Look for the smoke. It's going to be a red smoke. Whatever your red smoke. Okay, I got the red smoke. Sun run north to south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke. Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Roger, keep your fires west of the smoke. Commander's initials Bravo golf. Keep the fires west of the smoke. We have three smoke pops. Okay, copy that. I am visual the smoke. I'm going to keep my fires west of the smoke and west of the road. Roger, I see you. There are good days and bad days. Sometimes what starts off as a good day turns into a bad day real quick. But make no mistake, those bad days can always get worse if you're getting shot at with heavy weapons. If you are unfortunate enough to be caught in such a predicament, but are lucky enough to have air support overhead, it would be rather beneficial if those rockets and bombs were to hit the enemy instead of you. When seconds count, you need something that can tell the pilot where you are located, where the enemy is located, and where the bombs need to go. All with no confusion, no foul-ups, and with everybody understanding where everything is happening. From World War II up until the global war on terror, this effect was achieved by everything from smoke grenades to signal flares. But today, we've got something better. Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. Today, we're going to talk about one of the most important tools on the modern battlefield, ATAK, or Android Team Awareness Kit. As of 2026, a lot has changed, and this ecosystem is now a lot more accessible and vastly more useful to the soldier and prepared citizen than it ever has been before. So, we've got a lot to cover, starting with a bit of historical background, moving to the hardware that you will need, downloading and installing the app, installing plugins, some helpful configuration settings, and in part II, we will be demonstrating how all of this comes together in the real world with a fictionalized scenario that will help us understand how we can get out of the office and put this stuff to good use. Fear not, we will get down into the weeds of how to really get the most out of A Tac in due time, but for now, let's get started with the basics. However, we do have to cover a lot of background information that if we understand right up front, it will make it vastly easier when we get into the more advanced stuff. I know you want me to just get to the point, but understanding A Tac along with a lot of the doctrine and history behind it will make things a lot easier in the long run. From the ultra beginners to experienced users who might have been using A Tac professionally for years, there's always something new to learn, and we're going to approach this in a more well-rounded way so that there's something in it for everyone. I would be willing to bet that even if you don't have a use for A Tac, this series will be informative in other ways, and you might just learn something new. But for those who don't care and just want the part covering what to tap on the screen to get started, use the timestamps below to skip to whatever section you want. But for everyone else, let's start with some history. So, what is A Tac? A Tac is a mapping application that was originally developed for one simple purpose, to allow soldiers on the battlefield to share geospatial data with each other. It allowed soldiers to know where they were at and where the rest of their team were located on a shared map, all in a small enough package to be carried anywhere, such as an Android smartphone. Think of this like the mini map from Call of Duty, always there at the bottom of your screen showing where you and your team are located on the map. At the time A Tac was in early development, the smartphone was just becoming a thing in the civilian world, but the military needed cool tactical acronym to refer to these devices, EUD or end user device. So, when you see the term EUD in reference to the Tac ecosystem, just know that it's referring to your smartphone that is running the A Tac app. Over time, the simple goal of situational awareness on the battlefield has expanded to an entire ecosystem, which resulted in the A from A Tac being dropped. So, now the whole project is just referred to as Tac, with only the Android app itself being called A Tac. On the military side, you will also see the ATAC acronym meaning Android Tactical Assault Kit. The term Android Team Awareness Kit is the softer, more civilian-friendly term that is a bit more non-combat oriented for civilian agencies. In the civilian procurement world, where human resources is involved, they might not like a local fire department, for example, using something with tactical assault in the name. So, the term Team Awareness was implemented in order to appeal to a wider audience. This is helpful to know right up front because throughout the documentation and help guides and things like that, you may see differences in terminology that is describing the same thing but for different customers. Over the years, this project has expanded beyond its simple goal to now be much more than a very basic GPS app. ATAC is now the de facto gold standard for most military endeavors around the world. The public services are also starting to catch on, and the wildland fire community has started to embrace ATAC for managing fire crews in the backcountry because in many ways the concerns are the same. The paradox with ATAC is that it's hard to actually answer the question of what can it do because it can do so much and it's far easier to show rather than tell when it comes to what it can be used for. For many people who do serious work, ATAC is one of the tools that is intended to make the worst day of their life just a little bit easier. On the south east side of highway four. Tracking. I got the square building and the uh rectangle building to the northwest. We have a square building and a rectangle building to the northwest. And on the big square building there's a uh uh square rectangular like holding pond next to it. Do you see that? >> Yes, just west of it. >> It's on the west side. It could be the head of light flashing across the western side. Okay, you do see the uh rectangular shaped building next to it, correct? Yes, sir. That's affirmative. Is the mosque uh do not engage the mosque. Roger. The square building is the mosque or is it the rectangle? >> The rectangle. >> building is the mosque. Roger that. Let's go. Roll it in. Okay, in front of the mosque there's three vehicles oriented east-west. Do you see those? Yes. Affirmative. Got a vehicle moving out. One of the vehicles is moving right now. 10-yard now cleared to engage the moving vehicle. New nominals. >> Roger that. Cleared to engage. Any personnel around you see? Send by machine gun. >> Yes, more personnel. Cleared to engage those also. Affirmative. Let's go. Ready. Ready. Good shot. Direct secondaries. People running to the west. >> Missiles away. More people are standing in the vehicle and more people cleared to engage all those. If you ever sit down and listen to the audio tape recordings of firefights or radio chatter from any of the conflicts the United States has ever been involved in, one of the things you might notice is that people spend a considerable amount of time using their radio to talk back and forth to describe something that they are seeing from their position. This is because in the past we had radios and that's pretty much all we had, radios and paper maps. We did not have tools like ATAK in the past, but we've got them now and we can make good use of what we've got. These historical observations help us to start understanding where something like this might be needed. So, you might be sold and you want to try out ATAK. What hardware do we need to get started with? Well, we have a few different options, but preferably we're going to use an Android based smartphone. The ATAK app itself is primarily for Android. However, iTAK does exist for iOS devices. This is not the same application and as of right now it is known to be a bit buggy with some of the more advanced features of the ecosystem. If all you have is an iOS device and you want to give it a try, go for it, but just know that if you experience some frustrations or connectivity issues or some plugins aren't available, just know that chances are if you're having an issue with iTAK, that issue might have been already solved in Android. So, just be aware of that. Don't get frustrated with iTAK and then throw off the entire system. Know that the two are very different applications. There is also WinTAK for Windows desktop PCs, but again, it experiences the same issues of being ported from Android to work with Windows. Not all of the plugins are available, and to be honest, it's kind of a trash system to use. There are other options on the horizon. However, I would strongly recommend starting with the standard Android smartphone hardware just to get started. You can use pretty much any modern Android device. However, if you have some data security concerns, or if you are operating in an environment where you want to reduce your digital signature, you may want to just go and get a refurbished Android smartphone that you can use solely for iTAK. Samsung devices in particular are known for working with iTAK very well, and you can see that there are a lot of accessories that are specifically designed for these Samsung smartphones, like cases and cables, because over time Samsung devices have traditionally been what is procured by the government. In terms of the app itself, it's going to require a lot of permissions, and this app is going to dig really way down into the device that it's installed on because of what it can do. What phone you use is, of course, a personal choice, and it's really up to you. As for me personally, my line of work involves using iTAK daily, so I have a way more intense setup than most people will ever need, and I will have to get into this in a future video because it's too much to cover now. But for the purposes today, I will be showing how to install iTAK on a stock Android device. The reason for using stock Android is because iTAK is not the only application that I need to use personally. Remember, iTAK is just one tool on the multi-tool that is the smartphone, and some of the other apps I need don't run super well on the privacy-centric operating systems. Now, to download the app itself, you might be thinking, "It's installing an app. How hard can this be?" Well, it's not that simple. There are two ways to download the app, and they are not the same. You can download the app from the Google Play Store, which is easy enough, or you can download the APK from the tak.gov website along with the plugins. Now, the Google Play Store version is much quicker and easier to get set up, but not all of the plugins are listed in the Play Store. All of the crucial ones are, such as data sync and tak chat, but there are some plugins that are publicly available to we civilians which are not on the Play Store just yet, such as the reports plugin. There are also some third-party unofficial plugins on GitHub or other websites as well, which are mostly just smaller projects at the moment, but this is growing over time. So, just keep in mind if you are watching this in the future, a more substantial market for third-party ATAK plugins is very likely to develop over time. They're not all in one place, they're not all in one app store, and we'll have to get together a list of more useful ATAK plugins for the future. Personally, I would recommend getting the APK for ATAK from the tak.gov website and sideloading it in that way. If you want to download all of the publicly available plugins anyway, you might as well get everything at once. When you go to download ATAK, it has the option to select which plugins you want in the zip file that you're going to download. You may not use all of these plugins, and I would strongly recommend not having all of these loaded because some of them aren't really useful and they're kind of annoying to have on your screen all the time, but it's helpful to have these saved away for a rainy day just in case. It looks like a super scary government-only website, but rest assured any regular person can create an account on tak.gov. The part that's annoying is that they've instituted a passkey type infrastructure, so you'll need a third-party app on your phone to get a special code every time you want to log in. This is industry standard in the tech world now, but for normal people it's a hassle. So, don't be afraid, create a burner account on tak.gov if you want, and once you're in, you will see that there is a lot of content that isn't on the public-facing side of the website, including a lot of educational content on how to use certain tech features. But most importantly, if you want access to all of the plugins that quietly get released to the public with zero notice, you'll need an account. Honestly, I just log in once every couple of months to see what plugins just miraculously showed up on the website for me to download. But if you want to just get started really quickly without any fanfare, you can install the A Tak app right from the Google Play Store, which is what we're going to do today. Once again, if you're using the Google Play Store version, it's a lot simpler and you just go to the Play Store and search for A Tak and download it just like a normal app. Now, while this app is downloading, you can find some plugins if you like. These are going to install like separate apps and you're going to activate them or turn them on inside A Tak. Depending on the plugin, you may or may not get a prompt to load in the plugin and activate it. From the Google Play Store side of things, it's just going to look like a normal app. Same thing if you download the zip file with all the plugins in it from the tak.gov website, you're going to install the main A Tak app and go through the settings and then you can install the APKs for the plugins, which again install like normal apps. And opening up the app for the first time will walk us through the setup process. Now you see why you may need a tutorial just to install a simple smartphone app. A Tak is legendary for having an obnoxious number of disclaimers during the install process. Why is this? Remember, this app was not meant for you. It was meant for soldiers. And what the developers are trying to do with this setup wizard is make it nearly impossible to have connection issues later on. You don't want private Mukatelli to suddenly not be connected to the unit's network because he set up the app wrong or he hit the wrong button and fat-fingered something during the setup process. So they make absolutely sure that you can't mess this up during the setup process. I'm sure you Marines out there will find a way to break it, which is fair enough, but for most everyone else, that's what the setup process is meant to do. Personally, it's not really a concern for me to just hit yes to everything because I use A Tak on standalone devices that are not the same phone that I use for daily life. Now that we have the app fully installed and all of the permissions handled, let's take a look at what we see on the screen before we go monkeying around in different menus. On the top left, we have the compass rose. Tapping this will toggle the map between north up and the direction you are facing. This will use your phone's compass to determine which direction you are going and this mode is mostly useful for driving in a vehicle because it's a lot smoother and not as jittery when you're standing still. Tapping and holding will bring up a sub-menu which will allow you to tap to rotate and also toggle on the 3D tilt mode for more perspective. Both of these you tap to activate and tap again to lock. To disable both the rotation and the 3D tilting, you press and hold and press and hold again to close the sub-menu. When it comes to navigating both the rotation and the 3D tilting, use two fingers to rotate around a point as you might expect and two fingers moving up and down the screen together to change the angle you want. I would recommend leaving both the rotation and the 3D tilt turned off unless you really need it and then turn it back off again. This is because if you leave your map tilted at, for instance, a 45° angle, it can be a little misleading when it comes to perspective and if you fold this back up on your chest and open it up again later on, you might not remember which perspective you locked it at. Sometimes in life, it's a good idea to anticipate what you might need and know how your monkey brain might react if you're getting shot at. Keeping the map locked, centered on your location, north up, with 0° of tilt makes sure that you can flip your phone down and know exactly what you're supposed to be looking at. No forced perspective. We don't want any cool 3D views and impressionist art projects when we've got a situation to take care of. Plus, the rotation and view angle function are really sensitive when you're using gloves or have a slight bit of moisture on the screen and I have found that the slightest bump will teleport my map to the North Pole randomly. So, to prevent this, I just leave the map north up and just straight down. Underneath the compass rose, we have the self-location button, which brings you back to your own location if you have your location data turned on. This is very helpful if you're working in a different area and you don't want to have to re-find yourself on the map again. One tap will snap your view back to your exact location. On the top right, we have the action bar, which is probably the most important feature to understand getting started. Think of the action bar is like a quick access menu for all of the features of TAC, to include plugins. This allows us to have easy and quick access to certain tools without having to open up any other menu and scroll around for different tools. Here's a quick tip. Tap and hold anywhere on the screen to toggle the action bar on and off. A lot of times, people will accidentally make their action bar go away and probably forget how to bring it back. So, just remember, tap and hold anywhere on the map to bring it right back. Up next, the toolbar. This is an extension of the action bar and holds all of the other items that can't fit on the action bar. The action bar is for quick access and the toolbar is for everything else. Hitting the hamburger menu at the top right will open up the toolbar and we can see all of the other features we can use in ATAC. If you have a plugin installed, the chances are you'll be able to access that plugin from here and depending on the size of your phone screen, this may be a two-wide column or a three-wide column for those of you who have larger screens. But, all of the tools are listed here regardless. Now, you might have noticed, if you're following along, that my action bar looks a little bit different than yours if you have just installed ATAC. This is because we can customize the action bar to add or remove things that we don't want. For instance, let's say that I don't need the shape drawing tool up in the action bar. I can open up the hamburger menu and tap the pencil icon to edit what tools are in the action bar. Dragging a tool from the toolbar will place it in the action bar for quick access and if there's something that you don't want in the action bar, you can drag it back down to the toolbar to delete it. Note that this will not delete that item from your app. It just removes it from the action bar. Tapping the save icon will save your toolbar or action bar arrangement, and you're good to go. You can also tap the bulletized icon here to change the layout of the toolbar if you like it to be more of an itemized list, and you can also create different toolbars altogether so that you don't have items or tools cluttering up your menu that you don't need. I prefer to keep things simple and leave every tool here. I think that creating separate toolbars is too complicated for field use, and in the heat of the moment, you don't want to have to have a need for a tool, but you can't find it because you created a bunch of different toolbars for different things. Leave the action bar for quick access items, and leave the toolbar for literally everything else. At least that's my own preference. Within the toolbar, we can scroll all the way down to the bottom to find one of the most important menu items in the entire app, settings. [snorts] So, before we get too deep into this, let's pause for a moment and make some changes to the initial settings that we can change after a fresh install. You may or may not want to make these changes, but these are the things that I personally change right up front whenever I set up a new device. First up is my location setting in Android. Like I mentioned, this is not within the ATAK app itself. This is within my Android application or my Android operating system. I go in and I turn off the location permissions for ATAK. There is no option in ATAK to turn off your self marker completely, which makes it harder for video production on my end. But personally, I'm also not using ATAK in the way that it was designed. I don't need the team awareness part of the app, and I don't need to share my location with others. So, I can just turn this completely off within Android unless I really need it for something like land navigation. So, if you have a job or you have a career field where you need to share mapping data with people who you may not know or with a small team where you don't want to have your own location, you know, doc'd on the map, just know that if you look at that blue triangle, that blue triangle is your self marker and it is going to stay on the screen no matter what unless you turn off your location data within Android. Future versions of A Tac may correct this, I don't know, but for right now this is the work around. Along the same lines, the self marker location or self marker location box is probably going to be activated on screen when you install A Tac for the first time. If you do not want that feature, you can turn it off. We go to settings, control preferences, additional self coordinate controls, self coordinate information, and I personally set it to do not display. This is again purely optional and if you turned off your location in the Android menu, this won't matter so much, but it's going to declutter the screen because we're not using location data for now. If I was using this app for land nav, I might leave this turned on so that at a glance I could see my MGRS grid coordinate, which is handy. Another more advanced setting that I change because I am using A Tac with A Tac server, which we'll have to get into later on because that is one rather deep rabbit hole, is I change my reporting preferences. So, I go to settings, call sign and device preferences, reporting preferences, and I make sure that send contact information is turned on. This allows you to be able to be seen not physically on the map, but when you open up A Tac, you will populate in everyone else's contacts who's also on the same server with you. This will allow users to see when you're kind of online and when you're offline. If you have your location data turned off, you're not going to be populating on anybody else's map, but your username, your call sign is going to show up in the contacts tab for everybody else, which is helpful if they need to send you a message. I also make sure that I toggle the hide my current location box to on. Checking this box will, you guessed it, hide your location. Once again, I personally am using A Tac via A Tac in a very non-standard way. Normally, A you want to share your location with everybody else, right? Well, sometimes we don't want to share our physical location, but we may want to share location data that's not our own. We may want to drop points on a map and share those with other people without actually explicitly doxing our exact GPS grid. Selecting to hide your current location does exactly that. I prefer this arrangement because this is going to allow things like geo chat to work when we start talking about the chat functions of A will get in will get more into this, but this is also going to prevent others from seeing your location if you're using somebody else's tax server, for example. Another setting that I change is contact preferences, so I go into settings, call sign and device preferences, contact preferences, and I uncheck the box as publish phone number just to be safe. Remember the setup wizard earlier? Some permissions are needed for things that aren't really seen on the front end to just yet. And in the case of phone numbers, this is used for setting up voice calls with certain plugins. So, I myself prefer to just set it to off just so that I don't accidentally docs my phone number if I hop in somebody else's server. It's probably not necessary for 99% of you out there, but it's a good safety setting just in case. And finally, the last thing I do is to change my call sign. I go to settings, call sign and device preferences, call sign preferences, and I put in an appropriate call sign. This is traditionally the very first step that you're going to do when you log in with A and it's mostly useful for those of you who are using A with A server or with a small group of people. This is where you would put in your call sign. You can make up whatever one you want. This is not like a ham radio call sign, and for most of you who are just using A by yourselves, this is going to be completely irrelevant because A is going to populate a random word here anyway, and you don't really need to change your call sign if you are just using A for things like land nav or to visualize KMZs or other types of data. So, if you're using A by yourself, don't worry about it. It's not really necessary. Now that we know the differences between the action bar and the toolbar, and we've configured our initial settings, let's take a look at a few tools that might be helpful to use right out of the box. First up is the imagery tab, otherwise known as the maps tab or tool. This is how you change the background imagery between different maps. Personally, I like to have the map icon in the action bar because I frequently switch back and forth between satellite imagery and other more dark mode maps for use at night so I don't ruin my night adaptation as much. Tapping the map icon will open up the imagery menu, and we have three choices across the top. We have imagery, mobile, and favorites. For now, the only one you want to be in is the mobile tab. This will allow you to switch between different preloaded map layers. Now, this tab is labeled mobile because we are currently streaming this map data from the internet. This is just like Google Maps or Apple Maps. So, as we zoom in and out, we can see the base map updating after a couple of seconds of moving around. Yeah, it's slower than your normal Google Maps or Apple Maps, and for most people this is perfectly fine because as you move around and zoom in and out, A-Tac will cache what you have already seen. This is particularly helpful for some very specific situations out in the field. Just as a field expedient example today, let's say we're working search and rescue and we're we've shown up to the hiking trail, we've shown up to the hiking path to find some overdue hikers. When you show up to the command vehicle parked at the trailhead, you're probably going to be pulling in there really quickly. You're probably not going to have any idea where you're going to go. You probably don't have any details of who's missing, where they went missing, what trail, or anything. You're coming into the situation blind. You've just pulled up in the parking lot, go, right? Most of the time, you're probably going to have internet access. This is 2026. Most search and rescue teams, most private people, even who spend a lot of time in the outdoors, are probably going to have something like Starlink or an internet hotspot. Again, this is 2026. There are many places in the US that do not have cell service, but most of the time most places where people are going to do say for instance go missing at, the trailhead usually does have internet access in most cases. Not always, but most. So, generally speaking when you're going to be showing up to a situation like this, there's going to be an information overload. You're going to probably get a packet of information, instructions, communications protocols. You're going to be giving a lot a lot of information all at once. So, what it would be really nice is if a lot of the information that you're going to bring to the table yourself is already taken care of, right? Well, one of the things you're probably going to do is have to sit there and wait for the rest of the team to show up. And while you're doing that, while you have internet access, while you have either your own personal Starlink or the command center's uh Starlink or some kind of internet access, just open your kit up. Literally, just open your kit up and uh zoom to the map that you want. Go to your area, find out where you're at, and just spend some just spend five five or six minutes scrolling in and out of the area you're going to be operating in. This sounds really stupid simple, but honestly, if I could just get most people to do that, it would be so much more informative. If you were to take 2 minutes and zoom around the area you're going to be uh stepping off into, just take a look at the trail. You don't need to know exactly where every mountain peak, where every river, where every trail, where every road is. You don't need to know that. Just spend a few minutes of zooming in and zooming around. And while you're doing that, while you're doing that initial intelligence preparation of the battle space, that very quick look of I've never been here before in my life. This is totally unfamiliar terrain. Let me just take a few minutes to zoom around, pinch in and out, pan around the area and see where I'm at, right? While you're doing that, ATAK is caching what you're looking at. So, even if you get the call and you say, "Look, we got to go right now. We've got to go run down the trail because we've the situation is much more serious than we thought. We've got to go right now." You can zip your kit up, and guess what? ATAK has cached everything that you looked at. So, you if you don't have time to sit there and and actually physically download an offline map, if you don't have time to get KMZs or map files from say your command center, you just show up, you sprinted up, you're breathless, you're you're you're you're tired already, and you've got to go step off to a trail right now, you actually have something to work from. It's minimal, it's not ideal, but it's something. And that's really what a lot of this stuff baked into ATAK is all about. You would not ordinarily get that from the training manuals, you would not get that from the brochure, and you're not going to get that from say many other competitors, for instance. So, ATAK has these little tiny features baked into it that actually make it really great for emergency response if and when time is of the essence. It's not perfect, but it's something. Now, you don't want to get into the habit of doing this all the time because what you may want to be tempted to do is roll up to a disaster, roll up to a crisis, and you just zoom in and out, pan in and out, and cache the maps. If you have the time, it would be a very fantastic idea to do it properly, download offline maps, load your information in ahead of time, right? 