's been said by various political and social groups around the world over the past few years without getting too much into the weeds we are seeing gaslighting and other similar psychological tactics being the primary weapons of very powerful people around the world and this is becoming a significant problem for the ukrainian war causing someone to doubt their own sanity and reality is certainly where we are at with regards to most of the events that are being talked about in the world today of course a false tweet is not comparable at all to a grodd strike but those of us who are located outside of the combat zone and are trying to help people in the combat zone the information war becomes the primary fight for us and this is where we come to a standstill ourselves because right now the misinformation that is out there is so thick that it's not possible to know what's going on with any reliability for the most part the theme for this brief is that there's a lot happening but almost none of it is verifiable due to the blatant lies that are being told by all sides i go out of the way to make this distinction now because understanding this concept is an important lens with which to view what i'm about to say when we get to each front line moving to the overall operating picture much like last time the situation on the ground with regards to front line locations has become more ambiguous plus we also have to remember that russia is conducting this invasion mostly along surface roads it's not like uh when we think of a normal front lines of troops advancing across the countryside there isn't a whole lot of cross-country travel being used by the russians except for tactically uh in various uh situations where they need to maneuver off of a a hardpacked road right so for the most part it's not really it's not really doing justice to the invasion to kind of put lines on the map but it's kind of the best way to visualize it so we're still going to keep doing that but in any case forces to the north northeast and east have observably slowed down the pace of their advance this is mostly in the north as russian forces build up for the fight for kiev the southern front continues to be the front where most advances have occurred although much like the rest of the fronts the pace has slowed down over the past three days there have been reports slash rumors of the russian ministry of defense calling up reinforcements by way of more conscripts and there is some evidence to support this but it is difficult to determine what fronts are the priority for any reinforcements that arrive in theater or move forward into ukraine from forward operating bases along the russian and belarusian border in other words we don't know if russia is calling up troops from all over the country like they did for this initial initial invasion or if they're just moving guys they had pre-staged along the border this whole time so it's really unclear really hard to say which units are moving where so at this point our graphics showing each unit is very inaccurate speaking of belarus lukashenko has been more vocal than usual lately and very strongly indicating that belarus will be joining this conflict soon and it looks like belarusian forces have already joined the fight in certain areas and probably were part of the initial invasion as well belarus doesn't have a super large military but lukashenko clearly wants a piece of this action and since the only reason that he hasn't been mussolini in the streets is because putin is propping him up lukashenko's entire existence is dedicated to currying favor with putin so we will see belarus join this fight the question that remains unanswered is how much they will bring to the table as far as iff markers nothing really major new there have been a few new symbols or letters but it's really hard to tell if they're actually a new letter or if it's an older letter that's either due to combat damage kind of disfigured or if somebody painted it wrong or something that's really hard to tell but this is really what we were still sticking with as far as iff markers on the northeastern front we continue to see russian forces make very small limited advances and there appears to be a split in various uh forces and what i mean by that is forces that are west of kharkiv appear to be dedicated for the fight for kiev they were supposed to go further into the countryside but it looks like russia has determined that kiev is going to be a big fight which it is and they are pushing forces that probably were dedicated for other locations to kiev now forces that are taking kharkiv those forces are going to take that city as well again kharkiv is ukraine's second largest city so it's not a small town by any means so there's going to be a lot of forces dedicated for that also we're seeing that tactic of russia basically encircling or and or bypassing cities occurring as well the town of sumi has been taken and retaken it's changed changed hands a few times but again then we fall into the definition of or fall into the tactic of trying to define what taking a village actually means does it mean driving through it do you mean does that mean you took the village you know it's really hard to say so really what we're seeing is russia trying to tie down forces in some of these smaller cities like konatov and sumi and then larger forces bypassing these cities to head for their primary primary objectives which in this case are kiev and kharkiv we're even seeing forces starting to bypass kharkiv and head further to the south and east as they try to conduct a pincer operation from kharkiv all the way down to just off the slide to the eastern front and lugansk regions so we'll move down there now on the eastern front it's become clear to us that two major lines of effort have emerged one which is a sort of pincer movement or really just an advance on two different fronts two opposing fronts for the city of maripo forces in the occupied territories are trying to push to the west to cut off marple to the north and try to link up with the forces that have advanced from the south from crimea around the city uh to to pincer around it and cut off the city further moropole for all intents and purposes is more or less cut off right now from the outside world although there are pockets right it's not like there's an imaginary line stretched around the city right so breakout operations are certainly still possible for any ukrainian forces that wish to egress further back into ukraine's territory but it's unclear as to what ukraine's motives are for mario paul it looks like they're going to be trying to take that city or hold that city rather for the foreseeable future moving down south there appear to be three main lines of effort with one like i mentioned being dedicated to supporting marupul from the west another one appears to be piercing to the north most likely along the nipah river north to japanese and an additional unit that's pushing to the west uh to take the city of kerrson uh as of a few hours ago we've got the notification that kirsan has been taken or at least their mayor says so uh so ukrainians are admitting that uh russian units have taken kerosene and are actually trying to set up administrative areas uh already in the city further attempts to push west across the deneber are really hard to say right now most likely odessa will be assaulted with an amphibious assault very very soon if it hasn't occurred already by the time this video gets out because odessa is a major is a major port town and that's going to be a very critical avenue for things like trade and it's just a very populated city right so it's going to be a major target for the russian advance moving to the western front the front which is really the forgotten front because not really much has occurred here still continues to give us some information and that is this time to do with alexander lukashenko so yesterday belarusian dictator alexander lokashenko held a televised meeting with his security council to discuss the situation in ukraine what caught many people's eye was the map that he was standing in front of which showed a few interesting things so let's enhance if we enhance the image a bit we can clearly see that someone is planning an attack on moldova maybe again this could all be a deliberate mistake that is made to make us think that russia and belarus are going to invade moldova specifically transnistria next this map also shows ukraine being broken up into four administrative areas again hinting at the goal of a total eradication of the ukrainian state if this is genuinely