Intel Update - May 16 - Flashpoint
Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 10th of 2016 2026. Things are getting crazier by the day, and we're going to be a little bit more spicy today with the topics we have to cover, so let's get right to it. This week, the more serious consequences are starting to emerge as we arrive at today 77 of the war in the Persian Gulf. Shortages of petroleum products and distillates are beginning, and multiple companies are issuing warnings of impending supply chain outages. Throughout Europe, the migration crisis has come to a head once again with high-profile murders and new migration centers being implanted throughout the continent to the sharp disapproval of native populations. Right now, as I'm recording this, throughout the United Kingdom, large-scale protests and counter-protests are underway throughout the nation as the United Kingdom demonstrations bring large crowds to London. Within our own hemisphere, Cuba is on the menu once again, and high-profile diplomatic endeavors have taken place this week just off the coast of Florida. And within the homeland itself, the governance situation is not going super well, and disapproval is high on a variety of issues. All the while, violence from the usual suspects continues to be the norm around the country. Moving to strategic movement for this week, most major deployments continue from last week, with the biggest change being that the Ford Carrier Strike Group has arrived home in Virginia from her long deployment. Just as a bit of context for how long the Ford has actually been at sea, I'll have to check the actual numbers, but I think she's been at sea for well over 300 days, which is the longest deployment that any American aircraft carrier has seen since Vietnam. So, she was definitely stressed beyond her max, and she suffered a lot of catastrophic damage from the toilet situation in Venezuela to the laundry fire situation in the Middle East, the Ford has had one very arduous deployment. So far, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group is slated to replace her in the Middle East. I don't know if they've departed port yet and formed up or not. It is interesting, though, that the Ford did not wait for the Ike to get on station. Usually, they conduct handover in region, but I guess the Ford said, "We've had enough," so they came on back early a little bit, or rather late, because this was a long deployment. But But any case, the Eisenhower is uh to take up station somewhere in CENTCOM. However they want to work that out is up to them. But either way, there will be a total of three aircraft carriers in the region once again in a week or so. Bottom line, there has been no cessation of American assets in the Middle East at the present time. Everything has been in a state of resupply, reconfigure, all that kind of stuff. And everything is still in place and ready to resume fighting if that is the chosen option moving forward. Around the homeland this week, there are several items of note to be aware of from a risk management perspective. A lot of the time we may be tempted to ignore a security concern because we don't want to get called names or get slapped with a label or some kind of ist or ism or whatever. And since nobody else wants to talk about this stuff in public, I will because it has very real security implications. You know when I caveat stuff like that, we have to read between the lines quite a bit. And this week there have been many potential flash points that may or may not escalate into something more serious over the next few weeks. But nobody in the counterterrorism or security space wants to talk about it. For one, we have the Chud the Builder scandal, which took place in Tennessee a few days ago. For those of you who don't know what this is all about, fear not. I'm also late to the party, but Chud the Builder is the screen name for Dalton Eatherly, who is a social media influencer, content streamer sort of figure who is infamous for conducting what is being described as like rage bait style content, street interviews, confrontations, uh stuff like that. A lot of his content is either political or mostly racial in nature or focused on that issue. So, a few days ago he was involved in a defensive shooting outside the Clarksville Courthouse in Tennessee after a black man attacked him, resulting in Eatherly shooting the individual. And let me just say, details on the whole incident are really sketchy. I don't think that any content was being made at the time, so I don't think this was one of those confrontations gone wrong kind of situations, but again, I don't know. Right up front, nobody wants to say whether this was a good shoot or not because of the kind of content that this individual makes, I guess. I don't really know. I don't really watch live stream stuff myself. So, I'm kind of in the normie camp myself with this, I guess, but I haven't seen the evidence, but I can guess because of what happened afterwards. So, the judge set the bail really high despite the fact that Eagley did not kill the guy and the courthouse surveillance tape of the incident has not been released. There was also a police officer right there during the entire incident and his body cam is apparently not available or something like that. I don't know. So, regardless of anyone's feelings on Eagley personally or on the style of content he creates, this is now a huge racial thing that's kind of in society now. So, and I think that the multiple videos of the incident not being leaked yet is quite telling because, well, we all know how this goes, right? It's also a free speech sort of thing now. Uh there's that angle to it as well because this is now an issue to answer the question of whether or not insulting speech justifies a physical attack. That's the question that's being asked. So, the risk assessment part of this trial is to decide whether or not minorities have the right to attack someone because they thought they overheard a racial slur. That's really what we're dealing with here. Nobody wants to say it. Again, people get offended