//The Wire//2300Z February 16, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: CONCERNS ARE GROWING FOR TWO CAPTURED AMERICAN PILOTS DETAINED IN WEST AFRICA. UNITED STATES SEIZES OIL TANKER IN INDIAN OCEAN.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Indian Ocean: Over the weekend the United States seized the M/T *VERONICA III*, one of the tankers which fled Venezuela in the wake of the fall of the Maduro government. The vessel was boarded and seized due to carrying oil in violation of American sanctions. West Africa: Concerns are growing concerning the safety of Two American pilots who were illegally detained by authorities in Guinea almost 6 weeks ago. On December 29th, Brad Schlenker and Fabio Espinal Nunez were piloting a private charter flight when they diverted to Guinea to refuel. They were given permission to land, and upon taxiing to the terminal, were greeted by armed soldiers. Both pilots have been detained since the incident. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: As of right now, the issue of the pilots in Guinea is still in the realm of diplomacy, as the families of the captives have been working with the Embassy to secure the pilots' release. Since this line of effort has not yielded any progress, the families have gone to the media with the hope that a media blitz will pressure the White House to speed along their release. All of this can probably be handled with a phone call, but just in case a more active response is called for, an understanding of the terrain might be helpful. So far, many details remain unknown as the initial circumstances of the detention are hard to verify. Flying for a regional charter airline in Africa is one of the most dangerous jobs a pilot can take, simply due to the corruption that is rampant throughout the continent. As such, it was an odd choice to choose to land in this country in particular, which has led many to assess that there is more to the story than meets the eye. The status of the original charter itself is also not known; some reports state that this flight was a ferry flight moving an aircraft that was recently sold (i.e. no passengers on board), whereas other reports state that they were flying a Brazilian family to Dubai. In any case, taking the story at face-value, the pilots diverted to Guinea for fuel and upon landing probably did not have enough cash on hand for the required bribes. Verbal permission to land is not good enough in Africa, and every stage along the way involves greasing palms, which always demand more. In this case, these pilots are currently serving as a bargaining chip, having chosen to land in Guinea at the worst possible time...during a state of military coup. General Mamadi Doumbouya is currently running the country after "winning" the election one day before these pilots landed. Doumbouya was the leader of the 2021 coup that overthrew the previous government, and over the past few years, the beleaguered nation has been host to the standard West African experience of poverty and violence while under military rule. Now that he's made his warlord status official, his government is probably looking to increase his standing. Nothing pads the ego of an African warlord quite like snatching a couple of Americans so as to get the attention of the United States (the mere dialog with the US alone will increase the legitimacy of his government). However, Doumbouya might find that his little stunt gets the wrong kind of attention from the United States if the pilots are not released immediately. Whatever the pilots did (if anything) to get detained is not a good enough excuse to avoid American involvement; the United States has proven over the past year that the US military will bomb a country back to the stone age for nothing more than a Klondike bar, so Doumbouya would be wise to correct this issue immediately. Local media reports (such that they are) indicate that the courts have actually declined to press charges against the pilots as they have done nothing wrong, but the military council running the administration of the country has refused to release them. On the ground, the situation is not great. Schlenker and Nunez have been allowed access to a phone semi-regularly, and have been making contact with family after their detention. State Department officials have also reportedly visited the prisoners in person, confirming that they are still alive. The exact facility that the pilots are being held in is not known, however they have stated that they are located in Conakry, so they are probably being held somewhere inside Conakry Central Prison (also known as Maison Centrale in French), which is the only known detention facility in the area. It is possible the pilots are being held elsewhere, however historically most leaders of African nations tend to keep a close eye on their political prisoners, and Guinea's history is no different, with the main prison being located a short distance from the Presidential Residences. This is important as if this is where the pilots are being held, they probably will not survive much longer. This facility is nestled in the heart of heavily urbanized terrain at the southwestern end of the peninsula which contains Guinea's capital city of Conakry. As far as prisons go, this facility is a standard example of the typical African prison, and conditions inside the compound are horrific at best and non-survivable at worst due to extremely harsh living conditions brought on by overcrowding, as well as the brutality of the guards who frequently torture prisoners. The terrain surrounding the compound is dense urban city, with little open ground. The target compound itself is encircled by slums to the North and East, and protected by a mud-brick wall approximately 8 feet tall, and 1-2 feet thick. Inside the perimeter sits a scattered array of one-story buildings, most of which are of cinderblock construction. Otherwise, defenses throughout the peninsula are sparse, with most weapons systems being centered around the standard Technical with a mounted crew-served weapon. It is likely that no MANPADs or other more sophisticated air defenses are located in the area. Most military forces are scattered sporadically, with the main bulk of somewhat-organized forces being concentrated at the Airport 7 miles to the northeast. All in all, if Doumbouya wants to take his chances, he's certainly welcome to do so, however it would be wise for him to seek a diplomatic solution immediately. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

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hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for saturday the 26th of february 2022. so let's get right to it i don't have too much information coming out of europe today i've really been focused on trying to figure out where the front lines are but there has been some pretty big news with regards to sanctions the eu has stated that they will be closing european union airspace to all russian aircraft we're still waiting on a bit of clarification on that because that would mean that more or less the entire continent of europe's airspace would be closed to russia and that would actually be a pretty significant move to counter russia's actions in ukraine but again russia would have had to have planned for this and could have guessed that this would happen so who really knows if this is going to affect russia that much plus russia has a lot of trading partners out in the far east and in the rest of asia so really trying to figure out what this is going to mean for russia and what the actual details are the european union has also agreed to cut off some russian banks from the swift banking system which i will admit i did not think they would do but again we will have to see what banks get cut off with these sanctions because as with all sanctions the devil is in the details and we'll have to actually go through and read the actual documents and not a news story on the documents to see what is actually going to happen to russia with regards to sanctions in russia alexander chulakov was found dead this morning allegedly taking his own life i say allegedly because much like other powerful figures in the world top-ranking politicians oligarchs and important people in russia do not normally meet to their end by natural or their own causes and alexander tulikov was the financial director for the entirety of gazprom russia's biggest energy monopoly and is the largest natural gas company in the world along these same lines and because i didn't have anywhere to put it there are rumors of dissension within the top-ranking politicians in russia again with propaganda flying everywhere from all sides at this point it's really hard to say what is actually going on and it is very unlikely that we're going to have any kind of information gathering capability behind closed doors in russia's top political sphere however rumors are running rampant right now that a lot of dissension is breaking out between some of the old guard in russian political structures and some of putin's closer friends and associates and things like that a lot allegedly a lot of people were kept in the dark in russian high society with regards to this ukraine situation and they're not too happy about it because like we're getting ready to talk about in a bit uh the invasion is not exactly going as smoothly as one would have hoped right it's not a complete and decisive uh conflict just yet uh russia is having to fight for every inch of terrain they get uh for the most part we'll talk about that again in on the fronts but i just wanted to mention that there are inklings of some dissension going on within within russia's political sphere much like the rest of europe which is completely and utterly disorganized in shambles with regards to the sanctions like i mentioned last time things aren't exactly perfect in russia either so i guess we'll have to see what comes of this we'll be on the lookout for any kind of indicators of squabbling going on but really i just wanted to point it out because it might be an it might be a factor for how this ukrainian conflict goes in the future i'm going to skip over the naval updates for today because i don't really have anything constructive to add and we'll talk about the black sea here in just a bit but moving on to the overall operating picture intel gaps are many and wide regarding the positions of the front lines at this stage russia continues her assault on all fronts though there has been a measurable decrease in the speed at which forces have been moving many russian units have been scattered on various fronts or are black on logistics like food water and ammunition much like yesterday russia's advance seems to be the most speedy down south along the crimean front but this is likely due to the open terrain and lack of significant populated areas to hold up the russians in places like urban centers or the more densely populated areas around the country russian forces are being observably bogged down by both ukrainian military actions and civilian efforts to slow their advance as to whether or not this will be effective enough time will have to tell on that again we are continuing to see russian forces being sent into action piecemeal which if you step back and look at things from a historical perspective is almost morbidly ironic considering the historical significance of this exact terrain it was almost 80 years ago that the german sixth army was advancing across what is now ukraine to fight that battle that would decide their fate at stalingrad which was renamed as volgograd after the war and both belligerents of the current war are echoing some of the same tactics used by both sides during the conflict during world war ii ukraine is taking the fight to the cities and letting their invader come deeper and deeper into their territory so that she stretches her supply lines thin russia is echoing the ghost of yetumenka by not taking advantage of the doctrine of massing her forces sending relatively smaller units into battle piecemeal when she should and could be sending in massive coordinated waves of troops ukraine on the other hand is a much smaller and more disadvantaged force but still somehow is managing to deny the russians the air even if it is mostly with shoulder-launched man pads russia seemingly ignorant or dismissive of the importance of air power has not yet dedicated enough aerial forces for this conflict and is now beginning to pay the price for it russia also largely relying on speed and rapidly advancing armored columns have begun to realize that a blitzkrieg might be an effective tactic but it requires fuel and logistics to make it work and putin surrounding himself with yes men instead of people who know what they are doing might be a pretty big reason for the losses that have been sustained taking the initiative to rapidly pierce deep into enemy terrain has been proven to withstand the test of time in the field of warfare but it does have its downsides punching deep into enemy terrain is all fine and dandy until you realize that you have no supplies and you are deep inside enemy terrain i think that all of these observations are utterly fascinating to those who study history and though i certainly don't think that this is an exact parallel to the stalingrad campaign these observations are plain as day to us here so i just wanted to point this out to anyone who might also be thinking along the same lines both the ukrainians and the russians are cherry-picking the best and sometimes the worst parts of their own history in order to fight this war before we get to each front let's briefly examine the iff markers that russia has been observed to be using since we're getting a lot of questions about this for the most part russian forces are using alphanumeric letters to identify friend or foe or iff this is extremely common for all militaries to do and extremely important for russia because ukraine has pretty much the same equipment so having some measure to tell each other apart is important however there has been some variation between the iff markers used some units stationed in the east have the letter v on their vehicles some from crimea have the letter o like the forces from belarus so just remember that as you see the thousands of videos or pictures that are coming out there's a little bit of variation between these on the northeastern front more or less a united front has emerged with russian forces linking up from cherniv konotop sumi and kharkiv i do want to caveat that by saying there's a big uncertainty bubble right there in the middle between kanotop and cherniv because we don't exactly know if this link up has occurred or not the troops in konatop have have been experiencing great difficulties just surviving over the past day or so so we don't really know if this nice flip we have drawn on the slide here is an accurate line or we don't we don't know if this is a complete line or if this is just pockets of front lines as russia moves forward either way this has occurred with great difficulty and at great cost to the russians like i mentioned locals in the vicinity of kanatop are reporting that russians are scavenging for fuel and supplies lots of single tanks and single btrs are also noticed to be driving around sometimes instead of in column form i don't know if this is an isolated event but it seems like some units in countertop have gotten lost or been the only survivors of their column it's hard to say the situation is far too fluid to make a judgment call either way but it is certain to say that the situation is quite serious in countertop for the russians this grants a little bit of credence to our earlier assessments that russian logistics are not nearly adequate enough for a slow-paced assault plus the downsides of russian doctrine are coming out now heavily relying on the battalion tactical group while an adequate tool for the task of invading a nation like ukraine still presents problems when it comes to the allocation of logistics bringing in btgs from all over russia and having them work together in a non-traditional command structure has got to be a logistical nightmare in other words the russian army is right now figuring out their logistical limits and they are figuring it out the hard way so over the coming days we will see how big of a problem logistics will be for the russians along the central part of the northeastern front sumi has been retaken by ukrainian forces with the assistance of local citizens who have been helping with the defense of their city with kiev being a primary target russia appears to have made the decision to break contact with ukrainian forces in the vicinity of sumi or tie up ukrainian forces so that other armor divisions can maneuver around sumi and head for kiev this is an interesting play for anyone who knows what the word salient means so if russia has indeed decided to encircle and bypass sumi this could be a significant vulnerability that ukraine could exploit if they try this tactic in other places along the eastern front not much new information to report it looks like a lot of the civilians out east have already started to kind of move away from the area so information is going to be kind of spotty probably from here on out on the eastern front we do know that an amphibious landing did occur in the vicinity of marapol though we don't know any other details besides that but this amphibious landing will be important for the rest of the southern front which we'll talk about now along the southern front the situation remains much the same with kirsan still in ukrainian hands though there is fighting in the city right now in the city might have been lost over the past few hours it's hard to tell there are also reports of russian troops fighting in miyakev right now just to the north of kirusan but again it's really uncertain and the front line is very fluid in this area so we'll have to wait and see what the line actually turns out to be and probably by tomorrow or a few days from now it's possible that russian troops are doing what they have done up in the northeast in sumi where some russian forces encircle a city and tie up ukrainian forces while other russian units maneuver around and bypass the city entirely whether or not russia has the forces to keep doing this leapfrog action remains to be seen but it seems to be attacked that they have started to use in the past couple of days along the eastern portion of the southern front advances continue to be made in the vicinity of mara pole and like i mentioned the amphibious forces that have landed in the vicinity of marapol will be very much needed in order to secure the city remember here in the south this terrain is wide open and this kind of terrain is exactly where russia maintains an overwhelming advantage which is why their advance has been so fast however that advantage rapidly diminishes in the urbanized areas and in areas that require the use of paratroopers to win decisively which we will talk about when we get to kiev along the western front not very much new to report moldova continues to accept refugees as does romania hungary and slovakia so there's that for those who are concerned about refugee movement in transnistria we've tried to do some digging and get to the bottom of what's been going on there and it looks like russia only has about one or two btgs worth of troops there so maybe maybe a thousand troops top that's just kind of a rough guess so that's really not enough to do anything with in fact the tensions with moldova right now moldova the rest of moldova supporting ukraine in this conflict that tension there has probably got those russian troops and transnistria a little bit more concerned with their own security than was conducting any kind of operation within ukraine plus just looking at the map the southwestern portion of ukraine is very much a low population density area so they've got to punch a long way before they actually get to anything that's militarily significant so is probably going to be very much an irrelevant front uh for this conflict but again we'll still keep an eye on it and see what goes on with russia taking more and more losses there's no telling what they might do up north on the northwestern front limited fighting has been observed within the outskirts of kiev but again we have one of those little uncertainty bubbles here because the terrain between chernobyl and kiev is highly dynamic and very fluid at this moment so we don't really know what's going on uh in in the area between chernobyl and kiev uh just other than fighting is occurring but it's it's very sporadic it's not like there's a fluid front line that we can draw for you but let's get into kiev in kiev proper fighting has broken out all around the city today as russian forces continue their attempts to use helicopter assault forces to conduct air assault operations to seize and hold critical targets that will allow fixed-wing operations bringing in even more troops efficiently in other words for those of you who don't speak staff officer russia has been putting a lot of troops on a lot of helicopters and flying them into locations near airports so that they can seize the airports and therefore allow bigger aircraft to land and offload troops and supplies the fight for kiev might be a long and drawn out affair so russia is going to have to seize all of the airports in the area for that fight to actually be a victory russia has also been conducting many devastating airborne paratrooper drops for the same reason and i say devastating because these attempts have been very costly for the russians ukrainian forces have learned quite a bit and have been taking advantage of every weapon system that they have and concentrating those weapon systems in and around all prospective paratrooper landing zones there are only so many places a helicopter or a paratrooper can land which is something that the ukrainians know full well and the russians learned today ukraine even shot down two il-76 over kiev today both of which were allegedly fully loaded with russian paratroopers we're still waiting on photos of the wreckages to confirm this with any certainty as always but that might take a while since one wreckage apparently came down a few miles outside of kiev in the vicinity of vasilkev and the other much further south about 20k out from the city if this is true and two il-76s have been shot down by a ukrainian su-27 as is being claimed this is going to sting for russia as these can carry between 150 and 200 paratroopers depending on configuration and what the pilot is willing to fly with as far as weight numbers wise it's not a huge blow to the forces that have already been committed for the invasion russia has hundreds of il-76s but it's not nothing more importantly this indicates that the ukrainian air force might still have some fight left in them maybe though i'm not really sure how but this definitely proves that russia has not been able to achieve aerial superiority in the skies over kiev just yet aerial superiority which will 100 percent be a requirement for this invasion to go much further also in kiev civil defense preparations by civilians are fully underway with dozens of photos and videos showing the thousands of molotov cocktails that civilians have prepared for the upcoming urban fighting molotov cocktails are a cheap and easy munition to make and one which is devastatingly effective against pretty much all armored vehicles when massed in concentration as has been observed during the ukrainian war so far 30 or 40 ukrainian citizens with 30 or 40 molotov cocktails in their hands taking on a single btr might not seem that effective but so far in the previous fighting this has been observed to be a very valuable tactic and that's not considering the psychological effectiveness of such a crude but gruesome weapon system additionally the interior ministry of ukraine has asked all citizens to turn off their cell phones or only use them in emergencies due to russia's capabilities to detect cell phone signals and therefore detect large groups of people which could be targeted easily again this highlights how important electronic warfare has become in modern conflict and how even civilians must consider the risks that their smartphone brings to the table along the civilian front not too many changes from yesterday although i would like to point out that ukraine's neighbors to the west poland slovakia hungary romania and moldova have been more than willing to accept ukrainian refugees there hasn't been any hang-ups on this on this part other than the traffic to get to the border it looks like that's going pretty smoothly right now but again we have to remember that even though it's a good thing to see nations stepping up and taking uh people away from combat zones who don't want to be in combat zones right it's good to see european nations accepting refugees from this conflict right we also have to remember that europe is a political entity and nation states are political entities and this invitation might not last uh forever so unfortunately we have to think about things like this as we know the invitations for afghan refugees just four months ago was handled with not as much good-naturedness as one might have hoped from european nations now again the afghan culture and the ukrainian culture is very different so i think that kind of a side note is the reason why nations in europe are kind of hesitant to take afghan refugees is because of cultural reasons but and and of course historical political stuff um but i do just want to point out that hey even though nation states are doing the right thing right now or at least trying to with regards to refugees that might not be the case forever just wanted to point that out and that's pretty much all i've got for now we've as a side project been working on a sort of a briefing of or this might just turn into a slide on one of these briefs of information that encapsulates world events that have happened while the world's eyes have been on ukraine because a lot of people are asking and rightfully so what else is happening while the world is you is distracted with ukraine and the answer is kind of a lot a lot of things are happening around the world everybody's asking us what do you think is going to happen about china what are they going to move on taiwan now because of this i don't know it seems like to answer that question just while i'm here i don't know i don't think so at the moment more than likely what china is going to do is wait a little bit longer and see what other sanctions europe comes up with because again russia and china are very different nations russia before this conflict and before their ruble dropped down to the bottom russia was not in as severe dire straits economically as china is china is barely functioning economically right now they've had a lot of economic problems and again the fight for taiwan is going to be a lot different fight than the ukrainian conflict so yes it is a valid concern to think that we might be witnessing global conflicts kicking off here but at the same time i would also like to stress that the fight for taiwan is going to be very very different and the nature of it's different is different strategically different operationally and different tactically so i don't think that is much of a concern at this stage that might change tomorrow who knows nobody really knows what china is going to do so i guess we'll have to call that and play that by ear as far as other stuff going on around the world we're also keeping an eye on the united states that is for us who for for those of us who are located here in the united states that is a much more pressing concern than ukraine even though ukraine's the ukrainian wars impacts are being felt here in the united states in the form of cyber attacks and just uncertainty and of course the market implications but some of the stuff that's been going on in the u.s with regards to um tracking protesters and intelligence collection on uh american citizens on u.s soil some of that stuff we'll have to get into a little bit deeper as time goes on i just wanted to let everybody know that we are thinking about it we are seeing this stuff and we're not neglecting it uh just because ukraine is still going on um we're trying to get as much out there as we possibly can but again we're a pretty small team here so we're doing what we can so again that's all i've got for right now thanks again everyone for your support and we'll see you next time and as always fight in the shade