russia's plan then the situation is far worse than we thought and russia's goals are far more ambitious than we thought but i myself am withholding judgment on this for now attacking transnistria would be a really really big deal even if it is a breakaway republic russian puppet state that would prove without a doubt that russia's intentions do not lie only within ukraine the other interesting part of this map is that it is slightly out of date and based on the lines of advance we can clearly see that things are not going as planned for the russians so many forces have had to change their plans and as we can now see the mad dash for kiev has begun so rather than following this map's scheme of advance every unit along the northern and northeastern front is headed for kiev but again this might be all a trick who knows russia has been known to genuinely accidentally leak very sensitive top secret information to the press such as the stuff that came out a few years ago about the canyon nuclear torpedo project and other gucci directorate stuff ordinarily it's a pretty bold move to show a map of your invasion on live tv but lukashenko is a pretty bold guy so it would make sense for him to show this map and boast about his military goals and if this is a deception operation i can't imagine what goal that deception operation would have it seems like there wouldn't be much to gain by leaking this intentionally as always we will have to wait and see if these lines of effort materialize and more importantly keep a closer eye on the situation in moldova on the northeastern front russian troops have begun stacking up for the assault on kiev which should be getting underway in earnest right about now but the russian advance has slowed to a crawl so much so that i would go as far as to say the advance to kiev has stalled at least temporarily as russia continues to stage troops russia has dedicated a lot of forces for the battle of kiev and those forces have been observed in what is now called the 40-mile convoy a vehicle stretching along the main highway south into kiev but we will talk about this in a moment let's zoom in a little closer in kiev various local tv towers have been struck resulting in television broadcast outages throughout the area this is something that again we should have expected honestly on the first day of this conflict it should also be noted that russia has announced that civilians who want to leave kiev kharkiv and other cities will not be harmed for trying to leave and at this stage we here have no reason to doubt that this policy will be honored uh russia may have indiscriminately targeted civilians passively with artillery and airstrikes but for the most part russian ground forces have not been targeting civilians and mass however seeing as the ukrainian resistance will be heavily concentrated in cities russia will also begin to conduct strikes in these locations as well artillery strikes have already been conducted in some parts of kiev and we expect that to continue and increase in severity over the coming days as russian troops begin to enter the city it's unlikely that russian forces will attempt to level the city it's more alike they'll probably be going for just pockets of resistance or military things military targets within the city but again russia's complete and utter lack of concern for collateral damage means that there's going to be a lot of damage throughout kiev over the coming days and that kind of leads us to something that we have been observing and thinking about this invasion since it began and that is the question of why is russia performing so poorly in this fight and for the entire western world who is fervently taking notes on this war this question keeps coming up as well why has russia not had a single notable action during this entire conflict yeah sure russia is still invading and they're not losing and they're still moving forward and making progress but it's almost like every goal they have achieved has been almost on accident there has been fierce fighting in places like kharkiv journey of chernobyl luhansk maripol and places like that and russia has won battles in these areas but it does not appear that russia has achieved a clear decisive total victory anywhere every battle they have fought has cost them dearly even in the skies russia doesn't maintain dominance every first lieutenant at every army unit that has ever existed wrote a term paper at some point detailing the importance of aerial superiority during an invasion and even people who have no understanding of warfare doctrine can see that russia should have achieved total and complete aerial superiority over the entire country of ukraine within the first few minutes of the invasion but they weren't able to do that and even three days after the invasion began they had two il-76s get shot down and then there's the 40-mile convoy headed to kiev let me tell you every single military service member who has ever driven a vehicle can look at that satellite imagery and cringe that is without a doubt the fattest target for an ambush that i have ever seen in my entire life remember these guys are not stacked up like this inside their own country no they are miles behind enemy lines in a country which has an active insurgency against them and this comes after some of their comrades down south got decimated by a ukrainian drone strike in this exact situation so all of these thoughts are not to push the western propaganda that russia is losing or demoralized we have no way to know that this is just a genuine observation that at this point is worth talking about anybody who has studied warfare for five minutes can plainly see that russia is making a lot of mistakes mistakes that are so serious that it makes you wonder if there's something here we don't know and that is certainly the case we're just spectating this like everyone else however one mistake that we see being made on the part of western military strategists is that they are grading russia's actions using a western textbook russia's style of warfare is different from ours and there are a lot of things that people tend to forget like vehicle spacing we here in the us are hypersensitive to that due to several decades of fighting insurgencies russia's last insurgency-ish fight was in georgia in 2008 and that wasn't a great learning exercise for russia with regards to counter-insurgency because they overwhelmingly won that conflict in just a few days but even going back to the chechen war russia has not had the same experience that the united states has and russia's military is certainly not an expeditionary one russia's reliance on rail to move the majority of her logistics and the doctrine of not really stressing truck-based transport at lower and lower echelon levels might be the main reason that russia is having logistical problems right now and the logistical stresses of pre-invasion training exercises is something to think about too remember these troops were on the border of ukraine for a couple weeks and just keeping a hundred and seventy-five thousand troops fed and warm in the field had to have been a logistical nightmare and that was before the invasion even began and we know that these logistical woes did exist because we saw a lot of soldiers being sent forward uh to staging areas along the border without winter gear or with sparse food supplies for the aviation threat another way to look at why we haven't really seen the skies full of russian aircraft is that they know the man pad threat is real what's the point of sending in your brand new shiny fighter jets or massive waves of ground attack aircraft against an enemy that's extremely dispersed dug in and with a single dude with a shoulder launched missile on every apartment rooftop even though russia has the capability to send in hundreds of aircraft every hour if they aren't willing to get a lot of them shot down in the process do they really have that capability same with the armored divisions we've seen rolling around we think of russia's actions in terms of total numbers and not the numbers that are actually being observed in practice sure we might see a column of vehicles in armor that is over 40 miles long with hundreds and hundreds of armored vehicles stretching out to take kiev but here's the thing at the very front of that column you're not fighting all 40 miles of it you're fighting just the first few vehicles again the warfare doctrine that armies around the world learn the hard way over time is that this sure-fire way to whittle down an overwhelming force is to take them on one at a time this