//The Wire//2300Z January 7, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: UNDERSEA CABLE CUT IN TAIWAN. EARTHQUAKE STRIKES NEPAL AND TIBET. SOUTH KOREAN POLITICS CONTINUES TO REMAIN TUMULTUOUS. TRUMP CONTINUES POLICY FORMATION REGARDING U.S. TERRITORIAL ASPIRATIONS.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----    -International Events-  Korean Peninsula: Following Sunday's routine missile launch in North Korea, tensions remain high in the context of South Korean politics. Though North Korea's missile test was semi-regular (albeit with North Korea claiming as usual to have implemented some new feature, in this case a new type of warhead), the launch has added to the internal strife that continues in South Korea. In South Korea, the recent impeachment scandal continues to develop. President Yoon was impeached on December 14th, being replaced by Prime Minister Han Duck-soo. However, on December 26th, Han was impeached as well, placing Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok in charge. Now, the situation largely remains in the courts as varying factions within government continue their power-plays. Nepal: Yesterday evening a significant earthquake occurred in the Himalayas, with an epicenter located near the Tibetan town of Xizang near the Nepali border. Early estimates placed the magnitude of the earthquake at 7.1, at a depth of 10km. AC: This region, while occasionally host to very significant earthquakes, is also at exceptional risk of catastrophe from such. Following this quake, the casualty figures were initially reported as 9x fatalities, which rapidly rose to over 95x this morning. Taiwan: This evening Taiwanese Defense officials and the Chunghwa Telecom company confirmed that at least one undersea cable serving the island nation had been cut over the weekend. The cable in question is part of the Trans-Pacific Express Cable System, a large network of cables connecting many Southeast Asian countries (including China herself) with North America. So far, the chief culprit is a Hong-Kong affiliated cargo ship, which was observed to be at anchor over the affected cable a few days ago. -HomeFront- California: This afternoon a wildfire emerged near the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, rapidly expanding from the point of origin to around 200 acres in size in less than an hour due to strong winds. The Palisades fire rapidly expanded to over 700+ acres later on in the day. This rapid explosion of fire activity caused sudden risks to residential neighborhoods, with mass evacuations being mandated throughout most of Pacific Palisades and parts of western Los Angeles. AC: Due to the rapid arrival of this wildfire to densely populated residential areas, many people attempted to flee by vehicle. Many people subsequently ended up abandoning their vehicles in the middle of the freeway, attempting to flee on foot. As such, mass traffic gridlock has been reported throughout the area, with many firefighting units needing to use heavy machinery to move abandoned vehicles off of the roadway to make room for emergency responders. Washington D.C. - Incoming President Trump has continued to share policy decisions, from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, to mandating that votes are counted before 10pm on election day. Trump has also pledged to investigate the FBI's involvement in the 2021 J6 incident. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Trump has continued to assert his intentions with regards to gaining control of both Greenland and the Panama Canal. As of right now, this appears to be a genuine line of effort diplomatically. Of note, Donald Trump Jr. is currently in Greenland, reportedly filming content for an upcoming podcast. As of right now, Trump Jr. is not scheduled to meet with government officials in Greenland, and the visit appears to be more personal in nature, as opposed to an official diplomatic visit. These developments ordinarily would not carry much weight, as every incoming administration makes plans similar to these aspirations (though usually not to this degree). However, considering the diplomatic impacts of these efforts might impact the American people somewhat (particularly Trump's aspirations for war in the Middle East), the policy decisions that are being lined up would be worthy of being aware of. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground

the following is the S2 underground wire report for 1800 Zulu October 9 2023 precedence is routine information cut off date is 1730 Zulu 09 October 203 bottom line up front Arab Israeli War continues largescale combat operation imminent in Gaza home front attacks possible if situation escalates international news beginning with the Middle East Front the Arab is War continues as Palestinian attacks enter their third day Israeli forces continue to mobilize along the Gaza border Lebanese border and West Bank turkey issues warning to the United States to not get involved many Arab states are calling for deescalation though this seems unlikely as Israeli Defense Forces mobilize for a large scale combat operation within Gaza and or the West Bank Israel has already shut off electricity water food gas and other utilities to Gaza which is now in a state of Siege Egypt has begun publicly aiding Palestine with medical supplies through their shared border crossing how much other support is given is currently unknown on the far East Front in the Pacific Chinese incursion flights within the Taiwan straight continue following the largest people's Liberation Army Naval drill in history last month pla forces May seek to capitalize on conflicts erupting around the world to increase presence patrols throughout the South China Sea as well as in the waters surrounding Taiwan knowing indications are present so far pointing to significant Chinese military actions in the vicinity of Taiwan but harassment activities will likely continue as in the past on the home front in the United States tensions continue along the southern US border as the immigration crisis reaches New Heights United States Customs and Border Protection reports that 3.1 million immigrants cross the border for the 2023 fiscal year though this number does not include the 630,000 getaways who evaded capture analyst comments for this wire on all fronts information Warfare is substantial with many citizens rushing to support one side or the other with almost zero appreciation for the historical complexity of the Middle East the current conflict within Israel and Palestine is the manifestation of issues that run deeper than any of us can imagine regardless conflict in the Middle East has the potential to affect life at home via gasoline prices and availability tax dollars being spent inflation and vulnerabilities to the Homeland increasing as military hardware is sent overseas Palestinian forces are well known for implanting sleeper cells around the world and encouraging Lone Wolf attacks beyond their borders consequently though this conflict is taking place overseas citizens must remain Vigilant and observant of the potential for demonstrations within the United States to become violent several clashes have already been reported in several US cities between pro-israel and pro Palestine supporters but any substantial attacks are dependent on Israel's actions within Gaza and how the conflict escalates over the next few days this concludes the wire report for 1800 Zulu October 9th 2023

//The Wire//2300Z April 13, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: MAJOR ESCALATIONS REPORTED IN MIDDLE EAST AFTER PEACE TALKS FAIL. AMERICAN NAVAL BLOCKADE ANNOUNCED IN THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ. TERRORIST ATTACK REPORTED IN ALGERIA DURING POPE'S VISIT.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Middle East: Over the weekend, negotiations between the United States and Iran failed to produce any sort of agreement. Both parties have returned to their respective countries, and the potential for future negotiations remains unclear. Shortly after negotiations concluded, President Trump announced the implementation of a naval blockade of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. The post specifically stated that the U.S. Navy will blockade "any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz". A few hours later, CENTCOM posted an article on the implementation of this policy, stating that "The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman". Lebanon: The war continues as Israeli forces continue their advance to the Litani River. Clearance operations have been on going in the south, with most villages within a few miles of the traditional border between Lebanon and Israel having been either bombed or bulldozed over the past few years with the goal of establishing a buffer zone. Hungary: Yesterday, the results of the general election resulted in sitting Prime Minister Viktor Orban being replaced by Peter Magyar after holding power for 16 years. Algeria: This morning two IED attacks took place in Blida, which took the form of two assailants wearing explosive belts attempting to target a crowd near the National Police Headquarters. Analyst Comment: These attacks coincided with Pope Leo XIV's visit to Algiers. Consequently, local media is speculating that these attackers were on their way to target the Pope, and got discovered, prompting their detonation. However, considering that the attackers were on foot at the time (and Blida is a long way from Algiers, where the Pope was located), a more likely theory is that this attack was targeting the police station. This theory is supported by the rather graphic video of at least one of the attacks. These types of attacks are extremely common throughout the third-world, as low-level insurgent groups sometimes prefer to conduct attacks during a high-profile visit, so as to amplify the message of their cause. In this case however, nobody survived to convey what group actually conducted the attack, so pending a group claiming credit, the overall motive for this terror attack remains unknown. Eastern Pacific: Overnight strikes on narco-vessels continued throughout the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility, with multiple airstrikes being reported in the general vicinity of the Caribbean. Analyst Comment: While attention has been diverted to the Middle East, Operation Southern Spear has been continuing, with strikes on fastboats being reported regularly this entire time. Most of the more recent strikes have been conducted not in the Caribbean specifically, but in undisclosed regions of the Pacific Ocean (probably off the coast of Ecuador, where joint American operations have been increasing over the past few weeks). -HomeFront- New York: A mass stabbing attack was reported at the Grand Central Terminal subway station on Saturday, after an assailant began attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Police officers on the platform shot and killed the assailant immediately after the attack began. Concerning casualties, 3x elderly victims were wounded during the attack and all are expected to survive. The assailant has been identified as Anthony Griffin, and a family friend stated that Griffin was known to have mental health issues and that he was known to carry a machete. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Blockading ships from only Iranian ports is quite different from the White House's statements of "any and all ships", and as a result, the implementation of the blockade in the Middle East is extremely significant. If the U.S. does intend to halt "all" traffic through the Strait, half of the planet will be in a bind. If the U.S. is only targeting Iranian ships (or ships exporting cargo from Iranian ports), this would make sense except for the U.S. lifting sanctions on the Iranian oil market a few weeks ago. As of today, no one has really addressed this prior lifting of sanctions, and it is not clear as to which policy supersedes the other. At this juncture, there is no word on how this is going to work out, because on the one hand the U.S. has told Iran that they can export oil to the global market, but at the same time they are being told that their ships will be interdicted, and sunk if necessary. Clarifications may come in due time (or they might not), but at the moment the announcement of a naval blockade of any kind probably won't do very much to alleviate concerns among maritime insurance companies. Companies were already concerned about the Iranian blockade, but now merchant shippers have to be concerned about the U.S. Navy interdicting them as well, especially since there are differences in the terms laid out by President Trump and CENTCOM regarding what ships are being allowed through. Bottom line, the war is not over, and the concerns that have been in place since the start of the war, still remain in place. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for friday the 18th of february 2022 and it is being recorded the day prior on the 17th we've got a lot of stuff to talk about today so let's jump right into the geopolitical update i'm not going to spend too much time talking about geopolitics because there's just way too much going on there's a lot of stuff going on out there and most of it's really not that helpful so i'm just going to touch on the stuff that is interesting first up are the nations that have either closed their embassies or moved their embassies to the western parts of ukraine the united states has closed their embassy in kiev and are moving a temporary uh a temporary embassy out west to levov it is unclear as to whether or not that's going to be an operational embassy i haven't really looked into it that much but when it comes to americans in ukraine the good news is that poland is now allowing americans to cross land borders into poland without any prior authorization or visas or stuff like that you can just get all your stuff there right at the border which is good for those of you who are looking to get out of ukraine speaking of evacuations we're also seeing an unprecedented number of private jets leaving ukraine if you're following a lot of the flight tracker and like open source uh ads adsb trackers you'll notice there are an awful lot of private planes leaving uh ukraine uh one-way trips and going to other countries like romania hungary places like that so i thought that's kind of interesting that a lot of the um senior like economic leaders in the country have left actually ukraine the the current political leadership had issues statements urging their uh people to come back people who are civil servants uh to come back to the country so um that's just kind of the way things work out and kind of hints as to what people in very powerful positions are thinking about the potential for invasion speaking of air travel a few airlines mostly klm is the biggest one have canceled their flights to ukraine so they're avoiding all ukrainian airspace and this kind of makes sense because ukraine has a very long history of of civilian airliners being shot down during this conflict most european or really every airline has been avoiding the eastern part of ukraine for a very long time now because of that but now it looks like a few airlines are extending that to the entire country so if you're trying to escape ukraine if you're trying to leave you know airline travel might not be just like what we've been saying is airline travel might not be that reliable something also of note uh in russia is or or really rather disputed territory is the american submarine incident between the united states and russia so a lot of people aren't aware of what went on with this and we still really don't know the full story really all we're getting is russia's side of the story but the short version of this is that the russian navy intercepted detected and intercepted an american virginia-class submarine operating in their territorial waters off the kuril islands this was a few days ago the russians claim that they you have used kinetic measures to sort of you know encourage the united states submarine to leave their waters and the u.s submarine left at high speed now if this sounds a little fishy that's probably because it is there's a lot of things wrong with the russian version of the story for one the virginia class submarines are very hard to detect and the vessels that were in the area the russia claims detected the submarine that's going to be a hard task for those ancient vessels so there's that i don't doubt for one minute that the united states does not have submarines shadowing the exercises off the curl islands the russian naval exercises but it just doesn't sound right the us navy has of course denied the entire thing and russia has refused to give any kind of proof as to knocking the american submarine out of their waters or something like that the reason i'm having a hard time defining it is because russia has used very shady language they've said they used special means to get the united states submarine to leave i don't know what that means it can be anything there's a lot of different things that go on in the sub-world diplomatically so it could be everything from some kind of special acoustic measure or even some kind of kinetic measure to uh to warn the us submarine off but again they're being very vague about it and it sounds a lot like russian propaganda at this point and really the kind of the kind of nail in the coffin for this is this image um which has been circulating around a lot of russian language chats and a lot of russian media claiming that this is an american countermeasure an acoustics countermeasure for an american submarine as in the russians scared the american submarine and they deployed acoustic countermeasures to escape and distract and cover their retreat and here's proof right well here's the problem this is actually not american this is a russian anti-submarine or submarine countermeasure system uh this is a very actually a this this image pulled up on the internet quite a long time ago and it's very interesting because it's kind of a classified system for the russians so this torpedo-like system is is really an electronic countermeasure right it's a an acoustic countermeasure system that can deploy other countermeasures at least we think in the sub-world these are not particularly new they've been around for a while but they're new to most people i think but the interesting part is is that this image of one kind of washing up on the shore there is russian it was due to their russians testing on their own systems and yet a lot of russian language platforms are claiming that this is american so kind of interesting and kind of the nail in the coffin that proves that probably didn't occur did a russian surface vessel or other submarine detect an american submarine yeah probably maybe who knows it's literally impossible to know submarine diplomacy is one of those things where you're never really going to know what actually happened until probably 40 years later but it was kind of interesting so i wanted to mention it also russia has got an exercise coming up which is kind of a regular exercise for them that most people call the grom exercise it's basically their exercise for world war three it's to test their nuclear triad and the communication systems between their submarines their bombers and their land-based systems so a lot of people are thinking that this russian nuclear style exercise is really a way to deter nato from doing very much when russia invades ukraine so ukraine gets a ukraine gets invaded by russia nato gets a little squirrely russia uses exercise as a way to kind of dominate or try to encourage nato to not do very much so i thought i'd point that out because it's it's kind of an important thing moving on to our naval update don't really have much for the ga uk gap or the north sea so i'm just going to skip right to the med where there's a lot of activity now this slide is outdated we've been updating the slides in between briefings as some of you probably know i've been uploading these slides as regularly as we can between the videos that come out and this has changed quite a bit so at the time we made this slide there were a grand total of 12 russian landing craft or landing ships in underway in the black sea a few of them have come back and a few of them have gone back out again so we're still counting to figure out who's where but roughly speaking there's still a lot of activity going on in the black sea as well as the med there's been a lot of activity it's really hard to kind of track where these vessels are at because usually by the time that we get either a satellite image of where they're at or an ais pain of where they're at they've already moved so that's just something to keep in mind but right now in the med and in the black sea there is a lot of steel in the water moving to the overall update for ukraine we've kind of had to simplify this graphic a little bit it's still not perfect of course it's very far from perfect but i just wanted to show you the major units that are that are here in theater because this is going to be a high level map we just have too many icons at this point so let's go ahead and jump to the actual fronts on the northeastern front this is where we're seeing most activity as of the past 48 hours that's why we've drawn a little flat there a little frontline enemy troops just so people understand what's more likely to occur right over the border just on the other side of the border of kharkiv in russia we're seeing a lot of units move to what we think are their final staging positions this is something that the us government has also backed up if you trust them which you shouldn't honestly but even ocean trackers on twitter can show you pictures of these units moving to their final staging locations we're seeing units move really really close to the border in this particular area so this is kind of the highest tension part of the entire ukrainian border at this time but we have other things to mention as well so let's jump a little bit closer into the car key front and see what's going on so like i mentioned we're seeing a lot of units being staged in belgrade and then moving out from belgrade to other further locations closer to the ukrainian border such as certino vessela lopez and the shebacchino depot these are basically just fields little either defunct old soviet bases that they're revitalizing or places like that we can get more into specifics to some of these as time goes on but i also wanted to point out that in belgrade we're starting to see a lot of the tos ones mlrs move into the area as well now these are some nasty weapons i wanted to point that out because it's an interesting concept that not a lot of people think about and these are like your standard mlrs but the warheads that they're being used that they that these systems use are they have the capability for using newer thermobaric types of weapons basically it's very comparable to our highmars system here we have in the us the the grid square eraser right but this does it with thermobaric weapons and that's just really really nasty the reason that i want to mention this specifically is because we saw during the battle for the donetsk airport a lot of ukrainians claiming that thermobaric weapons were used against them and that these specific weapons were used against them and there wasn't a whole lot of conclusiveness to that i would say it's pretty conclusive based on the the pictures of the bodies it's something that you really don't want to talk about at the dinner table to be honest but the international community was like i don't really know well now we're seeing these units being kind of openly transported not even you know being covered whereas the first time they were allegedly used it was very secret so now we know that not only do these units exist but they're also exist in this theater and they also exist with the kinds of weapons that we think they have so again confidence level in this is you know moderate i guess but we've seen these on trains being unloaded from bell garage so you know take it for what it's worth i guess so jumping into a couple of specific locations i wanted to talk about belgrade farp for a second this is an interesting one uh because this uh this is a jump farp a a forward arming and refueling point for helicopters this points to russia's recent i shouldn't say doctrinal change which is just kind of what they do now which is rely heavily on helicopters for movement and this is a perfect location for it it's only 36k from the ukrainian border it's a nice safe area this is an old cold war base that's just kind of in the middle of nowhere even though it's on the outskirts of belgrade there it's still really a remote location um but that's what they're they're using this location to stage a lot of their helicopters so similar situation over here in vessela lopen uh this is just a normal civilian town uh interestingly enough when the russians got here they weren't actually using the camp that's uh to the northwest of town they were actually uh staging their t-80s and different kinds of ifvs like bmps and such along the railway so civilians were able to get really close to these um parked vehicles and get a lot of good pictures of them so something very interesting but now we're mostly seeing them staged just to the northwest of town there just wanted to mention this because again we found out about this camp and really the ocean community found out about this camp right as russia was claiming that they were pulling back and we're seeing you know videos on twitter of tanks being offloaded um quite clearly uh and then sent to this camp here moving out east we've actually seen a little bit of an increase in conflict along the eastern front now when it comes to the actual conflict it's hard to say where the conflict has occurred there have been a lot of ceasefire violations over the past few days but the international monitoring group for the ceasefire has actually started to pull out of this area so they're getting ready to evacuate so it's really hard to say how effective the international monitors are um at checking out the conflict in eastern ukraine so they haven't said that they've fully left yet but it's kind of it's kind of obvious that everybody in eastern ukraine is thinking about leaving so i guess we'll have to see how effective they are at monitoring the conflict over the next few days also diplomatically we're seeing a lot of things uh being claimed by the russians that i'm not quite certain how to think about just yet for instance the russians are claiming that they have discovered a lot of mass graves in eastern ukraine and as such a lot of western analysts are thinking ah this is russia's excuse to invade um to stop the genocide right because putin himself has used the word genocide a lot to describe what's going on in eastern ukraine never mind that it actually has been the russians shelling civilians this entire time but anyway just wanted to point that out that we are aware of the rhetoric and the language that's being used um it's just really hard for us to kind of narrow that down at this time and say do we know definitively what this true story is along the southern front like i mentioned lots of vessels out in the water there have been a lot of aircraft being staged in the crimean peninsula as well mostly at defunct air force bases we've got over 70 helicopters at one old old school soviet base so yeah again southern front looks like it's preparing now again i should mention that the russians have put out statements saying look we're withdrawing from our positions we're leaving we're coming back they're sending troops back and they publish videos of trains loaded with equipment and soldiers being moved back east across the crimean bridge here's the problem with that though a lot of those units um they're actually closer to ukraine's border when they go home to their home units they just move right around to the eastern front uh they're closer to ukraine when they go home than they are in crimea which is interesting also we're seeing a lot of those units that russia has in their own videos popping up closer to the border again either to the north or to the east so again it's really hard to say what's going on but it sounds a lot it sounds to me like there is a lot of russian gaslighting going on when it comes to yeah we're pulling our forces back when we can clearly see ourselves that that's not the case and that's completely irrelevant of of any american rhetoric on this like i can download the satellite images and and i can go on twitter and count tanks just as well as anybody else can and i can myself can see that ah the russians aren't pulling out anybody just yet under the western front really not a whole lot going on other than the united states issuing do not travel orders for transnistria and moldova and beginning like sort of evacuation processes for those countries as well but i'm not really sure how how significant that is other than maybe a push for odessa if it comes to that like i mentioned the the reason that we're talking about this front is because it's it's it's important especially for odessa so we'll definitely keep an eye on it but there's really not a whole lot going on there at the moment moving to the northwestern front we have a lot of activity here as well and a very interesting story that has unfolded over the past few days so let's dive in a little closer first up i wanted to talk a little bit about bufgorka camp from last time just to show you some updates to it so here's the overall satellite image here's the image we showed last time and here is imagery as of the ninth showing that vehicles have moved this is something that we expected as soon as we dropped the video on it and as soon as other uh ocean entities became aware of this location it's not particularly new these guys have been there for a very long time but again just because we're talking about it in a video does not mean that we just discovered it these guys have been there for quite a while so i don't want to say that russia moved these assets due to we here you know exposing their position but that would also not surprise me so to those out there in the intel or operations world don't think that we're naive in this regard we are fully aware of who's reading these products i just wanted to point out that we here are thinking about these things and being as considerate as possible towards the planning efforts of those who are more better suited to doing good than we can if nothing else a little healthy competition coming from ourselves and agency in the open source world with almost no resources can encourage the us intelligence community to up their game after all no commander wants to see that some guy on youtube with an internet connection has better intelligence than their active duty s2 shop that's the way it should be i wouldn't want that either ocean is a tool in the toolbox not the entire toolbox so if our work can encourage our active duty counterparts to be better instead of stealing paragraphs or grants them that nobody will read or sitting on merc chat all day long with a bag of cheetos that's a good thing in our book and now moving to a big bit of news that has been taking the osant world and the journalistic world by storm for the past couple of days that is this pontoon bridge that has been set up in belarus now for those of you that keep up with ocean and know what has happened to this bridge hang on for just a minute and let's take a look at the overall area of this bridge because this really doesn't show us that much moving out we can see the ukrainian border up there the chernobyl exclusion zone there in orange and the pontoon bridge itself as you can see it is very close to the border it is six kilometers as the crow flies uh to the border there within the belarusian side of the uh chernobyl exclusion zone and as we can see it's very close to kiev as well so let's jump out of the satellite image and go to a street map image so we can talk a little bit more about this location one of the reasons that the world is all abuzz about this bridge is that it's kind of a big deal with regards to wet gap crossings in other words militaries have to cross bodies of water and pontoon bridges are the way to do that and if you put a pontoon bridge here it looks an awful lot like you're trying to move forces or enable the freedom of movement for forces really close to the border because the next bridge that can be used by armored vehicles to actually cross the pripyat river is all the way north in missouri so as the crow flies that's 66 kilometers so one might think that hey if troops are trying to move in this direction they're going to need to cross this bridge and then they can punch right through in across the border into the exclusion zone very good way for troops to move around otherwise they would have to go all the way over here to measure and then head south right so that's why people are thinking about this is like holy cow this is like the smoking gun when it comes to russia trying to invade ukraine this is like the most important news ever right well not really for one the biggest bit of evidence kind of against this pontoon bridge being any kind of use whatsoever is that russia is already on the other side of the river that's where these units are right now that's exactly what they did they went to major they crossed over and now they're right there and yelts right across the border so they're kind of already on the other side of the river another bit of information is that when you look at a map like this you tend to forget something and that is what the weather's like so let's zoom in a little bit and take a look at some recent sentinel imagery here's where the pontoon bridge is and here's the rest of the pripyat river it's kind of frozen now granted the ice in the pripyat river might not be thick enough to drive a tank over you need a many inches of ice for a tank to be able to drive across it right and the thinning patches of ice that we see up to the northern parts of the pripyat river that kind of you know indicates this it's probably not thick enough for for a tank to drive across but i also find it pretty hard to believe that the russians wouldn't be able to find a better spot to cross they clearly chose this spot because of the open water for a reason so taking all of this into account and just kind of absorbing all of the information that's out there about this pontoon bridge we come to a few different conclusions or really a few different explanations uh for why this bridge can be there the first of which is the one that everybody's saying which is that this bridge is a legitimate attempt for russia to be able to increase their freedom of maneuver right next to the border so that they can strike fast and strike hard right you know even though they can use the bridge up in measure it's probably a little bit easier to have a bridge a little bit closer down to the border if they're trying to invade somebody again i don't think this is likely i think this is extremely unlikely knowing what we know now but i'll get to that in a minute the other immediate thought that comes to mind is that this is something shiny for the americans to look at right it's a distraction in other words it's something for a ukraine to get all upset about because it's six kilometers from their border that should be a hint in and of itself because you don't want to build something that close to the border when even light even light artillery can take it out right so the fact that it's so close to the ukrainian border is presents a risk so something to think about right another big hint but again this could purely be a distraction with no intention of russia using it whatsoever but really what i think is most likely is that this bridge serves multiple roles for one russia benefits by keeping tensions high right now right they look like they're the ones who are in the right and the west is in the wrong they're able to keep their propaganda machine going in overdrive it keeps the morale for troops high and it again allows the americans to be embarrassed once again russia time after time even just over the past couple of weeks russia's actions have been very good at getting the west to react to them when in actuality russia is just sitting back and letting the west you know make fools of itself again russia has gotten really good at gaslighting the united states for one but also making western leadership look like fools through their own actions russia is really good at pinpointing something and then doing something to make the west react and then the west looks like an idiot so this is a good way to do that a pontoon bridge is pretty cheap to install it's it's very easy to do and it's very very public and it's also good legitimate practice because let's face it russia is going to have a lot of wet gap crossings in ukraine if they choose to invade so you've got the denipa river you've got a lot of other smaller bodies of water that still require you know engineers to get across so it this is a good way to practice for that and like i mentioned earlier right when we started talking about this bridge there's more to the story as of this morning the bridge is gone we can tell this via sentinel imagery that was downloaded uh as of last night and the bridge has now been relocated so that's that i guess this whole exercise in talking about the bridge really isn't about the bridge it's really to show that even though the intel handbook indicates x some common sense is also required just like the us government and governments around the world were dead set on telling the world that russia is going to invade on the 16th of february and since it's now the 17th or 18th when this video goes out and no invasion occurred the us intel community looks foolish and speaking of that date a lot of people have been asking well how did the us government know with such certainty that russia had planned the invasion for the 16th and why would they say this openly well the reason for saying it openly is is a quasi-legitimate i suppose if you say hey if you have unrefuted undoubtable proof that russia is going to invade on the 16th and you tell the world this well obviously russia is not going to invade on the 16th they're going to not invade on the 16th because you've discovered their plans and now they have to change their plans or they were never planning on invading on the 16th and now you just look like a fool in any case we will never know what intelligence the us government had to indicate with such certainty that russia was going to invade on the 16th it's a win-win for both because now the biden regime gets to claim that ah we stopped them invading on the 16th and russia gets to claim well the us looks like fools because they said we were going to invade on the 16th and we never invaded on the 16th so it's a win for both sides which is why you don't really hear too much about it based on my own speculation i think i know how they got that date if they didn't have any really concrete proof it's pretty easy to come up with the 16th as a date and this is just my own personal guess right so my guess is that they either had some kind of comment you know some kind of communications interception or some kind of document right some top secret document from the kremlin that indicated that date plus the 16th was during a green illumination cycle in other words the moon was very bright and therefore more conducive to nighttime airborne operations which is what russia would use right which as a side note is why we talk about this stuff because lunar illumination is important for things like this but it's not the only factor right and at the same time i can look at that assessment of the 16th and know that it was made by a junior analyst or somebody who doesn't know what they're doing in other words if i were back at the intel schoolhouse and i had a class of soon-to-be analysts in my classroom and i were to ask them to assess what date russia would choose to invade i would expect every one of them to say the 16th that's just what you come up with if you're a junior analyst that's the textbook answer and it's not it's not a wrong answer right if you're a junior analyst that's what i would expect and you use the intel cycle you process information and you come up with 16th as a date it's not textbook wrong it's just that if you know more about the situation you're not going to come up with that date unfortunately in today's intel community most analysts are incapable of giving anything other than the textbook answer either way this is all just a gut feeling on my part and i think i've beat this horse enough i just thought that this was a fascinating illustration of so many different ideas that it was worth sharing because this bridge has become more of a proverbial wooden horse than a wooden bridge it is a great example of analysis gone awry and how it's good to think for yourself and really it's an allegory of the deception that's taking place everywhere with regards to ukraine right now when this bridge first became public it swept through the ocean community like wildfire as it should this is important stuff right wet gap crossings and pontoon bridges in this context are something that should grab one's attention but it shouldn't consume one's entire attention span we shouldn't be scurrying from event to event just like the russians and the american defense industry want us to we need to see the whole picture but we also shouldn't ignore the indicators of an invasion keeping calm and keeping a cool head is very hard to do especially when you have so many intel gaps there's so much that you don't know but it's still important to do the world isn't going to end because you waited a day to form an opinion on something and it's always better for analysts to be unconventional in their thinking and speaking of invasion potential and looking at the whole picture right the team here found an interesting article that comes from a ukrainian think tank which outlines a few critical points that argue against the possibility of an invasion they think it's not likely with everyone arguing about the will they want they nature of the russians invading i wanted to offer at least one legitimate counterpoint to our opinion that the invasion is imminent right now opinions regarding russia invading are mostly coming from a perspective of american domestic politics a lot of people are rushing to fill the opposite space of whatever their political opponents are saying so the biden regime comes out and says russia is going to invade the people who are opposite to the biden administration come out and say russia is not going to invade they only want to have that opposition they don't want to actually look at the situation on the ground and the situation in the world they just want to be the opposite of whatever their enemies are and sometimes that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but if you shove america's domestic situation and the military-industrial complex aside we can clearly see russia's actions as inflammatory this paper which i would encourage you to read the link of which will be in the description of course and on the sources slide for this uh goes into detail on why they think russia won't be invading in any significant way so rather than highlight their points for them i'll let you read through them on your own but i would like to address some of the ideas that they had first up is the potential for a large-scale combat operation or lsco also known as world war iii at least in this context right so is russia prepared to launch a large-scale combat operation i don't think so but like we mentioned in an earlier brief russia has left her own territory laughably vulnerable to pretty much anyone who wants to strike her all of the units that have been deployed by russia have been either meant for a conflict in ukraine or as a deterrence for nato in other words if russia was preparing for a knock down drag out fight they're doing it all wrong because they haven't deployed nearly enough troops but is it enough to handle ukraine absolutely i think so i think russia's choice in style of warfare from everything from unit composition to their diplomacy is the perfect choice for going into combat for ukraine if i myself were planning an invasion of ukraine i would do exactly what russia has done so far now the other point that the paper makes is meant to address the follow-on question that people have right now people are asking okay russia is going to invade like that seems pretty clear at this point but how far will they go i like anyone else don't know the answer to that question but my guess is that russia probably will not go whole hog and launch a total invasion without any concerns for nato my guess is they won't do that but i also think that based on the units we've seen maneuvering they won't exactly go for a minor incursion either a byproduct of the world's eyes on ukraine right now is that russia will not be able to use their little green men or separatists at all this time right with everyone all hyped up and watching this is going to reduce a big advantage that the russians love to use secrecy that might be enough to deter them or it might not what do i think they're going to do i think they're going to invade how far will they go i don't know what limitations will they place on themselves to keep tensions with nato as low as possible while still meeting their objectives in ukraine i don't know that either how long does russia plan for it to take to reach their objectives i don't know but based on their logistics or lack thereof probably not very long i think what would be interesting is for russia to do a sort of double bluff and pretend to draw back forces or just leave them forward deployed for a few months until nobody cares anymore and then use the slow approach like they did in 2014 when they were more or less able to operate in the shadows and the world didn't care that would be pretty slick it would make the us leadership look foolish for all their recent sky is falling rhetoric and it would leave russia in a better spot for an invasion later in the year of course i'll be the first one to admit that as an analyst one has a very strong urge to put caveats on things every analyst has an escape sentence in every assessment just so that in the event that they're wrong they don't look like a complete idiot and i'm not perfect i do that too i try not to do that so much because i think it's cheap and dirty and i think that analysts being afraid of being wrong is why the intel community sucks so bad and why bad analysts or yes men keep getting promoted but i would also have to argue that man if this all turns out to be a massive military deception campaign on russia's part they certainly fooled me and here's what they did to fool me russia deployed more people and equipment to their borders than have ever been deployed since world war ii and they spent millions of dollars and countless resources doing it they deployed most of their naval forces for no reason and moved vessels around the planet all the way from the arctic and from the pacific just to fool us they established ford positions and hidden staging areas on their borders that we didn't know about letting us see where russia would deploy if an invasion were to occur for real in other words if russia did this this massive deployment just to test nato's responses and get nato to reveal their wartime tactics well nato certainly learned vastly more about russia than russia learned about nato these actions on russia's part are why i think russia is going to invade if we were to flip through the checklists of what russia would have to do to invade ukraine almost every box has been checked there are only a couple of criteria that haven't really been satisfactorily met and the weather isn't super great nor are their logistics thus the uncertainty but right now i would and am making decisions based off of russia invading ukraine and whatever effects that might have on us here at home in addition to being a vital look into what a modern large-scale war might look like we do not often get chances like this to learn without experiencing casualties of our own and since ukraine is about to pay the price the least we can do is remember and learn the lessons that have been learned the hard way by others at this stage russia has a lot to lose if they don't invade there are a few things that russia gets out of this deployment so far like embarrassing nato and the knowledge that nato will back down in the face of russian aggression that's quite clear i think this was i think that was clear before this whole ukrainian situation launched i think it was clear in 2014 when the ukrainian conflict sort of kicked off in earnest but if russia doesn't invade look what she will have gotten she will have strengthened nato presence in eastern europe along a whole host of other things right we're talking new alliances forming more equipment flowing into ukraine and nato being more likely to accept ukraine into their memberships so regardless of whatever u.s politicians or defense industry executives are saying about this this is really it russia has a lot to lose if they don't invade at this point they have a lot to lose and very very little to gain unless there is some other kind of secret objective that russia is trying to go for and i something that i don't understand right of course nobody's perfect and i might be a total idiot on this i might be missing something completely huge right but i just can't see at this point what russia would have to gain other than some very minor things if they don't invade and before we closed out for today i just wanted to remind everyone that there is a lot happening around the world in fact it's maddening to try to keep up with it all keeping an eye on what's going on in europe is important because it affects us here at home but so is keeping an eye on what's happening here in the us or with our brothers and sisters to the north so do not think that we are neglecting our own backyard at the expense of talking about ukraine because it's interesting we are certainly watching what's going on in canada as well because very few people are talking about what's going on in canada and the the implications that this has on our entire western civilization um and we're going to be talking a lot about that in the next brief as well the next non-ukraine brief so i just want to let everybody know we're watching this stuff and we're trying to figure out what this stuff means for all of us here at home as well so thanks again everyone thanks for your support and remember to not let this stuff stress you out too much it's pretty easy to be overwhelmed with a lot of the stuff that's going on these days so taking some time to unplug and unwind is just as important as being informed so thanks again 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 March 30th through April 5th, 2025. So let's get right to it. Starting off with our new slide again. It has been a very busy week for strategic movement around the world. On the home front, obviously the biggest concern this week has been largely economic in nature as the White House has released its reciprocal tariff plan, which we'll get to in a moment. The effects of this are largely still working out. Things are happening very, very quickly. So it's probably going to be a few more days before we see any real solid changes. Right now, things are just too fluid to to determine exactly how things are going to stand. Nevertheless, over in Eastern Europe, the war continues in Ukraine as before. Ukraine has very much fallen out of the news cycle as the economic impacts and things in the Middle East are heating up. But unfortunately, no developments on that for this week. Over in the Far East, the Chinese naval drills in the vicinity of Taiwan have concluded, largely without any big changes other than every time China does one of these drills, they learn something new. And this time around it it was really more of a focus on combined arms warfare and getting service branches to work with one another and improve communications and logistics and command and control things like this things that you would