//The Wire//2300Z February 19, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: WAR EXPANDS IN THE CONGO. TENSIONS BUILD BETWEEN THE US AND UKRAINE FOLLOWING ZELENSKY BEING SIDE-LINED DURING PEACE TALKS.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): The advance by M23 rebels in the eastern districts of the country has continued, with the rebels capturing the city of Bukavu yesterday. Separately, in the northeastern region of Bunia, Uganda launched an invasion of their own, deploying special forces soldiers throughout the region. AC: The flimsy attempt to conceal the M23 "rebels" as an independent group has largely fallen away, as the military uniforms that the "rebels" are now wearing more or less confirm that these forces are in fact mercenaries slow-walking a Rwandan invasion of the DRC. Uganda now wanting a piece of the action is very likely to escalate the situation further, and probably marks a new era of the decades-long conflict. Europe: Tensions remain elevated between the United States and Ukraine, with Ukrainian leader Zelensky expressing a variety of hostile sentiments towards the United States for himself not being invited to the peace talks conference currently underway in Saudi Arabia. -HomeFront- USA: The arrival of winter weather conditions throughout much of the central and eastern parts of the nation has caused significant travel delays. Many airlines have issued ground stops for much of the central United States due to poor weather conditions. In Kentucky, the casualty figure has risen to 14x fatalities resulting from the recent flooding disasters throughout much of the state. Arizona: This morning an aircraft collision was reported at the Marana Regional Airport, which resulted in the destruction of two small planes. Two fatalities were reported as a result of the collision. AC: As the focus remains on aviation mishaps nationwide, it will be up to the individual to conduct their own analysis to determine if these events are happening more often, or if the increased media coverage is skewing the overall risk assessment. Washington D.C. - Various Presidential actions continue, with a handful of cartels being formally designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) this afternoon. AC: This decision was made weeks ago, and already in practice as evidenced by the significant intelligence collection efforts recently undertaken by the United States in Mexico. As the formalization of this decision is solidified in policy, the ball is now in the court of the various cartels to determine what their reaction will be. On the diplomatic front, relations between the United States and Russia have improved significantly over the past few days, at the expense of rapidly deteriorating relations with Ukraine and most of Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an official restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, as part of ongoing conversations pertaining to peace talks. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: As has long been theorized since the start of the war (and as the conflict in Ukraine draws to a close), a lot of things are going to happen in very rapid succession. Perhaps most frustratingly, a lot of things are going to happen that may seem to be nonsensical to some. This is due to the rabid censorship efforts over the past few years that have painted a specific picture...the vast majority of those in the west have largely been looking at the war through a lens that is completely one-sided. This is nothing new, however, reality is often a great equalizer in the realm of information warfare...at a certain point all of the propaganda and gaslighting falls away to reveal the reality of the situation. In the case of Ukraine, there are many people who likely still believe everything they have heard about the war, the motivations for the conflict beginning, and so on. As such, when the lies are increasingly more and more detached from the truth, the more damage is done; the bigger the lies are, the harder they fall. Over the next few weeks, the American taxpayer is going to learn a lot of inconvenient truths, and as a result may feel a level of betrayal as the situation does not turn out the way that it has been portrayed for years. More specifically, harsh statements will very likely continue to be traded between the United States and Ukraine as it becomes more clear that ever since the West became involved in the conflict Ukraine has had very little agency or leeway to decide their own fate. Ukrainian leaders may even seek to bite the hand that feeds them, as that hand starts feeding them less. Likewise, many European nations which have been involved in the war will probably continue to express hostile sentiment toward the United States (as Germany already has), for a variety of reasons: some probably justifiable, some not so much. Either way, the rapid pivot away from the policy of the past four years is likely to cause issues domestically among Americans who have differing (and often combative) opinions on the war. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the Underground. This is the Intel update for July 4th, Independence Day, 2026, and the recognition of the 250th anniversary of our nation's birth. I'm going to keep things light today, so that we can all take some time and really reflect on the meaning of the holiday, but there are a couple of events worth diving into, so let's get right to it. Around the world this week, the main focus has been on the crisis in Venezuela, as well as the growing war in Ukraine. The conflict in the Middle East has remained fairly tepid as the Ayatollah's formal state funeral has begun this week. So, all sides have really kept things to a minimum, as demonstrated by the rather lackluster negotiations in Doha this week. Within the homeland this week, Washington, D.C. has been host to the series of events that celebrating our nation's 250th anniversary. On that note, the America 250 Committee announced last night that the parade today has been canceled due to extreme heat, as the temperature is expected to hit 110 to 115° F today in Washington. No alternative date or time has been provided, but I will keep monitoring the situation, as always, to see what events are actually going ahead despite the heat. The parade itself was supposed to be sort of the crescendo for all of the events that have been ongoing for the past couple of weeks now, but it looks like that might not happen due to the uh extreme weather event. Moving down to Venezuela this week, rescue and recovery efforts continued despite significant challenges on the ground. The disaster zone is incredibly large and spread out over dozens of miles in what used to be heavily urbanized terrain. The road network linking most of the hardest hit cities is mostly okay, but there are transportation issues, and some of the terrain deformation has definitely destroyed uh some of the sections of the coast roads in Catia La Mar. In the cities themselves, there simply is not enough space for the tens of thousands of people who now find themselves without housing, and clean drinking water and medical care is pretty minimal. At this point, we're looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of additional casualties, simply caused by lack of access to clean water and the spread of disease over the next few months. As a side note, one of the reasons for focusing on rescue at this stage still, even a week after the incident, instead of shifting into recovery at this stage, is due to the potential for people to still be alive in void spaces under the rubble. In every search and rescue situation, there is a time limit when a rescue operation transitions into a recovery operation as in a person has been missing for long enough that they could not have survived. So, your risk management is going to be tailored appropriately for that. For instance, if someone is still alive, your rescuers and first responders might be willing to take a lot more of risk because there's something you can still do. However, if someone is deceased, there's not a whole lot you can do and going all out to risk your life to recover remains is not something that is normally done, right? And in urban disasters such as this one, that period of time is going to vary quite a bit, but normally it's going to be increased somewhat based on the circumstances of each individual building. This is why it is important to assess each and every single structure independently because every building collapses differently and some might be more prone to having void spaces where survivors might be alive, but still trapped under tons of rubble. Another factor to consider for Venezuela is the weather. It has been raining for a couple of days throughout the disaster zone. Normally, this is terrible for rescue efforts because it makes everything harder, but it is extremely common for victims to be pulled from rubble many days after a disaster because rainwater trickled down to them through the rubble providing a water source while they are trapped and awaiting rescue. It is of course most certainly a long shot, but among those few who have been rescued alive from similar building collapses either in Central and South America itself or even as far away as Korea, these survivors have reported rainwater being a benefit to them while pinned under debris. Looking at the environmental conditions in Venezuela since the earthquakes, this disaster has been a good candidate for continuing to prioritize rescue operations for longer rather than just switching to recovery efforts after a few days. Uh even last night, uh locals were reporting that victims are still being recovered alive after being trapped in the rubble for over a week. In terms of the administration of the disaster and what groups are coordinating disaster response, I am aware of only a small handful of groups which are heading down there. The biggest effort from the United States is being led by a task force called USA 01, which is a government-run task force, uh interagency kind of organization that is made up of professional first responders from various government agencies, mostly in Fairfax County, Virginia. And these guys have been airlifted into the disaster zone. They were put there uh boots on the ground pretty quickly. In terms of private NGOs which are doing their own thing, this so far has been pretty minimal due to the diplomatically challenging situation on the ground. Volunteers have been turned away uh due to either not paying bribes or not having the right connections or visas. So, unlike many other disasters around the world, this is certainly not a case of people just getting on a plane and going down there like we normally see. There is an unbelievable amount of red tape and administration on the part of the Venezuelan government. And suffice it to say that local corruption is utterly staggering. The biggest NGOs on the ground uh which are linked in with Task Force 1 are Samaritan's Purse, of course, which has provided a small field hospital at the Paseo La Guaira Mall. This looks to be like a Role 1 field hospital, mostly for triage and a staging site for further surgical intervention outside the disaster zone if necessary. Other NGO groups that are involved are Project Hope, uh Team Rubicon, Doctors Without Borders, Catholic Relief Services, UNICEF, and a few others. I will provide updates as best I can for those of you who would like to help, in addition to providing some of the lessons learned regarding the response so far. Every disaster is a learning opportunity, and hopefully now that the disaster response community is starting to use more tools such as better drones, portable seismic sensors, thermal optics, and many other resources which have gotten a lot better over the years, we can learn from what works and what doesn't work to improve the response moving forward. In this case, it's going to be pretty tough uh due to the sheer scale of the devastation, but also due to the current diplomatic situation with the Venezuelan government. So, not exactly an easy uh situation to help with, but we'll do what we can, and more to come on this crisis later. Jumping over to the war in Europe over the past few weeks, but this week especially, the war in Ukraine has heated up. And the impacts of the war in Iran turning in Iran's favor have directly resulted in the dynamics changing with other conflicts around the world. Think of this as a textbook case of the big tough kid on the playground being a source of common fear for all of the other kids, and as such, a sense of order blankets the playground. Well, if the smaller kid suddenly breaks the big kid's nose one day, suddenly that big kid doesn't look so tough, and the perception of his power is gone. This results in a lot of infighting among other groups of kids, all vying to establish their position on the playground. Before the incident, all the kids in the schoolyard had the bully to fear, but after that incident, the perception of toughness is weakened, and power dynamics shift. This is what is happening in Ukraine right now. The United States has unfortunately lost the war in Iran, and as a result, both Ukraine and Russia both know that the US has no hope of settling their war militarily. So, Ukraine is motivated to fight dirtier than they already do, and Russia is motivated to more directly confront NATO now that the main backer of NATO, the United States, has lost a lot of prestige. Now that Ukraine has begun to more routinely strike oil infrastructure in Russia, along with Moscow itself, the potential backlash from Russia has largely not been considered. Remember, here in the US, we really only hear the Western European pro-Ukraine side of things, and unfortunately, that has become a major blind spot for a lot of people who might not understand what's coming next. Ukraine, in defending itself from invasion, has found itself relying on a nearly total support from Western Europe and the United States. And in doing so, Russia has found herself fighting a war against NATO, which is becoming more and more open by the day. Internally within Russia, Russia does not consider the attacks on her oil infrastructure as solely coming from Ukraine. Russia blames NATO for these attacks, because nearly all targeting data comes from NATO. Just like within the United States, there are warhawks in Russia, too, and many of these voices have been encouraging escalating the situation by targeting a NATO member as a means of warning the West against waging their shadow war against Russia. In short, many of the big voices in the Russian national security apparatus are arguing that they should strike a Western city outside of Ukraine with conventional weapons, and if that doesn't work, a nuclear device should be detonated at some abandoned area of Ukraine as a way of showing how serious Russia really is. Now, when we drop the N-word on the timeline, not that one, the other one, nuclear, there are normally two main responses to this. First of all, influencers will usually try to sell you freeze-dried food, and secondly, many others will say that Russia normally talks about nuclear weapons on a daily basis, so this isn't exactly new. With either approach, the result is usually the same, people ignoring what Russia is saying, because Russia has a tendency to over exaggerate a lot of the things that they say, especially when it's clipped and translated for the Western media. However, at this point, it would be wise to consider them to be quite serious about at least their aspirations toward perhaps escalating the war more directly in terms of at least conventional munitions. Overnight, I saw that a couple mainstream media outlets in the West have picked this up by saying, "Oh my gosh, Russia's going to strike something like Poland or something." I don't know. You can There is no balance, and there is no mitigation, and there is no nuance with any mainstream media anymore, so it's challenging to describe how real of a threat this really is, because in the West, the mainstream media wants to use this as proof of saying, "Ah, see, look, the Russians want to strike us, so we need to strike them first." Like, no, we need to have more nuance than that, and we need to understand where Russia is coming from. There is a lot of talking past each other in the international space, but this is what the war hawks in Russia are saying, and nobody in the West is really listening to what they are saying. They're just taking the sound bites to use that as justification for whatever they want to do. They're not actually taking what Russia says seriously. But nevertheless, this is indeed a rather serious idea, and the wisdom of allowing continued deep strikes into Russia from Ukraine, this has simply not been considered in terms of preventing Ukraine from dragging Europe into a larger conflict. Ukraine has been in a rather unique spot for a while, namely that they have only considered if they could, but not if they should conduct certain targeting efforts in their attempt to halt the invasion of their country. From the Ukrainian perspective, it makes perfect sense to use every single available tool in order to make the conflict as costly as possible for Russia. However, if Ukraine keeps hitting Moscow and oil infrastructure throughout the country and Putin responds by slamming an arresting ballistic missile into the Ukrainian parliament building in Kyiv, it might not have been worth it. Similarly, if Russia responds by dropping a ballistic missile into a German factory building that makes missiles for Ukraine, the situation might get out of hand rather quickly. It doesn't make it morally right or even fair, but that's the raw deal of the war. Russia is a nuclear-armed superpower and Ukraine is not. All roads will inevitably come back to this basic fact, no matter how much this reality will be ignored. Even though Russia started the kinetic phases of the war for reasons that seemed to legitimate to them, if NATO keeps using Ukraine as a proxy to strike very serious targets in Russia, Putin is going to respond in increasingly more serious ways. We saw this during Operation Spider Web when Ukraine started targeting the Russian nuclear bomber fleet. I said back at the time that was probably not the best idea because of how serious that could have been, and Ukraine in, of course, doing what Ukrainians are supposed to be doing right now. I get it. I truly understand Ukraine's perspective. I really do, but the United States and NATO are letting them do things that are very, very serious. It sucks all around. It's not good. It's not a good situation. Pointing fingers doesn't really help when there's a bright flash on the horizon, right? So, this is why this year, especially, every year there's some kind of new development to the conflict, and this year, especially, peace would probably be a very, very good idea because just like with the war in Iran, the international stage is changing, power dynamics are shifting, and despite how much of a tough situation it is, it would be wise to tread carefully when there is a major superpower involved in a land war in Europe and I think a lot of Europe seems to have forgotten that. This is why Ukraine is back in the news and why this summer's fighting season will be more important than in years past because now that Ukraine strikes have resulted in fuel shortages in Moscow, Russia will be less motivated to keep holding back their bigger weapons and we are entering into another window where things might get rather serious. So that will be something to watch out for over the next few weeks for sure. >> On the home front this week, there have been several high-profile incidents but one in particular that is worthy of mention. In North Carolina this week, a potential terror attack was thwarted in High Point after a suspicious person was intercepted by the security team at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church. One suspect was discovered arriving at the church parking lot during services wearing body armor and camouflage clothing. Upon seeing this individual sitting in his truck in the parking lot in tactical gear on a Sunday morning, one observant member of the church called 911 to report the suspicious person. As it turns out, an off-duty officer was working at the church at the time in some capacity, either in a security role or in another capacity, I'm not really sure. But either way, the suspect was immediately confronted to figure out what he was doing. The suspect stated that he was a police officer himself, which the real police officer knew to obviously be a lie and so the assailant was detained immediately. After backup arrived and a search of the individual's vehicle was conducted, a series of weapons was discovered including a few knives, two crossbows, two flamethrowers and a few hundred rounds of ammunition and an assorted collection of drugs. There did not appear to be a weapon associated with that ammunition but that's at least what the mainstream media is saying. During the press conference a couple of days ago, the mayor of High Point added in more detail stating that the suspect had a notebook in the vehicle which contained the names and addresses of a series of churches and schools throughout the area. Most official statements also surmise that the suspect had mental health issues and not many details have been provided on the suspect but he has been identified as William S. Milliken III. In this case, the probable attack was interrupted before the suspect could act, so there is an intelligence gap and unknown regarding what the individual actually plans to do. So, this will take some time to figure out. It could have been just a mentally ill individual pretending to be a cop, or it could have been a full-blown attack which was stopped before it even began. Either way, it is a good reminder to stay vigilant, especially around potential attacks on religious institutions. These threats have been on the horizon for a long time. We all know we've been covering these for a while now, but it is always a good reminder to applaud the efforts of those who pay attention and have the courage to take action to prevent a tragedy from taking place. Sometimes all it takes is a prepared citizen in the right place at the right time, and a lot of good can be done. And on that note, in closing things out today, I wanted to again wish everyone a happy Independence Day, even our friends across the pond. No hard feelings, guys. We have found ourselves in a similar boat these days, and even though things are a bit heavy this year, every unfortunate problem that we have to handle is an opportunity to do good. You can look at stuff like this in two ways. You can say, "Oh my gosh, how terrible it is that our society is collapsing. The United States, Western Europe, it's all just it's all just falling apart." Or, you can look at this as an opportunity to finally shape the future ahead. There are a lot of questions and uncertainties going around this year. What does it mean to be an American? What do we want our future to be? And how do we get there? Clearly, there are a lot of hostile forces working against our future at all levels and from all angles. Betrayals are disappointing, and the refusal to stand up and say no to these dark forces is equally shameful for each and every one of us. But, as we are trying to forge the path ahead, I wanted to end today with a quote from Samuel Adams, continuing the tradition of the day. This quote is often falsely attributed to a variety of sources, but I found a microfilm copy of the original letter, which was written by Adams to his friend James Warren back in 1772, years before the war began. I will link for you guys who want to read it, the original document below. But, if you will permit me, I would like to read most of it, as I believe that we can all benefit from these words, especially today of all days. The letter begins, Boston, December 9th, 1772. My dear sir, I had the pleasure of receiving your letter of yesterday's date this morning by the hands of our friend Mr. Lothrop, and much obliged to you for the pains you took in distributing the letters sent to your care. I am very sorry to find in your letter anything that discovers in you the least approach towards despair. Nil desperandum. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead, and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will enkindle it. Say you that the Tories spare no pains to disparage our measures. I knew they would, and should have greatly doubted of the importance of the measures, if they had not been much nettled. Nil desperandum, a Latin phrase meaning never despair. Even 254 years ago, the order was clear. No black pilling. And what's more, the full letter tells us that the contest was even more powerful and even more timeless for us today. No black pilling, even when our enemies seek to divide us by pretending to be on our side. Adams reminds us that if you're upsetting the enemy, you're doing the right thing. And what's more, this effort doesn't have to be flashy. It doesn't have to be entertaining. As such, the most interesting parts of the letter are even less famous than the opening parts. The letter continues on. The select men of Medford have unanimously agreed to call a meeting of their town. Charlestown have met and appointed a committee to consider the independency and report 3 weeks hence. Our pamphlet was read, and upon the motion of your cousin, the consideration of it was referred till March meeting. I expect every moment to hear from Marblehead. They had their meeting the day before yesterday. It is reported that they have appointed a committee to write to ours after the good example of Plymouth, and that Colonel Orne and Mr. Gerry are of the committee. Two gentlemen whose such sense and integrity, as well as firmness, I think may be much relied upon. Roxbury, I have reason to hope will terminate matters well at their adjournment next Monday. There has been no dissension among the friends of the cause here, none between my brother Otis and myself. It is likely this is one of the Tory lies at Plymouth. It may arise from some of the Whigs refusing when nominated to be of our committee, but I believe most of them were then unaware of the evil tendency of their conduct. Mr. Cushing has frequently met with the committee and appears to be hearty in forwarding the measure. I am informed that your own minister refused when desired to read the letter of this town. You will excuse me if I whisper in your ear that in my opinion it would have done as much good as one of his sermons, the benefit of which, however, you would not have been deprived of. The Tories are determined to play a poor hand to the best advantage. They are therefore for instructing the representatives to prevent the independency of the judges taking place, but it must be done by enlarging their salaries, which would be a tacit acknowledgement of a right in the crown and making a mean bargain. This maneuver, in my opinion, is most to be apprehended. I rest with esteem, yours affectionately, Samuel Adams. This letter is merely a footnote, one of the many letters that Adams wrote during the era and is not really treated with any consequence. It's just a boilerplate administrative letter and these words are not etched onto any building in our nation's capital, nor is this letter on display anywhere. Just a copy that was scanned in and stored on microfilm many years ago for some random researcher to come across at the Massachusetts Historical Society. That, my dear friends, is why this letter stands out to me. 254 years ago there were problems and this letter has it all. Cities and towns expressing their intent toward independency, at least the independency of judges, and dissension in the ranks by people spreading lies among them. Community churches being involved in their common goal and pamphlets and, dare we say it, memes were being distributed all over. And perhaps most aptly, judges and their supporters in the colonies were being paid off by the crown to side with the British Empire and their objection to the question of impartial judgments. Even back then it was important to figure out who one's friends were because there were people pretending to be of the cause only to sell out their people and their country for personal gain. There were honest men who were tricked and deceived by these enemies, but not all were deceived. We might consider this an allegory for where we find ourselves today. Quite a lot has changed in 250 years. Our republic is barely recognizable by the original standards, and the centuries have helped highlight to us that while many great men started this great experiment, they were not perfect. Some sentiments have withstood the test of time and others have not simply because the sheer incredulity of how we find ourselves now was not considered at the time. And those decisions way back then are being felt today where the tyranny we are experiencing now is orders of magnitude more substantial than at our nation's founding. As we move forward into another era for the United States, it is my sincere hope that we can hold fast in our convictions and have the courage to do what's right even when it seems like everyone is against us. No, we will not all just get along, nor should we. But there is an indescribable element within this land that makes us a nation. It is not magic dirt, nor a stamp on paper. It is us. We are America, and we shall do the best we can to preserve it, persevering with honor and integrity. And when we win, magnanimity will be our watchword in victory. This will require sacrifice from everyone. All of us will need to approach the challenges ahead as if we alone were the single deciding factor. Samuel Adams was writing to every single American, and it is now up to us to take up the challenge of figuring out what kind of future we want to pass down to the future generations which will inherit our actions or our inaction. So, let's do the best we can with the time, energy, and resources that we have even if we have to, for the moment, fight in the shade.