concept goes all the way back to the gates of thermopylae and the story of the 300 spartans canalizing terrain even self-imposed canalizing terrain in the form of sticking to roads for ease of navigation is something that the russians don't appear to be too concerned with and with a civilian populace in full-on guerrilla warfare mode this is a decision that russia will regret later a lot of people are split along the following lines those that think that russia is intentionally holding back for some reason and actually does have the capability to fight better and those that think that the russian military is old and busted and doesn't actually have the capabilities that they claim they do going back to a cold war mentality that russia's power comes from the perception of her power in either case if russia is voluntarily or involuntarily not as effective as they should be the effect is the same they're not as effective as they should be whether they can't or they can but won't isn't super relevant to the 19 year old bmp driver outside of kiev or to the civilian defending their home i don't think that any one of these thoughts is the complete explanation for why russia doesn't seem to be doing as well as we might have guessed they would or why russia seems to be making a lot of poor decisions but maybe these random thoughts provide a different perspective or a different way of thinking about the russian military in general in any case russia is writing a lot of doctrine right now and they are writing it the hard way the same way the u.s wrote ours by gaining experience and maybe the biggest lesson that russia has learned from this conflict is that kiev is not tbilisi and ukraine is not georgia russia may start learning these lessons and if they are fully committed to taking kiev they might just win this war though win would be definitely too strong of a word whatever happens this will not be a total victory for russia russia's actions on the international stage have embarrassed herself even taking aside the obvious western propaganda and meaningless sanctions russia is supposed to be a superpower that should have taken ukraine on the first day much like the u.s and her overseas ambitions in the past expeditionary military operations to a country where the local populace doesn't want you there is a lot harder than it looks on the civilian front not too much to report other than the increasing tensions along evacuation routes to the west traffic is still atrociously bad along with the rail transport to the west trains are still running as far as we know and lots of people are cramming as many people as they can onto trains to get them to the west out of these areas but it's really hard to say when or where services might stop likewise with traffic there's really no good way to to show people how to get around it because every road is jammed heading to the west we aren't seeing too many problems or too many issues popping up although tensions are really high along the obviously the border zones there have been a few fights breaking out here and there along the border at various immigration controls and things like that um so it's really hard to to say exactly what's going on i wouldn't say that it's complete and total pandemonium no it's it's not like an all-out panic you know like a mad bat a mad dash to the border but there is there is tension there and uh the tensions are increasing and um it's just not really a super pleasant time right now so uh if we get any more information regarding the civilian front and how that's going to affect the civilian populace in the occupied territories we'll let you know before we close the day i wanted to mention just a few thoughts because there's a lot of there's a lot of ideological thoughts out there these days and it's really clear that a lot of the sources that are talking about ukraine are talking about in a certain way and like i mentioned in the beginning the situation for us has become a lot more complex and a lot more irritating when it comes to the information that is available to us about this war the information that we can use to make decisions about our own lives uh what i find myself doing really at this stage is just making observations and then taking steps to reduce my own personal vulnerabilities and increase my own capabilities those of you who have been listening to our stuff for a while you know that we're all about that we're all about reducing personal vulnerabilities and increasing capabilities no matter what the situation is right so rather than get bogged down in the ideological fighting over what belief is better or what piece of information is better or worse i find that it's a lot less stressful and a lot more productive to think about certain events and then the potential impacts like right now the reason that we're even talking about ukraine is that we generally don't think it's a super great idea for one nation to invade another especially in europe especially for the reasons that russia is claiming to have invaded for but i also don't want to engage in situations that might increase the risk of going to war with another superpower that internal conflict that debate over what opinion to have is not very useful to kind of flesh out in my mind plus i mean the world is such a different place today i mean remember how for two years now we've had that magical c word on our minds for the past two years barely an hour has gone by without us thinking about the virus for a lot of people that became their identity nothing more important than that however they felt about it and now the same thing is happening right now with ukraine a lot of people do not go five minutes without talking about or consuming the ukrainian war for political or social reasons so we want to avoid that and taking a step back reassessing what's actually going on and prioritizing what lessons to learn is sometimes necessary this isn't going to be the last event like this and we're looking into the future be it another invasion or some other worldwide polarizing event we've got to get in the right mindset for the next decade so that's all we've got for now i just wanted to briefly touch on how keeping the right mindset is important moving forward and as we move forward into this conflict we have to remember that information is going to be few and far between when the fighting for kiev begins in earnest there will be very little that we or anyone else can do for us our own goals are largely complete we chronicled the lead up to the invasion and the initial invasion itself our goals were to help provide enough information for people to make the decision to stay or leave ukraine and what avenues of approach to take to do so so in that regard our work is mostly done there seem to be very few people left in ukraine that have not either made the decision to stay or go what we will try to do moving forward is to provide our thoughts and lessons learned so as our information about the situation on the ground becomes more and more ambiguous we can still at least learn some lessons that will be helpful in making decisions in the future so we're not going anywhere but we also don't want to waste anyone's time if we don't have anything meaningful to add so thanks again everyone thank you for your support and we 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 friday the 20th of may 2022 and it is being recorded the day prior on the 19th of may so let's get to it got a lot of stuff to talk about today so i'm just going to start off with critical infrastructure concerns and really the the kind of oddball out is uh the twitter slash elon musk debacle situation that everyone's been following uh over the past few weeks um really i don't have a whole lot to say about this um it seems like the deal for elon musk to purchase twitter is still kind of on hold slash limbo due to third party audits revealing that a significant portion of twitter twitter accounts are actually fake which is something that was not disclosed by twitter as part of the agreement so i guess we'll have to see how this works out the only reason i'm mentioning it is because again everyone's been talking about it and i guess social media like twitter especially twitter um people rely on it whether or not you like it or not i'd personally despise twitter no matter who owns it i just don't like it as a platform but despite how i feel about it it doesn't really matter it's still a huge communications platform for a lot of people on the planet so um i guess we'll have to keep an eye on this and see how it goes my guess is that elon musk will