by everything nowadays. Even conservatives get really offended about stuff like this, but that's kind of the issue that's on the table and the court's going to have to decide that and I don't think it's looking super great, but again, this just happened a couple of days ago. The complicating factors are his own social media posts, which are going to make it very, very easy for the prosecution to put him away or secure a conviction. So, in effect, if you want to think of it simply, this is like a very high stakes version of the Shiloh Hendrix case. The issue here is that we're not entirely certain that this guy, Chud the Builder, did anything wrong. He might have just been randomly attacked. We just don't know. He also could have instigated the thing. Again, we don't know. There's 15 different video angles of this and nobody seems to have any of them, and the the one video that has leaked is extremely blurry. It's like a Bigfoot video, right? So, I think we know how this is going to work out, but the bottom line that I wanted to mention this today is because it's setting conditions. So, this is going to set conditions for a lot of rhetoric, a lot of tensions, a lot of other problems that are going to compound this summer. This is also just the first landmine that we have to know about today because in a similar vein, there are two other big trials on the menu for the next few weeks. In North Carolina, the De Carlos Brown Jr. situation remains unresolved for the time being after Brown has been found incompetent to stand trial for the murder of Irena Zaretska. No hate crime charges have been filed, and Brown has been determined to be incompetent to stand trial on the charges that do remain. So, it's not really clear as to what's going to happen to him. There are still a few competency hearings, and the next one I think is on June 9th, but it's not really clear how this is going to work out because the defense is literally trying to get him released from custody into psychiatric care. I don't know if that's going to happen, but this is the uncomfortable truth that we seem to be living in right now in the United States, and from a risk management perspective, people might scowl and click their teeth, but the fact of the matter is that if you're a minority in this country, you can kill a white guy or a white girl on a train, a judge labels you incompetent to stand trial, and then you just get out. That seems to be a very common thing from murder one all the way up at the Irena Zaretska level all the way down to smaller crimes. So, this whole trend of oh, they're too mentally unwell to go through a trial, well, let's just let them out. You know, that's the alternative solution that's selected, and I think they're trying to go for it. I think they're trying to go for it with this situation in Charlotte. I think they're going to do it. I don't know if they're going to succeed, but I think they're trying for it, and if that occurs, if De Carlos Brown gets off for the murder of Irena Zaretska because he's too mentally ill to stand trial, I think that's going to be kind of like an O.J. Simpson situation times a million. So, once again, is another political topic that nobody wants to talk about, but look man, I I got to warn you guys if your city is going to be burning down here, and I think that that might actually happen if some of these trials end up with a lot of these criminals walking even after conducting very brutal murders. And I say that not because the victims in this case are going to riot or anything like that, but because when these criminals get off, when they're let off by a judge or, you know, something you know, you you basically get away with murder, other murders are going to happen because now they know that murder is legal as long as you say you're crazy first. That's the kind of situation we find ourselves in, and we're just kind of tiptoeing around it, you know? Uh and sometimes we just got to got to say it like it is, and this is the way that it is, especially with the situation in Texas. In a couple of weeks, the Carmelo Anthony trial is set to begin, and this one is also not looking good, either. So, this is the trial for the murder of Austin Metcalfe, who was murdered by Carmelo Anthony, who stabbed him in the heart during a track meet at Memorial High School in April of last year. Note that I did not say allegedly murdered, because Anthony has confessed to the crime. He himself specifically said, and I quote, "I'm not alleged, I did it." Even though his lawyers have claimed self-defense on his part, so this is now a self-defense trial to begin in a couple of weeks. And we'll see how it goes, because once again, this is a huge racial thing at this point, with Anthony's family setting up a massive GoFundMe campaign for him, the killer. A lot of very high-profile and prominent attorneys and social media figures in the black community have rallied behind Anthony, saying that that this was a good thing, and supporting him for killing this kid at the track meet. So, I've covered all of this abhorrent behavior before, trying to be as neutral as possible, but this was a very public event. It's captured on video. There's a thousand witnesses to this crime, and the killer confessed to it right then and there. Again, seems fairly open and shut, you know, at face value on a societal level. Again, that's what trials are for, to, you know, iron out things that are not so open and shut, but still, this one's pretty pretty clear as to what's really the driving factor behind this. So, that's on the menu to be aware of over the next few weeks because this has really stirred up a lot of racial hatred all around, and of course, that drives up risk. Since we're basically jumping on top of landmine topics today, I also wanted to mention that many states have revamped their food stamp programs over the past 2 months to delist a lot of foods and products from what is eligible to purchase by EBT cards. Now, this is another hot-button issue, and I'm not bringing this up to examine the entire program itself. The whole, um, idea of welfare