//The Wire//2300Z June 25, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: TWO MAJOR EARTHQUAKES STRIKE VENEZUELA, WIDESPREAD DEVASTATION REPORTED. SEPARATE EARTHQUAKE STRIKES JAPAN. HORMUZ CRISIS CONTINUES AS IRAN STRIKES MERCHANT FOR TAKING UNAUTHORIZED ROUTE THROUGH STRAIT. OIL PRODUCTION SHUT DOWN IN IRAQ DUE TO LACK OF TANKERS TO OFFLOAD CRUDE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Venezuela: Yesterday afternoon two major earthquakes struck just west of Caracas. The first earthquake struck shortly after 4:00pm local time, and was estimated to be a magnitude of 7.2. Less than one minute later, a separate earthquake struck in nearly the same area, measuring a magnitude of 7.5. Widespread destruction has been reported throughout La Guaira, the coastal metropolitan area that was closest to the epicenter of the quakes. Many structures within Caracas also experienced heavy damage, or were destroyed outright by the earthquakes, and major rescue and recovery operations are underway. Analyst Comment: This disaster is already one of the worst ever recorded in South America, and so far the casualty count is expected to be in the thousands. Right now, the latest figures estimate roughly 11,000 missing with thousands of people currently entrapped within collapsed buildings. Due to the complete devastation throughout much of the region, the true scale of yesterday's earthquakes may take some time to become known, though the videos that have emerged so far indicate devastation on an unfathomable scale. Japan: Overnight, another earthquake was reported off the coast of the northern province of Iwate. An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.2 struck just offshore, however not much damage was reported due to the remote nature of the epicenter. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Middle East, the situation has become complicated on multiple fronts. Firstly, the peace talks continue, which at this point is good news all on it's own, even if rhetoric has been flying all around. None of this rhetoric is trustworthy at the moment, but progress appears to be made toward solidifying a final deal. Another point of confusion or contention over the past 24 hours has been the complicated management of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil is flowing to some degree, and though the number of tankers transiting crude out of the Gulf is nowhere near historic norms, progress is progress. This progress was briefly derailed this morning, after Iranian forces conducted a drone strike on one vessel which was attempting to take the southern route through Omani waters. Ships have been disregarding Iranian demands to take the northern route for a few days, and this morning Iranian patience apparently ran out, and one vessel was hit. How the US responds to this will be notable, but right now the complicating factors are the discrepancies of which routes are being used by ships. More broadly, global oil futures have fallen sharply since the announcement of the MOU being signed, and gas prices are subsequently falling. However, gas prices still remain at around $4.00 per gallon nationwide, because there is still a large discrepancy between the *futures* prices, and the actual *delivery* price of crude that is being pumped off of tankers into the United States right now. As a result it is important to understand how long this recovery process will take. For instance, yesterday the West Qurna 2 petroleum facility in Iraq (one of the largest oil fields in the world) had to shut down production, because their storage tanks are full, and there are no tankers available to load onto for export. This is simply due to timing...nothing moves fast when it comes to moving tankers around the world. This is why the world may breathe a sigh of relief that the war appears to be over at this point, but we're not out of the woods just yet. The next major questions will be whether or not the complex balance of oil production and maritime shipping can stabilize before the more serious impacts arrive. And now that the Iranians have continued to demonstrate that they are willing to enforce their control of the Strait with explosives, this crisis is certainly not over. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z June 25, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: TWO MAJOR EARTHQUAKES STRIKE VENEZUELA, WIDESPREAD DEVASTATION REPORTED. SEPARATE EARTHQUAKE STRIKES JAPAN. HORMUZ CRISIS CONTINUES AS IRAN STRIKES MERCHANT FOR TAKING UNAUTHORIZED ROUTE THROUGH STRAIT. OIL PRODUCTION SHUT DOWN IN IRAQ DUE TO LACK OF TANKERS TO OFFLOAD CRUDE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Venezuela: Yesterday afternoon two major earthquakes struck just west of Caracas. The first earthquake struck shortly after 4:00pm local time, and was estimated to be a magnitude of 7.2. Less than one minute later, a separate earthquake struck in nearly the same area, measuring a magnitude of 7.5. Widespread destruction has been reported throughout La Guaira, the coastal metropolitan area that was closest to the epicenter of the quakes. Many structures within Caracas also experienced heavy damage, or were destroyed outright by the earthquakes, and major rescue and recovery operations are underway. Analyst Comment: This disaster is already one of the worst ever recorded in South America, and so far the casualty count is expected to be in the thousands. Right now, the latest figures estimate roughly 11,000 missing with thousands of people currently entrapped within collapsed buildings. Due to the complete devastation throughout much of the region, the true scale of yesterday's earthquakes may take some time to become known, though the videos that have emerged so far indicate devastation on an unfathomable scale. Japan: Overnight, another earthquake was reported off the coast of the northern province of Iwate. An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.2 struck just offshore, however not much damage was reported due to the remote nature of the epicenter. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Middle East, the situation has become complicated on multiple fronts. Firstly, the peace talks continue, which at this point is good news all on it's own, even if rhetoric has been flying all around. None of this rhetoric is trustworthy at the moment, but progress appears to be made toward solidifying a final deal. Another point of confusion or contention over the past 24 hours has been the complicated management of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil is flowing to some degree, and though the number of tankers transiting crude out of the Gulf is nowhere near historic norms, progress is progress. This progress was briefly derailed this morning, after Iranian forces conducted a drone strike on one vessel which was attempting to take the southern route through Omani waters. Ships have been disregarding Iranian demands to take the northern route for a few days, and this morning Iranian patience apparently ran out, and one vessel was hit. How the US responds to this will be notable, but right now the complicating factors are the discrepancies of which routes are being used by ships. More broadly, global oil futures have fallen sharply since the announcement of the MOU being signed, and gas prices are subsequently falling. However, gas prices still remain at around $4.00 per gallon nationwide, because there is still a large discrepancy between the *futures* prices, and the actual *delivery* price of crude that is being pumped off of tankers into the United States right now. As a result it is important to understand how long this recovery process will take. For instance, yesterday the West Qurna 2 petroleum facility in Iraq (one of the largest oil fields in the world) had to shut down production, because their storage tanks are full, and there are no tankers available to load onto for export. This is simply due to timing...nothing moves fast when it comes to moving tankers around the world. This is why the world may breathe a sigh of relief that the war appears to be over at this point, but we're not out of the woods just yet. The next major questions will be whether or not the complex balance of oil production and maritime shipping can stabilize before the more serious impacts arrive. And now that the Iranians have continued to demonstrate that they are willing to enforce their control of the Strait with explosives, this crisis is certainly not over. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z April 2, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: COLONIAL PIPELINE SHUT DOWN BRIEFLY OVERNIGHT AFTER SUSTAINING DAMAGE IN GEORGIA. STRATEGIC BUILDUP CONTINUES IN MIDDLE EAST AS UNITED STATES BEGINS TARGETING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE WITHIN IRAN.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Middle East: American targeting within Iran continues as Iranian forces continue to hit U.S. bases throughout the region. American bases in Kuwait have been hammered over the past few days, with ballistic missile strikes being reported at Camp Arifjan and Ali Al Salem Airbase. Within Iran, this morning the United States began more deliberate attacks on infrastructure which are not solely military targets. The B1 bridge west of Tehran was destroyed, which was not yet opened (it was still under construction) but would have been the largest bridge in the country and the main link between Tehran and Karaj. Analyst Comment: The Iranians are very likely to retaliate by hitting one (or several) critical bridges throughout the region, on the south side of the Persian Gulf. The King Fahd Bridge linking Bahrain with the mainland was already struck by the Iranians on the opening days of the war (when Saudi forces crossed the bridge to put down the Shia uprising/protests in Manama) so if they wanted to hit it again they've already demonstrated that they have the ability to do so. Iraq: This morning the US State Department issued another travel alert, specifically warning that attacks may escalate over the next 24-48 hours. Analyst Comment: This is probably in response to the kidnapping of American journalist Shelly Kittleson by Kataib Hezbollah two days ago (who still remains missing in Baghdad) but also the deteriorating security situation nationwide, which is being compounded by various Iraqi militia groups beginning to mobilize against American forces in the region. More strategically, the situation is Iraq has deteriorated to it's lowest point in years, and there is now a very real risk of some kind of insurgent uprising coming about, due to the opposing militant groups which have been stirred up by the situation in Iran. This will be an important situation to monitor over the next few weeks. India: Following weeks of petroleum disruptions nationwide, the first oil tanker arrived in Vadinar overnight, completing India's resumption of purchasing crude oil from Iran, which was originally halted in 2019. Analyst Comment: India had previously halted the purchase of Iranian oil due to American sanctions, but due to the war in the Middle East resulting in the US waiving oil export sanctions, India has resumed the purchase of oil from Iran. Indian media reports that the transaction was carried out in Chinese Yuan. -HomeFront- Georgia: Yesterday evening Colonial Pipeline's Line 1 was shut down after sustaining damage during drilling operations. The pipeline was shut down for several hours while repairs were conducted, and as of this morning Line 1 is fully functional. Analyst Comment: While this incident was not the result of malign action and it was resolved quickly, this was still a big deal. This is the largest gasoline pipeline network in the United States, and provides the vast majority of gasoline to the east coast. Considering the recent volatility in the oil markets, this outage occurring right before a major holiday weekend for travel was exceptionally poor timing. Washington D.C. - Several leadership changes have taken place this afternoon. Attorney General Pam Bondi has been relieved of her duties, with her Deputy Todd Blanche taking over her roles until a replacement is found. At the Pentagon, General Randy George was requested to take an early retirement, effective immediately, stepping down from his role as Army Chief of Staff. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: President Trump's address to the nation last night concluded without any major announcement of policy changes, and the speech was neither an announcement of the end of the war nor of any substantial increase of combat operations. Timeline wise, President Trump stated that the conflict will last 2-3 more weeks, though no official exit plan was conveyed. More generally, speeches by political officials are not usually reflective of the tactical situation on the ground and as it stands right now, the raw information available to the public continues to indicate another surge of military hardware and resources into the Middle East. Yesterday CENTCOM published their list of assets deployed to support Operation Epic Fury, which included many resources which have recently arrived in theater, such as the EA-37B COMPASS CALL platform (which is used for electronic warfare). This platform arrived on station yesterday, having been observed at Mildenhall Air Base on her way to the Middle East two days ago. Aircraft movements such as this one (and others) continue to indicate that operations are ramping up...not down. National-level reconnaissance and EW assets being moved into theater at this point (conducting their first combat deployment a full month after the war began), is not an indicator of the war coming to a close. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z July 17, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: GULF WAR ESCALATES AS INFRASTRUCTURE TARGETING BEGINS. SIGNIFICANT IRANIAN RETALIATION REPORTED ON AMERICAN INSTALLATIONS. IRANIAN TARGETING OF MERCHANT SHIPPING REMAINS CONSTANT.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Middle East: The war escalated again overnight, with the United States beginning the series of strikes on bridges and infrastructure targets intended to soften up areas near the coast of Iran. Several bridges were struck in the vicinity of Bandar Abbas, along with the usual nightly strikes on more military targets. On the Iranian side, the targeting of American installations has been substantial over the past few days. In Iraq, Iranian forces successfully struck the Patriot battery in Erbil, with satellite imagery indicating burn scars in the vicinity of where one launcher was previously located. In the UAE, a series of warehouses and probable weapons storage facilities were destroyed at the Zayed Military City. In Kuwait, one of the HIMARS launcher sites on the Iraqi border was targeted, in addition to a desalination plant providing the fresh water supply for Kuwait City. Persian Gulf: The war on the seas continued with many different strikes and incidents being reported around the region. At the northern end of the Gulf, the UKMTO reported an unidentified incident involving a merchant vessel, which was carried out by unknown parties and in the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea, several targeting efforts of merchant vessels was reported throughout the day. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Last night's targeting in Iran possibly offers up a clue as to what the military objective of this specific operation might be. The bridges that were struck by the United States are not specifically military targets, however they did offer high-speed avenues of approach to the coastline. If the IRGC ground force needed to reinforce specifically the area of the coastline to the west of Bandar Abbas, north of Qeshm Island, these would be the bridges they would need to use. The bridges that were taken out also would be a way of isolating Bandar Abbas in terms of trade. In addition to the naval base being a military target, this is also a major civilian port city that handles the import of a lot of cargo for the nation (some reports claim up to 80% of Iran's imports arrive at this port). Under normal circumstances, taking out bridges is a tricky subject in the world of military targeting; if the bridge is predominantly used for military purposes, it's usually a valid target, but if it's predominantly a civilian bridge it's not normally legal to target. This categorization gets really blurry really quickly, but what is very clear is that targeting infrastructure like this isolates the military objective into only a few possibilities. Either the United States is attempting to go scorched-earth on civilian infrastructure so as to make life as miserable as possible and thus attempt to turn the populace against the government...or this is pre-shaping fires for other operations that might take place in the vicinity of the coastline. Neither option makes a whole lot of tactical sense, but making sense has not been a prerequisite for any military objective sought so far during this conflict, so the continued targeting over the next few days will probably shed some light on what the objective is with this latest campaign. As of this afternoon, dozens of refueling tankers are once again making their way into the Middle East from Europe and beyond, so the war is likely to continue escalating for foreseeable future. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground NomadNet: 5fa68c88be727a0e1a250a75e5e79269 Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z July 17, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: GULF WAR ESCALATES AS INFRASTRUCTURE TARGETING BEGINS. SIGNIFICANT IRANIAN RETALIATION REPORTED ON AMERICAN INSTALLATIONS. IRANIAN TARGETING OF MERCHANT SHIPPING REMAINS CONSTANT.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Middle East: The war escalated again overnight, with the United States beginning the series of strikes on bridges and infrastructure targets intended to soften up areas near the coast of Iran. Several bridges were struck in the vicinity of Bandar Abbas, along with the usual nightly strikes on more military targets. On the Iranian side, the targeting of American installations has been substantial over the past few days. In Iraq, Iranian forces successfully struck the Patriot battery in Erbil, with satellite imagery indicating burn scars in the vicinity of where one launcher was previously located. In the UAE, a series of warehouses and probable weapons storage facilities were destroyed at the Zayed Military City. In Kuwait, one of the HIMARS launcher sites on the Iraqi border was targeted, in addition to a desalination plant providing the fresh water supply for Kuwait City. Persian Gulf: The war on the seas continued with many different strikes and incidents being reported around the region. At the northern end of the Gulf, the UKMTO reported an unidentified incident involving a merchant vessel, which was carried out by unknown parties and in the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea, several targeting efforts of merchant vessels was reported throughout the day. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Last night's targeting in Iran possibly offers up a clue as to what the military objective of this specific operation might be. The bridges that were struck by the United States are not specifically military targets, however they did offer high-speed avenues of approach to the coastline. If the IRGC ground force needed to reinforce specifically the area of the coastline to the west of Bandar Abbas, north of Qeshm Island, these would be the bridges they would need to use. The bridges that were taken out also would be a way of isolating Bandar Abbas in terms of trade. In addition to the naval base being a military target, this is also a major civilian port city that handles the import of a lot of cargo for the nation (some reports claim up to 80% of Iran's imports arrive at this port). Under normal circumstances, taking out bridges is a tricky subject in the world of military targeting; if the bridge is predominantly used for military purposes, it's usually a valid target, but if it's predominantly a civilian bridge it's not normally legal to target. This categorization gets really blurry really quickly, but what is very clear is that targeting infrastructure like this isolates the military objective into only a few possibilities. Either the United States is attempting to go scorched-earth on civilian infrastructure so as to make life as miserable as possible and thus attempt to turn the populace against the government...or this is pre-shaping fires for other operations that might take place in the vicinity of the coastline. Neither option makes a whole lot of tactical sense, but making sense has not been a prerequisite for any military objective sought so far during this conflict, so the continued targeting over the next few days will probably shed some light on what the objective is with this latest campaign. As of this afternoon, dozens of refueling tankers are once again making their way into the Middle East from Europe and beyond, so the war is likely to continue escalating for foreseeable future. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground NomadNet: 5fa68c88be727a0e1a250a75e5e79269 Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z March 19, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: WAR IN MIDDLE EAST CONTINUES TO ESCALATE DAILY, AS IRANIAN TARGETING INCREASES IN SCOPE AND EFFECTIVENESS. GCC STATES VOICE GROWING CONCERNS REGARDING ATTACKS ON OIL AND GAS INFRASTRUCTURE. PENTAGON REQUESTS $200 BILLION BUDGET INCREASE TO CONTINUE WAR.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Middle East: Iranian targeting efforts have continued to become more effective over the past few days. Drone and missile attacks have been increasing since the war began, with strikes being reported at most US military installations around the region daily. Oil infrastructure has also been targeted in GCC states that have been allowing American forces to launch HIMARS missiles at Iran. Iran: Within the mainland, satellite imagery from yesterday confirmed that Israeli/American forces struck a target at the Iranian Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. Imagery provided by Airbus indicates at least one impact crater roughly 350 meters from the Bushehr 1 Reactor. Shortly after the attack, Kuwaiti state media broadcast an announcement from the Kuwaiti National Guard stating that radiation levels after the strike were reported to be normal. The Qataris made similar announcements of normal radiation readings this afternoon. Israel: Within Israel, Iranian targeting remains constant as well, with drone and missile attacks being reported regularly throughout the nation. Yesterday Ben Gurion Airport was hit, with several aircraft burning on the tarmac. The port of Haifa has been hit continually since the war began, and over the past few days more footage has made it to social media depicting the damage, as another substantial missile strike took place last night. Analyst Comment: Continuing long-standing national defense policy, it is nearly impossible to determine where strikes are happening within Israel, as this information is tightly controlled by the Israeli government. Livestreaming cameras and traffic cams have been destroyed by the military throughout most of the country, so the intelligence gap of how bad things are in Tel Aviv is quite substantial at this point. Saudi Arabia: Last night, an Iranian strike was reported at the Samarra Oil Refinery complex in Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast. This strike resulted in unknown damage, but the fires started by the strike were detected via satellite. -HomeFront- Delaware - Yesterday evening President Trump attended the dignified transfer of the airmen killed in the crash of the KC-135 in western Iraq. No media was allowed to cover the event, with the White House photographer only providing a few images of the transfer. Analyst Comment: This is not the first time that media have been blocked from such an event; Dick Cheney instituted this as a blanket policy in 1991, and this became more heavily enforced starting in approximately 2003-2009, during the height of the GWOT. It is unclear as to if the White House will be re-instituting this policy, or if this was a one-time ban. Washington D.C. - This morning the Pentagon requested the approval of a $200 billion defense package to supplement the War Department's budget, for the continuation of the war in the Middle East. Analyst Comment: For perspective on how much money this is, as of right now, the United States taxpayer has sent a grand total of $175 billion in military aid to Ukraine, since the start of that war in 2022. As a result, the Pentagon casually requesting a check from the taxpayer greater than that which has been spent to date in Ukraine is going to be a hard pill to swallow. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: The strike on the oil refinery in Saudi Arabia is not like the others, and this specific refinery was probably targeted for two reasons. For one, this is the facility that is the end-of-the-line for the Saudi East-West Pipeline that is helping to alleviate some of the constraint on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have proven that they have the ability to not just impact the primary means of oil transport in the Persian Gulf, but also the secondary backup measures that involve the pipeline bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. The second reason that this specific attack was carried out is due to an American base being quietly set up just a few miles to the north last year. While the effectiveness of this strike will be debated, something is still on fire at this facility as of this morning, which is not the gas flaring that is normally witnessed at refineries. Additionally, with the exception of the strikes on Israel, this is the longest range attack conducted so far during this conflict. This is yet another indicator that the Iranians are not only able to survive, but carry out increasingly more complicated and difficult targeting efforts. Similarly, Qatari officials have voiced outrage at the continuation of the war, stating that roughly 17% of their entire natural gas production capability has been completely destroyed, and that even if the war stops right now, it will take a minimum of three to five years to return to baseline capacity. Saad ​al-Kaabi, the CEO of QatarEnergy stated that $20 billion worth of damage has been done to their array of units, which originally cost about $26 billion to build in the first place. This morning, statements by the United States have not exactly alleviated concerns, as President Trump responded to the recent targeting efforts at the South Pars Natural Gas Facility. In his post on social media, he claimed that Israel acted unilaterally "out of anger" in striking this facility, and that if Iran attempts to respond to this attack, the United States will blow up the entire South Pars gas field. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 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.