probably eventually end up buying twitter and seeing how that goes as far as whether or not it will be a good platform or not after that i don't know i highly doubt it um despite what many people might seem to think on the internet i personally don't think that um really any billionaire is the savior of mankind right so um i have so i have serious reservations and and i'm highly doubtful in anyone actually being able to provide social media in such a way that it's productive because i don't think that most social media especially twitter is a place where any kind of rationalism can thrive so i will be very interested to see how it goes and i think really the biggest part is the second and third order effects of this uh if i almost think that it's probably not a good thing uh because if elon musk takes over twitter and it's he's publicly stated that he is no longer a democrat and he is going to vote republican in this next election um the fact that he said that makes me think that there's going to be a a whole lot of conservatives uh rushing back to twitter uh because they've been banned from twitter and it's kind of obvious that twitter is a leftist platform i think that a lot of people are going to rush right back to twitter and we're just going to continue this goat rodeo for the next few years and i don't think that's productive i think that there needs to be another answer that's why we've been working on our our own solutions to this problem i don't think that twitter is going to be a safe haven for anyone and i don't think that it's going to be very much different than in the past you might have a lot more conservatives on it but i think that at the end of the day it's still a money-making platform and i don't think that it's a place for any kind of free speech to to take place so being like i mentioned the second and third order effects are going to be interesting to see what happens from this but other than that i'm really not interested in really following the my new details of of who owns twitter at any particular moment what i'm vastly more interested in is number two there which are the food distribution center fires which finally someone has noticed that an awful lot of food distribution centers production facilities packaging factories and warehouses have burned down lately now the mind my mind immediately thinks huh interesting isn't it this plays directly into the themes of food shortages being instigated by the government now i will say that there is very little evidence either way it's just a gut feeling that there's something fishy going on when at a time when food security has never impacted more people in the united states rationing is already at an all-time high since the great depression suddenly food distribution centers start burning down weird isn't it i don't know about anyone else but i don't believe in coincidences the the correlation in this example is way too strong to ignore even if there's really no evidence to indicate causation there's no evidence to indicate what's exactly happening so we're going to keep an eye on it obviously and i agree that that all of these warehouses burning down is more suspect than a than a ballot drop box but i really don't have anything at all to point fingers at any entity for the reason behind these fires but i would say that it's awfully convenient for the us government who is constantly and consistently trying to target the u.s citizenry such as the infant formula shortage moving on to number three the infant formula shortage is the result of a few things for one a few months ago i'm pretty sure most people don't remember but a few months ago there was a nationwide contamination of infant formula causing huge disruptions in the market again as we've said many times in the field of logistics a single factory being offline for just a short time results in widespread shortages and significant logistical challenges immediately however the shortage has directly been made worse by the us government in the form of the fda not allowing major factories to come back online until they meet us government standards now i must say that i do not know if this is a situation of the us government holding these factories hostage by forcing them to meet unmutable standards which is slowing production or if it's something else i think i think that's the case but i'm not really sure it could also be a case of manufacturers dragging their feet for a variety of reasons but again i'm inclined to think that the us government has a huge hand in this because of what happened immediately after the story of infant formula shortages going viral almost immediately this was used by pro-abortion activists as a way to push their ideology i cannot tell you how many times i have seen pro-abortion activists directly saying oh you can't feed your infant well you should have aborted it i have seen that specific line a lot brought to you from the same regime that said if you had an electric car you wouldn't be affected by fuel prices and shortages the same exact mentality has been applied to having children and i can barely contain my own anger just to get through this but this is what i'm seeing so yeah there is a lot of evil in the world these days and things like this confirm it so for the specific shortages of infant formula the fact that this has now gone viral means that there will be shortages everywhere there will also be shortages of things that parents with infants also need as well the rationale being once parents realize that the logistical supply chains relating to their infant are vulnerable they will buy as much stuff as they possibly can not just formula we're talking other baby supplies as well at least that's probably what i would do if i had an infinite home i'd be stockpiling as much of everything as possible so i'm not going to patronize parents by saying only buy what you need and don't panic buy because i know that's a futile effort when it comes to newborns instincts take over and we just have to realize that panic buying is going to happen so hopefully production capacity will be able to meet demand and we'll uh we'll get through this but in the meantime things are are not going to be super great along those lines moving on to number four fuel shortages as literally everyone in the country knows the entire country is suffering from high gas prices and availability issues as well so it's kind of a twofer right what's a much bigger problem than high gasoline prices is diesel shortages right now there is a shortage of diesel fuel all along the east coast which is going to wreak havoc on industry and the logistical transport of everything so availability is an issue but so is cost commercial truckers are kind of freaking out over this and rightly so because in many cases across the country the costs are so high that they can't even break even uh if it takes four thousand dollars worth of fuel to transport cargo from a to b and you're going to get paid three thousand dollars to do that that's a net loss so right now we're seeing a lot of trucking outfits especially independent drivers taking losses due to these high diesel prices and and other shipping costs and things high gas prices for standard gasoline are also going to sharply increase pretty soon at least that's what the internet seems to think i've seen some estimates by professional logistical think tanks that are expecting gasoline to possibly hit 10 dollars per gallon by the end of this year and i don't say that lightly and i don't say that to freak everybody out but right now a lot of gas stations are retooling or reprogramming their their pumps to account for double-digit gas prices so next time you're fueling up check and see if the pump has been retrofitted and had the screen replaced to actually add an additional place for an extra digit that alone is a pretty big indicator because gas stations are not going to go through that expense which surely is pretty high unless they truly believe the gas prices will get that high i i personally can't even imagine gas hitting double digits just just me thinking about it in the past i would have thought that some kind of civil rebellion would break out long before gas prices get close to double digits especially since we know that the earth has enough petroleum to last humanity like another thousand years or so what i mean is is clearly these gas prices are a politician's invention and the result of political decisions it's not a supply thing domestic gas prices are clearly being influenced by the federal regime which is all too happy to find a way to target the average