in the United States, that's a big issue. I'm specifically talking about one component of it because this could be a factor moving into the summertime. So, we've got the perfect storm for what I'd call cultural violence, uh, because a lot of people are being told that they can't buy certain foods with their EBT cards, which is a problem for a major fraud scheme that many people might not be aware of, which is the selling of plates on Facebook. Many of you may have seen this parenthetically or seen people talk about this. This has been going on for quite literally decades. Uh, it's not all fraudulent, but a lot of it is because this is a major way of laundering EBT money. The scam works by someone going to the grocery store and buying a lot of food with their EBT card, and they take it home, they package it up, and they resell it for a profit. Once again, the scale at which this is occurring is staggering. One woman in Michigan was arrested on fraud charges a few months ago because she was using her EBT card to literally buy supplies for her professional brick-and-mortar bakery. She was running an entire storefront where the stock and supply for her business was paid for by EBT. It's pretty easy to be a small business owner when you have exactly zero overhead and free supplies being provided by the taxpayer. And now that a lot of goods have been delisted from EBT in the first place, this is now a major income source that has taken a huge hit over the past few months. So, in isolation, this doesn't really matter a lot, right? But you couple this with gasoline prices getting super high and you've got the perfect storm for crime because a lot of this income is fixed, but gas prices take money out of the pockets of Americans universally. But at the state level, you might say, "Okay, you're getting a thousand dollars worth of EBT per month and because you're delisting a lot of products, now you're saying that that person can only launder half of that, so $500. And now you're spending double the money that you normally would on gas to ride around town." So, again, gas prices complicate everything. Same with drug dealers and human traffickers, high gas prices are serving as an unofficial tax on everybody. And now that we have not one but three high-profile, highly racially motivated criminal trials on the menu, things are not looking super great on the civil unrest front and the natives are a bit restless, if you get my meaning. Once again, I want to add another closing caveat. There's always going to be this angle to push a lot more of the societal division and a lot of this is being done intentionally, I think. I think that the the the tensions are intentionally being stoked by a lot of people, parties, media figures, stuff like that. So, I don't want to don't want to make this out to be like a complete apocalyptic Armageddon here for the summertime, but I'm saying that the conditions are starting to line up for that eventuality. Some of it's organic, though. Some of it's just tensions that have been there for a very long time. Some of it is probably being stoked. I don't know. All I can say is that the dominoes are stacking up. Will the Will those dominoes fall over? I don't know. I can just tell you that the dominoes are stacked up, right? So, it's up for you to decide what to think about this sort of stuff from a planning perspective. So, So, bottom line, everyone's asking, "Does this mean we're going to have another summer of Floyd again or another summer of love?" I don't know. I don't think so unless something major happens. It's more likely that a lot of these gas prices are just going to drive people crazy and you're going to have a lot more low-level crime, organized stuff like the whole BLM riots of the past few years. That's going to take a lot more organizational effort and that's That's not materialized just yet. But, for those of you guys who have to rely on public transit or you have to walk, you know, to work through a city and it's not a super great area, uh keep your head on a swivel. Just be careful. All right? So, you know, situation normal. Just be careful. So, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Talked about this too much already, but this does lead into another growing concern that is becoming more realistic with every passing day, which are the supply chain disruptions that are coming about from the war in the Middle East cutting off a good chunk of the global energy supply. This week, several companies and automotive groups have warned that they are having to cut back on oil changes because there is a growing shortage of certain weights of motor oil. Some companies are dealing with a 40 to 50% drop in the availability of some petroleum products, which is staggering. It is far too early to panic, but it would not be a bad idea to start thinking about what your needs might be if this conflict continues for much longer, which I think it will. You all know how panic buying sets in super quickly and in this case, once the word gets out to the normies, it's going to be on like Donkey Kong, possibly quite literally, and store shelves are very likely to be wiped out by people who think that they need to buy 10 years worth of oil changes all at once. So, that's going to be fun to deal with over the next few weeks, but the petroleum sector is is slow to change and shortages take a very long time to materialize because we're dealing with a slow drip problem set. 20% of the world's energy supply being offline due to the war is a big deal, but it's also not 100%. So, that means that there's a bit of elasticity to the markets, and the biggest impact that the war is having right now is high prices for everything. But, motor oil and other distillates coming into short supply is definitely a canary in the coal mine for more serious logistical problems later on. Right now, it's still in the early stages, though. Another canary in the coal mine to be aware of on the forefront over the next few weeks is Cuba. Since the war in the Middle East slipped into more of a long-term problem, increased rhetoric has been issued