//The Wire//2300Z June 26, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: RESCUE EFFORTS CONTINUE IN VENEZUELA AS INTERNATIONAL DISASTER AID EFFORTS BEGIN. HORMUZ CRISIS REMAINS TENSE AS IRANIAN TARGETING OF MERCHANT SHIPPING CONTINUES.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Middle East: This morning another vessel was struck by Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz. A total of four drones were reportedly launched during this attack, with the White House claiming that three of the four munitions were intercepted. Analyst Comment: These targeting efforts have resulted in the International Maritime Organization pausing their rescue plan to ensure the orderly evacuation of the Persian Gulf, though as of this afternoon the status of the Strait can only be described as a state of chaos. Some vessels have turned around after being warned by the Iranians, or just based on the news of other ships getting hit. Other vessels have gone "full-send" and sprinted through the Strait, hoping for the best. What has not materialized, has been a measurable surge of traffic *into* the Gulf. Right now, most ships are trying to get out of the warzone when they can be reasonably sure that it's safe to do so, and though there have been ships moving back-and-forth through the Strait, traffic is still nowhere near pre-war levels. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In Venezuela, rescue and recovery efforts continue throughout the country following the earthquakes which devastated the capital and several other major metropolitan areas. USSOUTHCOM has activated disaster response plans to allocate military resources for recovery efforts and other Central/South American nations are also working on large-scale mobilization of disaster aid. Major earthquakes in the global south tend to be vastly more serious than anywhere else due to poor construction standards, and Venezuela is no exception. On the ground, the hardest hit areas are the coastal region of La Guaira, as well as the capital of Caracas. Nearly every single structure and high-rise building at the tourist resorts along the coast north of Simon Bolivar Airport have either been completely destroyed, or heavily damaged. Hundreds of people remain trapped in the town of Carabelleda, with many large buildings collapsing with little warning for residents. Along the coast to the west, the town of Macuto suffered a similar fate, with many people still being trapped inside collapsed buildings. At this early hour, casualty counts are hard to assess, however the USGS estimates that there is a 74% chance that the casualty figure is at least 10,000 and that there's a 30% chance that the fatalities top 100,000 victims. Right now, it's very obvious that the 10,000-victim figure is the conservative assessment, certainly in terms of total victims (either injured or deceased). The United Nations estimated around 50,000 persons missing as of this afternoon. Officially, the total casualty figure is 971 confirmed fatalities, however this is not only certain to rise over the next few weeks, but new casualties are also extremely likely as well. Nearly all of the high-rise apartment buildings which are still technically standing are exhibiting the telltale signs of major structural compromise, such as X-shaped and stair-shaped cracking in the masonry and concrete walls. These are usually major indicators of severe structural damage, and that the risk of the building collapsing is extremely high. However, most people are still living inside these compromised structures, despite the very high likelihood that more high-rises will collapse imminently. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z June 26, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: RESCUE EFFORTS CONTINUE IN VENEZUELA AS INTERNATIONAL DISASTER AID EFFORTS BEGIN. HORMUZ CRISIS REMAINS TENSE AS IRANIAN TARGETING OF MERCHANT SHIPPING CONTINUES.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Middle East: This morning another vessel was struck by Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz. A total of four drones were reportedly launched during this attack, with the White House claiming that three of the four munitions were intercepted. Analyst Comment: These targeting efforts have resulted in the International Maritime Organization pausing their rescue plan to ensure the orderly evacuation of the Persian Gulf, though as of this afternoon the status of the Strait can only be described as a state of chaos. Some vessels have turned around after being warned by the Iranians, or just based on the news of other ships getting hit. Other vessels have gone "full-send" and sprinted through the Strait, hoping for the best. What has not materialized, has been a measurable surge of traffic *into* the Gulf. Right now, most ships are trying to get out of the warzone when they can be reasonably sure that it's safe to do so, and though there have been ships moving back-and-forth through the Strait, traffic is still nowhere near pre-war levels. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In Venezuela, rescue and recovery efforts continue throughout the country following the earthquakes which devastated the capital and several other major metropolitan areas. USSOUTHCOM has activated disaster response plans to allocate military resources for recovery efforts and other Central/South American nations are also working on large-scale mobilization of disaster aid. Major earthquakes in the global south tend to be vastly more serious than anywhere else due to poor construction standards, and Venezuela is no exception. On the ground, the hardest hit areas are the coastal region of La Guaira, as well as the capital of Caracas. Nearly every single structure and high-rise building at the tourist resorts along the coast north of Simon Bolivar Airport have either been completely destroyed, or heavily damaged. Hundreds of people remain trapped in the town of Carabelleda, with many large buildings collapsing with little warning for residents. Along the coast to the west, the town of Macuto suffered a similar fate, with many people still being trapped inside collapsed buildings. At this early hour, casualty counts are hard to assess, however the USGS estimates that there is a 74% chance that the casualty figure is at least 10,000 and that there's a 30% chance that the fatalities top 100,000 victims. Right now, it's very obvious that the 10,000-victim figure is the conservative assessment, certainly in terms of total victims (either injured or deceased). The United Nations estimated around 50,000 persons missing as of this afternoon. Officially, the total casualty figure is 971 confirmed fatalities, however this is not only certain to rise over the next few weeks, but new casualties are also extremely likely as well. Nearly all of the high-rise apartment buildings which are still technically standing are exhibiting the telltale signs of major structural compromise, such as X-shaped and stair-shaped cracking in the masonry and concrete walls. These are usually major indicators of severe structural damage, and that the risk of the building collapsing is extremely high. However, most people are still living inside these compromised structures, despite the very high likelihood that more high-rises will collapse imminently. 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 August 3rd through the 9th, 2025. It has been extremely busy around the world and at home this week, so let's go ahead and get right to it. Most of the events that have taken place around the United States this week have pertained to things like mass shootings, IEDs, utter pandemonium, you get the idea. Most of which are isolated incidents. However, these could also be an indication of growing sentiment here in the homeland, which we'll touch on in just a moment. Our friends to the north are not doing so well either as the wildfires in Canada continue to spread. But also social considerations start factoring in as Canada begins uh what many are calling climate lockdowns in certain areas such as Nova Scotia. Overseas things are indeed moving once again in Ukraine and in the Middle East. In Ukraine, peace talks are continuing and discussions between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine continue to be more frank in nature as all sides are seeking to try to just get down to brass tax and figure out what's what it's going to take to end this conflict. Ukraine is obviously not going to budge on any of their uh demands from their side. However, they're not really that much of a factor as much as it may be unfortunate for them to hear. What Ukraine thinks is not really a factor in this conflict. to the most of the negotiation is being undertaken between the United States and Russia as as one might expect. Russia wants eastern Ukraine. The United States says there may be some territorial exchange probably Donetsk and Luhansk if not more. Again, none of this is particularly new. This has always kind of been on the table ever since Russia was able to take Donetsk and Luhansk and hold both of those regions fairly effectively throughout the duration of the war. So again, not surprising in the slightest, but uh now that this is starting to get a little bit closer to the to the finish line here, things may uh start clicking into place. Who knows? We've gotten much closer before and uh things have veered away sharply right at the end. So this whole situation is is very dynamic and and absolutely nothing is certain. Similar situation in the Middle East. Uh something that is not unsurprising in the slightest is the announcement that Israel is going to annex Gaza and officially bring uh Gaza into uh Israel's formal territory. Once again, like a broken record, this is not new by any means. Israeli media has been saying this once every couple of weeks for the past year or so. And most Western media is now kind of forming the general consensus that Israel is probably moving into the stages to actually formally try to take Gaza more militarily. You know, again, easier said than done, right? Israel has quote unquote invaded Gaza at least a dozen times now. Somehow or another. We always hear about a new invasion in the next every couple of months, right? So, it's not as simple as that. It's not like this is going to be a particularly easy military victory, but it will definitely be a lot easier now to just roll in and and start bulldozing the rubble now that basically everything in Gaza has been bombed. What this means for the average American taxpayer is that once this conflict is settled one way or the other, if Israel is able to achieve their strategic goals, which again is not a foregone conclusion, but let's just say they do it. Let's just say they're able to take Gaza and into their uh terrain in the way that they want to do it. What will that mean? Well, that will mean that a front uh in a war is is no longer a factor. Right? So, if you're a nation state, this going going back to all forms of warfare doctrine. If you're a nation state and you're fighting on multiple fronts, when one front collapses or is no longer a factor or you reach a sort of peace agreement with a nation, either through diplomatic means or by killing all of them, when that front is no longer a fighting front, that means you can shift resources to other fronts. So, all of that is to say, when Gaza is fully militarily conquered, we'll probably see a very strong shift of resources to one of Israel's other fronts. We're talking West Bank, we're talking Syria, maybe Iran again, I don't know. Uh either way, the United States will be involved in some form or fashion. So this is something to keep an eye on uh unfortunately. So that's it for the global overview. Let's go ahead and shift to the United States and talk about the uh kinetic events that have taken place this week. This is again the general overview of what I have uh been aware of and kind of been investigating on my own. This is by no means all of the things that have occurred this week. Uh this is just the stuff that I've been able to put on the map and do a little bit of investigation on my own. Some of the more high-profile things. And once again, it has been a very very kinetic week, right? The proverbial frog in the pot appears to be simmering at this point. So again, this is fairly typical for the summertime in the United States when uh general crime increases, mass shootings tend to increase uh during the summer months as well. A lot of these general crimes tend to kind of pop up uh when when weather is pretty good. It's not really a causation thing. It's more of a correlation thing, but this is definitely a correlation that kind of pops up every year. But this time this week, we've had multiple mass shootings, multiple uh IEDs and arson attacks uh take place all around the United States. So again, we'll touch on some of these as I get to them through the regions, but just as a brief overview, we of course have the IED factory that was discovered in Long Beach. This was revealed to us through the DOJ where classic case, right? Uh the FBI befriends somebody online who wants to be a bomb maker. They provide all the resources to do so and eventually take him down, right? Fairly standard MMO from the FBI. Uh, and really the only source of this information is of course the DOJ. So not a whole lot of information on this. I'm calling this an IED factory incident because this was what the guy was doing and that's the doctrinal term to describe a structure in which explosives are being made. Right? So ammunition and weapons production facilities sometimes if they're more improvised we shorten that to IED factory uh in the nomenclature. So it sounds really scary, right? IED factory. It sounds bigger than it is in a lot of cases, but this is a nomenclature, even if it turns out to be some goober making some very poorly constructed IED uh in their back room, which has occurred a couple of times this week. Anyway, moving on to a more deliberate attack was the arson attack in St. Louis, specifically the township of Clayton. this incident. I'm waiting on more information for this because obviously this is very politically hot button topic and I don't know if there's going to be some manipulation going on with the information that we have, but allegedly an IDF soldier uh was targeted in an arson attack by someone setting fire to the vehicles on the street outside his house and leaving anti-Israel or anti-IDF uh graffiti. I've not seen an uncensored version of the graffiti, so I'm not entirely certain what what was said. I've not been able to confirm a whole lot of the details myself on this or or even really dig into this a whole lot. So hopefully next week we'll have something that I can work with, but right now it's just information operations all around unfortunately on that one. Moving over to Tennessee again, an IED factory in Old Fort was discovered. We'll talk about it here in a minute, but uh this was definitely a case of some goober uh trying to build what he thought were IEDs in his in his back room. And yeah, you'll see the photos here in a minute and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. But more kinetically this week, we of course have the mass shooting at Fort Stewart in Georgia and also the mass shooting in Atlanta, which took place last night. I haven't been able to uh dig into too many details on that one, but again, two instances which are very highly polarizing. The shooting at the army base uh appears to be more of a workplace dispute. I can't that's just speculation at the moment. I can't confirm any of this, but it it appears to be a workplace dispute. We'll know soon enough because uh of the five people who were shot at Fort Stewart, all five of them are expected to survive and only two of them had minor injuries. So uh we'll definitely know how that whole situation went down if the army is willing to uh release a lot of those details. The shooting in Atlanta is going to be much harder to get information on as the shooting took place at the CDC headquarters. So that's it for the general overview. Let's go ahead and shift to Canada for just a moment. So, as many of you know, Canada is dealing with a very severe wildfire uh crisis situation, mostly in central Canada, but also dotted throughout the country and really the continent as well. All of these red dots uh that you can see here on the slide depict current detections of wildfires or some kind of heat signature. So, this is something you can see on my online tracking maps. You can turn this layer on or off. Uh it's it's off by default, but if you go into the layers, you can turn on the fire data, and there's several different satellite layers you can choose from. They're not always perfect. Uh that's why multiple layers is is helpful. But you can clearly see there's a very large hot spots detected in central Canada. I wanted to mention this because Canada has decided to start locking down some areas due to climate reasons, right? So the general situation that's going around or the general sentiment being expressed by many Canadians is that the climate lockdowns have begun. And here's what I mean by that. So Canada, specifically Nova Scotia, has decided to ban people from the woods. So most national parks, open spaces, things like that are closed right now to the public. And also, they're trying to crack down on private property as well to try to tell people that they can't be on their own land. Uh because somehow just people being in the wilderness, just standing in the woods of it's it's going to cause a wildfire, right? There hasn't really been a push to identify arsonists or uh try to go after people who may be setting these fires or anything like that. Uh they're just trying to lock down and prevent people from going out in the woods again. So they've pulled out all of the policies from the CO era and they've they've returned to form quite truly in Nova Scotia at least. Now I wanted to mention this because this sounds bad, right? This sounds like well if people are in the woods and there's fires going on, you know, maybe it would be a good idea to keep people out of the woods. Maybe it would be a good idea to keep people out of harm's way or prevent, you know, the hot exhaust from a car setting off some brush or something like that. So, if you don't know where Nova Scotia is, you might be inclined to think, well, this I can see the logic here of of kind of closing these places off, right? Because in the United States, we do the same thing. If there's a big wildfire, right, we want people to stay out of the place where the wildfire is. That's a generally, you know, good idea to do. Well, here's the problem. Here's where Nova Scotia is located. This, ladies and gentlemen, is where Canada has decided to lock down people and prevent them from going into public parks. Nowhere near any of the wildfires that are currently burning. So, you see why this might be a slight problem or why many people might say that this is politically motivated and not actually a wildfire thing. So, yeah, I'll just leave with that and let you guys form your own conclusions because it certainly seems like uh this is really just kind of testing the waters for more national level policies. uh that may come later on. Now, moving down south to the United States in the southeast region. Like I mentioned, we have one IED factory discovered in a uh double wide down there in Old Fort, Tennessee. Now again, I know people are going to hear the term IED factory and think this is some kind of largecale terroristic kind of activity, but if you look at the IEDs that they discovered uh in this guy's trailer just in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, you can rapidly come to the conclusion that this was most certainly a case of some goober who hates the government, who probably threatened his local politicians, threatened the local police department, and they rolled up there and found some very, very crudely, as in so crude they probably would not even work IEDs that this guy had created. For those people who are very familiar with this region of the United States, this arrest uh is not even remotely surprising in the slightest. So again, this is definitely more of some goober uh causing problems down there in the local area and less of a case of an al-Qaeda splinter cell, right? this is just some idiot in the woods with a lot of explosives, which is again very common for that area, but some you don't want to downplay or like uh you know factor out of the equation because these people can be pretty dangerous if they get enough smarts about them somehow. But generally speaking, we hear IEDs discovered 14 explosive devices discovered at a compound in the woods. You know, we can phrase this in such a way to make it sound a lot more organized than it really is, and it's just some idiot in the woods. So, all in all, it's important to get the background context of this sort of thing because that's a little bit more helpful for assessing risk. If I heard the news story like the news was trying to make it sound like there's some kind of al-Qaeda training camp down here in Tennessee and they found over a dozen explosive devices, well, that's a lot different than what actually happened, right? So context is important for mitigating a lot of risk, especially when it comes to, you know, a lot of the same old sources keep claiming that there's this mass like 9/11 right around the corner and they latch on to this stuff and away we go, right? So not to say that it's not important. You need to be aware of it. You need to be aware of people like this and how these sorts of cases are taking place all around the country and they get no coverage. But again, there is also very much the incentive to manipulate these kinds of stories to make it seem like they're uh you know, more organized than they are. So, just something to be aware of. Now, also in the Southeast region, I'll briefly cover what's going on in DC this week, and of course, it's fairly busy as usual. Something that I have not seen any coverage on uh with from any media source is the SNAP program overhaul. For many of you who have not heard of this, the federal government is overhauling the SNAP system right now and there are changes being made to which products are available for purchase with uh EBT cards. So, the bottom line is that there's been a lot of unrest at some grocery store chains and mostly convenience stores like 7-Eleven and things like that where people get up to the counter, they realize their EBT card won't pay for whatever product that they're trying to buy and they go ballistic, right? Something to be aware of. I don't know how widespread this problem is, but the federal government a few months ago and a few states as well with state level resources. Uh the various agencies that handle various welfare programs in many different areas are starting to overhaul and tweak these things and reduce the number of products. Many of you have probably seen the efforts by RFK Jr. to kind of like publicly remove things like sodas and uh sugary snacks and things like that from the SNAP program. Uh I don't know if they've reached a consensus on that part yet. However, a few months ago, the program was quietly altered and uh ever so often things kind of get delisted and a few days ago, a lot of people realized, wait a minute, half their cartload of groceries is no longer covered by the program. So, just something to keep in mind if you're trying to have a peaceful shopping experience. In some places, you might have a bit of a brawl on the checkout line, but I just wanted to mention it because uh I haven't seen anybody else uh talk about it yet. And this is probably going to get worse over time as the program to kind of shrink the SNAP program continues. So, another thing to be aware of is the federalization of Washington DC. There's been a lot of talk about this over the past couple of weeks or so. I don't really know how this is going to work out in practice, but uh anytime the National Guard kind of deploys to DC, I uh perk my ears up for obvious reasons. I don't know how serious they are about that, but you know how things are going in Washington. the the official government policy changes by the hour uh on in a lot of cases. So, I don't really know what to make of it. They may put fences back up. Uh I don't know how serious they are about federalizing DC, but there's definitely this initiative to try to decrease the crime in the National Region, especially the National uh the National Mall. I don't know how it's going to go, but you may see some changes in DC over the next few weeks as they try to figure something out. I don't know. Moving down to Georgia, there was, of course, a mass shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. This was originally reported as a shooting at Emory University. But after a while, it became clear that the person was on the campus shooting at the CDC headquarters. They basically just arrived at the scene, pulled out a weapon, and started shooting at the CDC building uh randomly seemingly. This is a developing story, so I don't have a whole lot of details on it yet. So far, one fatality was reported. one of the police officers who was the one of the first responders to the shooting was shot by the shooter and uh the situation kind of rapidly deteriorated from there. As far as the shooter themselves, I have no information on this. It's been almost a full day after the shooting so far and we don't have a name. We don't have uh any kind of details on the shooter except for one thing. I find it very very odd that we don't know the shooter's name. We don't know what their deal was. We don't know their history or anything about them. Yet, the mainstream media is still reporting at the moment that they shot up the CDC building because they were vaccine injured and they had grievances with the CDC uh with regards to vaccine production. So, I find that very convenient and I am just naturally skeptical about stuff like that, especially when it comes out and we don't even know the shooter's name, but yet we know why they did the crime. Isn't that very odd? Normally, it's the other way around. and we know the shooter's identity, but we don't know why. Like the the guy who shot President Trump and and Butler, right? We know who committed that crime, but we don't know why. So, I find that to be very interesting that that that's the story that's going around. Of course, this will definitely be something that we investigate. It could very well be true. There are a lot of people with a lot of grievances and a lot of people at the end of the rope on that front. Could be true, but again, I'm trying to kind of pump the brakes on any kind of information manipulation on that. So, I'm just going to have to say we'll see. And speaking of the truth not really being known, I did want to briefly mention the initial scandal that I spent so much time writing about just for the policy to be rescended immediately after I wrote my report. This of course is the uh discovery of an old policy by uh the Reuters journalistic agency in which they discovered that the Department of Homeland Security had quietly uh put in allegiance to Israel as a condition for getting federal FEMA aid. Not necessarily aid for victims of disasters, but for the terms and conditions for getting federal grants for equipment mostly. That's mostly what it applied to. Now, I know I've written a lot about this in the wire, so I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but the general gist of what occurred is that back on April 18th, the DHS updated their terms and conditions for what you've got to do essentially to get federal aid for your agency, department, whatever, uh, when it comes to disaster relief aid for things like FEMA. So, if your fire department wants to buy a new Stokes litter and they don't have the funding to do so, well, FEMA's got you covered. There are probably there are a lot of federal grants that will allow local departments to buy stuff, but you've got to follow the rules, right? You've got to make sure that your department is following all the guidelines by the feds. And back on April 18th, the federal government updated their terms and conditions for getting this type of uh grant money, which they do every year. They update these things several times a year actually because they frequently catch typos and things like that and problems arise. So, they they update these things quite often. And on April 18th, they quietly added in a paragraph that states that if you boycott an Israeli company, then you're not getting federal aid. And that of course became rapidly inflammatory because of how this is technically the textbook definition of treason, right? I mean, nobody wants to say it, but that's what it is. If you're acquiring allegiance to a nation state, if you're requiring Americans to purchase something from a foreign nation before you're going to help them, that's is that not treason? I mean, anyway, but following what happened, uh, nobody really noticed this because nobody really cares about terms and conditions by federal governments. So, nobody cared about this, uh, even though it appeared on April 18th until August 4th when Reuters noticed it. Uh, I don't know how or why they came to notice it. I mean, it was there. it was on the portal the whole time. I mean, nobody really noticed it, but this is how the federal government works a lot of times. They'll put a government document online for the public to see, but because it's nested so deeply in, you know, government infrastructure, nobody notices it for a while. So they finally noticed it on August 4th. Everybody freaks out and uh the government, which is the more interesting part, more interesting than the policy itself because the policy itself, let's let's face it, this this kind of mentality has kind of solidified in most law at this point. What's interesting to me though is that the DHS went in there and edited the file. They didn't change the version. So the the file name that was actually posted online was version three. You would think that they would create version four. That's not what they did. They edited version three to make it look like this paragraph was never in the text at all. They deleted the initial version of this, so you can't find it at all. Uh what it originally said, which to me sounds like a violation of the Federal Records Act, but what do I know? But anyway, uh the paragraph is no longer there, so everything's good and and copathetic, right? Well, no, not really. Just because a federal agency stops committing a crime does not mean that that crime did not occur. So, what has been the result from all of this? Well, really the White House in particular and the entire executive branch and well really all branches of government have just tried to pretend like this never happened, right? So they're just saying they're taking the position of well we changed it. So what? You know what's the problem? Well, because people want accountability. They want to know from April 18th when this policy was in place to August 4th when you secretly rescended it and tried to pretend like it never existed, how many departments were denied federal aid based on this policy? Right? We want to know that this is something that's very important. It's hurricane season. It's wildfire season. People like me need to know, did my local fire department bend the knee enough to a foreign nation state so that they could get some FEMA aid that might help me if I need to get rescued one day. We we kind of need to know these sorts of things and everyone's kind of ignored this. Somewhat interestingly, what I you know what I thought they were personally going to do? What I thought the White House was going to do is blame it on an intern and then just say it was some crazy uh person who unilaterally made a decision, then they fire uh somebody and then, you know, kind of cover it up from there. That's not what they did. DHS and FEMA and the White House have not taken the position that this was a rogue actor. So, this was not a malign actor. This was the policy. I thought they were going to do it. I thought they were going to say I was just some malign actor in government, but they didn't. uh they have basically just said, "We've changed the policy, so next question." Which to me means that the risk is still the same. So either way, trust is very hard to recover once it's lost. And like it or not, it doesn't matter if it's fair or not, the next time there is a disaster, Americans are going to wonder if a paragraph mandating support for a foreign nation is going to mysteriously reappear 5 minutes before a hurricane hits. If they secretly added it and they secretly removed it with a couple of clicks of a mouse button, then how do we know they're not going to do that right before a disaster, right? Anyway, that's something to consider. I know that it's a topic that's that not a lot of big voices are going to talk about because it's dangerous. It's dangerous to talk about this sort of thing nowadays. It's physically dangerous. It's financially dangerous. Part