american and since we're sucking all of our strategic reserves dry the federal regime is creating the conditions for things to get really really bad later so even if things stay the way they are with regards to fuel shortages and prices we're screwed but does anyone want to take a guess as to when the next cyber attack on a pipeline or pol processing facility is going to be a cyber attack that the fbi will magically be able to solve a week after it shuts everything down exactly everyone should expect that by now cyber attacks that are attributable to no single actor and yet the federal government is able to magically solve the problem after the damage has been done i would consider that a new norm in this fifth generation war so with all this cheery stuff out of the way let's move into something more exciting significant governmental actions and up first is number one uh the issue of the army's new recruitment ad for the psyop community the perpetual pain in my rear i wasn't even going to talk about it but i figured i probably should because it has a slight variation of our logo in it and for those that haven't been following us for a while we have no affiliation with army socom or really any government agency or service branch at this point the ghost icon actually comes from a historical military unit that i personally thought was kind of cool because i like to study military history and i once did a term paper on them so i picked that because i we needed a logo for instagram a couple of years ago and a buddy of mine spent exactly four minutes drawing this so and after a while it just stuck um and recently other groups agencies and organizations have picked up the ghost logo and used it as well including army psyops which is which makes sense because they're the descendant of that original military unit they're trying to look to history to rebrand the psyop community into something vastly better than it is so they're bringing back an icon from their glory days which i understand to be honest and since we're not talking about it as far as the analysis of the video i think that it's hilarious and also tragic at the same time you would think that the people who would be able to read the room the most would be the psyop community but apparently not somebody down at bragg should have thought hmm you know right now with all this information warfare going on maybe we shouldn't put this out because the american public is going to take it the wrong way but no nobody thought that and guess what your cloak and dagger message that would have been really cool 10 years ago now brought you into the spotlight so way to go genius remember i'm an analyst by trade so i guess i'm biased by knowing the culture of military intelligence but i personally am not concerned or scared by any of the messaging in the video i don't think it's particularly nefarious i think it's what military leadership would look at and think man that's a cool recruiting video now right now a lot of dudes in the psyop community are high fiving over this ad which kind of hints to the effectiveness of the organization as a whole and for the people that are going to say oh they're just talking about controlling the narrative out in the open because they always tell you their plans for the prophecy to be fulfilled right let me stop you right there the military side community is not that there is a gigantic grand canyon of differences between military intelligence and domestic civilian intelligence the two communities are not compatible which is why it's hilarious to see someone talking about the intelligence community like it's one big thing the intelligence community is a dozen or so directors of various agencies making decisions without listening to anyone beneath them i was a military intelligence analyst for over a decade and i never once considered myself to be part of the intelligence community i could barely get my own commanders and bosses to listen to me much less a congressman or the director of an agency so to think that the intelligence community actually does any intelligence at all is laughable it's a political organization and it always has been and on the military side of things the psyop community is mostly known for six weeks of planning replanning and more planning just to drop a load of leaflets or make a single social media post that no one is going to read anyway so all in all the sciop community is about as efficient and professional as the military intelligence community which is to say that it's crippled by bureaucracy about 50 years behind the times when it comes to doctrine and tactics filled to the brim with people who are just looking to appease their boss to get a promotion and largely irrelevant when compared to one dude on instagram making memes i mean come on guys i really hate to burst their bubble but man this ad is disappointing if the psyop or soft community at large i guess cannot take the pulse of america and realize that this recruiting ad makes them out to be the enemy of americans that speaks volumes about their effectiveness they can high five and pat themselves in their backs for finally creating a non-woke recruiting ad that is cool and 10 years ago i would agree with them this would have had people lining up to join just like those navy recruiters that set up tables outside of movie theaters that were screening top gun back in the day remember that i get it i really do but not today this ad was a swing and a miss too little too late and only effective at making regular americans look at the socom community with suspicion so if you want an indicator of measures of effectiveness there you go i look at this ad as a resume for army psyops and i'm not impressed again i would have been impressed 10 or 15 years ago but right now if we crack open the psyop handbook and start evaluating this information campaign on target demographic and effects achieve this was a disaster if these guys can't even get their own advertisement right what am i supposed to think about the rest of the military psyop community the goal of this advertisement was to recruit people into the psyop community but what did it really do time will tell if it failed on the recruiting aspect but there's two things that it did succeed at number one freaking out civilians and making the psyop community look like the enemies of the people and two bringing a community that thrives in secrecy into the public sphere they shined a spotlight on themselves at a time when they are trying to fight an information war with russia and china and everyone else so all in all this is again disappointing i really shouldn't be disappointed after all the dod's motto these days is to lower your expectations right i know my navy guys out there know what i'm talking about so sorry for the rant but i felt like bursting bubbles today i've seen a lot of talk over the past couple of weeks because a lot of people have gotten too big for their britches over this ukraine situation a lot of military commanders think that based on russia's poor performance in ukraine they could beat them easily since that war is a war of information as well i've been seeing a lot of people thinking their hot stuff just because russia is doing poorly so i occasionally like to remind people that a dozen people making memes on instagram is more effective at shaping narratives than the bureaucratic upper echelons of the psyop community up next is the proposed rule changes for this year for the who's international health regulations and yes this is really obscure um this kind of ties into the who treaty that a lot of people are talking about which is it's slightly separate but it's kind of kind of the same thing it's really complicated um but i did see this being mentioned online and i wanted to kind of calm the situation down a bit um every few months we get inundated with emails about something to do with the who or the un or nato um i remember last year the story was the chinese had invaded canada remember that one the videos circuit there's like one grainy video circulating of chinese troops patrolling the canadian wilderness and setting up secret bases right um or better yet container ships full of chinese troops being landed in california man that that story was completely made up and it was a thorn in my side all last year um it was completely false with like the tiniest tiniest gram of truth um and it circulated like wildfire online and um big social media accounts occasionally picked it up and in turn my inbox filled up well this event the whole rule change has a lot more validity so i want people to be aware