//The Wire//2300Z May 04, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: VBIED ATTACK CONDUCTED IN OREGON. NAVCENT PUBLISHES TRANSIT PLAN FOR VESSELS IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ, WITH MIXED SUCCESS. IRAN CLAIMS TO TARGET US NAVY "PATROL BOAT" IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ, CENTCOM CLAIMS TO SINK 6X IRANIAN GUNBOATS IN GULF. VEHICLE RAMMING ATTACK REPORTED IN GERMANY.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Strait of Hormuz: Major developments have taken place in the Strait over the weekend. Last night, President Trump announced the creation of "Project Freedom", a plan to allegedly "guide" third-party commercial ships out of the Persian Gulf, so as to at least get non-affiliated ships out of the combat zone for humanitarian reasons. Today, the details of the plan became more clear, and it also became clear that the Iranians did not agree with this plan, nor were they notified ahead of time. Early this morning, the United States revealed that the plan was actually the publishing of an alternate traffic scheme for merchant vessels to transit the Strait using Omani territorial waters. Immediately after this plan was published, two merchant vessels made the crossing attempt, both of which were either struck with Iranian cruise missiles or drones. Later on, a third vessel was reportedly on fire in the Strait, though the cause of the fire is not yet known. Following this incident, the IRGCN released a new map of the Strait, with two no-go barriers depicted to the east and west, further stressing that the Strait is closed. At some point throughout the day, the United States has claimed that two unidentified vessels were able to make it out of the Gulf, though the names of these vessels have not been released yet. Separately, kinetic targeting between the United States and Iran appears to have resumed on the high seas. After the United States announced the implementation of Project Freedom, US Forces conducted kinetic strikes on 6x Iranian gunboats patrolling either the Strait of Hormuz, or the Persian Gulf itself. On the Iranian side, the IRGCN have claimed to have targeted what they describe as an American Patrol Boat with two cruise missiles during the earlier strikes on merchant vessels. The Iranians claim that these missiles were not targeting the vessel, but were serving as warning shots to prevent the US vessel from proceeding further. Analyst Comment: Due to the linguistic and cultural barrier, all Middle Eastern nations tend to use doctrinally incorrect terminology when referring to American warships. In this case, "patrol boat" might not refer to an actual Riverine Command Boat (RCB), but might refer to a Destroyer (DDG) or maybe a Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). CENTCOM issued a carefully worded statement confirming that a ship had not been hit, but did not address the claims directly. On the other hand, the Iranians have been known to make outlandish claims regarding the targeting of American warships, so it's equally possible that the Iranians tried to sink the vessel, then claimed that the missiles were "warning shots", so as to save face from successful interceptions. However, last night the sky over Hormuz was filled with munitions, and multiple hulls are burning in the Strait as of this morning, so out of all of the prior claims made by the Iranians, this one is the most plausible situation where the Iranians might have actually come close to hitting an American vessel. United Arab Emirates: After this morning's scuffle in the Strait, four Iranian drones/cruise missiles were reported in Fujairah, as Iranian forces targeted the large oil refinery complex which has been used to circumvent the need for merchant tankers to transit the Strait. The UAE indicated that three of these munitions were intercepted, but one made it through to it's target, with several large fires being reported at the refinery this afternoon. In response to these attacks, the UAE has begun to re-closed their airspace for the next week. Southern Atlantic: An outbreak of Hantavirus has been reported onboard a cruise ship which is currently moored off the coast of Cape Verde. Three passengers have died from the virus so far, and two other passengers are reportedly symptomatic. The vessel remains under quarantine while the extent of the illness is investigated. The vessel had previously departed Argentina, and the full ship's itinerary included stops in the Falklands, South Georgia Island, and a few other smaller islands as part of an Antarctic tour. Roughly 150 passengers and crew remain onboard the vessel. Europe: This afternoon a vehicle ramming attack was reported in Germany, after one assailant rammed his vehicle into a crowd of people in Leipzig, near a strip mall at the southwest corner of the main town square. Two individuals were killed immediately during the attack, and three others remain in serious condition at a local hospital. The assailant was detained at the scene, but has not yet been identified, other than authorities stating that he is a 33-year-old male from Germany, and at the time of his detention was verbally incoherent. -HomeFront- Oregon: Saturday morning a Vehicle-Borne IED attack was conducted at a gym in Portland. One former employee of the Multnomah Athletic Club rammed his vehicle into the main entrance to the facility, before detonating a series of explosives inside the vehicle. The explosives were comprised of several propane tanks, along with unidentified materials. The devices failed to produce a high-order explosion and instead mostly burned, consuming the vehicle. The suspect was the only person killed during the attack, and several other explosive devices were discovered in the vehicle that did not detonate during the fire. Analyst Comment: Local authorities have specifically stated that they are not treating this incident as a case of domestic