of me gets it because I understand people have to play the game in all aspects of society in some ways. But look, man, you know, at a certain point, you've really got to start looking at this stuff because it's starting to impact your safety and well-being, right? Regardless of who's heading up these agencies or who's in the White House, this is something that we've got to hold people accountable for. So, I'll just kind of leave that uh there. The policy has changed allegedly. All the DEI stuff is still there, though, which is interesting. But, that's a completely separate fight than the initial uh complaint with this document. So, I guess we're just going to have to see if or when this stuff uh gets changed. All I know is that I'm just trying to focus on basic risk assessment and a government document which uh is as concerning as this one certainly needs to be considered for people who are trying to prepare for disasters, right? Nobody's going to want to talk about it, but we've got to and uh we can see how things go from here. So, moving out west, I did want to mention this because I think this is going to be another case of information manipulation, and this is the developments in the case with regards to the M18 service pistol regarding the case of the airman who was shot at FE Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming a couple of weeks ago or last week. The Air Force has shifted that investigation to being an involuntary manslaughter uh investigation. So one airman has been arrested for uh making false statements uh obstruction of justice things like that. So of course this case has taken another turn. It is not as simple as we thought it was initially which is what the air force thought it was is the M18 went off shot the service member in the chest killed him and that was that was what was uh theorized and triggered the investigation. Right? We have to trigger investigation so that we can get to the truth. Right? And the development in this investigation is that the Air Force seems to think that at least one person who was there or involved in this case made false official statements. So that is a piece of information that you have to process and make your own risk assessments. Now the reason I wanted to mention this is one because this is an interesting development that people should be aware of but also because my irritation with the online influencer community grows daily. And what I mean by that is I think that it is important to get ahead of this when it comes to risk assessment. Remember like I just said, I'm trying to approach well life in general as an exercise in risk assessment, right? Trying to figure out how to carefully mitigate risk, take chances when possible, but also be as safe as possible while taking those risks in an increasingly dangerous world. So that's the frame of mind I'm coming at this from. I personally have nothing against Sauer. there is a P226 sitting on my desk right now as I'm recording this. I don't have a personal vendetta against them whatsoever. But what I do find concerning is what's getting ready to happen if it's not already happening on some parts of uh social media for instance. So two things are going to happen. One, a lot of people are going to make it seem like people were foolish for ever doubting SIG, right? And secondly, they're going to want apologies for switching over to other firearms, banning the P320, the M17, and M18 at uh gun ranges, things like that. So essentially, a lot of influencers in the gun space are going to be like, "Shame on you. You should never have doubted Sig. This was the case. This was like a murder investigation. Uh it wasn't a case of uh Sig finally killing somebody." So on and so forth. That's what the the gaslighting attempts are going to look like. And understanding this is going to be crucial for risk assessment because unfortunately a lot of people hinge their world view on uh what an influencer says and does. And I don't like it. The political left does it, the political right does it, but they pretend that they don't. And unfortunately, I I think, you know, the fat lady has not sung on this. Uh mostly because not one single person who was gloating about Sig, you know, potentially being redeemed by this uh and the developments in this case. Not a single one of those people knew at the time that this might have been murder or some other kind of foul play situation. We must remember what happened at the time. We have to remember what decisions were made, right? The army and the air force stopped using the pistol out of an abundance of caution. So my question is exactly what were we supposed to do, right? Was that not a good enough reason to mitigate risk? If the army comes out and says, "Hey, this pistol is dangerous enough for us to stop using it forcewide and we're going to investigate this." Is that not a good enough reason to say there might be a problem here and to just figure this stuff out? If the army said it was too risky to use, exactly what is the consumer market supposed to think, right? And unfortunately, I think a lot of people who are probably being paid by Sig, I think that a lot of people are going to make it seem like that decision to stop using this pistol would have been foolish. Like, you should never have doubted Sig. This is shame on you kind of thing. And I think that is gaslighting of the highest order, especially considering that this scandal has been years in the making. People have been shot by this pistol. Sig is definitely not out of the woods yet, and they're definitely not do apology either. The investigation is still ongoing. The pistol could have still gone off in a holster. The the service member could have just lied about who did it, right? There are so many speculative angles to this story. There's not a whole lot that we can learn. So, what can we learn from this? Well, like I said, the P320 situation itself, not so much. Nobody can definitively say what's wrong. And a much more technical analysis is definitely needed before we uh make a final judgment call on that. But what about the reaction to it? Right? In typical fashion, I'm sure it probably annoys many of you, but generally when a scandal occurs, I'm not so much interested by the scandal, but by the reaction to it and the manipulation and the gaslighting that occurs. And in that in this case, that is what I'm most interested in. So when it comes to risk assessment for me, I would very strongly recommend to number one, never let anyone make you feel foolish in hindsight for being a little bit more safe or riskaverse during a situation. And I see that happening all the time. And and that's just that's not the appropriate way to assess risk. But also, and this kind of affects that risk assessment, too, is that when big money is involved, trust is easier to lose and harder to earn. Could it possibly be that people in SIG's ecosphere or or the or any gun company's ecosphere, it's not just SIG, this applies to all very large corporations, people who are in the sphere of these companies, could it possibly be that company, in this case SIG, may seek to use these soft measures, these uh more indirect means of controlling information to protect their 500 plus million dollar contract. I don't know. It just seems like the gun industry culture a lot of times covers up a lot of the very corporate and dirty nature of this. And I think Sig's behavior uh during this entire uh situation has very much enlightened a lot of people uh that just because they're a gun company does not mean that they are pro- second amendment. Just because a gun company exists does not mean that they're acting in the best interest of the American people. Right? So, you know, gun companies are not immune from all of the criticism that a lot of other big Fortune 500 companies get. And we tend to forget that with SIG. People are uh very much brand loyal and there's a lot of insanity uh going around these days. And uh it's something to keep in mind if you're trying to just be safe. What I certainly would not want to have happen is this story break. And a lot of influencers get out there and say, "Look, Sig is vindicated." They're not vindicated, but they're going to say, "Oh, Sig is vindicated. This was a really a murder case." Or something like that. And Sig is, of course, going to lean into this and say, "See, look, you never should have doubted us. Come back. Start carrying your P320 again." And not a single fix has been implemented. The only thing that has changed is now the Air Force is investigating somebody for making false statements. That's it. For me, that's not nearly enough information for me to assume the risk of saying, "Well, the P320 is all fine now." you know, there's got to be more investigation on this. So, all you all we know is that a service member lied about the incident. That's all we know. We don't know uh what actually happened. And I think that a lot of people are going to lean into this. And I would really really hate for somebody to get injured or killed out there simply because the online influencer culture is probably going to spin up about this. So, please be careful of how you conduct your own risk assessment, your own risk analysis, and definitely uh keep that in mind when it comes to people who might be financially motivated to get you to think one way or the other. So, that's all I have for today. Let's go ahead and roll things up with the intercepted ghost net reports. Uh it was a very interesting week for the ghost net. A lot of information. I I've only got the three uh screenshots here, but there were dozens of messages I I uh wasn't able to sift through this week. It's it's it's becoming a very large network. It's working out very very well and I'm glad to see uh this providing a lot of useful services for people who are trying to get information in an off-grid way. You know, a lot of the times it's not necessarily about the the novelty of radio. It's about trying to, you know, war game these kinds of things and start getting familiar with a lot of systems and radio technology that can be used to exchange information in a more resilient and censorship resistant way. radio, especially HF radio, is not perfect. It is very hard to use in a lot of cases. It's definitely not for beginners, but out of all of my research that I have done uh over the past uh decade, I guess, this is really one of the only solutions that we have. And we're not really using these tools the way they were intended to be used, uh but we're using them in ways that they can be used. Right? I know I haven't gone into depth on the Ghost Net stuff in a while. I'm going to circle back around to comms in a bit. I'm still writing some stuff on that. But yeah, it's it's definitely something to be aware of. Download the Ghost Net plan if you don't know what it is. It's like 50 pages at this point, but it will explain everything about the plan and what the general gist of it is because it's kind of specific uh what the this niche use is for. It's just one tool in the toolbox to help us be as resilient as possible and exchange information uh in a more off-grid manner just in case various entities out there want to uh restrict speech. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. And of course, uh, for those of you who don't know, all of these sources can be found on my Obsidian page where uh, they're sorted by the day. So, if you see a wire report, that link at the bottom of every wire report will take you to my Obsidian page where most, if not all of my research is being hosted. So, if you want to do work on your own, feel free to do so. Uh, the sources are always there for you to examine and form your own opinion about things. So, thanks again everyone uh, for your support and I will see you next time. And as always, in 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.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for June 29th through July 5th, 2025. It has been a very dynamic week throughout the United States and around the world. So in the interest of time, let's go ahead and jump right to the map and talk about some of the severe flooding in Texas as this is a currently developing situation as I am recording this update. All right, so here we are on the map. I'm going to be using wind tac mostly today instead of my normal ArcGIS maps, uh, which I'll I'll talk about in a moment. As I've mentioned a few times before, I prefer to use WINTAC and ATAC to uh build a lot of these more realtime products so that I can then bring them into my more long-term mapping projects on ArcGIS. I know it's not the best way to display the information sometimes, but uh this will have to do for now. So, let's go ahead and zoom into the flood zone in Texas here, just northwest of San Antonio up in Carr County, Carville, and the city of Ingram. So, waiting for our map to finish loading here. As many of you have seen over the past couple of days, mostly last night, the the evening of July 4th, severe flooding struck this area. The National Weather Service predicted about 3 to 6 ines worth of rain throughout the region due to the collapse of a weather system that rolled in over the Gulf. Didn't form into a hurricane or anything like that, but uh the remnants of it ended up stalling over this area and just dumping way more rain than anyone expected. And this area is very legendary for flash floods. And that's exactly what happened. So, so far a total of 24 fatalities have been reported throughout the area, but this number is probably expected to rise as rescue and recovery efforts continue. Some of the more high-profile uh rescues and incidents occurred over here in the west. Uh so this is probably why a lot of you have heard about it uh due to it receiving national attention. There were three summer camps that were affected by this uh that were host to hundreds of children, you know, taking advantage of the Fourth of July summer camp sort of season, right? And unfortunately, all three of these camps were hit very heavily by flood waters as they are quite literally on the river, right? That's typically where a lot of summer camps end up being. Camp Mystic uh unfortunately was hit the hardest as we can see. Uh it was pretty bad and a lot of helicopter rescues had to be undertaken from this camp. I think there were a few hundred kids there uh when the flooding started and quite literally no one had any warning. There was um uh really no way to predict or determine exactly how bad the flooding was going to be once it uh just dumped all that rain all at one time. The camps to the north along the Guadalupe River itself, Camp Walddemar and Camp Lahonta, uh these camps were evacuated successfully. No reports of trouble there, although there were a lot of kids swimming uh to to make it out of there. So, uh, rescues were conducted here successfully and rescue operations continue along all of these tributaries and, uh, flood planes throughout the whole region. So, for those of you who are in the area, uh, one of the biggest challenges has been trying to find and, uh, re reunite families with one another. So, just for everyone's awareness, there are two uh, reunification points. One of them is the Ingram Elementary School and the other one is uh a historic theater downtown in Carville uh called the Arcadia Live Center. It's a small building there. Uh you'll you'll see it once you get in the in the area. So these are the two places to check if you are looking for uh family members and loved ones. Of course, this is a nightmare when it comes to reunifying families because uh you've got a lot of kids who are, you know, they're not at home, right? So, you're talking about trying to reunify potentially hundreds of people. So, it's kind of a tough situation logistically. A lot of people have been reunited, thankfully. Uh but just for those who may be in the area who are uh still looking for people, uh this these are the two places to check. On the recovery front, there are several shelters that have been opened up throughout the area. The first shelter is in Ingram at the Ingram Fire Department. That's probably a more of a small facility, but it's a good uh good place to rally, good rally point for now. Some of the more substantial resources over are actually over in Carville. Uh mostly churches. So, the First United Methodist Church just across the river there to the south, the Notre Dame Catholic Church and also the Calvary Temple Church are also open for uh those who need to seek shelter during this crisis. And also one of the uh main buildings at Shriner University is open as well as a uh as a shelter temporary shelter. So in terms of road closures, most of the river crossings here that are low river crossings uh over the Guadalupe River are closed. Um a lot of bridges are washed out, smaller bridges throughout the area. So it's just kind of a it's kind of a logistically challenging thing to find out exactly what's still standing. Riverside Drive down here uh to the souththeast of the city is uh is closed and there are random pl random road closures all over the place from where things have washed out. So again, flash flooding is one of those logistically challenging things to kind of get a hold on. So uh that's just something to be aware of as as time goes on. It's kind of a spread out area, hill country, right? So terrain makes these things uh a lot worse when it comes to flash flooding. So this is the situation as it stands. I will continue to build this map product out a little bit further. And for those of you who want this map product, this will be on my ARJS maps here very shortly. And also, I have a KMZ of this. So, if you are a responder on the ground and you want to get my data, uh there's a KMZ for you already built. You just drop it right into ATAC if you want it and we can go from there. So, I should mention that KMZ is also being updated fairly regularly. Uh this will probably change as I get a lot more points and as more reunification points come about and uh more aid and uh resources flow into the region. I'm going to start adding more points as I can find them. It it may not develop much more than this, but uh we'll see. So you can find the the most up-to-date KMZs for all of this stuff. All of my products are on GitHub in KMZ format. And if you want just a live updating map uh that you can, you know, view on your phone, uh you can check out my ArcGIS maps below. So, that's pretty much all I have for the Texas flooding situation. So, let's go ahead and switch gears quite significantly and let's talk about some of the mapping products I've been working on when it comes to the border crisis. So, as many of you know, I have been developing a lot of products that are attempting to track the cartel movements throughout the United States. This is a working project. It is not perfect by any means, but we've got to get started somehow. And this is the best way that I found to to get started with this project. As many of you know, I was hit this week with a DMCA takedown order from ArcGIS from the parent company Ezri due to this exact map layer. It turns out that one of the NOS's that is funneling illegal immigrants into this country has decided to engage in a little bit of lawfare or at least try to. didn't work out so well for him, but this is how things stand as they are. So, I thought it would be good to talk about this agency today and exactly what they are doing with your tax dollars. As many of you know, most of these immigrant safe houses, logistical hubs, uh any kind of agency, group, NGO, company, church, charity, whatever, most of the pucks on this map come from this one agency, the Immigrant Advocates Network. And I would very strongly recommend you guys go to their website www.immigrationadvocates.org to see exactly what they are doing to further illegal immigration into the United States. And you might say, "Well, S2, how do you know that they're funneling illegals into this country?" Well, I'm glad you asked because you can find out very easily. They're very public about it on their own website. So once we get to the immigration advocates network website, we can click find help here at the top of the page and we can select a state. So let's go ahead and pick uh let's say Colorado. Let's just pick a random one here. And since we clicked Colorado, here is a list of all of the groups that this one agency, this is again just one NGO. Uh these are all of the groups that this one agency has partnerships with to help illegals enter the United States. and stay in the United States and evade ICE and all of that kind of stuff. And you might say, well, again, how do we know that this is not just uh some kind of uh legal immigration sort of thing? You know, the kind of um all everything's above board. Well, I can tell you right here. Just look at the second one. Uh the Catholic Charities of Central Colorado Family Immigration Services. These are the things that they do. And as we can see, they help immigrants with removal hearings. So, what does that mean? This means that they are assisting illegal immigrants to stay in the United States and fight their own deportation hearing. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. This is the kind of thing that is going on on a gargantuan scale around the country. That's why I have so many pucks and points on my mapping projects and this is why they want to take my content down. This is a very large uh effort and unfortunately they're using this word charity here uh especially Catholic charities they're using this word here to unfortunately mask what they are doing because we hear the word charity and we instantly think oh okay well they're just trying to help people out right well you know this is not the sort of thing that they're doing sure they may immigrants may show up to to a uh one of these facilities and you know get a bag of food or some kind of you know emergency aid or something like that but they also get an attorney because as we can see they're getting free, that's right, free pro bono legal representation so that they can stay in the United States and fight their deportation orders. So that's exactly what's happening. You can see they even get help completing forms. They don't even need to speak English. They have everyone handle this for them. And as you can see, the these agencies are lining up around the block. That is why this is such a serious thing. I don't think a lot of people tend to understand how much money is in this. Uh these groups are tied again to very very large international organizations uh such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They also get a lot of uh billions billions of dollars of endowment funding from random billionaires you've probably never even heard of before. So this is how they're able to do it. I mean I know it may seem surprising, but I mean this is just kind of how uh a lot of these groups tend to work. Uh it may seem surprising, but that's just the way that it is. So, uh understandably, when it comes to my own mapping projects, it's not exactly a uh a safe thing to be doing. Uh to be honest, this is a very dangerous line of work. I understand that fully, which is why a lot of times I have to kind of tiptoe around things. So, uh in order to stay above board and to avoid the lawfare uh from cracking down too much, you know, it's just the the way that it is. Sometimes we have to kind of operate in a a more lowp profofile sort of arrangement. Like it or not, it's just the truth that if you're an illegal immigrant in this country, you can have hundreds, if not thousands of attorneys just chomping at the bit to help you stay in this country and continue committing crimes. But if I put your agency on a map, I don't exactly have a whole lot of attorneys lining up to help me for free. You know what I mean? So, you may get one or two, but the scale of this is just astoundingly high. So, I know that I don't say this very often, but I'll say it now just for the record. I am fully aware that a lot of not so nice people are watching what I do. They are consuming my products. They're consuming my work. I am not naive to this. So every single thing I do, every comment on social media, every slide, every dot on a map, everything is done through the lens of assuming that a bad guy is watching. That's just the way things are when a lot of your work is public these days. So please do not think that I am a complete idiot. I mean, I may be, but I am not naive to the fact that a lot of not so nice people are watching. This is why all of the data sets that I do, everything that I do is intended to maximize the benefit to the good guys and minimize the effort to the bad guys. So if a malign actor gets one of my work products, be it a slide, a brief, map layer, whatever, I want that bad guy to look at my work and say, "hm, this doesn't really help me continue to be a bad guy, right?" But I want a good guy to get the work and say, "All right, this is very, very helpful." Right? It is a very very careful balance. I will admit and it is not always possible. So a lot of the work that I do simply doesn't make it to the public's eyes because it's either in still in progress, it's still being worked on or some data that I find I just can't make public because it would cause more harm than good. So I know that's incredibly frustrating when I have things like that, but it doesn't happen too often. Most of the time these these groups, especially when it comes to things like NOS's, they're very they're very proud of their work, right? They're very open and uh honest about the crimes they're committing on their own website. They confess to it, right? There's very minimal risk there in these people kind of being found out, right? Really, the best disinfectant for these people and for these agencies and these NOS's is sunlight. And that's what I'm going to continue to do. Uh one point of note, however, for a lot of these immigration projects moving forward, I'm not going to be able to provide a lot of the sourcing. So, I may uh just be able to provide indicators, right? I'm I'm sorry about that. I always like to provide the source data for everything that I work on, but sometimes I may only be able to put a street address and it's on you to figure out exactly why I put that point on the map. I'll make it easy for you, but again, we're uh we're operating in a non-permissive environment. It's unfortunate, but that's just the way that it is. And of course, just because I put a point on the map does not necessarily mean that every single location that I find is truly and utterly guilty of uh some kind of crime. It's just an indicator, right? But again, this data set is new. I'm going to continue building it as long as as long as I'm able to and we'll see how it goes. I think right now the biggest thing, the biggest benefit for this is uh just simply awareness. people being made aware of how pervasive illegal immigration is and the sheer industrial effort that NOS's are going through, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to provide an entire ecosystem of legal support uh at every single step of the way to help illegals stay in this country. This is a very very big thing. And as you guys can probably tell by my other map layers, the border engagement trackers and the more kinetic things like IED blasts, that sort of stuff, we want to keep that south of the border, right? We want to make sure that does not make its way into the United States. And as we can see, we're starting to heat up in that regard. So this is one of the more serious things that I have tracked over over time, both in terms of risk to me, but also risks to this nation. So that's why I am focusing on this quite a lot because really there isn't anybody else. There's a lot of people complaining about immigration. There's a lot of yapping and a lot of yammering back and forth, but there's not a whole lot of people who are trying to do the best they can, you know, as safely as possible, but still assuming some risk because we live in a risky world. Uh, and trying to do the best that they can. So again, it's not perfect, but I will continue to try to make it a little bit better as time goes on. And just in case I forgot to mention it, all of the links to these products will be in the description box below. My border crisis map is still there for now. Download it while you can or at least view it. If you want a total rip of all of the data that's on the map, I provide KMZs again on my GitHub page just so that you can load it into whatever system you use, be it Google Earth or ATAC or whatever, uh, and you can see all of the the data uh, a little bit more clearly. So anyway, I know that's kind of a long digression to to kind of talk about this data project, but I think that it's necessary to understand the importance of this stuff. This is an issue that strikes at the very heart of what this nation's identity is going to be in the very near future. This is one of the defining issues of our era and uh I'm going to try to do what I can to make sure that the good guys come out on top. With all of that being said, that's pretty much all I have for today. Again, I will continue to update the products with regards to the disaster relief in Texas and seeing how that goes. Uh, and I will continue to work on the immigration issues. I'm reworking a lot of my data sets and I'm adding a lot of points that I uh previously had not published just yet. Much more to come over the next few weeks. A lot of this is very hard work or it's not very hard, it just takes a long time, right? So, it's very time inensive task. So, please forgive me if I'm not the fastest at updating a lot of my data sets, but we'll get there. And speaking of getting there, let's uh roll things up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. It was a very fantastic week for the radio. Once again, having a more holistic or all-encompassing view of a lot of the work that I do is probably for the best. I've said it uh many times before, but I'll say it again. If your job is in the information space and if your uh profession or skill set is to do with things like data analysis or something like that or in my case uh information and intelligence analysis, it is also your job to make sure that your information, your work, your effort, your labor can make it to people even in a contingent situation. And that's kind of what I've tried to do with the ghost net here in addition to it being just a more generalized HF radio net. So adding in a radio communications component to all of this stuff is uh is what I've been working on for quite a while now. And as we can see what we have now going on with the ghost net is a lot of people exchanging information uh doing everything from testing and training to sharing real world information from their local area. So, I've I see quite a few people throughout the week, uh, sending news reports from their local area and generally trying to do the best they can to bring a component of off-grid radio use to a lot of the work that we do here. So, that's fantastic to see. I'm glad that it's working out so well, and I can't wait to see how it develops in the future. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Thank you guys for sticking around for a little bit more of a disorganized one today, but a lot of things in motion, a lot of uh a lot of irons in the fire and we're going to have to uh see how things work out over the next few weeks. A lot of lot of data to crunch through for sure. So, thank you guys all for watching. Thank you guys for all of your support. It really does mean a lot. I would not be able to do any of this work uh without your support. So, I really do appreciate that and I hope that at least some level of success can be had. Uh if not fighting these groups directly, that's going to be impossible, right? But maybe we can have a little bit more marginal success on the lower end and uh make sure that the right people know what's going on around the country. So, thank you guys all again for watching and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

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