of it but i also want to prevent it from slipping down the same road as other stuff and getting kind of spun out of control so here's what the deal is the who the world health organization maintains this thing called the international health regulations kind of like a set of rules that member states have to abide by sort of like an international standard for health events you see where this might be going and every year there are additions or corrections made to the set of rules and this year the biden regime submitted some rule changes that have raised some eyebrows again to prevent this from slipping into the realm of propaganda a lot of websites have popped up calling this an attack on the united states sovereignty and that these rules allow the who to override the us constitution i would encourage you to read the document yourselves i will provide the link in the description and i will put it on the sources slide as usual i have read it and though i am certainly no lawyer i do not see anything that jumps out at me as being holy cow get your kit yes these proposed rule changes are not good and grant the who a lot more authority and i'm going to put a fat asterisk next to that word authority for later so remember that but when i read this i thought ah they're trying to poke china the proposed rule changes look like they're meant to target china which is interesting if you take the politics out of it which is hard to do i understand but if you look at it objectively you got to realize that china caused a lot of problems for the world they warped the entire health care industry especially in the international scene and allowed the perfect conditions for tyranny to run rampant but they also completely negated world health care issues and the entire planet's infrastructure for handling like legitimate contagions right so all in all please read the document yourselves but nowhere do i see anything that allows the who to do anything really and coming back to that asterisk on authority you really have to understand how non-binding international agreements really are and that's not even considering the fact that the united states is going to have to ratify this you know the congress is going to have to ratify it which they i mean honestly they probably will because all of congress is on the side of the bible regime right on stuff like this so but even taking that into account honestly all international diplomacy is just lip service the only international diplomacy that decides issues is war the who says we order you to do x and a nation says make me and the who backs down because they aren't going to be able to win that fight over something that small i'm doing a really poor job of explaining this but just know that i'm not so concerned about this particular document what's going to happen on the national or international stage is beyond all control from us mere citizens anyway and this applies to the the who treaty that people have been talking about that is sort of along the same line so you can kind of cut and paste you know the the kind of explanation over onto the wha treaty type stuff so again there are efforts i will agree there there do seem to be efforts um that world leaders are taking to create more of a world government right it's called globalization right that's just it's just the way it is like look at the um world economic forum i mean there you go there's your platform right if anybody is surprised by this at this point i don't know what to tell you but again if and when international agencies start challenging us authority more than they already do we citizens will of course do what needs to be done whether or not the biden regime literally walks into the national archives and shreds the constitution by hand or if they sign away our natural rights to an international conglomerate the effect for you and me is the same so even if the bible regime and congress and the supreme court sign away all of our rights and sign up americans for complete totalitarianism my life doesn't change that much because i'm already living as if totalitarianism is here because it is i've talked a lot about this before especially after the election but what's done is done and the fact that we are in the situation we're in that alone has obliterated all of our founding documents and our founding ideals at least on an institutional level socially yeah we can still talk about that but institutionally is there anything that matters anymore they're going to do what they're going to do whether or not they sign a piece of paper to it or not the bible regime did plenty of things without actually signing an executive order anyway for how many companies went above and beyond to follow laws that did not exist we covered that extensively too so they don't exactly need a treaty or a piece of paper to bring in totalitarianism but if they want to formalize it i guess that's probably what they're going to do so again i've beat this horse enough but hopefully that explains my line of thinking with things like this 20 years ago yeah they probably would have thrown a president under the jail for anything that the biden regime does on a regular tuesday they just break laws that often but that's not the world we live in anymore things have changed so that's really all i have on that at least until something else comes out about it then i'll probably be forced to talk about it even more moving on to number three the supreme court leak um this of course is something that everyone has probably probably already knows about um but i think that if you were to go look up what uh clarence thomas has been saying on this uh i think he he is probably the best source for what this means for the for the future of the court now i personally am no fan of clarence thomas for for many reasons but um i do think that he's correct and i think that he has given the most accurate uh portrayal of what this means for the court i think that of course out of all of our government right out of all of our government all three branches um their authority comes from the perception of their authority right and their force comes from the perception of their force when people realize that they can't back up what they're saying we have things like minneapolis riots right so if you have that on an institutionalized national scale if people start realizing hey if we don't do what the supreme court says um what are they going to do about it they have no enforcement ability and the biden regime figured this out a long time ago with regards to their uh medical mandates right they just openly stated that they're not going to follow stuff if you guys remember the press secretary um saying that so it's like well what are you gonna do you know when the supreme court says something and you say no we're not gonna do that um does that mean the supreme court is kind of irrelevant i think so and to some degree so again the supreme court thing i think is just an illustration of the larger problem which is i don't know maybe maybe maybe a collapsing society maybe a decaying civilization i don't know maybe a fifth generation war i don't know either way clearly the institutions particularly the justice institutions are um they're not doing so hot right now and arguably they haven't been doing so hot for a very very long time so i guess we'll have to see what comes out about this um and this is kind of related to the next one number four which is the uh inevitable second amendment infringements that are going to happen um due to recent events so moving on to that one uh just in time for the election cycle there have been multiple attacks conducted by people with firearms over the past few weeks i honestly have a lot to say about this latest one the one that looks like the most obvious false flag attack since the vegas shooting but i'm not really going to go down that road too much all i will say is that every single thing about this attack screams that it was a false flag attack that's just my gut feeling i've really nothing other than that the guy was a socialist communist and his manifesto has been blacklisted by all media because that's what he said in it which counters the narrative of white supremacy um much like how mainstream media forgot all about the dc sniper a couple weeks ago because he was a black supremacist this latest incident is of course being shaped by the ministry of truth as much as it can be which includes removing his manifesto from the internet because specific wording in the manifesto was suspiciously similar to other shooting incidents honestly this guy looks like a fed that