terrorism, even though this incident meets most traditional criteria for a Complex Coordinated Attack (CCA) due to the attacker using multiple weapons during the attack (the vehicle ramming, and the IED detonations). USA: Around the nation, fuel prices increased substantially over the weekend once again, with a total of 8 states reporting diesel prices over $6.00 per gallon: Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, and California. Nationwide, only two states are below $5.00 per gallon for diesel (Texas and Georgia). Analyst Comment: While many citizens are beleaguered by high gas prices, keeping an eye on diesel is even more important. Diesel prices are directly tied to the consumer market, as everything from food to medicine is transported on trucks and trains that use this fuel. Many commercial-goods companies instituted price control measures two months ago when the war in Iran first began, with Amazon for example instituting a 3.5% surcharge for all third-party sellers on their platform, to cover the cost of rising fuel prices. As the price of diesel and other distillates climb higher, these fees are certain to increase as well. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Persian Gulf, wishing does NOT make it so. It is unclear as to what decision making process has been used by CENTCOM in the creation of Project Freedom, and it is hard to imagine that the plan really is indeed what has been implied. It's always easy to armchair-quarterback the war, and criticism of the operations so far has been plentiful all around. However, there's no way to sugarcoat this situation...intentionally putting civilian lives at risk without offering sufficient protection is...something. Telling ships that the US will "guide" them through, but this guidance essentially just being a roadmap and no substantial support, is hard to believe...but it sure looks like that's what happened this morning. As with this entire war so far, every single event will be analyzed and debated not just in terms of effectiveness, but also of intent. On the more nefarious end of that scale, one of the more plausible theories for the events of the day is that the goal was to not really open the Strait, but to get the Iranians to fire first, break the ceasefire, and thus justify a resumption of the bombing. Granted, the US doesn't really need a reason to continue the war, but sending a couple of Destroyers into the Strait (if they actually did that, which isn't confirmed) to provide the bare-minimum "security" in order to convince a handful of ships to cross, is not in accordance with traditional naval doctrine. Especially since the wording of the notice announcing "Project Freedom" confirms that NAVCENT clearly stated that they haven't cleared the mines, but that their route takes ships through the minefield. Consequently, using merchant vessels to clear a minefield by driving through it is an interesting choice that will result in cost savings for the US Navy, but is not likely to result in companies trusting the United States. CENTCOM claims that US Navy vessels are in the Strait and protecting merchants from Iranian targeting efforts, but if they are indeed in the Strait they are sailing with their transponders off, which is not exactly indicative of a safe situation. Plus, the two (possibly three) successful Iranian strikes in the minutes after Project Freedom began cast doubt on the success of those escort efforts. One of the critical requirements for warships escorting merchant vessels is to actually protect merchant ships from harm, and if this cannot be guaranteed there's not much confidence in the overall mission. As with any war, there are knowns and unknowns. Deception and obfuscation are critical parts of all warfare, and in this case military deception has been used on all sides to achieve military objectives. Granting CENTCOM leadership as much charity and leeway as reasonable in their planning efforts, it is possible that what is transpiring in the Strait cannot be observed with total certainty by outside forces; it's possible that one or two ships are sneaking through with their transponder turned off. It's also possible that a larger operation is brewing. The US has a lot of tools in the toolbox of deception, but the grand question is how much deception can actually work in such a tight space. Maritime chokepoints and the terrain of the battlespace offer finite parameters to work within...it's a small Strait, and a dude with binoculars perched on any point of 500 miles of Iranian coastline can clearly see any merchant shipping attempting to cross it at any time. Weather is nearly perfect in the region year round, and day or night, there is zero way to conceal a large vessel's transit through the waterway. Considering all angles, it's theoretically possible that the US Navy has actually secretly cleared (or at least marked) many mines, if not from above the waves, then from below. The US certainly has the technical ability to get one or two ships out, but getting traffic back to the pre-war numbers of 100+ merchant ships transiting the Strait every day is not going to be possible without the Iranian's cooperation. Sneaking two ships out successfully (while also losing the same number to missiles), is what most would call a pyric victory at best, and since there are roughly 2,000 merchant vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf right now, this Project has gotten off to a rocky start. From the perspective of the commercial maritime industry, there's simply no way to know beyond all doubt what threats remain, and what the United States and Iran will do. But therein lies the problem...insurance companies and merchant mariners alike don't make decisions based on *all doubt*, but rather *reasonable doubt*. And right now it is very reasonable to not want to transit the Strait due to the risks, which remain insufficiently mitigated by western forces. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z May 04, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: VBIED ATTACK CONDUCTED IN OREGON. NAVCENT PUBLISHES TRANSIT PLAN FOR VESSELS IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ, WITH MIXED SUCCESS. IRAN CLAIMS TO TARGET US NAVY "PATROL BOAT" IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ, CENTCOM CLAIMS TO SINK 6X IRANIAN GUNBOATS IN GULF. VEHICLE RAMMING ATTACK REPORTED IN GERMANY.