by the White House regarding American aspirations for Cuba. In short, a lot of talk was circulating, mostly originating from remarks made by President Trump himself, indicating that the US might seek to conduct some sort of military operation in Cuba to obtain control over the nation in a similar manner as to how the operation in Venezuela worked out. Maybe not the operation itself, but the follow-on effect, as in Venezuela becoming a puppet state for the United States. Well, the United States wants the same thing for Cuba. Weeks ago, this was just talk, and nobody really took it seriously, kind of like the Greenland aspirations. Um, and right now, it still looks fairly unlikely, but less unlikely than before. American delegations of diplomats have visited Cuba to conduct talks, and the American blockade of Cuba is a very strong move to tighten the screws on the Cubans. Once again, the United States has completely, full stop, shut off all the energy supply to Cuba. That is not an embargo, that is a straight-up blockade. If you want to be doctrinally correct, you can crack open your textbook and say that this is an act of war, but we don't really care about terms and words and things anymore, so I guess that doesn't really matter. Either way, the Cubans are hurting right now. Most of that is being done by their own government over the past few years, but a lot of that is now starting to be more directly uh, result of American action. So, the Leeden Doctrine is most certainly at play with Cuba, which is the idea that every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show the world we mean business. At least that's the quote, which is the origin of the doctrine. So, whether you agree with it or not, this is most certainly a good chunk of President Trump's mentality towards foreign policy, especially when it comes to smaller nations. It's what we did in Venezuela. It's what we're trying to do in Cuba. It'll have to look a lot differently, but in any case, just want to set the groundwork for me dropping a lot of red diamonds on Cuba in the next few weeks because as we all know, Sun Tzu always said that when you're in a war with multiple nations on multiple fronts, it always helps to open up another front. And that definitely seems like our plan. So, we'll definitely see how it goes, but I'm going to start preparing for that like I said a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to actually do it for real this time. Going to start preparing for Cuba just in case the United States seems to be interested in that sort of thing. So, moving overseas to the United Kingdom, tensions remain rather high due to the revelation of a rather grizzly murder that took place a couple of years ago coming to light this week. So, what happened back in 2023 and why is this case both so interesting and also so incredibly tragic? In December of 2023, Henry Noack was stabbed by Vikram DeGua on the street in Southampton. At first glance, this appeared to be a rather routine uh, stabbing attack with neither the victim nor the perpetrator knowing or really interacting with with each other before the incident. Noack, being stabbed with a ceremonial Sikh dagger, was severely wounded and called for police while trying to escape. DeGua continued to pursue the victim. He followed him down the street, stabbing him multiple times, and eventually when police arrived, DeGua, the stabber, told police that the victim had made a racial comment toward him. The responding officers promptly arrested Noak, who was still bleeding rather profusely from the stabbing and placed him in handcuffs. Over a period of several minutes, Noak bled out on the street. The entire attack was captured on video on the victim's phone, which had been found in Deeg's pocket as he robbed the victim after stabbing him. Due to the nature of the British legal system, in nearly all high-profile cases, the fact that a crime occurred in the first place is obscured so the general public is not aware of crimes when they take place, and in this case, the crime occurred 3 years ago, but the details are just being known now. The reason for talking about this incident now, years after the fact, is twofold. For one, if we don't talk about it now, then we never will, and this could be another Southport moment, and more unrest is possible due to the horrific details of the crime. Secondly, this crime is bringing about very specific cultural considerations that are tough to talk about, but must be noted purely from a threat analysis perspective. This information is useful for you if you live in the United Kingdom, but it also will benefit you if you live in Canada or the United States. So, the Sikh community has a very particular reputation around the Western world, as the Sikh culture is not just a religious sect or movement, but there is also a very strong nationalist movement which seeks to use violence to achieve their goals, or at least it has since the 1980s. Within India itself, many major terror attacks have been conducted by the Sikh community, and many notable Sikh political leaders have actually been exiled from India, having been convicted of terrorism at some point during the Khalistan uprising incidents back in the 1980s. These guys did pretty much everything. They brought down civilian airliners with explosives, small arms attacks, hostage stuff, all kinds of violent attacks throughout India, mostly in their own region they were trying to seek autonomy within. So, this is kind of like India's version of the PLF. If you guys remember that from the 1960s and 1970s, all that violence and the airline hijackings and bombings and all kinds of stuff like that that was occurring in Europe and the Middle East. Well, India was dealing with that within India itself from the Sikh community. Cut to today and many of this organizational leadership has actually ended up settling down in the Western world such as in Canada and the United Kingdom, both of which are nations that require this back pocket knowledge to be conveyed in hushed tones because it's in effect illegal to know this information