infiltrated a white supremacist group to get clues but they never really accepted him into the group so he had to go to wikipedia for his narrative which is why nothing he said or did looks like something that a real supremacist would say or do and something else very suspicious is the fact that he said all of the magic buzzwords and used all of the magic gear that feds want to ban anyone with common sense can see that there's something going on here but since i have nothing concrete all i can do is grumble to myself and watch what's going to happen and here's what's going to happen the atf is going to use this incident to get a new director that will make david chipman look like barney the dinosaur the bothering regime is going to ban whatever they can get their hands on and even average us citizens are not going to follow those rules companies particularly small companies that sell firearms or firearms gear or parts are going to get the shaft and most importantly federal agencies are going to allow communist groups and terror groups like blm to run rampant with their violent rhetoric which is already completely unchecked by any counter-terror organization which actively encourage these people to target people based on their ideology again this is all my own opinion which i guess is my magic caveat that is my polite way of saying that i don't care if people disagree with me and i say all of this with a bit of vested interest which is why i wanted to remind everyone to stay vigilant and watch your back i know everyone says this all the time but we here recently got a not so pleasant reminder of how important it is to remain vigilant in public i do not like to talk about my own experiences with the tension in public these days because i only see a very small part of the world i don't travel all over the country and i don't have a really good sample size for making an assessment of society at large i guess and i live in an extremely politically insane location so my own personal experiences are certainly not representative of the nation as a whole but one of my staff members here almost got killed or seriously injured yesterday when two people in a vehicle crossed multiple lanes of traffic to try and run us over in a parking lot while we were out running some errands i cannot go into too many details for opsec reasons but based on the occupants of the vehicle who were both wearing face masks and the political statements on the vehicle it was pretty clear to me that it was a racially motivated attack which is probably more sad to me than any other kind of attack to be honest but we here are all okay i was a bit better off than our rider who was much closer to buying the farm than i was but they were able to evade in time but it was a close one thankfully at least one bystander checked to see if we were doing all right but everyone else that saw the incident did nothing as expected again i'm talking about this nonchalantly because honestly this kind of thing is super common in my local area at this point i don't live in a historically bad or high crime area i mean it's not that it's not the nicest place but even in my very small part of the world the city centers are absolutely insane and this has only happened over the past couple of years really and no we did not involve local law enforcement because our local police department does not respond to crimes like this anymore in fact we would be lucky if anyone even answered the phone when we called 9-1-1 so we didn't even bother they just tell you to come in and fill out the report at the station which i am not going to do because the police department is located in an extremely high crime area and people are routinely attacked or mugged going into that station because people know that anyone going into the police station is unarmed again if this sounds crazy it is but i'm not trying to harp on how much my own local area has gone to hell in just a couple of years i'm mentioning this as a plea for everyone to be careful watch your back and do what you have to do to be safe out there because even in a place like where i live where crime really wasn't a thing just a couple years ago there were basically no arrests in my area just a couple of years ago and i have zero indications that things like this will get any better anytime soon so again be careful out there i know not a super cheery way to end this segment but that's always the way it is isn't it oh well nature of the content i guess so let's move to international issues up first is russia uh i'm obviously not going to be talking too much about it due to youtube's policies which ban us from talking about anything bad ukraine might be doing um so we're just not going to talk about it but the thing i did want to talk about is this anti-russian sentiment and how things have gotten out of control on that front i'm just going to say up front you always need to leave someone and out like on the high school debate team you never want to back someone into a corner because when you do they just stop playing the game and nothing productive happens and the russian people have been hurt thousands of russian mothers will never see their sons again and all because of a war that they didn't ask for russia has lost more soldiers in a month than the u.s lost in afghanistan in 20 years think about that for a second think about how you felt every night when dan rather cut to a soldier's d.a photo as the nightly news ended using the same b-roll from the last time a soldier got killed i don't know about you but i damn near lost it every time and i still get angry thinking about how my youth was spent watching soldiers photos scroll by on the evening news now think about what russians are feeling right now with their extreme losses i don't know about anyone else and even though youtube has ordered us to not talk about ukraine's crimes i'm not going to kick someone when they're down even if they are an adversary russia has learned many lessons all of them the hard way and even though the anti-russian mass hysteria is in full swing my personal opinion is that if the west keeps kicking russia when they are down we are not going to like what that brings in the future for me russia is an adversary but not an enemy the relationship between russia and the united states is competitive and adversarial on many topics for better or worse but for me the russian people are certainly not an enemy my enemies are the people that started this mess on all sides and in my day-to-day life my enemies are certainly more domestic than foreign at this point right now with all of this anti-russian hysteria people are playing with fire they're playing with fire and they don't know it because the political elites are treating this ukraine situation just like every other issue they use to rile people up years ago it was occupy wall street then climate change then it was religion by way of refusing to make a wedding cake then robert de niro's anti-jab stuff then back to climate change then russia gate then veganism or election stuff and back to climate change then blm and antifa then the virus that cannot be named then back to climate change again then ukraine and now roe versus wade i wonder how much youtube is going to shadow ban this video just because of that paragraph i just read but anyway you see the point ukraine was just a play thing which has apparently now been cast aside but ukraine out of all of these issues was a very dangerous thing for mass hysteria to latch onto there are real concerns here this is not a game there are real defense issues to work through both tactically and socially within the us military there are lessons to be learned in the civilian sector too most of all among citizens again for tactical and social reasons all i'm saying is that there are a lot of things going on right now with regards to russia and ukraine and this mass hysteria that we're seeing is severely warping what should be happening like we mentioned before banning russia's access to banking is a crime but visa and mastercard did it anyway that's going to come back to bite us hard things that we do not think about are also affected think about the international search and rescue community the us and russia coordinate a lot of rescue efforts because we have joint agreements with regards to search and rescue satellites same thing with a space program or international shipping or trying to work with china because russia is the only quasi friend that china has got so our efforts to combat china are affected by russia too even though i personally think russia was definitely in the