9/10 of success is preparation, right? So, download maps ahead of time if you have the time, but if you don't, if you're thrown into a bad situation, if you don't know where you're going, you don't know what the situation is, and you're and you're just kind of left to sink or swim, ATAK can help you out with that sort of thing. So, the caching feature in ATAK has gotten me out of a bind many times, especially when I've loaded in maps, I've loaded in trail maps, I've loaded in all the KMZs I have, and then I end up walking right off the edge of the map, right? I've walked into the the area that I had not never thought I would be in. So, sometimes that helps when you cache the area around the place you're going to be in, that might help you as well, especially to get you out of a bind. So, what if you want some other kinds of maps? Like I said, by default, ATAK will stream map data to your device using your phone's internet connection, and when you load up ATAK for the first time, you will probably not have the maps that I have shown here today. By default, ATAK will come with a few maps, but I would strongly recommend adding in many other maps, and this is a very good way to segue into showcasing the import tool. The import tool is the way that you're going to add in all kinds of data to ATAK. Anything and everything that needs to be added into ATAK is imported using this one tool. If you have a KMZ file to add into your map, this is the tool you're going to use, and it's incredibly simple because the import tool recognizes which kind of data you are trying to import and puts it in the appropriate spot. Whether it's a hiking trail or a photograph, ATAK will ask you where it needs to go. As an example, let's use the import tool to add in some different kinds of base maps. Going over to GitHub using the link below or just Googling ATAK maps, the user Joshua Fuller has compiled XML files for pretty much any map that you would ever need. These are files which allow us to access the streaming sources for most common base maps. From the main ATAK maps GitHub page, we can click releases and then the ATAK maps zip file. We can save this zip file to our downloads folder on our phone or wherever you want, it doesn't really matter. Then, within ATAK, we open up the import tool, tap local SD, and we can navigate to the folder that we saved the zip file to. Select the zip file and hit okay. Depending on what you are trying to import, you will probably get a prompt to either copy or move the data to the ATAK folder. Personally, if I get this prompt, I always tap copy because I like to keep my data separate, but it's a personal choice, it doesn't really matter. Once we click copy, the import tool will bring in our map layers, and it will recognize that these are map layers, which is handy. You don't need to unzip the file, just import it using the tool. So, we can open up our map tool, and there we go. We have a lot more options for streaming maps, including Google and Bing satellite imagery, which is handy to have. Now again, just to be clear, this zip file just contains the data links for various streaming map sources. You can add your own. It's just that this one is pre-made for us and is a really good source to use. But, you are not downloading offline maps, but rather a way to get offline maps within Avenza Maps. To download the entire globe offline, if that's what you wanted to do, that would be dozens of terabytes of data at least, and no phone on the market could ever hold all of that offline map data. So, what do we do? Well, for the most part, we stream various map sources when we have internet access, and when we need an offline portion, we download those specific sections as we need them. Personally, as a data hoarder myself, I would like to have maps of the entire planet at every zoom level completely offline, but that is simply not possible due to storage space constraints. If you want to download a section of offline map, it's pretty simple to do, but it might take a long time depending on how big of an area you want to download. You may need to do this in sections bit by bit. Once you have the incredibly handy the Avenza Maps data loaded in via the import tool, you can open up your map tab and select which base map you want to download offline. From here, you can tap the tiny arrow at the very bottom right, which opens up the downloader tool. Tap select area and choose whatever shape you want. In this case, I'm going to choose rectangle. Now, Avenza has what they call three-point entry, which takes some time to get familiar with for drawing a lot of the shapes that we use. In order to work with a stylus or gloved hands, we have to tap the first corner, the second corner, and then the third corner, which gives us the depth of the shape. If you mess up, you can always tap the back button and start over. Once you tap that third corner, the shape fills out and you can select the detail that you want. Remember, we're dealing with a sophisticated tool here, and every time we zoom the map in and out, that's actually a different layer, sort of like how we open up Google Maps and we zoom in too quickly and we we have to wait a second for our phone to clear up the image by downloading that level that we are zoomed in to. Avenza lets us select which zoom levels to download data for and we can use the slider tool to make these selections. Course data is more useful for wide areas, but fine data will be helpful for more urban areas. Moving the sliders around will change the number of tiles that you are downloading. Personally, I try to keep this as small as feasible because it's going to take a long time to download if you have thousands of tiles you want offline. Once you have your area selected and you find a good sweet spot for which maps you want offline, hit the download button and this will allow you to create a new tile set or add this to one you've already created. Select the add to a new tile set option and give it a name. Tapping okay will begin the download and depending on how big your data set is and which map layer that you've selected, this could take a long time or it may just be a few minutes. It really depends. Once it's downloaded, you should see the tile set you created under the imagery tab and if you want to see the outline of what you've already downloaded, you can tap the outline toggle to see what's already saved offline. If you don't want to stream any data at all and you just want to work using offline maps, you can also flip the switch at the bottom of the map tab, switching map source to local. So, that's how we use offline maps and depending on how much you have loaded in, you can cache and save offline a good chunk of the world, especially for stuff like the old USGS topographic maps. There are many different data sources that we can bring into A-Tak, which we will cover in depth later on. Just know that for now, this is the very basic way to get maps offline. Elevation data, satellite imagery, and other maps are important, but we're just sticking with the basics today. So, we'll get into it later on. Moving on to the other mainstay of A-Tak, layers and overlays. This is another critical feature to understand. Chances are, if you see it on your screen, it can be turned on or off in the overlay manager. So, you will spend a lot of time in this tab and I myself like to have this tab also in the action menu for quick access. Tapping the layer icon here to open up overlay manager, we can see everything in ATAK organized by type of thing. If it's a marker, it's under the marker tab. If it's an image attachment that's geo-located to a point on the map, it's under the attachments tab, and so on. This is where you can toggle things on or off or see what you've already got loaded. You can also delete data that you don't need anymore or just hide it if you want to keep it, but you don't want to actually see it on your screen. This is also where if you have a KMZ loaded in, you may want to turn off different folders within that KMZ. There is no folder function within ATAK, but a lot of the KMZ files that we download, for instance, some of the KMZ files that I publish every day, some of them have different folders or different levels within that KMZ, and you can turn off what you don't want. This is very handy if you've been given a product by somebody else, and you don't want to turn the whole thing off or the whole thing on, you want to actually just select what data that you need. Well, this is how you would do that within the overlay manager. So, now we understand the more background stuff. We have our background map selected, and we know where to find all of our overlays. Now, we can actually get to putting data on our map, and the first place to start is the point dropper tool. This allows us to, you guessed it, drop points on the map. There are many different types of points, but the four main points point to the point of the app, if that makes sense. Anyway, remember why we had to go on the tangent at the start to explain the history of ATAK? Well, these points are mostly used for military purposes. The yellow clover shape, what we might refer to as a yellow quatrefoil, represents unknown units. The green square is for neutral or sometimes partner nation units. The red diamonds are enemies, and blue rectangles are friendlies. This symbology is based on a common military standard, which is called military standard or MIL-STD 2525. Remember, ATAK is a combat tool, So, we have to get points on the map really quickly sometimes. In that case, we can tap the point we want and tap where it should go on the map. If you place it in the wrong spot, don't worry, we can always move it later. Now, it must be noted that these four points designate generic ground units. What about aircraft or vessels? Well, you can tap this drop-down menu with the word ground in it and choose whatever type of symbol you want. This will change the overall shape and thus the overall meaning of what that symbol is supposed to designate. Apart from the tactical side of things, there are other symbols, too. For instance, the emergency management community has been instrumental in getting their symbols into the TAC ecosystem. If you are so inclined, you can also load in your own custom icons, as well, which I do fairly often for things like mapping industrial accidents and such. Now, once we create a point, we can use the ever-faithful back button to back all the way out of the menus, and we can tap the icon that we just placed. We will get a radio menu that allows us to change everything about that point. Depending on the type of point you drop, this will look different, but this is the generic layout, and you only need to know about a few things to get started. At the bottom, in the 6:00 position, we have the trash can icon, which allows us to delete the point. At the 5:00 position is the edit which allows us to edit all of the data pertaining to that point. So, if you want to change the symbol or add remarks, add notes to the actual point, this is where you will do that. You can also change the name of the point. You can do all kinds of stuff from the edit tab. You can also designate whether that point is present, destroyed, or degraded, etc., which is especially helpful for military units where you want to remember where a unit was destroyed or degraded or damaged, but you want to actually make it clear that that point you're looking at is no longer there or it's just a burning hull of a tank. This is also the menu where you can tap send to send this point to other contacts, a server, or any feeds you may have set up. More on that later on. It's a complicated topic. Just know that this is where that menu is for the time being. At the 8:00 position, we have the move tool symbol, which allows us to move around the point to a more accurate spot. This is very helpful for when you're placing points quickly in the heat of the moment, such as when you're tracking an enemy hiding in the bushes and they keep moving. Similarly, the icon at the 4:00 position is a toggle switch. When you tap it, ATAK is now tracking that point in the background. This is something that is incredibly helpful that not a lot of people know about ATAK. If we turn that toggle on, if we enable tracking on this point, if we move that point, we can start to see that point leaving behind a breadcrumb trail. And as you use the move tool, this breadcrumb trail will continue on for as long as the tracking is toggled on. Now, maybe we can see the utility of something like this. If you are chasing Charlie through the jungle, he's not very likely to have a tracker on him that's going to populate on your own map. Real life is not Call of Duty, and even though ATAK does remind us of that mini-map down in the corner of our favorite video games, in the real world, we're not going to see any little red dots designating enemies popping up on our map automatically. We have to find the enemy ourselves, and the enemy makes us work for it. civilian context, this tool is perfect for tracking a lost hiker or a missing person. It would be a little overkill just for mapping out, say, a hiking trail or something, but you can totally do that as well if you want. Just like the classic Garmin GPS tracking on your handheld GPS, or maybe your GPS watch, you can create a breadcrumb trail of your location and export that as a GPX file for use elsewhere. However, ATAK has another trick up its sleeve, because you can create this breadcrumb trail for any point you drop, not just your own. As we can see, this can get really complicated really quickly, so let's break it down simply. Let's say that you have turned tracking on for a particular point, and you've moved it around the map as you're following it through the mountains. By opening up your radio menu and holding the tracking button, again, using that ATAK feature of tapping versus holding something, you can bring up another radio sub menu. Tapping this search button allows you to search for the tracking data for that point. And you can export that map marker's track in multiple file formats. This is very, very helpful for tracking missing persons because one team can easily export their work to hand off to another team. Of course, it's not like SAR teams don't already do this. They obviously do. It's just way faster than having to go to the talk, plug in your ancient Garmin into a dusty Windows 7 laptop, and pull off a GPX file into Basecamp. Doing it this way will make it so that at the end of the mission, you have an actual ground track where the subject was actually located. And since it's time-stamped, you can play this back on something like Google Earth if you want to create a short video clip of how this movement was observed over time. Again, niche trick, we'll cover it later on. Just wanted to point out this is pretty slick and very professional if you are trying to set yourself or your team apart for a client or just in general. And it's very helpful for missions that seem like they're going to be quick, but eventually turn into multi-day events. Again, ATAK core is built around the idea of being useful, especially when things are going sideways. Now, of course, we should not expect everyone to be walking through the woods with their face glued to their phone in range of potential adversarial forces. That's not the smartest move. But, if you can spot the enemy on the next hilltop, and you can geolocate where you think they are, you can move their point as you see them whenever you get a second. And perhaps that's the best way to think about ATAK in general. This is an app for your phone. It can help you out a lot, but it cannot replace basic soldier skills if that's what you're using it for. It's not going to replace any type of training you may have had, any SOPs for rescue teams, or anything like that. And it's certainly not going to replace legacy systems. Can you navigate with it? Sure thing. Does that mean that you don't also need a paper map and a compass like always? Sure doesn't. In warfare, everything with batteries is going to fail at some point. And usually it's going to fail when you're already having a really bad day. All Paragon 6 over. Alpha 6, this is Alpha 6. We have your smoke. Uh Bravo should be moving shortly. Over. This is Alpha 6 now. Look at this little knoll. We are on this little knoll now reorganized in the uh about uh 400 m from our logger site. We have an extremely large force moving in the valley to the west of us now. We need uh air strikes or anything. You'll have to control it from up there. Put something all around this hill, but still enough to reach spine. Over. This is Paragon 6. He's telling you a large force is moving toward you from the west. Over. This is Alpha 6. I'm not sure whether they're moving away or toward us. We've got heavy movement and firing on our left. I'm thinking that they're trying to break contact. If you can get artillery or air over in the on coordinates uh 9 uh 99 3 170 down in that valley. Don't come below to the south of the 17 grid line. You might catch some more of those bastards. Over. Roger. 9903 0 Roger coming. Over. This is Alpha 6. Roger. Down in that area down there. As serious as this use case is, we also have to remember that most of us are not going to be talking a Cobra gunship onto a target in Vietnam near the town of Dak To. Most of us are going to be using ATAK for vastly different purposes. Stuff that's way less serious than a firefight. Many of us might be using ATAK for search and rescue or even just trying to stay on the trail during a peaceful hike in the woods. We may use ATAK to plot the location of wildlife game cameras or for hunting stands or even just for good bird watching spots. But, the world is a pretty busy place these days. A vicious land war has been fought in Europe for years now. Conflict in the Middle East is popping off, and in the Fa

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

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the intel update for sunday the 10th of july 2022 and it is being recorded the day prior on the 9th of july so let's get right to it up first as usual our infrastructure incidents and concerns and we're going to kind of breeze through these a little quickly because there haven't been too many that are worth talking about in the infrastructure category this time around but up first in the northeast in connecticut there was a grocery store that caught fire and burned down in the early hours of the morning of july 4th really no information on this whatsoever just wanted to point out that it did happen uh it's kind of a smaller grocery store it's not a national chain and grocery store fires are unfortunately quite common so i don't know if this one is more to fairies or not just wanted to kind of put it out there moving down to the southeast uh i'm sure there was something that happened of note but i haven't quite found it yet so uh through my several hours worth of digging i haven't really found anything worth talking about for the southeast so we'll just go ahead and go to the east central midwestern region which of course again not very much going on this time around but there was a fire metal processing facility i think this one is very vague again more some of the more industrial fires in uh smaller townships don't really get a whole lot of press uh if they get any press at all so even the local news agency for this one out of white house ohio didn't know what in the sam hill was going on with this one so it looks like it was just a small fire at a metal processing facility uh the cause is unknown and of course the investigation is underway so it is this one looks like more more of your routine ones but but you can't really tell of course because there's just no information on it again keeping michigan in our minds we have the abbott laboratories flood recovery no news on that front so we're still waiting for an update from abbott laboratories moving to the west central midwestern region same story nothing really new to a report i'm sure something happened but i haven't found it for this time around so let's go down to the southwest in which case there was only one thing of note and it was of course again a liquid natural gas pipeline fire so this was out in fort men county texas there was a decently large as they always are pipeline burst in the middle of just a farmer's field so i don't know if somebody clipped it with you know some kind of agricultural implement as is extremely common because for those of you who don't know most pipelines are pretty they're not very deep underground they're only a few feet in most cases sometimes less than that so people hitting pipelines is not exactly an uncommon thing to have happen in in a lot of areas but again this one was in such a remote area and there wasn't any apparent construction going on in the mid immediate vicinity so there's no real telling uh what the cause of this was but again since it's a pipeline burst explosion type thing we're probably not going to hear about what the cause of this was and finally for the west again nothing significant to report so let's go ahead and move to the suspicious fires really only have two fires to add for uh this briefing and that is on july 1st in paterson new jersey the greater assembly house of prayer caught fire this one have no information on it whatsoever moving on to number 10 we have on the 8th of july in waverly tennessee a fire at the glenwood church of christ this one is we have a little bit more information on but still very sketchy not a whole lot of information gets put out there with regards to church fires specifically church fires but the local authorities have been kind of hesitant to say that this is under investigation for arson but the even just the local sheriff kind of commented that this is just one of seven or eight suspicious fires in the local area over the past few weeks so it looks like there might be something going on there in waverly tennessee but again we have seen this this kind of behavior pop up in various places around the country just these kind of arson style incidents right so again we're really probably not going to hear a whole lot about these suspicious fires that have been occurring around the country because we can call them suspicious but you know if a local jurisdiction calls them non-suspicious fires then you know where are we gonna what are we gonna do you know there's if that's kind of where the investigation stops you know the investigation stops right so uh we'll move on to the more unfortunate slides which are the kinetic incident trackers now i had to change this uh quite significantly because i did not have nearly enough room to make these all make these fit all on one slide so we're gonna have to break these down again by a region so we'll start again with the northeast region and talk about some of the more kinetic incidents that have occurred over the past 90 days or so really the two newest additions to this unfortunate uh tracker come to us from worcester massachusetts and they are two centers uh that were the target of jane's revenge in roughly the same kind of area and those were the problem pregnancy which is a clinic and again a clear way clinic as well so two pro-life clinics or resource centers or however you wanted to word it were attacked again by jane's revenge who claimed these attacks on their websites moving down southeast we have quite a diverse arrangement of terrorist attacks for this cycle uh beginning with the new additions for this time which are on the 3rd of july in hillsborough north carolina the holy family catholic church was vandalized no agency has claimed this particular attack but it was most likely antifa due to the graffiti they left behind this is just again one of many different church vandalisms that has occurred over the past 90 days the next day on july 4th also in north carolina in asheville north carolina there was an ied attack uh on a local statue or what the site of a former statue so again this is not particularly surprising asheville north carolina has a pretty solid antifa uh sort of left-wing militant presence and it would make a lot of sense because asheville actually took down a lot of their statues remember when last year or the year before last where all of the you know every government agency was looking to destroy any kind of history they possibly could of the civil war or things like that asheville north carolina had a lot of statues that they tore down and it looks like a couple of dudes affiliated with antifa or some other leftist group tried to build some homemade pipe bombs to blow up basically the the base of where a statue used to be so there wasn't a statue there anymore the the government had already destroyed it or removed it these guys were just trying to do to make again some kind of stupid attack on the site of where a statue used to be but again they were arrested of course and um i guess we'll see how that goes probably will be bailed out almost immediately uh but on on the same day in richmond virginia there was a mass shooting that was actually thwarted by a local citizen so this is a very interesting case that of course has been blacked out by the media because the two guys who are planning on conducting mass shootings against soft targets at july 4th celebrations uh these two guys were illegal immigrants so of course the mainstream media would not report on this kind of thing but i thought this was a very interesting case because the attack was thwarted very interestingly of course the richmond virginia police claimed 100 of the credit uh but it was actually stopped by a concerned citizen who reportedly overheard their plans to conduct a mass shooting so i'm very interested to see what the details are because overhearing a terrorist attack being planned is that almost never happens so was this were these guys literally like discussing their plans like in their house and their neighbor heard them or were they discussing it in a public location and someone overheard it i'm not entirely sure but either way this concerned citizen reported uh what they heard to the local authorities who then searched their place and got them to confess slash found all of their uh the weapons they were planning to use yeah very interesting case of domestic terrorism uh being thwarted on u.s soil again by concerned citizens so very interesting case indeed and finally in georgia one of the more interesting cases that i'm sure has swept all the way through the bottom depths of the internet by now uh this is the ied attack on the georgia guidestones so this is a very very very interesting case depending on how far you want to go down the rabbit hole of weird stuff on the internet and so for those who don't understand why this is such a polarizing slash interesting event it really surrounds the georgia guidestones themselves which are a very controversial monument that was put up a few years ago by unknown secretive groups slash agencies slash individuals right uh and this you can go read the wikipedia page before it gets deleted from the internet about what the georgia guidestones actually said um but it's depending on how strange you want to get into it what's undeniable i should say let me just start there what's undeniable is what the tablet says said it's a stone series of stone monuments kind of like an american version of stonehenge right our stone monument outdoors in the middle of nowhere that has some really weird inscriptions on it uh basically ten commandments so to speak for humanity i guess but the reason why this has been so controversial is what the commandments are so what's undeniable is that these tablets endorse things like mass genocide population control medical tyranny eugenics and things weird things like that right so of course it's going to get a lot of press when something like this gets blown up a lot of people have in the past attributed this as like a a monument to like either satanism or just like a sign of the antichrist or something like that like a world economic forum thing it's really hard to kind of put this into words what this thing actually was i think the most interesting part about all of it is not really the the rabbit hole stuff that you can go down on the internet but the the fact that this was attacked using uh ieds right in the past the the georgia guidestones of course based on the controversial things that these that's inscribed on these tablets these have been the subject of attack for a long time they've been vandalized graffiti has been they've been sprayed up with graffiti a lot this is this is nothing new what is new is someone using explosives to try to blow them up so yeah pretty interesting um i think though what's more interesting is the fact that there was pretty good security at the georgia guidestones like perimeter uh due to the past attacks that have kind of happened uh they put up a lot of security cameras and they've got a pretty good like you know security perimeter i won't say it's great but it looks to me like from what i've seen uh pretty decent and especially for in the middle of nowhere georgia and yet this kind of thing still happened i think though what is the most interesting part about the entire thing is that this ied attack occurred in the early hours of the morning on july 6th so way right in the middle of the night uh on july 6th well by the end of that day after the detonation had occurred they the guidestones were dismantled and destroyed people noticed construction equipment out there tearing down the rest of the monuments so from what i know about investigations of ied attacks on u.s soil i'm very highly suspicious that the site of an ied attack where you're trying to conduct chemical forensics and and conduct an investigation gets dismantled in just a few hours right after this idea attack happened like you would think there'd be crime scene tape around this sucker for at least a week or so while people are trying to figure out what happened and maybe go after the people because you know id attacks are not they're not common here in the united states especially against you know like a hardened structure like a stone tablet right so i don't know i think that the destruction of these guide stones immediately following the the explosive attack on them i think that's sketchy though i don't really know what else to think about it but again this is kind of a more weird one but since we don't really get to talk about ied attacks too often uh you know except in the context of like antifa or somebody i thought i'd mention it and especially considering i know that people are going to have a lot of questions about it so i guess we'll see what comes of it but my guess is due to the highly suspicious and secretive nature of the the guide stones themselves uh my guess is we're probably not gonna hear much about this uh anymore so i don't know we'll see though moving to the east central midwestern region we really just have three additions for this time three different terror attacks uh all three of course claimed by jane's revenge and all three are vandalism so the first one was in detroit michigan where a pro-life center a pregnancy center again was vandalized as expected and as you can see on the slide there numbers four and five occurred on the 22nd of june in jackson michigan both of them occurred they they shared an office so one of these uh places that was attacked was a pro-life center the jackson right to life center and the other one was interestingly enough a congressman's office so republican congressman tim wahlberg's office was vandalized along with the right to life center there it's a small building they kind of shared the same structure and people uh graffitied it up pretty good and damaged some of the facilities there so so again not really surprising this is kind of the mo by now for a lot of these leftist groups but again just wanted to mention it because we're seeing these attacks increase all over the nation moving to the west central midwestern region we have two new editions for this time both of them vandalism both of them claimed by jane's revenge again pretty standard by now uh one of them was a pro-life center in saint paul minnesota uh which was uh the birthright center uh company there just is kind of like a pro-life center uh they were attacked on the fifth of july and then going back to the second of june i forgot to mention this one on the last last time this is in des moines iowa an organization called dsm street medics which is a like a pro-life resource center they were also vandalized and again claimed by jane's revenge moving to the southwestern region we have a whole lot of nothing i haven't been able to find any in the states of arizona new mexico texas or oklahoma though i'm sure different attacks have occurred i just haven't found them yet so a lot of these are very much buried by the media and i'm sure that you can understand how hard it is to find these uh digging through the depths of the internet these days but again we'll keep an eye on the southwest but usually we're not really going to see too much just because of the climate and the nature of these attacks right so so for the western region we have two new additions for this slide this time both of them occurred on the 27th of june uh the first one was in portland oregon uh the mother and child education center it was like a pregnancy center was vandalized again by jane's revenge now i should note that this one is very interesting uh the local locals seem to think that this might have been an accident because the mother and child education center is they have not picked a side on the roe vs wade thing so they are not pro-choice and they are not pro-life at least according to them it's really hard to kind of say why they were targeted because they don't i'm not entirely sure if they offer abortions at this facility it seems like they're more along the lines of just just an education center and they kind of appeal to everyone at this particular place a lot of these pregnancy centers you're going to find are very much pro-life as you would expect but this one is more more center of the road which is a little confusing to me but it is portland right so it kind of makes sense in any case i looked at the photos of this facility's vandalism and it seems like it it could very well be a case of mistaken identity because this the name of this place is mother and child education center and if you look at the logo of the agency it looks very much like a pro-life facility so my guess is that the roaming bands of antifa members who have basically nested in portland over the past decade or so probably just saw the sign and said you know what we're gonna we're gonna attack that place so so yeah either way this one looked like it was more of a target of opportunity rather than a deliberately planned uh coordinated attack and on the same day on the 27th of june in longmont colorado a facility called life choices which is a more of a pro-life center education center type type thing uh it was set on fire and that is currently being listed as arson so so again not a lot of this is surprising unfortunately but still got to keep a keep an eye on this just so that everyone's aware of the the levels of terrorism that are going on around this country before we moved on i briefly wanted to mention that there has been some congressional interest in all of these attacks that seem to be popping up all over the country for instance senator chuck grassley of iowa sent a letter to the fbi last week urging the fbi to investigate the more than 40 pregnancy centers that have been attacked since the roe vs wade leake this is in addition to the letter tom cotton sent to the department of