in public. It is unfortunate to talk about because it's a very complicated issue and because you're dealing with this sort of religious aspect to it. You don't want to re- you know, insult somebody's religion, right? That really gets you nowhere, but this information is critical for one's survival because as angry as Britons are about this case, the Sikh community is starting to rally around their own flag. Tensions have been growing among the Sikh community throughout Europe for a while and the details of this case are likely to cause further confrontations and incidents. Also, the officers which helped to murder Noac, if you want to phrase it like that, which I certainly would, it's possible these guys are still on the police force and therefore public interest remains in figuring out if the officers who handcuffed a man and let him bleed out to death were of the same national origin and culture as the attacker because if that's the case and it may be, I don't know, it's speculation, but if that's the case, if there's a link there, yeah, this could get even more ugly than it already is. Unfortunately, these cultural aspects are a major part of the case because in the United Kingdom, Sikhs have been granted a religious exemption for the ban on carrying knives and Kirpan, the murderer in this case, was open carrying an 8-in ceremonial knife at the time at which he used to conduct the murder. So, while everyone else in the United Kingdom has to go to extreme lengths to comply with UK knife law, the Sikhs have been granted permission under a religious exemption that allows them to carry long daggers known as kirpans. That alone would be a very, very hot button topic in British society and even in like Canadian society where the same kind of crackdown on, you know, weapons and stuff like that is a big concern there, too. The other issue, and I think the main issue, is why does this religious exemption exist? Again, this is one of the articles of the Sikh faith because all Sikhs are required to carry a blade on their person. And in their religion, this dagger is exclusively intended to be used as a weapon. To put this in context, imagine if Pope Leo said that all Catholics had to carry around a Beretta and shoot anyone who is perceived to be in violation of the Vatican's policies. To us, the first part sounds kind of entertaining, but the second part, the idea of carrying around a weapon for the exclusive purposes of hurting people for religious reasons, that's absolutely insane. We don't do that here in Western society, but within the Sikh faith, which is heavily centered around violence, and since the 1980s, they have linked their cultural aspirations with their religious aspirations, to them this is normal. So, if you Google this, they try to say that it's for self-defense and that the five K's of Sikhism are all about defending the weak or something like that. But, if you scratch away the paint, you see that this is really just a bit of word play because they have the concept of Dharam Yudh, which loosely translates to holy war or war for justice. This concept within Sikhism is the reason for why India has had a problem with counterterrorism in Punjabi territory. And if you read a lot of internal Indian politics, I know nobody really wants to do that, but it's very interesting from a counterterrorism perspective. If you read a lot of their internal news about internal counterterrorism and and policing stuff, they're having a really big problem with this, and they've had a big problem with this over the years because the Sikhs use this belief system to justify terrorism as part of the Khalistan independence movement. So, in the West, this {quote} defending the weak and self-defense aspect of their faith, these guys are not the Mandalorian, okay? These guys are not just trying to immortalize like the second amendment in their faith. This is really just a cover that allows them to carry knives and be ready at all times to carry out attacks against anyone who they subjectively perceive to be against them. So again, anytime we talk about defense and self-defense, it gets kind of cagey because everybody has a bunch of different views on that sort of topic, which is understandable. However, we have to look at this through the context of this specific region on earth and the belief system that came from this region, which again is not it's not universal to all Indian people. It is not It is not Hinduism. This is Sikhism. This is a different thing. And again, even in the United States, this is a big deal because many of you may have been familiar with Sikh culture through our kind of problems we've been having with trucking. So trucking in the United States, Indian dude, you know, runs off the road, kills somebody. There have been a few high-profile crimes like that occur over the past couple of years, which have gotten a lot of attention on the Sikh community and occasionally, as in nearly 100% of the time, what you will do is look at the cab, look at the the photos from the actual crime scene itself, and you'll see the same guy on all the trucks. So again, I went down this rabbit hole a while ago. So just to digress for a bit because this kind of matters in the context of talking about Sikhism. If you see this on the highway, this is what this is. A lot of times you'll see this on a lot of more Sikh truck drivers. They have these decals all over their trucks of this guy this guy with a turban carrying an AK-47. So what is this about? This is a decal. These are images of a guy called Sidhu Moose Wala. He is as a Sikh rapper who was killed in a gunfight a few years ago, and since then he's become kind of a musical or artistic expression of Sikh nationality, ethno-nationalism, that sort of thing. So, that's what this is all about. If you're kind of confused as to why you're seeing do pictures of do the same guy with an AK on the side of a trailer or a truck, you know, a big rig going down the highway, this is probably what you're dealing with. So, think like the Punjabi version of like the Crips and the Bloods kind of arrangement. This is