absolutely need to to be very sharp on if if you're going to invade a nation like Taiwan. So China has most certainly been practicing that and they have learned quite a bit. But most eyes around the world have been focused on the Middle East this week as what I'm hesitantly calling the surge has continued. Cargo flights from both Europe and from Southeast Asia have most certainly been flooding into the region, adding to the concerns that this whole force buildup in the Middle East might not actually be a bluff or any kind of power projection role primarily. But we'll get into that in just a moment. Speaking of strategic movements, I've created a a very rudimentary fleet tracker here just to add a little bit more context with regards to what is going on with regards to strategic movement. So the past week has been host to significant American naval activity on the west coast. The USS Nimttz carrier strike group has deployed on a standard rotation to the far east. The Carl Vincson CSG was the one that was stationed in the Pacific. However, Sentcom announced uh earlier a few a few days ago that they will be taking operational control of the Carl Vincent. So, there will be two aircraft carriers in Sentcom's AO until further notice essentially. So, right now in the Middle East supporting various operations in the Middle East are the Harry S. Truman carrier strike group and the Carl Vincson carrier strike group. The Vincent's probably going to make their way into the Indian Ocean right about now, right as this brief comes out. So having two aircraft carriers in the Middle East is not entirely an oh my gosh, we're going to war tomorrow kind of indicator, but it is something to be mindful of, except for the fact that there aren't two aircraft carriers in the Middle East. There are actually three. The French are also in theater. The Charles Zagal carrier strike group is wrapping up her deployment to the Middle East. It was a standard training deployment. Nothing out of the ordinary, but as of I think this morning, she was still spotted in Djibouti. So, uh, you know, she's still on station kind of in the region, and it's going to be interesting to see if we're expecting some kind of shenanigans to go down in the Middle East over the next couple of weeks. You may see her either kind of linger on station for a bit or shoot and scoot really quickly back up uh to her home waters to to rest and refit so that she could come back out again if needed. Once again, this is really the only carrier in NATO that's uh you know operationally like deployable at the moment as far as I know. So something to keep an eye on for sure. Also unconfirmed reporting this week. I I did want to mention it because even though we can't confirm it, this is one of those closed source things, but uh some closed source reporting that, you know, mainstream media journalists are getting directly from their contacts in the Pentagon states that at least one THAAD battery and at least two Patriot batteries have been deployed from Paycom to the Middle East. The THAAD battery looks like it probably came from South Korea because there were a lot of uh there was a a boost a noticeable increase in C17 and C5 traffic out of South Korea a few days ago which was a little bit odd and now we're kind of just putting two and two together. It's a very loose assessment but it makes sense that a a THAAD system would be deployed from South Korea to the Middle East. Same thing with the Euima. I've been keeping an eye on the USS Euima LHD7 which is once again not slated for deployment anytime soon. She just wrapped up a pretty big exercise uh in the Atlantic a few days ago or a couple weeks ago at least and she's going through various modernization processes right now. So right now she's been moving around a lot though. There are a lot of indications and warnings that she may be getting ready for a deployment and it's nothing scheduled as far as I know. So that'll be something to keep an eye on. unscheduled deployments of very large naval assets or non-standard deployments of naval assets or transferring one aircraft carrier from one AO to another that these are big indications for something going on. Of course, there are always counter arguments for that, but this is the real deal as it stands right now. Drilling down a little bit more specifically to the North American continent. I have continued to update what I'm I'm very loosely calling the domestic terrorism tracker. My goal for this is maybe a little bit hard to convey at the moment, but but generally speaking, this data set uh among others that I'm working on, this data set in particular is meant to track all of the things that are not necessarily just routine street crime, but a little bit a little bit more high-profile than that. It started off as tracking all the various domestic terrorism events, but as we all know, I I don't particularly like that word terrorism because, well, it can be used in a bunch of different ways and it's a very very loose definition. So, if anybody has any better idea for what I should call this, please let me know. But yeah, this is uh kind of the good baseline I'm laying down. And and the reason that I'm I'm trying to do this is so that we can look at charts like this. Uh again, this is very primitive. I've got much prettier ones in the works, but we can see that the latter half of the month of March experienced a burst of vandalism activity, but also other types of activities. You can start to see more colors come into the chart there at that point in time as well. we can start to see a diversification of these styles of more political politically motivated attacks. So again, I know it's super boring. It's not super helpful for most of you out there. I know a lot of you just want the just want the story, right? But these are the things that I'm working on kind of behind the scenes that will paint a more clear picture later. I promise it will make it will make sense later on. So switching gears back to the economic front, let's talk about the North American trade tariffs as they are being implemented by the White House. These are the charts produced by the White House. So, you're seeing the primary source material for which trade tariffs are going to go into effect with which nation. Again, it's a lot of data to take in, but really we only need to take a look at uh the first chart here. Even though we've got a total of eight charts, really the the first one is where most of the data is centered. So, now let me state right up front and I am most certainly not an economist. I really can't comment on a lot of these economic things with any accuracy. And as with anything in the world of economics, there is a lot of very vicious and vitriolic debate on a lot of this stuff. But let me just share with you two things that I'm kind of thinking about that might be helpful for you over the next week or so while we're still waiting to see how these things kind of shake out. First of all, the immediate impact is largely going to be with industries which can't easily and quickly bring manufacturing back home. So all of this aside, let's talk solutions for a moment. It's never a good idea to panic. Panic is never helpful. it's it's it doesn't really help us at all in any situation really. But being mindful of the impacts that could happen very very quickly uh in the world of logistics is very very helpful. Bottom line, if you need to buy something, know where that thing is made. Again, I don't have to tell you guys this. This is all just common sense kind of stuff. But considering that we are uh crossing the Rubicon or looking at the Rubicon in many ways these days, it's just important to recognize where we are at and take it from there, right? But anyway, we shall see, I suppose. So, let's move over to our favorite island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia. As many of you noted this week, I updated some products regarding the V2 spirits that have been observed at Diego Garcia for deployed. This imagery is not open source imagery. Well, technically it is, uh, but it's not free. you got to pay for it. This is commercial satellite imagery from March 30th showing five B2s. And we got some imagery a little bit more recently from April 1st that shows all six. So, at the moment, we have confirmed that at least six B2 Spirit bombers are for deployed to Diego Garcia along with at least six KC 135 Strata tankers for refueling, obviously. Now, we can get way down into the weeds with this, but I did want to briefly mention because I forgot to mention last time, these uh pillshaped objects uh just to the north of the runway there, these are indeed hangers for B2 Spirit bombers. So, when it comes to numbers, theoretically, technically, there could be as many as 10. Four in the hangers and six out on the runway. Now, I personally do not think this is likely. I think that the six that we see are the six that are there. Why do I think this? Well, essentially because we were able to bean count. Uh this is something that kind of goes back to the world of intelligence and the Cold War and essentially looking at satellite images and counting the beans as they move around on the map. In this case, airframes. Many an imagery analyst has made their living off of bean counting for their career, tracking the Soviets and Russian ships in and out of port like the Hunt for October, things like that. So, we can do the same thing nowadays with things like strategic aircraft. So, I will state that it is technically possible for four more B2 Spirit bombers to have sneakily taken off from Whiteman Air Force Base and flown halfway around the world to land here and not be imaged by a satellite and very hush hush gone right into the hangers. I don't think that's very very likely. Uh because all six of these we were able to track and we were able to know how many were on the way because of the aviation traffic as they were able to uh they had to communicate with air traffic control transiting various airspace uh corridors and things like that. Like I mentioned last week, there are only 20 of these around the country. So we only have 20 B2 bombers in existence. But I failed to mention last week that not all of them are operational. And as of the congressional hearings on various military budget stuff from last year, the Pentagon states that their testimony is at least that 11 are operational. So this means that right here on this image, you are looking at over half of America's entire long range stealth bomber force. That's a pretty big deal. B2s do fly around the world. They are seen doing exercises. Uh they even targeted the Houthis a while back couple of months ago, as a matter of fact. So, they do get around, but four deploying six to one base, I mean, these that's pretty rare. I don't I don't know if I've ever seen that before. I don't think I've ever seen this many B2s in one place outside of Whiteitman Air Force Base. If it's a bluff, it's one that we've never made before. So, that's all I can say so far. But, but more generally speaking, if we just acknowledge the fact that there are these six bombers are here and we've deployed such a huge number of these bombers to this one base in the middle of nowhere. What are they for? Well, in short, probably this place. This is Iran's Natan's nuclear site. So, this is one of, I believe, two facilities, which are kind of like the main nuclear facilities for the uh Iranian development of nuclear weapons. The Iranians have a lot of nuclear sites sprinkled all around their country, but this is one of the main ones that would probably be used. And and let me explain why. So, if we add some overlays here, we can see this is you normal nuclear facility, right? We've got the standard stuff that you might expect, of course, processing facilities for all kinds of precursor materials. We've got underground enrichment halls and uh facilities for enriching uranium and the processing of various minerals and all kinds of administrative buildings and power plants and transportation facilities. All kinds of stuff. It's just a military base that conducts enrichment of uranium, right? No surprises here. Well, well, the real secret of why these B2s are probably at Diego or Seia lies a little bit to the south. So, if we shift our map just a little bit to the south, we can still see the main base at the top of the slide here. We can look down into the mountains a little ways. And this, my friends, is probably why these B2s are a dig a Garcia. It may look like a nondescript mountain to to you and me, but rest assured, there are a lot a lot a lot of underground facilities here. And as we can see by the hardened bunker entrances here at the bottom left, there is an entire labyrinth of underground storage facilities that may or may not already contain nuclear weapons. So either way, this is probably why the B2s are here. Because if we take a more datacentric approach, we can just do 5 minutes of research on the internet and find out that to target an underground facility that's potentially hundreds of feet underground, you would need exactly one type of munition, the GBU57, otherwise colloquially known as the bunker buster. Now, there are a few other munitions that work as as well with these types of things. However, this is the tool for the job. If you're trying to use the correct tool for the correct job, this is exactly the only tool you would probably use to take out these facilities. Again, there are other options, but if we're thinking like a general, this is what you would need. You would need a bunch of B2s carrying a bunch of GBU57s and dropping these bombs not on, of course, not on the entrances, but on where the main underground storage halls and facilities are located. So, this is the deck stacked, right? We have half of our bombers overseas at some Podunk Island in the middle of nowhere. And these bombers, the B2s that are at Diego Garcia, fun fact, they are the only bombers that are currently, at least publicly, currently certified to carry the GBU57. So, we've got the right tools for the job, the right platforms to carry those tools in the theater and stationed at a base which is within range of these facilities. So, this is why we're trying to unfold the mystery. Is this a bluff or is this something else? This is where the grand question comes in. Has the Rubicon been crossed? Because as far as I can tell right now, there are many different theories about what's going on in the Middle East. Not just with the B2s, though that is a fascinating aspect of it. The B2s, the carriers were moving around, moving THADs and and Patriots around. You know, we're we're starting to add up a lot of random facts and random details that are starting to paint a picture. And so far there are two main theories. So the first theory is that this is all power projection. The United States doesn't really intend to do this. But we want to make the Iranians think that we will. And because of that, the Pentagon and Sentcom is undergoing this very elaborate, very very elaborate demonstration of power, which still by the way falls into the aspect of military deception because uh demonstration is a type of military deception, right? It is it is an ambiguity decreasing operation. meaning that it's a it's an operation that is intended to make your adversary more certain of what your plan is. Right? So, if you're an Iranian general right now, it sure does look like the United States is getting ready to bomb your country, doesn't it? So, that's kind of theory one. Theory two is a lot more nefarious and it's a lot more black pilling, if you if you will. So, the the other theory is that this is not a a bullying move. This is not a move intended to force the Iranians to be scared, but this is actually a legitimate wartime preparation. This is what we would see uh if we're actually going to war with Iran and uh that's really it. It's not really I mean if they're scared about it, then that's you know a side benefit. But essentially the second theory is that the Rubicon has been crossed. And just as a side note for those of you who don't know what this this reference is to crossing the Rubicon, this is an analogy that goes back to the time of Julius Caesar back in uh 48 49 BC I believe in which Julius Caesar, right, was kind of puttering around with his army in the district of Gaul uh where he was governor at the time and and an actual river really more of a small stream than anything else separated his district from the administrative boundary of Rome. And at the time it was illegal. It was an act of war. it was a huge deal to cross over that river Rubicon uh with an army. And Julius Caesar knew this and as his army was crossing over this river, he knew that he that that once he crossed over to the other side that he would essentially be committing treason and he would be committed to his attack. So there was no turning back once you've crossed the Rubicon. You've kind of committed to your military advance. So today, in short, the term crossing the Rubicon is essentially synonymous with crossing a point of no return. Now, the second theory, like I mentioned, is that maybe the White House is standing in the Rubicon right now. Maybe they're not fully committed right now to a war with Iran. Or maybe they are. Who knows? I mean, if a decision had been made, if Trump had secretly and covertly made a decision weeks ago to go to war with Iran, and all we're doing is checking down the calendar, you wouldn't see anything different. So, that's kind of one of the big bits of evidence uh that's stacking up to say that maybe theory 2 has a lot of weight as well. Of course, we want to think it's just power projection. We want to think that it is indeed just a just a posturing move to get the Iranians to do what we want. Um now, again, the original question of why are we involved in any of this at all? Well, that's another story for another time. But seeing as we're here now, the American people are trying to figure out is their government trying to bluff Iran or is their government committing them committing the American people to another Giwat. And at the moment, I'm sorry I don't have a good answer for you. There are a lot of other sub theories that that maybe come about. Like for instance, there's a lot of credence to the theory that well maybe it's not for the Iranians. Maybe it's not for any of these complexes, underground bunkers where the Iranians are storing nuclear material. Maybe that's not what we're going for. Maybe it's the maybe it's the Houthis. I'm not going to say there isn't a lot of evidence to say, well, maybe we maybe we deployed half of our long-range bombers to, you know, take out the Houthies. I mean, it would definitely be using a cannon to kill a mosquito, but I don't know. It's a new era. It's a new Pentagon. Maybe they're maybe they think they can do it. I don't know. The Rubicon idea is definitely a central aspect and will be important to think about over the next few weeks as more and more evidence starts stacking up. It's all based on a balance. What do you think? Where is the reasonable doubt? Is there more evidence in pile A or is there more evidence in pile B? So, all in all, I know this is not particularly helpful, but uh generally speaking, this is kind of where we're at. There are going to be a lot more indications and warnings uh come about over the next few days, weeks, months, years. and uh trying to keep a a more neutral perspective and acknowledging the the very serious concerns when they do appear is is going to be critical because I think a lot of times we're tempted to stick our heads in the sand and say, "No, this isn't happening and no, it's just a big bluff." And that may not be the best uh perspective moving forward. If nothing else, that's why I'm kind of paying attention to this because, you know, I I I I'm not saying it's happening. Don't don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that it's happening, but I see the potential for us to get dragged into another very bad conflict in the Middle East and I'm I'm a little bit concerned about that. So, that's why I buy these satellite images. That's why I keep an eye on this. And, you know, hopefully I'll look like a fool. You know, I would I would really be happy if I look like a complete idiot for spending so much time on this in a few weeks and all these planes go home and everything's hunky dory again. I would be the happiest person in the world. But until that happens, uh, I've got to keep buying satellite images. So, so wrapping things up for today. I know I've talked way too long, too much coffee today, I'm afraid. But wrapping things up with the ghost net. I'm afraid that I missed the ghost net window this week. I was preoccupied with some other stuff. And uh, by the time I got on, I only heard a few uh, SNR requests. So, that's to that's totally my fault. But anyway, the propagation by the time I got on wasn't too wasn't too great anyway. So, if you were out there, I probably wouldn't have heard you anyway. I'm trying to work on my antenna, doing a little bit of uh spring cleaning with antenna work and things like that. So, you guys know how it is. I'm I'm no different than than all of you who make this network a great thing. So, I've still got to get my practice reps into just like everybody else. So, so that's pretty much all I have for today. Uh here are the sources as usual. And you guys know the drill. Clickable links are on my Obsidian page for each day of reporting. Thank you all for watching. Thank you for sticking with me this time. I will keep working on the projects I'm working on. I've got some other irons in the fire, too, and we'll see how that pans out next week. But hopefully we'll get some more good news next week. So, thank you guys all for watching. Thank you for all of your support. I couldn't do it without you. I seriously mean that. And I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

//The Wire//2300Z April 24, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: BUILDUP OF AMERICAN FORCES IN MIDDLE EAST REACHES RECORD LEVELS. KUWAITI BORDER CHECKPOINTS HIT BY FPV DRONES. ARREST MADE REGARDING MOLOTOV ATTACK IN LOUISIANA.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Middle East: Overnight Kuwaiti forces reported two FPV drone strikes on border crossing checkpoints with Iraq. No casualties were reported as a result of the attack. Analyst Comment: The statement provided by the Kuwaiti Army did not specifically disclose which border crossings were targeted, however there are only two crossing points in total: one main crossing on the northern border, and a smaller outpost on the western border. The interesting detail in the notice is the disclosure that these attacks were conducted by fiber-optically-guided FPV drones, and both of these sites were too far away from each other for these attacks to have been conducted by the same team. -HomeFront- Louisiana: This morning one individual was arrested following the firebombing of a Tesla Service Center two weeks ago. John Michael Hinkhouse was arrested for throwing a Molotov device at the entrance to the facility, which resulted in fire damaging the front of the building. Hinkhouse was located after security cameras tracked him back to his residence after the attack. Washington D.C. - Two incidents involving city busses have taken place over the past 24 hours. Yesterday, a bus caught fire in the 9th Street Tunnel, resulting in the tunnel being shut down for many hours. The cause of the fire remains unknown. This morning, two city busses collided with each other head-on in the Pentagon's south parking lot, resulting in a total of 23x people being injured. Analyst Comment: Currently there are no indications that either incident was nefarious in any way, however it's worth paying attention to during periods of heightened terrorism risk, just in case other incidents pop up later. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Concerning strategic movement in the Middle East, American cargo flights continue unabated, along with the forward deployment of even more fighter aircraft. Last night another squadron of F/A-18's arrived at Al Dhafra Airbase in the UAE, and the USS *GEORGE H.W. BUSH* (CVN 77) arrived in the Indian Ocean following her long journey around Africa. Another Expeditionary Sea Base (ESB), the USS *MIGUEL KIETH* (ESB 5) is also projected to be approaching the operational area, after having transited the Strait of Malacca and should be arriving on station soon (though it is not clear as to if she is expected to take part in this operation). This brings a total of 3x aircraft carriers, 2x Expeditionary Sea Bases, and 1x amphibious assault ship (a total of 6 "flat tops") for whatever operations are planned. Of note, CENTCOM has provided press materials that imply that the *BUSH* is not replacing the *LINCOLN* or the damaged *FORD* but will serve independently as a third strike group throughout the region. This buildup has become even more substantial than the 4+ months of lead-up to this war breaking out, with even more naval assets being transferred from the Pacific to supplement the forces already in theater. As a reminder, at least one Brigade Combat Team (BCT) from the 82nd Airborne is still in the region. Considering all of these developments, the grand question remains: Does the US plan to reignite the war? This remains an unknown, and it's impossible to know what secret decisions have been made at the upper echelons of government. What is certain, is that a large-scale rearmament and resupply operation has been ongoing since the ceasefire went into effect, and enough resources are on station to conduct large scale operations if that is the chosen course of action. Not only is the war not over, but there are now vastly more resources in theater right now, than at the start of the conflict. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

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

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

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 3rd through the 9th of 2026. So, let's get right to it. At the more strategic level this week, the insanity continues with events in the Middle East mostly remaining in a state of chaos. At home, multiple domestic issues have been brewing for a while as both the summertime crime and immigration issues remain impacting for many Americans, which has been exacerbated by both the reforms within EBT benefits around the country coming into effect over the past few weeks, but also the international fuel crisis, which is beginning to hit some parts of the globe rather seriously at this point. For us Americans, our canary in the coal mine for the fuel crisis is Europe, and I'm afraid our friends across the pond are feeling the effects of roughly 20% of the global energy supply remaining mostly offline. All of these issues are exacerbating all of the pre-existing conflicts that are going on around the world, and I've made an actual slide this time for tracking some of the conflicts that I'm keeping an eye on that are going on around the world at the moment. Just so that we don't forget that there are a lot of different conflicts that are currently being fought around the world. First off, we have the situation in Venezuela, which has reached a point of sort of stability, although it's still kind of dubious as to what's actually going on. We snatched Maduro, and then that's all we heard from it. There really hasn't been any update on the status of the governance of Venezuela. There have been a few people step up to kind of take control, but this has really become more of a vassal state situation for the United States to export Venezuelan oil. This is what the United States has openly stated, so I don't know how this is working out domestically within Venezuela, but I guess we'll have to see how it works out. I just wanted to remind everyone that Venezuela still is a thing. They still exist, they're still around, and that's still a planning factor for things moving forward, especially with the chaos in the oil markets. Similarly, in the same area, but kind of a different conflict, are the narco strikes, which continue to take place in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. I suspect, again, I don't know, but I suspect off the coast of Ecuador or Colombia. Once again, US Southcom continues to post videos every day of themselves hitting narco boats and fast boats trafficking drugs, and there's really not been a whole lot of explanation as to what's going on here because again, a lot of the justification for the targeting for narcotics vessels in the Caribbean Sea is that Maduro was the technical leader of the cartel of the Sun and because of that, these are combatants now. That was kind of a loose justification at the time, but most people are not going to lose any sleep over drug dealer boats getting, you know, hit with Hellfire missiles. So, it just kind of went from there, but now that Maduro is gone, the strikes continue, right? So, they're not striking things in the Caribbean Sea, they're striking things in the Eastern Pacific. This is kind of an interesting campaign. It's a long-term bombing campaign that is going on that not a lot of people know about. So, that's worthy of consideration. Same thing in Somalia. We are indeed conducting air strikes in Somalia on a fairly regular basis and have been doing so for many years now. So, just want to remind everybody, yeah, that's going on. We're bombing Somalia. It's not very much, but it's still going on. So, you have to kind of account for it. As to why we're doing this, I don't really know. The AFRICOM uh PR pages have mostly just said this is due to, you know, trying to crack down on insurgents who may be eventually potentially supporting the Houthis at some point. I don't know. It's kind of a loose explanation. We may just be bombing stuff just to bomb stuff, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering that there's an active shooting war going on in Mali right now with a civil war underway there. So, that's something to keep an eye on. Africa is definitely pretty hot these days. It's probably not going to matter too much for the United States like I mentioned before, but American tax dollars are going to be funding something one way or the other. So, something to be aware of. Similarly, in the Middle East, we of course have the war in Iran, which we'll of course talk about in great depth, but we also have a war in Lebanon. A lot of people have forgotten about the war in Lebanon is continuing to go on. The ceasefire there in Lebanon kind of just went away. I don't know if it ever really went into effect, but the Israelis are continuing to push into Lebanon to secure their buffer zone or maybe it's more accurately described as living space. I don't know. But, that's that war is continuing on for sure. There was a strike the other day in Beirut. The large-scale bombing of Beirut has largely ceased or largely kind of tamped down a little bit, but they are conducting precision strikes in Beirut, allegedly precision strikes, right? That's definitely going on. And also, of course, we have the war in Ukraine. So, we still have a land war in Europe going on. It has reached a point of stability, I think. It's hard to say with these sorts of things. The war in Ukraine tends to tends to change its nature once a year or so or once every 6 months, depending on how the war has gone so far. And right now, there's currently a ceasefire going on for the uh Victory in Europe uh Day, VE Day. Russia and Ukraine have called a bit of a truce for a couple of days here uh to just, you know, celebrate that holiday, and then they're going to get back to it, but hopefully we'll get close to a peace deal. Again, there has been uh quite a bit of talk with regards to securing a peace deal over the years. We've gotten really close to seeing the end of this war a few times uh right before veering away. So, that can always happen. It's not over until the fat lady sings, and the war in Ukraine is certainly not over just yet. Similarly, in Iran, the war in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf War, whatever you want to call it, is still going on and has mostly transitioned into what I think should probably be called the Hormuz Crisis, because that's basically where a lot of this hostility is uh remaining for now. The larger war, the bombing campaign within Iran, has largely come to a point of pause due to this ceasefire. However, things in the Strait of Hormuz, uh the only thing that really matters in this entire conflict at this point, are still very much uh at a point of contention. So, that's kind of going on. And then also, in Southeast Asia, briefly wanted to mention the Burmese Civil War is still going on. It's been going on for many, many years. It's been a lot of interesting uh combat data coming out of that for those of you who like to study uh the the way of modern war, uh the Burmese Civil War or the Myanmar Conflict or Myanmar Crisis, however you want to phrase it, that is a factor as well, because Southeast Asia is looking at a large-scale famine situation because of the Hormuz Crisis. So, fertilizer can't make it out of the Middle East to Southeast Asia for the rice planting seasons, and that's a bit of a problem. And there's already a hot shooting war in Burma, which the United States, by the way, is supporting like we are supporting the rebels in Myanmar. Publicly, we're not supporting them with military aid, but we are providing them with non-military aid and material and stuff like that. So, again, something the United States is involved in. It's probably not that big of a deal outside the area, and it's not something that's going to spill into a wider region. I mean, it's South these Asia, so it always could, but it's probably not likely. What's more likely is that is that this is going to be a complicating factor as food shortages and food insecurity becomes a thing over the next couple of years due to the planting seasons being thrown off due to the Hormuz crisis. So, again, everything is a domino. Things are coming into fruition that we probably did not expect or, you know, the second and third order effects are starting to rear their ugly head, and they're probably likely to do so over the next few months as well. Hard to predict, but we'll do the best we can with it. Taking a look at the strategic movement for this week, a lot of the assets that are staged around the world are do reflect a lot of these conflicts. So, the biggest change is the departure of the Ford Carrier Strike Group from the Middle East this week. The Ford is going home to conclude her very, very long deployment to the region, and I think she's planned to undergo long-term repairs from the fire that she suffered a few weeks ago. There is no replacement for the Ford right now because the Lincoln and the Bush are operating together as part of the unified command effort that is the American blockade in the Gulf of Oman. Maintaining this blockade is a gargantuan effort, which requires a lot of resources, and since the hostilities are mostly confined to the Gulf of Oman right now, the US forces in the region are concentrated in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, as well as in the Indian Ocean, which is mostly serving as one big interdiction zone for Iranian ships that either run the blockade or otherwise are strategic targets or stateless vessels. So, that's the force allocation that I'm tracking around the world for this week. A lot of hardware, a lot of steel is in the water, and and it doesn't look like there's going to be any change on that anytime soon. So, before we get into the homeland concerns for this week, let me briefly take a moment and recap the tactical situation on the ground in the Middle East, just because a lot has happened and things are starting to become more active after a couple of weeks of ceasefire. There has been a lot of shooting in the Strait of Hormuz over the past 48 hours with skirmishes being reported between Iran and the UAE, as well as between American forces and Iranian gunboats. There's not a whole lot of information on any of these sporadic engagements, but I am working on plotting these as best that I can. Just know that out at sea, it's impossible to know for sure where anything is hit, because unless we see a boat sinking in real time, there's just there's not really a good point of reference for stuff like this. So, it's a lot more challenging uh when there's uh combat on the high seas as opposed to on the land where we could get a satellite image to confirm stuff uh and local eyewitnesses are actually physically there to record this stuff. So, it's been really complicated to plot stuff this week. I'm still waiting on some clean satellite imagery to figure out what actually was struck in uh the UAE and also on Qeshm Island. These things are not exactly uh easy at this point because the stranglehold on information is definitely tightening around the region. On the more diplomatic side of things, two major initiatives have come to a head. Project Freedom from the United States and the Persian Gulf Strait Authority from the Iranians. Details on both are pretty sketchy and hard to verify, but Project Freedom was the short-lived effort to force open the Strait of Hormuz and essentially provide top cover and missile defense for merchant vessels to get out of the Persian Gulf. This effort lasted about 24 hours because the Iranians had struck three of the first five ships that attempted to make a run for it. At least that's the number by my account. It could be more, it could be less. I don't know the exact hour that Project Freedom officially began. Either way, this project is over or at least halted for the foreseeable future, which might be for a variety of reasons. Mainstream media is saying that the US stopped uh Project Freedom because the Saudis and the Emiratis banned the use of their airspace for this operation because they saw it as a sharp escalation that would only result in retaliatory efforts targeting them. I can't confirm beyond all doubt that's what happened because a lot of this is just conjecture and, you know, rumor and stuff like that. But, either way, what's clear is that Project Freedom is over or at least paused for now. In response to this effort, in response to the Project Freedom scuffle, the Iranians formalized what they are calling the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which is basically just a web portal and an email system that ships can use to apply for permission to transit the strait. How this is going to work out is anyone's guess, but the general consensus is that the GCC states are probably not going to accept the Iranians controlling the strait because it was an international waterway before the war. However, again, easier said than done, right? And removing Persian control from this waterway is proving to be way more complicated than anyone in the US government seems to know. So, for now, the situation is kind of a hot shooting stalemate. It's hard to describe. The Iranians control the strait or at least influence it enough to prevent free travel through it. Mines are still a problem. The minefield's still there, and the US Navy can't begin to clear them in earnest until the situation is over. And the merchant traffic through the strait is not looking good and has trickled down to basically nothing. Only local ships and a handful of Chinese and shadow fleet tankers have transited in and out of the Gulf. So, traffic is not anywhere near normal. Quite a tough spot we seem to find ourselves in in the Middle East, but on the home front, things are becoming a little bit more serious as well. On the home front for this week, right now, the biggest factor for the United States is the fuel crisis. Specifically, not just the high prices, but also sheer availability, which might become a problem at some point. For those of you who are looking to plan ahead, and if you're looking for an indicator to start thinking about fuel and preparedness terms, now is the time to start thinking about that. This is a pretty big topic, and it would take far too long to flesh out all of this. But, the short version of what to pay attention to is that there's no real way to know how high gas prices will get before the availability itself is cut off. And there are competing ideas on this from a preparedness perspective. I don't know which one's right. I'll just explain the general idea here. Right now, there are a lot of people who are talking about oil rising to $200 or even $300 per barrel because those are the numbers that President Trump himself said would be acceptable. He clearly stated that even if oil got to $200 a barrel, the current war would be worth it. Now, what might this mean in terms of gas prices? Well, most people expect this to be about 7 to $9 per gallon for regular unleaded. Of course, this figure is going to vary by state quite a bit, but $7 is a general figure that is cited by most journalists. However, this figure is based on an economic model and not really a national defense model. Again, there's competing ideas here. So, economists will tell you the math because they have the spreadsheets. So, if you ask an economist, "Hey, how much could gas prices become if the Strait of Hormuz were to be closed forever?" And they'll dutifully give you a figure. I mean, it's you're going to some high, you know, astronomical number or something like that. But if you ask me that question, I'll tell you that question is kind of a farce because if it's planned to be closed forever, we're going to use strategic resources on Iran, and this is going to be all kind of a moot point. Just to cut right to the point to pay attention to, do not assume that gas prices will just keep getting more and more expensive forever. For as long as this lasts, there is a zero barrier, right? At some point, we're going to be using strategic measures, and gasoline itself will be measured mostly by availability and not its market price. This point is indefinable and unknown because there's just there's just too many factors to know how this is all going to work out, but what is certain is that gasoline is not going to get to 20 or $30 per gallon because long before it gets to that point of scarcity, price alone is not going to be the most important factor, and we'll probably just have a large-scale war before that. Personally, again, I don't know which theory is correct. I just know that a lot of people hop on the news. All the talking heads get on there and say, "Okay, oil is going to be $150 a a if this happens. Oil is going to be $200 a barrel if this happens. And if it goes on for this long, it'll be at $300 a barrel at this date or something like that if something doesn't change. And I think that that is probably not the best way to think about it because long before that, we're going to have issues with availability. And the reason for that is because in terms of what's going on in the Middle East, there are more factors than just the White House and Iran and the Israelis. It's not just about turning the tap on or off. There are complications within the oil production cycle as well. For instance, oil is not just like a spigot that you can turn on and off. There is a ramp up and a ramp down process that takes time. And maintenance is a problem, too. If an oil rig is shut down for too long, things get clogged up from methane hydrates or something, and everything corrodes. It's not something that you can just turn back on in many cases. And when it is turned back on, it might not produce as much oil as before due to these problems. Just to add a little bit of context on this for what a lot of the talking heads are saying, there's an interesting relationship between pumping oil out of the ground, refining it, and then storing it. For instance, Kuwait. Kuwait has produced exactly zero barrels of oil for export for the month of April. So, they're exporting not a single barrel from their from their country during the month of April. But, they're still pumping it out of the ground, and they're filling up their storage slowly. Why are they doing this? Why are they still pumping oil out of the ground to fill up with their storage, you know, fill up their storage tanks, when they know that they can't get a tanker out through the Gulf? Well, it's because you can't exactly turn that stuff off. If you shut down the pumps hard, you know, shut them off completely, then the whole system gets out of whack. So, basically, you have to just turn that turn that production down to a minimum. What that number is is going to vary by refinery, right? You can't really know. If the storage starts filling up, then they then they have to shut that stuff hard down, and it's going to become even longer of a process to start their infrastructure back up again. Before the war, Kuwait was producing 2.5 million barrels of oil per day on average. So, you go from 2.5 million barrels to zero barrels exported. That means that either you've cut production all the way down and you're just trickling the oil out of the ground to keep the keep the pipes warm, so to speak. But, it's got to go somewhere. It's got to go into the storage, otherwise very bad things happen with regards to the machinery and maintenance and stuff like that. So, getting back to that 2.5 million barrel per day production level might take a lot longer than we might think, especially if production has been halted or reduced sharply for such a long period of time. OPEC in general, the GCC states, are well known for ramping up and ramping down production for both economic and political purposes. So, there is a little bit of elasticity there, or a lot of elasticity there, in terms of how much they produce versus how much they export. So, there's a lot of flexibility in the system. So, this effect may be negligible. I don't know. But, if we just take the UAE into account, another factor which must be considered is the straight-up destruction of refineries. I've said this many times before, so I'm not going to beat a dead horse here, but several Arab nations have stated that many of their facilities have been damaged to the tune of billions of dollars. And what's more, a lot of these facilities will take years to repair enough to get back to full capacity. So, once again, it's not just an issue of the strait itself being closed and exporting being a problem. It's also on the production side of the house. There are production problems as well. It's going to take many, many, many years to get back to the level, if we are ever to get back to the level of oil production that existed on February 27th of this year. In one day, it all came crashing down, and I don't know how this is going to work out in the future. And, as luck would have it, the destruction or damage of facilities in the Middle East is not the only factor to consider because a lot of refineries have been destroyed or damaged around the world either by industrial accidents or due to armed conflict. Like I mentioned last week, the war in Ukraine starting to involve the targeting of Russian oil refineries is something that is easily forgotten because it's a different war, and it's targeting Russian oil probably won't affect Europe as much because years of sanctions have largely stifled the market for Russian oil in the Western world. But Russia sells a lot of oil to China and China also gets their oil from the Middle East. So China is going to be heavily affected if this continues on because they're getting the double whammy of Russian production being affected. We don't know how much it's affected, but it can't be zero, right? Having 18 or 20 of your refineries being hit by drones and taken offline for a while, that's not nothing. It's got to have some level of impact. But their other main suppliers are also being hindered in the Middle East. So China is definitely paying attention to what's going on. And if everybody who says, "Oh well, it's worth it if we're affecting China." Well, the United States is going to be affected, too. Maybe more so in some areas because the United States, by comparison, is also being heavily impacted because we also import a lot of oil from the Middle East for domestic production and refinement. The US does produce a lot of oil, but it's a different product altogether. This is a gross oversimplification, but the US mostly produces a lot of light sweet crude, which we export around the world. The actual refineries in the US are built to handle the heavy crude from the Middle East. Even though the US does export a lot of oil, a lot of what we need for domestic production actually comes from the Middle East. Thus, our current high gas prices. Why are we exporting so much petroleum if our gas prices are so high? Shouldn't we just keep that here? Well, yeah, probably, but we can't refine it here. So we sell what we can and we buy what we can. And we refine what we can here at home. And what we need to refine here at home is the Middle Eastern oil. That's one of the reasons for the craziness. I've gotten a lot of messages and emails from people asking like, "Why are we sending our oil overseas if we need it here at home?" Well, it's because we can't refine it here. So we sell it to the customer who can. Again, this is a gross oversimplification, but that's kind of the general gist of the how complicated things are at the moment. In the context of refineries around the world being impacted, we're also not immune to problems with domestic production on our end. Just taking a look at the map, we can see the recent problems at domestic US refineries over the past couple of weeks. There have been several fires and maintenance problems that have impacted production, which is undeniable. What is definitely harder to get a bead on is whether or not these incidents are the result of malign action. On the one hand, it's quite the coincidence that the Middle East is cut off, Russian refiners are being taken offline due to the war, and now refineries all around the world from India to China are catching fire. On the other hand, this is exactly what I would expect because when one major refinery is taken offline, all of the others have to take up that slack. And how do they take up that slack? They run to the red line, don't they? Many refiners are being pushed to their limits and beyond in the US right now, and a lot of mothballed units are being brought online again because the US is desperate to produce and refine as much petroleum as possible. So, it's a tough spot because everything's being run at the red line, and things break all the time. Personally, I'd wager that we will continue to see a sharp increase in legitimate and verifiable industrial accidents at refineries in the US over the next few months. So, that's going to be something to be aware of and keep an eye out for as the situation in the Middle East remains in a state of, well, I guess stagnation is still the best word to describe it. Taking all of the words and statements by officials out of the equation and just ignoring all of the talk and rhetoric, the events will speak for themselves. The strait is still closed to Western tanker traffic. The US Navy has not yet been able to ensure freedom of navigation in the strait, therefore supply is down. Demand in the US remains the same and is going to go up as the summertime arrives. And because of that imbalance, prices climb higher, and the official policy of the White House, as it stands, is that $200 a barrel is an acceptable price to pay. Of course, that may change if we ever get close to that. It may just be words right now, but President Trump has given us a number that he says is acceptable. And so, we have something concrete to plan on, for better or for worse. Might not happen tomorrow or ever, but starting to think about the practical ways to insulate against these problems would be a good idea. I was just trying to think the other day, what would I do if gas got up to $9 a gallon? Like, how would I be able to maintain operational readiness if that's the case? Well, it's complicated because it's not just about price, but planning for long-term disruptions would be wise at this point, and I myself am digging down right now to start organizing my mapping products to help wherever possible. There's no need to panic, there's no need to start stock piling fuel at the moment, although I