justice last month also urging the fbi to do their job the fbi has responded by saying that they are instigating excuse me investigating these attacks and have again encouraged citizens to report suspicious activity to their various hotlines but until something is done the average citizen is having to take a crash course in counter-terrorism in a nation which arrests people for trying to stop terrorist attacks on u.s soil so not exactly an easy task but this is certainly a great time for the average citizen to educate themselves and remain vigilant and when it comes to future terrorism we have really one just kind of warning to go out there and that is that several groups affiliated with antifa your more leftist militant groups uh have been offering bounties or encouraging the attack of supreme court justices in washington dc so far uh bounties have just been offered up for public sightings of brett kavanaugh specifically uh with bonuses for if he's still at a location when uh the the terror groups when the terrorists arrive so again they're looking to target supreme court justices deliberately and openly now uh which again is not surprising unfortunately but what is kind of interesting is places like the white house press secretary deliberately uh egging this kind of stuff on so the precursor to to this is uh brett kavanaugh being swarmed uh while he was out trying to have dinner at a dc restaurant so this kind of spurred these more leftist groups iww antifa uh any kind of communist party of you know whatever city these groups are really looking for for blood quite literally and are openly encouraging violence against public officials so my guess is that due to this latest event involving brett kavanaugh the conservative justices at least will be hidden away in secure locations for the foreseeable future uh and almost certainly they were probably looking at doing this before the roe versus way decision was released the leftist terror groups around this country are really predictable at this point but with leftist politicians again to include the white house press secretary openly encouraging these kinds of attacks we have to assume that these attacks will probably be used on conservative politicians or public figures as well so it will probably expand beyond just supreme court justices right when it comes to leftist groups in this country they're really only whipped up into action to do politicians bidding for them every few years or so i mean of course you're going to have your your classic um communist groups that are pretty much in well not pretty much they are in every single city in this country uh at this point but usually they're really kind of small groups uh your more deliberate terroristic kinds of attacks like your jane's revenge type stuff that only really occurs uh ever so often once they've kind of get their resources back or they get their funding uh the reason that i think we're seeing a lot of this now is because of course roe vs wade was a hugely uh motivating uh recruitment tool for them for one and it also allowed billionaire politicians to funnel this money into supporting their their demonstrations their protesting and especially their bail funds so as far as what all this means for the average citizen uh really the takeaway is to remember that while politicians have taxpayer-funded armed security for protection which have zero legal implications to think about you do not and you most certainly do not want to be collateral damage so if you're at a location that might be a target for leftist terror groups remember that defending yourself against these terrorists will in all likelihood result in you being the one prosecuted uh we've seen this in new york very recently uh and in texas but this sentiment has been echoed in pretty much every state around the nation in sporadic cases right uh i of course don't mean to be overly pessimistic on this but i just know that i myself do not have the budget to spend years of my life going through a kyle rittenhouse style show trial i would rather egress from an establishment that is undergoing a mob style attack rather than let the terrorists force me into action that's of course just my own opinion but i always think it's important to remind everyone of the way things are right now within our multi-tiered justice system high-ranking politicians might have security but if you are dining at the next table over what do you think is going to happen their security team is for them not for you and the legal implications of you being forced to defend yourself are not of their concern either no politician is going to bail you out of jail or pay your legal fees because their presence near you caused a mob to target you and you had to defend yourself so please keep this in mind as we move into a time in which politicians of one party are allowed to openly encourage the harm of their enemies and government agents arrest citizens for defending themselves or their families again not a pleasant thing to think about but i think it needs to be said constantly especially since genuine domestic terrorism is becoming a norm in the united states moving on to significant governmental actions we'll keep the peachy mood going and talk about ups so ups united parcel service has apparently gone absolutely insane and is now not only canceling their contracts with gun parts companies such as brownells but they are now openly stating that they will be opening and stealing your packages if their scanning sensors detect that you have ordered something they do not like and if this sounds vague it's because it is ups has not been clear about any of this the gun community has rightfully expressed outrage over this especially considering that ups is going above and beyond to create their own laws i guess that this is surprising to a lot of people that a company would confiscate packages that even the atf says are completely legal but for those of you that have been following us for a while you know that we here have been focused on companies that create their own laws for a long time now like i've said many times before this is a huge problem and i don't know what the solution is i think that the classic argument of they are a private company so they can do what they want uh is kind of ridiculous at this point there are only a tiny handful of postal carriers in this country and all of them are heavily federally subsidized with your tax dollars and in many cases directly controlled by federal government we all know how social media companies have put political regimes into power and how defense contractors have taken your tax dollars to develop technologies that they then refuse to sell to u.s taxpayers so ups doing this is a little surprising because of how quickly they made this decision especially at a time when so many companies are going broke because of their wokism ups is neck and neck with their competition and they decide you know what we're gonna do we're gonna go above and beyond full steam ahead on the woke train to follow laws that don't even exist when you control the mail you control information i say good luck with that ups and let's see how that works out for you but my guess is that people are going to be focusing on using other shipping options the one or two other options that they have for shipping gun parts around the country moving on to number two this is kind of the incident that has been highlighted by many a conservative news agency over the past couple of weeks and this is a story that the biden regime has sold about a million barrels of crude oil to a company that is owned by the communist party of china not only that but this oil came from our strategic oil reserves so we quite literally uh emptied out our reserves of at least a million barrels of oil to sell to china that alone is pretty damning but it gets better the company in question is sinopec this is indeed completely owned by the chinese state government but in 2015 a private equity firm called bhr partners purchased 1.7 billion dollars worth of shares in that company sinopec bhr associates was created by the bank of china and you guessed it hunter biden as if that is not delicious enough for you it gets even better hunter biden to avoid any hint of impropriety announced that he would be resigning from bhr partners during joe biden's presidential campaign but guess what as of the second quarter of 2020 after the election mind you hunter biden was still listed as a board member so pretty interesting i was not able to independently verify whether or not hunter biden is affiliated with this company still but i would stake my entire existence on the entire biden family being up to their neck in this rampant and blatant corruption i think it's pretty clear that that's exactly what's going on by now so i guess we'll see what happens with this case but my kindergarten level assessment is that nothing will happen at all as a result of this corruption but we may see a few republican congressmen get upset for a bit but that probably won't result in much being done uh in the long run and since hunter biden was recently caught smoking crack cocaine while in detox for smoking crack cocaine uh detox that his father paid for i think that this hunter biden saga is just going to keep giving us very interesting tidbits as we move on down the line clark that's the gift that keeps on giving the whole year so let's wrap things up with a few international issues first up is the netherlands like i mentioned uh the dutch are still protesting in quite significant numbers uh the police have actually fired several live rounds at least once during the demonstrations at farmers so it's really unclear as to to what's going on with regards to these smaller spot protests that have kind of popped up around the nation this is very much a nationwide protest at this point and the demonstrations are becoming a bit more lively uh with more and more people joining the demonstrations as people start to realize just what the the world economic forum controlled dutch government is trying to do to its people uh similar protests have popped up in various spots around europe as well such as in france for the same reasons so i guess we'll have to see how kinetic things get as more and more european citizens start to realize what their governments have done to them or are trying to do to them as one might expect the farmers specifically in the netherlands have gotten a lot of support from people who realize that farming is kind of an essential activity and their government's efforts to restrict it are kind of not a good thing so we'll have to see how this develops my guess is that these protests will probably grow quite significantly based on the severity of these draconian climate change policies that are far too numerous to even mention but are kind of popping up everywhere around europe moving over to germany germany's largest housing group a company called vanovia has announced that they will be involuntarily turning down the thermostats in their rental units the retail units that they own for the foreseeable future during the hours of the night when things get the coldest so a company smokes person said that from the beginning of the next heating period the plan is to throttle the heating between 11 pm and 6 am so that heating only heats up to 17 degrees celsius which is about 63 degrees fahrenheit at night for those that are unfamiliar with this company vinovia is a very infamous company in germany it's probably one of the most hated corporate entities in the country uh because they are a they're very well known for unethical business practices so this is not a surprise at all however they own over half a million apartments so they're not a small company whatsoever so again i would expect this trend in germany to become very commonplace uh however we might actually see the german government start trying to ration natural gas uh probably very very soon uh they're kind of floating that idea right now there's a lot of rumen to a lot of rumors flying around regarding rationing natural gas because of germany's own decisions and their reliance on russian natural gas which is now not an option for them so that's going to be interesting to follow as with most things it does present a few other considerations though wood-fired stoves and other heating appliances have completely disappeared from store shelves as german citizens race to prevent their government from freezing them to death this winter this presents a lot of problems the energy crisis in europe specifically in germany uh has presented a lot of problems mostly due to how most people on earth are completely inept when it comes to basic survival skills the same people that think chocolate milk comes from brown cows also probably think that their home is heated by magical fairy dust so you're going to have a lot of people who are completely confused as to why their home is freezing cold and these people who have never even thought about basic things like energy and heating are suddenly having to figure out how to heat their home when their government or their company decides to restrict their heating modern caveman moments like this are likely to cause quite a few problems as inexperienced people race to keep their homes warm this of course is not to cast shot and florida on the germans this is certainly an american thing too the number of people that are somehow baffled every winter when their pipes freeze and burst is quite astounding when it comes to heating in the winter though there are a lot of other issues as well winter time is when people tend to buy some of the more unsafe heating appliances like cheap chinese space heaters which then burn their house down and guess what time of year is most difficult to fight fires in wintertime injuries for firefighters usually spike during the winter hydrants and hoses freeze ice and snow present challenges of their own and all of this happens at the exact time of year that residential home fires spike it is a tale as old as time and one of the main reasons for murphy's law not only will everything go wrong that can go wrong but it often does so at the most inopportune times or when it is most difficult to fix the issue such as residential home fires in the winter so for any german citizens out there please be careful with your heating methods this winter you've had this pair of extra gloves this whole time yeah we're in the rockies jumping over to the pacific in japan the assassination of former prime minister shinzo abe has grabbed a lot of headlines this week i don't really have much to say about this one but we do not often see the assassination of high-ranking politicians so i did want to mention it abe was very much a controversial figure mostly due to his political ideology which some would describe as ultra-nationalistic we here in the u.s hear that and think well alright then but we have to remember that what is nationalist or ultra-nationalist in other countries is not exactly the same definition as here at home but yeah he was still a very controversial figure in japan the west supported him because of his hard-line stance on china which won him support for many japanese citizens as well not much is known about the attacker just yet i'm sure lots of media agencies are doing profiles on the guy by now but for sure various antifa elements are celebrating this assassination as expected so who knows what is interesting is that crime especially gun crime is pretty much completely unheard of in japan this is not something that is easily understandable by a western audience much like lots of japanese culture i guess it's kind of hard to explain but i will say that it's pretty clear that this assassination has rocked the nation for sure stuff like this especially with an improvised firearm are completely unheard of in japan i think what kind of sells this idea is this photo from the assassination which reminds us that the security detail for a former prime minister carries revolvers so yeah that kind of points out how different the culture is in japan with regards to firearms and law enforcement moving to sri lanka the situation in sri lanka has deteriorated to about as close to a full-blown collapse as i think we're going to see protesters stormed the presidential palace yesterday in order to demand the president's resignation and generally voice their displeasure at the government causing them to starve the prime minister has agreed to resign and allow the formation of a new government and the president actually just a few minutes ago as i'm recording this also announced that he will be stepping down as well although even with these resignations it is unclear if anything can be done at this point to stop the economic collapse and mass starvation moving to our friends across the pond in the united kingdom the news this week has been the resignation of boris johnson this follows a several months saga for boris starting with the party gate scandal and ending with his covering up of his appointment of a serial sexual predator as deputy chief whip so yeah not a super great past few months for old boris thus his resignation we shall see how the conservatives handle his resignation and who might replace him but no real news on that front moving to our friends to the north up in canada there have been quite a few issues regarding telecoms this week mostly stemming from the rogers communication incorporated outage rogers communications is a major telecoms sort of conglomerate that offers a lot of services they handle everything from normal citizens cell phones to 911 networks to to credit card transactions to wi-fi they handle a lot of different things and they have had a widespread outages since yesterday rogers has issued statements late yesterday evening that they should start having some services come back online as of the evening of the 8th although today is the 9th and it's there's still a lot of different outages particularly with things like 911 call centers and things like that so it's really hard to tell when they're going to be fully recovered from this but yeah again canadians figuring out exactly uh how vulnerable it is to put all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to telecommunications here in the united states we see this frequently like just last time i briefed uh we had an outage with our unemployment services and this one company which managed the website for unemployment or unemployment benefits you know websites to where you apply for that kind of thing that one company provided services to over 40 states and because they went down they took 40 states unemployment systems down with them so again we're finding out just how vulnerable it is and how little of these systems are not networked you would think that a lot of these systems are either air-gapped or on different networks or somehow not completely vulnerable to one thing bringing the entire nation down but i think we're finding out these days especially over the past couple of years with the rise of cyber attacks that this is most certainly not the case and systems which should be air-gapped like 9-1-1 call centers most certainly are not and finally in afghanistan it has been a while since i mentioned something with afghanistan and i wanted to end on something that doesn't really have much intel value but is utterly fascinating to me and that is the unearthing of mullah omar's vehicle from its hiding place in afghanistan for those that don't know who this is muhammad omar mostly just called mullah omar was the founder of the taliban in afghanistan and has been an almost mythological feature in afghan culture over the years back in the early years of the war he went into hiding and remained so until he died reportedly of tuberculosis in 2013 and now a few days ago we've learned from pictures posted on social media that his followers have unearthed his personal vehicle that he had placed into hiding during the initial invasion his followers posted photos of themselves digging up the vehicle that he used to escape from the 2001 u.s invasion apparently this was the vehicle that he used to drive from his home in kandahar to his hiding place in zabel where he remained for the majority of the war in hiding sometimes just a few hundred meters away from american fobs and outposts based on these photos it's clear that he and his team had buried his toyota corolla wagon underground in the event that he needed it again and now that the taliban have their victory they are now starting to literally unearth some of the items important to the history of afghanistan and their own history as the taliban as distasteful as it may seem to even have the slightest respect towards one of our nation's most vicious enemies especially with the fall of afghanistan and all of the pain that caused i myself can't help but be fascinated by the history of stuff like this and i hope that in the coming years we get to hear some of the stories from the other side of the wire so that we may better understand how we lost that war for now i think that a simple toyota being dug out of the ground illustrates that we cannot possibly begin to imagine how much we don't know about that war the exact same thing happened with vietnam too general nguyen zapp the head general in charge of the nva survived the war only to remain a mystery for the most part and mullah omar like general zapp remains an enigma to the west despite both of these men having a huge role in being the leaders of the only organizations to ever topple multiple superpowers i just think that if western military leadership isn't really interested in learning from their enemies i certainly am and i would be especially interested to learn the stories from the other side of the wire lest we repeat the same mistakes again mistakes that cost us dearly anyway i didn't mean to get all philosophical i just thought that was interesting and i really can't wait to get started on some more of the warfare studies sort of content that we've been researching for the past few months so thank you again for watching everyone and thank you again for all of your support i really do mean it especially for those of you who support us out there on patreon on youtube you guys are just really awesome and helping us out that way allows us to keep bringing this kind of thing to you i think we're going to be pretty busy trying to track a lot of these more kinetic incidents that have occurred here in the united states here at home and also overseas in the international arena definitely going to be a busy next few weeks and months unfortunately so we'll keep an eye on that 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 April 13th through the 19th of 2025. So let's get right to it. Starting off here at home, the trade war between the United States and China has remained fairly kinetic over the past few weeks. Even though it's more or less been removed from the news cycle, the global trade tariffs that were announced and abruptly delayed for for a few weeks are still a factor. However, it's more of a back burner issue at the moment. So, as something to not forget about because when these tariffs do come into fruition for some nations at least, we're probably going to see another bout of instability in the markets. Right about now, the economic situation can mostly be summed up as the rules are made up and the points don't matter. However, when it comes to the United States and China, this is something that is is taking more of a military/strategic tone rather than something that's just purely economic. It's become painly obvious right now that the United States and China are sort of slugging it out on the economic front as a means to a military end rather than being just solely about profits and tariffs. So that sort of shifts the game a little bit. It's not really about fairness or anything like that. It's more along the lines of just international flexing which makes a lot of the developments a little bit harder to understand or it really just makes it so that economists are a little bit more inaccurate than normal because they're looking at the situation through purely an economic lens whereas in actuality this is more of a blend of economics and also military strategy. So this is why the situation remains tenuous and we're just going to have to keep an eye on it. Similarly in Ukraine the situation remains much as before. Negotiations are continuing to take place. Early this morning when I was finishing up the slides for today, I didn't see reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that an Easter ceasefire will take place along all of the fronts in Ukraine. So, I haven't been able to verify that at the present moment, but hopefully that will come into fruition and be a good uh a good development towards uh getting this conflict wrapped up. So, in the Middle East, things are still rather kinetic depending on where you're at. In Syria, there is a possible drawdown going on of American forces who are shutting down a few uh smaller bases and consolidating at some of the larger ones. Hard to say what's going on with any certainty as the Pentagon has not commented on this yet, but there's a lot of movement taking place in Syria right now. So, likewise in Yemen, the bombing campaigns have continued to intensify and have grown in scope pretty much every day over the past few weeks. Again, I'll expand in greater depth in a moment, but for right now, it appears that a lot of the B2s, or at least some of them that are stationed at Diego Garcia that we've been kind of keeping a sharp eye on for the past few weeks, are probably conducting some bombings in Yemen. There are a lot of rumors surrounding the intensification of the conflict in Yemen and also the diplomatic talks with the Iranians. So, right now, it's still very much up in the air how the future of the Middle East is going to look in a few weeks. So, that's the wave top level of what's going on around the world. Let's look at strategic movement for a moment. Again, things are very much the same as before. It is not quite to the level of nothing significant to report as there are very significant actions taking place. Both the Truman CSG and the Carl Vincson carrier strike group are conducting largecale bombing campaigns in Yemen. Both of them appear to be taking part in this for now. And in the Pacific, the Nimitz was also seen in Port Guam. I don't know if she's still there or not, but she was seen entering Guam a couple of days ago. So things are remaining as active as before. Moving to the kinetic activities tracker for this week. I know many of you might not be aware of a sort of side project I'm working on that's rapidly becoming a gargantuan effort. This is a mapping project that I am working on that is supposed to help add a little bit more data context to a lot of the incidents and things that we're tracking around the world so that other people can use the data however they wish. So I had previously called this the domestic terrorism tracker, but in order to have a little bit more uh leeway in what I can put on the chart and put on the map here, I'm just going to call the kinetic activities tracker for now. And you can see based on the legend the kind of things that I'm putting on here. I've got multiple data sets that I'm loading in. And if you go to the SIP cop map, the common intelligence picture that I have created, of course, links below in all of my videos, you can see these different layers and and turn things on and off as you please. Uh I have loaded in this kinetic activities tracker three times. You can just do this with filters, but it's a little bit harder for the lay person to do with just their phone. So I've just turned on uh different layers. So, so I've loaded it in as three separate layers. I may change that in time, but for now, this is what I've got. This is the total database. This is everything that I've put on the map since January of this year. And these are all the kinetic activities that have taken place over the past 30 days. And this is the past 7 days. So, it's been fairly kinetic. Of course, this is not just a general crime tracker. Otherwise, I would have tens of thousands of, you know, points and icons on the map. This is more along the lines of just high-profile incidents and things that I think can be used to help make a decision if you live in some of these areas. So, a lot of the time I'll find or many of you will find and send to me really concerning situations, incidents, attacks, whatever. But it doesn't make the mainstream media. It doesn't make social media either sometimes. So, I figured there's really no one big database of things like terror attacks, very gruesome uh attacks or things that are a little bit more concerning than just your average street crime. Right? If I were to put like muggings on this uh map here, it would there would be tens of thousands. But really, I'm focused on things that are going to help people make a decision about how uh societal changes are taking place in their area. So, check it out if it's useful. I don't know. I don't get any analytics on this. I can only see how many people view the map. So, I don't actually know if this is helpful for anyone at all, but I'm doing it anyway. And uh you'll see why uh next week. This is not the final project. I have something that I'll be releasing in a few days that might uh help populate this map quite a bit faster. So, let's move on to the actual regions themselves. And let's start with the Northeast region. In Pennsylvania, as many of you know, last weekend, right after this briefing came out, an arson attack was conducted at the Pennsylvania Governor's Mansion in Harrisburg. This was a fairly significant attack. details are hard to verify and there's a little bit of contradiction in the story. However, the general gist of what happened is this is this man Cody Balmer hopped a fence at the mansion and was able to run up to one of the windows at the governor's mansion and the state police that were you know providing security for the governor's mansion before they were able to respond and and actually locate him and find him. He had broken a window and he had made entry to one of the rooms in the mansion and immediately started lighting and throwing Molotov cocktails everywhere. So, this was a very rapid pace sort of situation. It occurred in just a few minutes time, but it was a rather kinetic event. And considering the fact that the asalent here, he brought a hammer to smash the glass windows. He deliberately chose a spot on the back side of the house to cross the fence. He had pre uh pre-made Molotov cocktails. Like, this was definitely a premeditated thing. However, when we dig into the story of who this guy is and why he would have done something like this, that's when we start to get a little bit unclear. I did a little bit of a deep dive on this guy. So, like a mediumbth dive, and I have not been able to figure out exactly what this guy's deal is other than the fact that he looks like just the average skitso. He's got messages uh on social media accounts attributed to him that are anti-Biden, but also anti-Trump. So, I don't know. It doesn't seem like this is more of a political thing other than just this guy had a personal grievance with the governor, which seems to be fairly decently confirmable at this moment. So, I know the media will try to spin this uh any number of different ways, but I mean, look at him. I mean, you can kind of look at these mug shots and and see this guy's not wrapped too tight. So, either way, sometimes you just got to call it like you see it. And yeah, I don't I don't know. My guess is the investigation is probably not going to turn up much more than it already has. But you'll probably see a lot more security at some of the uh governor's mansions throughout the Northeast because I mean there's a lot of people that want to break a lot of things nowadays and it's not entirely clear as to what their motives are most of the time. Seems like they have every possible motive in the books. So similar situation down in the west central Midwest out of Wisconsin. Don't normally get these stories out of Wisconsin which is why I thought this was very interesting. But this story, which has been utterly buried by the media, occurred actually a couple of months ago, back on February 28th, possibly. It's hard to determine, but this was the incident that appeared to be just a standard gruesome murder, but this individual, Nikita Cassup, murdered his parents in their home uh just outside of Milwaukee. Now, that's where the investigation stood for a while. Murders are tragically common in the United States, but recently the feds have unsealed a search warrant that was related to this particular murder investigation. And it turns out that the story has a little bit more than meets the eye. This does not appear to be your average psycho. There's a little bit more deliberation here. This person didn't murder their parents. This is fairly open and shut. It's quite clearcut as to what happened there. However, the reason why was concealed for a while. And it turns out that this person murdered his parents so he could steal their money and used that money to fund an assassination attempt of President Trump. Or at least that's what the FBI says. Again, it always must be noted that whatever whenever the FBI claims something, you've got to cross-examine this because just be just taking the FBI at their word is not really a good idea. But I did find this to be rather interesting because this individual essentially this dude's got ties to neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. So, this is a little bit more than