what's going on within India politics. Again, nobody cares. Nobody should have to care about internal Indian politics in a small region in Central India. But, because this culture is literally in governance in a lot of the world now, it's worth being aware of. I've been looking at this for a while now, and again, I have to put the boilerplate statement on there. I don't know if everybody's like this. This could just be a cultural thing. It's kind of foreign to the United States, but it's here now, and you know, it's here to Western Europe. The United Kingdom is, of course, having to deal with it more strongly than the than the United States does. The context from which we're talking about this. And again, I can't say that all Sikhs of, you know, all 20 million Sikhs or however many there are, I don't know if everyone in this culture is on board with this kind of ethno-religious nationalism violence kind of mentality. I don't I don't know if everyone's on board with that. I'm sure there are probably varying degrees of it. However, when it comes to the United Kingdom knife laws and the kid that got stabbed to death on the street, I cannot speak to anything but the data. And the raw fact is that in the United Kingdom, 100% of Sikhs have been granted an exemption to carry weapons in the UK, and 100% of Sikhs are required to do so by their religion. It's not a personal, it's not an insult, it's just a fact that this particular belief system is completely alien to the West. And by their own admission, they do not assimilate, nor are they compatible with Western culture. Because if they were compatible and they wanted to assimilate, they would not get laws changed to accommodate them, and those laws would not involve them being able to carry a weapon everywhere they're going to go so they can kill their political enemies if they so choose. You can bring this into the self-defense space if you wish. I'm not taking it there. I'm just saying that the Sikhs somehow have the right to carry weapons, daggers, machetes on the streets without any question whatsoever. And if you question that, you're going to get arrested. And the ethnic Britons have they they can't even get a Swiss Army knife, right? That's the reasoning before the censorship in this case. It has everything to do with the knife itself, the religious aspect to it, the culture behind all of this, the political stuff, the decals on the trucks. It's all one big mess. This was not a random stabbing attack. It was a Sikh using his kirpan as intended. These weapons are carried by Sikhs for them to kill people with it. So we have hostile intent and hostile action. And they have been allowed to do so via the religious exemption in the UK. Coming back to the actual case itself, which is why I've spent so much time on this today, is there's another factor to this as well, which is honestly the least surprising detail of the case, which is that Diguva is not the only person on trial. His mother took the bloody knife and hid it in the family home, aiding Diguva in covering up the crime. So she's on trial as well for aiding and abetting the murder. Several other family members on that night were also arrested and initially charged, but these charges were dropped over the past 2 years. So you've got people who probably knew about the crime, were trying to cover it up, but they couldn't stick them with anything and they're just walking around. This involvement with the Sikh community closing ranks to protect one of their own, this is likely to exacerbate tribal violence on the streets of Britain for the foreseeable future because right now the Punjabi communities of London are trying to figure out how to keep that kirpan exemption. And as a result, even more adversarial perspectives are likely to emerge. I would expect many Sikhs to start carrying larger kirpans in public throughout the United Kingdom to dominate and flex on the laws being tailored specifically to them. That's just kind of their style. And once again, I'm not trying to dunk on anybody's religion. I really don't want to do that because again, it gets you nowhere. But if your gurus require you to carry a long knife and that you are to use that long knife to carry out a holy war and I also cannot carry a knife myself to defend myself from you, we're going to have a problem. And that problem has manifested in this case for the British people. I know ethnic Britons, everyone who lives in the UK who listens to me are probably fuming about that because you may not know this as an American, but in the UK, intent is a huge part of British knife law. If you're carrying a plastic fork in your pocket and you tell a police officer that you intended to carry that plastic fork to defend yourself with, you go straight to jail because it's extremely, extremely, extremely illegal to carry anything expressly for the purposes of self-defense. If you have a potato in your pocket and you say that's for self-defense, straight to jail. Do not collect $200. You are toasted. But if you're a Sikh and you say that my religion says that I have to carry this machete so that if I think a holy war is justified, I can murder people, the British police will arrest anyone who disagrees with you. That's the That's the level of of seriousness we're dealing with here. So, this case completely revolves around cultural and religious lines and also line of action on the part of the police. And all of this is why this case was buried for as long as possible, years in fact. So, now that the truth is out, tensions will remain palpable while Deegol's trial continues, which is why it's worth getting to the bottom of this cultural issue. Once we go down into the weeds, we can see that there are really four completely separate issues which have a high potential of driving unrest and violence moving forward. For one, we've got the Sikhs being allowed to carry weapons, but ethnic British citizens not being allowed to do the same. So, there's thing one. Secondly, the British police instinctively sided with a murderer who was covered in blood and arrested the 18-year-old kid who