mean, you certainly could if you wanted to, but regardless of what happens in the Middle East, the energy crisis in the homeland is already beginning to happen, and the question is how serious it's going to be. Hopefully, it won't be too bad, but we'll do the best we can no matter what. And with that, that's all I have for today, but I did want to close today by reminding us all that no matter what happens in the Middle East, we still have a lot of problems here in the homeland that are more serious and more impacting to us on a daily basis. One of the biggest problems that has shifted out of the news cycle is the issue of both illegal immigration and the sharp increase in crime around the country. Many of you know that earlier this year I wanted to create a segment just for reminding us of all of the important incidents that took place, but have just become memory hold and forgotten about. And today, I wanted to highlight just one case among many, which is the case of Marco Villanueva Gonzalez. Back in 2018, this individual killed Jordan Huguely by driving 86 mph in a 35 mph zone in Midvale, Utah. This led to a crash which killed Huguely, and at the time Gonzalez was arrested. As he was a juvenile at the time, he was sentenced to only 6 months probation by Judge Tupac Renteria. And from there, he was just basically let go. Jumping forward to last year, since Gonzalez is an illegal immigrant, he was picked up by ICE in Salt Lake City on drug charges and held in ICE detention. This arrest was publicized by the ICE social media page at the time, and everyone just forgot about it and assumed that he got deported. That assumption was incorrect because somewhere along the way ICE let him go. What he has been doing between May of 2025 and now is not known, but it turns out that it is not good because he was just arrested again. On May 4th, he was released from the Salt Lake County Jail to ICE. So, he's back in ICE custody and completely off the grid. We don't know if he's been deported for real this time or if he's been released back into society again. It is hard to make general assumptions based on a case study, but accountability at ICE when it comes to actually deporting criminals has been lacking over the past few months after attention has shifted away from this issue. I don't know how many deportations are happening because ICE stopped publishing the numbers, but I can prove beyond all doubt that at least one person who was in their custody somehow not just evaded deportation, but remained in the United States committing crimes. And I wanted to mention this because it is so incredibly easy for us to forget that there are victims here. A father lost his son by an illegal who suffered no meaningful consequences for his actions. Not only did Gonzalez not show any remorse for his actions, but he continued to be a menace to society for years because Tupac Linteria gave him a slap on the wrist and ICE failed to deport him despite parading around his arrest as a PR victory. All the while a father has been trying to get the tiniest gram of justice for his son. ICE now has the chance to do the absolute minimum and finally deport this individual and it would be a very good idea for them to do so because at this point with tens of thousands of victims like this being murdered every single year, deportation is the moderate, loving, and kind option and the option that allows this individual to evade justice to be honest. But in polite society, this is the option that we have at the moment for handling these types of people and this delicate balance might not be in place forever. So, we'll keep Jordan and his family in our prayers and do what we can to not forget these cases even though the latest shiny object might distract our attention. It's a hard thing to keep a good foundational perspective on events these days because we're constantly dragged from one headline to the next, but we have to remember what the end goal is, which is to do good things, help stop the civilization decline, reverse the bad things, and hold bad people accountable, and do so from a place of honor and magnanimity. We are not going to get out of this mess without everyone putting in their part and going above and beyond to improve the world around them. Many times we don't have a direct way to do this, but we can help in indirect ways at minimum. Picking up trash, keeping yourself clean and physically fit, and learning a lot of new skills that might be helpful are all things that we can do on the individual level. We do not have a chance at tackling these big things until we can do the little things right. For me, one of those little things is building maps and awareness and also working on communication stuff. I know it's boring, but think about how you would have known any of the information I've covered today if a platform goes down. Sure, you might hear it from somebody else or in some alternative way, but I think that strengthening our lines of communication are a basic requirement for moving forward at a time when everything from censorship to technical outages are becoming more of a headache. And that makes for a good transition into the Ghost Net reports for this week. As many of you know, the Ghost Net is a radio net which hopes to provide some level of both emergency preparedness and also everyday use. Back in the day, we used to get the news over the radio, which is a shocking concept now, but this is our attempt to rekindle old-school reliable ways to exchange information around the world no matter what happens. And this week, the net was fantastic once again with many people sharing a lot of information about events and incidents in their local areas around the world. I myself have been trying out the Android version of JS8Call, which is the software package that we use to control our radios, and it seems to be working out quite well. I've heard some reports from people saying that the Android version doesn't decode as well as the desktop version, but I can't really tell a difference on my end. I will say though that it is harder to send longer messages, at least on the version that I have, I can't send more than just one standard block of messages on JS8Call on Android, but the app is continually being updated, so hopefully this will be a good analog to replace a lot of the capability we have from our laptops on our phones at some point. Right now, I've been testing this with my own field radio setup, and I've been trying to streamline the experience as best I can. More to come on that later, but for everyone who might be hearing of the Ghost Net for the first time, you can check out the handbook I've written on it, as well as the entire playlist on the project that's on my YouTube page. So, that's all I have for today, everyone. As always, all of my research can be found on my Obsidian page, and my mapping data can either be found at the links below or on my GitHub page, where I provide updated KMZs for my work as I make updates, which is pretty much every day. So, thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is a briefing for Sunday 19 September 2021 and it is being recorded the day prior on 18 September so let's get right to it with the weather so whether over the next 12 hours is going to be pretty bad for the Pacific Northwest with lots of turbulence and low-level Cloud ceilings for much of the West Coast there's also going to be some spotty low-level cloud coverage throughout the American Southeast mostly over Mississippi Alabama area so that's going to be a factor for any kind of surveillance operations in the area at least for visual surveillance as we move forward into the winter season the days are getting shorter and the night time is getting longer so we're going to have a lot more hours of Darkness to play with so the end of evening nautical twilight which is also known as eent is going to be at 807 PM Eastern Standard Time for the for the eastern time zones this will of course be similar for pretty much all of the other time zones as well also we're right now in a green illumination cycle so the moon is going to be very bright in the areas that don't have cloud cover that is and even in the areas with cloud cover there's going to be significant lunar illumination so if you're out there using any night vision devices you're going to have a pretty good time seeing what you're seeing what you're looking at when it comes to lunar elimination and like I mentioned high level clouds for the Pacific Northwest are going to be pretty pretty thick over the next 18 hours also over the Mississippi Alabama area as Fallout from some of that weather rolling it over the gulfed coast comes to fruition but for the rest of the country it's going to be pretty clear for the next 18 hours moving into no Tams really there's only two of note one of which has expired or already and so I wanted to throw it up on the screen this is actually the no Tam for Del Rio Texas again this one has been taken down due to public backlash but this is a no Tam that was put up to prevent journalistic agencies from getting pictures of the immigration crisis that's going on right now at the International Bridge down there in Del Rio so the federal government did not did not like the fact that journalists were getting pictures of the immigration crisis down there so they put up a TFR temporary flight restriction to not allow drones to fly in the area now obviously this caused a huge backlash actually the Texas State Department of Public Safety actually took up Fox News journalists in their police helicopter which can get around the no Tam and uh that so they could get pictures of the actual crisis down there so clearly this was a huge problem for the the presidential Administration and so they put a no Tam up for special security reasons right so they got the FAA to put up a TFR to prevent drones from flying uh uh near the the bridge itself and also the second notam is for of course presidential operations this is the standard presidential vacation one uh Biden is spending the weekend at his beach house so this notam went into effect uh actually as if we're recording this yesterday so from the 17th of September to the 20th of September so he's having taken an extra long weekend at his beach house so that's the no Tam for that and then moving into civil unrest really there aren't any major changes I I changed the change the map back to the normal gray color so that it wasn't so horrendously bad on the eyes but really we're still kind of in weight and C mode when it comes to a lot of these uh civil unrest sort of potential actions around the country uh right now number five there in Washington DC as this is going on as as we're uh recording this here today on the Saturday really not that many people have shown up so it looks like pretty much everybody else was feeling the same way that we were feeling about it like it was a chance to entrap people I mean even Trump himself issued statements saying that he thought it was a setup so yeah it's kind of it's kind of obvious these kind of things now um so yeah I just wanted to point that one out but really for the rest of the country really not a whole lot of change when it comes to the civil unrest front all right so moving into Logistics a quick update on the microchip shortage the Biden regime has issued permits for the Chinese tech company Huawei to import microchips from the US which doesn't really look good I mean this is coming at a time when the US is short there's a global microchip shortage of pretty much any kind of semiconductor ship and yet we're exporting the manufacturing capabilities that we have to China so the manufacturing world is complex and things that seem like they are horrendously bad or inefficient might actually not be this is kind of a weird world to be in honestly with the way that you know globalism works now whereas you could have you know a product made in one country and then shipped to 18 other countries to finish the manufacturing process right so I don't know the intricacies of this particular International Trade sort of agreement but it really doesn't look good at a time when the world is desperate for microchips and China is where most of them are made so why are we issuing permits to for China to import them so in any case it's going to I don't know if this is going to directly affect the rest of the microchip world because every chip is different right every chip has a different use and when we talk about microchips we're not we're not talking about them it's we're talking about them in extremely broad terms so it's really hard to say which chips are used for what there's millions of different kinds of ships but the larger theme Here is that all of them are in pretty much very short supply also the paper shortage has again like I mentioned last time gotten slightly worse a lot of a few more publishing companies have come out and said that hey they're they're going to be entering into a time of shortage for book publication which is interesting and uh something to be mindful of as we move forward into the future and then just briefly before we roll into critical infrastructure where I'm going to talk about it a little bit more I did want to briefly talk about the propane shortage so it looks like there's going to be potentially some propane supply chain issues moving into the winter season when demand for heating propane goes up and our exports of propane have gone up quite significantly as well so we're exporting more to other places but our demand domestically has also gone up so that could lead to some supply chain issues moving forward into the winter season so jumping into critical infrastructure concerns uh really the a lot of random stuff today first uh really around the country there are a lot of grocery stores that are publicly announcing that they are reducing their store hours and there's the the long list so far that we have been able to find uh you can comment below if your local grocery store has issued a statement as well but these are really just the bigger chains throughout the country that have publicly announced hey we're cutting our hours because of Staffing shortages all of the stores here on the slide have announced that they are cutting their hours due to not having enough Personnel to actually man the store for a long you know many hours during the day during multiple shifts so this is going to be a huge problem as we move forward you know everyone's talking about oh there's a wage shortage ah there's a worker shortage whatever side of the aisle you're on with regards to what is causing this problem it still is a problem right there's not enough people working in the service Industries or in the kinds of Industries like grocery stores and stuff so it's going to be a huge problem when stores are having to shut their number of hours and then up next I'm going to come back to number two I'm going to skip it for now I'm going to go to number three and talk about the Border situation down there in Texas so right now it looks like there might be anywhere from 10 to 12 000 illegal immigrants that have sort of set up they're being held sort of in a camp underneath the International Bridge down there in Del Rio Texas so I'll go ahead and throw up a video for you guys to see the situation down there it looks like there's you know kind of a lot of people and this is kind of again highlighting the Border crisis that's going on people that live in the area or live in areas or states where a lot of these illegal immigrants are being transported to around the country obviously know that this is a problem but if you live in some place you know like Wisconsin or you know Maine you might not know what's going on down at the southern border and you might just think that it's just another political issue right we you know immigration is a political issue most of the time and a lot of people ignore it because they're not affected by it but I urge you to take a take a good look at what's going on down along the southern border when it comes to the numbers of people that are coming in and you can quite clearly see as this incident illustrates that it's it's moving out of the realm of politics and moving into the realm of a logistical problem right well a lot of people are saying are saying that that's been the case for years now but you know 12 000 people is is kind of a lot of people so where are they going to go and we've got you know that number of people transiting over the Border you know every hour or so for the rest of the border so you can look at whatever made up statistic you want for that but really the the concern is that hey okay the border is pretty much open in a lot of places it's completely open and a lot of people are coming into the United States and when you start adding this stuff up it's not really so much about politics anymore so much as about like Logistics like where are they going to go so huge problem take a look at it and uh be prepared to get into some highly polarized terrain because talking about immigration or even just trying to research it's very very difficult to do so moving back to Hurricane Ida the department of energy actually released the products that show how much uh hurricane Ida impacted our crude oil production in the Gulf of Mexico during that time period And as you can see right there it was quite a serious dip in our petroleum production capabilities so huge problem especially considering that moving into the winter season we're going to see propane prices Skyrocket so right now propane prices on the on the market are the highest levels since 2014 according to the eia so that's up a hundred and twenty percent from the same period last year so huge problem we're also exporting a lot of this propane to other countries at a time where it's not so much about trade as it is so much about having the actual supplies on hand to heat houses in emergency situations through the winter so something to keep your eye on I know that everybody's eyes glaze over when they're looking at charts and line graphs and crude oil production statistics and stuff like that that's really boring and hard to research however something to keep in the back of your mind as we move forward that hey you if you use propane for heating or cooking you might want to go pick up an extra cylinder before we get into the extreme price increases this winter and then moving back to the map for number five there there was a an outage on the Verizon network across several States actually and across several different um plans so data was down cell towers were down land lines were down internet connectivity was down for those that have it through Verizon uh stuff like that so a lot of people were waking up because it happened early in the morning and realizing hey I have no connection to the outside world and this was a big issue for for Verizon for a little while uh even though most of the time when there's a cell phone outage or something like that people tend to forget about it pretty quickly once it's over and they don't really realize the lesson there that hey when you're so when your cell phone went down your internet also went down and your TV also went down and and your data plans also went down so all that stuff being on the same network really drives home the fact that it would probably be a solid idea to make sure you understand how your local telecommunications networks are set up as best you can because when these out to just happen they're going to happen with no warning whatsoever and you really don't want to be stuck trying to communicate when you have no ability to do so so something to keep in mind as we move forward into the winter season when there's going to be lots of ice on lines and things like that and a lot more outages due to the winter weather conditions moving forward into significant governmental action it's really the first one is the Facebook it was revealed through various sources that Facebook has a program called X check which has been allowing VIP users like celebrities basically people that are you know we know as blue check marks are people that have been verified and they're like part of the club right celebrities and things this program allows them to bypass Facebook's censorship policies and post content that ordinarily is caught by their censorship you know tools and things like that like when your post gets flagged and taken down and stuff like that basically this is a fast lane you write like a TSA pre-check through the security for Facebook's censorship tools so really this program's existence sort of confirms what we already know that Facebook is indeed uh censoring people uh some people more than others so and if you look at the people that are part of this program well then it becomes a lot more clear there are there are the people that are controlling Facebook right so also the Fallout from uh General Millie's uh traitorous Act is has gotten quite worse actually Trump's former acting Secretary of Defense stated that he specifically did not authorize Millie to make these uh phone calls and things like that so really what a lot of people who are in the know and sort of in the defense Community I really we're not seeing hardly anybody say this isn't treason like it's pretty clear or like a textbook case of treason Millie called China and stated that he would in fact warn China if strategic assets were used so the Fallout from this is going to be much more significant than just some guy who's may or may not get fired I I really don't think Millie will get fired but I will be surprised if he does at this point but this is going to have very wide-ranging concerns even if we might not see it right now you can bet your last dollar that all of the other nuclear Powers at least the ones in the Western World particularly you know NATO and a lot of other European powers and things like that they're gonna they're sitting down and thinking wait a second the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the United States of America was conspiring with China to stop the president from having strategic strike capabilities right like the Press is going around and and saying that Hall Millie did a good thing he prevented Trump from launching nuke set at something what they don't understand is how our nuclear Triad works and our strategic options news flash they're not all nuclear that's the whole thing is that Millie prevented strategic options being provided to the president and that means a lot of other these a lot of these other powers are thinking okay um that's not good because the chairman of the joint staff is conspiring with China one of their biggest adversaries in a time where strategic options might be necessary that's a huge concern this brings back sort of the question that the JFK asked going way back to the beginnings of our nuclear system and the question that he asked was how would someone know that I the president of the United States gave the order to launch how would a person sitting in a silo know that the order was genuine and coming from me and really a lot of other nations around the planet who have nuclear strike capability have also been asking that question and really there is no particular satisfying answer this brings up a lot of questions about the nature of the nuclear Triad the vulnerability of the systems to a rogue general or something like that right your old Crimson Tide movie comes back into the debate again because these are things that were supposed to have solutions for but this General Millie thing is proving that ah no we we don't right the fact that Millie can influence the Nuclear Strike capability or any other strategic acid doesn't have to be nuclear any kind of strategic strike the fact that he can influence that and prevent the man in the seat from influencing it calls into question the entire process so you can bet that some very high ranked staff officers are uh are sitting in their Skiffs and wondering okay what do we do because this proves that this is a problem this should not have been able to happen right one guy should not have been able to stop the president from getting anything right but he clearly did and he admitted to it in a public venue so that's a problem and it's going to be something that I don't know that we're going to have a solid answer for but just remember this is not just some like the concept of a rogue General is not something that we should take lightly this is not just everybody being upset at Millie for being an awoke General right this is this goes much much deeper than that this goes down to the very Bedrock of Our National Defense infrastructure right what's the point in all these trillions of dollars worth of nuclear warheads if some guy goes woke and can affect the process or the other way right so it's this is something that again we don't have a really great solution for any solution is going to suffer from really the two generals problem of of not being able to verify things and authenticate and man it's just a mess that you can go down a really deep rabbit hole on but I just wanted to point out that again this Millie Fallout stuff is it's not just one guy not doing his job this calls into question the entire strategic launch capability and continuing with the theme of Defense I just wanted to touch briefly on the purges going on within the military for uh the experimental jab right so there there's a lot of stuff going on with this and there are a lot of different chat rooms a lot of players a lot of groups tracking different things when it comes to the military medical mandates and there's a lot of different rabbit holes that go down for instance there's a huge issue between is the actual jab that the military has authorized or not and it turns out mostly no really the Jabs that the most military medical providers have is not the one that has been uh approved by the FDA they have the ones that are still under the emergency use authorization so there's a lot of different players back and forth trying to figure out the legal implications of following an order that's not really a legal order if they can't follow it so you've got commanders out there who are coercing troops into getting the jab but it turns out the hospital doesn't have any of the jab that's authorized so it's really just coercion by you know putting a boot on someone's neck essentially and this is going to be a problem for VA claims against any potential side effects because the VA is going to say oh you took the shot that wasn't uh mandated so you know sucks to be you I guess right much like everything else that the VA does it's basically sucks to be you but we've seen some products floating around out there you know among some of the the military uh service member groups uh that are talking about how roughly 30 percent of troops at you know six bases that we've been able to you know kind of get our hands on uh roughly 30 of those troops have been resisting and they're going to take the punishments like there's a you know a lot of different units are doing a lot of different things like for instance 82nd announced that they're handing out go Mars for for not getting um not getting the the medical procedure so for the civilians out there don't understand what that is basically that's the the stake in the heart of your of your military career um uh so there's that you know article 15's flying out like freaking candy uh all kinds of stuff being done to all different kinds of units it's just a mess on the military side of the house when it comes to the jab um what we're waiting for and the 64 000 question is after all of this goes down and after the smoke settles how many soldiers troops whatever how many of these people are going to take the separation and get out of the military use this as an opportunity to get out of the military that we have no clue it's probably going to be a small number right probably going to be a very small percentage almost certainly going to be a very small percentage we're not counting on this whatsoever but it's going to be interesting to see because that's a good metric like we've said in the past like we're you know this is what we're waiting on this is a good metric to see how many people are willing to lay it all on the line because getting out of the military ending your career um is not something to be taken lightly so anyone that's willing to do that is clearly in a a uh state of mind that they don't really have that many options left so yeah this is not a good situation for anyone in the military it is a shame that this old thing went down this way but I just wanted to highlight for anyone who's not sort of in the military circles anymore um that this is a fight that is is one of the most significant we've ever seen when it comes to Personnel in the military so we'll keep an eye on it and we'll uh update you as we go along moving on to the immigration crisis like I mentioned uh the International Bridge down there has gotten a lot of press you can just go take a look at it for yourself honestly there's really not much to the story even though you know news Medias are trying to make it out to be uh something you know like it's a new problem it's really not it just so happens to be that there's a lot of people under this one particular bridge that are being held uh so they can be processed in the United States really the the only really take away from this is hey yeah there's a lot of people coming into the United States illegally and we're just taking them so uh yeah again the immigration issue is something that's very highly polarized it is a huge logistical problem um and but because of that polarization because people don't understand how citizenship works in the United States or how immigration works in the rest of the world they don't understand um that this is a much larger issue when it comes to Logistics and like where these people are going to go then you know you think it is so something to keep an eye on hopefully if we can keep an eye on it if the FAA doesn't throw up a no Tam to prevent people from flying their drones down there again uh we'll we'll definitely be keeping an eye on that and then finally and perhaps most depressingly for the day Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has ordered the employees of the Federal Reserve to review ethics rules as it became public knowledge over the past week or so through financial disclosures that a lot of the regional presidents of federal reserve banks are cheater cheater pumpkin eaters so this is a very complex topic so I'm going to try to break it down Barney style as much as I can but just understand that there's a lot more to it than just this and it is it gets really really complicated as we've been saying for a while now and as most people have been saying uh really if most Americans understood how the FED what the FED did uh they would Revolt over this kind of stuff so um really the short version is that last year the FED purchased mortgage-backed bonds which most economists believe directly led to the housing bubble which we're experiencing right now which has made home prices Skyrocket but oh looky here Eric rosengren the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston just so happened to both own and Trade four different Securities which he himself directly influenced these Securities were not conducted via a blind trust but by him personally so for those that do not understand the world of Economics or what the Federal Reserve Bank even is the short version again is that a lot of people who directly decide and influence what your tax dollars are spent on when it comes to bailing out companies and the same people who control large portions of the economic Market decided to buy and sell stocks that they themselves had personal control over a classic textbook case of corruption but fear not because statements by all of the people in this Scandal are that they did not break any ethics rules uh which is interesting I guess they didn't break so many rules that most of them have decided to liquidate all of their Securities the moment this story broke in the mainstream media but again not to worry because the chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell has issued a statement that the FED staffers will be reviewing their ethics policies a little refresher course if you will which is interesting because he himself the chairman of the Federal Reserve held millions of dollars in municipal bonds which they fed just so happened to spend over 5 billion dollars bailing out last year so since these documents will most likely get censored quite quickly from the internet I just wanted to point out that we have them all compiled in a nice zip file for everyone if you want to read the financial disclosures from all of the people implicated which will be available on our Odyssey page moving on to our mask mandate tracker really not a whole lot of changes again this is a product that is far from perfect but it's something quick and dirty and hopefully it helps kind of highlight what's going on again States themselves individual states is what we're tracking here the state legislatures we're not tracking individual school districts if we did that we wouldn't have time to do anything else like eat or sleep most States leave it up to each individual School District to decide what they're going to mandate or not mandate but we're tracking a lot of states that are specifically requiring it for a large portion of their population or they're banning the mandates for a large portion of their population at the state level some states are weird because you've got places like Utah there where Statewide the state laws of mass mandates are banned but a lot of school districts are going against that like in Salt Lake City they have some of the strongest mask mandates in the country so that's kind of a an interesting thing going on there similar situation in Maryland and other places around the country but yeah this is what we've got for now and then moving into the actual jab mandates really not a whole lot of changes to this slide really for now the only place in the country that we can find that is mandating the jab for students in K-12 schools is California and even in California it's only one school district Los Angeles school districts so uh if you know of any other place that is specifically requiring the jab let us know and we'll throw it on the slide for the next time but really going through each you know the thousands of school districts in the United States it's kind of hard to to figure out we're just tracking really the state level and the California one got so much press it's easy to track that one and then all of this rolls into our sort of medical resistance tracker so this is the slide from that we briefed last time and these are the updates to the slide so Arizona has been the first state to launch a lawsuit against Biden uh so that we're counting that as kind of a a specific active measure against the federal regime a few states have taken some states back like Arkansas has kind of taken a step back their Republican Governor Hutchinson uh is clearly a fan of Biden's policies but is getting upset that Biden's mandate is making it harder for him to coerce people to get the shot so the governor of Arkansas is upset that Biden is spoiling the plans by creating such a hard and fast resistance uh resistance which he doesn't like so it's weird Arkansas has laws preventing mandates yet their governor is just as bad as Biden when it comes to coercing people into getting the shot so Nebraska similar story their Republican Governor Pete Ricketts said in a press statement that the shot is a personal choice but he also proudly added that his administration has been working hard to encourage people to get it so Nebraska has a governor who publicly states that the jab should be a personal choice but on the other hand is promoting the shot itself so the resistance of Nebraska's political leadership to Biden's orders is unreliable at best unlike Florida which you know you everyone here who's been listening to us for a while knows our our analysis on uh on Ron DeSantis but at least Florida is actively taking a lot of measures to prevent this kind of stuff and speaking of Florida I don't want to lean on this too heavily because this is uh in the Intel world we call this rument and there's different kinds of intelligence human is human intelligence imminent is imagery intelligence and roommate is kind of a another one that's not official where it's rumor intelligence the rument for Florida which again is extremely unconfirmed is that the Florida National Guard units might not be required to get the jab if they stay under title 32 orders if they go on title 10 I.E they're activated for federal service they might but it looks like the military leadership of Florida is uh is is backing off on the the shot mandate for those kinds of troops which is going to be interesting if that is true and that actually does happen this is going to be a big deal for a lot of other National Guard units and command structures in a lot of heavy resistance States so we'll see how that pans out this again is rumor right now but it I just wanted to point it out because it's a rumor that's extremely interesting to be on the lookout for and finally really the only other change is that North Carolina and Vermont's political leadership appears to be in wait and see mode actually I think North Carolina's Governor said they are in wait and see mode so they're not implementing any specific changes just yet to comply or resist uh Biden's mandates but but almost certainly both of these states political leadership is is definitely a fan of Biden but they're definitely scared of things like lawsuits and really the stress and problems that they have so they're waiting to see which way the wind blows and then they'll go with the majority to see what they can get away with and moving into international issues there is a lot of stuff to talk about this week on this front so let's get right to it first off is an interesting tidbit coming out of Israel uh well technically Greece I suppose but an investigation has been launched into the plane crash that resulted in the death of Heim garon or however his name is pronounced this dude was a witness or was going to be a witness one one of the 300 plus Witnesses against Benjamin Netanyahu in his corruption trial so it's very interesting that his plane crashed in Greece with him himself and his wife on board really everybody who has any you know brain cells drug together thinks that yeah this is probably some kind of hit you know to get this guy uh off the witness list but again who knows it's really hard to say until we can kind of put the things together as to what he was going to say uh before he was killed so again something to keep an eye on because a lot of shady stuff coming out about Benjamin netanyahu's corruption trial also Russia is launching zapod 2021 their military exercises largest they've done in a while this is actually quite a massive demonstration of lots of new tactics at least new for Russia maybe not new for the United States but new for Russia the most significant of which was a nighttime Airborne drop of 600 Personnel along with 40 infantry fighting Vehicles specifically the bmd 2kas and the bmd 4ms this is the largest Airborne training event they've ever done so the Russian Airborne forces have proven that they can drop at least a battalion strength element all at once under nighttime combat conditions this is also the first public exercise in which Russia unveiled the sarmat II combat dune buggy sort of light infantry vehicle and demonstrated the ability to successfully deploy them under combat conditions from the backs of things like those Mi 17s there or mi8s moving to North Korea almost immediately after our last brief in which I mentioned the long-range cruise missile test the dprk conducted a second launch this time it was a pair of kn23s which as you can see were launched from a train car this is the first time that North Korea has demonstrated the capability to launch from a train car which is very interesting and definitely increases tensions on the peninsula South Korea not to be outdone within just a few hours of North Korea's missile test they conducted a test of their own South Korea for the first time tested their new submarine-launched ballistic missiles or slpms which is a major milestone for the International Community it actually makes them the seventh Nation on Earth to actually have that technology they're the only one that has the sobm technology but no nuclear weapons to put on those missiles so uh very interesting as one might expect these missile tests being conducted by both the North and the South man tensions are really high in the region yet again also Japan is conducting their first National Defense exercise in 30 years mobilizing over a hundred thousand Personnel 20 000 Vehicles 120 aircraft as well as a whole host of other partner Nations coming on board to include the US uh this exercise should be running until the end of November and again this exercise is almost certainly going to be a major factor diplomatically uh for tensions in the region moving on to France uh lots of anti-lockdown protests and anti-medical passport protests are still going on and are increasing in severity and becoming more widespread so we're going to definitely keep an eye on what what France is doing over the next few you know days weeks months as we move into the winter season and see uh see how this all shakes out for France because as we as we know politicians here in the United States are really looking to see how other nations handle their civil unrest so they can get ideas for what to do here in the United States moving on to China China's economy is not doing super swell uh they are facing an economic crisis when it comes to real estate specifically ever Grand ever Grand is China's second largest property in Real Estate Management Company slash conglomerate massive entity right they have currently found themselves in a pickle because they cannot pay their 300 billion dollar debt um and this is kind of a complicated issue but think of this as China's version of these banks are too big to fail well this one's failing and they're failing big time so this is going to cause a lot of economic Strife for China as they try to bail them out or at least control their collapse so that we don't they don't affect uh the Asian trading markets too much moving on down to the Sahel region of Africa France recently announced that they killed Abu Walid in the Sahel region of Africa we don't really know which country yet the France didn't state it but it was most likely either Niger or across the border in Mali most likely Mali because this is where this guy was operating but these to hell is pretty autonomous when it comes to the Insurgency in Africa you know the barren desert offers lots of places to hide and lots of places to set up training bases so lots of good freedom of maneuver throughout this whole Sahel region Abu Walid is almost certainly the Islamic State Commander that directed the attack on Oda 3212 during operation Juniper Shield back in 2017 and this was the Ambush that left four Americans dead at least one of which may have been tortured before he was executed so Abu Walid has been a local warlord for a very long time and he's maintained an operational areas spreading from Northern Mali into Niger with most of of his senior staff functions like his his version of a battle staff right being located mostly just Slightly North of the town of GAO in Mali um now that Abu Walid is dead his Deputy Abdel Hakeem will most likely step in to fill that role however locals on the ground are reporting at least via rumors that he himself might have been killed in a French Special Forces raid in the town of tomalot near the Niger border so I guess we'll see how their leadership structure shakes out of the next few months but looks like a lot of other partner Nations besides the United States are conducting a lot of operations in Africa as they have been for years now and we'll see what the Islamic State does now that their uh their main guy in in the region is out of action moving back to Europe specifically the Netherlands uh the Dutch foreign secretary and defense minister have both resigned due to the Fallout of the Afghanistan debacle The Dutch actually evacuated over 1500 people themselves from H Kaya but they did end up leaving at least 22 interpreters behind to us this event mostly highlights that the Dutch are willing to remove their defense minister and foreign secretary over incompetence that got only 22 people left behind and yet here in the U.S we are confirmed to have left behind thousands of American citizens behind and thousands more interpreters yet the only person to have been fired over this has been the one military officer that has publicly demanded accountability so yet again international events highlight the problems that we Face here within our own government moving over to Saudi Arabia the United States is pulling out most of its Patriot missile defense systems from Saudi Arabia amid the Pacific pivot or the shifting of resources to bolster defenses in Asia against a potential conflict with China this is obviously upset the Saudis as they are currently getting shot at kind of a lot by houthi rebels and neighboring Yemen so by removing their missile defense systems we fully expect the yemeni conflict to heat up a little bit and we'll likely see some show of force indirect fire attacks on Saudi Arabia as a way of maintaining legitimacy for the rebels and moving back to the sort of five eye Nations the United States the United Kingdom and Australia have entered into a new defense pact which is colloquially being known as August as a way of again pivoting to the Pacific for a potential war with China this is soured relations with France uh they are super mad uh they actually recalled their ambassadors to the United States in protest over the defense pact which incidentally resulted in Australia canceling an order for France to build their new nuclear submarines and is instead going with the United States shipbuilders since nuclear submarines are pretty expensive this is seriously damaged relations between France and the United States who has always wanted to be a part of the five eyes Community really since it's kind of existed so they see this as even more of an exclusive club that they're not a part of and that's a problem for them on the defense front at least that's what they think and finally Afghanistan yes Afghanistan is still a problem uh there are hundreds if not thousands of Americans still left on the ground uh in fact it has recently become public knowledge that the Taliban were holding six aircraft full of people hostage and not letting them leave mazari Sharif otherwise known as Mez because the Taliban didn't want any interpreters to leave who were also allegedly on the planes however this this might not be the truth we really don't know the Taliban have made it quite obvious and Biden himself explicitly stated that diplomatic options were what they were pursuing this means negotiating with the Taliban instead of a military action so as this Afghanistan debacle continues please do not forget that this is still going on even though that there is almost nothing we can do to help the Americans get back home we can certainly remember and never forget what the US government did to its own citizens so on that cheery note that's all I've got for today thanks again for your support and here are the sources for today's briefing you can find the sources for this brief on our Odyssey page where the PDF of these slides is uploaded we can't drop the sources in the description because every time we do YouTube either deletes the video or uses their algorithms to make it less visible so our workaround is to upload them separately for those that wish to do some research on their own so thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time and as always fight in the shade