just your standard gruesome murder here. This this may be a little bit more organized than we might think. So, I'm sorry I don't have that many more details on this. I just thought I would bring it to your attention for anyone interested in investigating this a little bit further. But, yeah, very, very interesting case out of uh Wisconsin. Moving down to the Southwest, it has been a rather rough week for Texas. So uh as many of you know the Carmelo Anthony trial situation is getting rapidly out of hand and it is getting very very hard to talk about because we are seeing elements of the South Africanization of the United States taking place with this sort of thing. So again there are two counterprotests that are scheduled for roughly the same area in Frisco today actually. So as I'm recording this this should be fairly kinetic or not. Who knows? uh by the time this video comes out. So, we'll know either way. But I can't imagine a more high-risk situation uh personally. But either way, there have been open calls for genocide uh from this situation. And anytime we start getting into the realm of normalizing calls for genocide and especi, you know, open calls for murder and violence on social media from not just one or two accounts, but we're talking tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of social media accounts. This is this is not particularly good. Now, a lot of people are saying this is intentionally being amplified and this is intentionally intent intended to stoke hatred. I I don't necess I mean that may be true. I don't necessarily know. All I know is that it seems to be like there are a lot of genuine feelings that are not really being stoked so much as having, you know, been there the entire time that are really just coming out in the open now. So, again, the situation is a very hot topic. It's going to be a very very contentious topic for a while, but I would argue from my tiny wheelhouse that there's really not much use in protesting when the people you're trying to protest are calling for open genocide. At that point, once you've reached that level of South Africanization where you may have a peaceful issue on either side and the other side wants, you know, straight up murder and, you know, mass genocide, that's not really something that is going to be solved with a protest in my opinion. But hopefully the situation calms down. Uh it would be really great if we could not have another busy summer like in years past, but I'm keeping an eye out just in case either way. So, not super great. Another situation which has uh really become kind of a problem is there was a school shooting in Texas and not very many people seem to have noticed. This individual Tracy Dinard Haynes Jr. attempted to kill four to five people at his school by opening fire on a crowd uh earlier this week. And I say that with fairly high confidence because this individual posted a confession video uh on social media. One of the more interesting parts of this case is that the the Dallas Police Department and school officials even having this uh evidence and knowing that this person got away from the situation. So, you have a school shooter, made entry to the school, shot four or five people, it's hard to say how many people were injured or wounded. That distinction is not quite clear, but this dude shoots up a school egresses from the area. He's a fugitive. He's on the lamb. The authorities know exactly who he is because witnesses identified him and he posted this video confessing to the crime and the surveillance footage makes it abundantly clear that this person was the guy who did it. They covered it up. They did not release his identity. They did not tell his description or anything. So, they had an active fugitive for a couple of days. And this dude, I mean, can can you I just I just I'm sorry. I just can't wrap my mind around how this can be such a thing in the United States at this point. We've seen this in Europe where, you know, the police put out an APB for somebody, you know, they put out a bolo and they put a mug shot, they give a mug shot to the news media and then they blur the photo. Like, we've seen that in Europe, but now in Texas of all places. Maybe that should be a clue there, I guess. But, it's very interesting that this person's identity was concealed by the police until after he had eventually turned himself in. So, there are some investigative reasons for this. I want to stress that rather abundantly. However, if you've got a school shooting that takes place, you know who did it. you know, he's on the lamb and you know that he may uh commit further crimes to me. I don't know, maybe it's just my opinion, but it seems like that was probably a very bad judgment call to keep this guy's identity a secret. But anyway, I don't want to drag this one out too much. This one just kind of got to me this week, especially in the context of the school shooting in Florida, which I know I don't have a specific slide on. More to come on that on Monday. I'm still doing a little bit more research and digging a little bit more into that one. But yeah, we've got multiple school shootings going on around the country this week. It's already becoming a very kinetic, very hot summer. You can already see when these types of things spike. It's very indicative of national atmospherics. So, yeah, I don't know. Just something to be mindful of that you may have a school shooting and the local police department may conceal the identity of the shooter even though they know that the shooter is on the lamb and is a fugitive. Anyway, moving out west, sort of in a similar vein, situation out of Colorado a few days ago. I didn't see very many reports on this, but I thought this was rather interesting. and arms shipment was uh intercepted on the highway in Canyon City. Middle of nowhere traffic stop. I'm not sure the circumstances of the traffic stop. It could have just been random or it could have been a license plate that was flagged. Who knows? During the traffic stop, two illegals who were of questionable immigration status. I'll get to that in a moment. They were caught with a lot of ammunition. And we're not we're not just talking a brief range trip here. Now, they had almost 200,000 rounds of of small arms. So mostly 38 rounds and 762 by I'm assuming 39 rounds. So that's a little bit of an important context there. That's that's a lot of ammunition being moved around. Now, of course, like I wrote in the wire, that's not illegal. It's not illegal to roll around with, you know, almost 200,000 rounds of small arms in your in your trunk. However, it is illegal if you are illegal. So, these two individuals were uh admitted to the United States on uh under President Biden's uh catch and releaselease program. It's questionable as to h what reason they were actually in the United States for over the past few years. I don't know if it's specifically a Biden thing or if this actually goes back to Trump's first term. I'm not entirely certain on that. Either way, whatever their immigration status is, it's quite clear they were not allowed to handle this handle ammunition and small arms and things like that. So, I know it's probably rather contentious to make this assessment, but when I see, you know, a couple of Mexican nationals who are here questionably legally and they're rolling around with almost a quarter of a million small arms rounds in a van, I don't tend to think to a advocate. I tend to think cartel. So, I know very very hot topic these days, but I did want to mention it because cartel operations are still going on. The border may be more or less quote unquote sealed. That itself is very debatable, but even if the border is sealed, it doesn't mean the cartel just goes away. And right now, there are an awful lot of turf wars going on down south of the south of the border that have already made their way north of the border. So, some of these groups, especially groups like TDA, have decided to make a make a standing fight in a lot of areas, especially when it comes to counter immigration and deportation operations and things like that. They're not just going to, you know, roll over and and kind of weather the storm. Some of the bigger cartels might. and they may try to do that, but for right now, we're also seeing some of these smaller low-level groups, you know, they're arming and and they're definitely preparing. So, something to keep in mind, especially considering that things like this don't get very much news coverage. But that's really all I have for the United States today. Let's move over to Diego Garcia again, just as a brief correction from last time. I'm sorry I wasted so much of your time uh last weekend because I was not only wrong once, but I was wrong twice. So, the vessel that I thought this uh vessel was at Diego Garcia is not the one that I said it was. It's very clearly not a submarine tender. I have received better images since then, and I'm still working on measuring them because I've got a little bit more metadata to work with. I was fairly confident based on my measurements that this was a submarine tender, but it is very clearly not. So, my working theory at the moment, I may be wrong three times in a row, who knows? But my working theory at the moment is that this is the USNS second lieutenant John P. Bobo which is again a an auxiliary cargo ship. It's uh fairly regularly stationed here at Diego Garcia. So for all of you who do not care about the little minute details about this stuff, I don't blame you. The overall bottom line last I suppose kind of general synopsis here is that this isn't anything out of the ordinary. So the shipping to Diego Garcia as far as dry goods and cargo has been fairly standard apparently. However, the tanker's new uh the Senate imperative, that's a new development, which kind of makes sense for the B2s that are stationed there. So, again, sorry I wasted so much of your time last week, but I did want to make that correction uh rather than just kind of throw it all to the wind. See, that's the problem with doing things in kind of video format. Sometimes once it's uploaded and out to the internet, you can't really take it back. I mean, I can take the video down. However, do I really want to take down a video that's got 80% important information because 20% of it's wrong? I mean, I don't know. I'm sure many of you would would disagree, but either way, I thought I would issue the correction today and uh we'll just kind of keep an eye on the island. And keeping an eye on the island, I have been doing there really haven't been that many satellite passes. I expended my self-imposed imagery budget for this month. So, we're just going to have to make do with the free imagery. And as we can see, it's it's more or less nothing significant to report. The six B2s are still there. The six strat tankers are still there. So, they're still running operations out of Diego Garcia. Some are probably in Yemen, others I don't think so. So, what do I mean by that? Well, let's let's go to the Middle East here and let's uh kind of talk about what's going on in the region generally speaking. So, overall, however, the situation in the Middle East is moving. Uh it it may seem that there's not very much going on, but I assure you there is a lot going on. Not a lot that's publicly viewable or really publicly confirmable, I'll say, but there are a lot of rumors flying. So, I will share the unconfirmed, extremely celebrity gossip level rumors in hopes of maybe getting to the truth at some point. Unfortunately, we're very strapped for information. So, we've got to got to go on these very Real Housewives of the White House kind of approaches to things sometimes and the rumors that have been circulating are very serious. So, what do I mean by that? Well, generally speaking, the rumor this week has been that there's largely a lot of infighting in the White House and that there are certain factions in the White House that shut down war with Iran essentially. So, so the rumor this week so far is that President Trump had indeed decided to go to war with Iran. Like it was all set and done, especially with Netanyahu's visit couple last week, couple weeks ago. Like it was all, you know, signed seal delivered kind of thing. And that's why the B2s were sent to Diego Garcia. The United States had already decided to go to war like I had theorized. The decision had already been made. However, essentially the rumor is that White House chief of staff Susie Wilds, SECF Pete Hegth, and uh the vice president uh JD Vance essentially talked him out of it and put to bed a lot of the military options that were already decided on for Iran. So again, it's rumor. I don't know how true it is. I mean, the Trump White House seems to be leaking just as much as the Biden White House. So, it there's probably a lot of credence there, but from my wheelhouse, I can very strongly assess that at least this time 2 weeks ago, the Pentagon had made the decision to go to war with Iran. Like, we saw every single mobilization indicator and we still continue to see some of these indicators today. Now, these rumors being circulated could also be a ruse, especially in the context of moving troops in and around Syria. I mean, I don't know. The the situation in Syria has ebbed and flowed over the years. There have been combat operating posts uh set up and taken down. You know, there have been bases spring up and then disappear. So, it's kind of ebbed and flowed over the years, but right now it seems to be ebbing at least in some parts. So, we're seeing a lot of bases being shut down or presence reduced at. It's like a quiet draw down. Now, why would you want to do that? What are the reasons for that? I mean, you can say, "All right, cool. We're drawing down." But why? Well, there's two radically different theories that I can think of off the top of my head. There are uh many other theories, but two main ones that I can think of, and they could not be any more different. The first theory is that, well, we're drawing down because we don't want war with Iran and we just don't care about the Middle East anymore. So, we're getting out of Syria because why bother? Why leave a thousand people on the ground there when it doesn't matter anymore? So, just leave the Middle East to itself. That's theory one. Theory too is that we're reducing our presence at bases which are very vulnerable to an Iranian counterattack when we bomb their nuclear sites. You know, do you see how different of a theory, you know, different theories these possibly could be? You know, one says, hey, you know, we're backing away. We're stepping away from war. We don't care. We're leaving the the sandbox alone for once. And the other theory is we're strategically repositioning our troops so that when we do launch a war, it will be less detrimental to us. Right now, I don't have any evidence either way. Uh, it's purely just on what you think is the most likely situation. So, what we do know is that 6B2s are at Diego Garcia. They would be great for use in Iran. Uh, but it seems right now that they've probably been shifted to Yemen or they're just sit they're just sitting there parked. They may be redlined. I don't know. I mean, they may just be not functional anymore. They may just, you know, be struggling with maintenance. I know that it's a very very very expensive show of force to just keep these B2s parked on that parking apron there. It's got to be tens of thousands of dollars a day or maybe even an hour just to leave them sitting there with the engines off, you know, just from a maintenance perspective alone. It is a nightmare for logistics. They're pressing these airframes to the limit. Uh just getting there, you know, and so this forward deployment is not for nothing. And like I said last week, this is not the kind of thing you're going to be using in Yemen. I mean, the Saudis have been using F-22s, I think, uh, for many, many years. They've been bombing Yemen for 15 years rather successfully with increasingly larger bombs. I say successfully, it hasn't really done anything to be honest because it turns out the United States may be working through the same logic that they went through in every conflict from Vietnam to the counter ISIS conflict, which is that you can only drop so many bombs from the air on people in the desert before it stops being productive anymore. So, I don't know. Like I remarked a few weeks ago, like look, if they're deploying B2s to strike targets in Yemen, and they are not doing so for training purposes, and they're not doing so as really more of a slight to Iran, and if they're not doing so because it's more of a kind of a switcheroo, like trying to make the world think that the B2s are for Yemen, but they're really for Iran. If they're not trying to do any of that and they're they're legitimately deploying B2s to strike targets in Yemen, that goes against pretty much all military doctrine that I know. I mean, granted, I'm just some random guy on the internet here. I don't work in the Pentagon, you know, so I'm not making decisions on any of this stuff, but to me, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to use uh this particular cannon on this particular mosquito unless that cannon is actually for a different target like Iran. So, I don't know. Take your pick. Either the situation is deescalating or it is entering into its final stages of escalation and we're just working through a bunch of ruses and military deception campaigns, ambiguity, uh decreasing operations, things like that. You know, take your pick. At this point, that's all I got for you really. So, maybe we'll get some more information this next week. I don't know. We'll have to see, I guess. But, let's wrap up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. And this week, it has been a fantastic week for the ghost net stuff. So, propagation was really good this week. Um, for those of you who are not radio nerds, that just means that the radio signals are flying through the upper atmosphere really good this week. You're able to get a really good range. So, I was picking up people all over the United States just from my small little setup here. A lot of people were also sending news reports from their local areas. So, we've got a lot of uh people who are are taking interest in this now, which is great. Sometime some weeks it's not it's not so so much, but this week was really really good. a lot of diverse reports, a lot of very interesting things. And uh I know that I haven't talked about the ghost net in a while, but I will be talking about it again soon because I have other developments that I'm working on to kind of tie a lot of this stuff together. But again, more on that next week. It takes time. Remember, I'm only one person doing all of this. So things take a lot more time than um I personally would like it to sometimes. But either way, that's pretty much all I have for today. Uh here are the sources as usual. You can, of course, get all the links and clickable links from my Obsidian page. Links are pretty much posted anywhere. So, if you want something to click and read, I've got you covered. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Thank you guys all for watching. Thank you for all of your support. I really do mean that. And I hope that all of you have a great and happy Easter. Sometimes with all of the bad things that are going on around the world, it's good to take some time and really reflect on the things that actually do matter. So, hope that all of you are able to do so this weekend and we can begin a new next week. So, even though it's become kind of an unwitting catchphrase at this point, I suppose it would be more accurately today to fight in the light, for indeed Christ is risen. So either way, I will keep all of you in my thoughts and prayers as usual, and I will see you next

we all know the story in the dead of night a man sits hunched over a small radio in the corner of a cramped East Berlin apartment cigarette smoke swirling overhead as he frantically writes down seemingly random characters on a small notepad pulling in the invisibly thin antenna wire back inside his apartment Window he opens his code book and one time pad deciphering the message quickly his case officer needs to meet urgently he grabs his coat on the way out the door not knowing that his so-called invisible antenna wire wasn't really invisible he doesn't know that a concerned neighbor made a quick phone call in the meeting he was heading out for would be his last the Cold War era is filled with International Intrigue and political day taunt spies stealing out in the dead of night to fight a global war a war with no battles only casualties if World War II was the Golden Age of spies then the Cold War era was the Industrial Revolution of Espionage Spas used the most cutting-edge technology of the day tiny cameras microphones in everything tracking tags on diplomats cars and most importantly radios for the Spy abroad governments have spent billions of dollars to build massive infrastructure to communicate with even just a handful of clandestine agents overseas infrastructure which is still used today the 1980s gave us the rise of ultra portable shortwave radio receivers which could be used by spies to listen in to number stations back home they would rely on predetermined schedules tuning in at the right time each day receiving their Espionage instructions from higher command at one time shortwave receivers were super popular with most people around the world owning a small shortwave radio this was perfect for spies since owning a civilian grade shorewave radio wouldn't be viewed as suspicious if captured by authorities shortwave radio is a dual use technology at face value it has a perfectly innocent use listening to news or music from around the world however it also has another use tuning in to number stations to receive coded messages even to this day regimes Trapped In Time know the power of shortwave radio in North Korea for instance possessing a shortwave radio carries a death sentence in the years since the Cold War the technology of Espionage has gotten a lot better and become a lot more modern one-time pad messages can be sent in an email or over text message or as is extremely common these days via Bluetooth or NFC however with most counterintelligence or spy hunting operations focusing on spying on smartphones or emails or other internet-based means of communication old school shortwave radio is still very much an option for spies to send and receive messages around the world however shortwave radio is not without its own downsides and one of the biggest problems with shortwave or HF radio is that we are limited by physics and this affects arguably the biggest problem with HF radio the size shape and space needed for the antenna antenna so let's go over some options for clandestine HF antenna emplacement which kinds of antennas work best for small cramped areas but can also be set up as clindestinely as possible with one extra caveat portability if we are looking to send and receive messages by radio in cramped locations that we have to constantly move between this makes everything infinitely more difficult so why is portability such an important factor when everything else is already pretty challenging history provides the answer if you are an agent stationed in a foreign land either in the west or behind the Iron Curtain it would be a really bad idea to transmit from your home even if you are sending and receiving Communications that are encrypted Direction finding stations can narrow down your location pretty accurately though on shortwave frequencies Direction finding is a lot more difficult than you might think especially in a cramped Urban environment counterintelligence agencies on both sides of the war spent decades hunting clendestine radio stations in their own cities some were found and spy Rings were rounded up others were never found despite the best efforts to Direction find them in our modern world Direction finding is just as much of a problem as it was in the past but the incentive for massive nation-states to devote billions of dollars to rooting out spy radio stations it's just not there like it was in the past from the end of World War II to the height of the Cold War the stakes were much higher this is best demonstrated by diving into the history of how all of this got started during World War II Allied Powers learned the hard way just how difficult it was to set up resistance groups in occupied territory the Romantic idea of the French Resistance is certainly still fresh in our mind but in reality creating an effective resistance organization was very very difficult and the French Resistance in particular was not nearly as effective as one as led to believe after the war both eastern and western Nations tried to solve this problem no more air dropping and operative in Behind Enemy Lines with a radio to coordinate resistance no more insertion by submarine into a strange and foreign land these super spy activities would still be done but only sparingly as a last resort and certainly not without prior coordination with ground forces many OSS and soe agents lost their lives trying to parachute into enemy terrain with a radio throughout japanese-held Burma sometimes the last person to see an entire OSS team was the jump Master watching an entire unit's parachute canopies descend into the unfriendly jungle below never to be seen again clearly something had to be done learning from their disastrous origins in Burma the American office of strategic Services would establish resistance leadership before a conflict ever began the British Special Operations executive who also had their own troubles in northern France added their lessons to the mix and the concept of stay behind operations was born the goal of stay behind operations was to create a network of local operatives who could remain hidden and then activate when needed creating a more coordinated and sustainable form of resistance this new approach aimed to avoid the dangerous high-risk missions of the past and instead prioritize the establishment of long-term effective resistance networks to do this military units would secretly be stationed among the civilian populace and maintain intense networks of weapons caches secret radio transmitters observation and listening posts and so on these military units would work hand in hand with vast civilian resistance groups to build the infrastructure and most importantly the communications plans prior to the next War breaking out these military units and their civilian counterparts would lie in wait for an enemy at the time the Soviet Union to start rolling their tanks across the German Countryside once again stay behind units would not fight these initial Invasion waves but instead hide and wait until the front lines passed them then these stay behind and forces would be Behind Enemy Lines and able to carry out guerrilla warfare in the enemy's rear areas these crack Commando teams were called operational Detachment alpha or Oda teams fun fact this is where we get the a team from quietly stationed around West Germany these units Were Meant to serve as both intelligence collection assets and educational resources training local resistance fighters to carry out operations Behind Enemy Lines just in case west of Germany became east of Germany and since they were already in place before the war they were already there and already had vast networks of Supply caches radio transmitters and everything else needed to wage a clandestine War a few years after their creation someone in the Pentagon realized that special forces dudes trained to operate Behind Enemy Lines and train local guerrillas well these guys might be really handy to help out with a problem that was developing in French Indochina what we now know as Vietnam setting up operations in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in general some Oda commanders started wearing unique headgear during training operations and other unit functions this was the Green Beret though the history of the origins of army Special Forces is a fascinating one one of the biggest considerations for the original a teams in place throughout Europe was Communications of all of the Spy tradecraft that has been taught over the years the ability to operate a radio usually has been a baseline task if a potential agent could not operate a radio or they had no familiarity with the concepts of radio communications there was very little point in continuing with further training like sabotage operations remember in the real world sabotage operations Behind Enemy Lines were not as important during the Cold War taking a peek behind the Iron Curtain Oda teams prepared for a hot war that never came running Communications exchanging information and Manning electronic listening posts was the primary and sometimes exclusive mission of America's Special Forces today the idea of stay behind forces officially ended as most nation states shut down their programs following the collapse of the Soviet Union however with a major war currently underway in Europe it does not take much to imagine that both eastern and western powers are quietly re-examining the idea of stay behind operations and are almost certainly already miles ahead of where the Cold War left off you might ask how does this apply to us all of this spy stuff is is cool and all but we're not really concerned with International Espionage all we want to do is talk with a friend about our opinions or a medical procedure or politics or pretty much any purely innocent idea that is now treated as extremism by certain governments around the world learning from history we can easily draw a few conclusions that apply to the prepared citizen today for one Communications must be in place and functional before a conflict Begins by extension this also also means that other operational needs must be taken care of before the conflict as well but at minimum Communications are the most important part we can use coms to coordinate everything else that's why the comms network is a top priority secondly on the operational side of things clandestine tradecraft is a top priority as well remember stay behind operations and all this cool spy stuff are the actions of a nation-state if we a concerned and prepared citizenry want to apply some of these lessons today we must realize that we don't have a nation state backing us up we have to do all of this ourselves with our own funding and as such we have to be more careful in today's world a suspicious wire in the wrong spot is a huge indicator of wrong think and can easily get you in some trouble okay maybe not today specifically but we can see the writing on the wall for the future as the hobby of ham radio becomes more popular and certain agencies and governments begin to realize the power of radio and this hobby will be a prime target for suppressing Free Speech we don't have to look any further than the recent Cuban jamming incident to realize that governments have already figured this out so before that happens and before that becomes too much of a concern preparation and muscle memory is good to develop now while things are still comparatively easy and we can discuss these ideas in the open thus having a compact clandestine antenna is important but portability and Mobility are critical too in the event you are being hunted and you have to constantly move around it is these challenges that we hope to answer today but we first must determine what our needs are we don't want to get distracted by cool spy stuff and get a little bit carried away with pretending to be James Bond we want to learn from history and Implement what works best in the event that even basic communication between citizens is locked down or otherwise not available if the average citizen one day has to live their life like a spy from the 80s just to get by we want to make that as easy as possible depending on what your needs are there are two major paths you can take if you only need to receive transmissions and you are not looking to transmit at all that's one path if you want to transmit and receive messages that's another path for most of you watching this you probably want to go down the swl or shortwave listening path this is its own hobby with many people around the world getting into the addicting world of Simply listening to the signals that are out there getting a small shortwave receiver or a cheap SDR is a great way to get started with listening and it's great for learning for me personally if I had to learn the radio world all over again I would strongly recommend starting with an SDR don't worry about buying a cheap analog handheld radio at first you can do that later but learn how radio propagation works first with an SDR sdrs weren't really a thing when I first got started but they are now an industry standard so getting started with listening is a great way to start and just to to cut right to the chase if all you want to do is listen on shortwave bands the antenna that comes built into your radio will work just fine in most cases you don't really need to do anything special but if you wish you can plug in an external real antenna which is just a random piece of wire that you either plug into the radio if it has a jack for it or you can clip it to the extendable aerial you would be surprised at how effective A simple piece of wire is for increasing the number of signals you can get so if you just want to Echo James Bond and only receive signals this is as far as you need to go things get a bit more complicated if you're looking at receiving data modes which is my own interest but for the most part this is a good start and that's perfectly