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for sunday the 23rd of january 2022 as always this is being recorded the day prior on the 22nd of january starting with the european geopolitical update one of the major bits of information that has come out over the past 24 hours has been the united states evacuating their embassy in kiev nbc staff have been given the notice to start evacuating this is not a very rushed evacuation this is more of a more deliberate evacuation and due to the united states history recent history with evacuations failures this is most likely a preemptive evacuation to get all as many non-combatants out of the way as possible so that they don't face a political defeat yet again something also that was interesting that actually happened quite a while ago but is becoming more relevant with the the times is russia passing legislation or rather guidance regarding mass graves so this is something that would that happened back in december actually on december 20th this was uh finally approved and this is uh you can actually read it yourself if you speak russian for those of you who don't this is coming from the russian civil defense and the translated title is the urgent burial of corpses in wartime and peace time the general regulations for this so this is something that's kind of interesting because this is something that you would expect from cold war russia right like that they very much love their psyops right so you would expect moscow to pass something like this or put forth regulations regarding mass graves of civilians and things like that as a scare tactic right that's what you'd normally think this of well they actually haven't been they did this very quietly so me personally i'm kind of on the fence as to the psyop value of this because no western media has picked this up very few people have have actually followed you know what the duma does and and what regulations are passed by various uh you know government agencies within russia and this was quietly done only a couple of places i've seen actually have have actually figured this out and read the documents it's only a 20-page document but since it's in russian most people you know can't read it but in any case i think it's very interesting that it's more i think that it's it's less of a psyop and more of a logistical constraint right this is a logistical attempt to realize that hey russia saw at least in the conflict that has happened already in ukraine they saw a lot of casualties you also have to remember russia is dealing with the chechen war grazing places like that in which they have a lot of experience with conflicts and fighting in civilian urbanized areas and they've seen a lot of casualties so they're starting to you know cross their tees and dot their eyes when it comes to logistics of so many casualties coming out because of this so again this might be a cold war era psyop that the russians just love doing or this could be a legitimate uh logistical problem that the russians are trying to solve before they get into this conflict and uh they're trying to you know get this and get their uh stuff in order uh in any case this is becoming more relevant because this document and this guidance fault comes into effect on february the first so is this cut this is coming up and i thought hey even though this happened a while ago this is still relevant also within russia there is a massive massive naval exercise underway in the north sea this is interesting because once again the north sea is kind of russia's you know home plate when it comes to their naval forces and they've got a lot of their experimental stuff up there that's really the home fleet is where where russia keeps theirs in north sea it's interesting because this time of year it's extremely cold usually you're not going to have a whole lot of activity coming out of the north fleet north fleet this time of year but again russia trying to pull out all the stops to either politically pressure or military militarily position for as much as they possibly can and i i did want to mention that this exercise the declared areas for this exercise a lot of those areas fall within norway's economic exclusion zone so norway's territorial waters russia's conducting exercises in something that doesn't happen very often they've done this in the past or they've you know they've declared uh they've dropped no tams uh for these specific areas and uh kind of overlapped norway a little bit when relations are not so great but they've done it again so again worth mentioning another russian move over the past 24 hours is russia decla or demanding actually a return to the 1997 nato borders essentially what russia has demanded is something quite outlandish wherever you're at on the spectrum of of this this incident here russia has um essentially wants romania and bulgaria to be kicked out of nato and for nato's armies to be pulled out of romania which is this is an outlandish and utterly ridiculous uh uh demand that would that would be very akin to the united states demanding that brics break up as a as a economic partnership that just doesn't work right so to me this sounds like uh russia demanding something that they know without a shadow of a doubt that nato is not going to do just so that russia can seem like the reasonable one in this which is what russia has been trying to do the entire time and you know we've got a lot of political stuff going on here in the united states and people are picking sides on this kind of thing and and uh talking about you know the military-industrial complex versus the uh historical agreements we've had with ukraine and i you know whatever but i think that's probably going to complicate things a little bit more because russia declaring or demanding uh things that are impossible also kind of interesting is germany doubling down with their lack of support for ukraine not only are they refusing to give ukraine weapons themselves but they are also trying to prevent estonia from giving aid to ukraine so this is kind of another little diplomatic spat over some howitzers that estonia is trying to give to ukraine howitzers which were oh man the history of this goes back a long ways and it's ridiculous it's utterly ridiculous uh howitzers that were stored in the former east germany and then they were sold to like some other european nation and now estonia has them and now germany says that since they were stored here we still own them it's such a ridiculous thing that germany is trying to prevent another independent nation from sending their own weapons to another independent nation but again i guess we'll see how that works out to me i just i'm reading this you know as an as an american i can't help but think this is very interesting and speaking of interesting uh the great russian fleet the flotilla that is heading presumably to the black sea i've got just a little bit more information on that so this is the minsk this is actually an archival photo i tried to get as much of a beam on shot as i possibly could but i wanted to show you that uh like last time i mentioned that it would be kind of a sucky journey if these vessels these landing craft these amphibious landing craft were loaded with soldiers and i think they are because based on this archival photo we can do a little bit of hip pocket imagery analysis so for all you imagery analysts out there take a chill pill because i'm working with powerpoint here and that is that you can you can take a look and do some very basic analysis and see that you know the average human being is six feet tall right and there's a guy standing on the deck we can cross-reference this with a guy who's obviously standing up straight six feet there on that part of that leaning up against that stanchion there and what we can do is we can do a little bit of magic here and start measuring things we can also confirm this six feet height based on the number which which size we know and we can determine that based on what we can see in this image is as least distorted as we can get it that the minsk has 16 ish feet of freeboard when unburdened meaning from the from the deck of the ship down to the water line is about 16 feet now of course this will vary in c state and change based on a lot of different stuff but my point is this this is an image of the minsk as it that was taken as it was transiting through the baltic straits and again this is the this is the other side of the ship uh but it is again as close to a beam shot as we could find straight on uh perpendicular to the side and of course the sea c-state's more turbulent which excuse the results a little bit but um since this is a rough approximation we can enhance right and bring it in and we can do the same overlay that same graphic and see that uh the minsk as she was transiting through the baltic straits has about 12-ish feet of bree of freeboard so you can see quite obviously she's riding low and it's even more apparent with the quarter lev which is riding a little bit lower again the sea state's a little throwing things off a little bit but we can see that these ships have something on board they might have a full complement we don't know i'm sure some someone out there in the ocean world has figured out which units are on board already but we're still tracking that down in any case i wanted to show that hey these these ships have got some teeth on board so i guess we'll have to see where they go next moving to the overall uh sit temp for the ukrainian theater i wanted to show that we have kind of a lot of updates regarding the forces that we had templated for the last slide really the the biggest updates i want to show you on this particular slide are the s 400 battalions uh that we mentioned last time uh turns out they're not uh they're not battalions they're they're actually uh divisions so quite a lot more uh sam capability within uh belarus right now and our assessment is that these s 400s are not so much there for ukraine obviously the one situated to the south kind of is but the other one to the west the other division out west in belarus it's kind of spread around the countryside that's really as a message for nato it's not going to be as effective where it's positioned and you know granted these will provide a lot of help for maintaining that top level air cover for ukraine which is going to force the aircraft ukrainian air force to fly a little lower uh and thus right into the jaws of the sa-7 traps right that have been used by russian forces in ukraine for a while now so that's a common tactic and the s-400s would be great in that role so that makes sense as to why they're there also we have seen an increase in activity around the 20th guards army stationed in they've honestly been there for a long time but we're seeing a lot of cargo moving through this area to support units and various subordinate units of the 20th guards army as of the past 24 hours likewise further south down in viliuki we've seen the third motorized full division have a lot of activity around their little footprint area for over the past couple of days they've been fully established now for a while for a few weeks but we're starting to see a lot more activity with them we'll come back to them in just a minute so let's jump to the fronts for the northeastern front like i mentioned we have the third motorized rifle division hanging out around vilyuki we'll talk about them in just a second what i wanted to mention here are the units stationed slightly to the east of korsk which are the 138th motor rifle division and the 25th motor rifle division they moved into this area sometime between a couple of days ago and a couple of weeks ago don't know when they got there but that's where they're at we've got pictures of them circulating on social media and also up in razny that is the 90th guards tank division we don't know if the whole division is there but we know that at least three btgs from that division are located in that area moving to the eastern front the third motorized raffle division is more or less fully established in the village area with the 752nd motorized raffled regiment and the 237th tank regiment hanging out in salote also they have spread out slightly further east the 252nd motorized rifle regiment and the 99th special artillery regiment and bogoshar moving down south to rostov the eighth combined arms army headquarters has seen a lot of activity lately mostly moving around the 150th motorized rifle division which is stationed there those are forces that are permanently stationed in rostov that's a massive army complex for the russians obviously uh considering that's a good access point to really the rest of europe for them hanging out to the east almost off the slide is the 20th separate motor rifle division which is stationed in volgograd now those guys have been there for a while uh the only reason i wanted to mention this is because this unit used to be a brigade but it was upgraded to a division last month so they're most likely preparing for some kind of action either reinforcing or whatever they're doing but you don't reinforce the unit and upgrade its strength without having a plan for that and then the further down south we have in krasnodar the 47th missile brigade and the 238th artillery brigade uh these guys have been stationed there again for a long time just wanted to put them on the map because they will most likely be major players if and when this thing kicks off also before we moved on i wanted to kind of update this graphic by showing what the front line actually looks like now the front line is not really a border if you go and you search on google or any other mapping service you'll you'll see the map the line that we have drawn as well this solid red line that's like the the furthest most point of russian controlled territory however using this this uh dashed line as a reference you can see that fighting is occurring in between the dashed line and the solid line so this is a very wide uh front as you can see there's a lot of fighting that has been taking place in this this zone this sort of very much militarized zone i should say it that way moving down south to the southern front we have seen a little bit of activity on the crimean peninsula not so much but uh we did want to add in the units that we do know are there because they're they're normally stationed there which is the 810th naval infantry brigade the 126 separate coastal defense brigade and the eighth artillery regiment which are hanging out around sevestopol and maybe a little bit to the east as well and then circling back around to the biela russian border the northwestern front has seen a little bit of activity mostly units moving closer and closer to the borders so in the town of belarus we mentioned last time this btg that we were able to geo locate this is not a btg anymore this is actually a brigade now specifically the 38th motor rifle brigade so we'll give them the 38th flashing there and designate them as such also in the gomel region we have a bella russian unit which is the 38th guards air assault brigade they're one of the more specialized and elite units within the beale ocean military so i just wanted to template them on the slide because we know that they're there and that's pretty much it i did want them to show though where these units are in belarus because this is the graphic that the uh mod of belarus has put forward showing where their exercises are taking place now let me flip back and forth and you can see that this is where belarus says they're conducting military exercises and with the exception of the airborne units which we don't know where they're at this is where we have units templated in belarus so as you can see none of these units here on the eastern side of belarus down near the border with ukraine none of these guys are supposed to be there even according to belarus's own graphic so i think that's kind of interesting and shows that this claim of an exercise is is all a sham right it's all just a ploy to get uh forces closer to the border without nato doing anything now jumping back to our overall map here i want to talk a little bit about theories of maneuver and to do that i have to talk a little bit of politics um and that is the minor incursion uh scandal that has occurred within the american white house over the past couple of days so um biden himself has made a lot of gaffes a lot of misquotes and he's said a lot of offensive stuff even before uh taking office so he has a very long history of political gaffes right and he's said some pretty bad stuff over the years but i think that this seemingly innocuous statement that he made when he was talking about that a minor incursion is a different story right that's a different story when it comes to ukraine so ukraine an invasion is bad but in a minor incursion that's a different story right that kind of attitude whatever the wording of the actual quote is is irrelevant that attitude that was conveyed uh is a game changer so even though the white house came back immediately and did damage control on this on this gaff right saying that biden misspoke and that their policy regarding ukraine hasn't changed and you know blah blah blah right i still think this is a really big deal because the world is watching and even though the leaders of other countries in europe do not have any respect for biden's cognitive abilities and they know that he's prone to misspeaking the music stops when this minor incursion quote dropped because that simple misstep which i personally think was 100 intentional but either way this has given putin permission to invade i don't know how much more clear the united states can can make it that the u.s political leadership is perfectly supportive of this invasion as long as russia doesn't go too far and upset our friends to the west and all of this political stuff as annoying as it is to talk about when we're trying to count tanks this is important some pretty smart dude once said that war is a continuation of politics by other means and this situation could not be a more perfect example of that so when it comes to russia's overall tactics it's really hard to say what's going to happen because what russia can do will differ from what they will do so on the eastern front we might see a minor incursion right a straight-up invasion to the east uh because there's been fighting there in the past it's relatively uh abandoned from a civilian perspective area it's really just a front line it has been a front line for a very long time for many many years now people in the area understand and know what's going on they know it's a war zone so in theory at least you might have fewer civilian casualties if you were to invade into the area that's already a well-known war zone i don't know maybe they might also try to launch with an amphibious landing first and take the city of odessa they might do that they might not land in odessa they might land in the city they already more or less exert a lot of influence over which is maripole to the east they might land troops anywhere along the coastline of ukraine they might land them in crimea just as a simple way of moving a lot of troops around and then drive them up i would think that would not work so well but you know anything's possible i guess right generally speaking i should also point out that a lot of military strategists focus on the dnipa river right the nipper river is a huge a huge body of water uh it's it's not insignificant it's it's um you're going to need some kind of bridge or special craft to get across it right it's not a mud puddle here and a lot of people think that that is kind of like a diplomatic stopping point uh in years past when we've we and others have theorized about when russia invades fully will they stop at that river and and most people seem to think in the past that yes russia will drive as far as the nipper river and that will be kind of their way of exerting influence and taking back that part of ukraine and then further on they'll decide to cross it and when they've gotten a lot more supplies and things set up because remember these btgs are not really good for logistical support right so they can easily overrun their own supply lines and russia has a long history of of doing exactly that uh to some people invading russia so russia doesn't want to to repeat the lessons that they taught to others right however i think that with each passing day and seeing the number of forces that we have in the area now what we're talking i'll give the low ball estimate of 60 btgs 60 btgs in the area that's a lot of people that's a lot of forces and you i don't think you'd need that to to take uh the eastern part of ukraine if that's all you were going to do you wouldn't need all these forces historically i should mention that in talks with diplomats and military strategists throughout europe uh the general theory has been that since the cold war i should say that your uh that russia can take um a nation or or two nations one or two balkan nations with around 30 btgs um and this is a quote that is a statistic right just a made-up theory right that has been repeated at so many military conferences i've i've lost count and if that quote is true if that you know idea is is valid i should say then we're sitting at 60 we're sitting at double that for ukraine right so they've got more troops than what they need then again ukraine's been spending the past what seven eight years now recovering from uh what they what their mistakes of demilitarizing right so now ukraine has got some teeth as well um this is not going to be an easy fight for for anyone involved i think the general consensus is that ukraine is going to lose no matter what but again you also have to remember ukraine whatever you think about it whatever you read in the news or watch on vice right about the ukrainian military you also have to remember they're fighting for their homeland right and again like i mentioned whether or not another foreign nation should fight for someone else's homeland is is irrelevant in that debate because ukraine is fighting for their home and you never want to underestimate the group of people that are fighting for their homeland because they're quite literally fending off a foreign invader so again very important thing to consider because these dudes have been fighting to the last man for years now and that was only during during the fight for the dawn bass really they've been fighting to to literally the last man in every unit in many cases i should say so there's a lot of things that can happen uh i will point out though that as far as what russia is going to have to do russia's got some tall orders right and they're going to have to be quick about it because the spring thaw is about to occur in just a few weeks and really when we talk about the spring thaw what we mean is look at this terrain look at this this terrain to the south and to the east of ukraine that's open tank country that's what russian tanks were made to just punch through really easily but you also have to remember that ukraine would have the advantage when the when the spring thaw happens meaning that tanks while they are of course you know more or less all-terrain vehicles right they have trouble maneuvering in mud just like everything and we're talking you know mud up to your up to your freaking neck here in some of the parts of this country and you get tanks stuck your armored columns start slowing down that's going to tip the scales in the favor of ukraine who are going to have to use a lot more asymmetric tactics uh when it comes to taking out a lot of this russian armor and if russia wants to get in to ukraine do what they got to do and then get their armored columns and their btgs out again um that's going to be a tall order to do because the the clock is ticking so that's why that's that's why all this urgency that's why if you look around you're saying russia's going to do it any day now well it's because the clock's ticking right they only have so many they only have so much time before they start losing the overwhelming advantage or pieces of the overwhelming advantage that they currently have now when it comes to actual locations kharkiv will have to be taken very quickly they're going to have to take car cave quickly in order to provide support for the assault on dinipro so nipro is a city right there on the nipper river and it is a crucial hub for central ukraine so this is going to be very important for russia to take quickly if that's what their goal is they're going to have to punch all the way to the nipple river and if that that's going to have to be what stops them because that's really the only geographic feature that can stop russia in eastern ukraine everything else is very open and there's plenty of roads to drive on so you don't even have to go cross country most of the time so kiev is also another massive military target uh but again bringing the politics back into it for a minute depending on what nato does russia might leave ukraine's capital alone for the time being i don't know it all depends on what russia really wants to do then russia might launch a minor incursion right to the south uh into the war zone area that's already there link up with crimea which they already have tried to do quite a bit and then punch north who knows right it all depends on what nato's reaction is going to be if nato comes down like a freaking sledgehammer on russia and starts you know using russian tactics against them which is unlikely i should mention but if they do that then russia might say oh um don't want to tick off nato too much but right now we're seeing a very much permission being given by the big dogs in nato which are the united states and some of the other more significant military powers so right now i think putin and russia has got they've they've got all they need uh to do this they've got the permission they've got the logistical constraints they've got the energy crisis going on in europe which is complicating things and giving russia the advantage on the economic front when it comes to that kind of stuff so you know i i should also mention that this just just stacking on top of how confident russia is i should also point out that russia has left herself extremely vulnerable to a counter-attack by nato um almost comically vulnerable right it's almost like it's a joke um and again this is very very remote but the forces that have been moved around for this shindig are not something that can hold their own against nato right the btg as interesting of an idea as it is and the btg i should mention is the right tool for this task right the btg is a great style of unit to use in ukraine again it's what it was made for essentially but the btg as a concept is not super great for the powers of nato right this is we're not seeing russia mobilize her entire military we're just seeing her mobilize btgs cherry-picked from here and there we're not seeing main human wave infantry divisions being stood up or anything like that like you would normally see if nato's nato counterattacks were a concern so russia leaving herself vulnerable to a counter-attack by nato that just kind of points to to how confident russia is that nato's not going to do anything at all so if nothing else even if you don't know what nato is going to do i can tell you what russia thinks russia is betting very strongly on uh nato not doing anything uh anything significant that is and we've seen that over the past couple of weeks because i can tell you that that russia has been in the mood to call all the bluffs of nato so nato is not gonna it is not gonna do anything significant because russia is gonna be right there to call those bets so that's all we've got for now uh stay tuned for some more disturbingly outdated maps here from us in the future uh we'll continue these briefs as long as this becomes as long as this is an interesting thing to follow for people and uh yeah i guess we'll have to see uh what the next few days and weeks bring because we don't have that much much more time before russia has got to start moving either either committing one way or the other either invading or start moving all of these troops and men back to where they came from for the for the spring times i guess we'll have to see how that all works out but in any case we'll be here doing what we can so thank you again for watching thanks again for your support and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

all right good morning again everyone welcome back to the s2 underground uh this is the kabul update for monday august 23rd as of about 11 a.m eastern standard time so let's jump right into it uh quite a few updates over the past couple of days so let's start with the most pressing which is a lot of rumors or sort of confirmed not really confirmed reports of isis the islamic state threatening personnel refugees american soldiers coalition soldiers in and around the kabul airport so this is something that we kind of expected the islamic state still does maintain control of very very small parts of terrain they are sort of like an insurgency within the insurgency so when the afghanistan war was going on we had tamped down isis pretty good they were only in very small select areas in the in the very rugged and rough terrain in down in nangahar a few of them pushed forth and forward up into kunar uh and where they sort of just hit out and a few of them remained in and around the kabul area so there are some reports reports coming from both the taliban themselves and u.s intelligence that are indicating that isis is trying to target and sort of increase their own brand so remember they are sort of the with the insurgency within the insurgency uh the taliban are enemies of isis uh as of now but as anyone knows who's been in and around the afghanistan conflict for a while uh allegiances uh come and go like the wind so one day someone can say they're isis the next day they could say their taliban it just really just depends on on how how the wind's blowing that day i suppose so it depends on a lot of factors as if these threats are genuine it's best to say probably they are with a lot more and more people getting crammed into the area around the airport and even inside the airport itself that's just a ripe opportunity for some separatist group or some agency that we haven't even heard of a splinter group of a splinter group of a splinter group to come out and conduct an attack so they could get their street cred up so that's always a threat it's pretty minimal at this time but we we really don't know so i'm sure the official us intelligence reports have more on it but from our ocean side of the house and the open source open source world there's just really not much information out about it also overall the situation has been worsening over the past couple of days and particularly around the night time us and coalition troops have had to close all of the gates into the airport for a few different reasons for one capacity inside the airport is just too much and the security forces are not being able to control the crowds inside the airport as well as they should or as well as they could so they're having to actually shut the gates and leave people outside until they can clear some people out with you know getting them out on flights so it's a way of keeping the the area uh secure and not not crowded and things like that so just be be mindful of the fact you might see reports from a lot of journalists over the next couple of days of hey these gates are closed why are they closed well that that's why it's just capacity reasons and also sometimes if there's a shooting or or somebody gets unruly or something like that they will close the gates just to kind of help you know let things dissipate and let things work it work its way out i'll let people calm down a little bit and then they'll resume getting people inside the gates also on the political slash u.s front here at home the civil reserve air fleet has been activated by the the presidential regime uh government so uh this is basically the united states government drafting different airframes physical aircraft from civilian airliners uh commercial commercial airlines to shuttle people outside of non-combat zones so we'll talk we'll talk a little bit more about how the evacuation process is going once you get out of afghanistan but right now it's i think 18 i think 12 to 18 aircraft have been formally drafted into the u.s military control so that they can shuttle people uh around the world once they're out of the combat zone they're not sending in you know at american airlines you know you know 737 into kabul that's they're not doing that other countries are but uh the united states is not doing that and it's only a few airframes this is a program that's been around for a while for a very long time actually and it's something it's sort of like a lottery u.s american airlines american commercial airlines they basically draw straws for a specific period of time and that during that specific period of time they have to make sure that they have aircraft that are ready to go at a moment's notice within a 48-hour 24-hour window and that's been that's happened it happened on friday we got the warning that it happened on friday and it's now officially happened and that has the aircraft are being transferred right now also speaking bringing things back to the gates themselves there's been a lot of confusion at the actual gates with soldiers from different nations being manning these very cramped quarters there's been a lot of confusion as to what kind of paperwork gets is needed or required so there was a lot of reports last night or sorry two nights ago of canadian citizens with proper paperwork being uh turned away at the gates because the guards did not know that they the canadians had special paperwork so that's something to keep in mind is if you have people or if you yourself unlikely that you're watching this video but if you yourself or your interpreter or something like that is trying to get through the gates and they have non-standard paperwork or if they have paperwork