hello again everyone welcome back to the underground this is the briefing for tuesday september 28 2021 and it is being recorded the day prior on the 27th so let's get right to it with the weather weather over the next 12 hours is going to be quite significant on the west coast with lots of systems bringing in a lot of precipitation of all different kinds and all kinds of cloud ceilings that are going to be really low to the ground so for any kind of asset aviation unmanned or otherwise it's going to be not good flying off the west coast for the next 12 hours and remember as we move forward into the later parts of the year the days start getting shorter and we have more hours of night time to play with so for the at least the east coast for tonight the uh end of evening nautical twilight is going to be at 7 52 p.m we're also going to have pretty good lunar illumination for this cycle we're at a 65 illumination level and throughout the rest of the country really the only other place that's going to have some trouble with some low-level clouds is the northeast as they start to get some of that winter weather coming their way and as we can see here moving into this slide i change it just for this week just to show the uh precipitation off the west coast is going to be really bad for any kind of aerial operations as well as little spots up there in new england which are going to prohibit or be very unlikely for any kind of aerial surveillance operations again if it were to be a factor just to get everybody in the mindset of seeing wind directions and and how these prevailing winds actually work out moving into no tams really nothing significant to report for this brief uh it's not the weekend so we don't have the presidential one to talk about and there's really nothing else going on there are a few standard ones that have been up but you can go check them out if you're interested in learning more about no tams and for our civil unrest forecast for this briefing there's really not that many changes really the only one i wanted to highlight is number four there in phoenix arizona where the election audit is ongoing that election audit as everyone has probably heard by now is heating up quite significantly and i'm personally guessing that the results of the forensic audit will be released in their entirety after this brief goes out but probably before the next one so that's something to be aware of as uh we're gonna have to come back to once things become a bit more clear on that front and for logistics a quick rundown of the shortages from last time uh as always over here on the left side of the map you can see the list of shortages that are impacting the nation as a whole are really no major changes on that front and again from last brief we're still tracking school bus driver shortages in the states depicted on the map we're also tracking the microchip shortage as is starting to impact things about the same as it has been over the past few weeks and months which is to say quite significantly we're also seeing public transit driver shortages in the states that are depicted same thing from last time really the only thing new to add is costco shortages so costco the company has restricted toilet paper and bottled water again they're saying that they're facing shortages in those arenas so it's unclear as to where in which stores they're going to be having shortages that but my guess is since this has now hit the news probably all of them so costco claims that this their shortages are due to both inflation and supply chain issues um which is a you know good excuse but we here don't know if this is true or not uh this could be a case of a company claiming that there is a shortage to cause a run on their products and drive demand up in the short term so of course we've been tracking inflation seriously affecting things along with a widespread paper shortage but nothing has specifically indicated to us that there was a shortage looming for costco specifically so again like last time the shortage of bottled water and toilet paper we predicted that one quite easily along with a lot of other people because it was very easy to see because news media articles were spinning a story that the virus that cannot be named caused digestive issues so that was the reason which spun up all the news media over the toilet paper shortages and then once they started uh reporting that well then it just became a snowball a logistical nightmare so we're not seeing that this time other than you know a normal paper shortage that we've been dealing with for months now we're we're not seeing a specific coherent you know event that is resulting in costco being completely out of all their stuff sure shortages have been happening but it's not like there was one really inflammatory thing event that occurred to cause costco to have these widespread outages so until we get more information on that i guess it really doesn't matter in the long run because there are shortages now so who knows the chain of causation here isn't really determinable because we just don't have inside access to costco supply data so just know that if you shop at costco there will almost certainly be shortages on random things probably toilet paper and water and other things as well as people go there to stock up on stuff so there's going to be shortages now and other stores are almost certainly going to be affected as well as these shortages spread to other big box stores from the demand being so high and moving into critical infrastructure concerns really the biggest one to talk about is the crystal valley ransomware attack so the minnesota-based crystal valley agricultural co-op was hit with a ransomware attack a few days ago actually almost immediately after the new cooperative the new cooperative was hit down in iowa much the same way as far as impact uh this attack has shut down operations for the co-op and is affecting about 2 500 farmers in minnesota and in northern iowa in various ways that you know we can't really get a feel on for for instance uh this co-op maintains fueling stations for agricultural vehicles and things like that uh which are having issues taking payments from credit cards so so far that's really all the info we have regarding impacts this co-op has been really tight-lipped about exactly what systems are currently offline or were impacted but we expect to know more as this incident continues the ransomware attack actually occurred back on september 19th and the media local media at least became aware a couple of days after that so so far there isn't any indication as to if their systems are back online or if anything's been resolved or what we haven't seen a statement either way at this point so again just like last brief this cyber attack highlights an increased effort for ransomware attacks and other kinds of cyber attacks against our critical infrastructure and with the highly computerized nature of agricultural operations these days these attacks broadly speaking will be a significant threat in the near future a lot of people don't know how advanced agricultural operations have become which is both good and bad but these cyber attacks quite clearly highlight the vulnerabilities when a farmer can't even turn the ignition and start up his tractor without the tractor having a gps or cellular connection and when a field cannot be irrigated without the automated management system sending the data through some server halfway around the country and this presents a lot of vulnerabilities for our food supply especially in an age of cyber attacks moving into significant governmental actions first up is delta airlines so delta airlines has made themselves a no-fly list which is separate from the national no-fly list which honestly itself warrants further investigation if you want to go down the rabbit hole and get extremely angry in the process because it's really infuriating to realize the details of no-fly lists in general but delta has been keeping their own a separate no-fly list for political reasons they have been kicking people off flights for not complying with their mandates which again make absolutely no sense if you actually read them but since the federal government hasn't put people on their national security no-fly list for these mandate violations delta has again proven themselves willing to go above and beyond to follow laws that do not exist and even make up their own no-fly list that is just for them and delta wants other airlines to share their lists too if they have them to create a national no-fly list that is separate from the federal no flight list this is just among the airline companies themselves right so as infuriating as this is it is also quite an interesting look into the strange field of certain kinds of companies and airlines are a fantastic way to learn a lot of information for instance we have talked a lot in the past about private companies that are technically private companies but they go above and beyond to follow laws and rules that do not exist simply to gain favor with the federal government a good example of this in the past has been companies that sell night vision devices some companies make you sign a stack of waivers scan a copy of your driver's license and a bunch of other stuff none of which is federal law by the way all you've got to do to own night vision in america is just follow itar rules which basically means don't export it but other than that there really isn't that much regulation right so other companies don't make you sign anything at all and you just click the you know add to cart button on the website and check out like normal like you're just buying something like normal federal itar laws say nothing at all about scanning a driver's license it is on the consumer not the company to comply with itar laws but some companies go above and beyond to require things that are not actually required by federal government thus the airlines airline companies were the first ones to require medical passports even before the federal government got involved they did that on their own so again this is infuriating i get it but it's also a great opportunity to see exactly which airlines and companies will go down this unique path and eagerly be the tip of the spear when it comes to medical mandates and not just a hesitant complier who's complying because they have to or the government will shut their business down it really just highlights the spectrum of of willingness to comply with the federal mandates and it looks like especially delta airlines is right at the tip of that spear and speaking of medical mandates moving on to number two the biden regime has stated in various cryptic press statements that they are mandating the medical procedure for all federal contractors again we don't know exactly how this is going to go down because we haven't seen the exact wording of these mandates and we might not see it for a while the biden regime is clearly full steam ahead on using tactics like regulations instead of full-on executive orders executive orders are clear and concise and can easily be overturned by a court but getting some minor regulatory agency to verbally pressure the companies they regulate that's a lot harder to battle in court that's why biden is going through osha to mandate the jab for private businesses if that were an executive order a federal judge could easily stop it at least temporarily but if it were a rule change which by the way biden is extremely famous for during his tenure in the senate if you followed his career before he even became vice president he was very famous for this it's a lot harder to sue and it's a lot harder for a judge to stop because it's not as simple as placing a hold on something right so again this incident is interesting because we don't know how many federal contracting companies have already many months ago gone above and beyond to comply with a medical mandate that didn't exist yet but now does right so we might have some companies have very little change to their workforce because they already thinned the herd months ago or we might have some companies quietly not push the issue because they can't afford to lose their workforce especially with gigantic federal contracts on the line so again we have very little data on this so i guess we'll just have to see how it goes but it will certainly be interesting to follow and moving on to number three uh so far we have had several incidents involving afghan refugees at two u.s bases uh fort mccoy in wisconsin and fort bliss in texas there have been other incidents that are not yet public so we can't comment on those just yet but two afghan refugees that were brought here as part of the afghanistan evacuation have been indicted federally at fort mccoy one for attempting to force himself on a child and the other for attempting to suffocate his wife these are two separate incidents with people that they're not related or anything there's also been a third incident that is currently under investigation by the fbi in which a female u.s service member was assaulted by several afghan males this event occurred in the refugee tent city in fort bliss texas as far as commenting on this there really isn't that much intel value except to point out that this is a direct side effect of the hectic nature of the evacuations so for those of you that did not follow our briefings during the afghanistan evacuation one of the unfortunate things that happened was the evacuation of unvetted people and this is kind of a delicate thing to talk about but it turns out that a lot of people that we evacuated weren't super great people a lot of the people that we evacuated happened to be what would be even for afghan society considered to be freeloaders who just wanted to get a handout from the us government and weren't actually in threat of being killed by the taliban for those of you who have been to afghanistan and you know what we're talking about here we all know that there's a certain group of any real society i guess no matter where the military base is at in the world but it just happens to be in afghanistan as well people that hang around the base try to get as much free stuff as they can from the government while they can and those people were a lot of those people were the people that ended up on flights so plus there is the completely atrocious parts of afghan culture that we cannot talk about here because we try to be as family friendly as possible in these briefings but every soldier again who's been to afghanistan knows exactly what i'm talking about so when you combine all of this stuff together the culture the evacuation the the the need for the biden administration to pump up numbers even people who might not have deserved a trip out of that country to here uh all of these things adding up together mean that you're going to have incidents like this we saw this coming we saw this we saw this and talked about it during the evacuation and now we're now we're seeing the results of this moving on to number four uh new york is in a pickle uh the state government has created a worker shortage in the health care industry by mandating the jab so what nor what new york is dealing with right now is a medical crisis of their own creation which they freely admit to creating this is not some this is not just me being biased this is something they admit to they mandated the jab for health care workers a lot of health care workers left the job or they were or they quit um and now there's a shortage of health care workers allegedly so much of a shortage that the governor is planning to call up the national guard to staff hospitals now one might ask instead of calling up the national guard why not just get rid of the mandates and bring those people back that quit well that would certainly be the preferable option from a strategic standpoint but the past couple of years have certainly been a time for governors to use the national guard as they see fit so who knows i just wanted to point this out in case you end up needing medical care in new york you might find that your doctor is a soldier in the near future due to the shortage of health care workers and moving on to number five kind of moving back to afghanistan too the fbi is publicly they've publicly released that they are investigating certain veteran groups who were working to rescue people from afghanistan that the u.s government left behind the fbi has launched an official investigation and made visits to individual residences of people and groups who worked to get americans back home for us this is completely unsurprising as we have stated many times in our afghanistan series the us government is trying to cover up leaving americans behind and is targeting anyone who tried to help get americans out no witness is no crime right so the u.s government is working around the clock to make sure that as few people make it home as possible again something that we pointed out as as being a huge problem in our afghanistan series and number six i briefly wanted to touch on the border crisis just to remind people that it does in fact still exist it's still a huge problem we have observed a significant propaganda effort to slander the border patrol agents down there you know with the whole photo scandal that was completely fabricated uh border patrol agents never whipped anybody and the video and other photos of the event have shown that this is a complete and utter lie even the guy who took the photo that the white house has been pushing and their minions have been pushing on social media the dude who took the photo said he never saw anybody whipping anyone so that's really pretty much the update on that just to kind of dispel that that never happened right uh and a lot of there's a lot of propaganda um and the fact that the illegal immigration problem uh this immediate crisis as specifically is still a massive problem and the byte administration has been quietly letting in the very same people that they said they would send back to their host nations so pretty much the status quo on that front and moving into a new slide i wanted to briefly talk about some developing technologies i know this is going to be kind of hard to work into the normal rotation of things but i did want to talk about it because there's a lot of new gadgets and technologies that are coming out that i think are worth knowing about at least the first one is this new satcom detector so this is a new detector that is you can read all this technical data about it at least the technical data that is public about it in the sources but this is a new detection device that can detect and pinpoint sat phone calls from the iridium network the thurian network and the inmarsat network now of course sat phone interception tools have been used for years so this is nothing new it's just this particular one is new so that's kind of interesting um moving on to number two is the shadow dragon surveillance software uh so this again is something that is currently being used it's actually kind of old this has been around for kind of a while but i didn't want to mention it because it's gotten a lot of um a lot of press lately actually the article that is the source for this the primary like company that is like you know outraged about this software is the intercept and if you read the article it is it is full of very uh very biased language i'll say that i'll say it like that um but in any case basically the shadow dragon surveillance software is just a suite of software tools that's like palantir for those guys out there who have used who like who are analysts and have used this stuff it's like palantir it's actually more closely aligned to like analyst notebook from way back in the day but yeah it's just a social media aggregator it has a lot of different sources and tools very powerful tool and it turns out our police most police groups in the united states are using this or something like this so yeah something to be aware of it's very interesting how if how the whole thing works and uh the intercept article's got some interesting stuff about it but again just be advised it's not really easy to read um so yeah i thought that would be kind of interesting to talk about also the mark 22 sniper rifle continues this development the fort bragg pao just put out a a few pictures of it so it underwent some airborne testing a couple weeks ago in which they wanted to make sure that it actually maintained its accuracy after uh the the jostling of a of a jump you know static line deployment so um that's kind of interesting it's going to be probably fielded pretty soon if it isn't already in the hands of some special dudes doing special things as it already has been for at least a couple of years now i think and one of the more cool ones i think to talk about is the new mc130 juliet variant the commando 2 amphibious variant specifically of the c130 airframe so basically this is a c-130 hercules or really the the mc130 that they're going to put some gigantic floats on so that it can be amphibious now this is kind of interesting because this is afsock requesting this of course but the fact that we're trying to shift uh to the pacific you know the great pacific pivot right that a lot of military analysts are talking about this is one of those things right being able to land at some of these smaller atolls and we're trying to repeat a lot of the doctrine we're kind of going back to that world war ii uh conflict against japan right the war in the pacific there and looking at a lot of the lessons learned and geography hasn't changed at all since world war ii so uh technology has to uh has to change in order to provide the capabilities we need for that conflict so i thought that was kind of interesting also it's in really the the later stages of development they're they're actually going to have this is going from drawing board to full scale demonstration in 17 months so that's uh that's a fast track program that's that's why i wanted to talk about it this is this is moving quick uh for such a program so you know again the special forces community has been very uh very interested in using the c-130 airframe for very specific things in the past and they have fast-tracked other airframes as well but this is an interesting one to to keep in mind and to be on the lookout for if you happen to see one in testing and moving on to number five uh this one is really kind of uh the cat's out of the bag so i guess we can kind of talk about it now considering it's all over the internet at this point a huge a gigantic optic violation resulted in a worker or some personnel or somebody taking a video and posting on tick tock of one of our stealth aircraft that was undergoing testing at the helendale radar cross section facility so yeah nothing is known about it other than this video coming out but it is very interesting design and it it's raising a lot of eyebrows around the internet just because of how futuristic it looks but again this is probably not something that is anywhere close to being developed if they're still undergoing the radar cross-section analysis then it's probably early on in its phase of development but interesting thing to note uh moving forward i guess and finally is something that is sure to creep a lot of people out this is a flying microchip so northwestern university has created the smallest ever human-made flying object which is essentially a flying microchip so i'm not sure if you can actually see it or not but there is a whole pile of these things right here and this is of course inside reference to a carpenter ant they're smaller than some of these grains of sand so there's one there there's one there there there and there yeah very interesting uh now i know this is talking about anything that's small and flying and potentially a collection asset is surely to ignite the most interesting parts of the internet i guess i'll say it that way but this is purely conceptual sure they've made them and it does appear to work but again i'm not exactly looking around the room for these little particles of dust that are flying around with cameras on them just yet so yes there is a demonstration yes this is a proof of concept essentially but it's not like this is going to become a mainstream thing uh even within the next year or two this is a long-term thing as we try to make sensors that are smaller and smaller and smaller you know the government agencies making these are going to have a harder and harder time uh getting things as compact as possible so again something interesting i thought i'd touch on and uh yeah i guess we'll keep an eye on some of these developing technologies and see how they how they shake out over the next few you know weeks and years i guess moving on to the public school attendance mask mandate tracker map so really there have been a couple of updates not too many but really the two biggest ones are florida and texas so florida most large school districts now require masks directly going against the governor's orders which is a trend that we've been observing for a long time it seems that on the government level particularly when it comes to these mandates that politically liberal officials and agencies in conservative states are 100 percent willing to fight their conservative governors and openly not complying with their orders but the reverse is not true so conservative officials local governments and agencies and entities uh in liberal states are certainly not willing to fight their liberal political leadership in in the more liberal states uh certainly not as much as liberals are willing to fight conservatives on issues like this so um i wanted to point this out because it's something to keep in mind as these maps start getting blurry over the next few days and weeks right same situation in texas mass mandates are banned right but that ban was overturned by a court or by a judge who's put a temporary hold on it and also about 85 percent of all the school districts in texas require masks so there you go and that trend applies to pretty much all states right now this slide isn't great i don't like the way this slide is depicting things because it looks like the states that are gray it kind of looks like there's nothing going on there but just as a baseline almost all states actually i think every state at this point has a mass mandate in their most populated cities uh in their capital cities or really even just their largest school districts so i just wanted to point that out that even though there might not be a mandate on the state level every single state has at least one very large school district usually the biggest school district in the state in which masks are mandated so and as far as other changes from the last brief tennessee two judges teamed up together to block the mask mandate ban and the same thing happened in oklahoma a temporary injunction was issued there to stop their mandate ban on the other end of the spectrum south carolina is actually doing pretty good there there look like they're charging forward ahead um faster than anybody else uh their supreme court upheld the ban on mandates at the state level so that will deal a significant blow to the mandate makers in south carolina for a while although local districts can and still do mandate masks on their own it's just it's prohibited at the state level and it's backed up by the south carolina supreme court moving on to the jab mandate tracker really no updates at all to this slide california is still the only state where it's mandated for students k-12 to receive the medical procedure so i'm just going to push forward into the medical resistance tracker uh really there's only been a couple of updates really arkansas is the biggest one again arkansas is in that weird situation where the governor has verbally stated that he is in favor of medical mandates but he's just upset that it's the federal government doing it and not anybody on a lower level such as himself or company by company i guess so we expect similar sentiments to work their way out over the next few weeks as we see what other mandates are coming down the pipeline remember we still haven't really seen anything tangible to give us an indication of the exact wording of these mandates that will be coming from osha so right now a lot of the states that are claiming to resist don't really have anything to grab onto with a lawsuit just yet everybody's pretty much in wait and see mode for now with only a few states going out of the way to provide a blanket of laws that will prevent whatever the regime comes up with from being enforced and moving on to international issues i'm going to move through these quite quickly because there is a lot of stuff to talk about so first up is the medical stuff getting that kind of out of the way so australia new zealand and france uh they're we're seeing significant resistance to the medical mandates and really government overreach at this point and those demonstrations are certainly escalating uh as the days go by some nations such as sweden denmark and norway have actually backpedaled sweden and norway announced their recovery from the the pandemic and denmark has actually done the same but also reclassified the virus as something that is no greater threat than the flu so for some nations their governments are doubling down on the restrictions and in other nations they are treating it like it's like it's over so that's interesting as time goes on moving over to southeast asia the coup in myanmar is escalating quite significantly as a military junta there tries to drill down its control even further there's been quite a quite a bit of resistance in burma throughout the past few months but this military coup situation will probably have follow-on effects for a long time and moving forward into africa into the sahel region specifically mali the long-range reconnaissance group is at it again most people might know them as the lrdg of the long-range desert group the ses has been very active in north africa and the long-range reconnaissance group has specifically been conducting a lot of long-range missions that are very much an homage to their heritage throughout north africa really and this is due to the fight against isis being quite significant in throughout mali and niger as we move forward into the winter season although lately the past few years we've seen a pretty significant fighting season continue throughout the winter basically a year around fighting season uh for for most of the isis militants that try to maintain control of africa now i know a lot of people are saying why are you talking about africa constantly well because it's a huge theater and because a lot of people have a lot of interest in africa china has built a a lot a serious amount of bases there they've built a lot of roads in exchange for mineral rights it is a next it's not the next frontier but it is a major goal for a lot of powers around the world and you know we keep constantly having green berets get killed in africa in places where the american public isn't even aware that that's where we are so the united states has a presence there obviously the brits have a good presence there the french actually just had one of their soldiers killed in the same theater so africa is certainly relevant mostly for the mineral wealth most of the minerals that are required to make things like smartphones were things like colton and nickel and cobalt and bauxite and things like that those elements have to come from somewhere sure the devices are made in china but the the elements that are used to make the devices come from africa for the most part so that's why africa is such a huge deal and that's why china wants to invest heavily in africa as much as they can a lot of mineral wealth they can export back they can avoid the natural resource curse that pretty much every african nation has suffered from nations with large amounts of mineral wealth tend to tend to do pretty poorly economically even though it sounds counterproductive this is called the natural resource curse which you can read more about on your own but the case in point is that a lot of these nations are exporting their stuff so china is very much interested in africa and so is everyone else jumping back to europe the united kingdom uh our friends across the pond are not doing so well when it comes to shortages of things now everyone has that magic b word right brexit on their on their minds these days uh and it seems to be like a lot of the logistical problems are kind of caused by brexit but also not not really so you know driver shortages yeah you could point it back to brexit at some point uh everything it comes back to any kind of shaking up of the logistical supply network of a nation is going to be it's going to have results so that's why you have things like driver shortages they have you know gasoline shortages gasoline rationing is still happening uh from last brief that's still going on you've got a co2 shortage so um in the uk they use co2 mainly for the creation of things like of course beverage production but also for uh the humane killing of uh animals the slaughtering of animals for uh meat and that's that's already hitting the meat industry so it's not that there's a shortage of beef it's just there's a shortage of the chemicals needed to you know humanely dispatch those animals right so which drives production down and there you go so the united kingdom as a whole we know they're not doing super hot when it comes to logistics right now and jumping back to south korea uh they have of course as almost immediately after the last briefing work in which we talked about their new launches in the you know the sort of mini arms race that's going on between the north and the south right now they have released or released footage of their new anti-ship cruise missile so it's a hypersonic missile so huge technological development for them of course uh they got outside help so if you actually look at the missile itself it looks very similar to some russian uh russian missiles so interestingly south korea is continuing their uh continuing their missile tests we'll of course see something from the north if we haven't already that we just missed uh something from the north is going to happen uh probably another missile test or something you know it's how an arms race works so something to keep an eye on if you happen to see north korea has done something this is probably why and moving forward to russia so for those that don't track russian politics russia recently had an election and if you look at a lot of the things that are being said online a lot of people are saying that it could not have been more fraudulent if they tried so we're talking about all kinds of things like people recording the actual digital voting screen thing changing their vote uh the number of votes being changed so so um alexia navalny's old political outfit was like hugely in the lead uh at one point and then like 60 seconds before the voting polls closed uh putin's party jumped to the lead with like 90 percent of the vote so you know the classic stuff we keep hearing and uh stuff that eerily rings true here in the united states as well as we question our own uh electoral process so very interesting it's kind of hilarious to see the kind of the things that are coming out about the russian election but uh you guys can go check that out on your own i just think it's quite interesting to to to note that uh uh russia and the ruling elite are still uh still up to their old tricks just like just like expected and moving to austria or really i suppose technically the united states as well so u.s and austria the cia station chief in vienna has been ousted from her job among accusations that she did not report any sort of incidents involving havana syndrome so for those of you who have not been following our discussions on havana syndrome this is a it is an illness that was first thought to be a myth a few years ago it's been around for gosh i think the first time i heard about havana syndrome was about 10 years ago um but basically it's an it's a mysterious illness with no it's got symptoms like nausea headaches tinnitus things like that so people are exhibiting real symptoms but you there's no uh indication there's no tox no toxins in their system they pass a full medical evaluation and so havana syndrome is very much a uh mysterious thing even among the highest levels of our intelligence agencies they've gotten a lot more evidence about what they think it might be now but back in the day what's become public knowledge i suppose and safe to talk about is it is most people think it has something to do with some kind of electromagnetic weapon some kind of uh ray gun or some kind of directed energy weapon you know dew uh that is causing these kinds of things we don't some kind of microwave weapon is what was theorized at one point uh others think it's some kind of x-ray or something to do with the electromagnetic spectrum so um that's kind of the general thinking about havana syndrome right now and a lot of diplomats have reported it because it of course surfaced in havana cuba of diplomats you know not every diplomat who lives in a country you know is a representative of the united states they don't all live inside the embassy they live outside the embassy so workers would report getting sick and this started happening all over the planet and it turns out bringing it back to austria in vienna they had more cases than anywhere else combined so there you go and the cia station chief there was covering that up or down playing down playing it like so many uh diplomats have downplayed it over the years but it's clearly a real thing uh people are really getting sick as to who is doing this the classic finger pointing is of course russia our number one diplomatic adversary um it's it sounds like a russian thing to do that's kind of along the thing kind of along the lines of the cold war tricks they used to do but then again the united states is also perfectly capable of doing these attacks on ourselves as well so who who really knows right unless you're the director of the cia you're not going to know the full story of any of this stuff and even then you might not know so i thought it was kind of interesting it brings back this havana syndrome uh medical thing in back into the press for people to to kind of sink their teeth into and it's sort of from our side of things um it kind of triggers us even here as a civilian group right um it triggers us into thinking okay well well is this this is going to be a huge deal a few years down the line because we've already seen how in just a few short years it's gone from being a myth to a very serious thing and we're trying and it's one of those things that like once you get down into the weeds of well how would you how would you stop it how would you prevent something like this it gets very difficult to do so i just wanted to point that out for those that are interested in havana syndrome and moving on to china so china not doing super hot they're still working through the problems with the evergrand crisis their economy is is seriously in trouble i guess we'll see how this plays on the asian markets which are not doing super hot right now either way but it looks like uh china is going to have some serious economic problems for the foreseeable future finally ending on bahrain sorry it's too small to show on the map but i just wanted to briefly mention the new cooperation the new partnership between bahrain and the us navy in which they're going to start patrolling together a lot more so for those that don't know bahrain's a small little island kind of nation out there next to saudi arabia off the coast there and it's it's really just a big u.s navy base it is its own nation they have their own stuff but it's really one of those diplomatically weird places to describe uh but they do have a navy they do have a coastal uh you know coastal defense thing and they have quite a few ships um so we're going to be uh the united united states is going to be conducting a lot more exercises with them throughout the rest of the gulf region uh quite soon and that's pretty much all i've got for today uh thank you again to everyone for watching and a special thank you to all of our supporters on patreon i know we've gotten kind of a burst of people supporting us over there so just wanted to thank you all again for that it really does help with our rising costs here as we start to put out more and more content and moving on to our sources kind of got a lot for this week so there's slide one two three four and five slides on sources so you guys can pause and either manually type these in or you can check out the link below which will have the pdf of these slides uh uploaded to odyssey where you can actually get the clickable link so if you wanted to research more which we would recommend so once again thank you everyone for watching 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 6th through the 12th, 2025. It's been a very busy week, like I say all the time nowadays, but in this case, I'm afraid that this week has been a swing and a mess on my part, at least from a research perspective, which we'll get to in a moment. Sometimes Intel work is like that. A lot of times you have to do an awful lot of work to come up with a giant pile of nothing or just get stuck at some step along the way. So, I'm afraid I've been a little bit preoccupied with uh some research that hasn't really panned out. So, I haven't had much time to dig much uh into what has happened around the world this week, but let's go ahead and talk about the global strategic concerns right up front. And in the United States this week, the trade war has continued. So, lots of ups and downs, not a whole lot to sink our teeth into. We're just going to have to wait and see. When things are chaotic, it's probably a good idea to let things pan out and see how it works. As far as the tariffs go, it looks like most of the tariffs uh on on the rest of the planet from the United States have either been paused for 90 days or they have been reduced to 10% uh for 90 days while negotiations are ongoing. At the moment, the big tariff conflict appears to be between the United States and China, both of which are digging in. So, as things stand right now, the United States has a 145% tariff on Chinese imports and China has a 125% tariff on American imports. This has obviously amounted to what is essentially a trade embargo between the two nations. Uh, this is very obviously not something that is economically sustainable in the long run. So, I would expect by this week to have some more information on Chinese American trade negotiations. More specifically around the United States, aviation concerns have continued to grow over the past month or so. Since the election, there have been a lot of shakeups at the FAA and various uh airports around the country regarding personnel and things like that. But the past few weeks have been rather kinetic. For instance, there was a fist fight between air traffic controllers earlier this month in the tower during flight operations in Washington DC. Uh this is coupled with a couple of days ago a couple of aircraft clipped wings in Washington DC. There have also been a few highle retirements. For instance, uh the chief of all air traffic control doctrine and management retired announced his retirement earlier this week. So, it's a fairly kinetic time. Of course, the media is going to focus on things like the the plane crashes and problems with general aviation that are more typical and not really out of the norm. But when it comes to other things like fist fights at airports becoming a huge problem now, even apparently amongst staff it seems, and other things that are adjacent to the aviation community, these concerns are beginning to mount and uh there's been increased scrutiny on the way that air traffic control is handled throughout the country. Moving over to Eastern Europe, the situation with regards to the Ukrainian war continues really without much change. However, this week the United States and Russia have begun more direct negotiations with regards to how this conflict is going to shake out. This is not really new. The United States and Russia have been working on this for a few weeks now. However, the talks are beginning to become a little bit more high level and a little bit more publicly high level. So, this is probably a positive tone for the the how the Ukrainian war is hopefully going to come to an end, but no real public progress has been made. Sometimes that's uh that's the way that it is. And uh sometimes in the world of diplomacy, no news is good news. So uh nothing bad has happened so far between the United States and Russia. So that's that's probably a positive thing for now. Moving down to the Middle East, the strategic buildup continues as before. I know we're tired of hearing about it, but it still continues and it's still continuing to get more and more substantial. The grand questions are starting to be asked on the on the national stage of is this buildup for Yemen or is this build up for Iran or is this build up for somewhere else? Uh who knows? It's really hard to say at this moment, but the the buildup does continue. The United States, more specifically, has continued bombing nearly daily in Yemen, and we'll talk about which assets are conducting that bombing here in a moment. But over in Diego Garcia, where we're going to be spending most of our time today again, there have been a lot of indications and warnings of uh increased logistical efforts. So, we'll talk about that in just a moment. Though, moving to the strategic movement tracker, our fleet tracker for this week, things have remained very much the same as before. The Nimus has arrived in the Pacific theater and is cutting some circles out there in the North Pacific Ocean at the moment. The USS Euima has been in and out of Port Norfolk for a few days now. I think she's conducting some sort of exercise, probably some follow-on training regarding the exercise a couple of weeks ago. No real indications and warnings of a major deployment, but both the Euima and the Wasp have been seen moving in and out of Norfolk a little bit more often than is normal. So, we'll see how that works out. But either way, they are not a factor. Neither of these flat tops are a factor for what's going on in the Middle East. That is squarely on the Truman and the Carl Vincent. The Truman is in the Red Sea and the Carl Vincson was observed off the coast of Oman a few hours ago. We don't have an exact location for either of these carrier strike groups obviously because you know operational security. However, aircraft uh who have been conducting logistics flights to these carrier strike groups have been observed on ADSB. So, we can kind of get a general gist of where they're located. And the Carl Vincson was definitely off the coast of Oman at least a few hours ago. Both of these carriers, their mission is somewhat ambiguous, but it's very very likely that both of these carriers are conducting strikes in Yemen. We've seen a very sharp increase and at least the Houthi is reporting things blowing up. So the SNCOM has announced various bombing campaigns. The White House has been talking about it quite a lot. It's hard to pin the tail on the donkey as to which carrier is doing which bombings, but that's the kind of situation as it stands for now. Moving down to Diego Garcia. I don't want to hyperfixate on this location too much in the grand scheme, the big picture of things, but I do have a lot of satellite images to cover. I've already bought them, so I might as well talk about them. Uh, this image is from the sixth is probably the best image I have this week of the South Parking Apron. As we can see, six B2s are still there. Six tankers are still there. Hangers still may or may not have bombers in them. Probably empty, but you never know. One of the more interesting images this week came from April 8th. Again, this is a commercial imagery, so please forgive the Looney Tunesque distortions on this image. I can't really help it that much, but this image shows that three of the B2s were missing. So, three B2s and three KC135 Stratakers were missing. Now, again, most people might say, "All right, fine. They're aircraft. They were off bombing something in Yemen or doing something." However, a little analytical rule of thumb is that when you're looking at satellite imagery from an intelligence perspective and you're trying to figure out what's going on, sometimes the time of day that the image was taken is more valuable than what's in the image. In this case, we have three missing bombers and three missing tankers. Now, you may say one of two things happened. Either one, those bombers are secretly in those hangers uh hiding and they're doing some kind of something on the bombers that they don't want satellites to see. Very good theory. But a more likely theory is that the three bombers took off and they took each a tanker with them wherever they went. Now again, time of day matters. This image was taken at 0443 Zulu time, which works out to be around about4 to 11 local time. So middle of the day, more or less, around lunchtime. So this image was taken during the daytime. So what? Well, for one, one of the main theories as to why these B2s are here is because of the story, the narrative that's being pushed either by a lot of so-called oent pages on Twitter or by the White House or the Pentagon themselves or everyone is basically saying these B2s are for Yemen and they're conducting bombings in Yemen. And that may be true. That may be true. However, the Houthis have not reported a single daytime bombing at all. uh certainly not with large bombs that are going to be delivered by a B2. Now, there have been hellfire strikes here and there from drones. Uh there have been a few sporadic bombings during the daytime. We have footage of this, so we know these this has occurred, but the Houthis have mostly reported these very large scale bombings. The the large targeting, the large deliberate targeting, not the dynamic stuff, the deliberate stuff, which is what B2s are going to be doing. That kind of targeting has taken place during the nighttime, which makes sense. So, if the B2s are missing during the day and they're not bombing in Yemen, where are they? Where did they go? That I cannot speculate on. I do not know. You can make the argument that it's it was a training flight. These that three B2s took off uh with their tankers and they flew somewhere for training. I don't know why you're going to break multiple world records to land at this place and and conduct a forward deployment like you've never done before just to do some localized training. That's not something that B2s normally do. I don't know. I'm sure there's plenty of theories out there, but I thought it was interesting that it does not make any sense for these bombers to be gone during the daytime if they're conducting bombings in Yemen when no bombings have been reported in Yemen. So, that was kind of an interesting tidbit from the April 8th. Also kind of interesting as we can see there are two C5 galaxies sitting on the runway. And just to show my homework a little bit, you can 1,00% say that these are in fact C5s and not C17s as many people have claimed. These are C5s because I can load this satellite imagery into ArcGIS and do what's called point mineration. Basically, I can measure things with a very very good accuracy. the end. If I were to use my measuring tool here to measure the wingspan of whatever aircraft is on the runway, I can compare that to what the US Air Force says is the wingspan of a C5 Galaxy. And in this case, I'm off by a couple of meters. So, with a resolution, uh, image resolution of 1 meter, I'm off by two pixels. So, sorry about that. But either way, uh, pretty close. So, we can say with a pretty good certainty that these are two C5s sitting here delivering cargo to Diego Garcia. So, pretty interesting stuff. Other images I already got this week are from April 9th. Again, the analyst nightmare of clouds over the target. This has been the bane of existence for most military analysts who look at imagery since uh World War II, and it's still the same today. I can't afford a synthetic aperture radar image to punch through these clouds. And and a lot of the satellite images uh that we can buy images from commercially, they don't have infrared either, so it doesn't help us out too much. But we can still see a handful of B2s peeking through the clouds. And the next day, we also have a free satellite shot. Sentinel 2 imagery from April 10th confirms that all six bombers are back at base along with their respective strat tankers. And we do have one C5 parked on the runway as well. And one of the interesting notes from this image is that one of the B2s appears to be maneuvering. So either she's just taxiing around, testing something, maintenance checks, whatever, or she's returning or departing. Either way, kind of an interesting image, even if it is a low quality rendering. Now, one of the things that we have to be mindful of when it comes to looking at runways and blurry images of aircraft is hyperfixation. A lot of people are looking at this island, and a lot of people are looking at this parking apron here. And the US government knows, the Pentagon, and whoever federal agencies are watching this video right now certainly know that people like me are watching this to get a feel for basically if we're going to go to war or not. And because the national intelligence agencies are watching this, they may be inclined and the forces at this island may be inclined to pull a little bit of a sneaky. So, while we're looking down here at the South Apron, it's easy to forget that this isn't the only parking area on this airfield. There is a North Apron. So, I did get a shot of the North Apron just to confirm. I already had a hunch, but I did get an image to confirm that no, there is nothing going on at the north parking apron. is uh an unused portion of the base normally, but I would have expected maybe a C5 or C17 to park here if the south south apron gets a little bit full. Uh so if we start to see more strategic assets start to stage here, we'll have to keep on an eye on the North Apron, too. But for now, the situation here is Nister or nothing significant to report. A giant fat nothing. And even though nothing is occurring at this part of the air base, this is a good reminder to avoid slipping into the analytical trap of failing to zoom out. And to zoom out this week, I did. If we were to go back to our Sentinel imagery and zoom out quite a bit, there have not just been aviation concerns this week, but also maritime concerns. So, even though you guys have not seen this work, I have been tracking the ships as they have been coming and going from Diego Garcia simply because I'm interested to see if this location is starting to be used more as a jumping off point for very uh long-term military operations. And unfortunately, my research has been rather inconclusive this week. I did find two unidentified vessels that seem to be rather new to me over the past few weeks or so. And I will share with you some of my homework in trying to identify these vessels. So, one of the reasons we may want to be mindful of this is again taking a more holistic approach. Just tracking B2s, as cool as it is, and looking at these very, very expensive aircraft on satellite imagery is is interesting. If we're trying to get a much more bigger picture of things, you're not going to be able to fly in enough bombs on a C5 or C17 to sustain a long-term bombing campaign, right? You're going to need ships. And in this case, these two ships caught my eye. Now, before we jump into what these two vessels are and their true identities, I had to jump back in here after I have recorded this brief. I have edited it. I have even uploaded it. It's all good to go. And in classic fashion, the very minute that I finished the upload for this briefing today here on Sunday, April 12th, I have identified this vessel. So, in short, all of what I'm about to talk about, highlighting my thought processes and all the images and all of the analysis work on my end, all of this is kind of irrelevant now. So, if you want to skip past it, please feel free to do so. But I wanted to leave it in to show you some of the things that I think about and the things I was working toward. And if you want to, you can actually see some of the analytical mistakes that I made going through this. some key assumptions right up front that actually are very very inaccurate. Now, I did