fine because it sets you up for the other vastly more complicated path you can take transmitting this of course requires a significant investment not only the license required to get into the ham world but also the fact that everything in the HF radio world is very expensive the ham world is unfortunate for the most part still stuck trying to sell 1930s technology at very premium prices but the good news is that if you invest in the receive only route at first you usually don't end up wasting money since having an SDR or a compact shortwave receiver is always handy to have the bottom line is that with either path you have some serious choices to make regarding antennas specifically generally speaking the antenna options for receiving messages are a lot easier than for transmitting HF signals however there are trade-offs at every turn no matter what radio you use a shortwave receiver or a several thousand dollar HF rig the biggest problem you are going to have is the antenna and depending on what you want to do you can open the whole can of worms that is the biggest fist fight of the ham radio world resonant antennas versus tuned antennas here's what I mean let's take a look at a standard dipole antenna for the 40 meter band dive polls are a fairly standard antenna style they're some of the oldest antenna Styles it really throughout history they're extremely easy to make they're extremely common and they work very very well this antenna as shown here is set up in an invis configuration or near vertical incident Skyway for closer range Communications this works pretty good if you can transmit during the time of day where invis propagation is actually you know functional but dipole antennas are resonant antennas meaning that the majority of the signal that is pushed into them resonates at the proper wavelength for the frequency you are on and the transmission gets made efficiently this is a gross oversimplification but it'll get us started depending on your choice of frequency or band the antenna has to be the exact right size the right length if we change bands we need a whole new antenna at least with dipoles so why go with a resonant antenna why would we want to use an antenna that's 68 feet long if we can get away with something smaller in a word efficiency to explain this let's look at something that is a very important concept to understand standing wave ratio or SWR if you hop on the YouTube you will hear hams talk about SWR all the time mostly in the context of showing how efficient or good an antenna is sometimes SWR gets a bit overhyped but it's still a very important thing to understand at its simplest SWR is simply a measurement of how much of a Signal's power is actually getting pushed into the antenna and thus the airwaves versus how much of that power is being reflected back down the antenna back into the coax and back into the radio if we look at this handy chart here courtesy of the fire stick antenna company we can see that this measurement is of course displayed as a ratio so for instance an SWR of 2.4 to 1 means that there will be a loss of 17 17 of the power that you're pushing into that antenna is going nowhere it's getting reflected back into the radio and if your radio is transmitting at 4 Watts that means in reality only 3.32 watts of power is actually making it out of the antenna and into the world in a world of perfect physics we would always have an SWR of one to one meaning that your radio pushes one watt into the antenna and one watt will be pushed out of the antenna perfectly well we don't live in a perfect world because the only antenna capable of an SWR of one to one is an antenna made of air specifically air in a vacuum I guess so we can see that's not possible we have to make our antennas from wire so there's always going to be some kind of loss most ham radio operators will strive for as low of an SWR as possible usually any SWR under two to one or sometimes three to one is what we're going for a crazy high SWR like a measurement of 10 to 1 means that your antenna is not resonant you can push all the power you want into it but really your antenna is just acting as a heat sink a cloud warmer and the signal itself is being converted into heat instead of transmitting out through the air now SWR readings can become a bit misleading for instance on this chart here technically an SWR of 10 to 1 means that there's a loss of 66.9 percent now you might say all right that's that's a lot but we're still getting something out right after all 33.1 percent is being transmitted and if we're using 4 Watts that means we're still getting 1.32 watts of output and in the shortwave radio world even a single watt has a lot of power for certain modes so what's the problem well remember this is all theoretical in the real world things are a bit different if you have an SWR of 10 to 1 you are going to transmit to exactly no one that signal probably won't even go as far as the other side of your house technically it should but in the real world if you have an SWR of over four or five some people say over three you are not going to be transmitting very far at all and worst of all if you transmit with a hide SWR you could possibly break your radio remember SWR is the ratio of how much power is getting out versus how much power is being reflected back to the radio this means that transmitting with a high SWR is going to push all that power back into your own radio which can physically damage your radio this is why we tried to get an SWR as low as possible I personally would never key up the mic on a 10 to 1 SWR because I would be concerned that my radio would be damaged coming back to our antenna a simple 40 meter dipole if we were to hook up an antenna analyzer to the antenna this is what we might see a chart detailing the SWR of the antenna as we can see this antenna has a great SWR on 40 meters as most of dipoles do and SWR really really close to one right here at 7.1 megahertz or right in The Sweet Spot of the 40 meter band now on either side of the lowest point we can see that the SWR starts to increase as we move up or down in frequency and then as we start to move out of the 40 meter band our SWR gets crazy high because this antenna is not resonant on any other band just 40 meters but since this u-shape here is so wide and deep we can cover pretty much the whole 40 meter band without having an SWR over say 1.5 or so at the extreme ends of the band we might start to creep up and reduce our efficiency but for the most part this whole band is good to go this is why dipoles are very much used in the qrp world if you have a small qrp radio like the ic705 or the elecraft kx2 or 3 or even a mountaintopper or something the general attitude throughout the ham Community is that resonant antennas are preferred for low power work because we want to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the radio as possible and since resonant antennas are are usually quite long this is why we usually say the smaller the radio the bigger the antenna has to be but there are of course exceptions and one of those exceptions is using a different type of antenna are there other options that allow us to use a resonant antenna keeping the benefits of high efficiency but also being able to switch bands around so we don't have to carry around half a dozen different antennas the answer to that is yes we have a couple of other options a great alternative to a dipole is the in-fed half-wave antenna this style of antenna has become super popular throughout the ham community over the past you know few years or so as more and more people want to explore other bands than just the the common ones the extreme popularity of in-fed half-wave antennas has earned them a bit of resentment from the old school hams who sometimes see the promotion of in-fed half waves as over the top and here's why let's bring in the SWR chart for the lightweight end fed sloper or leff's antenna from chameleon don't let the name convey use you at its core this is an in-fed halfway of antenna I'm using this chart because this is the in-fed half wave that I personally use most of the time if I have the space for it now unlike the 40 meter dipole we've got a lot going on here with this antenna as we can see this antenna is resonant on several bands all at once which is awesome we can see that the SWR stays pretty low as well maybe not as great as a near perfect dipole but certainly respectable and for most people in most circumstances for routine daily Communications like spy stuff the difference between an SWR of 1.5 and an SWR of 1.8 is going to be negligible so this antenna seems like a perfect solution or as close to it as possible but remember everything in the world of radios is a trade-off and we can see this when we look at the chart unlike the dipole which had a deep and wide u-shape this antenna's curved on the parts where it's resonant are a lot sharper a lot more v-shaped than u-shaped this means that this antenna for some bands has what we call a high quality factor in the ham world you will often hear this called a high Q High Q antennas have a very narrow bandwidth that they are resident on low Q antennas like a dipole have a decently wide bandwidth that they are resonant on technically the Q factor is really just an expression of how quickly or slowly a resonator dampens out but that's a bit too much for us to get into for now just think of high Q antennas as having super narrow bandwidth sometimes so narrow that the bandwidth for the antenna is only one or two megahertz wide sometimes even lower than that in that case where you have a super high Q factor forget moving up and down the band with a high Q antenna you will have to retune the antenna every time you change frequencies pretty much now this isn't necessarily a bad thing for one this specific antenna is not at all a high Q antenna it works great for pretty much all of the ham bands or at least the most popular ones but by having a higher Q than a dipole and a narrower bandwidth that the antenna is resonant on it means that in the real world when you're going to emplace this antenna when you're going to string it up in a tree it's going to be less forgiving than say a dipole might be now don't get me wrong I have tried all kinds of utterly garbage emplacements with this specific antenna and it works just fine so so don't think that you can't get it to work I have strung this antenna up horribly and had an SWR of over three to one and still made contacts with the ic705 around the United States so for this specific antenna the Q factor is perfectly acceptable and not even worth worrying about where Q starts to matter a lot is when we talk about the Ultimate Spy antennas these right here these vary widely in naming conventions because this style of antenna usually is marketed or rebranded so many times that the original name is completely lost right but this very compact fact HF antenna is what I'm talking about because it seems like the perfect compact HF antenna solution until you actually use one and figure out what you have to do to make it work but we'll get back to these in a moment for now multi-band resonant antennas seem like a great option don't they maybe not as efficient as a dipole but in practicality you can get a respectable SWR of you know round two or maybe as high as three while still being portable and allow you to use multiple bands that's the reason for the hype with these in-fed half-wave antennas they are a good balance of all factors and a happy medium for most people but for the Spy trying to contact other Agents from a cramped apartment or for the citizen trying to communicate with friends around the country regarding forbidden topics to get censored by social media or government agencies the dipole and the in-fed half wave antenna might not be a good option the chameleon lefts for instance is a little over 60 feet long and if you use it in its preferred configuration a sloper Arrangement used still need about 40 to 50 feet of linear ground space when I lived in a place that had a postage stamp backyard these kinds of antennas were not an option simply because I did not have enough space to string them up properly I could never get an SWR down to even just a safe level much less an ideal level when trying to use one of these in a very compact area so what can we do is there a way of taking advantage of the physics of dipoles and having a compact Urban friendly ground footprint at the same time as always yes there is an option or rather several options that all rely on the same idea loading coils this can get really complicated but the general gist is that we can effectively shorten the length of a dipole antenna by coiling the antenna wire in a very specific way these coils reduce the overall length of the system so as far as physics is concerned we technically have 60 plus feet of wire but due to the coil the whole thing is shorter in the real world we see coils most often with VHF and UHF handhelds like from the movie Die Hard the handheld radios used in the movie had small stubby antennas how can this be well it's because inside that rubber casing is a coiled up antenna usually we see this for UHF radios that operate on the 70 centimeter band this is because these antennas can get away with being all coil and at those frequencies they're going to be a really short antenna anyway which is perfectly fine for short range Communications such as up and down nakatami Plaza but for comparatively lower frequencies such as the shortwave Arena we can't really get away with having an antenna that is 100 coil it would be cool if that would work but in actuality it doesn't this is where these kinds of micro antennas come back in they are almost entirely made of a very long coil of thin wire with a very short aerial taking what we have already learned these kinds of antennas usually have an imp possibly High Q factor if we were to look at an SWR of this kind of antenna this is what it might look like forget having resonance on a band you will be lucky to make this antenna resonant on a single frequency and you might not even be able to work all modes sometimes you might only have success with really low bandwidth modes like CW since the Q factor on these is so high these antennas are super frustrating to tune this was a huge mistake of mine that I had to learn when I was first getting into radio years ago with a high Q antenna tuning it to the right frequency by ear takes forever and under real world field conditions where you're trying to get a message out clandestinely it's just not possible with these kinds of antennas you also need at least half a dozen radials radiating elements are again a topic for another day but suffice it to say you think you can get away with just the stock photo on the website but no you actually need a lot of ground space to spread out some radial wires in an attempt to flatten out the Q factor and increase your bandwidth the tiny bit all of this takes time so bringing our goals back into the equation we can't really use an antenna that takes forever to tune and is super frustrating to work with in field conditions where muscle memory is a huge thing this is just not a something that's going to work if all of that is a bit confusing I understand but just think of this general rule of thumb the more coils you have in your antenna the higher Q or narrow or bandwidth you have to work with so in effect the more compact the antenna the narrower the bandwidth and the more frustrating it is to tune this means that these options are usually a no-go for what we are going for clandestine but still effective antennas that are easy to set up and use in situations where the in placement is important so what's the solution then if these small antennas won't work what's the what's the happy medium well a company called buddy pole has one answer this company started years ago with a very specific idea to industrialize the process of making loaded coil dive pole antennas the Buddy pole and the subsequent buddy stick are technically both loaded coil off center fed or center-fed dipoles over the course of human events this is the best compromise we have come up with so far with a buddy Pole or buddy stick system you have some of the benefits of a dipole and some of the compromises of a compact antenna on these antennas the Q is higher but it's not as bad as the more compact antennas and once you get it tuned just right you can usually move up and down a band just like you would with a normal traditional dipole the Q factor is not so bad as to limit you to just part of a band usually when you get these tuned in you can move up and down a band without retuning it every single time if you wanted to change bands you would need to retune it but you would need to buy a whole new antenna so there's that benefit this setup allows us to have the smallest ground footprint possible for working HF radio while still having a respectably low SWR and an appropriate SWR curve or an acceptable Q factor right balancing every important factor nicely for me what has worked really well has been using a buddy stick in a very small lot I purchased the Buddy stick system but also got the tent pole style aerial with what buddy pole calls the Stinger attachment to make tuning a lot easier this allowed me to set up the antenna as compactly as possible remember the Buddy stick is still basically just a dipole so it absolutely needs a radial you can't just use the vertical element with the coil to be resonant the radial is mandatory because technically it's not really a radial it's the other leg of the dipole but by setting things up the way I have the radial can be much shorter than you might think this is one very specific way to sort of cheat physics using a loaded dipole with a vertical element and a short radial which is actually the other leg of the dipole how effective is this solution from my own experience it does work it's not ideal by any means after all you're always working with a compromised antenna the question is how compromised is it this solution may be a lot more compromised than you want but it is an option and if it's all you've got it's all you've got especially if you want to stick with the resonant antenna in the smallest possible space so this is an option that I've used with pretty good success in the past now there is one other option that we have to cover in the field of resonant antennas it's another one of those Game Changer antennas that seems like it would be perfect blowing all other antennas out of the water these are magnetic loop antennas most commonly called mag Loop antennas these are Ultra compact resonant antennas that are most commonly used to get around Homeowner Association rules regarding antennas in case you haven't figured it out by now there's a lot of overlap between the world of Espionage antennas and the solutions that people have worked out in order to get around tyrannical HOA rules and the mag Loop is one way to do this how these work is a bit beyond the scope of this video so we'll have to discuss that some other time but the key takeaways is that mag Loops are super calm compact so they work really great up in attics or even on a desktop however there are some downsides that are deal breakers for some as you might have guessed there is no way of getting around physics there's no magical way to get away with a small compact antenna system without some serious compromises and one of the biggest compromises with these is that these antennas have to be tuned for each band you want to operate on sort of like a buddy stick but a lot more finicky at times the real problem for some is that these antennas usually have a super high Q factor depending on the type of Mag Loop products vary of course by different manufacturers so if it's a poorly made mag loop I would go so far as to say that these might have an insanely High cue so much so that it takes quite a bit of time to tune to a point of decent resonance some people might balk at that having lots of experience with mag loops and thus knowing they're geared to the point that it's it's not a problem but for me I like to hop around bands quickly almost always in austere field conditions where the set up is less than ideal so for me mag Loops are too much of a headache however for the person that doesn't mind staying on one band or likes fiddling with things to tune up a good SWR mag Loops are great and they are really the only option that works for people in super small apartments where they don't want their antenna to be seen by any curious eyes outside if you can get away with stringing up a loaded dipole on a balcony or out of a window or something like that or if you're super lucky and you can string an infant half wave out of a window and into like a tree or something that would be infinitely better in in my opinion than using a MAG Loop but if you are just flat out stuck and you still want to get on the air the mag Loop is pretty much all you've got the other major downside of Mag Loops is price mag Loop antennas are pretty much the most expensive antennas you can buy sometimes you might even pay more for the antenna than the HF radio you are using so these are automatically not an option for many people but again if you are limited to a super small area like a balcony or apartment and you can't get away with anything else mag Loops are pretty much all you've got so that's pretty much it for resonant antenna options all of these work in their own ways and have advantages and disadvantages if you want to stick with resonant antennas this is what you've got to work with however like clockwork there is another path you can take this path relies on using antenna tuners and a usually random piece of wire and this is where the fist fights break out because there are Die Hard Defenders of Both Worlds those who prefer resonant antennas and those who use tuners to match their radio to whatever piece of wire they are using here's the reason for this conflict those who prefer resonant antennas view tuners as unsportsmanlike viewing resonant antennas as the purest form of radio this is not an elitist kind of attitude there's good reasons for this because there's also the general impression that resonant antennas are more sensitive and more efficient than using a tuner in the other Corner those who use tuners say that tuners are a great way of improving a not so great antenna emplacement and in many cases allow people to get on the air that ordinarily would not be able to get on the air because they don't have the space or the geometry for a resonant antenna antenna tuners have also earned a place in the prepping Community because the wire you use for an antenna can just be a random piece of metal plenty of people have hooked up their radio and their tuner to gutter downspouts or metal roofing or a metal fence or any large piece of metal and using their tuner they can get on the air pretty effectively so how did tuners work well it's a bit complicated but the gist of it here is that automatic antenna tuners contain a bunch of relays and Hardware that sort of Tricks your radio into thinking that it's getting a good SWR this is why the guys who like resonant antennas say that tuners allow people to be very lazy with their antenna setups because there's a lot of misconception of how antenna tuners actually work this this is why using SWR as a metric for determining how good your antenna is well that can lead you astray there's so much more to antenna Theory than just SWR you can have a guy get a garbage antenna string it up very ineffectively hook up a tuner and get a decent SWR people think an antenna tuner is magically making their antenna great it's not the main thing tuners do is allowing you to transmit with a garbage non-resonant antenna without harming your radio so when you hook up a tuner and magically your SWR comes down on the band you want your antenna didn't change at all the tuner only matched the impedance of the antenna and the coax to the radio to make the radio happy in truth there is no such thing as an antenna tuner the tuner is not doing anything to the antenna really antenna tuners are technically matching units or matching Transformers matching the radio to the proper impotence for whatever antenna you using this is how tuners can lead you astray you can get into a situation where your tuner is telling you that you have a good SWR but that SWR isn't telling you the whole story again this is why we can't always use SWR as a metric for determining how good your antenna really is with a tuner your radio is being tricked into thinking that your antenna is resonant so in reality antenna tuners are mostly a safety device making your radio function in situations where the SWR is so high that you would break your radio tuners bring the SWR down artificially so you can safely and effectively transmit but we have to remember that your antenna itself didn't change it still has a high SWR nothing changed there the only thing that changed is that that reflected power is being reflected back into the tuner instead of your radio so the bottom line is this you hook up your radio to an antenna and you check the SWR and it's not great it may be a four or five or even higher you plug in your 10 tuner hit the button and boom you have an SWR of one to one or something like that this does not mean that your antenna magically got better your antenna is still not really resonant it's still a garbage antenna the only thing that changed is now your radio is happy and content with pushing power into that antenna because all of that nasty reflected current is being absorbed by the tuner and not being sent back into the radio that's why the world of antenna tuners is kind of a lie yes you can hook a tuner up to a wire fence or a gutter downspout and you can get a perfect match but you're still not going to be pushing hardly any power out most of it's going to get reflected back into the tuner if you are planning on using a tuner to cheat physics I'm sorry but that's just not the case you can't really do that so if the cake is a lie when it comes to tuners do antenna tuners still have a place are they still worth the sometimes Hefty investment in some situations yes I personally prefer resonant antennas because I'm almost always running in qrp comms very very low power however there are times when a tuner is Handy for instance I can string up my chameleon lefts and add the 80 meter extension to get as much wire up into the air as possible then I can add in a tuner to get me down to 160 meters if I want ordinarily my radio would Revolt if I tried to key up on 160 meters without a tuner but with a tuner everything is fine in terms of the true energy that is being radiated by the antenna you know nothing changes and the tuner is not increasing my range at all but it does allow me to use my radio it allows it to function without breaking even when using an antenna that is not really resonant a very common setup with using a tuner is pretty simple it starts with just a piece of wire this is usually called a long wire antenna or a random wire antenna A simple piece of wire of random or unknown length as much wire is physically possible is strung up again as high as possible and that wire is attached to the tuner which is then connected to the radio the radio is turned on tuned and you are good to go how long should the wire be technically it doesn't matter and nobody can really answer that to be honest as long as possible is the general answer people give this is where tuners really shine when you only have a small area to work with and you are just a bit too short to use a proper antenna for instance let's say you have a small backyard or a small attic and you want to get on 40 meters with a dipole or something but you've clearly not got enough space just properly string up a 40 meter dipole or in-fed half wave you could string it up as best you can you could wrap it around the perimeter of a fence spreading it out as best as you can and the extra wire you can run wherever possible now if you did this and you checked your SWR you might find that it's a three to one or a four to one or something less than ideal remember dipoles need to be stretched out in a straight line as possible to be as resonant as possible you start scrunching up the wire in an attempts to make it fit your environment and and your SWR might start to creep up if we are trying to be as covert as possible tuners can be a huge benefit from World War II to the Afghan war operatives on all sides have made use of random wire antennas that simply blend into their landscape one of the most common is the simple clothesline though not as common today in wealthy modern westernized cities clotheslines strung up in backyards or in between buildings are extremely common throughout Eastern Europe Asia the Middle East and the entire third world even in westernized Nations rural areas are common places to find the simple clothesline lines which sometimes conceal a shortwave antenna trees have also been used to conceal antennas with vertical elements going right up the trunk to the top of the tree if needed depending on the setup this could also provide some limited directionality if needed to confuse and confound Direction finding efforts but unless you have a tree or a clothesline that is the exact right height or length chances are you will need a tuner in order to make the most out of a less than ideal clandestine setup if you had the room for it and if your background noise isn't too bad a dipole or invet half wave would be great but if not a random length of wire as long as possible can be strung up however possible and a tuner can be used to get you the rest of the way toward an acceptable SWR you aren't going to improve your transmission range at all it's not going to magically make your antenna awesome but you are going to make your radio able to function albeit not as great whereas without a tuner you wouldn't be able to key up at all looking back in time we can see that almost every radio used by clandestine agents had a tuner of some kind why is this well because in placing an antenna was already very risky so it wouldn't do well for a spy to have to keep going back to the antenna to lengthen or shorten it if it was in place in a less than ideal location sometimes a covert radio operator only had one chance to get an antenna up and once it was up they had to make it work no matter how garbage the SWR was this is why antenna tuners were and still are critical tools of the Spy toolbox in one specific case Norwegian resistance agents had trouble using their assigned frequency to communicate with higher headquarters these operatives were tasked with observing German shipping along the coast of Norway in 1943 already operating in an extremely risky environment as German Coastal Patrol Boats were constantly Direction finding their Transmissions British MI6 agents were dismayed to discover that environmental conditions and the extremely remote locations of observation posts meant that the frequencies had to be changed quite often just to make contact and since frequencies had to be changed often anyway to avoid detection this became a huge problem of frequency management eventually operatives settled on using nighttime only frequencies in the 40 meter band which worked best along the IC Norwegian Coastline however these problems could have been alleviated somewhat if better technology such as better tuners were available at the time which could have made contacts a lot easier under those less than ideal antenna and placement conditions looking forward a bit in time one of the most widely used radios specifically designed and for stay behind operations under NATO's gladio program the fs 5000 was a highly modular shortwave radio system a core component of the radio itself was the antenna tuner which was designed to work with a 15 meter long random wire antenna this is one of the main reasons why it's so difficult to find out information on what antennas were most useful for those operating clandestinely most of the time they used a simple random wire antenna with a tuner So the antenna doesn't get documented as much also in the early days of vacuum tube based radios the antenna was not as big of a deal as it is with today's radios tube based radios were a lot more forgiving in this regard and were able to adapt a bit more easily to the antenna remember there is no cheating physics no matter how hard we try things can get really confusing really quickly there are so many ways of trying to get around the rules but in the end physics always wins you might say all of this is well and good but let's take a look at what this might look like in the real world keeping with the idea of stay behind operations we have to realize that radio communication is very important but also quite tedious even today the most die-hard ham radio operators would not entirely be thrilled if they were mandated to conduct comchecks and exchange messages every single day in accordance with a comp plan rain or shine 24 7. the mundane nature of the requirements of clindostan radio comms can turn a fun hobby into a tedious chore this adds in another important factor convenience if we look back through history convenience was a top priority as well for most stay behind forces specifically the civilian operatives that might one day fall under the command of the military side of things they had to live somewhat double lives for instance civilian operatives of Switzerland's stay behind group p26 were expected and required to have a day job prior to joining which would provide appropriate cover for their clandestine activities having a day job while also running a secret life is tough work in Austria something similar was also underway friends Ola created a fun organization station called the osterichester van der sport on gazelle in English the Austrian hiking Sport and Social Club this was a nice little group of a few thousand members who like to hike around the countryside compete in various sporting functions and play with copious amounts of plastic explosives that's right one of the largest stay behind organizations ever operated secretly under the guise of a hiking club and keeping up this double life on a daily basis was no picnic so it's best to make things as simple and easy and convenient as possible especially when it comes to Communications which is a lot to expect from most shortwave antennas going out into a dark and stormy night standing in the middle of the woods with a tangled bird's nest of wire is pretty frustrating but even more so if you are trying to quickly get set up to exchange a few messages before you take a few hours rest so we've honestly got a lot of unreasonable demands we need a covert antenna that functions is compact yet easy to tune oh and it has to be really convenient to put up and take down down on a daily basis speaking generally about what we've talked about already we can have a really efficient dipole or in-fed half wave antenna but it's huge and requires a lot of ground space or we can use a loaded coil system and hope that we have enough space for radials or we can use a compact mag loop antenna which is a super high q but may work for us if we don't plan on jumping around a lot or we can use a random piece of wire with a tuner and hope that we have enough power at that moment with that configuration to send the message keeping in mind that there is no blanket solution for any of this and things are constantly evolving in the communications World there are some general solutions that may work in many situations first let's start off with my preferred antenna syst