wrong to invade ukraine poking the bear and letting mass hysteria get way out of control so that that poke becomes a shove is not productive right now we need world leaders to put on some big boy pants and solve problems rather than creating them like they always have done we need people to mediate international relations and start working towards solutions for this because this has gotten way nastier than i think anybody ever expected but that's warfare for you but no what we have is incompetent world leaders playing with fire because they either one don't remember the cold war for what it really was or two have been in politics for so long that they are incapable of seeing any form of reality and that in my opinion is not good and speaking of this russia craziness let's move on to finland and sweden joining nato potentially so for those who haven't heard finland and sweden have both officially submitted their applications to join the north atlantic treaty organization and the proceedings are kind of going on right now right now it's everything's kind of stalled as far as i know um turkey is kind of holding up proceedings a little bit and kind of causing a ruckus but um a lot of people are going to ask what does this mean and is this good or bad uh i don't know if it's good or bad but i will say that it's not good for relations and it's not good for tensions it will escalate the situation even more than the u.s has over the past month in my opinion like i have any bearing on world events or what i say matters whatsoever i think that they should have waited finland would still have been perfectly justified along with sweden and norway and joining nato two or three years from now granted i understand that they are trying to strike while the iron is hot and never let a good crisis go to waste but this i think is too soon russia is still wounded from how the ukraine situation worked out and right now they are likely to lash out in ways that we are not going to like so i think that finland and sweden joining nato is going to cause more problems than its worth clearly russia is incapable of taking even ukraine arguably the easiest target on their border to suggest that russia even has the slightest hope at successfully invading finland or sweden or poland for that matter is laughable granted if i was finnish or swedish or norwegian i would feel differently historically being situated close to russia has been hazardous for one's health so scandinavian countries increasing their civil defense is always a good idea i think that civil defense is one of the best justifications for even having a government but also it's one of the most under-utilized sectors of government here in the us our civil defense procedures haven't been updated since the 1980s which is a shame but anyway nato membership yeah i think that that's going to cause more problems than it's going to solve norway sweden and finland certainly do not have large militaries but they are vastly more prepared than ukraine was in 2014 and they have history and geography on their side so all in all i think this native membership situation is a result of politicians getting something rather than a legitimate defense effort and it's going to cause russia to react and russia's reaction is going to escalate an already tense situation even more and it's going to justify everything russia has done as is russia has no leg to stand on but if scandinavia joins nato russia can say look they really are trying to surround us we need to strike first a very dangerous position to be in and that's exactly where we're heading moving down to india and sri lanka there is mass civil unrest underway right now the situation in sri lanka is not doing too well uh sri lanka is basically out of fuel which is a major barrier to food shipments around the nation india also has stopped exporting wheat because of their own food security issues which has caused even more food shortages than sri lanka because they're a major obviously a major trading partner in short the people of sri lanka are starving and pandemonium has been the result of that there's an old saying that we are only three meals away from total anarchy meaning that if a population's food supply gets disrupted for even just a single day for three meals in a row mass hysteria and civil unrest will result right now sri lanka is finding out exactly how true that idea is and it seems to be pretty accurate on social media i found some pretty gnarly stuff including local politicians being tortured and beaten by their starving constituents i obviously cannot show these videos here and i'm not sure if i'd want to anyway because if you just search out there yourself you'll find some pretty nauseating stuff in any case the situation for sri lanka does not look good and even though the situation is desperate it does not hold a candle to the international famine we will see if this trend spreads to the rest of southeast asia or even elsewhere so keep an eye on sri lanka and india too hopefully the logistical nightmares can reach at least some level of resolution soon and finally somalia the biden regime has deployed several hundred soldiers to somalia and yes i know what you're thinking nothing bad has ever happened in somalia right well right now the biden regime has stated that the number of troops will be capped at 450 but my assessment is that this is what we call a lie this is because the department of defense proudly concealed the true number of troops that were in afghanistan under trump and especially in the past couple of years everything the dod has done has indicated that the upper echelons of the dod is purely rotten to the core so my guess is that those 450 troops will probably be double triple or even quadruple that simply just for tourism patches and that's not including the various odas and teams that have been in somalia for years fighting al-shabaab aqap and the like groups which will only increase in size the reason for this deployment has yet to be released however i have my own guesses a couple of weeks ago there was a regime change and the new guy in charge was backed by the u.s shocking i know but now it looks like the us is protecting their investment and at the same time trying to counter china's influence in the horn of africa which has been expanding significantly under the guise of counter piracy so i don't know if somalia is going to be the new afghanistan i highly doubt it it's just it's a completely different fight it's a completely different set of mission set it's it's not really comparable but you never know right the dod is is all about furthering the military industrial complex because you know politicians in uniform have got to get their raytheon stocks up right so there's no telling what's going to happen um like i've been saying for a long time there are a lot of bad dudes in in africa with regards to um al qaeda and things like that the the sahel region out west and to the north north part of this northern part of africa and north saharan region man they're just eat up with aqap dudes and and al qaeda and al-shabaab and a lot of other groups that i forget same thing in sudan ethiopia eritrea places like that it's just become a hot spot for global insurgency and um you know i guess the opinion is you can have different opinions on whether or not we should be there or not uh and i think there's opinion that's a valid question to ask for sure uh but there's nothing i can do to change a dod's deployment right so i don't know what's going to happen is going to happen i guess and uh for those of you who have not been reading up on somalian history that right now would probably be a good time to do so um because it uh hasn't hasn't been a really good one so in any case that's really all i've got for today thank you again for watching everyone um we'll have another one of these briefs out pretty soon because i'm pretty sure that i've got twice as much content that i haven't even talked about yet and of course things are going to get even crazier domestically and internationally over the next few weeks or so so i guess we'll uh we'll circle back around and talk some more about some of these issues when they inevitably become more much more bigger problems than they are right now but for now that's really all i've got so thanks again for watching and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

…The Ministry of Transportation has advised the temporary halt to all civil maritime activities in their waters until further notice. This comes after yesterday's death of a citizen, who was found deceased on their private…