start off with this sort of okay, but it really did kind of bug me that some of the data points that I identified never really sat quite right. Anyway, I'll start to go through my process now and kind of jump back and show you what I was thinking and then I'll cut back in at the end and tell you exactly what this vessel is because it's not a supply vessel. Well, technically it is, but not really. Anyway, we'll we'll get to that in a moment. But for now, here's what I started with. Now, the first one, uh, which we'll call composite tanker number one. This was very obviously a a tanker of some kind. Completely normal, not nothing out of the ordinary. It doesn't seem to have visited this location very often, at least based on my um limited research, but it's still going to be delivering fuel probably for the aircraft at this base. Maybe oil, too. Who knows? Probably a variety of petroleum products, to be honest. Either way, we've got a pretty good jumping off point for what vessel that is. The other vessel is a rather unique one. Uh this is very obviously a supply vessel, an auxiliary. And to me personally, uh it looks like a Louiswis and Clark class dry goods auxiliary. Uh that's generally what they're called. Um now I scrolled back through all of the Sentinel imagery and found out when she arrived at this location. That's a pretty good place to start from. When did she get there? That maybe help us figure out which one which vessel it is. And it appears to have arrived between March 11th and March 18th. Some people claimed that she is the USNS Guadalupe on social media. We'll get to that in a moment. But overall, uh, my appointments for this time for this vessel is that she's approximately 213 to 215 m, at least from my rather garbage imagery. So, I'll show you that. Now, one of the reasons I don't think she's the Guadalupe, even though that's what's being claimed right now, is that her whole configuration looks different. Guadalupe has got a pointy bow, and this one has a rather blunted beak, so to speak. It just doesn't look the same. Uh there the folks on the Guadalupe is rather large as well. Doesn't really match. However, if we look at a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary, it looks very similar to that. It looks like the small folks there in the squared off portion of the bow looks a little bit more accurate. And we can even go a little bit further. Go to Norfolk Naval Station, our favorite naval base for getting top- down imagery of US Navy auxiliary ships. And we look at a Henry J. Kaiser class replenishment oiler and our our satellite image of our vessel that's uh in the harbor at Dega Garcia. And you can see it doesn't really match. It's not the same vessel. However, it does look a lot more like uh a Louiswis and Clark class dry cargo or ammunition ship, right? So, you know, this is generally the kind of back pocket research that most of you will never see, but it's being done in the background. Anyway, I just thought I would share this time around. So again, I got multiple images of these vessels throughout the week, and I was really kind of interested to find out what is the name of this auxiliary ship here, and I got way down into the weeds by creating a table of every single Louis Clark class auxiliary ship with a goal of finding out uh through process of elimination which this which vessel this could be. Again, there are easier ways of doing this, but I I wanted to do the hard work this time around. This is some kind of like junior level intel guy stuff. So, I wanted to do this work uh just to build familiarity with where these vessels are located normally. And through my own work, I was able to basically narrow down uh which vessel this could be. If it is a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary, it's got to be one of these three because all the ones in red here, uh it obviously can't be those ships. So, I thought, well, you know, none of these were really good fits either. So, I thought, well, maybe it's not. Maybe it's not a Louiswis and Clark. But I measured multiple times from multiple images and the measurements I was getting are not the best. I mean, it could be a lot of different things. I think probably the image from April 5th is the best image I could get of this particular vessel, but again, not really conclusive. Uh it it does look like a Louiswis and Clark class, but it may not be. Um the tanker, it seems a little bit more clear in this image from April 5th. So, uh, the claims that this is the tanker Stenna imperative that that does kind of match the Stenna line of oilers or tankers, excuse me. Uh, those are very impossible to tell apart on satellite imagery. The only way to tell these apart is again by AIS and uh by really good imagery, much better imagery than we can get from a satellite. So, I did work through, just to show my work, I did work through uh one of the classic ways that we track and uh categorize ships since World War II. So, believe it or not, the US Navy uh specifically the Office of Naval Intelligence still does do this by hand. Uh the they classify the whole configuration and what we call the upright sequence. This is done by hand still to this day. So, I pulled the upright sequence for the STA imperative. I found a side shot of the Stenna imperative and I did the upright sequence myself. Now again, this is really nerdy stuff. It doesn't really help you that much, but this is kind of an interesting little bit of Navy lore. This goes back again to the days of World War II uh when imagine you're a submarine captain in the North Atlantic. You're you're hunting merchants and uh you need to know which merchant you sink, right? How do you for instance on all those History Channel documentaries, how do we know the gross tonnage of vessels that were sunk? Well, I'll tell you how we know. The submarine captain looked through his periscope and conducted an analysis of the upright sequence of whichever ship he was getting ready to shoot a torpedo at. And from that upright sequence, we could then determine what ship it was, especially if it's in the dark. Uh all you see is a silhouette and you see masts and funnels and cranes. And you can uh categorize the hole shape and superructure. Well, if you've got a big database or in many cases just a a book, you know, on board the ship of which vessel it is, you know, you can generally kind of put two and two together as to which submarine sank which ship. And that that research combined with the losses, for instance, during the Battle of the Atlantic, the losses on the Allied side, you know, which ship was sunk, you know, at which location and uh on what day, you can narrow down and figure out which ship it is. But this doctrine carries forward to today. So determining the upright sequence for commercial ships is very very important when it comes to trying to identify commercial merchant vessels. And in this case uh it's a little bit subjective. Uh but I did the upright sequence as mast mast crane funnel crane just identifying the features you can see. Again we're looking for big features on board the ship. There is a little bit of room for debate. Modern ships are not like World War II ships. So for instance, in this in this particular image, you could the analyst could make the argument that that second mass there is a king post. But in any case, this is generally what we're going with. And if we also do the same thing with the hole configuration, in this case, it is a raised one uh hole configuration. Some might argue it's a flushed hole. Either way, it's just more data in our pocket. it doesn't really matter because the the upright sequence and the whole configuration for our ship that we see here in the imagery matches pretty good. Uh so we're going to say with a fairly high confidence this is probably the Stenna Imperative as claimed. Again, World War II, we've made a lot of development since then and we have uh really overly watermarked drone shots of some of these uh vessels as well. And we can compare that to the open- source Sentinel imagery. And we can compare it to the image uh the paid commercial image and it seems to match pretty pretty dang close. So as far as the tanker goes, yeah, it's just an imperative most likely. We can also uh check the AIS data. Again, some of you may say, well, why didn't you check the AIS tracking data? I did. Almost all vessels shut off their transponder before they get within a thousand miles of this island. Again, it's a very decently secret place. And uh there is an AIS transponder or receiver here. And none of the vessels who go to this island turn their transponder on. So it's very much a kind of a blacked out place, which is understandable considering it's, you know, largely military use. So that's kind of where I'm stuck at here. One of the reasons why I can't identify this vessel is uh there are a few theories here, uh which you can read on your own. It could be that I'm just stupid and am missing something completely. This could be a standard thing that maybe this isn't a buildup of resources at Diego Garcia. I went through and I looked through the past four years of Sentinel images. Every single time an image was taken, I looked at it and from my own eye, I can't really I mean, there are routine logistics shipments to this island, but I can't say I can't determine right now. I don't have enough data to determine if what I'm seeing in this image, for instance, is anything abnormal. I maybe it's not abnormal. I don't know. Another thing to remember is maybe I'm just misidentifying this vessel. Maybe it could be something else. Maybe it's uh maybe it's a foreign vessel. Who knows? I measured it. I did all this uh point mineration on it and it matches as best I can to a Louiswis and Clark class auxiliary. Another theory is that well maybe the Sentinel imagery is misleading. Maybe they're trying to pull a sneaky on us. Again, coming back to the military deception possibility. Here are uh the past few images where I think this vessel arrived uh at this location and anchored in this spot. And as you can see based on the kind of yellow orange circles, it's been there since at least March 18th. Now, there was a gap of time between March 11 and March 18 where there was no satellite coverage. So, she arrived somewhere between 11 and 18. But maybe she didn't. Maybe that's a different vessel. Uh, it's pretty cloudy. So, maybe she really arrived on the 31st. There's no telling. I mean, maybe they're maybe they're trying to play a shell game here and telling different commercial ships to to anchor in the same spot to make it look like it's been one single ship this entire time when in actuality it's been multiple ships. That's a possibility, too. I say that because if we go back to my chart here of who it could possibly be, uh, based on the images, well, we've got the our three contenders. You can see the dates here. The dates are not matching up. So, something is wrong along here. It's far more likely that I'm just wrong and that I have done something incorrectly up until this stage than than it is for a sort of ghost ship to exist. Ships don't just, you know, appear, right? So, all right. Just to save everyone some time, uh, in the comment section down below, I can confirm 100% that I was wrong. This is not a Louiswis and Clark class dry cargo ship. The entire internet is wrong as well. Twitter is wrong. All of the multi-million dollar think tanks and probably CIA funded naval warfare publications are also incorrect. I have figured out what this ship is. This vessel is the USS Emory S Land AS39. And some of you out there may say, "What in the Sam Hill kind of vessel is that?" Well, my friends, this is a submarine tender. I would like to state for the record that I'm not entirely at fault here, okay? Uh because this ship is not supposed to be here. So, the Emory S Land is one of two ships left of her type in the entire US Navy fleet. There is the USS Emory S Land and the USS Frank Cable. Like I mentioned earlier, it didn't really make a whole lot of sense. There was something a little bit nagging to me about this vessel being called something that it wasn't right to start with. And then the uh actual like AIS data indicated that well, it doesn't it can't really be a Louiswis and Clark vessel either. It doesn't I mean the imagery is kind of bad, but I mean it's almost the same dimensions as a Louiswis and Clark vessel. However, what I was measuring is the helellipad off the rear end. And if you'll see at the very very top image, the the satellite image that I bought here shows a cutout in the uh helipad. So, it's like an offset helipad. And that was the thing that kind of got me going to think maybe this is maybe this is not a Louiswis and Clark class vessel because they they have a helellipad that's obviously uh contained within the hole and it it it just looks different. So anyway, I kind of had an epiphany. It came to me that this is actually a submarine tender, the USS Emory S land, and that's definitely what it is. If you look at all the images you can Google on your own, it's definitely what it is. Now, for those of you who feel a little bit charitable with wasting your time for the past few minutes, this is still very important. So, I was originally concerned about this ship coming to this area to deliver bombs. Well, we know that's not the case now. This ship is here to take care of submarines. This is a submarine tender. So, what does that tell us? So it tells us that the US Navy is going to be running attack subs out of Diego Garcia. Now, now the more astute of you, if you research the USS Emiry Sand and the submarine tender class of ships, you may find that, "Wow, wait a minute. She's been here before." And you would be correct. The USS Emory S Land was stationed in Diego Garcia almost 15 years ago. That's a long time. Right now, here's the kicker with this. There's only two of these vessels left. The Emiries Land and the Frank Cable. Now, the Frank Cable is supposed to be stationed in Guam and the MRA land is supposed to be stationed here in Diego Garcia. Now, here's the kicker. I've got a lot of documentations that state that this ship, the Emory Land, was actually transferred to Guam and the Frank Cable was sent to the west coast of America, back to Seattle, right? So, quite the twist of fate, isn't it? It's not exactly what we were talking about, but in unraveling this mystery of what this ship is, we've actually uncovered something rather new. That's why I couldn't find this ship going back a little ways in the imagery because well, she wasn't there. She was in Guam. And now, at least as of a few months ago, maybe even a couple of years, she's been stationed here in Diego Garcia a little bit more permanently. So, how long has she been at Diego Garcia? I don't know because my sentinel imagery is not that great. During the wintertime, there are sometimes many, many months where I can't get a good image of anything because of cloud cover. So again, I've gone through years and years and years of uh this this area worth of imagery, and I can't find the this this ship here passed a few months ago. So when she got here, she got here in the probably in the middle of March, like I had originally theorized, between March 11th and March 18th. So I don't know. You guys tell me. What do you think? I mean, this is kind of interesting. No, it's not the ship we were expecting it to be, but it is very, very interesting in a completely different manner. So, once again, not particularly new. This is rather old information to be honest, but I think it's kind of interesting and and it does highlight that we're looking at militarizing Diego Garcia a little bit more often because otherwise, why would she be here, right? Again, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is very helpful for running submarines uh out of uh the Middle East, so that you know, the submarines that are accompanying the carrier strike groups don't have to wait so long without going uh with mail and uh things like that. So, it's kind of interesting. I don't know if this is a smoking gun that points to, holy cow, we're going to be having more submarine operations out of Diego Garcia. I don't know, this may be the same baseline. So, it doesn't really help us make any more decisions about the seriousness of what's going on at Diego Garcia, but it is very, very interesting. and I I found it to be uh quite the thrilling hunt to fi find out what this vessel is. So either way, this is kind of the research that I have done this week. These are the the facts that we can sink our teeth into. And unfortunately, you know, this this does highlight the difference between journalism and intelligence. If we were to just talk about just the raw facts, hey, there's two ships in the harbor, right? Uh and we don't go into the analysis of what that means or we don't do any of the research to determine what vessel it could be. we we're not going to highlight any of these discrepancies. So the world of intelligence is of course different from the world of journalism. Uh journalism is supposed to tell you just the facts whereas intelligence is supposed to help you make decisions based on incomplete information. And in this case there's a lot of incomplete information. Sometimes that's that happens but either way it is a very good uh week for learning lessons and kind of getting back to the basics of good intel habits to have. Don't hyperfixate on one thing. I know I've hyperfixated on these ships this week, but don't focus on just the aircraft. Don't focus on just this island. This island doesn't really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. It's all little breadcrumbs. All little breadcrumbs of information we're trying to put together. It's like uh it's like a paint by numbers thing. We're trying to paint a picture here, but we've only got like two colors and we can only fill in 30% of the of the spots on the on the painting. So, not going to be a very pretty picture. And you may have to still look at that picture and make a decision. That's kind of what this is all about. showing my homework to uh detail some of the more in-depth things that that we talk about and work through and some of the conclusions we have to come to uh based on very very incomplete and oftentimes conflicting information. So, I know not very interesting, very very boring, but that's what I have for this week. That's pretty much all I've been able to focus on and and work through with regards to what's going on around the Middle East. Now, I do have a couple of things I'm not going to talk about just yet. I do have a couple of other locations. I have not, as you might be led to believe by what I've talked about so far, I have not been focusing only on Diego Garcia. There are a few other places to watch. And watching them, I have been. So, I will hope to have a little bit more information. We have to start developing these things out. We've got to start somewhere, right? So, I'll hope to hopefully have a little bit more information on that over the next month. It's going to take a while for my my work to come to fruition on this to kind of figure out are we going to war with Iran or not or are we doing something else. But either way, wrapping up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. It's been a pretty light week this week, which is kind of understandable this time of year. It's always pretty light. Everybody wants to be outdoors and uh not playing with radio stuff. But that's the eternal battle, isn't it? It's always a uh challenge to keep from being complacent. And uh we most certainly have to remember to not get complacent. Make sure you know how to use your stuff. Make sure you have a plan for communicating with people you need to communicate with if and when communications goes down. We still have to remember submarine cables are still being cut. China is uh still tapping or trying to manipulate or cut or anchor drag over cables all of the time. It's become a very common thing to do. So again, don't be complacent. Realize that the internet may go out for certain parts of the world and it may be hard to figure out what's going on. So, as we all know, you cannot really easily create a communications plan after a disaster. You kind of have to plan on what you're going to do beforehand. And the ghost net is at least a stop gap measure in that regard. So, that's all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. And thank you guys all for sticking with me today. I know it's been kind of a whole lot of nothing this week. Uh even though there have been definitely a lot of things going on, it's just not a whole lot of conclusive uh activities that we can kind of really get any sort of closure on, I guess. But either way, I'm going to continue keeping a very broad view on things and we'll see what uh see what next week brings. Hopefully, we'll have some more information there. But until then, thank you for all of your support. It really helps when uh when I've got to go through a lot of satellite images and it really helps a lot, too. And uh keeping the mapping project I've got going. So, that that definitely does help quite a bit. So, thank you all for that and I will see you next time.

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 a briefing for monday the 4th of october 2021 and it is being recorded on the day prior on october 3rd so let's jump right into the weather weather over the next 12 hours is not going to be super great for any kind of aerial asset as we can see most of the eastern united states is going to have significant cloud coverage at very low altitudes as well as some of those medium and higher level altitudes as well and also the pacific northwest is also going to be hit with some of those winter weather type systems moving forward into the later parts of the year it's a good idea to understand not just the cloud levels and the cloud ceilings that occur at low altitudes those are good to understand and keep an eye out for or at least get into the habit of but it's also good to understand freezing levels and where the freezing levels are located and these different kinds of atmospheric conditions that might affect any aviation asset when it comes to things like icing we're also in a red illumination cycle with lunar illumination being roughly at 11 or so so the low lunar elimination means dark nights and moving into the later parts of the year we've got uh really long nights we've got a lot more hours of darkness combined with really uh significant layers of cloud coverage and icing man it just really adds up to sort of understand that this is most certainly charlie's weather when it comes to any kind of aerial asset and like i mentioned up in the northern parts of the country we're starting to already see some very poor visibility up at altitude when it comes to things like precipitation and other kinds of storm systems moving into the area as we move forward into the later parts of the year moving on to no tams really only to of note of course they're both presidential uh the first one is in lansing michigan i haven't done the research to figure out what this one is probably some kind of visit from either uh the president or the vice president and the second one is in wilmington delaware that is the standard uh vacation ops no tam that we've been tracking for months now for this weekend so usually probably by the time this brief goes goes out and goes hot it's going to be canceled so just everybody knows and for the civil unrest forecast really not a whole lot uh really no main changes to this slide the election audit is still still going on um we're gonna wait have to wait and see exactly how that all shakes out there's a lot of speculation a lot of talking about the election audit online and we're we're definitely still in wait and see mode when it comes to that particular event moving into logistics a quick rundown of the shortages from last time so school bus shortages have gotten worse i've only left the two icons on the map which i'll explain in just a minute but most states are dealing with a significant school bus driver shortage at this point which is why i have listed it on the left hand side of the slide so for those that don't understand the left hand side of the slide that sort of box there shows the shortages that are present for every state if i were to drop those icons on every state you wouldn't be able to see the map so i've put them over off to the side that is not a legend for the icons that are on the map i'm speaking to the icons on the map if i were to put a legend for every icon that i'm using i would have over i have over 4000 icons right now so it would take kind of a long time to and a lot of slide space to actually put all the icons up there but there's two icons that are on the states of massachusetts and ohio i left those there because they seem to be having the worst worst time of it when it comes to the school bus shortages particularly because massachusetts has activated their national guard and ohio looks like they are getting ready to activate their national guard but we'll come back to that in just a second and the reason that i wanted to talk about the school bus driver shortage particularly is because of a sort of new development in that field so we've done a lot of digging and gotten a lot of feedback from a lot of people via email and dms that indicate to us that a large portion of the people in some areas aren't exactly quitting being school bus drivers they're actually being fired from being school bus drivers due to medical mandates now this turns out to be almost impossible to verify at least in any in any way is to make a broad statement about it so if you do your own homework on this just know that there are almost certainly several reasons for the school bus driver shortage from our own analysis there seem to be a few main reasons that people are not choosing to be bus drivers firstly people cannot continue the job due to money now even within this category there are widely different reasons some bus drivers are currently being paid a lot of money some people might say they're being overpaid for the hours that they're working but they feel that they can make more money elsewhere so they're quitting or they like the idea of bending over the education system to use this as an opportunity a leverage to make even more money and on the other end of the spectrum some people are genuinely being paid practically nothing so they genuinely have to change careers just to put food on the table because being a bus driver requires a schedule that isn't really conducive to most other nine to five jobs on the medical slash political side of the house there are also people that are primarily concerned with the medical mandates and they're just fed up with the whole thing so they quit and others are outright being fired for not complying with the needle-based tyranny right so there are a lot of different factors playing into these school bus driver shortages that are affecting pretty much every state at this point also the water shortage out west has gotten uh status quo on that really it's still bad as we move forward into the winter and we start getting a lot of precipitation from the winter weather we'll see how this works out but just know that of course people living in these areas know the water shortage is pretty dire but for people who aren't living there the water shortage has been an issue for honestly months and months and months at this point so that continues to be a major concern for people living out west also the microchip shortage has gotten uh quite a bit worse we've added a couple of states there as you can see really these microchip shortages are there at a point where it's very very concerning and it's starting to affect a lot of consumer goods so mostly it seems like the automobile industry has hit some of the hardest but we're also starting to see these microchip shortages trickle down into individual consumer goods basically anything that takes a microchip is going to have some kind of shortage at this point as to how severe that shortage is who knows you might not even notice it or you might not be able to buy a pickup truck in you know this in the entire country in a few months we just don't know how bad this is going to be but we do know that it is absolutely worth keeping an eye on and it's going to be a very uh significant thing as we move forward into the future also much like the uh school bus driver shortage we're also seeing a shortage of public transit drivers for much the same reasons or the array of different reasons a lot of cities have reported severe severe shortages of public transit drivers so we're just calling that as being a nationwide problem at the moment and finally really the only other addition is a sort of brief follow-on to last brief which is when i mentioned costco's shortages of toilet paper and bottled water now i mentioned last time that the shortages at costco of toilet paper and bottled water made no sense whatsoever because there was really nothing to indicate that these shortages were happening right remember during the great toilet paper shortage fiasco during the height of this whole pandemic thing the reason for that was social media hysteria really the main reason driving the the driving that shortage was a news article getting spun people freaking out and then it just snowballed into it causing genuine shortages because everybody went out and panicked bought toilet paper because it because social media told them to now this time it turns out costco's prayers have been answered because a few days after costco announced the toilet paper shortages this study from japan came out it turns out a japanese study was done showing a brand new symptom of the virus which is probably the sketchiest thing ever um that you know this virus might cause some gastrointestinal problems so if you look at the timing of this uh it's very interesting i don't know if there's any link or or not but i just thought it was kind of funny that costco announces there's toilet paper shortages and then like two days later japan releases a study some this ridiculous like sounding study which makes really no sense even if you're not you know medic have a medical even if you don't have a medical background like us it doesn't make any sense whatsoever so of course even the new york post right there is sensationalizing this as much as they possibly can so the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter at this point if it is a manufactured shortage somebody just trying to make a quick dollar off of people's stupidity online or if it's a genuine shortage due to people actually being concerned and going out and rushing to buy things there's going to be shortages of things like toilet paper and other random things because as we all know when people rush to a store to go buy something in a panic they tend to buy other things as well and as we all know our grocery stores and our logistical networks can't handle that demand all at once so it's just like you know on game day in a big you know football town or a big college town they're going to be completely out of a lot of random things right usually the alcohol section will be completely cleared out along with the snacks section so expect a similar type of thing to happen because this is just getting spun way out of control on all of social media and all of these so-called journalistic agencies so i thought that was interesting to touch on and moving into critical infrastructure concerns uh really i wanted to leave the crystal valley ransomware attack on there from last time really there have been no major updates from the last brief about the crystal valley attack several mainstream media outlets have reportedly reached out to crystal valley uh several times in the past day or so and haven't really gotten any response so we don't know if this attack is resolved and we don't know if it is still still going on so i just wanted to leave it on there to show that it probably still is there's still some impacts that are occurring because of that attack also moving on to number two there bandwidth.com the company bandwidth which is you know confusing name as a company but bandwidth is actually the company name of a newer company but they are a very large provider of voip services so voice over ip services they have a lot of clients everyone from verizon to local 911 run their telecommunications networks uh through services that are provided by bandwidth so um even though this attack this attack was stopped quite quickly bandwidth.com announced that they uh they had mitigated the impacts of this uh quite quickly so they didn't really get very deep uh into the systems of how you know bandwidth works and things like that but since bandwidth has such a wide wide breadth of services that they provide there were very widespread impacts felt from this cyber attack so again it really just shows the vulnerability of our telecommunications networks to things like cyber attacks even if they're stopped very quickly the fact that we're so networked and one single company and one single set of servers can impact the entire country so this is a great example of that and then moving on to number three uh the shipping situation when it comes to the port congestion things like that has gotten quite worse there is currently still significant shipping congestion and it has spread to most of the ports in the united states as we briefed last time the port of los angeles was the most heavy hit and has had to divert cargo ships to offload as far north as vancouver actually we can see right here this these are the ships that are actually uh they haven't been diverted north to vancouver these are just some of the ones that are still there uh hanging out outside of los angeles waiting to offload as we can see there's quite a lot uh they're sitting there waiting so shipping on the east coast is also affected with thousands of ships being at anchor outside ports waiting to unload or being diverted elsewhere and again for anyone who doesn't understand why this is such a big problem the short version is that our national and even global logistics networks have always had serious problems our logistical systems barely work as is but because barely working is still technically working very few people care or pay attention to things like this so when you take a system that is just barely chucking along and just barely functioning and you increase demand sharply while the logistical networks can't handle it anymore which is a huge problem and since everything is so interconnected since our logistical transport capacity is so small compared to the amount of goods that need to be shipped you have a lot of random shortages happen there's only so much space so the there's an opportunity cost for each load of cargo right and the choice of shipping one item over another can make a huge difference simply one ship unloading its cargo before another ship or one train taking one less freight car than it could will result in localized shortages of random goods in random places around the country and for significant governmental actions not a lot of great news this time so up first there new york has begun the process of terminating doctors for not complying with the medical mandates and in turn has activated thousands of national guard soldiers to assist with the personnel shortages that are a direct result of this so new york is freely admitting that they they have created this crisis and they are perfectly fine with that arrangement because they're calling in the soldiers to fill the gap so we'll come back to that one in just a second when it comes to the national guard deployments but moving on to number two there as expected another round of purges from social media has begun with youtube itself announcing that they will be outright deleting videos and content that goes against the regime's narrative on the medical procedure that cannot be named so we're in a really tough spot because the regime is coming out and stating in places like the actual manufacturers of these medical um substances are coming out and stating a lot of stuff and they're being quite open about how ineffective this stuff is like for instance the cdc director rochelle wilinsky just the other day stated that the jab cannot prevent transmission you know you've got places like webster's and you know dictionary and the cdc changing the definition of that v word online so that it's no longer the same word as before so we're in this really weird spot where the regime is freely admitting that this this stuff is uh really just about control and totalitarian you know things like that but youtube still wants to take it wants to take up for them so we can't even show the regime talking about the regime's own ideology which is strange so um yeah again pardon this for having to talk and encode so much that is really the only thing that is keeping us from getting outright deleted from youtube at this point so um i guess we're just going for confusing the algorithms instead of uh trying to go against them i guess but in any case i should mention that we here back up all of our videos to odyssey which is in the description uh just like always so i thought i should mention that that you know youtube you if you have another youtube channel that you like um and they're uh they're definitely questioning the regime's narrative even though the regime itself is questioning the narrative in a lot of cases youtube is probably going to delete them so you can of course there are a lot of third-party websites which will allow you to take the link of a youtube video and download the video so i would recommend that for any videos that you find that are particularly interesting on youtube we do that with our own videos just to make sure that we've got everything backed up separately on all kinds of different drives and stuff so i just thought i should point that out as well moving on to number three uh millie the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff testified before congress he was called to testify based on well i guess the allegations of treason but as far as his actual testimony goes you can actually you know watch it download it whatever if you want um there's really not much intel value with this other than merely doubling down on everything uh confirming that he did in fact commit treason but the sticking point is that what everyone else calls trees and he calls doing his job so again it's not really there's not really much to learn here it's just interesting to note and it is very important i think in a larger aspect to keep in mind the mindset and the political ideology of senior military leadership as we move forward into an age of military deployments on u.s soil which i will talk about in just a bit moving on to number four even more concrete proof has come to light that confirms the biden regime is preventing americans from getting back home from afghanistan you can read the specific details yourself but the biden regime particularly the state department has a long track record at this point of preventing u.s citizens from getting home but also allowing non-siv and non-green card holding afghan refugees to wander unguarded around us military bases so this is a much larger story a lot of people have done a lot better job at covering this development uh than us because there's i think that there's a lot of journalistic value there but there's not really a whole lot to analyze for us other than yeah this is a concern and we need to watch out for this stuff but really when it comes to national level policy and what the federal government is doing you know best thing we can do is watch unfortunately with a lot of this refugee type stuff so again something that we've talked about a lot already um i just wanted to provide yet another example of the regime's behavior on this for posterity's sake i guess and number five finally the infrastructure bill is back in the press for some reason which is perplexing to us because we and hundreds of other entities covered this months ago when the infrastructure bill was introduced but for some reason this tax per mile program is drawing outrage once again even though it probably should have been drawing outrage months ago so here it is this is an actual screenshot of the issue in question the per mile tax on citizens pilot program again don't just take our word for it or our screenshots that could easily be doctored you can actually read the full document itself the link is is in the sources after this but this clearly outlines the creation of a per mile tax on all drivers eventually nationwide now currently as this bill is written this is a pilot program but anyone with any common sense can see the language of this pilot program is to establish infrastructure to actually work out the logistics of how to tax people clearly this feasibility study is really just instituting the creation of this logistical system which we think will almost immediately not be a pilot program but a full-on thing or they'll just keep calling it a pilot program decades into the future after every single vehicle in the united states has a tracker in it now interestingly this bill also highlights how they plan to do it right here as we can clearly see there will be trackers placed in your car excuse me the cars the pilot program participants now we can get into the weeds of how this will work when the bill passes and we kindly get the first ideas of what kinds of tracking devices they will use also as we pointed out months ago they honestly don't even need to have tracking devices in everyone's car all they need is a network of automated license plate readers which are networked with law enforcement i.t networks so that you won't be able to drive on the road without your plate being flagged as not being registered under this system and considering that the funding for this is 10 million dollars you know it's really hard to tell where that money is going to go it doesn't say in in the bill list i'm showing you probably 90 percent of the text to the bill as it's written so it's hard to say as to how this will actually work out it's basically just a blank check of 10 million dollars to set this system up and again a slight digression to kind of put things in perspective we here always try to balance what we call the the freak out point for for lack of a better term conveying exactly how concerned to be is always difficult it is really almost impossible to convey the sense of urgency to someone who is not an expert in a particular field sometimes it's just easier to tell people when it's worth freaking out over something our classic example of this is that if i were out and about walking around town and i just happened to see a bomb disposal technician and full kit and everything uh sprinting away from something i don't even care what's going on i'm going to break all land speed records to outpace them even though i have no idea what's going on i'm just going to assume that there's something that i don't understand that's going on and i'm going to defer to that trusted expert until i can figure out what's up and make my own decisions so when it comes to stuff like this the u.s government literally telling you that they are going to put tracking devices in your vehicle we would recommend having the same level of concern as if the government told you that they were putting a tracking device in your vehicle yes this is a volunteer pilot program but we can all assess how that's going to go there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program also this program is voluntary yes the us government seems to think that people are going to line up to voluntarily pay taxes on each mile they drive i mean i guess this is good news for the folks that are fans of volunteerism this is an outstanding way to see how that's going to work out but my own personal assessment is that this voluntary pilot program will be about as voluntary as the medical mandates are the good news is is that the u.s government tracking every person's vehicle in the u.s is going to be a massive logistical nightmare it will be easy to defeat easy to just say no to and almost impossible to enforce plus most people go out of their way to hide their income and avoid paying taxes anyway and even then it is highly unlikely that the us government reaches a point in which they will be able to send a swat team to your specific house because you unplug your tracking chip sure they can get big names and resistance leadership but they can't get everyone and the us government already has a hard enough time getting everyone to pay their taxes as is yeah this is a gateway to some really horrifically bad stuff but it's also something that we can easily fight so hopefully that explains what we think the appropriate level of concern is over this particular governmental action it is worth being aware of and definitely worth taking concrete steps to disrupt deny and dismantle these systems once we get an understanding of exactly how this is going to work out but for now there really isn't much that's worth completely freaking out over and i go out of the way to over explain the appropriate freakout level the appropriate level of concern to have because of the next slide i am sure that this slide will get screenshot and posted all around the internet and it will probably set the comments section on fire but since we've mostly really stopped reading comments i just wanted to show you some of the most significant troop deployments around the country since there seemed to be quite a lot and as governors activate their national guard units the american public is having a lot of interaction with the national guard in a lot of areas so we thought it would be handy for people to know what's going on and where these units are located just in case someone sees a convoy or something or walks into a hospital and sees it staffed with soldiers we get a lot of messages from people who see military units moving around which are almost always units just going to training or something but again with so many guardians deployed around the country i thought it would be helpful to start covering this there are probably tens of thousands of national guard troops deployed around the country for anything from wildfire response to helping stock food banks and other genuinely good and decent missions so keep in mind that this is this slide only shows the deployments that we think might be helpful to know about because a lot of these states have really not been good about letting their populations know that their local hospitals are now staffed with soldiers and as far as symbology goes i'm sorry if this looks atrocious i just tried to go for a blend of something like you know mil standard 25 and something that blends a little bit better so moving on to the most significant one which is massachusetts so in massachusetts the 26 maneuver enhancement brigade of the massachusetts national guard they're the unit that is providing soldiers to drive kids to school for this school bus driver shortage as far as how many soldiers are actually being deployed for this uh numbers are not clear at the moment we know several hundred at least but we're thinking probably more than that so for right now i'm just keeping it at at the brigade level just until we have an understanding of how many are actually out there driving these school buses and vans and such and moving on to new york uh the largest deployment by far for the entire united states is most likely going to be the new york 42nd infantry division so again keeping the symbology there of a division we don't know how many people of from the 42nd will be deployed most likely it will be the 122 medical battalion along with others but again they're not deployed they're just you know the dashed outline there indicates projected unit positions so yeah they're going to be deploying a considerable amount of troops to staff hospitals now again they're most likely not going to have enough doctors so they're going to probably deploy a lot of infantry soldiers as well in order to fill other staff roles like cleaning and food services and things like that so when a lot of these states say they're deploying their national guard a lot of times they're not even deploying medical personnel or the medical personnel that they had have already been deployed so a lot of these national guard units are deploying infantry assets or some kind of you know engineering assets for various support roles and things like that moving on down to texas the 36th infantry division really just elements of that division mostly the 72nd brigade combat team and the 11th medical battalion they're down there supporting the enduring border mission which texas is calling operation lone star other states have sent small elements of national guard soldiers down to the border as well but it's really hard to track all of them because we're talking thousands of soldiers at this point is down there on the border so once we have a better understanding as to where and which units are down there we'll provide that update as well jumping back to ohio several school districts have actually requested the governor activate the national guard to help with the shortage of school bus drivers as well and the governor has signaled that that they will be doing this and press statements confirm that hundreds of soldiers are currently being trained to drive buses and other vehicles so again this deployment is projected so we don't have any specific units just yet uh moving down to the rest of the south alabama a really small element probably a dozen or so doctors nurses and medics are helping out local hospitals down there georgia same thing slightly more people about a company-sized element of soldiers have been called up to be spread across about a dozen hospitals throughout the state of georgia and also the similar situation in south carolina just a small handful of troops deployed really those are just medical only troops maybe about a platoon's worth spread around the entire state moving out west to wyoming their governor reported that they have roughly 200 people hospitalized with the virus at the moment so he has activated about a hundred soldiers to be spread across hospitals in 16 cities around the state montana similar story about a company's worth of soldiers are being deployed at about half a dozen hospitals around the state and moving back to kentucky a little bit more nefarious reporting coming from kentucky it looks like kentucky is having the same situation that new york might be having we've been receiving reports that kentucky hospitals have been firing and replacing hospital personnel with national guard soldiers for months now again that's really hard to verify because we can't tell we're not exactly getting termination papers in our inboxes for each person that's fired so we can't tell exactly down to the ground what's actually going on i'm just saying that this is what we've been seeing reported around social media kind of a lot so since there's enough of people talking about i just wanted to point out that you know right now there's about a battalion's worth of soldiers scattered around most major hospitals in the state and it looks like most of them are coming from the 149th meb and wrapping things up with oregon oregon has been really proactive i should say about deploying their national guard troops for pretty much any reason so they've activated the air national guard several thousand soldiers from different components of national guard units all around the state to support local hospitals so it's really kind of hard to figure out what kind of personnel are going to places but it seems like it's mostly just uh your infantry mos is from either the air national guard however they do things and how the army does things basically saying it's not medical personnel it's largely not medical personnel that are that are being deployed because the medical personnel for oregon's national guard units have already been deployed for months now so really there's they're just calling up thousands more troops uh to fill supporting roles hopefully that's helpful in understanding the largest deployments around the country i know i missed a lot of deployments here and there but this this takes a lot of time to