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

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the briefing for tuesday the 30th of november 2021 and as always it is being recorded on the day prior the 29th of november so let's get started moving quickly through the weather we can see that winter weather is definitely a factor for most of the united states as one might expect this time of year but this combined with a lot of the low-level clouds that we're going to be seeing in some parts of the country up near the northern border along with the very dark nights we're only at a 28 illumination level and the moon is going to be setting at 2 32 in the afternoon so it makes for some pretty dark nights moving forward and we can see here on our surface winds chart that we have lots of winter weather advisories in the northern areas so let's move on to no tams really nothing particularly special there is a presidential one for minneapolis but by the time this briefing goes out it will be expired it's just uh biden is taking a visit to minnesota to talk about infrastructure something like that it doesn't really matter for no tams i just wanted to point that out because that's really the only one that there is of note moving into our civil unrest forecast uh really at this point this slide is becoming a kind of a dated item because really we're seeing violence and just general crime and looting and things like that in most major u.s cities on things like weekends or whenever there's some kind of policing action even if it's not anything that's high profile we see random things happen like that and especially the states which have basically legalized shoplifting this is a huge thing so it's just become a daily a thing of a facet of daily life for a lot of people in most major cities but really we're not tracking any huge major events that are either planned or really stuff that we can't really predict with any reliability at least we can't so yeah there's really not much to say on the civil unrest forecast other than to say that most american cities are not doing super hot right now so let's move on to logistics so for logistics really not a whole lot of updates there are really no major changes from the last brief however there are some changes on the national level shortages so moving forward into this kind of new slide we've set up here there are two things to note one is ammonia so fertilizer shortages continue to be a huge problem globally this is not just the united states united states is actually doing not so bad when compared to the rest of the world when it comes to fertilizer shortages but the united states is most likely going to start feeling the shortages of ammonia uh pretty soon because in europe uh the price of ammonia is already up 300 since january so again inflation and just high prices skyrocketing globally on pretty much everything are are definitely playing a factor here but the production of ammonia the raw materials needed to produce it the agriculture that's also needed to produce it that's a huge huge thing that drives prices up and then also switching gears quite significantly there is also a maple syrup shortage so this is kind of a weird one the quebec maple syrup producers organization is releasing over 50 million pounds of maple syrup from their strategic reserves which is a headline that i wish i was making up but interestingly enough the canadian maple syrup market operates much like opec in that they have very specific production and distribution timelines to keep the international price of maple syrup stable like this is a very very much a precious commodity for most of the world so they uh they have very much an opec like uh organization and uh earlier this year the market experienced a pretty big hiccup in the weather um it's just a growing season the harvest season for really maple syrup was not super great this spring which reduced production and this has resulted in roughly half of canada's strategic maple syrup reserve being released to keep prices stable so we're really not sure how this is going to affect things but if you like genuine maple syrup you might notice that it's kind of hard to find in the grocery stores although they're you know releasing the strategic reserves so i guess we'll figure out how that plays into it i just thought that was kind of interesting uh when we get to uh some of the critical infrastructure concerns uh for this brief so let's go ahead and jump into the mandate updates uh this is just kind of a quick heads up as to the situation with the mandates right so as many of you already know the white house has announced a new wave of authoritarianism in the form of yet another mandate uh so we've already talked about these other two right here uh these two mandates previously but we now have a new one um this is uh this is the the mandate that just came out the gist of which is that every truck driver that crosses a u.s land border will have to be jabbed no exceptions now i still keep that in heavy air quotes because as is a classic biden tactic going back to his very first years in the senate nothing is in writing just yet um you know at least not yet right so we don't really know how this will work out because again this is not not in writing now even the casual observer can clearly see that biden's tyrannical overreaches have been halted by many courts at this point and this mandate would certainly fall under the category of a court saying not to do something and biden or the white house is going against the court like it's pretty clear at this point that the biden regime while actually very hesitant to actually give any opposition room to stand on it's also clear that the regime's propaganda and coercion tactics are waning and the biden regime has made it quite clear that they will not hesitate to use force when that propaganda becomes less effective so like i mentioned there's nothing in writing with this there's there's no executive action on this osha is basically in the doghouse right now with the federal courts because they're the ones who are taking the heat for biden's uh tyrannical mandates but when it comes to like what this actually means nobody really knows because this is a pretty classic tactic biden knows or the regime i guess collectively knows that whenever he does something tactile like an executive order this can easily be immediately stopped by a court but if he or the other people that are running or influencing things doesn't put anything in writing if he puts out a press release or or hops on twitter and just signals to the media what what the white house's interests are well that can become a self-fulfilling tyranny machine right there which is exactly what happened with the osha mandates right these ones that are on the slide already right biden didn't actually put anything in writing for months after mandating the jab for companies with over 100 employees and yet even though he didn't put anything in writing these companies and entities went out of their way to follow a law that didn't even exist yet so and arguably doesn't even exist to this day because it's not a law right so employees get fired because the company is following an executive order that didn't even exist yet one of biden's well-known tricks and a trick that this regime uses first this is like their primary weapon right is just throwing out a statement and seeing what people will do they just throw out these mandates and see what sticks if the end result is people following it biden gets a freebie he gets people to do what the regime says he gets people to do what he says and at the same time no court can come after him because he didn't put anything in writing so just like we talk about all the time a lot of people these days are absolutely salivating at the prospect of using the we were just following orders excuse that just seems to be the case at least from what what we think it's quite literally the milgram experiment all over again except there's a big difference that the participants fully know about all the details of the experiment and they are actively wanting to participate in it and to continue the analogy it's almost like a lot of people have the attitude of you know hey mr lab coat man come back in here and sort of intimidate me a little bit so that i can have an excuse to flip this last switch it's like people are begging just to flip that last switch which is kind of scary but i say all of this to hopefully explain how we here look at a lot of these mandates press releases executive orders but whatever and what all of this means for the nature of well authority in general i guess but really this is just an important thing to think about when it comes to trying to figure out a livelihood that is more resistant to the crazy stuff that we're dealing with these days so i just wanted to kind of talk about that for a minute because it requires a lot it's not just as simple as is this constitutional or not is this legal or not is this a law or not it's not that simple because we're starting to again like i've mentioned many times before we're examining the nature of what a law actually is we're examining the nature of what an executive order actually is or what a court order actually is and yeah sure it's dangerous but hey look we're having to deal with this on a daily basis so i thought i'd kind of take that digression to help kind of explain what we're the mindset that we're in when it comes to this stuff so with that out of the way let's talk about some critical infrastructure concerns and right up front right up top there is the trucking mandates right just like i mentioned how are how is the trucking industry how are most truckers going to respond to this mandate well i think it's quite clear the ceo of the american trucking association has stated that their internal polling has indicated that that uh over 37 percent of all truckers in the united states at least in their association uh are saying not only not quote not no but hell no to these mandates so yeah that kind of makes sense right like you know we here we're here not in the trucking industry but look like we've got family and friends and things like that that work in logistics and hey look it's it's quite clear that uh the power of trucking cannot be understated like the the people look down on that job a lot but hey look we're finding out just how much power your average trucker has and it's quite significant and it's going to be interesting to see how much that affects things because it's we're in this grand game of chicken when it comes to these mandates and quite clearly it's becoming a lot more clear that the federal government thinks that that like the truckers the doctors the military service members they think that the people that they command are going to blink first and that could not be further from the truth doctors and pilots and service members are willing to to all end their careers before they comply with these mandates and we're of course we're not talking about most we're not talking about most people but hey we're we're seeing levels of resistance that i will admit surprise me i thought i would never have thought that this many people uh would have resisted things even just now right and the resistance is growing every day so i think i thought that was an interesting thing to note when it comes to critical infrastructure basically hey be prepared for trucking shortages to get worse and then number two they're moving on to uh the energy sector so biden is or at least the regime has stated that they're going to release 50 million barrels uh from the strategic petroleum reserve to combat the high gas prices and the interesting thing is is that this makes absolutely no sense because at the same time uh the binding regime has is begging begging opec to increase production which makes no sense whatsoever because if the united states is going to flood the market with oil then why would opec increase production they're going to cut production so that so that the price of gasoline doesn't go down to two cents a you know gallon and so that they will have actually some profit because it's is people and people like to look at these big oil companies and say oh they're just you know evil corporations right and you can make that case in a lot of different areas but the interesting thing is is that when you have price uh price manipulation or or the market saturation when it comes to oil change so significantly like if we were to drop uh the price of oil in half because gas is what like double what it used to be it's like gosh what four or five gallons in some parts of the some parts of the country that we're in and nine dollars a gallon in california and places like that so if you were to drop that gasoline if you were to flood the market with petroleum and drop that gasoline down to 50 cents a gallon people would probably be generally happy but that would decimate the oil industry because what the oil industry is going to do is lay off everyone and they're going to not have the production capability so you have a short period of time where your gas prices are low but then the gas prices skyrocket because you've messed with the system too much too quickly and that's what opec is is looking at biden like like he's the slow kid in class opec is like cracking jokes about this at this point like hey dude what are you doing even russia is like yeah man we're gonna cut production like why are you really why are you releasing strategic petroleum reserves like you could have just asked us to increase production um it's almost like opaque is cracking jokes like hey you want more oil pump it yourself because you're the one who cut cut production in the united states like we were energy independent for so long like why are you looking to opec to to fix the problem so this is kind of one of those things that we could talk about forever when it comes to energy sector but really the interesting side note now specifically when it comes to the relationship between the biden regime and the energy sector is this uh i i know that the fashionable thing to do is just bash biden right that's just that's just a popular opinion these days and i get it i really do there's plenty of justification for that but at the same time in most cases we can't just say well biden's dumb or he's mentally incompetent we can't just say that and call it a day sure sure that you can argue that these things are true but you know after all biden does have a very long reputation in the senate for stuff like this he's not he's not known in the senate before he became vice president he was not known for being a smart man but generally speaking the biden regime has done some pretty smart stuff i mean smart if you're trying to be a dictator but there are definitely lots of indicators that show that at least some kind of thought process is going on but all this being said to me the biden regime's actions in the energy sector just don't make very much sense to me um i just can't figure out the angle you can take all the usual talking points and make an argument like yeah you sure you can do that like biden is trying to bankrupt the petroleum industry to appeal to the hippies and yuppies and the democratic party's base which makes honestly that even that argument makes no sense to me because the energy sector makes life possible and they have a lot of power like a huge amount of power whereas the base that biden would be appealing to can't really do anything for him and then things get even more complex like you start talking international diplomacy and things like that which you know again truthfully is not pride and strong suit it just it's just not uh things get really complicated i generally think that on issues like this it's pretty clear that this is not so much of a political thing like it's not left versus right when it comes to the higher echelons of national energy policy it's just not uh it's factions right it's this company against that company it's these cronies over here versus those cronies over there it's it's favors in retirement plans versus other people's favors and retirement plans like that's just the way politics works at the highest echelons in general and especially when it comes to national level energy stuff but i can't figure out for the life of me why biden if he wanted to be a dictator which he clearly does or at least the regime collectively does right what does he why does he consistently stab the energy sector at every chance he gets i mean if it's to appease his political base well he can appease most voters with the klondike bar all i'm saying is that it seems like the intense targeting and alienation of a valuable wartime industry like the energy sector is not a good idea if biden wants to have control so all of this seems like a misstep on the regime's part or whoever is exerting influence on the white house over these issues again most people will just chalk this up to him being a crazy old man or a puppet for somebody else and that and that's probably partially true right but i just have a gut feeling that like something is not quite right with this especially with how specifically and fervently the energy sector is being targeted there are probably lots of different answers to this weird analytical note so i thought i would share that thought lay everything out on the table in the event that someone else out there has been kind of casually thinking the same thing right i'm sure if i dedicated you know a few days to this i could probably figure out what the angle is but you know i just don't have the time to figure out what the white house is doing on you know when it comes to the energy sector and who knows who and all that kind of stuff so i just thought it was kind of interesting and hopefully somebody else out there is thinking kind of along the same lines because i think it's kind of odd there's something going on there that's a little weird and i haven't haven't been able to quite figure out why why the hatred so much but anyway let's move on to significant governmental actions so as everyone's probably heard by now there is a new variant of the uh the virus out there that cannot be named right uh i think the most interesting part which is um being uh sort of uh joked about all over the internet is that the who and their naming convention skipped over the letter of the alpha the greek alphabet that they used that as the naming convention to avoid offending the chinese communist party because one letter of the greek alphabet actually just so happens to be the first name of their dear leader so i thought that was kind of interesting um it's very very interesting honestly and it kind of points as to what the who's kind of mentality is there's really not much intel value there other than i think it was interesting uh but yeah it just kind of proves to chose to go that the who clearly is making political decisions and has been for probably ever honestly moving on to number two there the uh case for bynan's nominee for the office of comptroller not looking so good for for that nomination process uh solo omrova recently had a background check done on her and somebody figured out that she was actually arrested back in 1995 for shoplifting um again not a really huge uh intel value here i just thought that there i have not seen anything quite as ironic and honestly tragically poetic than biden's economics nominee being charged with theft i just thought that was kind of hilarious and and sad at the same time so i thought i would share that as well but moving on to kind of number three and four there which are kind of linked to sort of the same idea is that texas is not doing super great right now when it comes to their battle against crt so so one school board in texas decided to use their own law enforcement agents the basically school resource officers to go and arrest parents at their homes and charging them with disorderly conduct with the intent to disrupt a public meeting so yeah again this is not surprising for anyone in the who's got skin in the game or anyone who's just kind of casually observing this this is a a a pretty fierce fight uh like if we look at all of the sectors in which um this kind of crt woke stuff whatever you want to call it a communist takeover like look at where it's at like is it in look at what industries it's at it's it's really in education right we've known that that uh universities have been kind of havens for this kind of stuff uh for a long time um but like looking at crt being taught to like preschoolers that's kind of uh that's kind of not good at least in our opinion and a lot of people are kind of figuring that out and it's very very important um to kind of uh propaganda like just propping into 101 well what do we call it now information operations right we kind of church it up a little bit to make it not sound as bad but if you're trying to conduct intelligence operations or information operations against the population if you're trying to topple a government you really need to get the kids you need to get them young you need to get them questioning things very very early and questioning the things that you want them to question and thinking the things that you want them to think so again this is very interesting from a doctrinal standpoint we can get way down in the weeds with it i guess someday but i thought it's kind of interesting that ordinary parents are starting to look at what their kids are bringing home for homework and they're it's they're starting to figure this stuff out like hey yeah yeah we've been kind of talking about stuff for a while and uh it's good you're on board but hey this is this has been going on for a while um you know we're also seeing things like point number four there we're starting to see these um racial equity board members uh doxing parents who are suing to kind of stop this crt training you know the fact that a school has a racial equity board what like what there are so many things that like if you if you if you take a few classes or if you study like the history of the soviet union quite quite significantly particularly when it comes to other maybe not traditionally russian countries but other countries that kind of like vietnam is a great example china is another good example if you start studying this stuff and starting to realize how communism kind of spread its you know its tentacles everywhere and how it got kind of started in some of these areas it's very fascinating because you start seeing the sort of political commissars come out right they all have different names right but you start seeing these political organizations come up and and kind of eclipse the ordinary things like we've all heard of school boards right like school boards have been around forever right but you know these racial equity boards right these um what do they call it uh racial trauma advocates like what what is this you know so it has that sort of i'm not saying there's a direct link but it's pretty clear that there's a flavor of political commissar type behavior in a lot of our educational systems and texas is finding that out the hard way right now or at least texas parents are so you know if you're this is not something that's unique to texas of course this is happening in the school that's like two miles from my house so it's quite clear that this is a nationwide problem but i do think that in in digressing on this topic yet again i think that it's interesting to kind of understand a lot of the history that goes into this kind of stuff because again from a doctrinal's perspective from an information operations perspective it's utterly important to understand this stuff then moving on to number five they're just kind of a heads up uh just a reminder that the just lane maxwell trial is currently underway there's no media coverage of it and this is going to be most people kind of know how this is going to turn out but i just wanted to point out that that it's going on and the mainstream media is trying to bury this quite harshly just like they're trying to bury the story of the uh uh the terror attack that occurred at the uh christmas parade right so um that's it's it's like tis the season for censorship i guess and kind of hiding uh terrorist attacks and things like that so yeah i just wanted to point that out that that did happen the met trial is underway uh and i guess we'll have to see how it works out there's really nothing more to add on that and before we move on i wanted to talk about this again because i guess today is kind of a blend of an intel update and a sort of podcast about deeper issues than just a standard you know intel update but i thought this was interesting and this is something that has kind of uh depending on what parts the internet you go on to this is kind of blowing up other places are not talking about it at all but this specif specific wikipedia article is drawing a lot of attention and this is the article for the mass killings under communist regimes now the interesting part is that if you can quite clearly see that this article is being considered for deletion in accordance with wikipedia's deletion policy so a lot of um i would say more conservative uh sources are trying to are citing this somewhat correctly that wikipedia is trying to censor uh the the the deaths that have been caused by communism essentially that wikipedia is trying to rewrite history um by allowing this article to be uh kind of gone you know disappeared right and okay that's interesting enough as is and we can talk about that you know endlessly right but this is the interesting part to me so if you go and you look right here it says this article has multiple issues please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page so if you click that link and go to the talk page this is the page that comes up and this is the part that's fascinating wikipedia is tracking the number of media organizations that cover this article this is interesting like so what this is like i don't man this is crazy right this is the interesting part to me not the fact that wikipedia wants to delete articles wikipedia deletes articles all the time some rightfully so because they're dumb pages but like arguably like this is the interesting part to me um like we can make the the argument that okay the page might not have been the best source of research like it's wikipedia right so it's not exactly a a scholarly source right but the interesting thing is that wikipedia is not only tracking this right they're also they literally are tracking these reddit pages that are are bringing in high traffic uh a lot of traffic from these different websites that's fascinating to me not only is wikipedia aware that an article is being tracked by media organizations but also they're tracking the websites that are talking about a wikipedia article man if that is not just a poetic like note again tragically ironic note considering the the topic considering that this is about communism and stuff like that holy cow i thought that was insane um so again not really a whole lot of like intel value i guess other than just to sort of show man how far this stuff goes um and i thought that was quite interesting so i again thought i would i would talk about it some so let's move on to another interesting slide which is developing technologies so they're really only three items of note and all three are kind of military the first one there is france's new camouflage system so this is called the adaptive multi-spectral camouflage system aka the salamander camouflage don't know why they didn't call it chameleon camouflage missed opportunity there i guess but this is supposed to be debuted actually today or tomorrow maybe france has a national like once a year defense trade show and uh they're supposed to be able they're supposed to be debuting it so i really all we have is this old video of it um but you can see it's kind of interesting us has obviously been working on this kind of technology for a while as well i think bae systems has also got something lockheed has got something similar to this raytheon has got something i think most defense contractors have some kind of technology they're working on this kind of cloaking stuff the stuff the us is doing is is pretty cool um but yeah this is the the reason that i wanted to talk about it is that this is supposed to be fully motion capable uh by now so i don't know if that's true or not i know that based on the calendar timeline and the kind of excitement that there's been along in the french military communities as you know this might actually be capable for them now who knows uh but moving on to the interesting ones which are number two and three and they both have to do with russian tanks so these videos and pictures started showing up a few days ago maybe maybe a couple weeks ago of russian tanks in the ukraine area really the the don bass and donetsk uh fighting areas right um with the russian build up there they're starting we're starting to see these interesting modifications being done and this is something that's not particularly new but the implementation is new if it makes sense so these cages uh these cages on top of the turret there like these those aren't particularly new uh the or at least the idea isn't new these are used to protect against things like shaped projectiles rpgs really any kind of shaped projectile um that's what it's for but usually it's on the side of the front of the tank right to prevent a side on you know rpg from hitting the side like every you know veteran in the us military has seen these like this is just kind of a thing that's standardized um really this goes back to world war ii like the the you know the german panzers had them t-34s had them uh or some some kind of uh shaped projectile disruption tool right it says cages aren't new what's interesting is that they're on top of the turret and they're not they're nowhere else so a lot of analysts are thinking that really what these are being used for on the tops of tanks and on the turrets are to prevent and disrupt the effectiveness of munitions like mortars and grenades that are dropped by drones like these small like dji drones this is interesting this is a new implementation of such technology now a lot of people i should point out that a lot of people think that these uh cages on the tops of turrets kind of angled like that are to disrupt or at least maybe serve as kind of like a hail mary prevention against something like a javelin and that kind of makes sense but i i don't know uh it that could be just a placebo i can't imagine that stopping or even reducing the effectiveness of a freaking javelin but you never know who knows it might just be uh i mean the russians are really good deception too right they might put 200 with a scrap steel on top of a tank to make analysts like me think about it for a while it could be that i don't really know but it seems to be very interesting and we've seen a lot a lot of use of these small uas platforms that are dropping very small mortars but they're being devastatingly effective i can't really think of any other use for these kinds of cages that are on tops of turrets other than okay maybe some built up areas but i mean doughnuts can really i mean ukraine has you know a lot of christiana houses that are like what six stories tall or five stories in the ground floor that makes sense you know if you're in an urban built up area the top of the tank is very vulnerable because the armor is not as thick as on the front or the sides or even the rear right but at the same time like i don't know it just seems like it's meant to prevent against uh small uas attacks so i mean i guess we'll have to see we'll have