was actively bleeding to death. That's your second issue. Thirdly, the reason for why the Sikhs even carry the blade in the first place is very concerning because there's a lot of history and cultural violence behind it. And fourthly, the British government covered all of this up for years. So, once again, many different aspects four flashpoints to emerge, all of which are really tough concerns to even talk about in the first place. So, enough of Punjabi land. I know everyone's tired of of it, but I wanted to get that out there because this is kind of a complex uh canary in the coal mine, I should say, for a lot of the issues going on in the United States as well. So, worth talking about in a long-form format anyway. So, finally, I wanted to wrap up today with a few notes from the recent presidential state visit to to China. As with all diplomatic visits, 99% of this trip was useless banter and tourism, but that last 1% can get pretty interesting. First of all, the objective of the trip itself is not entirely clear. The State Department can church it up with flowery language all they want, but it's not really clear as to why the president and a huge delegation would take a trip abroad while their nation is at war. To me, that alone is pretty interesting because it implies there is a reason as to why a trip to China is more important than the war that we're actively fighting, but anyway, whatever that reason is, I don't know, but it's still interesting. Secondly, by far the most interesting part of the trip came from an offhand remark made by President Trump on board Air Force One as they were heading back to the US Thursday night. I will play the clip just in its entirety because it touches on the Taiwan issue, and this is probably one of the more interesting parts of the diplomatic endeavor, so here's the clip. Would the US defend Taiwan if it came to it? I don't want to say that. I'm not going to say that. There's There's one person that knows that. You know who it is? Me. I'm the only person. That question was asked to me today by President Xi. I said, "I don't talk about that." He asked you today. He asked you if you would send troops, if you would defend He asked me if I'd defend them. I said, "I don't talk about that." He told him that. I know it's a little hard to hear. I'm sorry about that. The audio was not great when it was being recorded, but the gist of the conversation kind of came out. Now, obviously, we cannot put a whole lot of weight on one short clip. That's really a bad idea when it comes to President Trump because he himself is not exactly a man who has hard and fast positions on anything. But, in this clip, a couple of things happened. For one, President Trump stating that he will not reveal as to if the US will defend Taiwan. That's completely normal. In fact, this is a continuation of the very long train of China policy, which back during the Kissinger era was referred to as strategic ambiguity. Meaning that the United States would not reveal whether or not we will militarily back Taiwan. So, we're going to leave that as a question for China to figure out. Will they, won't they? Will they defend? Will they Will they will not defend? If we If the Chinese do this, will the United States do that? Again, strategic ambiguity. No real hard red lines in the sand or in the island chain, so to speak. Anything to deal with Taiwan in the diplomatic spaces has been handled incredibly delicately over the years. And, like him or not, it is undeniable that President Trump often, and rather ironically, acts like a bull in a china shop on pretty much everything he does, for better or for worse. And so, he let slip that there would be a war if China invaded Taiwan. Whether he means that or not, I don't know. It could be a lie. It could be a genuine thing. I don't know. He changes his mind a lot and doesn't really speak plainly on stuff like this, which is fair enough, I guess, but it's still interesting. However, the most interesting part about this short exchange on Air Force One is that President Trump said that Xi asked him the same question directly. And kind of hilariously, you can even see the journalist who asked him the question kind of taken aback by this because if this is true, and I want to stress that this is a big if, this is very surprising. The Chinese, just as a matter of cultural and diplomatic policy, they absolutely never ask direct questions like this, let alone President Xi. So, if this actually happened, we might be closer to Taiwan kicking off than we might think. Granted, this is a huge debate right now, so some say the timeline is for 2027 invasion, others say that China is never actually going to invade. Uh they're actually not going to use military force at all, but rather take over diplomatically, and all of the military force that we're seeing them use is actually for other aspirations throughout the maybe second and third island chains. Hope not on that front, but I, you know, that that's the argument anyway. I don't know what to think personally on that front. It's all in the international space, and it's kind of hard to figure out who's going to do what because there's so many factors to consider, but the bottom line is that the Far East is not looking to stay in their period of peace and tranquility for too much longer. And President Xi directly asking Trump to his face, "Hey, are you guys going to get involved in Taiwan if we go take it?" If he's asking that directly, mhm, that's not a very good sign. But again, we're placing a lot of weight on a very short exchange and personal testimony from one person, not something that we can make a whole lot of decisions off of, but again, indications and warnings are stacking up. So, knowing how the American involvement in Iran has worked out, the Chinese have been taking a lot of notes on that endeavor. They have been very, very interested in how our war has gone out gone on in the Middle East, and this uh situation becoming a little bit of a fiasco here has maybe emboldened them to think that they might have a chance against the United States in the