research combing through official pao websites or social media or or each state's executive orders it just takes a while to compile all of this data and usually when a national guard mission goes down it'll happen and then people will forget about it so even though soldiers are deployed for months to some location after a couple of weeks the news stops caring about it so now we're having to go back and dig up news articles talking about a specific unit being deployed months ago even though they're still there so really hard to do and it's hard to categorize all this information and make sure that it actually is as accurate as possible so as time goes on we'll hopefully have even more data to go off of and moving forward into the k-12 public school mask mandates really the biggest update from last briefing is south carolina so south carolina has entered into a confusing legal mess so here's what we've got we have the south carolina supreme court ruling that masks cannot be mandated which gave huge legal support to the mask mandate ban but a federal judge came in and halted the mass mandate ban after that the governor said that the state would appeal it to the u.s supreme court so we have a combination of many things happening the south carolina supreme court says that masks cannot be mandated and a federal judge said that the mass mandate bans are halted which are two separate things in the south carolina supreme court based on the opinion that was written on their earlier decision makes it extremely unlikely that they will go against the federal court ruling but the governor and the legislature clearly is going against the federal judge by announcing lawsuits and things like that oh and on top of all of this all of the school districts all over the state are just making up their own rules at this point you could have a kid going to school in one district and be living a pretty normal life well as normal as to be expected from the public school system but a kid who lives across the street in a different district is engaged in a very tyrannical situation so of course people who live in south carolina have much more knowledge about this than we do but just for people living in other states uh south carolina's situation is a good way to illustrate just how complex the public school situation has become and also kentucky a slight error that i missed kentucky originally months ago had a mass mandate statewide right no no exceptions right but the state legislature overturned that executive order last month however after digging around we found that 96 percent of all the school districts in kentucky have a mass mandate so yeah the mandate got overturned but almost all school districts have kept the mandate so i thought that was worth keeping kentucky red on the map so just so you know and for the jab mandates california has announced that gavin newsom announced that california will be making the jab mandatory for all k-12 students no exceptions in all school districts moving forward i don't think it's actually occurred just yet but it's making the rounds and all the usual sites this morning so i thought i'd mention it and also just as a reminder that usually when something happens in california of a tyrannical nature it makes its way to other states as well so my guess is probably new york is going to do the same or something similar along with a smattering of other very uh historically tyrannical states particularly if they have the same political leadership that they had during the initial crisis so uh really this is the only update for this slide and overall really no change to what we're seeing with regards to individual states uh resistance to the medical mandates i guess we're still in just wait and see mode when it comes to what states are going to do when it comes to lawsuits and things like that so we'll see and we'll update this as time goes on and for international issues this time up first are iran and azerbaijan so tensions are quite high in the region at the moment azerbaijan has been quite cozy with israel lately actually over the past few years so the israelis have sold azerbaijan quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and other defense technologies which has obviously made the iranians quite upset to have a sort of quasi-military defense ally to these to israel on their northern border so iran is currently holding the first ever military exercise on the border with azerbaijan which azerbaijan has reciprocated by holding exercises on their side of the border so classic tit for tat military deployment story i guess we'll see how this goes as we move forward into the next few weeks moving on to north korea just a quick update the missile that they launched back on the 30th of september was a new sam system turns out so so for those of you keeping score at home that makes it the fourth completely new missile system that north korea has launched in just the past couple of weeks so they are really pulling out all the stops to keep up with the shows of force that japan and south korea have been conducting so that arms race is probably going to continue to increase as time goes on but north korea has got to be running out of new systems to test considering that their economy is it's north korea's economy right so it's not like there uh have a whole lot of extra stuff just lying around right and moving down to australia a bit of good news coming out of new south wales uh their premiere gladys barrett jiglian has resigned due to a corruption scandal uh so this corruption scandal is separate from the medical tyranny stuff that's made her famous uh bear giclee has a very long history of being tied up in financial scandals and in this case it stems from her having a secret relationship with a member of parliament who was the center of a years-long massive bribery scandal so she has stepped down to distance herself from this and i guess we'll see how this works out with the whole corruption thing not really sure how this is going to go as we move forward and moving back to china so china has been at it again with their flying their aircraft into taiwan's airspace so for those of you who've been following us welcome to our world uh it does seem that like it happens quite a lot china has been flying aircraft into taiwan's ada's for what decades now i guess so it's nothing new it's just that we try to keep note of things when they happen to be pretty big flights and this time it was uh 25 aircraft so that's usually about the the number of aircraft they fly when china is really super mad at taiwan over something china's trying to both bully taiwan and and expand their territory and their control of the south china sea and stuff like that this is probably going to be a staple for the next foreseeable future as the tensions between taiwan and china uh continue to increase and finally the united kingdom they uh just a quick update from last time the the uk has actually activated their military get fueled where it's needed so like i mentioned last time it's not so much a shortage of fuel so much as it is a shortage of fuel truck drivers which again is for a lot of different reasons but it's to the point where the military is involved which is is never really a good thing uh when it comes to the logistics of things um so any time the military gets involved to help move supplies around in a country it means that the civilian networks have failed so that's and that's not good right so hopefully they'll be able to get the uh trucking shortage under control very soon and go back to a normal type system but uh yeah we're definitely gonna keep our eyes on this as time moves on so that's really all i've got for today i know a lot of data being thrown out today and a lot of really boring and monotonous stuff but hey this stuff can't always be entertaining unfortunately but uh thank you for those of you that stuck around so far and thank you again to all of our patreon supporters who have really helped us out quite a lot as we move forward so here are your slides for today i know i decreased the font size sorry if you have a hard time reading that but as always you can get these slides from our odyssey page the link of which is in the description so a lot of information is packed down in our description box which we would highly recommend everybody checking out so that's it for today thanks again for watching and we'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 January 18 2023 happy New Year everyone looks like this New Year is already getting pretty spicy so let's go ahead and kick things off by talking about significant incidents and concerns in the Northeast region one of the biggest incidents that got a lot of mainstream news media coverage was the polar vortex or whatever kind of buzzword you want to call the winter weather storm that hit around the beginning of December uh last month particularly the actions uh that actually happened within the City of Buffalo New York now a lot of people got got a lot of news coverage on this so I'm not going to beat it to death but the situation in Buffalo New York and how that whole winter kind of situation worked its way out was very indicative and a very good demonstration of a lot of the issues that we've been talking about previously we had a lot of infrastructure problems we had a lot of traffic incidents we had a lot of you know censored medical issues I'll say it like that and we had a lot of um release date actions right so there were a lot of issues to kind of unpack with this incident and though none of these are particularly surprising it's very important that we all kind of keep these in the back of our mind here right for instance one of the biggest elements of this whole incident that kind of caught my eye was the implementation of military police to serve in a domestic policing role in Buffalo New York uh to keep drivers off of the roads and you know underneath the kind of Quasi curfew that was uh that was enforced really it was just a ban on driving personal vehicles on the road during the snowstorm now I know a lot of people whenever I talk about curfews people don't really like it because there are a lot of people out there that actually support curfews for whatever reason but I'm just saying it's probably a good idea to kind of keep an eye on incidents like this especially considering that now we have the word curfew as part of our daily vocabulary in a lot of a lot of cases around the country there are a lot of persistent curfews that have been in place for years and they're just keeping they just keep popping up in a lot of places around the country and I you know don't think that's a super great thing so that's why I want to keep talking about these kinds of incidents because I think we all kind of have a a shared understanding of the seriousness of curfews and any kind at any time you're using the National Guard or any uh green Suiter military force in in the United States against uh potentially against citizens that's not a good thing I don't care how friendly the relationship seems It's not a super great thing so the Buffalo incident was not great uh granted it was a very serious issue and really highlights a lot of um you know prepping concerns about how you really need to be prepared for extreme severe winter weather uh I think way more severe than is is kind of normal for the area but at the same time you also need to be concerned about the things that nobody likes to talk about like uh you know domestic policing actions that's kind of a Hot Topic that again really people don't want to think about uh but you're not really going to see a whole lot of prepping you know kind of culture publicly embracing the idea idea of all right well now this is part of our daily life here you know to talk about curfews and driving bans and okay now there's a you know a uniform Soldier telling me I can't drive on the road you know we're here now um and as scary as it is we kind of have to acknowledge the fact that this has become a norm in the country and that's why I wanted to mention it moving on to some more unfortunate news of a green Suiter nature I wanted to talk about an incident that occurred in New Jersey way back in actually in November of last year but I'm just finding out about it now uh the short and sweet version of this incident was a a parent in North Hanover posted a photograph and made a post on Facebook of illicit content explicit content uh that was displayed at the entrance of her child's school now I think that we all know what kind of content this is I'm not going to go into many more details than that because you can easily Google this and find out the real story here and I'm not going to show the photo because I consider that content to be explicit and I'm trying to be you know at least a little bit more family friendly with these kinds of videos so I do want to say though that nothing in this original Facebook post uh was threatening in any way it was just a photo of the explicit content that this parent's child saw at the entrance of the school no no hint of violence it was anywhere near the social media post well despite this an Army lieutenant colonel took issue with this mom's Facebook post and immediately reported it directly to the local police chief using the internal lines of communication that were pre-established per their own words this military base communicates directly with the police chief for security reasons it kind of makes a lot of sense if you think about it in in a in a perspective of like a peacetime military you want to make sure that you know your guys with guns on the military base also are kind of tied in with local law enforcement because there's a lot of incidents that occur you know there's weird jurisdictional things so there being a kind of shared understanding between a federal you know service like a military base and a local law enforcement agency it makes a lot of sense for lines of communication to be open however that's basically where the common sense stops because these lines of communication in this case were used to Target parents just as we saw the FBI do with regards to targeting parents all over this country for you know voicing their opinion at school board meetings so long story short parent posts a photograph and and a post showing the the explicit content at her child's School some Army Lieutenant Colonel sees the post and gets the police chief to investigate and harass the local parent now on a brief admin note I'm not going to drop this specific lieutenant colonel's name right now because of several reasons uh for one this guy is clearly trying to Target people so uh you know that's that's not good but also I want to make absolutely certain that this actually is the guy because so far the documents that I have seen and reviewed uh have had many names okay so it's not just this one guy there are a lot of people in this this chain here right so I just want to make sure before we drop any names or if we drop any names you can easily Google this this guy's name you can once you figure out you know hey just Google the story this is made national press uh back in November or actually I think in December is when I think Fox News picked it up either way I can tell you that the interesting part about this story is the next part so I started looking into this Lieutenant Colonel right and I just Googled his name and one of the absolute first results that popped up was this stock photo from a stock photo website uh detailing his recent change of command and wouldn't you know it look at what unit he was the commander of a military information support Battalion hmm would you look at that you might know this kind of unit colloquially as psyops so what this story looks like is a psyops commander directed a local police chief to Target a parent because her child saw something obscene at school man I I tell you I I don't think I can comment on what that means and how serious this is so so I'm just gonna move on and let this kind of stew for a bit and if you guys want some homework go read into this story a little bit but I can tell you that this doesn't seem to be an isolated incident okay uh this has happened before and this is not the last time this is going to happen I can guarantee that so moving to the Southeast region we get to more traditional stuff uh and that is the well let's start with the Gulf Coast for a minute um there have been an awful lot of Refinery and Pipeline and terminal issues down in the Gulf Coast uh for a variety of reasons it's really kind of hard to explain we could probably talk about this for for quite a bit more but let me just give you the kind of short and sweet version is that the the winter weather that we had last month the kind of you know whatever buzzword Arctic blast uh went through the country uh broke a lot of stuff but not just that because we can kind of compensate for maintenance issues a lot of times but things that we can't really fix that that quickly are staffing issues and someone who doesn't know how to do their job and just other maintenance deficits or or other kinds of problems it doesn't appear like all these refineries at least in the Gulf Coast in this specific instant I'm talking about all these issues that we saw with the winter weather or that you know kind of popped up around the the same time last month these don't appear to be particularly nefarious because it just looks like there's there's a lot of things going on here and it's just kind of snowballing into just bad stuff right parts not being there staff not being there cold weather breaking things people not knowing how to fix things people not knowing how to prevent things from happening you know we're getting to the point now where our infrastructure is crumbling and I think it's quite obvious and when you look at places like Pol refiner areas and pipelines places that have some of the most skilled work in the entire country you know what happens when you have a a non-skilled person or someone who's not experienced working at some of these places you get a lot of a lot of issues now that doesn't I want to separate these issues out from all the other ones we've seen I don't think that anyone in the country can look at refineries Catching Fire all over the country in the past year and say that that's normal it's it's not it's clearly not we know this instinctively it's just a gut feeling we don't even need to look at any data to to see how often refineries Catch Fire however when it comes to you know severe weather or or any kind of slightly out of the norm weather we have a lot of problems that pop up and are the result of many things it's really hard to pinpoint and point the finger at one thing all we know is that it just sucks and that's just the way that it is now I'm going to keep an eye on the refineries as usual and see which ones you know kind of miraculously have an accident next because that's a norm apparently every time we brief something something else has had some kind of incident at it but so again we'll keep keep an eye on this stuff and I just want to let everyone know that you know we're not out of the woods yet with our infrastructure we still have a long way to go and we're just beginning to see I think uh the the the the the snowball at the top of the hill right and we're about to see it uh accelerate rapidly uh just based on the amount of uh things we've seen happen right even just none taking nefarious things out of it even just some out of accidents we've seen happen genuine accidents and the amount of genuine maintenance problems that alone uh can be very crippling to any infrastructural system moving on to the topic that has United many Americans more than I have seen in recent years uh the potential gas stove ban so the Biden regime is planning to or floating the idea of potentially outright Banning natural gas stoves uh the reasoning behind this ban is very much unknown at the moment we're hearing about this from the consumer product safety commission and they have not provided really any of the research but we're getting anecdotal evidence as a brief side note many of you have noticed that apparently news headlines are law because that is the way that a lot of companies and entities and agencies have been treating things over the past year or so we all remember how for instance the IRS came out with that whole uh 600 limit thing you've got a report you know his income kind of thing well guess what all of the platforms out there PayPal venmo uh cash app all of these Services went ahead and implemented that policy even though no one had ever actually seen the policy so it's like what's going on here so I think that's what's happening with this gas stove ban thing it's not an official policy nothing has been signed nothing has even been written just yet it's just kind of an idea that has floated to the news media and since the news media now apparently make law or something to that effect what I think is going to happen is a lot of states and localities are going to ban gas stoves at the local level without the feds having to get involved in it it's brilliant honestly if you think about it from a nefarious like you know Devil's advocacy kind of situation if you were the Biden regime what would you do because remember we've been briefing this for a couple of years now The Binding regime has actually had a pretty hard time in some cases with virtue signaling a lot of times the news media doesn't know how to spin a story so and the Biden regime is not able to answer you know hey how should I spin this story and I'm CNN writing an editorial on something around the Atlantic writing an editorial on something and they they don't know how to spin the story because they don't know what the federal government wants they don't know what the Biden regime wants them to say so they just kind of wing it and really that's a problem because sometimes they get it wrong well this is quite clear the Biden regime has signaled to all of the virtue signaling entities your media your local governments your local city council your local your local County Commissioners all of these agencies in entities now are fully aware of what the feds want and they want a ban on gas stoves right so the feds don't have to lift a finger they don't have to write anything because again Biden can just sit at his desk and wave his magic wand and apparently a news head news news headline will become law so that's kind of the situation as as I see it and the really really the big concern moving forward we don't have any information other than that nothing has been signed nothing's been published we don't even have the research that led the consumer product safety commission to say that gas stoves are harmful for people we just have General anecdotal evidence I challenge you to find what the what the consumer product safety commission is actually talking about because so far all I've seen is circular reporting One news agency says oh well the cpsc says they're harmful well and they cite another news agency who then cites another news agency who then cites some guy on Twitter who then cites some random employee at cpsc and they can't actually find me a directive for something so again by the time this goes out I'm sure they will be something in writing because the modern regime doesn't like to wait on things like totalitarianism but it's interesting this is another illustration of how laws can get in effect made like it's a de facto law it's a de facto regulation people are following laws that don't exist yet and it's happening all over the country so I would very much recommend people to kind of look into this a little bit more now to walk a lot of this back and to bring this back to a more uh a more clear perspective I guess we have to be aware that this might quite literally be the most palpable case of gaslighting we've ever seen okay and I trust me the irony is not lost on me on this now what I mean by that is the Biden regime can float this idea okay they can float this idea they can leak it to the press the Press freaks out every American freaks out because guess what I've seen some data you know again studies and and statistics are made up nowadays so who knows if this number is accurate but apparently rarely as many as 30 percent of the entire country thirty percent potentially a third of the citizens of this country use gas stoves so you're now telling them that they're going to have to go buy a new uh stove or something we don't we don't know when the government's telling us right because there's no information but either way what I mean is if this is going to happen this is going to be very very very severe and the impacts of this will be very widely felt now where the gaslighting comes in is the vitamin regime can say oh no no no you misunderstood we never meant to ban gas stoves we meant to ban like this kind of gas stove or like this kind of connector that nobody uses or or some some specific technical jargon that nobody understands or that isn't actually used right so they can walk it back and they can say well no no you were spreading misinformation we weren't going to ban gas stoves despite the fact that's exactly what we said uh we were never going to ban gas stoves and you're just spreading misinformation and shame on you and you know know there you go so they can walk it back very easily and Gaslight the heck out of us if they want um which I think is probably what's going to happen because man I tell you if you if anybody bans gas stoves oh boy uh man I I don't know the impacts of that uh I can tell you it's not going to be good um oh boy and then the next question is all right well what about gas heat because good let me tell you something a lot more people rely on gas heat uh than you think and uh that's not going to be good um I did see one Theory and and I I agree that it's kind of an interesting idea is that I forgot where I saw it so sorry if if you know you had this idea first I've literally just forgot where I saw it uh somebody had the idea that this might be the result or or it might be intended to drive a wedge between urban and rural populations yet another divide right and it's not a bad idea because uh natural gas is not available in the middle of nowhere like I live in the middle of nowhere now and I there there's no gas line anywhere near me I don't think there's any natural gas in my entire County to be honest you know that's a interesting thing you know natural gas is really kind of a big thing in cities but not so much in the rural areas so rural people are not going to be affected by this really at all but people in cities will be it's an interesting Theory I just wanted to mention it because like I said I saw it somewhere or maybe it's just a fever dream I had I don't know but I thought I wanted to mention it so very very severe stuff very uh significant stuff if it actually comes to fruition the other thing I wanted to mention and I'll mention it here because the decision took place in Washington DC so I figured I might as well throw it in here and that is the pentagons floating idea or submitting The Proposal I suppose is the best best way of describing it for a zero trust infrastructure for well the internet at large I guess now the idea of a zero trust infrastructure in the field of cyber security fairly a fairly simple construct but it gets really complicated in actuality uh now I again have stated many times I am not a cyber security expert so I am most certainly not going to go into the details of how this all works but I can say that I know enough to to know that this kind of thing is very concerning now to explain zero trust concepts for the layperson which includes me it really is kind of a a complex idea think of it like this in the past or even today actually uh you have passwords for things right you have a username you have an email account and you log into a website with a password even physical security you have a physical badge that gets you access into facilities or a PIN number you can put in to open or unlock a door okay once an entity or a company or an agency has given you access to something you have access to it right you may not have Total Access real it's not how it usually works like after all I can't log in to you know say Gmail for instance and get access to Google servers no no I just have access to the client side kind of stuff right if I were to use Gmail and likewise if you have a badge or some kind of key code to get into a building chances are you're not going to have you know a master code right the whole concept of access to things whether it's cyber security or physical security relies on a person being the the the vector by which trust can be given it's not so much talking about trusting an individual person or not trusting a traditional person it's about removing this this this construct altogether because here's the thing we gave Edward Snowden trust right he was trusted by the NSA he got he got a really high security clearance and he got a lot of passwords and logins and a lot of stuff same thing with Bradley Manning right so maybe using the concept of you know access or no access is not really the construct to move forward maybe we need something else maybe we need something that is you know various applications various you know tools that that are on the software side of things that can make sure that everything is running smoothly because as we all know we're in an age of cyber attacks right someone gets access to a system they can shut it down whether it's a you know a tractor sitting in a field that's connected to some server you know or cell tower or something or if it's you know a colonial pipeline right either way using if you remove the the the understanding of providing access to someone based on a trust or no trust you know criteria if and if you go to a whole new system itself that's kind of the way forward with regards to cyber security that's a little bit hard to understand and I fully admit I don't completely understand it myself either because there's a lot of there's a lot of ways to kind of get to where you want to go with with zero trust infrastructure the bottom line for why you the average citizen should care about this is that this is a fantastic way to lock you out of the internet if they don't like you on it and here's what I mean by that one of the closest ways that you get to kind of a zero trust infrastructure is what we already kind of know throughout the cryptocurrency world and that is the dreaded kyc or know your customer in other words the bane of anyone who has ever tried to buy cryptocurrency newsflash it's not exactly 2010 right you can't just go online and buy cryptocurrency with the you know with a credit card or something uh anonymously it doesn't work like that even if you were using you know a credit card that wouldn't be anonymous but the point is is that if you want to buy cryptocurrency today in 2023 you're gonna have to put your social security number in somewhere uh now there are some things and ways around this but to be honest in terms of most cryptocurrency there really isn't especially the most common cryptocurrencies so this is kind of one of those the kind of the closest way I can think of explaining a zero trust infrastructure is I can guarantee you kyc requirements are going to be a huge part of a zero trust infrastructure um or at least while the system's kind of getting its way out you know getting working its way out through through the development and stuff like that so again bottom line this is your indication and warning this is the video that you can look back in a couple of years time and point back and say I Told You So when you are locked out of your email account or your bank or your company because of something you said or thought or something you didn't say this kind of infrastructure the zero trust infrastructure for me not being a cyber security guy not being a technical expert it on the one hand it seems kind of the way forward when it comes to cyber security but on the other hand it seems like a great way to prevent me from getting on the internet at some point right it's it's a great way to build a off an authorized list of users on the internet which is going to be kind of a basic requirement for this moving forward and go from there again I'm not doing a super good job of explaining this and you I'm sure far more technical experts will pop up in the in the comments to to kind of explain this a little bit better but the point is is here's the timeline 2020 7 this is from their own slide this is the dod's actual product that explains what the dod is working on and I don't know about you but look you know living in the world today and knowing how the world Works anytime the dod does something I'm very suspicious okay you know I I've hey I hate that I have to explain that at this point but anytime the dod develops something it's going to be used against Americans at some point so I'm really kind of concerned that the timeline for this is so short and the dod is going to figure out a way to do this and this would be a great way to implement you know social credit this would be a great way to implement you know some kind of you know social ban on any kind of any any of the systems that keep our society running so I wanted to kind of bring this out as kind of homework for you guys if you were more interested in this I'm not particularly surprised and honestly you don't really need to know much more information beyond what I've already told you to make a decision and the decision you know it should be look hey you need to start kind of moving away from these kinds of systems because let me tell you something the reason that we don't have such a great Communications infrastructure as is is because of how big these problems are the nature of the internet uh in and of itself you know servers connected to other servers that are controlled by other people the way that https traffic works it is an infrastructure that is very helpful if you don't want people on it and if you control the way internet traffic works at the very base level you control a lot of things and I'm very concerned about that so that's why I wanted to to mention it here so I'll just kind of leave it at that and move on to the next wildly different topic which is something that I realized recently has a name which I didn't think it did and that is transnational repression transnational repression is fascinating and terrifying and here's what it is transnational repression is something that we kind of we know happens we know this happens but we think that it's on a small scale so small in fact that I didn't even think that it had a name I thought it was just oh wow okay that was kind of a rare thing this is when a foreign government chooses to intimidate assault imprison arrest or whatever its citizens while they are in another country now that should ring a bell because CNN ran this article from a while back I think it was last month yeah in which CNN of all places admitted that China is operating over 100 police stations across the world with the help of some host Nations report claims that's the actual headline of this news article from CNN I'm shocked right again this is something that's not new at all we we have known that this occurs all over the world particularly with China China is a nation that is obsessed with its citizens and more accurately I suppose obsessed with controlling its citizens because that's how it maintains power it China is a communist Nation they quite literally are Xi Jinping or Xi Jinping however you pronounce his name he is not the president of China China does not have a president he is the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party it's right there on this Wikipedia page so when communist Nations do things like this when they are very concerned with citizens of theirs outside of their Nations uh we have things like the East-West Berlin Dynamic back during the Cold War we have very interesting things occur well the same thing's happening today and we now know it's become public record that there are secret Chinese police stations all over the United States that secretly detain and sometimes torture their citizens for saying or doing something and thinking that being in the US they're outside the reach of China well they most certainly are not the scary part about all of this you might think okay well this is kind of this is still pretty rare right it's pretty fascinating and and slightly terrifying that China you know is concerned about their own citizens this much but you know any historian is going to tell you this is not surprising at all so if we recognize this is happening and you know even though your average citizen out there in the United States is going to say well you know how does this affect me I you know after all I'm not a Chinese National living in the United States you know for those people man it sucks and you know I would be very concerned about you know being either you know assassinated or captured or imprisoned you know in some safe house that the Chinese government has set up in New York I'd be very concerned about that if I was a Chinese citizen you know not so much if I'm an American here's where it gets a little concerning for the American citizens listening and that is that the feds are now on to this and it has become so much of a problem that the FBI has set up a a a website and a hotline and and all kinds of threat intimidation guides to help citizens Escape their own Nation now again this is the FBI and it is very clear that the FBI has their own goals and those goal goals I do not think align with anything good but I it is very interesting that now the FBI is is quietly trying to spread the word about this and trying to address this issue of foreign police officers exerting their influence and taking jurisdiction on the U.S soil I have to be very careful when describing this because I don't want the runaway trains of the past we all remember that four month period of time where I was getting about 200 emails a day regarding uh people claiming that China had invaded Canada or that uh there were remember all those um uh cargo ships off the coast of California yeah yeah those uh shipping containers were all full of Chinese agents and Chinese spies and the Chinese military were planning to invade Via San Francisco yeah I've lived that nightmare of trying to walk that back and kind of show people that yes okay concerns valid it's not true moving on when it comes to this this is very much true and it is so much true that the FBI is now issuing memos to lower uh law enforcement you know local law enforcement agencies trying to explain to them that this is a huge threat now and to what should a local police officer do if they encounter a Chinese police officer trying to arrest a Chinese citizen on U.S soil that is a huge concern because the FBI doesn't do anything unless it has already become too much of a problem too too big of a problem so I just wanted to kind of point that out that uh this is a much bigger problem than just to see in an article there are actual agencies tracking this and trying to figure out what to do about it because again this is a foreign Nation conducting policing actions on U.S soil and that's a huge problem again for the average citizen out there what can you do about it I don't know I mean I'm just going to be completely honest with you and say look I don't think that the you know you can contact the FBI you know they've got a hotline they've got a number but I don't think it's going to help because at that stage good grief you know it's kind of a serious problem so so again I wanted to bring this up and make everyone aware that this is an issue so that when it becomes more of an issue in the in the future we can under have a basis for understanding of how all this works now again let me walk it back a little bit and say look I don't think you're going to walk into a Chinese police officer in your everyday life this is going to be a very select problem for a select few but hey if you're at a university you know and you've got the majority of say a nuclear engineering class is you know Chinese Nationals I mean when I was in college I had to take a few uh courses and uh the courses which were about things like uh energy policy and nuclear engineering turned out to all be Iranian students in one class I was one of three U.S passport holding American citizens and the rest of them were um either Iranian or Chinese Nationals so that's another problem for another day I suppose but for these people um you know if they're not spies themselves which I think you know a good portion of them are uh it's it's a it's a concerning thing especially for Chinese Nationals trying to flee China or flee Hong Kong or or things like that or or you know big names that have already left the country uh China is again a nation that is obsessed uh with not being humiliated and uh if you tend to humiliate China and you are a Chinese National well that doesn't tend to end well for you so again just wanted to bring it up and make everyone aware of this because this is going to be a huge problem for the foreseeable future I think moving on to the East Central midwestern region let's bring it back to our old standby of chemical manufacturing plants catching on fire and in this case our our winner for this time around is LaSalle County Illinois specifically Keras chemical hopefully I pronounced all that right uh they had a very large fire slash an explosion at their chemical plant and this one is very suspicious because the ex it started first of all with an explosion that began from inside a shipping container and um yeah kind of kind of suspicious there of course was nobody around the I don't know if the facility was occupied at the time of the explosion or not uh but there was no one around the shipping container when it exploded and also there is uh apparently Hazmat concerns because immediately following the explosion and multiple alarm fire uh a green oxidizing substance was observed to be leaking from the facility uh which had to be neutralized uh via you know various you know chemicals uh by firefighters so again not a super not a super great thing again when we talk about factories or or chemical plants or stuff like that you know blowing up or Catching Fire we have to look at you know everything we have to look at all sources right and one of the major things that I personally look for is all right was a facility abandoned at the time because if it was abandoned at the time that's going to be a a huge indicator that it it might not be as nefarious as you think because what is the point of a Black Ops wet work team you know attacking a facility that has no one working at it what is the point of some kind of social movement or domestic group I should say attacking a facility that's not in use right however we do see places that are abandoned burned down all the time due to drug use due to vagrancy due to a variety of factors right even even accidents or lightning strikes are the result of a lot of this with this plant they had just Broken Ground on a 20 million dollar expansion of the plant in August of 2022. so they were doing pretty good it seems they were expanding the plant they were looking at growing I've got a dozen photos online about you know showing their their grand expansion right and now suddenly their plant gets crippled by some kind of incident that we're not really sure about that started inside a shipping container very interesting I don't know if this plant has a history of safety violations my quick you know Google Foo did not really reveal anything usually if you Google one of these company names like the one last time I forget the name they had like a laundry list of fires and and and maintenance problems and staff having problems and it was just like an accident a day for years until you know the thing finally just just had enough and blew up this one I didn't really find anything now I'm sure somebody out there knows uh the history of this plant especially locals might know uh what's going on there but uh just let everybody know I wasn't able to find any kind of significant history of negligency at this plant at least for my my brief search so again we'll chalk that one up to some kind of you know incident and we'll just keep it in our memory and move on and wait for the next one moving on to the West Central midwestern region you guys get a reprieve from the bit of bad news this time around I wasn't able to find anything uh that occurred that was worth mentioning uh this time around I'm sure next time I'll find something but but let's go ahead and move on down to the southern border region and uh for the rest of the states that are in this you know kind of area I didn't really have much I really just kind of wanted to focus on the Texas border again and like I mentioned last time uh sorry I haven't really had time to drill down and and provide a lot of the information that I wanted to for this so let me just say this and that is the Border crisis is continuing and growing worse however the response to it is getting a little bit better in some areas but it certainly looks like the events over the past month or so especially with Biden's high profile visit down there uh this is a this is a losing battle particularly with the cross-border violence that is likely to occur from the incidents going on in Mexico now I know a lot of you wanted me to have a dedicated slide on this I got it I'm working on it I'm still building the maps for this and trying to figure out what's going on because I am not a South America analyst I'm not a Central America analyst I've never been there and I'm having a lot I'm having to do a lot of learning because um just you know spoiler alert the cartel situation in South and Central America and in Mexico is kind of complicated and it goes back kind of a long way so really what you need to know for now is that El Chapo's son one of the biggest cartel leaders in the area really the signaloa cartel right everybody's everybody's seen sicario right so no further explanation needed right well no really El Chapo's son was arrested and and uh the signaloa boys have have gotten a little spicy and they've basically declared a general mobilization against the Mexican Government until they release him well the Mexican Government is not going to release him he's going to be extradited to the United States or at least that's what they claim so far either way I I will I I will delve into the the situation in Mexico a little bit more at some point when I get time to actually learn about the situation and then I can you know speak more intelligently on it all we know is that you can hop on social media right now and see an awful lot of warfare going on in pretty much all over Mexico right now because of this now when it comes to the United States uh coming into the coming into the situation uh this just makes a bad situation worse right it makes an already tense board situation where there are thousands of active duty soldiers thousands and and hundreds of law enforcement from every badge you can imagine every agency you can imagine is down there at the border and you can argue whether or not that's enough people or not everybody knows that in no operation are you going to have enough people to do what you want to do but there are an awful lot of people down there it's a very tense situation there is a very high chance for international incidents right we have already seen cartel members attacking U.S soldiers who are standing guard on the border at some of these more high profile locations and it's not good there have been dozens of incidents since the start of this whole border crisis which granted is decades in the making but the bottom line is that right now it's pucker Factor 9.5 down there and it's not likely to get any better anytime soon so please be advised that this is a situation that's going to develop further now again to to keep things in perspective I don't think we have to worry so much about you know the cartels invading the United States that's not what I'm saying is going to happen uh we certainly have to worry about the humanitarian crisis we have to worry about the the immigration crisis or we have to worry about a lot of things but I'm not so much looking for cartel members trying to invade the United States that's that's not what's going on here what I mean is you're probably going to have a lot of U.S soldiers targeted uh either for political reasons or just because they're guys with guns in close proximity to other guys with guns who are probably very upset about the situation in their country right now so even though there is really no motivation whatsoever for the violence that's going on in Mexico to spill over into the United States there might be a little bit of a reason for justification now a huge flash point to look out for is when you see start seeing news headlines saying that the extradition of ovidio Guzman the El Chapo's son right uh when his extradition has happened okay because right now uh a judge in Mexico has has halted his extradition while they figure out what's going on here so again when that extradition takes place because it will most likely take place the US has been trying to hunt this guy for a long time ever since you know we got El Chapo himself this guy's a very senior member of the Sinaloa cartel so we're not going to let this guy get away if we have to go down there and get him ourselves which is most likely what's going to happen either way uh the bottom line is that for guys down there on the border if you see this dude's extradition is taking place because you're most likely not going to know about when it takes place ahead of time uh it's going to be handled by very special people in very special ways right they're going to sneak this guy back across the border into the U.S somehow well when that happens it's going to make the news and you need to be very careful about the situation down there on the border because then all those dudes with with guns were very upset about their their senior boss getting arrested uh they're now going to have a justification to start pointing those barrels towards the border so I just wanted to bring that up and mention that this is kind of a big deal and even though I'm not an expert on it right now I can clearly see the writing on the wall and that's probably probably not very good so again something to keep an eye on for the future and moving out west getting back to the tradition of things we have many many attacks that have occurred on electrical substations so again I'm not going to mention all the ones that have occurred in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon and Washington there have been around half a dozen or so within the past couple of months and they have ranged from possible theft to vandalism to tampering to actually like shooting it you know uh Transformers and things like that it's really kind of hard to say because a lot of these things are not they're not making the press in the way that you'd want them to make the Press because the major media is running the headline there's no information there because well you know Federal authorities are not going to release the details of these attacks to the mainstream public which on the one hand makes a lot of sense because the feds are obviously not going to want to encourage or or provide targeting guidance for people trying to Target other places around the country you know so keeping those details secret is it makes a lot of sense however by keeping things secret the general public and you know ourselves included are not able to discern why these places were attacked or if there was something that we could do to prevent it because for instance we're sending hundreds of millions of dollars to another country that shall not be named uh but if we can't afford a 50 padlock for a facility then that's a problem you know if we're not going to it's cheaper to file an insurance claim to get a half million dollar Transformer out to a specific site than it is to you know buy that you know security guard to stand there and watch it all day either way the result for people like you and me is the same we don't have electricity for a few days and this is a concern especially for uh incidents like the one that occurred at the PG and E facility uh really just a small uh substation well it really wasn't a substation it's actually a solar farm it provided uh power to a lot of the casinos in Las Vegas now this incident was very interesting and this was a I'm going to call it I have it on the slide Harris probable I'm going to call it an almost certain Islamic terrorist attack really the attack Vector was this it was a guy drove his vehicle into the mega array the solar array that provides power again for MGM Resorts uh in Las Vegas he rammed his vehicle through the gate and then some press reports are reporting that he siphoned gasoline out of the tank and set the Ablaze including the Transformer or some kind of electrical apparatus that he drove his vehicle into now you might note the date on this this occurred on January 7th slash eighth right we became aware of it on the eighth and it probably occurred overnight on the January on January 7th now this coincides interestingly enough with Al qaeda's usual yearly press statement so for the past few years Al Qaeda has you know still been around there's still a thing uh and they have issued uh directives slash like a happy New Year death to America message right and the one for this year specifically recommended uh their people to carry out attacks on U.S soil I think this is just me spitballing with very little evidence to back it up so just be aware of that but I think that's what the reason for this attack was I think that your your Lone Wolf attacks probably funded by some domestic U.S agency uh carry out these kinds of attack that's why I think we saw another attack in New York City Times Square on New Year's Eve a police officer was attacked with a machete uh and I think that's also why we're seeing some of these attacks right that message came out and you know your Lone Wolf extremists here in the United States were motivated to do stuff like that again it just kind of shows you that the counterterrorism has never really been an easy job but at the same time I would be willing to bet that these kinds of things are would have been easily preventable had the right people been working in the in the counterterrorism industry and had the counterterrorism agencies in the United States actually being concerned with tracking uh foreign terrorists rather than uh trying to Target parents at school board meetings but again you know there's no real way for me to describe this these kinds of things in neutral language anymore you know I just have to call it like I see it and you know I would be willing to bet my my thought is that around New Year's time we saw Al Qaeda release their message and boom now we have uh a few a handful of attacks happening in the United States low level attacks it really didn't have too much of of an effect but still it's like man hey a rookie analyst could have could have called this you know I mean these federal agencies are spying on us no matter what and they're investigating people for for speaking out of school board meetings but yet they can't actually dedicate time to conducting counter-terrorism operations that are relatively easy to do these guys would have been very easy to find because it's always like you know they were known to the FBI beforehand but anyway that's a whole lot of speculation that I'm sure you guys don't really want to hear so I'll just end my kind of ranting and raving on that for now and let's move to something a little bit more interesting and that is uh we're gonna skip over the entirety of Europe for now sorry guys and we're gonna move to kind of the the I don't want to call it a bigger threat but an interesting threat and that is the Far East yes the invasion of Taiwan by China the ultimate will they won't they this is something that has been debated by military strategists that get paid a lot more than me for a very long time and no one seems to have a really good answer for any of this will China invade Taiwan nobody knows uh we know generally what it would look like uh very very generally and we know that China has been making very strong aspirations toward the small island nation over the past well year few years but really the past few months for instance last month they launched one of their largest uh military exercises the largest one they've ever done which was like 70-something aircraft including bombers Fighters you name it it looked like it the party was about to start but uh they would have to have thousands of aircraft in the air for that but again I am not a Far East analyst I've never spent any time at paycom and nobody else here has either so I'm having to kind of get spun up on that as well the reason you might care about an invasion of Taiwan by China is well for a few reasons but really the the main theory is the the island chain Theory which states that if China is going to invade Taiwan they're going to have to keep going and they know that if they take Taiwan it's going to take the vast majority of their military and they're going to have to kind of expand into South southeast Asia and especially the South China Sea if they have any hope of winning that conflict uh really you can kind of very generally see where China is going to have to do exactly what Japan did during World War II they're going to have to take these small island chains Island hop as far as they can before before well the world mobilizes against them will this cause World War III I don't know um back in the day man when I was kind of like a junior analyst I always though