from a different nation or something like that it's best to find a gate that you can get through uh well get through in the first place i suppose but just be mindful that you might get turned away uh in the confusion of this now a lot of this by the time this video gets out will probably be corrected but i just want to let everyone know this situation is about as confusing as it can possibly get so just bear with everyone they're going to get everybody out it's just going to take some time and speaking of paperwork the taliban has been reportedly halting locals uh stopping them at their own checkpoints before they can get to the the coalition checkpoints at the actual airport itself this is something that it's a lot of its rumor uh but we have seen this happen and the reasons of which are are mixed so the us and well the u.s isn't really saying much at all but like reporters or people familiar with the united states side of the situation are saying that the taliban is stopping locals from leaving so local afghans like interpreters or or people that are just trying to get a p2 visa they're not letting them leave if they have other coalition paperwork they're letting them through so that's one story another story is from the taliban itself they're saying that no they're not they're only stopping people who don't have any paperwork to leave the country so like people that are just trying to be spectators or trying to to take advantage of the situation they're stopping people that that that are like that now of course that's the taliban and they're known to lie about pretty much everything they do so there's that and then other reports are saying that there's really no problems whatsoever this is the us government story and we know that that's just an utter lie so there are problems getting through checkpoints getting through the actual airport itself getting through taliban checkpoints and getting through the coalition checkpoints to the airport itself so that's a pretty good explanation of what's going on on the ground let's go ahead and jump to the map and talk a little bit more specifically about the situation on the ground as of this morning okay so here we are on the map this is wintec i've loaded in our kmz and our imagery that we have dropped we've been updating this kmz and the imagery constantly over the past three days and this is the latest information that we have so as you can see uh we colored the south side of h kaya yellow just to indicate that this is in fact a fluid zone uh there's really not it's not really not clear as to what's going on or who's where but it seems to me like everyone is everywhere so let's zoom right here into the pax terminal itself the the americans specifically the americans have sort of retaken or pushed back uh or negotiated with the taliban to push so that they could maintain control of the actual pax terminal itself uh the taliban do maintain a checkpoint right here that's uh confirmed as of this morning uh and actually see if i can zoom in yeah taliban 313 units a taliban special forces unit is stationed right here at this grid as of well this morning uh afghan time uh the actual corridor in and out from the main gate to the main pax terminal is fluid it looks like once you're past this point there are coalition forces here at this gate there are also taliban here at this gate mostly taliban but once you if you can get through you can usually make it un unmolested to the actual pax terminal that's if you can make it past this last taliban checkpoint these are like uh forward observation posts really for the taliban to keep an eye on the americans that are that are stationed there and these guys here are really just it's just pure bedlam right here uh dozens of cars all kinds of heavy machine guns mounted machine guns crew served weapons everywhere uh we're even seeing light artillery light artillery like mortars and things like that but they're they're trying to keep those hidden it's really just a show of force anybody who can carry a tube can carry it right so uh pushing forward over here to the abbey gate uh situation there there are crowds all along the every square inch of uh perimeter border around the airport is clogged with thousands of people so there's that hotel baron is located right here not going to talk much about that at this time pushing forward over here to eastgate again large large crowds uh and then north gate as well right here still lots of crowds now let me go ahead and turn on a specific layer for you guys okay i turned on the layer in the kmz that shows the actions over the past 24 hours or so so there was a small arms firefight this morning between afghan former a a who are maintaining security alongside german soldiers and unknown assailants so like i mentioned earlier these these small attacks uh as as one might understand and like i mentioned in the i think the very first briefing uh the taliban is not a they're not as hierarchical as a coalition forces right so it's not like a taliban commander says you know do this this is these are your marching orders and everyone's just going to follow the orders now 99 will but the cellular nature and the the gorilla nature of taliban forces over the years has indicated that or it just means that you're going to have some rogue dudes and uh rogue dudes are dangerous so these could be taliban guys it could be isis they could just be some you know hooligans that are trying to take advantage of the situation that's a very uh a very prevalent threat right now people trying to steal stuff or extort civilians that men might not necessarily be taliban or isis or just bad dudes all right so that's the situation uh oh let me actually point out there was a vbiad threat vehicle born ied threat at the abbey gate it was cleared pretty much as soon as reporters found out about it i don't know if it was genuine or not it could be anything right the situation is just changing by the second so it's hard to say what's what's actually going on yeah that is the situation on the ground of really the most significant updates over the past couple of days uh really the rest of the city hkia proper like uh here to the west and down south uh things are pretty normal like it's shockingly normal you hop on snapchat maps or on twitter and you start hopping on the um the actual local language twitter accounts for a lot of these areas and it's it looks like it's not not there's nothing going on honestly now granted there's taliban everywhere throughout the whole city and they're they're taking over everything every government checkpoint every government building is now has a lot of taliban soldiers outside of it but honestly you you wouldn't notice if you look at a lot of the snapchat stories and things from these areas so really the most chaotic parts of the city are hkaia itself and in some parts of the former green zone but that's really just because there's a lot of taliban uh in the former green zone uh it's sort of like their um their prize right their spoils of war so going through those buildings and getting what they can and you know setting up outside the u.s embassy is kind of a pride thing for them so let's jump back to the powerpoint let's talk a little bit about the future and as well as some of the other things that have been going on around the country over the past couple of days all right so like i mentioned the northern alliance is back in town uh the son of the former leader of the northern alliance uh is is back and is uh conducting a lot of combat actions so as of august 19th this was this is a map of obviously afghanistan of all the districts that the taliban controlled and it was all of them all of the districts were controlled uh by the taliban on august 19th moving forward into the 21st we can actually see that the taliban actually lost quite a few districts to these guys northern alliance fighters are just popping up everywhere the guys up north have always been a little bit different so and they remember fighting the taliban last time so a lot of those districts were pretty quickly overwhelmed now it's hard to say if that overwhelming was done due to the skill of the northern alliance guys or just because they had strength in numbers at that particular time we have been seeing over the past couple of days uh significant numbers of taliban we're talking several thousand up to three thousand um have been pushing forward into these areas to retake them so as you can see a lot of these areas are contested yesterday the northern alliance actually lost a couple of districts but they took a couple we would classify them as being taken granted the situation is still fluid and as of this morning things are pretty much right back to where they were a couple of days ago with things still being contested most likely it looks as of right now that the northern alliance is is they're winning in their respective areas because they are striking with speed and with strength in numbers in those specific districts but once the taliban war machine gets uh spun up and they can move their fighters up there up there up north uh things are gonna things are gonna change so uh that's something to keep in mind and definitely something to keep an eye on over the next few days uh to see how that northern alliance resistance movement is uh kicking off so finally i wanted to touch on how the refugee situation is working once people get out of kabul once they get out of afghanistan what is actually happening so this is kind of busy and there's a lot of stuff going on so let's just take it a step at a time so first is once the flights leave kabul they you know they transit out via the normal air corridor and land in doha qatar cutter uh from there that's a staging area they either land there or if doha is full which has happened over a couple of days literally they just can't process any more people they transit to american bases in kuwait but most most people like the overwhelming majority people are going to doha and then from doha they're actually going to ramstein air base in germany for further on processing or once they get to ramstein they then can file their paperwork and get things organized to actually transit to follow-on nations to wherever they're going there are a couple other ways to get out of afghanistan though so another route that's very common is to go through tashkent through the through the capital of uzbekistan they're they've been very helpful in facilitating that movement directly out of kabul for a lot of civilian airliners uh and there's also another route which is uh sorry once they get to tashkent that's that's not a final destination for a lot of people that's they're going to go elsewhere so that's really just a staging area at this point even though uzbekistan is going to most likely take a lot of refugees also in uh new delhi uh in india has taken a lot of direct flights uh they've rescued i think a few hundred people at this at this point maybe a couple thousand honestly by now uh so that's really these are really really the main avenues of departure for leaving the country now as far as which nations are taking whom uh so far uh there are a list of temporary staging nations so the nations in which people are just going to temporarily stay are qatar kuwait germany turkey uzbekistan pakistan tajikistan kosovo albania northern macedonia italy and switzerland it's not clear as to if the people that are staying there right now in these countries are going to stay there or not some nations have stated yeah these are just this is just a temporary situation till we get things figured out other nations have indicated that they're going to take more uh that some of those some of the refugees can stay there and it of course depends on nationality as well now as far as commonwealth nations uh all members of the four eyes community have uh said that they're either going to assist or help or or take some it's really uh hard to say but obviously the the four eyes community is really uh leading the leading the effort when it comes to uh then probably the numbers that they're going to take also western europe these nations france germany belgium denmark and poland they have indicated that they are going to take some or they have already taken some also eastern europe czech republic and italy really most european nations have been very very hesitant to actually commit to saying yeah we're going to take all of your refugees or we're going to take some of your refugees or we're going to take only these citizens or we're not going to take you know normal afghans but we'll take interpreters it's just really confusing nobody wants to take these refugees to be honest because europe has a refugee crisis already so without delving too much into politics it's it's a complicated situation and there's a lot of political actors on all sides pulling everything different ways and it's hard to say who's going to go where central south america really only colombia has expressed interest in taking some refugees and likewise same thing in africa only uganda has said they're going to take refugees i think they actually have taken 300 so far and as far as your brics nations brazil has indicated that they will use the same uh track that they developed to take venezuelan refugees you can if you're afghan you can now use that same track to get into brazil uh russia interestingly has indicated that they are not going to take any refugees from afghanistan they're the only nation that i've seen so far that has said that they're not going to take anybody everybody else has just kind of either not said anything or they've said like we'll figure it out russia has said vladimir putin himself said flat out no we're not taking any now they did not say that they wouldn't help transfer people and lend resources and things like that but they he said that they can't they can't come here essentially and then also india has already taken quite a few refugees and is planning to take even more as we move forward so just another reminder we have all of these resources available on our odyssey page if the link will be in the description box below just in case you guys wanted these files we'll be updating them constantly as long as uh the situation is is going on we're going to be following this really until it closes out so all these briefings will be on there we've realized we've probably got a lot of new members and a lot of new followers to the channel uh over the past few days so if you don't like youtube and or it's not working for you go to odyssey all of our videos are backed up there and this is where we're dropping all of our stuff like the kabul imagery pack we've pre-downloaded a series of of images and geotiff files that are easy to put on gps's and end user devices and things like that if you wanted to either follow along or you are trying to use this for your own intel collection and things like that go for it there you go we're updating this kmz i think we're on version 17 now um and we're going to consistently keep updating that with information as the time as time goes on and once again just wanted to show this slide again for people who have not seen it this is some resources you can use if you're trying to get out of the country or if you are trying to help people get out of the country right now there are a lot of people trying to help with this situation which is outstanding uh but that does not mean that the situation is less confusing and immigration is confusing on a normal tuesday right and it's even more confusing in an emergency situation so uh really there there's not much that we american citizens can do to help people on the ground but we're doing what we can uh to help get some of these to get to get all of these americans home safe and sound and our allies as well so thanks everybody for watching stay tuned for the next update we'll we'll have it out soon and we'll continue to update all the all the products that we've been putting out on this and once again thank you everyone for all of your support and we will see you next time and always remember to fight in the shade

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for June 1st through the 7th, 2025. It would appear that the summertime antics are in full swing once again as many significant things have occurred over the past week or so. So let's dive in and take a look at what's happened around the world. Though the world is pretty much on fire as usual today, we're going to spend most of this time talking about things that have occurred in the United States and in Russia or Ukraine. Here at home, we've had everything from political theatrics to domestic terrorism threats, both from malign actors located within the United States and from foreign nation states. Like I say all the time, it is hard to determine if the crime waves that we've seen throughout the United States are any higher than the standard baseline for this time of year or if this is just riot season again. But nevertheless, things have remained fairly kinetic around the country. Across the way, things are not much better in Europe. Though there have been quite a few political developments that are rather interesting this week in Europe. Most of the attention has really been focused on Ukraine as usual. Bottom line, the war in Ukraine continues and peace is nowhere in sight. This is most sharply demonstrated by Ukraine's operation spiderweb, their attack on various Russian military bases throughout the Russian homeland, as well as Russia's retaliation, which so far has mostly taken the form of limited missile strikes uh on Kiev proper, mostly the industrial sector of the city. So sources are dubious at best. This is the Ukraine war, right? And misinformation and propaganda is a huge part uh it's a huge tool used by both sides. So, it's hard to figure out what's actually going on. This is not the first few weeks of the war where uh before the propaganda machines got spun up. So, you know, we're kind of here at the latest stage propaganda kind of situation. So, it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on. However, Russia has struck a few targets in Kiev, mostly in the industrial sector, factories, uh military sides, things like that, but it hasn't really been the the big one that everyone's kind of expecting from uh Russia with regards to their response for Ukraine's attack, right? So, if we recall, the last time Ukraine made significant gains such as the their foray in Kursk, the Kursk offensive, Russia launched an IRBM. So, Russia launching a few cruise missiles and a few uh short-range ballistic missiles here and there, that's not really proportionate to what Ukraine did to them with this sneak attack. So, definitely uh keep an eye on this. I'm definitely going to be watching out for to to see what Russia's proper response is going to be. They may not do anything more than this, but I highly doubt it. They're going to have to respond in some way. And just to hammer home the significance of this attack, let's scroll over to Windtac where I will show you some products that I have for Operation Spiderweb. All right, so here we are on the map. So I know that this may look a little bit different uh for some of you out there who uh are used to my ArcGIS maps. This is not ArcGIS. Uh many of you may recognize this as WindC. So this is the Windows version of ATAC or the TAC ecosystem. Now, I know I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself by introducing a new thing without uh kind of any explanation. However, I did want to use WINTAC today to illustrate what's going on in Russia because a kind viewer submitted a data package for me. Uh they went ahead and plotted all of the things that were damaged and destroyed in Russia. And it's a little bit uh more helpful to have a a 3D view of the world that I can more easily uh show with my screen capture software. So, for those of you who are already spun up on ATAC and the TAC ecosystem and you say, "Hey, I want this uh for myself." Fear not. Uh all of these icons here are the kinetic activity tracker and the border crisis tracker, both of which are KMZ's that I have published on my GitHub page. So, if you want to emulate exactly what I have here, you can certainly do so if you wish. I've been updating these KMZs fairly often. And I try to do it once a day, but uh loading in a static KMZ is not uh not the easiest thing to manage if you have to change it out every day. So once every few days seems to be a good medium. But today we're not talking ATAC. Today we are talking Russia. So let's go over here to the European continent and see what is going on. As we can see, a lot of these locations that have been attacked, key military bases, key airfields deep inside Russia's interior have been attacked. Uh this is a pretty big deal. A lot of people may not understand the significance of this, but I'm sure many a white paper will be written by a junior lieutenant uh through all throughout the US military on this topic. So give it some time and you'll definitely see some stuff being written about this. For now though, the very wave top level is understanding that because Ukraine has cracked open this can, now we have a whole lot of concerns that we well we we've always had these concerns, but they've mostly largely just been theoretical. So the reason that these bases were chosen is if you'll notice, they're roughly around the same latitude. Why is this? Well, because of Russia's defense doctrine, which is kind of interesting. So just dipping our toes slightly into a little bit of cold war history to understand why this is so important. Russia is a very special country much like the United States in many ways. In the United States, uh the reason why we have a comparatively easy time with territorial defense is largely because of these two things right here, the large Pacific Ocean and the large Atlantic Ocean. And also the Arctic uh that is very very hard for armies to march their way through. So the United States compared to say I don't know most of Europe, it's very very hard for an adversary to just suddenly appear on our borders and want to cause a ruckus, right? Well, Russia is very similar in that while she doesn't have large oceans to protect herself from uh any adversaries that may seek to cause problems for the homeland, Russia does have a lot of space to play with. We all know the classic phrase, right? the classic blunder, never get involved in a land war in Asia. And the reason for that phrase is, well, many reasons, but it also applies to Russia. So, so what does this Ukrainian attack really mean? Well, look at where these attacks took place. They took place thousands of miles in some cases all the way on the other side of the earth from Ukraine. Now, is this because Ukraine has some kind of super secret long-range weapon? No. They were just able to get spies in uh probably through Kazakhstan and uh they were able to make their way to their targets and this was a very big secret squirrel operation, right? So it's not like Ukraine launched a cruise missile from Ukraine and it struck, you know, way over here in the in the Pacific. No, they they were able to um have a fairly large intelligence victory. Now Ukraine is most certainly celebrating this victory and of course they will. I don't blame them for doing so. Here's the problem though. Um, because Russia has such big space and because Russia is so vulnerable, right, a lot of their defenses are mostly just here. A lot of uh Russia's territorial defense is located along her western border with the European continent, right? So, the fact that these attacks were taking so uh so far behind the enemy lines, so to speak, right? This means very simply that nowhere is safe. So at the risk of digressing too much, I just wanted to cement this idea home and really convey the idea that Russia for many many decades uh to include the height of the Soviet Union made a lot of assumptions about her own defense. Right? Russia assumed that well our big size and our uh spread out forces all the way around our country, right? uh that's going to be a pretty good defense, right? So those, you know, uh pesky Americans, if they were to nuke us or something like that, you know, they're going to have to have a lot of weapons to cover pretty much all of the targets that they would have to do. Well, Ukraine, which is a nation which at least before the war and before American support, Ukraine had the GDP of Nebraska, uh roughly. So now, of course, that's a misleading statement because Ukraine has received hundreds of billions of dollars in support publicly and a lot privately as well. That's not being counted as part of those official metrics. But by and large, Russia's assumptions about uh her territorial defense may not be as accurate as they once were. And this is important. So for all of you out there who don't give one hoot about Ukraine and Russia, here's the bottom line. Ukraine's attack has proven, at least to Russia, that Russia's own preconceived notions about her defense and her doctrine and, you know, the whole idea of why Russia is a very, very big military power. All of these preconceived notions maybe not have been thrown out the window, but they're definitely called into question. Russia thought she was safe because she had a large size. Russia thought she was safe because she could spread her military bases out throughout the whole countryside. and you don't really have to defend so much, right? But Ukraine carrying out this attack proved to Russia that Russia's own preconceived notions about her defense may be inaccurate or outdated. And because Russia was wrong, or maybe has maybe not wrong, but maybe has outdated views of her own territorial defense, a similar nation, which has had similar understandings about her own defense, may want to pay attention. Just point blank. if somebody wanted to conduct the same kind of attack here in the United States, we couldn't do anything about it. So, just something to consider. That's why it's kind of important. That's why I've uh been kind of thinking about it. And a lot of people are going to be writing a lot of papers about this for sure. So, um the thing that I'm thinking about is all right, it's it's one and done. It's interesting. We'll write some write some papers on it and do a deep dive on it, but it's not the end, right? The war continues on. And unfortunately, now that this can has been cracked, we have to be concerned about this sort of thing here at home. I'm not saying that there's uh any direct threat to the homeland on this at the moment. I'm just saying I would not be surprised. So, if one day we get a rather unfortunate wire and things get very very spicy very very quickly, don't uh don't think that there wasn't anyone uh who was not predicting this. So, it's not just me. It's anybody and everybody who can see the writing on the wall. So anyway, I thought that was very very interesting and uh kind of a more helpful way to show this in a semi 3D manner. So I'll be updating my KMZs over the next uh few days and weeks to kind of incorporate this sort of thing. I'm going to have to create a few more layers, so please be advised there's going to be a lot of changes on this. Uh I have not incorporated uh this data package just yet. uh I probably will do so, but I'm trying to figure out how I best want to do it. So, uh just please give me some more time on that. But yeah, I thought that was kind of an interesting way to show this data. All right, back to the slides. With regards to strategic movement, there is really nothing significant to report. Uh the aircraft are still at Diego Garcia. There's still deployed there. Construction on various airfields still continues in the Pacific. All the carriers that were underway last week are still underway. And it's really pretty much the status quo. This of course is not too meaningful of information honestly because uh it tends to lull people into a false sense of security by thinking ah well you know we're not deploying any carriers or you know ARGs anywhere um that means that nothing's going on. No that's not true. It just means that uh the potential for a you know air campaign is kind of reduced. So I don't know. I find it very interesting that those B-52s landed at Diego Garcia right before uh Ukraine unleashed their drone attack on Russia's bombers. So, I'm wondering if maybe they're not necessarily there for operational reasons, but for uh reasons of keeping them out of the way. I don't know. That's just kind of a theory. Have no evidence to back that up, but it's something to think about with regards to strategic movement. Moving to the kinetic activity tracker for this week. It has been rather busy around the country. Lots of additions this week. mostly on the border map, but quite a few kinetic things going on as well. So, let's hop right to it with the more concerning icon on the map, which is the biological terror attack or possible biological terror attack, which occurred in the Midwest, specifically within Michigan. Earlier this week, the DOJ announced the arrest of two Chinese nationals, Chinese citizens, uh, by the name of Young King Xian and Zeon Leu, who were arrested for trying to bring a fungus into the United States, which is classified as a potential aggerrorism weapon. This is not something that we tend to focus on so much. However, this is a very serious problem uh, and a very serious threat vector that China has most certainly taken a very, very big interest in. Of course, these two researchers were working at the University of Michigan to allegedly study uh this kind of bioweapon. Now, I think we can all see through this and see what's going on here, but I find it very very interesting that the University of Michigan connection is there, as you would expect. Now, of course, the the media is uh taking two perspectives with this. The first perspective that the mainstream media is taking is that this is the end of the earth and that the fall of western civilization was prevented by intercepting this uh these these samples at the airport. The other perspective is that uh well this this substance appears naturally in the wild pretty much everywhere in America. So it's no big deal. As we probably can guess, the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes. This is absolutely not like anthrax or anything. It's not something that severe. However, it is a problem when you've got two card carrying members of the Chinese Communist Party who signed a letter, I think in 2022, pledging allegiance to the uh People's Republic of China. That's a problem uh when they're handling things that are classified as potential aggerrorism agents. One thing that not a lot of people have remarked on is the timing of this. These individuals were arrested earlier this week. However, the crime took place last year. Almost a year went by between when their samples were intercepted and they were detained at uh the airport for these substances and when they were arrested. I personally would be very curious as to find out where they were and what they were doing for the past year after trying to commit a bioteterror attack here in the United States. Very very interesting to know that information because it certainly seems like they were just allowed to kind of walk around and continue doing what they were doing. So yeah, it's not like they were just intercepted. they've actually had quite a long time to make other preparations and smuggle in more things and things like that. So, yeah, something to be mindful of. I would be very curious as to find out what was going on. Now, of course, I am not completely naive and I understand that it's very likely that the feds let these two people go once they were flagged and tagged basically after this little stunt and their samples were taken away from them. They probably had a van parked outside their house for a year. And once the the feds rolled up their investigation and developed their networks and they figured a we can't really get much more out of this. Only then did they arrest these two people, but that's always a possibility, you know. Uh so you don't want to rule it out. I personally wouldn't give the feds that much credit, but that's just me. It's possible that a lot of personnel changes that occurred earlier this year because of the election. Uh a lot of people figured out a lot of these older investigations and now they're trying to act on them. I don't know. But I do find it interesting that the arrest took place almost a year after the crime. You would think that with something this serious that would be arrested at the scene and, you know, thrown in a cell forever, but I don't know. That's not what happened. Clearly, they were just arrested earlier this week. Speaking of sketchy incidents, let's move out west for a moment and talk about the terror attack or arson attack or I'm not really sure how you want to call it or label it. Even the feds themselves seem to not really know how to label this, but we'll just call it the Boulder, Colorado incident. This was, of course, the Molotov attack on a persistent protest that was occurring outside the old uh the old historic courthouse there in Boulder. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I'm sure a lot of you have been oversaturated on this kind of attack. However, I have received a lot of messages from locals who are very much aware of this area. And from what I can gather, Pearl Street alone is a rather infamous area. It's very much a uh politically challenging area to be in. As we can see, there's a lot of social issues. So, I'll just say that this area is a very is very much a an area where a lot of social issues tend to clash. A lot of activists around pretty much all the time. Kind of like Portland and Seattle. There are some streets which are basically just I don't know First Amendment zones or whatever you want to call it now. But basically, a lot of people who just want to make their calls heard. They tend to hang out in this general area depending on the time of year and depending on what issue is hot at a particular given moment. In this case, there have been a few pro-Israel demonstrations that have really just been persistent demonstrations. And what I mean by that is it's basically just people getting lawn chairs and sitting uh out in the park there with signs. And that's pretty much it. It's not really much more than that. It's mostly the elderly who have been partaking in these demonstrations. But in this case, earlier this week, uh this individual who does not appear to be very um well wrapped too tight decided to attack one of these demonstrations that had been there for a while. Uh so he lit a molotov and threw it and this is why he is shirtless because he also set himself on fire as one commonly does throwing molotovs. I have not seen any update on how the people are doing who were attacked. I don't know their condition or anything. I saw reports that say that two people were very severely burned, but I haven't seen any follow-up information on that. No one was killed in the attack. So, uh there's that. But in terms of casualties and and those who were wounded, I I just don't know. Again, the suspect as well, his whole life has been kind of released and been the focus of, you know, mainstream media as well as authorities. So, I'm I'm not going to go into too much detail on that. But again, it's just a kind of constant reminder that as summertime comes, these persistent demonstrations, people who have a lot of free time on their hand to kind of demonstrate their whatever cause they wish to, you know, put out there, they're going to be out on street corners and because of this, you're going to have more risk, right? In this case, the closure area here, as you can see, the evacuation zone lasted for over 24 hours. So, I thought that was very, very interesting. And I think they were I think the local authorities were trying to uh I think they were trying to keep demonstrations from clashing again. So they basically just kept everybody out of that area for a couple of days. It wasn't just a few hours. It was several days. Uh and this evacuation zone eventually shrunk down and was cancelled. But still, you may find that because a couple of groups protesting issues you've probably never even heard of because they decided to have a a battle royale in the street. you may find that the city center of a particular area is closed down for a while. Just something to keep in mind as as we move forward into the summer. In the exact same vein, as I am recording this this morning, there are what I would consider largescale riots in Los Angeles. This is mostly taking place at the federal detention facility, the federal building uh there in central Los Angeles. And largely it is uh pro-immigration, counter ICE kinds of unrest. So far, it's pretty much your standard riot. It hasn't gotten too out of hand. They've broken a lot of things, destroyed a lot of vehicles. Uh they appear to be very well funded uh this time around, which is a huge indicator because they've got pre-made signs made uh which are not cheap. They've got vehicles that are driving around that have been made up with signs on them. So, something to be mindful of. the funding level. If a protest shows up and they appear to all have very professionally done signs, they all are wearing matching t-shirts, they're all show up at all the same time, they've coordinated traffic, they've got staging areas. If it appears to be a more professional uh situation, you know, be mindful of that. This is the kind of indicator for something going wrong uh with with a lot of these demonstrators. I know a lot of people will be quick to point out that a lot of these protesters are paid. I can't verify that for sure. For sure. I don't know if anybody can really. It makes perfect sense, but at the end of the day, I'm thinking more tactically on the ground. It doesn't matter if a person's paid or not. If you get hit in the face with a brick, it's going to be a bad day for you. So, just please be mindful of uh the civil unrest going on throughout Los Angeles today and throughout the weekend. Also, something to be aware of. Uh please be on the lookout for this individual up in the Washington State area. This is one Travis Decker. He is the lead suspect in the very gruesome murder of his three children uh at the Rock Island campground just uh east of Seattle just west of Levvenworth. I've been following this one personally because unlike a lot of the other gruesome murders around the country, at least for the first day or so of the manh hunt for this individual, there was a decently good chance that he might be discovered. He left his vehicle at the at the murder site and it's assessed that he was on foot traveling throughout some of these trails throughout the area. So, I wanted to put the notice out to make people aware of this individual because we got to catch this guy. And uh it looks like based on the search area, the extremely rugged terrain, it's probably going to be a member of the public who comes across him first. Now, the initial search area was closed off to the public. uh the local authorities and the state officials and now the FBI who's involved in this. They do not want uh help from local citizens locating this guy during the first few days of the search. I don't know why, but I suspect that it probably has to do with a lot of the rugged terrain. Every single year, uh the county sheriff has got to go out there and rescue people from this exact location. So, it's very very hard uh to find people who want to be found out here. Uh, and that makes for a very challenging search for a fugitive. So, someone who does not want to be found is not going to be found unless they make mistakes. And the reason that I wanted to highlight this is because uh this individual has already made some pretty big mistakes. As of right now, local authorities think they've narrowed down his position to the Pacific Crest Trail. Uh, so he could have gone north or south uh up and down that trail. It's it's hard to say. I can't there's nothing in the in the public view that indicates which direction he went. I can say that the the PCT intersects a lot of other trails in this area. So, if he is truly a fugitive, he's probably going to be using these trails as handrails uh more rather than just walking down the trail. He could also be prepared. He could have cashed supplies. He could also be out of the country by now. Enough time has had has passed to where he could be long gone. But local authorities seem rather adamant, and I don't know why, but I suspect it has to do with the intelligence they have. uh local authorities seem rather adamant that he is still in the local area. So since this uh trail and these the parks in this general area are about to get the flood of people uh into them for recreational purposes, a lot of backpackers uh start moving into this area uh this time of year. Please be on the lookout uh in case you find this individual alive or deceased. So I know a rather gruesome end for the day, but uh that's pretty much all I have. Let's go ahead and wrap things up with the intercepted ghost net reports. And this week was a very fascinating ghost net uh session because right at the time that Russia launched her counterattack against Ukraine uh at least with regards to uh the precursor attacks like the missiles striking Kiev uh that occurred during the ghost net window. So people were talking back and forth about these missiles being launched all in an off-grid manner. So I think that's a very fascinating development. I think that's very good to see. It's very interesting to see information being exchanged on geopolitical issues around the world via HF radio in a way that cannot be censored. You know, in case somebody gets upset and turns off Starlink, in case some malign actor wants to take down a cell tower in your area, you can still get world news through HF or shortwave radio. So once again, thank you guys for contributing to this uh Ghostnap project. Uh you it is really all of you who contribute to this that make it a great thing. And once I get a few other projects uh out of the way, I plan to make it a lot better. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. Again, links are on my Obsidian page. The KMLs and KMZs for uh most of what I've talked about today are already available on my GitHub page. And all of my other mapping products are, of course, in the description box below. So, thank you all for watching and thank you for all of your support. And I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 24th through the 30th of 2026. This week seems to have flown right by as many different events have come to a head over the past few days. Around the world, all of the current wars continue pretty much the same as before. In Europe, the war in Ukraine has intensified once again as the yearly summer fighting season has resulted in major offensive and counteroffensive actions being conducted by both sides. Most of the war remains fairly stagnant in terms of the front lines actually moving, but major offensives are being conducted far behind the lines in both Russia and in Ukraine via drones and missiles. And the Ukrainian attacks in particular are striking a lot of Russian oil infrastructure, which is affecting the global oil market. As a result, the war in Ukraine has served to put the squeeze on Europe even more than the war in the Middle East already has as Ukrainian forces continue to strike targets that indirectly make Europe's fuel supply even more expensive. Similarly, the Middle East remains in a state of stagnation or stalemate, however you want to put it, with a few engagements being reported this week, both in the Strait of Hormuz, within the Persian Gulf War, but also within Lebanon and Gaza as the Israelis continue offensive actions along multiple fronts. The Israelis are expanding their operations uh to conduct their land invasion into Lebanon, but they're also looking to annex more of Gaza than they already have with Israeli politicians stating that they plan to annex roughly 70% of Gaza. So whether that will actually happen is debatable, but nevertheless, the situation in the Middle East remains tense on many different fronts. Most importantly for us, the global oil inventories have begun to approach minimum operation levels in some parts of the globe this week, mostly in Asia as the shock to the global oil supply continues to be affected more seriously. Closer to home, kinetic strikes continue on fast boats in the Eastern Pacific as the United States begins to accelerate the counter narcotics mission down south. But there are very few details on this. So there's not much to note other than that the strikes happened generally in the Eastern Pacific. Within the homeland itself, civil conflict in the form of street takeovers and routine crime continues as before with no real change from last week. The situation is still insane. These street takeovers are still occurring in dozens of cities around the country pretty much every day. So it's hard to keep track of all of these. But the deteriorating situation in Newark, New Jersey has once again emboldened the anti-ISE demonstrations and served as a good barometer for other unrest which might develop if so desired. So very much a busy week all around. On the strategic movement front, the major military movements for this week have remained much the same as before. No big changes from last week with the little caveat that Cuba is still a central focus. This week, US Southern Command announced that a meeting had taken place at the perimeter fence of Guantanamo Bay between General Donovan and a collection of cheery fellows from various levels of Cuban senior military leadership. Not a whole lot of smiles down in Gitmo, which is probably appropriate, but this meeting does highlight tensions in the region because it's not something that is normally conducted. These meetings like this are pretty rare, and this one's not really clear as to what it was all about. Per their post on social media, the reason for the meeting was very vague and only mentioned stuff like operational security and general perimeter security. Who knows what the real reason for the meeting was all about. Maybe it was just a PR event, more about conveying the seriousness of the situation. It's really impossible to know for sure, but the end result is keeping Cuba at the forefront of the news cycle and reminding us that American aspirations in Cuba are still being formulated, whatever they are. As of right now, there's not really a clear explanation of why the United States is interested in Cuba. Of course, there is the general strategic implications of having a hostile nation, or rather a nation which is more amenable to your adversaries, Russia and China. That makes a lot of sense. The Chinese have a lot of radio listening post down in Cuba. So, it would make sense for the United States to be interested in that sort of behavior and getting them to uh push the Chinese out of Cuba would probably be in our strategic interest as a nation or really any nation would have these strategic interests. But the United States has not made that argument. So I don't want to speak for the White House and make arguments that they have not made. And so far they have not articulated exactly why the United States is interested in Cuba. What what's the point? What do we want from Cuba? That has not really been disclosed other than the general uh consensus of well, they're just bad guys. Okay. Well, that's not really an explanation for anything, so we're just going to have to wait and see. But at the moment, the aspirations for Cuba, either control of it or some kind of influence operation or puppet state, I don't really know. I don't know what the point of this is, but that has never stopped us in the past. So, we'll keep an eye on it. Make sure that uh we prepare for any kind of impact from another war breaking out in terms of the economic situation. I don't know. It's too early to say if this is going to make that cross from diplomacy to actual warfare. these days, those uh two sides of the coin tend to blend together quite well. So, we'll just have to wait and see. But anyway, Cuba is still on the menu, and we'll have to wait and see how it all works out. Within the homeland United States this week, the theme has of course been an increase in horrific crime, man-made horrors beyond comprehension, and far-left riots in New Jersey. So, pretty much situation normal at this point. In New Jersey, the riots at the Delaney Hall detention facility have continued and remained fairly kinetic each night. Over the past few days, a full-blown encampment has been set up on site to help the riers with logistics and to provide them with material aid. This was a substantial effort with an entire party tent for like weddings and such being set up on site along with other tents and really your standard Antifa style autonomous zone kind of arrangement. I don't know if that's what they were calling it on site, but that's kind of what they were building over the past week or so. However, last night substantial reinforcements arrived. The New Jersey State Police have been activated and are on site to assist with security of the main compound and also to keep riers from breaching the perimeter. The state police also ordered these encampments to be removed. Uh so the state police is in invested in trying to get that area cleaned up. And as of this morning, the riers essentially just left a bunch of trash behind. Now, the situation is most certainly not over yet. The riots are certainly not over and protesters remain on site pretty much persistently. With the fences being put up overnight, the chance of the compound being overrun is much reduced. But these logistical efforts propping up immediately are an indicator that money is behind these efforts. If we were to zoom out the map just a little bit, we can see that the New York, New Jersey area is absolutely packed with safe houses used by illegal immigrants. And all of these yellow diamond symbols depict an NGO or an agency that is dedicated to helping illegal immigrants evade capture and commit crimes. Now, you might be asking yourself, "Hey, that's a lot of different safe houses of people that are openly committing crimes." Well, yeah, welcome to my world. I've got thousands of these on the maps, and I'm not even uh speculating here. I'm just using what these people put on their own websites. So, if you were to tap one of these icons on my maps and just put the address, the street address that I have listed for that facility into Google, you'll find out exactly what's at that facility. I can't put the name of the facility down. Uh but they can't uh copyright strike me with a mailing address because you can't copyright mailing addresses. So that's how I have to get around that for now. But by and large, all of these yellow diamonds on the map marked safe, that is the uh mill 2525 symbology symbol for a safe house. That's what I've used to settle in on all of these places where illegal immigrants are being staged and taken care of and provided aid and stuff like that. But anyway, I wanted to focus on Delaney because this is kind of an interesting one. This has been the site where a lot of politicians and congressmen and general big figures come to make speeches and rile the crowd up because it's really close to New York. So, of course, everybody's going to go there in grandstand, which is why this uh protesting started off to begin with. I believe it originally started with an alleged hunger strike at the facility among the uh inmates, detainees, whatever you want to call them, uh waiting deportation, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because these illegals are not held here that long. Uh but maybe they are now. I don't know. Either way, it transcended into just kind of a big mess over the past uh week or so. And due to the close proximity to other things, again, why intelligence preparation of the battle space is quite important. If we see that they are within driving distance of a few dozen different uh milliondoll law firms and groups that are willing to provide them with free legal support and any kind of uh support they want. Well, now you see why this is kind of a big deal. You add in the fact that the White House is really really not interested in cracking down anymore after the whole Minneapolis fiasco and you get kind of a recipe for destruction. So hopefully now that the state police are on scene and kind of involved in this, this will simmer down quite a bit at this one facility. But again, there are many other places within driving distance. There are at least a dozen different federal buildings that these uh people can go cause problems at throughout the greater New York, New Jersey area, and there's not a whole lot that anybody can do about it but play whack-a-ole and just I mean you can't secure them all and these people have the numbers to uh dial up tensions to 11 if they so choose. So suffice it to say that this area has a lot of big money and the federal administration is really really desperate to avoid another Minneapolis. Once again, people get all been out of shape about how the immigration issue is on display in the street. Uh, but it's, you know, it's mostly boomers, neocons, normies, and people who don't understand how important crowd control really is. They may not understand looking at a crowd, reading the crowd, understanding what these people are doing, how they're dressed, what kind of insignia they're wearing. They they don't view the world through the lens of counterterrorism. So, they look at this and they just say, "Well, why are the police being mean?" Well, okay. They're they're trying to prevent somebody from getting killed here. And unfortunately, crowd control is a rather blunt instrument sometimes. So, the average normie Fox News watcher out there might not like it when Abua gets a little tearyeyed from the tear gas. But if it saves her from getting shot in the face because she threw a brick at a cop, then you know that maybe maybe there's a a place for crowd control. So either way, it's a delicate balance. Minneapolis showed that the federal government is not interested in maintaining their side of that balance, and Newark has confirmed it as well by being slow to react, by not using tear gas, by not using less lethal crowd control measures. And this is why we now have a thing to talk about. Right. Again, I don't want to focus on this too much, but when it comes to these counter ice things, this is a major concern. It is a much bigger concern than what's going on in Iran. It's a much bigger concern than paying almost $5 for gas, if we're being perfectly honest here. And so far, the immigration issue, specifically being heavy-handed at some of these riots, this is one of the only subjects where the White House actually cares about public perception and opinion, and they care about the public perception and opinion of their own political enemies, which is just an odd thing. But this is also why this minor policing issue has spiralled into a full-blown situation here. So once again, I don't want to make a molehill into a mountain over this sort of thing. This is one facility. This is in New Jersey because of course it is. And it looks like it's starting to simmer down now. At least the fences will make it a little bit harder for them to damage stuff. So there's that. But I haven't talked about immigration stuff in a while. And it's worth keeping these things on the back burner because as important as it is to understand what's going on around the world, it's even more important to understand what's going on here at home. So far, I do not know of a single agency, group, charity, whatever that has actually been shut down for encouraging these riots and for funding them. So, all it takes is the will and you know, just not seeing it. So, enough of that. Let's move to the Middle East for this week. And like a broken record, the situation remains about as tense as before. And let's start by working chronologically uh by walking through what chaos has unfolded in the region this week. Please forgive me if the details and timelines are a little bit off this week. The strangle hold on information has become much more substantial since the ceasefire went into effect. And it's harder to verify the timeline of events, but the general situation is that the war became kinetic again a few days ago, at least in a limited scope. Shortly after the announcements of an all but finalized peace deal last Friday that we discussed in last last weekend's brief, the United States carried out bombings within Iran on Monday, Memorial Day. During this series of strikes, the United States claimed to have taken out a few fastboats along with a SAM site and Bondara Boss. Sentcom did not acknowledge this series of strikes on their social media page. They have stopped providing press releases on engagements and no video was provided. The only reason that we know that it was the United States who conducted these strikes is because Sentcom spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins has been verbally confirming these strikes with reporters in mainstream media interviews. So after the American strikes on May 2526, the Iranians waited a day then launched their sort of proportionate response counterattack, whatever you want to call it, they launched their own attack again. This attack took the form of one ballistic missile targeting Ali Salam air base in Kuwait along with a handful of drones targeting Kuwait as well. At the time, the battle damage caused by this strike was completely censored and impossible to find out. However, as of last night, we now know that as many as five service members and a few contractors were wounded during this attack. So, casualties are still rolling in even from just one missile strike. Remember how I said that Sentcom is no longer posting their engagements on social media, or at least they're not posting all of them. They're just posting some of them. Well, this was quite handy because Sentcom did post about this Iranian counterattack on their page while pretending that the United States did not launch the first strike. They call this an egregious ceasefire violation and an unjustified Iranian aggression. But in reality, it was the United States which broke the ceasefire first by conducting the Memorial Day strikes. Interestingly enough, in this same exact post, Sentcom directly stated that Kuwaiti forces had successfully intercepted this ballistic missile, which might be a technically factual statement if we stretch the meaning of the word intercepted. However, it's also misleading because the missile actually hit the base anyway, wounding five people and damaging two MQ9 drones. So, it sounds like it hit an aircraft hanger. To me, this sounds like a cover for a failed interception. But that's my own personal opinion. I think they're just lying. I think the the missile actually did hit the base. But anyway, I just found this whole exchange completely baffling because believe it or not, propaganda works. In this case, all that needs to be done is to not disclose the fact that the US conducted strikes in Iran. And when the Iranians counteratt attacked, it'll be like the first time, which is exactly what happened. The US attacks on Memorial Day 1st. The Iranians counterattack on May 28th. And on that same night, the United States counter counterattacked the Iranians claiming to strike a drone that was about to be launched along with a few other undisclosed targets in Bond Abbas. Probably. This brings us to yesterday when President Trump posted this message on his social media platform, which contains a lot of information. President Trump outlined the rough criteria for what the United States would accept as part of a peace deal. But on the more tactical level, he also stated that the US would lift the American side of the blockade. Throughout the day yesterday, nothing much happened on this. And right now, it's hard to determine if this is the truth because no ships are transiting the strait due to what happened next. Yesterday evening, as everyone was trying to figure out what is going on, the UK MTO came in from the top rope with a pile drive to the peace process. For those who are just joining us now, the UK MTO or the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center is the leading authority for most maritime security issues in the Middle East. They cover other areas too, but the Middle East is their main focus. And they are like a British fusion cell run by the Royal Navy that works directly with US Navscent to help civilian ships know what security threats are present around the world. So, think of them like a British government agency that's like mostly civilian run, but they're still like directly tied into the government. They're not like a third party private company. So last night they published two advisory notes, both of which are incredibly interesting. The first one was an announcement that is comparatively rare and is not exactly good news. This was a notice of military operations being conducted north of the Musandam peninsula of Oman, which is this area of Oman, the peninsula that juts out north into the straight of Hormuz. So the UK MTO is saying that the US is going to be conducting military operations north of that. Well, that's in the middle of the street of Hormuz. Specifically, this notice warns of additional Iranian mine laying activity, and that US forces are on high alert. The notice also mentions that Iran continues to attempt to impede mine clearance efforts, which is the first public acknowledgement that the Iranian mines are indeed a threat, and that the United States can't exactly get in there to clear them. The notice goes on to mention that, quote, "Any vessel that does not comply with the direction of US forces may be determined to be an imminent threat and subject to proportionate measures of self-defense in accordance with international law." This sentence alone gives us a lot of information. Uh, for one, this further solidifies developments that took place last week, namely that the US is now conducting air strikes on Iranian vessels based on self-defense criteria. For the three of you who remember my anatomy of an air strike video from a while back, you may know that this is an indication that the US has completely revamped the concepts of kinetic targeting and the lines between deliberate targeting and dynamic targeting are not so clear anymore. Anyway, the US has now decided to allow target engagement authorities or TIAS, TEAS, at lower and lower levels of command to conduct self-defense strikes, which would normally be considered offensive strikes under all prior targeting doctrine as outlined by Sentcom's targeting guidance, JP360, and and a bunch of other long-standing guidance. This document from the UK MTO puts this in writing and is intended to warn the maritime shipping community that the United States will be conducting kinetic strikes in the strait very soon. The second document provided by the UK MTO is a warning that the blockade of Iranian ports is still in effect which takes the wind out of the sales regarding the lifting of the American blockade. So according to US Navent as in United States Naval Forces Central Command, the blockade is still in effect and this notice was published many hours after President Trump's announcement on social media. So somebody is lying about the blockade being lifted. In fact, these two notices are major indications and warnings of the war kicking off again soon and a primary focus is being placed on the straightup Hormuz. This notice directly states that the US Navy cannot guarantee the safety of neutral or merchant shipping, which seems pretty clear to me. And I don't think that any merchant shipping, at least any Western shipping, is going to go through the straight anytime soon unless they pay the Iranian toll. And if they pay the Iranian toll, then the US might pick them up, too. Because funny enough, as I'm recording this right now, I just see a notice come in from Sentcom stating that they disabled a non-compliant vessel in the Gulf of Oman to prevent blockade violation. So, I don't even know what's going on anymore. President Trump says the blockade's lifted. Uh, this looked pretty clear to me. Maybe I'm just stupid or something. I just can't read very well. And now Scom is saying, "Well, we're shooting at vessels which violate the blockade." So, I don't get it. Um, or maybe I do get it. Maybe I do understand it quite well. Uh because this type of well, we're going to let you go, but then when you get there, we're going to bomb you kind of mentality is really prevalent. I'm sure many of you have picked up on where this idea is coming from because there's somebody else in the world who tends to do this sort of thing. We're definitely not going to shoot. You can definitely go through this area. Oh, we bombed you. Okay. Yeah, now we see where this is coming from, right? At least that's my own general theory and I'll leave it at that. But anyway, I'll let that go for now. Uh maybe one day people will start reading between the lines and understand what's really going on here. But if maritime shipping needed any more reason to stay out of the straight this morning something else happened. Observers in Oman spotted a floating object that they assessed to be a naval mine which they say is currently floating to the west of the inshore traffic zone which is the new name that has been given uh to the alternative traffic separation scheme going through Omani waters. So there's a mine floating out there uh somewhere. what they think is a mine. Who who knows what it could actually be, but that's what they said. So, as of this morning, that's pretty much how things stand. We are on day 91 of the war, 3 months in, and the potential for peace remains very much off the menu for the time being. I would venture a guess to say that the hesitance to enter the straight of Hormuz from a western aligned vessel is roughly the same as it was during the height of the shooting. Otherwise, vessels are taking the Iranian route. They're paying the toll and they're just going on their merry way. I