Pacific now since we've depleted our stockpiles for the moment. Their whole defense policy is hundreds of thousands of anti-ship cruise missiles and they already know that the Iranians who only launched a few hundred missiles at us, you know, all total throughout this conflict directly at our ships. China with hundreds of thousands of munitions is that's pretty significant and they know that they probably have the upper hand at least to when it comes to Taiwan. So, so they might attack before we can rebuild our own military stockpiles because they know without a doubt that we cannot defend Taiwan. Taiwan is off the table. It just is. You may not like it. I don't like it, but it is. Uh based on how the war in Iran has gone. But, on the other hand, the Chinese are also looking at how the most technologically advanced military in the world is having a really tough time winning a war against a vastly inferior foe or at least a foe that is vastly inferior on paper. And that imbalance is taking place mostly due to terrain. If Iran looked like Iraq, we would have won the war 5 minutes into it, right? But, it's not. Iran is nothing in the world but hundreds of trillions of tons of granite. So, maybe the Chinese are second-guessing the success that their own operations might have in Taiwan. Other than these very tiny aspects of the trip, not much else came out of the state visit from what I can see. No real commitments to anything were achieved on either side, just very coy statements from the Chinese as you would expect. I'd expect nothing less. And right now, the trip mostly appears to be a giant pile of nothing other than buying a bit of time to focus on things other than the current war that the US is fighting in the Middle East. So, that's where we stand for today. Flashpoints all around both overseas, in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and also here at home with a lot of domestic unpleasantness being plopped on our plates this week. And our friendly redcoats across the seas having to deal with a lot of complicated issues as well. Thankfully, all of this uh rather unfortunate topics that we have to cover sometimes, these have given us some idea of what to prepare for and how important it is to remain situationally aware and keep your head on a swivel. High gas prices make people do crazy stuff all around and right now it is a very high risk time for any of the dozen or so bubbling tensions to reach another flash point. We don't have to do them in gloom, don't ever do that, don't ever black pill, no black pilling allowed, but we have to be aware, we have to be attentive, we have to talk about unfortunate things sometimes even if it's a little embarrassing or culturally inappropriate or we have to talk about it just purely because you need the information to be able to survive walking down the street sometimes. So with that, let's roll it up for today and talk about the Ghost Net reports for this week. Once again, this radio net that we use to exchange information around the world is very, very helpful sometimes. And it was a good net all around from everyone. Now that the summertime weather has arrived for most of us, a lot more people are joining the party, which is always good to see. The more mundane weekly testing and practice sessions are not always super high speed. They're just not. But in our case, this isn't just practice, this is also practical utility, right? So we can find some interesting information that many of us might not have heard before, which is always good to see. It's already been a pretty crazy year and with hurricane and wildfire season upon us once again, it's a good time to dust off the comms gear and make sure everything works. Even if you are not into the world of HF radio or Meshtastic, if you don't want to get into anything like that, if it's too much of an investment, there's always free or low-budget ways to get into this stuff, but even then the the educational barrier is pretty high. Working on that, going to bring that barrier down. There's a lot of other dudes out there doing good stuff to make sure that radio is more accessible to more people. Even so, you can always make sure that your own radios work, make sure that you have good communications plan put together, even if you don't have radios at all. Just make sure that if you haven't heard from somebody in a while, make sure you have a plan for that. Just so that you have a way to know how how get in touch with friends and family just in case regular lines of communication fail. Cyber attack season is also here and constant. That's a yearly thing. It's always going around, but these things always tend to come around when there's times of international tension and conflicts and stuff like that. And you never really know when a server is going to go down somewhere just due to some random hacking group getting a hold of things. So, again, just being prepared, doing the bare minimum to make sure that you know what to do and you have some kind of plan ahead of time. That's going to help out quite a lot. That's all I have for today, everyone. I know things are getting a little heavy out there in the world, but it's going to be okay. We're we're going to take things one day at a time and do the best we can. That's all we can do, anyway. So, thanks for sticking with me and all of my research and geospatial data is all available, all for free at the links below along with all of my source material that I use throughout the week. I'm still working on the A-TAC series. It's It's a lot of work a lot of work to get this stuff done, but I'm going to try to power through a lot of this more A-TAC and communications kind of doctrine and tutorials and educational stuff this summer time and we'll see how it works out. I hope it I hope it helps a lot. So, if you're interested in using A-TAC or communications or stuff, check out the playlist on my YouTube channel and you will be able to find all of the prior content I've made on that in addition to the new stuff that I'm trying to make. So, thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.