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the intel update for the 25th of june 2022 and as always it is being recorded the day prior on the 24th so let's get right to it all right up first are a new series of slides i don't know how long i'm going to continue this for but i thought it prudent to start talking about a lot of the interesting infrastructural events that have occurred over the past few weeks and months so we're going to talk about this from a regional perspective because i tried putting this all on one slide and it there's just too many so i know a lot of people are very concerned about infrastructure these days rightfully so and i know that there's a lot of either misinformation or propaganda from from all sides regarding who's causing some of these issues or if there is a cause at all so what i thought i would do is break this down by state and by incident really and see if we can kind of pinpoint some of the more innocent events and some of the more uh nefarious things that are just really sketchy all the way around so first up is the northeast region and we'll start off by talking about pennsylvania uh so if you live in the area you've obviously seen this in the news over the past few weeks and that is uh avian flu i of course am no duck farmer right but it looks like there are a lot of farms being impacted in southeastern pennsylvania with regards to either ducks or turkeys i think i don't know if it's spread to chickens just yet it seems like it's really just a couple of duck farms obviously the state is not going to point out where most of these avian flu outbreaks are going to be you know located they're obviously for privacy reads it's not going to be pointing the fingers at a specific farmer but if you can look at this image you can see kind of where the the government has put this heat map out to show where most of the avian flu outbreaks are kind of uh contained i just wanted to start with the avian flu kind of stuff because we have to remember that some of the things that we're talking about today when it comes to infrastructural concerns are really routine things avian flu is almost a yearly thing i'm pretty sure it's a yearly thing in a lot of areas around the country so i understand people's concerns with regards to a lot of the things going on in our food supply and i understand the the hyper hyper awareness that we place on our meat supply in particular these days especially considering all of the things that the oligarchs and the extreme you know leftists and tyrants of the world have been putting out regarding our meat supply uh but i also want to kind of pump the brakes on things that yeah and avoid um events that are basically routine from getting out of control it would be very easy for someone to create a headline that says oh my god all the ducks in pennsylvania are being killed at an astonishing astonishing rate you know 30 000 ducks at two different sites have been massacred right it's easy to it's easy to write those headlines and get a lot of clicks and views but what they don't tell you is that this is pretty much completely normal nowadays now you can of course do the research on your own and figure out what the avian flu actually is and the causes of it and things like that but i'm not exactly going to be peeking around duck farms and houses looking for george soros sprinkling some stuff in their food i'm not exactly going to be doing that so i just wanted to kind of start off with that one a little bit and move on to new hampshire so way back on the 13th of april if you guys can remember that far back east conway beef and pork in conway new hampshire east conway new hampshire was burned to the ground and this is going to be a common theme a very common line throughout this entire brief today that the cause of the fire is unknown and the investigation is underway now again with when it comes to arson investigation it's really really hard to tell a seasoned arson investigator will be very very much able to pick out the more obvious cases and i'll mention these as we go along but for a lot of these you know you can't really you can't really tell what the deal is did somebody is this an accident and we just can't figure it out or is this arson and if it is arson d what's the motivation here is it insurance fraud like i know you know growing up in you know where i grew up and i guess this is kind of a common thing throughout the uh the country is man people would burn their stuff down for the insurance money so you know is that something that is that the case or is this a deliberate attack on our infrastructure i don't know and in most cases throughout this brief today i'm not going to know and no one else is going to know either but i thought that the information would be valuable to share so so moving on to new jersey on the 23rd of march the pepsico bottling facility uh had a very large fire uh there again causes unknown investigation is underway and just keep in mind that when it comes to these investigations you're really not going to hear very much because remember local news sources local medias where we're going to be notified of these events and local media has zero incentive to revisit an article and say hey you remember three months ago that pepsi facility that burned down yeah it turns out it was an accident you're never going to see those news stories right so just keep that in mind as we go along uh massachusetts had an interesting one though both of them kind of well you know basically within a month of each other and both of them involving eversource energy so one was in newton massachusetts and the other one was in plympton massachusetts uh both of them were fires at electrical substations so the first one or actually the most recent one in june on the 20th of june was it looks like a worker might have been involved with that one so it may be accidental i don't know pure speculation the other one though back on the 30th of may was allegedly due to malfunctioning equipment and again local sources really provide no information on that whatsoever so hard to say what's going on but i did think it was interesting uh that there were two of those incidents very close to to one another in kind of the same general area right on the right on the outskirts of boston so very interesting and i guess we'll have to do some more research and figure out what's going on with some of that moving down southeast we'll start off with virginia back on april 30th purdue farms in the norfolk area had a major major fire at one of their processing plants so uh this one was it's really hard to tell exactly what went on it may have been some kind of overheated you know electrical part or motor or something like on a conveyor belt hard to say but the local news sources state that it was uh due to malfunctioning equipment i don't know but the local chesapeake fire department specifically went out of their way to say that it was accidental and not suspicious quote so again you can believe what you want i don't know what to think i just thought i'd share it and move along so in georgia there was a another more interesting one this is a smaller company red ridge llc in calhoun georgia i can't really i didn't really find very much on the company itself but they're they're apparently it looks like they're a very small local supplier of rubber or flooring or things like that their facility burned to the ground and again the cause is uh unknown of that fire moving on down to florida this is a more interesting one back in on the 19th of may there was a train deer element in martin county florida the train that derailed was carrying limestone and it looks like only five or six cars were involved in that derailment again the cause of the derailment is unknown which is not uncommon when it comes to railway things so as one might expect trains and the the rail logistics of this country are very much national security issues so uh when you see incidents involving trains i tend to be more hyper aware of it because uh i lived in the pacific northwest for a few years against my will and it uh it was very apparent to me that a lot of trains were being derailed due to uh eco terrorists up in the pacific northwest uh that was quite clear it was very common uh just a few years ago and probably still is to this day uh but it's very very uh you'll very rarely see that cause being attributed to something so uh when there's a train derailment or something to do with rail it's kind of you know a little sketchy i tend to be hyper aware of it and i'm not saying that's the case down down in florida you know trains are mechanical devices right and it's not easy to move things by rail around the country so you know it could just be something innocent it could be something nefarious i don't know i'll leave it up for you to decide moving on to the midwest or specifically the eastern central midwestern region if that makes any sense basically the five states of wisconsin michigan illinois indiana and ohio i had to break it out that small because i didn't have enough room on the slide so starting off with michigan probably the one that everyone has heard about the most which was abbott laboratories back on the 16th of june abbott laboratories uh suffered they were put on the plant was put offline due to a severe flooding incident that affected the really whole plant complex now abbott laboratories if you recall has been kind of in the news a lot lately due to them being the largest supplier of infant formula in the united states so again i really hesitate to point the finger at something like an act of god like rain uh being an intentional act i don't i mean that's it's gonna be kinda hard to make that you know assessment however when you have such a large factory that has already been in the news you know with regards to being shut down due to um bacterial contaminations and causing this infant formula shortage that we're still going through uh you tend to take notice uh you know one would think that they might have thought to put out a few sandbags here and there i don't know i don't want to you know judge what's going on there because i just i'm just not i just don't know what the situation is but i do find it to be interesting so i thought i'd mention it also in michigan uh there was a very large fire at the rider integrated logistics facility in delta township michigan so rider integrated logistics is a massive supplier of automotive parts they actually are a huge supplier for general motors so gm parts really come from rider integrated logistics they sort parts and things like that and source them as well so the the fire uh damage as far as we know is kind of unknown nobody really knows how bad it is it does not it did not appear to be too bad but it's uh hard to say because we just we just don't have pictures we just don't know right and again like clockwork the cause is unknown again fires at factories are not particularly rare there are hundreds of thousands of fires that occur all over this country you know every year so it's really hard to say what's going on but since this one is such a an important part of our automotive parts logistics you know chain i thought i'd mention it uh moving over to wisconsin uh back on the 13th of june a company called festive foods out of belmont had a very large fire that damaged most if not all of the building they are a major food production facility for some of the more pre-packaged food items that you see in grocery stores right again cause is unknown and it's under investigation really hard to say what any of this really means moving to illinois on back on the 23rd of may so a little bit a little bit further out a company called bio urja if i'm saying that right or bio urja if they're trying to go for urea i don't know uh it's an ethanol plant in peoria uh they are a major ethanol production facility and they had a fairly large fire that destroyed five grain silos so for the guys out in the midwest uh you you already know how big of a deal a grain silo fire is and for anyone else who doesn't know grain dust is one of the most explosive components known to man so whenever you see a grain silo fire that's going to be that's going to be a hot one but in any case this ethanol plant was shut down i don't know how much ethanol they produce but they do produce three grades they produce alcohol like human drinking alcohol grade they produce hand sanitizer grade and they produce vehicle ethanol grades so it's going to be hard to tell if that plant is online now or if they're going to be offline for a while really really hard to say and again the cause is unknown but it's also under investigation so again fires at grain silos are not particularly rare but since it's happened in an ethanol facility i wanted to mention it moving over just a little bit to the west central midwestern region i will start with minnesota which back on the 29th of may there was a fire at foreman farms in stockholm minnesota they are of course a major food production facility they make a lot of pre-packaged freezer goods as well they had a major fire that killed a few tens of thousands of chickens and again the cause is unknown and is under investigation well with this one we don't know if the fire affected just the chicken houses or if it affected the production facility can't really tell but also minnesota again really throughout the whole month of may they had a whole avian flu outbreak at multiple sites around the state in minnesota it looked like it was mostly affecting the turkey supply with many news sources if you want to believe them quoting three million birds affected so far so this is again been kind of a a quasi-normal thing i hate to use that word normal when we're talking about any kind of you know malady but uh the avian flu is certainly something that it just happens every now and then and it's been happening since may in minnesota moving down to missouri on the 2nd of june the paris brothers incorporated company they're from the missouri side of kansas city they're a major cheese production facility they had a listeria contamination so a major recall of a lot of different cheeses you can go to their website you can go to the fda's website and figure out if you have that cheese just so you know it wasn't really highly publicized at least you know not that i saw but again they probably would only you know run ads or notices that there was a listeria contamination in areas where the food probably went but i don't know in any case you know it's worth a check right moving over a little bit to nebraska on the 31st of may a company called knox crete incorporated out of omaha they are a company that manufactures cleaning chemicals for concrete if i have that correct this one was it was a relatively small fire or actually sorry the fire was relatively small the risk was great because as you could probably imagine the chemicals used to treat and uh clean concrete are very noxious and very hazardous so there was a shelter-in-place order for omaha uh for probably tens of thousands of people uh for quite a while while that fire kind of just burned itself out the firefighters went to defensive mode with this one and just kind of let it this kind of kept it from spreading because they couldn't really get too close to it uh the interesting part about this one was that again according to local news media sources which are known for making stuff up uh i the interesting line from a few different local media sources is that there were no employees on the site uh at the time of this fire again i don't know if that means nefarious or not i just think that i just thought it was kind of interesting so and you know the investigation is of course underway and the cause is unknown just like most of these other ones also in nebraska just outside of omaha city they're going to kind of share the same puck because they were kind of in the same area uh there was a cold train derailment and that was back on the 20th of june so um this one went kind of viral with a lot of people saying oh my god our infrastructure's under attack right uh this is again one of those high profile events that have kind of got you know pundits and other people making observations and um yeah this was an interesting one a coal train derailed it it uh chewed up quite a bit of track uh so it looked to me like maybe a quarter mile of track was pretty much um had to be have to you know be replaced due to this derailment um but yeah i was a trained carrying a you know full dozens of cars worth of coal and uh yeah derailed so again no cause to the derailment and it's under investigation uh again like i mentioned with rail things you're gonna have uh you're not gonna get a cause right they're not gonna let people know uh what caused this train to derail lest people get some ideas from the internet right moving up to south dakota back on the 14th of april there was a pretty big fire at a cabinet manufacturing business park i don't really have a specific name for the business there were a few of them there it's really hard to tell exactly what business even the local news media couldn't figure it out they just said cabinet manufacturer cabinet factory uh in blackhawks south dakota again very large fire totally destroyed the building that it was in cause was unknown under investigation then jumping back down to kansas back on the 17th of june um this is an event that has gotten a lot of press and i don't really know what to think about it this was one of those things where it's it's not it's not the event that makes me suspicious it's the reaction to it and this was the mass death of a few hundred head of cattle uh down in southwest kansas so this is something i i read about it i saw it uh i saw it pop up on the internet and i thought you know what you know par for the course i'm not a cattle farmer i've you know never raised uh any kind of cattle and i even i know that heat waves particularly in south kansas you know you get high humidity at night you know decently high temperatures during the day it kind of makes a lot of sense right it just happens sometimes especially you know amongst new farmers who aren't quite so aware of the threat maybe i don't know so when i saw this event i thought you know what not particularly interesting unfortunate for sure especially when it comes to our beef supply you know a couple hundred head of cattle are probably not gonna make a big difference but still it's like you know it's still unfortunate to see however when i started noticing the intense we're talking like military grade media blitz here to cover up this incident and just make it disappear from the internet my interest got peaked a little bit and you know any time i see you know fact checking on something these days i'm very highly suspicious so i wasn't suspicious about this incident before but you know again maybe it's my own bias maybe it's just my own experiences right how often how often we equate bias with experience right in any case my own experiences make me think when someone's trying to cover up something this hard maybe there's something worth covering up maybe i don't know clearly a lot of the more leftist media groups see this incident and they think that there's something to it even when there there might not be you you read any agricultural journal and they're like yeah man that was unfortunate but you know stuff happens right but the leftists clearly don't think that they think that this was they maybe the leftists think that there was something more to this so that's why they're trying to cover it up i don't know either way i just thought it was very interesting that out of all of the events that i've been able to find and put on these slides this is the one that had absolutely hands down the most fact-checking there have been so many articles written and we're not just talking like a little banner on a tweet right we're not talking about a little call-out box on an instagram post no no we're talking about five or six pages of a website talking about how oh this is fake news this is uh oh you know this this this and this and it's like interesting very interesting to see that so i thought i would mention it i personally you know i think it's going to be pretty hard pressed to find there was anything nefarious to do with this specific cattle death but i'm very interested over the amount of fact checking activation uh over this particular incident so we'll move on down to the southwest down southwest we have uh texas and again this is one that to me is not particularly you know nefarious on the face of it except for considering all of the other stuff that has happened and especially the targeting we've seen in our energy infrastructure so in texas back on the 8th of june freeport lng out of freeport texas had a very large explosion and a fire at their facility and the facility will not be online to full capacity at least until september that's kind of the quote that freeport lng has has given out to everyone again the cause is unknown and the investigation is underway from what i can sort of guess from a lot of the local news media sources is that it might have had something to do with venting emergency venting or something like that of uh you know vapors and things like that incidents like this fires explosions at refineries and production facilities pol production facilities are not particularly rare they happen kind of a lot so it's not surprising however but when you see something happen at such an important place you kind of look twice right especially you know five years ago we would have said oh man there's a fire you know freeport lng you know that's that's too bad but nowadays we immediately want to point the finger at something nefarious because of how important it is freeport lng produces or really rather processes uh 20 of the lng that we export from the united states and we're already seeing countries that we export liquid natural gas to they've already said hey we're going to immediately have to go to the saudi markets uh to to fill this demand because your your facility's offline so other countries kind of got the shaft with regards to that you know freeport lng that it's not a small complex it's a huge complex and they do you know thousands of different things there so i don't know how much of the lng that is produced or processed or shipped in or shipped out of the freeport facility where there was the fire i don't know how much that's going to affect american prices for energy i just i don't know i i just think that it's i think it's probably going to affect the export market more but again it's really hard to say moving out west uh let's start with oregon so we've got to go back uh kind of you know to the end of my sort of very loose criteria for reporting back to the 19th of april where there was a massive fire at the shearers foods food production facility in hermiston oregon so from what it looks like that facility burned to the ground and was basically a total loss again cause unknown investigation underway but yeah also just to just the very next day on the 20th of april azure standard in due for oregon they that facility burned to the ground as well now i don't know if that fire burned the hq building it looks like it took out their office building rather than the actual food production facility but again azure standard is a pretty big producer of the you know green bio you know ecologically sound you know organic foods around the country so they make a lot of that there so i thought it was kind of interesting you have two major major food production facilities up in the cascades uh of oregon along the border there and uh they both burned down very very close together again some people would you know say oh it's just it's message misattribution right causation versus you know correlation i don't know i'm telling you i don't know what the correlation is here if there is one i'm just saying that it's a very interesting case where you've got a lot of this stuff happening uh kind of in the same area around the same time you know again could be completely innocent i don't know either way we don't know no one knows because the investigation is not concluded on either one of those so moving down to california another very very large food processing facility taylor farms out of salinas california this was back on the 14th of april and this one actually did get a fair amount of press coverage uh because taylor farms produces a lot of uh prepackaged uh salad goods so if you were to go to your average grocery store pretty much anywhere in the country and you were to look at the like the pre-chopped pre-mixed like salad mixes they have kind of in the river in the produce section chances are you'll find a taylor farms product and that factory uh it looks based on the images it looks like it burned completely to the ground i don't know if it was a total loss or not they will probably have to rebuild a significant portion of that facility if they choose to rebuild it and again the cause is unknown investigation underway i think this one there were a few reports of maybe an equipment failure i i don't know maybe maybe some uh mechanical problem that ignited some ammonia fumes i've seen that on a couple of local news sources that kind of talked about it we'll keep our ear to the ground on that moving up to montana uh on the 27th of march so going back to really kind of like the the very end of the of my uh of when i started looking for these kinds of things there was a very large fire at the exxon mobil pol or petroleum oil lubricant refinery in billings montana so that facility up there in billings billings is well known uh for hosting that v it's a very low it's like several hundred you know acres maybe several hundred square miles if i remember correctly of a combination of refining transporting pipeline some pipeline stuff there are a few well heads out there if i'm not mistaken i don't really know much about the facility but i know that it's a pretty big facility in the area and again causes unknown investigation underway it's really i couldn't even find any pictures of what the damage was i guess we'll have to find out what that is if we find out what it is again just like rail logistics anything regarding a fire or some kind of even if it's like something intentional especially if it's intentional at a pol facility you're really not going to hear about that right so moving to idaho uh back on the 14th of april again so a few months ago jim state processing which is again a major food processing facility they process i'll be willing to bet probably potatoes potato chips out of haber and idaho they had actually a plane crash at their facility uh the facility wasn't really damaged too much but a small small civilian aircraft crashed into the roof of one of their facilities there now this one again the cause is listed as unknown but i just did a quick look at this on google earth anytime i hear of a plane crash at a factory i pull up google maps or some kind of other mapping services better uh and you can clearly see that this facility was directly on the approach path for the local airports runway so i don't know if it's a case of somebody getting their approach all messed up and they just flew into the ground or some kind of other emergency you know we all know that you know most airline disasters occur within what five minutes after takeoff and 10 minutes before landing something like that uh so it would make perfect sense if this was kind of a more accidental thing but again this particular one uh got a lot of press from some of the other you know some of the more conservative news sites you know pointing fingers ah you know they're flying planes into food production facilities i don't know my just my hunch is this was probably more more accidental than intentional so that kind of wraps up uh the talking about the different regions and some of the more the back history i guess if you can call it that of the past 90-ish days of interesting infrastructural events and incidents i kind of wanted to set the stage get the template up there and kind of get everybody used to seeing this kind of thing because i really wanted to do just one slide on this and then i started doing a lot more research and it became two slides and then three slides and now we're you know we're here at multiple slides we might end up having to break this down by state uh someday but again these are not all of the incidents i want to stress that very much this these are not all of the incidents that have occurred uh in the past 90 days these are just the ones that i had the energy to research uh because i had to cut this research off at some point in time or else this brief would just take months to get made this is what i've got for now we will be adding to this unfortunately i'd be willing to bet we're going to be adding to this quite a lot but i'll see what i can do to find more and and see what else we've got so again this is just what i think these are just the incidents that caught my eye and again i had to cut the had to cut the research off at some point so i will continue making this out i'll see if the rest of the team here has has any to add on some of these areas i'm sure if we were if we went looking for nefarious things i'm sure we could find them that's one of the the dangers of research is that if you're if you're on a topic you tend to research what you tend to find with your research right you tend to find what you're looking for even if that's not the most accurate way of doing things if that makes sense again that's why i took a more journalistic approach i'm just telling you about these incidents you can think what you want and i've given my opinion on a few of these as we've gone along and i'll continue to do that in the future but i don't want to put too much emphasis on on some of these incidents because i just do not know i think that at the end of the day doesn't really matter you know man if we found out that freaking bill gates himself snuck into the exxon mobil facility in billings and set fire to the sucker would that make any difference whatsoever to you if that occurred or if it was a total complete and total accident the result for you is the same right your impact your pol market is is impacted you know same thing with the food shortage right if it's a legitimate you know listeria contamination or a legitimate fire that was just legitimate accident or if it was something intentional does it matter are you going to stop the intentional acts from happening no you know i you know our nation's silent services right the the national counterterrorism groups and federal law enforcement agencies that are supposed to be kind of on top of this stuff and have kind of you know this is kind of their wheelhouse and has been since their creation i think it's you know they've made their they've made their intentions very obvious over the past few months and years i guess so i i don't really know that if if we can expect any kind of investigation into any of this stuff i'm talking about so again i just kind of wanted to temper expectations slash pump the brakes on a lot of this stuff that it seems to be circulating around a lot of internet circles and a lot of people are talking about it again rightfully so it's rightful to be kind of concerned about this stuff but i just also wanted to point out you know something somewhat cynical which is you know what are you going to do about it you know is anybody going to go out there and be able to have the intelligence collection capability to know when these facilities are going to be attacked if there is to be an attack right you know that's what that's what my kind of opinion is we can look at the news and say oh well that makes perfect sense all that facility has got a contamination now all that facility caught fire mysteriously in the night you know we can look at this and we can react to it but at the end of the day if we're not going to if we're not going to have the resources we're not going to have the intelligence collection capability as a citizenry to kind of stop these things i guess the best we can do is be vigilant make sure that we are you know watching out for ourselves and our communities and you know others who kind of are more vulnerable in situations like this and so if you're a worker if you are an employee or if you are somehow associated with a part of our critical infrastructure for this country be vigilant you know because you you you might be the first line of defense for for some something nefarious but you also might be the last line of defense right so that's something to keep in mind is that you you might not have a federal agency come to your aid or or stop an attack it might be just you so i just kind of wanted to leave it there i know i've talked a lot about this already but i kind of want to leave it there and just kind of let that marinate for a bit and we'll move on to something equally inflammatory which is church fires so this is one again that i did not really want to make but i did the research and i found myself finding more and more and more and lo and behold i have enough for a slide uh when it comes to specifically fire or any kind of fire event uh saul phrase any kind of fire event that occurs at a religious institution in this country uh is going to be categorized on this slide now i'm trying to rule out the fires that were obviously accidental some some of these fires you can look at and say all right that was that was obviously an accident uh so the fires that i have listed on this slide are really the ones that kind of caught my eye uh and of course we're not going back very far we're going back to maybe march april this is not uh kind of incorporate the you know january february time frame in which there were a lot and even over the winter time there were kind of a lot but i just wanted to kind of cut this off and stick with maybe a march or april timeframe last you know 90 120 days ish so again just to kind of pump the brakes on everybody freaking out a little bit i wanted to remind everybody to remember that churches by their very nature are very big targets for arsonists uh or even just the average mentally ill individual which a couple of these were definitely mentally ill individuals so you know churches are usually very large structures they're imposing on their terrain they're usually on the street corner or in some area where they have got you know got a big parking lot things like that and they're usually unoccupied for long you know periods of time and in many cases a lot of church buildings are of an older construction right so they're not made with the most fire resistant modern materials right a lot of churches around the country are just they've been made you know either in the 50s or even before that uh so they're not really made with the with materials that they're hesitant to burn right so we have to keep this in mind you know and we have to remember that not every church fire is caused by bill gates himself you know and you know i myself do not know the statistics of how many churches catch fire every year i just i don't know i know that hundreds of thousands of fires occur every year and it's really hard to kind of make make patterns and you know determine patterns with this kind of thing all i know is that incidents like this certainly seem to be on the rise or at least we are more aware of the increase due to everything that's kind of going on in the world so maybe it's not an increase maybe it's just us noticing it now and as you as you can see we've got 17 on this slide and that's just the ones that i stopped looking now interestingly enough in my research i hit a lot of barriers which you would expect these days uh of course using google you're not going to find these you literally have to go and search for each state's like local four letter you know affiliate like mainstream news site and then you have to search on those sites so as you can imagine this took me many many hours to find and a lot of these you're not even gonna you're not gonna find if you search for it and newsflash duckduckgo 100 sensors censors its search results um so you can't even really go to like a source like duckduckgo to find some of these you really have to be very you have to like search for the specific church name and then you'll find an article for it which i thought was very interesting uh and as you can see a lot of these are straight up arson uh they either somebody was arrested or they literally have a person of interest that they're trying to arrest or they were caught on film arresting uh you know setting the fire like for number eight there on the 11th of march there were actually two churches well a uh a lutheran church and a synagogue was uh set on fire by a crazy lady somewhere so um that was kind of you know it's a little bit more clear-cut but i didn't want to put it on there because it was such a brazen attack on two different religions which i thought was kind of interesting uh usually if you're going to see something like this it's going to be some kind of fanaticism or somebody's crazy so yeah it's it's very interesting to kind of once you put these on the map you're like whoa there were kind of a lot again i don't know if this is normal i don't i don't think it is um i've lived in america for kind of a long time i've lived on both coasts for a decent amount of time and you know i've spent a lot of time traveling around and i can't say that i think this is a normal kind of thing so again just my opinion but of course we'll keep an eye on these uh as we move along but yeah really all i can do is stick you know pins on a map really and uh just kind of tell you that i don't know what i don't know what to think about some of these things but it certainly does look to be a very palpable increase in this kind of thing at least just based on my own very small sample size so i guess we'll have to keep it keep an eye on this as we move through the summertime up next i wanted to specifically talk about lake mead and the water shortage that's been going on out west so for many of you who live on the east coast like we do and uh water shortages are not really uh they're not really so much of a cultural thing as they are out west uh i wanted to mention how serious this problem has become if you've been listening to me ramble on on these briefs for a while now you will have remembered that i talked about this quite a few months ago about the shortages that are that were going to happen and now that we're here i thought i'd kind of circle back around and and talk a bit about how serious this has become so uh out west uh the colorado river basin and the uh lake mead specifically uh have been experiencing a very very severe drought now this is not a drought that has just kind of sprung up it has been going on for a very very long time some people even say it goes back 23 years but recently the drought has become deadly serious unfortunately i don't really have a whole lot to say on the drought itself other than the fact that it exists and it's going to cause a lot of problems so i'll just briefly kind of recap what some of those problems might be moving forward first of all a lot of mainstream media sources are now kind of getting spun up over this again because of reports that the water level in lake mead is less than 150 feet away from deadpool status now deadpool's status for a body of water is when the water level gets so low that the the water cannot flow downstream from the dam so in this case it's the hoover dam right the massive hydroelectric project that is the source of lake mead right so water levels have gotten so low that they're in danger of not even being able to flow at all out of the lake which means that the colorado river after the hoover dam would cease to exist so this would be a very very serious and very deadly problem for the uh townships and cities and really the entire population that relies on the colorado river for a water source so we're talking about places like lake mojave lake havasu again this sounds really bad and it is really bad uh however we don't really know and when i say we i mean the engineers who actually are working on this problem that no one really knows if lake mead will get that low we've this may still be a few years away it might be a few months away nobody really knows it seems to be a problem that might be a few years out from what i've been reading but in any case what is very true is that the water situation out west is very very dire especially for people who get their water source from the colorado river now again just like i mentioned when this whole thing kind of came to our attention and we started talking about it in earnest many months ago the problem with this kind of thing the problem with a drought is that it's not just a drought it's never just the drought right so when you have water shortages it's not just the water that you have a shortage of it's electricity because the colorado river provides a lot of electricity via hydroelectric projects to the surrounding areas so you basically have all of these bad things compound at once so you're out of water and your power's out right so it's not just one or the other it's going to be both at the same time or you're going to be fa you know around the same time right again for those of us who do not live in the areas that are affected by this it's easy for us to get kind of very complacent and kind of say well okay that's a problem for out west when in actuality it really highlights a universal problem and that is how issues tend to compound at the worst possible times right murphy's law right that's definitely a thing that happens especially when it comes to emergencies involving critical infrastructure so even though for those people who who don't live in the area i wanted to kind of bring this up and keep this in people's minds because chances are you've probably got something similar going on in your area too as far as when the situation out west will be alleviated no one really knows a lot a lot of engineers are saying that this you know we might get some water back this winter time there might be some spring thaw next year it really is hard to tell no one really can give can give a straight answer on when this water crisis out west will alleviate itself yeah it's very unfortunate um i don't really know what to say on it like i mentioned uh but i would say that if you're living out west i would very seriously start looking into where your water comes from and if you can add to your water sources with ground water now easier said than done of course but i just think that you know my little two cent advice if you want to call it that is that the water crisis out west is illustrating two very big infrastructural problems the water supply and electricity you could even say transportation as well if the water gets too low to allow boats and things to transit but it really highlights these problems and you know it's one of those things where you almost don't even want to talk about the problem because there's no solution for it on the very individual level but you know we've got to bring this stuff up and we've got to get people thinking because you never know ingenuity might come out and we might find some way out of this but yeah i just wanted to briefly talk about it even though i don't really have a whole lot to say about it i've gotten a few people emailing us and dming us about it so i thought hey now would be a good time to reassess this now that we're kind of here and the water crisis is most certainly very severe and moving on to significant governmental actions i kind of burned myself out this week doing a lot of research for a lot of other stuff so i don't have a whole lot uh to go off of today for this kind of stuff all right so up first is the supreme court and uh they have given us two things to talk about uh this time around and uh both of them are very interesting so first up is the second amendment uh news which is the supreme court striking down new york's policy of of trying to attribute a reason to get a gun permit so new york had a law or a series of laws that basically meant that you had to provide justification to law enforcement in order to get a certain kind of permit uh to own a certain kind of gun so the supreme court struck that down and um so yeah it's really really good news uh really big news for the 2a community um you know me being me i uh i want to thank all right what's the angle here uh so so i don't want to get sucked into kind of the mentality of being pessimistic and um negative all the time right this is really good news but i also don't want to get super excited uh and i don't want to get sucked into the alternative which is thinking that a court can decide what a a god-given right is so it's interesting to me and i'm glad that the supreme court uh ruled this one of the very few things they have done that i think is actually good over the past few years but i'm also going to leave that caution bulb lit and see what comes out in the future uh and speaking of i had to re-record this segment because uh the roe vs wade ruling was overturned just a few minutes ago as i'm recording this so so yeah that's another very big one a lot of states i think um i have to count again but by my very quick count in just the past few minutes uh over a well over 20 states have trigger laws that are effectively banning abortions in those states i don't have the list together i'm sure that by the time this video comes out the list will be out already i'm actually kind of surprised the supreme court made that decision i surely thought it was going to go the other way but i guess that's you know watching court proceedings for you um i don't really have a whole lot invested anymore in uh trying to cover each little action within our justice system it's just too it's just too much for me to handle at this point but i think that really my own thoughts on it and really any other thoughts on it are kind of irrelevant because what's going to happen is mass pandemonium so as my guess is this will be the catalyst for a lot of violence in pretty much every city in the in the country for the next few weeks what i would also fully expect to see is uh something that we i guess often don't really think about too much and that is the the whiplash effect with regards to the leftist states which are going to uh endorse abortion even more than they already do so we can again we could have predicted this is going to happen uh but i just wanted to remind everyone out there that there's going to be a lot of nasty stuff out on the tv and on the internet and on social media and in real life too so so if you have children that are in uh public school just be advised that right now is is going to be the perfect uh justification for the wailing and gnashing of teeth that is going to come from the left so just keep that in mind uh if you're trying to you know shield your little ones from the the evils of the world so to speak it's uh it's not going to be an easy time so again just remember that um this is struck a nerve with a lot of the leftists out there with pretty much every leftist and it's uh it's going to get nasty and if you don't want your children to be a part of that as we have illustrated that children nowadays are most certainly a huge target for the left uh on an ideological level so just just keep that in mind i'm trying to to to be as as family friendly as possible when describing it but we we all know the nasty things that the left has been putting out on tv and you know things that i would never have expected to find any human being capable of doing is not just done normally but it's that kind of behavior is conducted on live tv uh for all the world to see uh so if you don't want your little ones to see that just just remember um that it's gonna be kind of a rough time over the next few weeks with regards to that kind of stuff so i'm already seeing the the grotesque actions being planned in my local area and i know that it's not going to be pleasant to see for um some of the more vulnerable populations right so just keep that in mind uh and as you know as always get ready for the riots because that's going to happen yeah there's really not much more to say on that so i'll move on so back in 2020 uh the state electoral college electors uh they signed the people physically who were the you know electoral college right signed a symbolic document um that they believed that their votes should go to trump due to fraudulent balance i think that's what happened i'm not entirely certain a lot of and again this is one of those things where i wasn't really too interested or surprised until i started researching it and oh my gosh i've found so much opposition propaganda it's ridiculous the leftist media sources which apparently there are tens of thousands of these websites are calling these people fake electors and they're just really going all in on the story of these people who are trying to like impersonate electoral college members i i really don't know i think that the truth is impossible to determine right now it's just it's like a oil fire it's just too hot to get close to right now uh so i don't know what's going on with this i just wanted to kind of bring this to your attention hey fbi targeting 2020 nevada electors and you can kind of figure out what's going on down the line i'll rev i'll revisit this if there's anything that