don't know if these vessels are being intercepted by the US Navy eventually at some point or what's going on, but right now the most hardest hit, the most affected vessels in the Persian Gulf that are stranded for 3 months now, a full quarter of the year are Western aligned vessels, American vessels, and tanker ships that are not aligned with the Iranians. Of course, things could change rather quickly. Uh, like I've said for months now and many others have said for months, the cleanest ending for this war, well certainly the quickest, but also the cleanest ending for the war is literally for the US to just walk away, declare victory, and privately cut a deal with the Iranians to give them whatever they want to open the straight again. So, we always have to consider the fact that that might happen. It could happen. We could just see a Trump social post one day and the Iranians confirm it that says the war is over. The straight's open, and we're all going to go home, right? That could happen. Those types of posts have been made several times before and they weren't true in the past, but it could happen. I don't want to neglect the fact that one day this could just be over. Personally, I don't think that's what's going to happen at all. I think that this war is going to drag on for a while longer, especially when we have a couple more months of strategic petroleum reserve left in the tank and the markets, the oil markets continue to be completely divorced from reality. some more mainstream sources are starting to catch on to what has been obvious for about 3 months now, which is that oil prices are not reflective of the situation at hand and that the bigger concern is the petroleum supply itself. As bad as prices are right now at the gas pump, it turns out that taking 20 million barrels per day out of the worldwide supply chain will eventually result in actual shortages of petroleum products. Uh the week before last, the United States has drained the strategic petroleum reserve at a higher rate than at any point in history. At least that's the claim that's going around. I don't know if the numbers actually match up, but it certainly seems to based on the charts. Gas is almost $5 per gallon in many places around the country, and this is actually artificially low. Like I said last week, gas prices should be much higher than they actually are right now. And one of the reasons that this has not happened is the wholesale draining of our strategic petroleum reserve. in addition to other nations doing the same from their end and a global tightening of the belt when it comes to petroleum products. So all in all, supply chain issues are seriously on the menu the longer this goes on. As we've known from the very start, time is a finite resource, and as of last night, there are even talks of extending the ceasefire by another 60 days. If that is the intent, we might be in a bit of a pickle because if we continue to drain these strategic reserves at the current rate of rise, we might not have that much time left before supply shortages begin and gas pumps in the US start running dry. Of course, this is not a major concern right now, even though it should be. But the Feds keep kicking that can down the road, and there's not a whole lot of uh expediency toward figuring this solution out. We're 91 days into this and there's not really a whole lot of interest in uh finding a solution anytime soon. It's like, well, let's schedule the meeting for two weeks from now. Well, okay. Uh but that's two weeks of very little oil making its way out of the region. So, not a super great look when the summertime travel season is just beginning right about now. And most Americans are going to be uh shaking their head at the gas pump unless something is done to fix this situation. And as of last night, it looks like many, many indicators are stacking up that point to the United States seeking more of a military solution rather than being interested in some sort of negotiation. But once again, a lot of this is going to be speculation. It'll be over when it's over, but right now it's not over. We just have to take it one day at a time and see what we can do on our end to be more prepared no matter what happens. So that's all I've got for today and let's wrap up with the Ghost Net reports for this week. Great net again all around this week and I think a lot of people are participating because weather is great this time of year. So I picked up way more people than I normally do from my own radio station. This week I heard quite a lot of people testing relaying messages around the world, testing other modes and frequencies. Some people trying to hit Australia, which is always really cool. I haven't hit Australia yet. That's pretty that would be pretty cool to uh do. It's pretty hard to hit Australia here from the east coast, but but otherwise, I saw a lot of people checking in to see who's up on the network and exchanging information completely off the grid. Radio networks like this one and others are really helpful when the power goes out, when the grid is completely down, and uh you have to operate completely offline, and maybe even in an environment where there's a lot of jamming. Resilient and capable communications are really helpful to have, especially when things are not going super well. So, that's all I've got for today. Thanks to all of you who support the work here on Patreon and thanks to all of you for sticking around as the summertime rolls in and everything gets more complicated. I have made some progress on the more educational material side of the house this week and I hope to have more at tech tutorials and more more well-rounded informational content out soon to help us navigate these strange and interesting times. There's never enough time in the day and I know that we're all trying to do our best. So, we'll continue on and try to stay one step ahead of the chaos as best we can. The goal of the Ghost Net and most of this other stuff too is to be an asset to the community even when times get tough and everything is collapsing around us. Hopefully things don't ever get that serious, but having these capabilities will be very handy and allow us to have the confidence to face whatever hardship comes next. So, let's get after it and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for September 14th through the 20th 2025. Like I say every week it has been very very busy. But thankfully this week, dare I say it, we have a bit of good news. So let's get right to it. Starting off with the global strategic concerns. All in all, around the world it's been fairly dynamic in many different ways. Down in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, the United States has struck another narco vessel. I don't have an exact grid, as with all of these, so we just have to kind of guess where it's at. But the United States continues to strike narco vessels down there. You would think you would think that they would uh be a little bit more careful. We keep dropping hellfires and uh what I also suspect to be small diameter bombs or SCBs, the GBU39s, I believe. And the cartel, the cartel deololis continues to send those boats out. Everyone's talking about how we keep sinking their boats, but uh nobody's really remarked on the fact that we keep dropping hellfires on their boats and they keep sending them out anyway. I don't know, if I was a small boat driver, I might be a little bit more hesitant, but that kind of speaks to the deliberation and the dedication that these cartels have to running uh drugs and people throughout the region. So, moving over to Europe. This is a developing situation as I'm recording this. Uh this morning, there were several cyber attacks that struck multiple airports uh not just in London, but also around Europe. Apparently, it was that the ticketing system uh was cyber attacked, but no real indication on what's going on or what's affected, but a lot of flights have been cancelled and a lot of people stranded because of that. So, we've seen this before in Europe, so it's not entirely surprising, but it's something to be aware of if you're traveling to Europe uh over the next couple of days. And finally, here in the Far East, we have seen an improvement of relations between the United States and China regarding the Tik Tok deal. So, it's a complicated arrangement and conglomerate of ownership, but the United States appear appears to have gotten what they wanted and uh China seems okay with it, I suppose. But either way, this is a a positive movement for tensions in the region to kind of deescalate. That's the way things are for right now, even though the Taiwan issue has kind of not really been addressed and still remains a fairly persistent point of conflict between the East and the West. So, that's it for the rather long-winded uh overview of what's going on this week. Let's move over to strategic movement. Like I said before, the war in the Caribbean Sea continues as before. All of the platforms that were down there a couple of weeks ago are still there. They're just moving around. Uh the F-35s are in Puerto Rico. And there are quite a few MQ9 Reaper drones that have been observed in Puerto Rico as well. So it does indeed look like the United States is settling in for the long haul uh to just keep sinking as many boats as humanly possible coming out of Venezuela. So that's it for strategic movement. Let's move around to the United States and talk about some of the kinetic events that have taken place this week. Here at home in the United States, we have had turmoil that has taken a few different uh tones over the past week or so since the Charlie Kirk assassination. Most of which is centered around a few different ideas. So, first of all, we have a lot of immigration uh stuff getting kicked back up again. So, we've got local opposition to ICE operations in Chicago, which is taking kind of uh national spotlight at the moment, but we also have similar efforts in New York City. So, we've got that pretty solid base of counter ice and pro-rime rhetoric and atmosphere out there in a lot of major cities around the United States. But, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, we can just heap a lot more icing on top of that cake, which has taken the form of uh two things. One, speech related stuff and also violence related stuff. So, the White House has done a very poor job, I'll say this very clearly, the White House has done a very very poor job at separating out these two issues, right? There is a major major major difference between saying mean things about Charlie Kirk and threatening to harm more people. Right? There there's a very clear line there, right? And it turns out that there's nearly complete overlap between those two ideas, right? When it comes to most people talking about the Kirk assassination, many of you have seen that that vin diagram is basically two circles stacked on top of each other. Meaning that the people who say mean things about Charlie Kirk also tend to encourage violence in the same exact social media post. Right? So, the White House has not done a very good job at at talking about that, right? And they're they've set themselves back quite a bit. I think they drag out Pam Bonnie and throw her on the uh media circuit to talk about hate speech, not realizing that this is not really a speech issue at this point, right? This is not about trying to police issues of someone saying mean things about somebody. They can do that all they want, right? That doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. What does matter is interrupting the terrorist attack planning cycle. And that's exactly what the federal government is trying to do. At least it's what it seems like. It's what I hope. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is kind of a common thing these days in all political realms. But all of this comes down to there being a major difference between somebody saying, you know, Charlie Kirk was a bad guy and someone hopping on social media and encouraging their millions of followers to go out and hurt people. And the latter is exactly what is happening. You've got a lot of streamers on Twitch, on kick, and they are uh they're all over these these social media platforms. They're all over these streaming platforms, and they're speaking to young people. They're speaking to people in Discord. They're arranging these groups, right? We know just from the the Kirk assassination itself that the killer was in, you know, a Discord group, right? And a lot of people had knowledge of the attack beforehand. At least that's that's the general insinuation so far based on statements by the FBI. So, all in all, this is not really a speech thing. So for all the libertarians screeching out there, chill out, right? This is not a speech thing. This is in my world now. This is uh this is in the world of counterterrorism, you will find no bigger skeptic of the US government than myself. However, if I hear the words slippery slope one more time, I'm going to become rather annoyed because we are in the trenches now, right? So all in all, positive movement in the right direction, but we also have to keep an eye on a lot of the malign actors that are starting to crop up. We've got Antifa, which is probably getting ready to mobilize if the feds uh actually do make them a terrorist organization. I don't know how they would do that to be honest. They may just flag them as an FTO so that they can cut their funding, but a lot of their funding comes from billionaires in the domestic United States. So, I'm not quite sure how that's going to work out. So, I don't want to commit to any kind of uh assessment on that just just yet. The left was largely neutered by the election. They lost a lot of their steam, but I think they're going to probably get it back if uh organizations like Antifa start becoming a good way to solidify resistance to the Trump regime. Right. I'm not going to say it's 2016 all over again. with regards to the mobilization of the left to, you know, just start their screeching as well. But it may uh it may take some of that historical atmosphere moving forward. But so that's what I'm trying to focus on uh personally moving forward is the immigration angle, the the cartel stuff that's linked into that with organized crime and and more standard uh criminal enterprise kind of stuff, but also the more terrorism angle, the the counterterrorism angle that comes with a lot of these leftist groups becoming more and more emboldened and wellunded and stuff like that. So going to be a busy winter all around, but that's exactly what I'm trying to focus on. And it's not all negative. It's more along the lines of just being aware of what's going on. You don't have to be doom and gloom all the time, right? That's very popular to do these days. But I think that it's very important to slot uh that reaction to Kirk's murder into the appropriate response, right? So yeah, you can mourn and lament uh not just Kirk himself, but also the state of the world and the state of the country, but we've got to get to work and we've got to get serious about our own survival now. If we didn't realize that before, we got to realize it now. and uh especially amongst all of the the normies that are going to come over and start realizing what's happening around them for once in their life. Uh so they are not to be shunned, they are to be helpfully guided, right? We're all about helping each other out and uh better late than never. So more broadly around the country, a lot of the violence and a lot of the kinetic activities that have taken place have largely been centered around the firing slash uh suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, the Jimmy Kimmel show, right? The ratings were already down. ABC was looking for an out and they got it. They're probably going to do the same with the View actually u because I saw that um they were getting some federal pressure from the FCC on that one too, but don't think this is any sort of victory even though there's hundreds of demonstrators out in the street protesting to bring Jimmy Kimmel back, his show was already tanking and they're probably looking for a way out. But nonetheless, the same demonstrators that are protesting a Jimmy Kimmel stuff that nobody cares about walk across the street and then protest ICE, right? So, they're the same kind of people, the same demonstrators, same groups, right? And some of them can be pretty kinetic, even though they're a lot of them are mentally ill, such as in Pittsburgh where the FBI field office uh in in Pittsburgh there was attacked by a dude who rammed his vehicle into the front gate or the the entry control point or ECP. No idea what that's about, but generally vehicle ramming attacks tend to be one of two things. A drunk driver or someone who's clinically insane. And it seems to me like it was the latter in this case because authorities stated that he had written uh like with a marker or a paint pen or something all over his vehicle. I tried to find some photos of that to see what he was talking about, but I I couldn't find any photos of what he actually wrote on his vehicle from the from what the feds have said. It doesn't seem like it was very uh clear as to what this dude was all about. But anyway, vehicle ramming attacks always tend to uh pop up when there's some something crazy in the news, right? gets all the the loonies uh riled up and this has definitely been a week for that. So, most of the unrest has of course been centered in Chicago this week uh because the politicians just keep heaping gasoline on that bonfire of counter ice and pro- crime initiative by the local politicians. You've got the mayor, Brandon Johnson, uh, in utter panic mode, trying to do what he can to keep the feds out of his city because he doesn't want to look bad. But because he's not a very smart man, he doesn't seem to realize that the words that he says are going to be recorded and they have meaning. So, when you call law enforcement a sickness that needs to be eradicated, that tends to be what we might u catch a terrorism charge for. So, I don't think the feds are going to go that far. They I mean they could if they wanted, but either way, chances are if you see somebody wearing a mask at one of these protests or one of these like events where you know ICE has to fling somebody across the street, chances are that the person flying through the air is a political candidate uh for some political office in Chicago. So that's mostly what that's about. However, things can get pretty violent pretty quickly. I know everybody's kind of burned out on the whole protester scene. We've seen thousands of people protesting random things that I've causes I've never even heard about over the past few years. I know it's not 2016 anymore. We're all kind of burned out about it, but that still doesn't mean that some pretty serious stuff can't can't happen. So, just something to be aware of. A lot of these groups are trying to become more solidified. It's not like they're formalized groups a lot of times, but you do have this weird conglomerate of politicians running for office trying to throw rocks at ice. people who are paid to be there, people who are there because they're mentally ill, you know, the whole gambit, right? So, it's not like you can put them under one convenient label despite, you know, media sources wanting to do that. But either way, something I'm going to be focusing on over the next few weeks because the White House, and it's not necessarily their fault a lot of times, but the White House has indeed engaged in a lot of activity that is going to be a point of solidification and a point of like unity for these uh for these people who are trying to cause harms. So, it's not the end of the world, but it's something to be aware of because most leftist politicians and leftist voice like politically left voices, even elected officials have urged violence. And you you can't underestimate that, you have to realize that crazy people exist. And though it may be hard for you to imagine that someone would look at a congressman or a congresswoman on social media and say, "I'm going to do exactly what they said." You got to remember people listen to the Kardashians for fashion advice. Okay? So there are enough crazy people out there listening to politicians and listening to big voices and listening to kick streamers. The people most likely to conduct the attack are the people who are also listening to these violent people and doing what they say. Right? So you can't discount that. It's not the end of the world again. But we've got to be aware that the risks are pretty high. And as long as these politicians and these influencers, it it sounds, you know, really bad to say that people listen to influencers, but they do. That's that they they really do. They do on the right, they do on the left. And as long as a lot of big voices are calling for continued violence, then you're going to get continued violence. So, I know a lot of conservative podcasters are now obviously and very quietly increasing their security, which is a good thing. Uh, but it's just something to to be mindful of, right? So, getting down into the regions, let's talk about Washington DC this week. And this is where we get probably the best news we've had all year, which is the changes to the H-1B visa scheme. Yesterday, President Trump signed the gold card uh membership sort of uh subscription package to American citizenship, I suppose. But they also changed how H-1B visas work. And it seems to be a quite a positive change uh for everything from counterterrorism to the safety of Americans on roadways to uh the American job market and economy as well. So, what have they done? Well, the short version is they have made it so that if you want an H-1B visa, you got to pay a $100,000 annual payment to the feds. So, they've slapped a $100,000 fee per H1B visa per year. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what many might describe to be a torpedo to the H-1B visa farming scheme. So, if any company, if any American company wants to have an H-1B visa come over from India, they have to redeem the $100,000 annual payment and they have to keep paying that along with a bunch of other uh stipulations as well. There's a pretty high uh fee just to apply. And then there's the $100,000 fee on top of that. So, it's basically not really removed the H-1B visa at, you know, entirely from, you know, existence, but it has made it very cost prohibitive to engage in as opposed to the few thousand I used to have to pay just in miscellaneous fees. Now, it's 100 grand per person per year. Now, some of you out there may have exceptionally good hearing, and you may be wondering why you don't hear the wailing and nashing of teeth from Silicon Valley, who have basically marketed their entire existence around the H-1B visa farming schemes. In other words, why is big tech not freaking out about this? Well, mostly because uh the pipeline for big tech basically remains the same. So, most of Silicon Valley gets their uh Indians imported into the United States through student visas. So, they bring him over on a student visa and then they can transition into an H-1B visa from there. That's the loophole for this. That's the catch uh to what Trump just signed, at least based on what I can read. So, that's a way that big tech can be okay with this because their farming scheme for foreign workers basically remains unchanged. They can get someone over here on a student visa or an L1 visa and then transition that into an H-1B visa, right? So, the the the farming is still there for big tech. So, don't think Microsoft's going to be emptying out anytime soon. And also, fun fact, this doesn't apply retroactively. So, everybody who's already in the United States with an H-1B visa is going to stay here, right? So, they're not getting booted because of that. So, some good, some bad. I think it's generally good, but it could be better, right? I think a lot more pressure can be applied uh to to get this loophole closed up so that you can't transition one visa to another to to escape the uh the magic uh fee payment here. Another thing which was done separately uh but it was something that was done kind of unilaterally by the state department is that the state department said they're no longer going to be accepting visas for any commercial truck drivers effective immediately. They Marco Rubio announced that I think on Thursday. So again, positive movement, right? I think that was probably done based on the deaths of those people in Florida uh from the Harender Singh uh case. But so again, all in all, positive movement, good stuff. We'll keep moving and keep applying pressure to uh to to help close these loopholes and maybe uh address some of those 55 million visa holders in the United States in due time. Moving over to the Midwestern region, I kind of jumped the gun and talked about Illinois, Chicago already, so I'll kind of skip that. But I wanted to mention something that is rather interesting in the realm of the immigration uh angle, which is Minnesota. So, a couple of days ago, the marriage license for Ilhan Omar was leaked, which confirms that she indeed married her brother so that he could obtain a green card. So, the classic green card marriage, the classic immigration fraud. So, I thought that was kind of interesting. I don't know if there's any traction or movement on trying to police this sort of thing, but I mean, you you can't have a much more smoking gun than this uh when it comes to immigration fraud and committing multiple felonies, right? So, I don't know. Uh it had been suspected for a long time. Uh I don't know if they're going to try to oust a congresswoman from office, especially one that's, you know, kind of got a lot of power these days or not a lot of power, but a lot of is very vocal these days. But I don't know. they went after George Santos. So, but yeah, I did want to mention it just because I don't want it to become memory hold and I thought it was kind of uh interesting that what we knew years ago has proven to be true. So, that's it for the United States. Let's briefly touch on Venezuela this week. I am continuing to work on the IPB or intelligence preparation of the battle space for Venezuela. Yes, I know this is amateur grade stuff, but airfields and military bases are what you got to start with first if you don't have time. And the whole world's been a little bit busy over the past couple of weeks. So, I'm trying to get back into Venezuela, especially considering that now that we have three sunken narco vessels, and I suspect there will be more. My guess is the next thing is probably going to be an F-16 shootown. The the Venezuelan military has mostly slipped into posturing. They know they can't win uh against the US military, and it's not to insult V the Venezuelan military. They literally just can't. There's there's no way they can have any kind of defense against the US military. It's just not it's just a non-starter. Not to say that they can't, you know, put up a good fight in some certain areas and in some situations, but by and large, uh, considering the force that's down there, I mean, you know, they're not going to be able to stop us from whacking narco boats. So, that will probably continue. The cartel deos, which is more heavily involved in the government of Venezuela than one might think. They're basically the way that cartels work in Venezuela is this one cartel is basically implanted at multiple levels of military and political existence. So unlike in say Mexico where there's this like uh passive, you know, everybody's on the take with, you know, the cartels down there and there's multiple cartels kind of fighting for each other, the cartel de la Solles is really the only power in Venezuela and they're more heavily ingrained in Maduro's government. So it's it's not like they're, you know, completely married up with the government, but they're close, right? They're a lot closer than we might think. So that's why this is kind of a big deal because when you're targeting a cartel in Venezuela, you're really targeting in many cases the Venezuelan military. So I would not be surprised if these dudes on these narco boats, which they seem to be targeting with rather large munitions, probably to ensure there are no survivors uh or evidence left. My guess is that they're probably soldiers. Uh but again, that's pure speculation, you know, so there's no way to confirm or deny e either way. But that's kind of how things work in Venezuela. It's a very strange and unique relationship between the government, the military, and the cartels, or really the one main cartel that's down there, which is kind of interesting because then TDA, Trender Aragon, gets thrown into the the mix because that's how the United States is claiming to go after these when really they're not targeting TDA. There's TDA has very little presence in Venezuela now. Although they they might be starting to get more popular uh since the United States has interest in Venezuela, but before anybody knew who TDA was, Maduro had already thrown most of TDA's leadership in prison. So they were kind of on their way out and then uh they found their way into the United States because we had open borders for so many years and then they started committing a lot of crimes and occupying places. Then they became a household name in the United States and cut forward to where the United States is on the brink of war with Venezuela. And we've got a complicated story, don't we? We've got a complicated situation. So, I will have uh more clear products uh on this soon. I just uh right now I'm trying to learn a lot of stuff myself. I'm not a Venezuela expert, but uh thankfully uh Venezuela leaks more information to the internet than War Thunder forums. So, it's not terribly hard to find out where their troops are located and what bases are truly operational versus which ones are just derelictked. So, it just it just takes me a little bit more time to go through it and figure out what's where just in case things start to get a little bit more exciting down there. So, I think that's uh pretty much it for today. I'll roll it up. It's already I've already talked too much today. So, uh let's go ahead and uh finish up with the intercepted ghost net reports. Again, the past couple of weeks, I I I didn't mention it last week, but the past couple of weeks have been absolutely fantastic for the Ghost Net. I've talked to a lot of people. I've got a lot of messages from people who say they've seen, you know, 40 to 70 people uh on the net during the window at any given time. Not that everybody's talking, but they've just seen these call signs come up through like heartbeat messages or something like that. Of course, this is all mostly dependent on solar weather, right? So, if there's a lot of solar weather interference, you're not going to see or talk to as many people as you might otherwise. However, uh I think that the solar weather for the past couple weeks hasn't been super terrible. Uh maybe it's because the sun is starting to set later in the day. I don't know. But either way, it's good stuff. More people are using it. A lot of more different call signs are are popping up and uh I think that a lot of people are getting involved. So, also, as another reminder, there is a VHF option, so it's probably not going to be successful. So don't get your hopes up, but it's there. If all you have is a bow fang, I've got a frequency for you. So download the ghost net plan and you'll see all of the stuff there. There is also a meshtastic node. So for those of you who want to plug that into your fancy RM1 node or any other meshtastic device, you can certainly do so. Line of sight stuff is just not really good to have on a national level simply because the chances of everyone being in line of sight of each other is fairly minimal. Whereas with HF, I can talk to somebody in Canada or down in, you know, Central America fairly easily. But from where I'm at, I can only get a couple of miles with say a Bow Fang radio, right? So unless somebody's a couple of miles, you know, from me, then there's not really a pretty good chance of the line of sight stuff working super well. But guess what? It's there just in case you need it. So that's all I have for today, everyone. Thank you for all of your support. I really do mean it. That's what keeps me going forward and uh continuing this stuff. So, thank you guys all for that and I will see you next time.

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

…reportedly underway in jenan West Bank Israel has rejected all calls by the United Nations for a ceasefire and has vowed to achieve the total Destruction of Hamas United States Central Command confirms that so far…

…to mention it because we're seeing these attacks increase all over the nation moving to the west central midwestern region we have two new editions for this time both of them vandalism both of them…

…up next time but moving on to the east central midwest nothing new to add nothing no new information on this one same with the west central midwest no new attacks that i'm aware of…