to see if once these go into combat service maybe get some battle damage on them we can kind of understand what the deal is with these and then finally the the third point here which is probably why i'm going to make a fool out of myself but i was genuinely confused with this is and a few other people who are in the game a few other analysts here in the shop as well uh are confused by this and this is a something that appears to be a thermal emitter being observed on a lot of russian tanks so this image hopefully shows a little bit more clear what i'm talking about when it comes to this thermal emission device and this is kind of a weird thing so so bear with me and this image is also confusing but um because we have three t-72s right that are driving uh towards the camera but the turrets for the t-70s are turned to the rear uh so that's why it looks kind of odd uh you might have trouble recognizing these but you're definitely looking you can see the driver's periscope right there the normal distinctive uh lights and weld points and things like that that you can use to to figure out if this is a t-72 or a t-80 or t-90 it looks pretty much like a t-72 to me just with the turrets turned to the rear to show us this weird-looking snorkel device so there's kind of here's the gist of what this might be so a lot of people think that this is just a standard um snorkel for like an engine air intake right uh and it is uh obviously mounted to the turret so that you don't hit it when you traverse the turret around but it's turned sideways right so instead of uh being able to allow the tank to drive across a river or something like that or traverse a river right instead of being able to do that it's actually holding a thermal emission device and what the the theory at least on this is that it holds it serves as kind of like a little arm as a support to hold out a really hot uh source of heat right and the goal or at least the theory is that the russians might be doing this as as sort of like a field expedient way of putting a hot source of heat outside of the tank so that if you had some kind of heat seeking missile it would zoom right past the tank's turret zoom right past the hull of the tank and explode harmlessly behind the tank because it's trying to go for this hot source of heat rather than the exhaust that it that normally would uh would be the target of a heat-seeking missile now i'm not a tank guy so i might be all wrong about this i'm sure some cav dudes are laughing their butts off because it's probably quite simple it's probably a simple solution like just a tank snorkel or something they've got folded down for uh transport who knows right i'm not a tank guy but this is the these images particularly this image here is uh is getting a lot of traction in kind of the ocean world as to like what does this thing do because it doesn't appear to be a standard snorkel it appears to be something else so uh it's very interesting i don't know what this does i think that it's an interesting interesting concept i can't imagine it working very well but i do find it to be very very interesting that we're starting to see a lot of this stuff come out as russia continues their build up in the ukrainian region so very interesting stuff um hopefully we'll get some more pictures of this and be able to talk about it a lot more but i thought it was kind of interesting and i guess we'll have to see what see how it goes and see what this thing actually is because i'm you know it's pretty interesting so let's go ahead and move on to the national guard stuff right so in the northeast really not a whole lot going on uh really the new york national guard is still using um uh both medical personnel and non-medical personnel and to uh supplement all the people that have been fired from hospitals in the new york city area so we'll hopefully get some more information on that but that just appears to be continuing moving down southeast there's really only one update and that is to do with kentucky so this is probably outdated at this point even though kentucky's uh you know national guard agent general and paos have stated that you know they're still doing the medical mission um this doesn't appear to be accurate because several battalions of the 149th meb specifically uh are currently in the stages of mobilizing for a pretty big deployment to the horn of africa to support that mission so based on the pre-deployment workups we've been observing for the past couple of weeks and months i guess around the state of kentucky it's a pretty big deployment so the number of people that are stuck helping with the domestic medical mission has got to be pretty low if they're they might be leaving behind some some support personnel who knows i just wanted to point that out that there's probably not a big mission in kentucky anymore everywhere else the mission remains the same really no major changes either way so we're just going to kind of assume that the mission is continuing with all these other places similar situation in wisconsin uh we're assuming that uh the national guard since we haven't really seen much about the national guard being either they were stood up for the whole written house trial thing and were there we really don't know if they're still around we don't know how many uh units have been kind of stood up for that security role type stuff so we're just going to assume that they're kind of still hanging out in the area because you know the situation in wisconsin is still pretty dynamic so i don't know we'll probably keep an eye on that for a while um the concern with ohio national guard potentially using national guard members as school drivers that concern is kind of waning because we're really it's it was probably just a political threat in the beginning but you never really know so we were tracking that and then the minnesota deployment continues as well down south of the border a lot of deployments uh by the texas national guard the texas guard and a lot of other states national guards who have sent troops down to the southern border uh that situation is pretty much status quo it's a status quo in the in the in that it's getting worse every day uh with regards to the violence and the number of people and the situations that you that are happening right it's just kind of deteriorating it's not deteriorating at an abysmal rate but it is uh concerned right so i just wanted to point that out that we're probably likely to see a lot more uh forces uh move into the area as the winter sets in and then that was no real major change the oregon national guard mission is probably going to wind to a close here pretty soon just because politicians are getting involved but other than that not really a whole uh not a whole lot going on and moving on to the mask mandates so really no no major change to this um again the situation in tennessee is kind of fluid uh we're still trying to kind of figure out what's going on like did the judge block this or did a judge not block it like what's the deal we're still going to keep tennessee red because it appears that most of the school districts or at least the biggest ones are requiring masks for school especially with this new freaking hype over this new variant right so that's that's going to be a thing we're expecting to see a lot more states probably locked down because of this um just for general reasons like this is you know a softball assessment you can see this coming a mile away right so not exactly a surprise to anyone but moving forward to the actual jab mandates we're not really seeing anybody trying to push this super hard we're seeing a couple of states even states that we were expecting to have jab mandates they're kind of backing off now because they've seen the resistance in california and people are finding out that hey you can't propagandize and pump propaganda into a child's head if a parent decides to homeschool them right and they they kind of need to to work both sides of the aisle with that if they want to keep these kids in school right so it's a huge thing it's really an emotional topic for a lot of people but we're of course continuing to keep an eye on the school situation and figure out what's going on there and then overall the resistance tracker is really unchanged not a whole lot going on um i should say there's a lot going on there but you know we're at 9000 rpms but we're in neutral right so there we're just kind of waiting for the courts to see what's going to happen with a lot of these states lawsuits and stuff like that a few states are probably it's going to be interesting to see what states do about these new mandates with trucking particularly states like texas a lot of a lot of trade comes comes through the land borders uh into texas from mexico so you know gonna be interesting to see how that how that works out but for now really not a whole lot of updates and then we do have an update to the mandate failure slide so just just to clarify a little bit this new slide is meant to track the companies and entities that have been forced to rescind their medical mandates due to people resisting right this is not a tracker of all of the companies that are openly and proudly resisting right those are everywhere at this point we just fill the slide up we're tracking the companies where the company itself was forced to make a decision uh to not push these mandates based on their workers resisting so all these companies wanted to push mandates right and or they did push mandates and their their employees stopped that and new to the list is disney so disney had a a jab mandate and which has since been rescinded so that's interesting um considering disney's man that's a whole rabbit hole i guess you could go down but um disney itself is a very interesting organization and the fact that they rescinded their jab mandate for their employees or at least they've appeared to this might just be a ruse and they're covertly um bringing it back in style who knows but i didn't want to highlight that because that seems to be kind of interesting so hopefully we'll have some more additions for this next brief but let's move on to international issues so wrapping things up here with international issues uh we have a lot of things to talk about this is doing kind of an injustice to not dedicate as much time to this but if you look at the list of countries on the left-hand side of the screen there i'll just list them off really quickly ireland italy greece the czech republic france the solomon islands niger slovakia australia and austria those countries aren't experiencing significant levels of resistance like we're talking like some of these countries is just open rebellion when it comes to the medical mandates that are just kind of sweeping the world at this point this is very interesting i think the two that are the most interesting to me are niger and the solomon islands because niger has had the french army deployed to quell the rebellion there and the same thing with the solomon islands with the australian military being sent in on that mission so you quite literally have empires going back to their colonies and policing up that actions there are obviously more countries more by the minute by the time this gets posted i'm sure we'll have a dozen more to add to this list but just note that even though a lot of the mainstream media sources are kind of burying this uh and not talking about it there is we're talking like arab spring level rebellion when it comes to the medical mandates in europe um in southeast asia in the pacific islands uh africa all these places right and then of course the rebellion here in the united states uh against these kind of tyrannical things so very interesting to follow uh i it's going to be it's going to be interesting to see how this all works out particularly in europe where they have a heavy-handed approach now when it comes to europe i will mention the polish situation with belarus so like i mentioned last time poland and belarus have got there's kind of a diplomatic spat going on so essentially the rundown of what that situation is this belarus is obviously a russian sort of proxy right they were the one of the last countries to leave the soviet union uh the president lukashenko is obviously one of the most infamous dictators in the world um and belarus is basically on um shares the border with poland poland is you know the gateway to nato right so uh what belarus has been doing allegedly um it's quite clear that's kind of obvious what they're doing belarus is taking migrants and immigrants from the middle east and transiting them to busing them to the border with poland and dumping them off in a lot of cases giving them weapons and telling them to go assault the polish border guards and so there have been a lot of clashes poland has strung miles and miles and miles of sea wire and razor wire because of this stuff and a lot of other european nations are starting to do that too so what i'm concerned about this is kind of a thing that i thought of the other day what i'm kind of concerned about is a sort of new form of berlin uh wall going up uh when it comes to immigration stuff in europe this is a serious deal in the united states we have to deal with immigration from mexico and central america south america it's a it's a little bit of a different story in europe i would argue that the story is completely different because you have uh migrants coming from the middle east mostly uh into europe into the schengen zone and the dynamic's different okay it's just it's hard to explain to an american audience but what is interesting is that we clearly have a sort of uh cold war relationship kind of starting back over this immigration stuff you've got you know your your old post soviet bloc countries kind of aligning with russia and russia is happy to let these migrants go through because it kind of ticks off nato and that's just kind of like their thing to needle with nato rights it's just kind of the status quo for the past you know 70 years uh and you've got countries like poland who are like hey you know we're putting up a fence uh you guys want in and then you know it's interesting i wonder i wonder how much uh of this immigration preparation and mobilizing militaries for immigration and threatening to invoke articles four and five of the nato charter i wonder how much of that is genuinely about immigration and i wonder how much of that is really just a pretext for getting something on the books and moving forces into the area to counter russia it would be great that would be a great thing to do if i were nato is to kind of say that hey yeah we're stringing this 800 mile minefield slash concertina wire to prevent some guy from baghdad to walk into poland and sounds like overkill to me in a lot of these cases so it's going to be interesting to see is immigration going to be a way for nato to quietly rearm itself um against a potential russian action uh some people would say no it's probably a naive thought honestly but because nato really wouldn't need a pretext to do any of that we've nato and russia and nato and the post post-soviet countries have gotten pretty good at uh figuring out what everybody's up to but i don't know i just thought it was interesting so i thought i'd share and then uh speaking of the middle east uh moving on to iran there the nuclear talks are uh failing as one might expect iran is just in the mood of do whatever they want um a lot of people ourselves included have made the argument that the united states is very diplomatically weak in the international arena and countries like iran they just they know this and they're just doing whatever the hell they want so iran is is like that north korea is the same way china is a little more complex but really iran sees that uh um we're not gonna do anything about their nuclear development so you know they're just gonna do it um and also turkey moving on to turkey is kind of an interesting thing they are dealing with an economic crisis like no other so currently they are dealing with currency devaluation uh some might call it a a currency crash right so the turkish lira which is their their currency is experiencing a 20 uh inflation rate um yeah so this is an interesting case to study because it's yet another classic example of how economics is pretty simple when you get past all the smoke and mirrors especially when it comes to inflation and turkey is finding out firsthand pretty quickly what happens when you keep interest rates artificially low for too long so yeah that's going to be pretty fascinating to to follow because hyperinflation is already setting in in turkey and this is not good for a nato member especially with all the impending conflicts around the world and the tension in europe right now as is and then finally talking about russia and ukraine uh honestly we should probably dedicate an entire freaking several hour series to the to this uh we've talked about ukraine in the past and how complex of a situation that is uh but currently russia has been uh there's a lot of activity so right now um there is a significant level of naval activity uh for instance russia has deployed uh the majority of her black sea uh submarine fleet um which is most uh most likely actually it's almost certainly in response to the united states sending in the arleigh burke herself ddg 51 to poke around in the very shallow and hard to hide in waters of the black sea so the us has for the past few months now i think had a destroyer hanging out in the black sea for a while it's just been kind of a constant rotation due to the ukrainian situation and stuff like that and i think actually the arleigh burke has has replaced the porter uh the uss porter if i if i remember correctly um but yeah the the russians have get their their it's you know cold war stuff at it

[Music] hello again everybody and welcome back to the underground so today we've got kind of a very controversial topic um this is something that we've been working on and thinking about for a very very long time and it's not necessarily a topic that we're covering for a dire need so much as the fact that we're we're sort of oddly fascinated by these you know really unique sort of survival situations and and um circumstances that are very very difficult to you know thrive in uh so we've taken a special interest in that over the years and we'll dive into that a little bit later but also due to a few different reasons um mostly due to the societal um i guess turmoil is perhaps a way to put it that is sort of sprung up around not just around the us but around the world so we wanted to take a sort of scientific approach or if if we can't be you know scientists and maybe we can be historians and kind of and kind of walk through uh what is a very very controversial topic like i said and the topic we're gonna be covering today is how and and when to begin thinking about uh perhaps uh hiding or or surviving or making it through a difficult time and you know we're not of course saying that we should go out and start you know hiding people in our attics or anything um but it is kind of something that's interesting to think about and it's in and we haven't seen anybody really talk about this in a sort of other than a reverent way of remembering history we haven't really seen anybody talk about this topic in a 21st century context so that's what we're going to try to talk about today and you know of course when we start talking about this these are some of the questions that we get um mostly the fact that you know when you start talking about um concealing people or or supplies or cashing things inside your home or other places um people tend to look at you a little funny even people who are you know hardcore preppers or or survivalists or or even you know like some criminal elements tend to look at you a little bit weird if you're a perfectly sane person who's trying to um or or even just thinking about um perhaps hiding from the authorities in such a way that's um to prevent a sort of an atrocity from happening and we sort of walk that fine line because as we see we're gonna have to talk about some things that aren't necessarily strictly legal when we think about hiding people in our homes we of course go back to the anne frank example and we must remember that during the time period that that scenario went um down we must always keep in the back of our mind that you know otto frank and and his family were the criminals in that aspect and the people that were hunting them down uh to murder them they were perfectly within the law so we're gonna of course not encourage anybody to do anything illegal um and we're not if we're you know once again i can't stress this enough we're not you know encouraging people to be extremely paranoid but with that caveat this is an interesting topic to think about uh and it's it's definitely worth talking about in today's society especially with with everything that's going on so um as a good jumping off point we we must remember that this is something that the us government excels in and this is what this image is now i would not expect anyone to recognize this group of barrel-chested freedom fighters if you did they were not doing their job correctly so let's go to another image and this is the same image of these gentlemen during the 70s and 80s no one really knows when this image was taken but once again they're not really well known you should not be able to recognize these gentlemen and that's because these guys were the first uh special forces for the united states military now this was the very beginning of a very special kind of special forces when they were first created they were called operational detachments and these guys were first were part of this group called the operational detachment alpha they're still called odas today so you've probably heard us mention odas or or being on an oda in some of our previous content but while a lot of people will call these guys you know being on an oda most people would know them as green berets so these guys were part of the very very first green beret units and their mission was not to uh you know be inserted behind enemy lines in vietnam like you know a certain john wayne movie that we all know for sort of bringing forth the popularity of the green berets their mission was very was one uh very simple one and other than standing guard and you know performing security functions their goal their mission was to in the event of a soviet takeover of um west germany they would be able to stay behind let the soviet union and the soviet troops steamrolled through their area and then caused a lot of havoc they would lead the resistance afterwards they were what we now know as stay behind forces this concept is not new this goes back to way before world war ii but i highly suggest you look into this concept yourself because we can't really talk more about uh stay behind forces and the things we're doing in today's military because a lot of that stuff is still classified even though it happened a long time ago and is pretty much common knowledge um you're gonna have to research that on your own we may have a separate video on that later but it's kind of hard for us to talk about uh sort of stay behind forces and things like that so just know that even though the topic we're talking about today seems to be a very very very paranoid very very last ditch like oh this will never happen type scenario just be just you know be mindful of the fact that the us military has been training and specializing uh special forces uh detachments in this exact topic for a very very long time so that's where we're coming at it from we're not coming at it from a sort of survivalist or prepper angle i know we've said it many many times before but i myself is too actual and i don't think most of the people here associated with the esg underground we don't classify ourselves as being preppers but we do like to be a little bit more prepared for things that that may happen down the line and you know our sort of motto here is be an asset not a liability so be an asset to your team be an asset to uh your neighborhood your friends your family don't be a liability so that's what we're coming at it from that so hopefully that will put people in the right mindset for what the difficult topic we have to cover today so this is one of the um the clinchers um so when we think about an invasion or when we think about a a tyrannical government contemplating something as atrocious as genocide we have to realize that history is is um history has a long memory right so we have lots of cases where this is you know the case everything from somalia to you know afghanistan when the taliban took over you know afghanistan used to be a a very very prominent ski resort in a heavily westernized area same thing with iran you know iran they were a very westernized society and then a lot of political changes took place and now they're known uh they're very infamous for different reasons so one of the big questions that we get all the time is should i leave or should i not leave like when do i know when it's right to leave my country when do i know it's right to egress from my area and to be honest the answer is very very difficult however we can say that usually you make the decision way too late to do anything about it anyway and also usually it's very very easy to leave a country that's in strife um like it's very easy to leave you know rwanda like going back to the rwanda genocide it was very easy for europeans to leave that country even as the genocide was in full swing it was pretty easy to do um to get on that planet out of kigali to to to get back to europe or the u.s or wherever um but if you were a refugee uh it's easy to leave the country just walk out of it because the borders were open but it's a little bit more difficult to figure out where to stay long-term so the chances are if you ever have the the question in your mind of should i leave my nation and flee to another country that's it's more a little bit more stable you know should i leave rwanda in the summer of 1993 or 1994. you know should i leave in 1993 in the fall before the genocide occurs next spring next summer um you know that's hindsight is very easy to make the decisions but during the time period is hard to say and here's the other bigger question can it happen in the united states because usually when we're talking about leaving a tyrannical country leaving a dictatorial country leaving a country where there's an authority you know an authoritarian government a regime that's you know maybe committing acts of genocide or or you know something as atrocious as that or even just discriminating against a a population of people um can it should we leave the us um and the answer is uh for the most part that we've determined is no uh the united states is usually you know people don't tend to leave the united states because it's too tyrannical people don't tend to leave the united states because it's you know an authoritarian enough an authoritarian regime um it's you know the united states is sort of the goal to get to um so we don't have an answer for that um and we're not really sure that any of this sort of stuff applies to the united states you know we try to talk about various levels of um of hiding things and we do have a an example from the us but the kid that the problem is is that we just don't know and this is kind of an intelligence gap that we have and it's not that we don't lack uh the the gut feeling it's just that we don't have a good example for this and you know just to kind of hammer it home we can't mention this by name in the video or else youtube will flag this and take it down but obviously right now uh the reason we're even talking about this in the first place is not necessarily this thing that we have here on the screen but the impacts of it right so we're seeing people that are you know we hate to say these things out loud because when we say them out loud it tends to make it sound like we're making this stuff up and the the blanket truth and the the blunt and harsh truth is that around the united states people are being arrested for being outside during the wrong time of day people are having their children taken away from them because they may be sick or they you know refuse to quarantine people are being arrested left and right for opening up businesses being in parks not wearing masks so you know and and it's not that it's not that it's happening on a widespread scale because we can't know that like i i can't know how many people are being arrested every day because of this it may just be one or two or maybe one or two thousand but i'm saying that the fact that it's happening at all shows that it's maybe time to start thinking about these things it may not be time to uh start building things like we're going to be talking about here in a minute but it's definitely worth you know thinking about that's all we're trying to do with this video is get people to think um and sort of share ideas and and spread knowledge right now because right now it may not be the time to go you know quit your job and stock up food and hide in your attic for a couple years it may not be time for that but it is definitely the time for learning and it's definitely the time for thinking right so that's why we're sort of talking about this so that with that being said and with that long sort of disclaimer being said hopefully we haven't turned anybody off but these are our goals right is to quote you know quote unquote fill the sandbags before the rain right because by the time it starts sprinkling it's too late to start filling sandbags for the most part uh to stick with the analogy of a flood um but i'll just read this out for people who may be listening on the podcast our our first goal is to to have the capabilities to hold out until societal political and economic pressures subside uh therefore returning to a more stable period in time and for this we want people to think in their mind you know think about maintaining operations through prohibition think about all those bars and those speakeasies that sort of popped up and maintain operations through prohibition it was only for a very very short period of time but prohibition was such a drastic thing that it literally altered our constitution right so people tend to you know jump to uh the the the nazi you know uh allegory but you know prohibition is is not to be uh not to be misled either so that's our first goal and our second goal is more serious right our second goal is to be immediately prepared to not only be self-sufficient but also to provide aid shelter supplies to others in the event of a more serious collapse-like situation and for this category we're thinking you know thinking about surviving the rwandan genocide the rwandan genocide was a very very quick event when it comes to uh genocides now granted it did take many many months to kill those hundreds of thousands of people however the from the very very start right from the sort of burundian genocide which kind of kicked everything off and sort of uh you know allowed the the hutus and the tutsis to develop an animosity towards one another that was even uh it was genocidal in nature that occurred only you know a year before the actual genocide so from you know like 1990 1991 until you know 1994 when the genocide occurred that's something that's a very short time period it's only a few years we're not talking about 100 years of sentiment built up so that's sort of what we're thinking about this is going to be a very short term you know a couple of years at the very most and then we'll be back to or at least a different society and you know when you look at these two goals here you can sort of build a comparison to what we in the military or what we you know intelligence analysts like to use which is our most likely koa our most likely course of action and our most deadly our most or most dangerous course of action depending on which agency you work for so you're most likely koa is you know going to be you know prepare for what's most likely right but also be prepared for what's the worst case so be prepared for what's going to happen you know uh you know most often but also be prepared for the absolute worst case that's our goal right to be kind of prepared for both or at least be mindful but start thinking about them so this leads us to our sort of our system for caches or hideouts or what you call it so there's four main types that we have identified now this is all our own organic research a lot of people have been have done research in different areas but we've kind of narrowed it down to four things that we think are worth uh thinking about and the first one is micro caches um and if we slide this over to the side and we take a look at what micro caches contain they're going to be for information right micro caches uh for things like microfilm from like the 80s from you know the soviet spys or these secret coins that they put microfilm inside but nowadays we're talking micro sd cards micro sd cards can be hidden pretty much everywhere including inside the human body so that's what we say when we mean micro caches next up are sort of larger gear caches and these are going to be for things like food and supplies and gear and other things that are most likely to be banned you know if you've got say like an ammo box you know that's got some ammo in it or or maybe some you know 80 lowers or something like that you know that's socked away in the bottom of a closet or underneath the floorboard or two that's what we're talking about when we mean larger gear caches now these obviously can be of any size but that's the