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so as you can probably guess we've got some pretty big news today um today we are launching our youtube channel so this is something that a lot of people have been asking us to do for a long time um we have had a podcast for quite a few months now and it's been working out quite well but we understand that some people aren't really about the whole podcast format and don't necessarily like um like just listening to someone they're more visual learners so we thought that we would create a youtube channel that helped us host some of our more visual content so today we are launching that youtube channel with this with the topic of workplace safety more specifically how to egress from a building so if you're watching this on youtube you'll be able to see uh this this powerpoint that we created you know we're analysts so of course we had to revert back to a powerpoint for our first video but if you're listening to this to the audio of this on the um on the podcast we'll try to do our best to visualize what's going on on the screen but if you're listening to us on the podcast we highly recommend you go over and check us out on youtube because then you'll be able to sort of understand what we're talking about we wanted to pick a topic you know that's once again a very visual thing that we can't exactly explain in a podcast format so workplace safety why are we talking about workplace safety um well for one this is sort of a topic we've been working around internally for a long time now because it's a topic that is not often talked about right it's very rarely mentioned in the military community it's very rarely mentioned in the prepping community it's really not even mentioned in a sort of taboo a lot of times to talk about within the emergency preparedness community because a lot of times the emergency preparedness community is based off of existing government guidance and as we'll find out that's not necessarily the best thing to resort to in a time of crisis like this so our goal here is to have a data-driven approach um we are going to tackle quite a few uh questions and problems we're not um going to try to theorize whether or not you should evacuate or or how you should handle things in your own uh life mostly because we're not experts right so we're trying to create a process we're trying to examine things from an empirical standpoint and figure out how we can best point out things that you maybe haven't thought about yet basically this whole video is going to be about different considerations that you can go about right so you know as we stated you know this is not going to be a strictly a gearless video we're not going to list out a whole bunch of gear that you are going to need this is more of a considerations type video we will cover gear of course but we're not here to sell a product we don't get endorsed by anybody and for the most part that's going to be on you you're just going to be on you to figure out how to address the problems that we're going to lay out so once again like we said we're not experts not by any means but we do have some common sense right we're not able to perhaps contribute to producing a peer-reviewed scientific journal article on you know emergency escape and and things like that but we are able to use some data right we don't have to be scientists to understand the scientific method and sort of loosely use that as a guide for how to be just be better about preparing for these types of things right so that's really our goal is to not necessarily use you know it would take years to go through a a scientific study of all emergency situations and and then dissect them all and then figure out what's going on with each one of them and then provide recommendations so we're sort of applying both some scientific knowledge and some historical knowledge as well as a lot of common sense and what we think works so that's why we're going to kind of weave back and forth between historical records and what we think so and this is why one of the big things that we've run into is that a lot of research you know hundreds and hundreds of of pages and and hundreds of journal articles have been written about even just minute emergency situations and disasters everything from terrorist attacks to hurricanes have been researched heavily in depth the response has been and the research has been conducted by experts as as it should right the research has been conducted by experts in the field and it's for experts so it's conducted four experts by experts um research has also been conducted by experts to help civilians chances of survival so you've got experts trying to determine what's best for a civilian to figure out uh their way and you know how can the lay person better understand a complex situation some such as some of these emergencies that have come upon us but very very little very little uh research has been conducted by individuals on an individual basis to help their individual chance of survival so that's what we kind of hope to tackle today we're laypersons when it comes to emergency management we do have a little bit of experience you know community emergency response teams cert teams you know so various medical training throughout the you know over the years as well as austere environment medicine so um we're not exactly um strict newbies but we're not experts in any way we cannot give a lot of the advice that has been given by experts on this so we're just going to take you through our thought process and sort of what we do now that of course is going to vary right so we're our goal with this is once again to trigger thoughts and considerations for you so one of the good ways to do this is the good old risk management matrix now i know a lot of you are probably going to be triggered by this graphic as well you should be because it's kind of a thing that gets annoying over time but it's a really good way for examining risk so for those that have not um sort of figured out what this is you can research it on your own time but in short it's a chart that describes the likelihood of an activity on a scale of one to five uh you know from rare to almost certain combined with the consequences or the impact of that thing happening such as once again on a one to five scale such as from insignificant up to catastrophic so let's put this into a format that we can all kind of understand so this was our sort of risk management matrix um this is this one we created just for this video but this is similar to what our daily lives were like uh when we when we lived in the remote coastal pacific northwest area so we we lived there for a few years up in the [Music] washington state area and as you can see a few things were more prevalent than others for instance we can look at landslides for us in our specific area landslides had a medium impact but the likelihood that they would happen was very very high because we were in a remote area so as such the risk for a landslide happening would be high so when we when we understand that um when we put these sort of disaster scenarios and and um and circumstances on a chart like the risk management matrix we realize that things shift around a lot so depending on where you're at things could be a lot different such as when we move to the urban coastal mid-atlantic area so as you can see from the chart all of these things switched around a lot so suddenly landslides became a very low likelihood and also a low impact if they were to happen because we're not in a mountainous area and there's so many roads that it's almost it's extremely unlikely that any uh that our transit would be totally cut off whereas in the pacific northwest landslides could take out the only road going back to our house so um that's sort of what we are are focusing on now as you can see uh in the upper right hand corner of this chart the uh the thing that that we're sort of most concerned about now is uh civil unrest the likelihood that will happen in our specific area is very very high and the impact that it could have is very high so for us civil unrest at this point in time is an extreme risk now that's also uh leads into the point that over time these things change you know risk and the things you need to prepare for changes sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis right so like for instance you know two hours before the minneapolis riots kicked off two hours before those videotapes were released and just using minneapolis as an example the threat of civil unrest was extremely low right but as soon as those videotapes were released and that night fight and that night fell on that same exact day things got really really bad so that goes to show that there's a lot of variables that go into how risk works and once you get kind of an understanding on that once you sort of start thinking in the terms of risk management right it it helps you prepare your response and of course we don't you know that's not to say that you should just memorize the earth's management chart and then just be a a government robot like a lot of us are taught to be when it comes to osha and things like that you know that shouldn't happen as well you should you know think sometimes things aren't going to be on the chart right and sometimes sometimes you need to prepare for things that exactly that don't exactly have a risk they can't you know be be categorized by a number or a color or a chart so that is you know the one caveat to the risk management matrix and so then we come to this um this is of course an image that many people will be familiar with and this is the world trade center uh collapse so we're not going to get into the conspiracy theories or anything like that today we're just talking about the actual result the the actual uh result of the collapse and the reason that we're using the world trade center disaster as a good bench point for a lot of this is number one we have a lot of data we have so much data that it's almost impossible for one person to analyze over a period of time so the world trade center has been heavily studied by literally thousands of people from dozens of agencies and so we have a lot of understanding as to what went down when it comes to the actual impact of the planes the impact of the fires things like that so that's why we're using the world trade center as a good good jumping off point because a lot of the deaths that came from the world trade center by a lot of the reports that came out afterwards were definitely preventable so obviously the people that were living in the direct impact zone of the aircraft that was not a survivable situation but a lot of this a lot of the casualties that occurred we're not entirely sure how many right but we can say that the number of people that could have been saved but weren't is significant so um but you know once again we're not just prevented we're not just talking about you know 911 the absolute worst case scenario a complex multi multi-layered um covert attack on u.s soil that no one was expecting we're also talking about things like the grenfell tower fire of 14 june 2017 in the uk that was a simple a fire residential fire in an apartment building that started when a refrigerator caught fire but that fire spread very very quickly to the rest of the building almost immediately and it resulted in 72 deaths and only 223 people escaping now if you look at the ratio of deaths to escapees that's a very high number of people that died from this tower and the investigation is still ongoing because it turns out that a lot of the cladding on the side of the building played a big impact on it and as you can see here um just a simple peruse of wikipedia can find out that uh a lot of other fires have been started a lot of them resulting in fatalities due to the exact same construction features the exact same uh violent safety violations that occurred in grenfell tower also started fires in other buildings around the world from you know south korea to new jersey the same the same construction technique and the same factors that led to the casualties in the grenfell tower are present around the world so that just goes to show that we're not necessarily planning for a complex multi-layered massive terrorist attack but we're also planning on something that's a little bit more likely even just just the other day one of our writers sent us a message saying hey look my refrigerator caught fire in my house i mean literally you know there was some kind of leak it was just sitting there in the kitchen and i was working at the kitchen table on a report i was writing and i turned around and i smelled something like a you know like like rubber burning it turned around and there's smoke coming out from behind my refrigerator so these things can happen to you every day we don't necessarily are trying to say that 911 is something we should be prepared for every day we're also trying to prevent normal things like building fires so as one might expect this this video is really heavy uh on the fire and that's for a few reasons um we've become i suppose the word is slightly more paranoid after our local riots swept through our area and it's because of fire um so we can defend ourselves against you know armed invaders we can defend ourselves against you know people throwing rocks and bricks and stuff but one of the things that cannot be stopped by us alone is fire right so we're heavily reliant almost totally reliant on the fire department um to help us out with that and we as we saw in our local area and it was widely publicized in not just our area but also in minneapolis where it all started but also in new york atlanta california firefighters being attacked with bricks and molotov cocktails because they were trying to put out fires and the rioters were trying to burn as many things to the ground as possible so for us fire is a huge deal and as a result we learn we learn a lot from firefighters themselves right firefighters are are extremely good sources of information because fires have been going on for quite literally millennia and as such the technologies and firefighting and the especially the personal escape procedures have trained have changed radically so as we see here in this image we have a firefighter that is practicing egressing from a window on an upper story building and that's where we're going to spend the bulk of our time talking about our system for that because one of the things that not a lot of people are talking about we haven't seen anyone talk about this within the sort of um prepping type emergency preparedness community with the exception of one source has mentioned it and we'll talk about that in a second but this is a thing that goes on in every fire department in america and it's firefighter egress systems basically this is a a rather large pouch that they put in the pocket of their turnout coat that basically allows them to within just a few seconds escape a room and rappel down to the ground from a window and it's something that's very interesting to study and worth looking into more so if you want more information about this i highly recommend you look up firefighter egress systems it is a very very fascinating subject to delve into even if you you're not a firefighter it's something that's very interesting to do if especially especially if you work or live in a building that's say two or three stories or even taller than that um which you know we do we live in air and work in buildings which are more than one story so it's something to keep in mind especially for that so so this is essentially what the goal is and this is a photo of a firefighter that's egressing from a structure that's on fire he was unable to egress out of the room any other way and he's forced to use his last resort which is to go out the window and we don't want to see the repeat of you know the very infamous people that have been videotaped and photographed jumping from high-rise buildings because the fire was just too much we don't want that we we want to have at least some last ditch it may not be survivable right as you'll see when we get into this the firefighter escape system and egress package that we've sort of created is not foolproof by any means it is not something that you train on unless you are in a very controlled environment it is a very very much a last-ditch method but it is infinitely better than simply just jumping out the window and hoping for the best so uh one of the big things that we're also thinking about that no one seems to be talking about are the covid procedures and mitigations so one of the big trends that's going around in literally every single profession is these coveted barriers so as we see here in this image this is a a gem that has become very famous for setting up individual workstations uh workout stations that have you know they're basically just cubes of pvc tubing with plastic um set up all the way around them and to in order to for people to be able to work out without wearing a mask or something like that now on the face of this this may sound like a you know you can debate whether or not this is a good or bad thing however no one seems to be considering um that this is in fact a um very big fire risk um so let's just take this image here and let's darken it for a second so imagine that you're in a fire and of course the power is going to go out because the fire department the first thing they're going to do is cut power to the building so your lights are going to go out all right so it's going to get darker okay well now let's add in some smoke well you see how hard it is to be able to locate the doors and exits much less having to deal with you know multi-mill plastic that you can and plastic tubing that you can get entangled in so that's a big concern especially considering that our children are now being affected by this so this photo shows a lot of the procedures that classrooms are taking now we could not find an actual photograph of our local elementary school and primary schools which have the actual full cages around the children but we do have this artist's rendition of you know the new procedures for basically doing the same thing with these little cubes and sort of cages put around each child's desk and the child goes inside the plastic barrier and they are able to you know do their schoolwork without a mask on well here's the thing um this this plastic sheeting is not easy to tear through with your bare hands like you need a knife to cut through it especially if you can't get a good purchase on it if you're in duress if you can't see if you're panicking if you're already tired and sleepy you know sleep deprived you're already fatigued from having to run down multiple you know stairwells it's not going to be easy to to to cut through a lot of this stuff and then we also see which this image shows um a lot of the a lot of grocery stores and a lot of workplaces and businesses are now barricading their doors right if you've gone to a grocery store in america or even you know canada or you know with our brothers across the pond um over in the uk or in europe chances are you go into a grocery store they're going to tell you to go in one way and exit one way and in this case in this image of walmart they've actually stacked carts up in front of one of the doors to prevent entry and exit from it you know so that you can only enter one way well what happens if that door becomes suddenly an emergency exit can people run through that barrier of carts no they can't right so you create a bottleneck at the door and that just leads to more fatalities so when we go to our grocery store and we look around and we see that they've you know they've actually moved a lot of the grocery store aisles to um cover up a lot of exits and allow and not allow freedom of movement within the store we think you know how is this not a fire hazard and um it turns out that fire departments agree with us a lot of fire departments well i wouldn't say a lot of fire departments but several fire fire districts and fire commanders around the uh around the us have put out have put out social media posts citing that you have to make sure that you're still abiding by the fire code with all of these coveted procedures so this particular fire department put out a facebook page that said you know that says hey you know shower curtains guess what they're extremely flammable and prone to entrapping people so that's a that's a big concern for us right because this plastic sheeting is everywhere and here's the plastic sheeting that we're talking about a lot of this plastic sheeting is actually made can be bought at lowe's as you can see right here from the screenshot but you can also tell that it's made out of this little material called polyethylene and if we bring up our old magic google machine we can find a lot of different research that finds out that plastic sheeting made from polyethylene will burn big time when it hits by when it's hit by flames so the polyester the polyethylene plastic sheeting that is used in a lot of places is extremely extremely flammable so you've got a lot of times with these covered procedures plastic sheeting it's an entrapment hazard that's also flammable oh and burning plastic also sticks to your skin and you're now creating a an entrapment hazard combined with another fire hazard so that's kind of a big concern for us that we haven't seen anybody talk about within the community so we just wanted to kind of share that and get you thinking about these things because it is a big concern right and another concern that we sort of can't ignore is um conflict right so this is um more addressed to those um workplace concerns and a lot of the things that we're drawing on for this particular bit is the a study that was done by the university of sussex entitled the mass psychology of disasters and emergency evacuations a research report and implications for practice it was written by and compiled by dr john drury and dr chris cocking of once again the department of psychology university of sussex and a lot of the data we recommend you go ahead and download this and read it i think it was written in 2007 so it's not the newest information done on this but it does show and it does bring up a lot of interesting points and one of the interesting points it brings up is how to better communicate with people during a disaster if you're the government agency that's responding to a disaster how to communicate with people in such a way that they'll believe you because as we can see here by this article one of the big concerns on 9 11 this article was written by the way i think two days after 9 11. one of the big concerns were people being extremely angry the survivors of it were being were angry after not immediately after 9 11 because the port authority uh told everyone to go back inside the building because we have to remember what actually happened during 9 11. one you know the world trade center uh when the first tower was hit there were a lot there was a lot of debris falling from that first tower so people were told to stay inside because it was the conventional wisdom was that even for a plain impact on the world trade center it was safer inside the building because people had already been killed that morning from falling debris and big shards of glass and and steel girders that were falling that were the size of vehicles so the port authority and a lot of the fire chiefs and a lot of the authorities that were responding to the initial aircraft impact were telling people to go back inside we have multiple multiple stories i'll just read this one right quick um but he told the observer that as he ran downstairs i heard people being told the building is secure the safest place is inside stay calm and do not leave that's what they were saying they were telling people to go back up to their offices and their desks like the building was not in danger right so that's just one story of many in fact here's another story this is more well known um this is the story of um stanley primeknith which i'm sure butchering that name but um that's how i believe it's pronounced um and we'll just read that one right quick for those listening on the podcast that primeknit had initially evacuated the building after the first plane had hit the north tower but was told to go back inside once he had arrived back at his office on the 81st floor he was on the phone when he noticed the second plane coming right at him he screamed and jumped under his desk as the plane was hitting the building after the impact primenoth found himself alive under his desk with only minor injuries stanley primeknith was a hero that day because he helped a stranger get egress out of the building because after that happened he of course egressed and you can read his story on your own but the point is is that he was he was outside the building he was on the street right he was safe and they told him to go back inside and he made it up 81 floors while there was a major terrorist attack in progress because he didn't know any better right and he was a very very lucky man that day because the plane hit below him and he was able to egress down past it during through the one staircase that had not been completely destroyed so um just little things like this are things that we're trying to to help people to think about so and that sort of leads us to this point of you know thinking do i need to evacuate even though my boss and the police say not to and that's something that you're going to have to evaluate for yourself because as we all know despite what people write in reports and despite what people say on tv and and romanticize things afterwards um we do have to remember that not every employing agency abides by osha right they do not and even osha themselves don't enforce a lot of things that they should um i can remember quite a few i think every single job i've ever had you know outside the military inside the military there's been some kind of osha violation that was a serious safety hazard right and you couldn't report it because if you reported it they'd know it was you and if they knew it was you they'd make your life miserable so um that's something that you're gonna have to kind of figure out how to get around yourself uh we haven't really found a good way to do that we can certainly google ourselves and you know tell you guys to google like how do i confidentially report osha violations and things like that but really i think the the best method is to just be aware and to take measures uh if you're if you're working in a company or in an employing agency and you know that there's no way on earth you're going to be able to egress out of your building if something goes down i mean like for instance you think there's no way you're going to be able to talk your boss into being able to let you evacuate because oh that fire alarm's going off oh it's just a drill you know i can't tell you how many times i've heard that myself so um yeah it's it's a it's a big concern i can't tell you how many times i've had to stay inside a skiff while the building i was in was actually on fire only to have a fire axe come through my skiff door because they were trying to get people out of there and hadn't realized that there were still three of us in the skiff because we were told to stay by the lieutenant commander navy lieutenant commander who had left himself so we realize these situations exist we're not going to ignore them and we're not going to sugarcoat them like a lot of these government reports will do but we do need to say that we don't have a good solution for you we just need you to to think about what you can do and if you're in that situation you're going to have to take a lot more preparations than what we're what we're going to recommend and what we're what we do so that's just something to consider another thing to consider is the longevity of of a disaster as we can see here in this image we have the the world trade center and um just how look how many floors were affected so that on the on the uh wtc2 the south tower the the impacted zone was from the 85th floor down to the 77th floor that's a lot that's a huge distance and likewise on the wtc one uh on the on the north tower it was from the 99th floor down to the 93rd floor so that is a very long distance right even the systems that we have would not have saved us have we been above those above the impact zone but really what we wanted to call your attention to is at the bottom of the screen here um it the wtc 2 collapsed after 56 minutes and wtc one collapsed after 102 minutes so these are not immediate things uh a lot of the a lot of the casualties that um were injuries or the or the survivors or the people that basically were in the towers but made it out in some way um a lot of them were able to make it out because there was plenty of time we're talking at you know we're talking you know almost an hour for the shortest time you know in over an hour and a half for the other tower they had plenty of time to egress and get out of there so we just want to stress that you know what you know the the tower collapsed at minute 102 right so at minute 101 people were still in that tower debating well should i go down you know they're still stuck on like the third or fifth floor you know third or fourth or floor or they're still stuck up god forbid above it you know so up until the minute it collapsed no one thought that those towers would collapse so that's just something to remember as well is that yes you may have time but you don't know how much time you might have and we have this concept of complacency that happens over time for instance you know the longer a disaster goes on without a change in in severity um the more likely people are to become complacent so that that did happen a lot at the world trade center disaster because you know well it's been up in the you know it's been uh half an hour since the plane impacted it and the building's still going strong there's no reason to think it'll fall right that kind of mentality cost a lot of lives that day so that's something to keep in mind as well and you know once again this is kind of a schematic of of what the wtc one the actual visual evidence of fires these are the windows that you could see fire in from the ground and from the air and as you can see this would have been very very very hard to survive had you been working or been located above the impact zone we can theorize about wtc all day long but the fact of the matter is is that even the systems that we have created for ourselves are not foolproof right it would be very very hard to do so and then likewise with wtc2 this one is a little bit different because this one of course it's always debatable but you can see the difference there's much much less fire in wtc2 and there was there was no visible fire on the west face so um that just shows you a a a difference between the two um and basically how even the same disaster can be very very different buildings which are have essentially the identical structure and they were hit with essentially the the the same attack can be very very different uh depending on just a few different factors so um and then moving on to you know this is the uh nist report nist report that was put out there have been hundreds of reports put out about 9 11 but one of the big ones was one of the big takeaways that we got from this report at the time was the milling about right one of the things that hampered evacuation was um as it says here i'll just read it out for the podcast listeners that you know normal response to uncertain but urgent circumstances involving information seeking information exchange and observation basically that boils that uh boiled down that means that people knew something had happened but they didn't know how severe it was and they couldn't see anything right they knew there was a fire they knew that the people in the second tower knew that a plane had hit the first tower because that that was um very obvious from the very start but people in the towers it took them a little bit to find the information about what had exactly happened had a bomb going off as it happened before and they had trained for and things like that and then another concern is here on the slide this is preparatory behaviors gathering materials phone calls making phone calls computer backups and shutdowns things like that basically people tidying up their desk and and closing things down for work just like they're going home for the day and that is a common theme among pretty much every disaster that hits a workplace people people report revert to habit people also don't have the the idea of i need to get out of dodge now and it's difficult to convey a sense of urgency plus we have to remember that uh that you know as it says here on the slide that no first responder interviewed by nist uh thought that the world trade center towers would collapse not a single first responder out of thousands of first responders that were there none of them thought the towers would collapse so that goes it goes to show you that your disaster might be a new one in the book right our disaster prevention guides and textbooks and all of our doctrine for emergency response whether it be something like the world trade center or something like a terrorist attack guess what all of that doctrine is based off of the last disaster it's based off of sometimes 10 20 30 year old logic and a lot of times that's not good enough in the case of the world trade center it was definitely not good enough um i think that you know this is not to of course this is not to demonize anyone or or or put down anyone who was there i you know we can talk all day long about how how awesome the response was and how you know i think that 9 11 was the most patriotic day that we can remember in u.s history but we do have to recognize that despite the fact that all of the first responders did the best they could and even did better than they should have considered the circumstances we've got to remember that it's not good enough we should always strive to be better and one of the big other takeaways here on the slide is it says in the upper right hand corner there was a quote from one of the survivors of tower 2 and the quote reads i was there during the 1993 bombing i did evacuate with a group of people who had no clue as to where we were going what i learned from that experience was to not trust the port authorities announcements had i not experienced that i might have listened to the port authority announcement and stayed put right so throughout the disaster the port authority was you know putting out announcements that says hey stay here um they they frequently you know i think one of the first ones was for everyone to go to the 60th floor go back up inside the building to the 60th floor where there is a an emergency staging area and you know that that cost a lot of lives that day so one one must remember that yes this research that's done by experts is probably the best research we have because you know research is better than no research at all but you also have to remember that common sense dictates a lot of things and we can't arm share a quarterback the 911 incident but we can say that we can arm share a quarterback our own disasters during the time that they're going on we can certainly say hey they're telling me this i need to do this that's perfectly fine that's what we're encouraging to do but once again it requires a lot of a lot of extra factors that we'll go over in a second so like i said this topic has has not really been touched on by a lot of people i think one of the the the good resources on youtube that's the more famous resource is the urban prepper i'm sure a lot of our uh listeners and and followers and people that are you know sort of in our network are aware of the urban prepper um the urban pepper you know is a guy who lives in pacific northwest um puts out a lot of videos on youtube and is you know an extreme um extremely organized he's well known for one his urban content right his urban you know bug out bags and uh disaster preparedness he's known for his little kids he's got i think he's got a kit for pretty much everything but he's also known for extreme organization so if you want to learn more we highly recommend you checking out the urban prepper by no means not a perfect resource but you know what it's got a lot of good information out there so if you're into that sort of thing that's a good resource to follow up on because we're certainly not experts in the field but you know he's got a lot of good points about things and i don't think any prepper is really an expert in the field i think that we're all doing the best we can because you know prepping and emergency preparedness and just having a generally good situational awareness and and thought process and plan that's not exactly that's not an exact science by any means right um so we're just trying to do the best we can and i think um you know this is one of the very few resources is actually talked about it um but unfortunately when we start going down the prepping road this is where we have to bring up prepping and immediately bash it is that prepping usually has a few stigmas associated with it which we'll talk about in a minute but one of the big things people get hung up on is the gear the gear the gear the gear we've done it ourselves i think i spent probably the better part of my boy scout days amassing a collection of military surplus gear and all kinds of things that are you know cool little gadgets and knives oh my gosh i probably got you know 100 knives and a drawer somewhere in my house but yeah we tend to get hung up on the gear a lot of times and that's not necessarily what we're going for right sure there is an interesting matrix um i couldn't find it for this video but um there is a matrix i think it was sort of talked about first by dave canterbury and the the logic is is that the more knowledge you have the less gear you need with you likewise the less knowledge you have the more gear you need to make up for that lack of knowledge that's why um bushcrafting is such a big hobby amongst people because bushcrafting the idea right is of course you know self-reliance and things like that you know bushcraft type setups and you know you just google the term bushcraft you know camping or bushcraft hiking or just bushcraft in youtube and you'll find a bunch of people you'll know exactly what style it is you know and it's not about um taking you know highly complex gear into the woods it's about doing more with less now likewise consequently we do have to have gear right there's no amount of knowledge that can save you from jumping out of a building there is no amount of knowledge that can protect you from breathing and fire right so we do have to have some gear but we also have to remember that it's not just about the gear and we ourselves have a hard time sometimes uh remembering that because we're definitely um definitely gear heads here we definitely like our gear and like our cool gadgets and you know as soon as our paycheck lands guess what it's probably getting spin on some camping gear or something or a gun part or something but but yeah it's just to remember that we don't want to fall into the trap of building kits right we don't want to fall into the trap of building bags right we want to get into the mindset of knowledge above everything else so that's where we're going to start if you want to start with the whole line system kind of going back to the urban prepper i'm not sure if he's the one who invented it but he definitely talks about a lot of his earlier videos and it's become basically a lot of doctrine nowadays of different lines right you know line one being the things you have the gear and the things you have in your pockets and on your person line two is you know like on your your your play carrier your chest rig or whatnot and line three is like your backpack right and you go on from there but we're going to start here we're going to use that as a rough guide right but we're going to start with line zero and that's the stuff that's inside your head right um and one of the big things if we're if we're going along with you know the fire theme here we're very heavy on fire this uh this particular episode because it's such a big concern for us just knowing where your fire exits are you know how many people just think to yourself right now you work in an office if you work in an office your office is required to have a fire evacuation plan okay well are do you know where that is do you know where that placard is on the wall because it's required to be posted do you have a picture of that evacuation plan on your phone that you can show to a firefighter and tell them hey my co-worker the last time i saw them was here do you have that and if not you probably should take steps to correct that likewise when you stay in a hotel how many of you take a picture of the fire evacuation map when you get into your hotel because a lot of times you know hotels at least in the united states are required to have the evacuation map like on the back of the door or something like that but i've stayed in many many hotels in southeast asia that don't have that at all so that's something to keep in mind as well you know either the placard is gone or it's just a bad hotel and you know trust me these things tend to compound right so if your hotel is not following the code by posting your evacuation plan from your room to the emergency exit chances are they probably skimped on some of the other fire protection methods as well so that is once again something to keep in mind so another thing is know where your first aid slash fire equipment is at we're not talking about strictly fire things nowadays because in a lot of workplaces and a lot of public places a big concern nowadays is active shooting or some kind of altercation or or something involving a gunshot wound so a lot of places a lot of workplaces are implementing these bleeding control kits as we see here in an image um and a lot of people they're new right so everyone you know pretty much everybody can roughly guess where their fire extinguisher is but then do they know where the bleeding control kit is for their workplace something once again to think about another thing to think about is um do i the status and the exact layout of your offices workplaces the place you spend your time that's not your home what is the sprinkler situation is there do you have a sprinkler do you have stand pipes outside that the fire department can hook up to do you have automatic sprinklers do you have no sprinklers at all but you do have reliable alarms something to you know be very considerate of because a lot of this stuff matters and then another thing to be considered about to think about is not necessarily fire but also flooding right so this here is a map of a flood area not a whole lot of people know and you can google this yourself but fema has a flooding map that you can actually type your address in and find your workplace and it will tell you whether or not your workplace is in a flood zone and news flash pretty much every building on earth is in a flood zone the question is what has to flood first so for instance our work center is not so much a huge risk for flooding but um considering it's it's like a hundred feet above sea level i think so basically if our office building gets flooded and in our house is even higher than that so um if our workplace or our or if our house gets flooded um basically the whole east coast is gonna be under water right it's gonna be an apocalyptic scenario right so this is not something you can exactly prepare for however the route that i have to drive from my house to my office is under sea level it is def it definitely goes right through a flood zone and there is no way i can get back to my house from my place of work if there if a flood happens because literally my house sits on uh my little geographic area the the general area which i live in is in a um area it's in a uh on a hill same thing with my office and though basically if there's a flood in my area guess what my office will be an island my house will be an island i can't get to one of the other if there's a flood so that you know that prior knowledge that prior research can save you a lot of time and uh it is something to consider so for instance if if you know if i'm at work can i get a notification that says hey heavy rain is expected within the next few hours and i just research it more and find out oh dear there's a flood warning for you know for a flood watch on until like 9 00 pm tonight guess what i'm going to pull chalks i'm going to leave work and go home early if i can and that will allow me to make sure that i'm at least at my place of place of residence before the flooding starts now if you don't have that flexibility if you have to stay at work basically until your building catches fire and then even then a few minutes afterwards to tidy the place up a bit if you live in and work in that type of environment we've been there with you trust me i i feel for you but you're gonna have to have a lot of you're gonna have to be have the capability of staying at your work or staying nearby the places you can walk to if you can't make it back to your house um and and this kind of you know to ending on the knowledge note we wanted to bring up kind of an interesting facet of of you know practicing with your gear right um it's become sort of white well not so widely known but widely known throughout the the um commercial survival uh industry that um we have the case study here brought up that the you know the famous uh captain sully landing on the hudson you know u.s airways flight 1549 um there were 150 people on board right they were landing in the water so basically that safety brief right that you get when you fly like people who have never flown before had never set foot on an airplane but have seen that in movies they've heard comedians talk about it they've seen it in popular culture like somebody it's so pervasive throughout society and so taken advantage of by comedians in the late 80s early 90s that everybody knows what generally what the safety brief is when you get on an airplane even people have never flown before but despite this there were 150 people on board that air aircraft only 33 of those people managed to take their life vests with them after the plane had come to a stop and they had begun evacuation procedures and of those 33 only four people were wearing their life jacket correctly so despite the fact that they had been lectured on this literally less than half an hour before right because the the incident took took place after takeoff it was immediately after the safety brief and they still failed to do it only four people out of 150 were able to take that knowledge understand it know where the life jacket is and be able to put that into use during an actual no kidding textbook survival scenario right so if you cannot do that if you cannot fall back on your knowledge right because we remember we fall back on the most basic level of knowledge right and for a lot of people grabbing their life jacket when they get off the airplane that's not uh base level base levels just get off the aircraft that's their highest level of training so we have to remember that training training training is the key here you have to remember that even though you know something even though you've read something when a disaster goes down you might not be able to put it into practice so that's sort of um a very very important topic that we cannot emphasize enough but moving on to line one this is the stuff you're wearing and carrying on your person now the first thing we have pop up here is a cobra belt with a cobra riggers belt with a d-ring attachment this is kind of essential right if if you work in a job where you're able to wear a web belt i.e in the military you better do so because this type of thing is pretty much mandatory if you don't have this you're not you're not going to be able to get very far now likewise if you have a job where you can't wear a belt like that you can also get which is what just popped up on the screen here one of these um simple bdu utility belts that cost about five bucks you can get them and they usually come in one size you just cut it to length and it rolls up extremely tightly and you could just put it in your bag and not worry about it and it will work just fine of course it doesn't have the d-ring loop and of course it takes a few uh extra seconds to don vice a belt you're already wearing but it will do in a pinch right so that's something that we're going to be relying on heavily here in a second up next is the pants you're wearing right or the clothes you're wearing so not a whole lot of people are um take advantage of the things they have and as you can see here in this pair of pants i'm sorry for our podcast listeners it's kind of hard to to illustrate but um uh these dotted lines going from the waist belt all the way down to almost the end of the ankle that's how we have rigged up a small short strand of paracord so you can take a paracord and you can loop it around your belt and then feed it down inside your pant leg so that it's almost reaching the floor and you can actually double it up and get upwards of 15 20 25 feet down your pant leg and it's practically unnoticeable for the military guys out there and for some of the civilians who w

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

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

e there for Australia to the South Pacific this is me kind of getting ahead of the curve with regards to geopolitical issues that may be taking place in the Pacific Theater if you know what…