kind of size we're thinking we're thinking maybe ammo box maybe foot locker size at the very most and the next size up are what we call quick hides now this is an interesting concept we haven't heard anybody talk about really a quick hide is is is basically a coffin right it's a coffin-sized um hideout that a person can slip into very very easily and very very quickly um and hide their temporarily maybe you know no more than a couple of hours tops right so we're thinking about things like uh you know cool tables that uh like a pool table or something that you hit a button and a compartment drops down and you hit a button again and it raises the person gets in and you hit a button and the compartment raises back up and the person is hidden inside the the pool table that's the kind of thing we're thinking about with these and um these are kind of hard to construct if you're going to build one yourself it's going to be not easy to do but we'll talk about that in a minute and then our last category are long term hides now these are every prepper's dream right everybody wants to have a secret bunker or a secret annex right or something hidden where you could live inside there for a long period of time and no one would ever know sort of that's what we're going for when that's what may be required in certain circumstances but um you know we'll go we'll go over the pros and cons here in just a second but you know suffice it to say these covert living areas um they're not gonna be easy to maintain they're gonna there's there's a lot of problems with them but you also have to remember that they are the most secure and they're able to sustain life in relative comfort for a very long time so just some examples of micro caches this is what we have here now when you go research these micro caches you can use any sort of keyword you want diversion safes are a good a good term to start with but you have to be mindful this is kind of where we're straight to the legal sort of area all of these caches here like on the on the right side of the screen they you can see right here uh the one on the bottom uh this right here is the diversion safe hair brush by stash it brand can hide can what does it say can safe to hide money jewelry or valuables with discreet secret removable lid and bonus smell proof container so obviously these micro caches when you go look for them on amazon especially on amazon they're really meant for one market and they're trying to sugarcoat it but basically these caches are meant to hide drugs like that's basically what they're made for you can call them like covert pill containers this one over here on the right side of the screen again is a flashlight that's a quote-unquote discrete pill holder yeah right it's meant to hold like either weed or some kind of pills or something so you have to realize that a lot of times that's what these are made for and you know i'm not saying that it's you know a bad market i'm just saying that uh they're not fooling anybody when they're when they're talking about that so you you know possessing these in some areas might might not be the best thing so just keep that in mind is that you know to basically keep your information private you know even if you're putting a micro sd card with your health records on it inside a coin like up here in this micro sd card or inside a bolt right here you're going to have to buy things from people who are probably trying to help people conceal drugs and whatever your feelings are on that you know it's kind of irrelevant because the you know law enforcement's feelings on that are quite clear is that that's a crime so just keep that in mind is that you're gonna have to sort of buy stuff from stoners on amazon if you're trying to uh if you're trying to do that so with that out of the way here is another concept and this i want to briefly touch on this because we're going to have a whole separate probably an hour maybe two hour long series on just this exact thing now this is uh not a con this is not a picture of my exact one but this is a i have this exact container um this is my seer escape capsule and we will have a whole video on this so i'm sorry we can't talk about it now because we just don't have enough time but this is a very very interesting concept that i don't see anyone on the internet talking about despite the fact that this is kind of a pretty big part of seer um and you would think that at least some you know maybe some brovets or something who've actually been through like the advanced seer courses would talk about this but they don't which is kind of weird so uh let's move along now to the sort of larger caches now these are like uh your fake vents your uh my personal favorite of these little um power outlets like you know uh power receptacles in a house that you tilt down with a key and uh you could put stuff inside those are awesome these little you know fake floating shelves that slide open you can hide stuff in these are great for things like you know like just like here like uh some you know some money some you know passport maybe a firearm or two you know just look up covert firearm storage and you will find a lot of things like this now a lot of these are quite overpriced i will admit um and a lot of these you can make yourself hurt very very cheaply um but if you want something ready made you're gonna probably the big market if you're trying to find something to hide things uh go for covert firearm storage because if you can hide a firearm you can usually hide things like stacks of cash um you know information records uh even food or things like that so that's the kind of thing you're going to want to research if you're getting more and that's really all we're trying to do here is encourage you to do your own research and then this is sort of like your quick hide type thing now this of course costs a lot more money but you can readily get these products online nowadays and this is kind of a lifted bed with a storage area underneath and all you got to do is press a button it automatically lifts up and as you can see here in the sales image they have pillows in there but why can't you hide a person or two in there you know in 30 seconds you could open open the bed up pop a couple people in there put them back down there you go no problem at all so [Music] and then here is of course the coup de gras this is a a secret area that i think a dutch family found in their attic that was obviously used for some kind of resistance activity during world war ii and you know that's just that's just awesome so um you know i would give anything to find one of these in my attic just for the nostalgia factor and then the coolness factor of this but yeah once again these these living areas covert living areas are absolutely crucial and um yeah they're uh they're not that easy to make but this is essentially what we're talking about when we say these long-term living and you know if you think that they don't work you know they're hard to build um they're not so this is a very very easy thing to do and as you can see the top right image and the bottom right image show the ubiquitous us military spider hole now this is more for a remote type application sure but i think the the viet cong and the north vietnamese army would prove that you know over a decade or so they were quite good at building these they're very easy to make and you can hide you know somebody can walk within six inches of you and never know you're there so now obviously we're not talking about building spirals in our backyard that would be kind of a ridiculous thing to think about but if you look on the uh the upper left hand corner that spider hole should be a little bit familiar to a few of you that have been in the military for a little ways and that's because that's the inside of a very famous spider hole and this spider hole was saddam hussein's hideout so this is exactly or this is an artist rendering before they actually got pictures of what the spider hole looked like but this is where saddam hussein was hiding out after uh we basically uh won the invasion uh phase of the operation so yeah he had a styrofoam panel it was a very small spider hole but it was large enough to have people in there he could probably have fit several people in there if he wanted to but as you can see the sort of um schematic isn't exactly how uh how his spider hole was but um yeah it was kind of uh kind of an interesting concept that yeah it does work and uh if if you know the united states had not if you know the us analysts had not been on top of their game and not uh done the right human stuff they would not have found him so these types of spider holes and things like that are definitely definitely useful um though you know i don't have any i don't think anybody here the s2 underground project has one of these and they're you know in any other properties um but it might be something that we're thinking about hey if you've got a free summer you know and you're willing to try some things out you know why not go for it you know it's a skill that's not necessarily a bad one to have so just just uh just something to consider on that and then another example of a more sort of covert hidden living area is this kind of spooky area and as you can see by the images on the far right hand side of the screen this was found by a family who just purchased a house um in i think the london area of the uk and uh they found underneath that uh underneath that rug there a small grate which i'll let down a you know a ladder led down a hole to another door and they found this underground chapel and um they're not entirely sure how old it is i think they're still trying to work with the local archaeology department to figure it out but they think based on what was found in the room such as a cross on the floor that it may have been a hideout for christians um during the uh during one of the conflicts over there i'm not sure exactly which conflict they thought it was but um the the the the bunker so to speak predated the house by a considerable amount so it's it's possible that somebody found the land found that bunker and uh built a house over it and incorporated it right into the house that's kind of an interesting thing to do um and as you can see you could live in there for a considerable amount of time so you know this is obviously a a pretty big fantasy list right this is something that you know not all of us are going to be able to do but this is far more common so this is a concept you know if you this is another field that you might want to research and this is you know illegal alien smuggling so it turns out that if you want to figure out how to hide a person the number one people to turn to in society and at least in american western society is the criminal aspect look into human trafficking especially when it comes to illegal immigration because when it comes to smuggling adults you know when it comes to coyotes smuggling you know people across the border there's a lot of information about that because it happens so often so these couple of guys they were found uh smuggling in they were behind a bumper as you see it was pulled off but they never would have been found if some x-ray technology had not revealed their position so um you know this is once again a reminder that if you're going to research this stuff be advised that you're going to have to you're learning from criminals right there's no u.s government doctrine that's going to tell you how to safely hide in your home there's no going to be no like lawful doctrine anywhere or or any history books really that are going to tell you how to you know you know hide cash away or things like that you know the diversion saves those are easy because those are you know they're just diversion safes right but when it comes to hiding a person you're really gonna have to turn to criminals to figure out how to do that so be advised when you're researching that you're gonna you know um you're gonna be under probably some sort of surveillance so i would definitely not google any of this stuff not by a long shot um and use some of our use some of the uh techniques that we've talked about in our mass surveillance um series uh in our podcast use some of that stuff to kind of research this further but we'll talk about more of that later just wanted to kind of bring that up again that hey you're going to be researching some stuff that may be illegal to even learn right because apparently in the year 2020 forbidden knowledge is 100 a thing so um moving along to our sort of pros and cons of these different kinds of caches so as you move down from as you move you know up in size um we have you know micro caches sort of how these arrows work is you know they show the capabilities right so you know micro caches you're not going to be able to store anything in them at all because maybe a micro sd card that's it um however a long term hide like a secret compartment in your attic that's gonna be able to hold people you're gonna be able to hold a lot of food a lot of water sanitation all kinds of things in there right you can't fit that inside a quarter you know you can't fit that inside a chapstick tube or something like that so you can realize that as the size goes up the capabilities you have also go up however the cost also goes up so the bigger the cash the more expensive it is and that's usually a general rule um a lot of these micro cashes are pretty cheap um and definitely more cheap than you know building a secret compartment in your basement or in your attic or a spider hole somewhere um also the resources you need to build them are going to go up and this is important because if you if you ever find yourself in a situation where you're going to try to hide a person in your home chances are you didn't build that you didn't build a place to hide a human being beforehand so you're going to have to have wood you're going to have to have nails and screws you're going to have to be able to do it quietly you're going to have to be able to do it with minimal supplies and you know the more the bigger the place the more resources you're going to need so you know you might not be able to do that when the time comes um now granted there are ways you can build long-term highs with not that many resources by just taking advantage of of void spaces that's what we try to do when we're trying to figure out these long-term hide locations is look for the void spaces in a house and you can take advantage of those but also be admired be advised that if you can think of it you know law enforcement can think of it too so that's just something to once again be aware of and then once again the social impacts are also what we're thinking about you know i don't know about you guys but if you know i were to tell my wife that uh hey honey this weekend i want to build a a secret compartment in the attic to hold six people um i'm gonna get a crate i'm gonna get you know i'm gonna get looked at like i'm an insane person um it's going to be a a harder sell you can't tell your neighbors about the sort of thing you cannot tell your co-workers you can barely tell your family right you can barely tell people that are you know only the people that you share a house with can you tell about this sort of thing and even then they you know it might be a little bit hard to get around socially whereas if you know if i were to say hey look i want to buy this you know fake can of shaving cream it's got a little safe in the bottom let's see i can hide a couple of sd cards in there nobody bats an eye because that's a normal thing people do nowadays you know people have like hey i want to buy a small little lock box so i can kind of hide in my desk drawer sure that's fine nobody you know nobody bats an eye but the second you talk about putting secret compartments in you know your house or in your car um the social impacts get a little bit more a little bit more intense so that's something to keep in mind as well because we can't just ignore that fact this is a very very social thing we're talking about here so um i feel like a lot of people leave that out they said like you know you know when when shtf or when you know when the wrol situation it comes around just gonna slap on all my stuff and go out and blah blah blah well that's all well and good but what about your family you know are you taking care of them are you gonna alienate you know the little old lady next door you know you're gonna scare her half to death you know so the social impacts of all of this stuff is very very important and it's a more of a driving factor honestly than it should be in a lot of cases but we'll talk about that later so some of the areas so if we're going to talk about covert living areas they're going to require a lot of space and honestly these are the ones that are harder to research like i mentioned before now these are some areas that you can research i'll just read them out right quick for the guys listening to us on the podcast but these are areas that you can research to find more about covert living areas and like residences first and foremost is obviously the holocaust and very you know it's well known for jews and other uh uh enemies of the nazi regime hiding out in secret areas another one is world war ii pow escapes you know with the french resistance helping people escape uh with other resistance movements like you know through belgium through through the uh the netherlands things like that and through poland especially good grief with the you know the the the partisan elements there uh trying to help people escape good source of research another one is you know the escape stories from the rwanda genocide also you know other conflicts like the first chechen war the bosnian war even the isis occupation of syria and iraq back from just a few years ago that's a good source because that was a very much an invasion also another good source of research is the religious persecution in china so for those that are unaware it's pretty much illegal to go to church as a christian in china and while i'm not particularly religious myself i find it very very interesting to study that sort of thing because in china apparently you cannot go to church the only churches that are authorized are ones that are run owned and operated by the communist regime in china so they have a lot of underground churches so check that out that's a very good wealth of information for this sort of thing another one is operation searchlight which is more known by the bangladesh bangladesh genocide another genocidal uh action that not a whole lot of people in the west have heard about so that's something worth looking into as well um also taliban doctrine in the early years right when the taliban was started starting to seize power and starting to you know hide away in caves and things like that that's definitely something to research and then once again you know your criminal elements look into you know how narcotics traffickers do what they do that's a very interesting you know a subject area because you know we're not like you know disclaimer legal disclaimers aside we're not trafficking narcotics here like if you know the worst thing that we're probably stocking away is probably you know ammunition for our personal usage and of course all of this is illegal we're not advocating for doing anything illegal it's not illegal to hide an sd card with some books on it you know and you know a chapstick tube that's not illegal at all but yet there may be a day when it actually becomes illegal and then you know once again even though it's a kind of a dated excuse or not excuse an example the the prohibition in the united states that's a good uh good jumping off point um and so we have to remember that with these covert areas what's the sort of what's the goal here you know it and you know we're sort of with the covert living areas our main goal is just to survive the quote-unquote door kick in the night um so you know uh you know a a raid um happening because of a uh um something or other that you know where people are trying to come into your home from a law enforcement nature and try to arrest somebody for something and you know i know i'm talking around this so i'll get i'll just break down and give you an actual example so in our area it is mandatory right now for any visitors from out of state to self quarantine and if they don't self quarantine there they will be arrested it has happened multiple times many people i won't say many people but it's happened a few times right that's documented of people coming in from out of state um then like checking in at a restaurant on facebook which is dumb i know or or using their social media in some way and tagging the city or something and somehow or another the county health department or the city health department finds out they're there they show up and with the sheriff and they are arrested so in our area um we had some family come in for um just for you know to to uh to do some things with us and they're from out of state and uh so we had to shelter we had to hide two people in our own home we couldn't we had to you know make sure that when they arrived they arrived after dark so that you know our neighbors didn't see they use the back entrance from the from the uh sort of back alley way it's not really an alley but you know from behind the house and uh yeah they didn't go outside during the daytime and they were you know just there passing through for the most part stayed a couple of days and uh yeah didn't go outside did not show presents things like that so technically we were breaking the law when it came to um our own family members but i can tell you that you know it i'm not going to turn in my relatives so they can get arrested just for surviving right just for living so that moment right there was when we kind of sealed the deal and said hey you know what um we're going to make this you know youtube video we're going to make this presentation and kind of show people what we're thinking because that scared us right um you know i i tend to not necessarily be scared or even surprised by the things that have happened because of this crisis we're going through right now but i can tell you that you know despite seeing a lot of horrific things over my lifetime that right now i'm i'm very very concerned very very concerned and um that's why we sort of have had to think about these sort of things and you know i you know i think that a lot of people maybe i'm just you know reminiscing but i think a lot of people tend to prepare for things that that don't necessarily aren't necessarily going to happen you know i think that as soon as everybody gets their concealed carry permit then you know as soon as they conceal care for the first time they're picturing in their mind okay what happens if a bad guy comes in this store here you know oh i'm in line you know in the grocery store oh what happens if a bad guy comes in what am i gonna do is this you know and uh it's very easy to picture these things in your head and for me you know even as a child you know when i was growing up in the boy scouts i had a very very morbid fascination with uh things and survival situations that were extremely rare like you know how to survive you know falling out of a plane with no parachute you know some things that you know have no way to survive but you can do something to improve your chances you know how to survive you know being adrift at sea with no life raft or anything like that like you know it's things that are extremely extremely rare um and i find that you know i you know watching the great escape and it was steve mcqueen one of my favorite movies of all time you know watching that you know growing up you know i started thinking okay well you know if i was you know in a pia that became how would i escape and you know it's nothing more than a morbid curiosity more nothing more than just something that's interesting never really seriously considered the stuff until you know my wife comes to me and says okay well what are what are our plans for this you know what what are we gonna do hey you're supposed to be the guy that's prepared for everything right or you know if not prepared for everything you've you know thought about this stuff i know you've thought about it so what are we gonna do so that's sort of you know i hate to digress it on this particular slide but that's something that i felt like had to be sort of you know conveyed when it comes to the goals for this kind of thing but unfortunately the one of the big things you're going to have to do is just keep moving we found that you know we can analyze this sort of you know anne frank story uh to death and and and find out that um it is very very rare um her family and uh the other family that was staying with them they stayed in that location for about two years and that was extremely rare if you look up the data you'll find that on average the jews that were in hiding in the occupied territories throughout the war stayed in an average of four places throughout the the time that they were trying to move out of the country and they certainly didn't try to stay so keeping uh keeping on the move is key but um yeah so that's how all i wanted to say on the sort of covert living areas um and then there are some more considerations to think about um when it comes to the actual like social impact and things you're gonna have to have gear right you're going to have to have supplies you know in today's society i've said it before on all of our platforms i'm pretty sure but it's 2020 and if you don't have a gas mask right now for every member in your family i i don't know what to tell you because that is a requirement now um you know if i did not have a gas mask i would probably that was probably be one of the things that i panic bought beforehand um because nowadays it's it's crucial and you're going to need a gas mask if you're a civilian in 2020 um because i can tell you with the with the riots going down in portland right now um and the sort of summer of violence in 2020 that we've seen and the rise of the use of the gas mask i can guarantee you that come this fall some politicians going to try to make gas masks illegal for civilians to earn so that's just a writing on the wall if you you know if you can't see that i i you know we might have we might uh explain on that further in an update video with our you know seburn stuff but um you need a gas mask you know other things you might need just you're going to have to your normal sort of prepping type supplies your food water sanitation but you know skipping over that because that's stuff that other people far more experienced than us have covered we can talk about the environmental concerns most notably uh nowadays we have this thing called flear we have this thing called infrared imaging and thermal imaging that can detect void spaces in houses you've got all kinds of technological devices that if somebody was trying to find you even in the most sort of you know bruce wayne type hideout layer they're going to find you so everything from you know dogs to simple stethoscopes in the walls they're gonna you know you're gonna be detected if somebody's looking for you um but you know uh you also have to worry about things like condensation and paint shrinkage like for instance i had one particular area in my house where i had to uh take a piece of trim out and i took the piece of trim out and saw there was a pretty big void behind it in the wall so i said hey let me put something back there so i put something back there and stock some supplies away then put the piece of trim back and then painted it shut well a couple weeks later i go back to check on it and lo and behold the painted shrunk because the humidity and the condensation and things like that so you have to be able to to maintain your sort of stuff like that also if you live in a very humid area you've got to remember that if you're that if your covert living area is in like an attic you're going to have to deal with you know the heat you're going to have to deal with spoiler you can't store food in an attic for sure you can't release you can store stuff in basements of course but you know we're thinking addicts because i'm probably because i have an act i don't actually have a basement um but yeah you're gonna have to worry about things like rusting like you know we're here in the coastal you know mid-atlantic region we're not right on the water um but uh yeah you know you know rusting of things like weapons and other metal items huge thing and then of course there's this thing called the changing of the batteries phenomenon i'm not sure if that's the doctrinal term i'm not sure there is a doctrinal term for it i've seen a few pop culture references to this but basically it boils down to one simple idea and it's the idea that during the height of the cold war most spies that were caught by either the russians or by the united states most spies were caught changing batteries right they weren't caught stealing the information right they weren't caught um trying to you know subvert something they weren't caught with you know a camera in their hand they were caught you know changes they're changing the batteries to their electronic bugs or they were caught going back to a dead drop something that was supposed to be secure so that's something to keep in mind as well in other words you know you're probably going to get caught entering and exiting your covert living area way more likely to except for that to happen than it is for you to be caught just simply hiding in it so something to once again think about and so this concept is an interesting one and i it's something that i don't see nearly enough people do and it's a very very important thing basically once again the idea we're going for is just a little bit of an edge right we're not trying to be jason bourne and disappear we're trying to have just a little bit of an edge so myself and everybody here at the s2 underground project once they learned this is something i did this is interesting and this is the i'm not here message basically you've got a kitchen table like here in this image and you've got a little a pad on the kitchen table like or or even a message on a refrigerator right a little cute note and basically the note says hey honey i'm not there um i've gone to baltimore with the guys for a few days you know sorry it's last minute or something like that and you know love whoever right and put your actual name there that way if somebody has a warrant and they come into your house and they see you know they come into your house well you're not there or they come into your house when you know when you're in your hiding spot they will obviously see the note right it wasn't intended for them at least they think so but it was intended for them because that note is not real that note you and your spouse or you and your family have predetermined you've left there on purpose they know it's a fake note and they leave it there 24 7 and the goal is for anybody who breaks into your house or serves a warrant on your house or enters your house in some way they'll think you've gone they won't know you're hiding just a couple of feet away behind a wall or something so that's an interesting concept i haven't seen anybody do now obviously the caveat is it's you know it's pretty much free to do you just gotta have a piece of paper and just leave it in the right spot that's very easy to do and you know the caveat is you know once again that you have to pre-arrange with your spouse or whoever's in your home it's a fake note right they can't believe that it's a real note so there you go and then if you wanted to take that a step further if you're leaving your home for a short period of time or maybe even an extended period of time this is really more for the extended period of time do what's called a pre-ransack so take some things you know take some items out of your yeah out of your drawers you know messy up your place i sort of like what's in this image in this image this is exactly the level of stuff we're going for stuff that's easy to clean up in less than five minutes but it shows that the house has been ransacked already right that way if somebody breaks into your house right or breaks into your room and they see oh well hey this place has already been broken into and left um i gotta get out of here because they've already cleaned this place out they're just gonna leave not knowing that you ransacked your own place and all the valuables are hidden away and you know things like that also for law enforcement if you know some kind of illegal law enforcement actions going on and they're trying to arrest you for not wearing a mask or you know something like that and they serve a warrant you know they do a bench warrant for you for not wearing a mask somewhere and then they try to show up to serve the warrant on you they're going to come into your house and they're going to see oh this place has been ransacked so it's going to raise questions with them right and it's going to serve to misdirect right so once again this is this may be going a bit overboard especially considering you're not likely to leave a window or door open as in this image you're going to leave your place locked up tight but the inside's going to be ransacked you know what's that about so anybody that thinks about it for a minute is going to be you know going to be able to sort of pick it apart but they're going to always have that in the back of their mind like what the hey you know what's going on what's going on and this is kind of a weird scenario so um th

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