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Strait of Hormuz: Major developments have taken place in the Strait over the weekend. Last night, President Trump announced the creation of "Project Freedom", a plan to allegedly "guide" third-party commercial ships out of the Persian Gulf, so as to at least get non-affiliated ships out of the combat zone for humanitarian reasons. Today, the details of the plan became more clear, and it also became clear that the Iranians did not agree with this plan, nor were they notified ahead of time. Early this morning, the United States revealed that the plan was actually the publishing of an alternate traffic scheme for merchant vessels to transit the Strait using Omani territorial waters. Immediately after this plan was published, two merchant vessels made the crossing attempt, both of which were either struck with Iranian cruise missiles or drones. Later on, a third vessel was reportedly on fire in the Strait, though the cause of the fire is not yet known. Following this incident, the IRGCN released a new map of the Strait, with two no-go barriers depicted to the east and west, further stressing that the Strait is closed. At some point throughout the day, the United States has claimed that two unidentified vessels were able to make it out of the Gulf, though the names of these vessels have not been released yet. Separately, kinetic targeting between the United States and Iran appears to have resumed on the high seas. After the United States announced the implementation of Project Freedom, US Forces conducted kinetic strikes on 6x Iranian gunboats patrolling either the Strait of Hormuz, or the Persian Gulf itself. On the Iranian side, the IRGCN have claimed to have targeted what they describe as an American Patrol Boat with two cruise missiles during the earlier strikes on merchant vessels. The Iranians claim that these missiles were not targeting the vessel, but were serving as warning shots to prevent the US vessel from proceeding further. Analyst Comment: Due to the linguistic and cultural barrier, all Middle Eastern nations tend to use doctrinally incorrect terminology when referring to American warships. In this case, "patrol boat" might not refer to an actual Riverine Command Boat (RCB), but might refer to a Destroyer (DDG) or maybe a Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). CENTCOM issued a carefully worded statement confirming that a ship had not been hit, but did not address the claims directly. On the other hand, the Iranians have been known to make outlandish claims regarding the targeting of American warships, so it's equally possible that the Iranians tried to sink the vessel, then claimed that the missiles were "warning shots", so as to save face from successful interceptions. However, last night the sky over Hormuz was filled with munitions, and multiple hulls are burning in the Strait as of this morning, so out of all of the prior claims made by the Iranians, this one is the most plausible situation where the Iranians might have actually come close to hitting an American vessel. United Arab Emirates: After this morning's scuffle in the Strait, four Iranian drones/cruise missiles were reported in Fujairah, as Iranian forces targeted the large oil refinery complex which has been used to circumvent the need for merchant tankers to transit the Strait. The UAE indicated that three of these munitions were intercepted, but one made it through to it's target, with several large fires being reported at the refinery this afternoon. In response to these attacks, the UAE has begun to re-closed their airspace for the next week. Southern Atlantic: An outbreak of Hantavirus has been reported onboard a cruise ship which is currently moored off the coast of Cape Verde. Three passengers have died from the virus so far, and two other passengers are reportedly symptomatic. The vessel remains under quarantine while the extent of the illness is investigated. The vessel had previously departed Argentina, and the full ship's itinerary included stops in the Falklands, South Georgia Island, and a few other smaller islands as part of an Antarctic tour. Roughly 150 passengers and crew remain onboard the vessel. Europe: This afternoon a vehicle ramming attack was reported in Germany, after one assailant rammed his vehicle into a crowd of people in Leipzig, near a strip mall at the southwest corner of the main town square. Two individuals were killed immediately during the attack, and three others remain in serious condition at a local hospital. The assailant was detained at the scene, but has not yet been identified, other than authorities stating that he is a 33-year-old male from Germany, and at the time of his detention was verbally incoherent. -HomeFront- Oregon: Saturday morning a Vehicle-Borne IED attack was conducted at a gym in Portland. One former employee of the Multnomah Athletic Club rammed his vehicle into the main entrance to the facility, before detonating a series of explosives inside the vehicle. The explosives were comprised of several propane tanks, along with unidentified materials. The devices failed to produce a high-order explosion and instead mostly burned, consuming the vehicle. The suspect was the only person killed during the attack, and several other explosive devices were discovered in the vehicle that did not detonate during the fire. Analyst Comment: Local authorities have specifically stated that they are not treating this incident as a case of domestic terrorism, even though this incident meets most traditional criteria for a Complex Coordinated Attack (CCA) due to the attacker using multiple weapons during the attack (the vehicle ramming, and the IED detonations). USA: Around the nation, fuel prices increased substantially over the weekend once again, with a total of 8 states reporting diesel prices over $6.00 per gallon: Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, and California. Nationwide, only two states are below $5.00 per gallon for diesel (Texas and Georgia). Analyst Comment: While many citizens are beleaguered by high gas prices, keeping an eye on diesel is even more important. Diesel prices are directly tied to the consumer market, as everything from food to medicine is transported on trucks and trains that use this fuel. Many commercial-goods companies instituted price control measures two months ago when the war in Iran first began, with Amazon for example instituting a 3.5% surcharge for all third-party sellers on their platform, to cover the cost of rising fuel prices. As the price of diesel and other distillates climb higher, these fees are certain to increase as well. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Persian Gulf, wishing does NOT make it so. It is unclear as to what decision making process has been used by CENTCOM in the creation of Project Freedom, and it is hard to imagine that the plan really is indeed what has been implied. It's always easy to armchair-quarterback the war, and criticism of the operations so far has been plentiful all around. However, there's no way to sugarcoat this situation...intentionally putting civilian lives at risk without offering sufficient protection is...something. Telling ships that the US will "guide" them through, but this guidance essentially just being a roadmap and no substantial support, is hard to believe...but it sure looks like that's what happened this morning. As with this entire war so far, every single event will be analyzed and debated not just in terms of effectiveness, but also of intent. On the more nefarious end of that scale, one of the more plausible theories for the events of the day is that the goal was to not really open the Strait, but to get the Iranians to fire first, break the ceasefire, and thus justify a resumption of the bombing. Granted, the US doesn't really need a reason to continue the war, but sending a couple of Destroyers into the Strait (if they actually did that, which isn't confirmed) to provide the bare-minimum "security" in order to convince a handful of ships to cross, is not in accordance with traditional naval doctrine. Especially since the wording of the notice announcing "Project Freedom" confirms that NAVCENT clearly stated that they haven't cleared the mines, but that their route takes ships through the minefield. Consequently, using merchant vessels to clear a minefield by driving through it is an interesting choice that will result in cost savings for the US Navy, but is not likely to result in companies trusting the United States. CENTCOM claims that US Navy vessels are in the Strait and protecting merchants from Iranian targeting efforts, but if they are indeed in the Strait they are sailing with their transponders off, which is not exactly indicative of a safe situation. Plus, the two (possibly three) successful Iranian strikes in the minutes after Project Freedom began cast doubt on the success of those escort efforts. One of the critical requirements for warships escorting merchant vessels is to actually protect merchant ships from harm, and if this cannot be guaranteed there's not much confidence in the overall mission. As with any war, there are knowns and unknowns. Deception and obfuscation are critical parts of all warfare, and in this case military deception has been used on all sides to achieve military objectives. Granting CENTCOM leadership as much charity and leeway as reasonable in their planning efforts, it is possible that what is transpiring in the Strait cannot be observed with total certainty by outside forces; it's possible that one or two ships are sneaking through with their transponder turned off. It's also possible that a larger operation is brewing. The US has a lot of tools in the toolbox of deception, but the grand question is how much deception can actually work in such a tight space. Maritime chokepoints and the terrain of the battlespace offer finite parameters to work within...it's a small Strait, and a dude with binoculars perched on any point of 500 miles of Iranian coastline can clearly see any merchant shipping attempting to cross it at any time. Weather is nearly perfect in the region year round, and day or night, there is zero way to conceal a large vessel's transit through the waterway. Considering all angles, it's theoretically possible that the US Navy has actually secretly cleared (or at least marked) many mines, if not from above the waves, then from below. The US certainly has the technical ability to get one or two ships out, but getting traffic back to the pre-war numbers of 100+ merchant ships transiting the Strait every day is not going to be possible without the Iranian's cooperation. Sneaking two ships out successfully (while also losing the same number to missiles), is what most would call a pyric victory at best, and since there are roughly 2,000 merchant vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf right now, this Project has gotten off to a rocky start. From the perspective of the commercial maritime industry, there's simply no way to know beyond all doubt what threats remain, and what the United States and Iran will do. But therein lies the problem...insurance companies and merchant mariners alike don't make decisions based on *all doubt*, but rather *reasonable doubt*. And right now it is very reasonable to not want to transit the Strait due to the risks, which remain insufficiently mitigated by western forces. 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 February 7th to the 14th of 2026. It's been kind of a quiet week by comparison, I guess. Only a few major terror attacks to be aware of, so basically everything is fairly standard for this week. But anyway, we've got a lot to talk about, so let's get right to it. Around the world this week, things have been pretty busy on multiple fronts, but nothing entirely new. Here in the homeland, the civil unrest that flared up in Minneapolis and other major cities has simmered down for a couple of weeks now, although some cities have been host to an increased baseline of violence. Overseas, several investigations have been initiated in conjunction with the Epstein document releases, and civil unrest appears to be popping off in some major cities in France due to recent clashes between protesters and activist groups. In the UK, stabbing attacks continue as before with about three or four stabbings being reported in London more or less every day. Same story in France and Italy, whereby civil unrest and domestic terrorism has bloomed into season a bit earlier this year. As the Olympics are ongoing in Italy, many different terrorist cells have been sabotaging rail lines in a few different cities. And in France, French nationalists are fighting French anarchists in a few major cities after protests have become intense riots over the past few days. Otherwise, in the Middle East, the situation is heating up yet again, and the US is starting to dump military resources into the region once more. Timeline-wise, we're looking at a couple of weeks before any potential happening is on the menu. Unless the Pentagon just wants to bomb a few targets like they did last time and make me look like an idiot, both of which are always likely. Keeping track of airframes and ships is basically a full-time job for a whole team of people, but at a very wave-top level, the US has been observably pumping more resources into the region at a steady pace over the past few weeks. So, overall, a lot of things to keep on the lookout for over the next few weeks. Switching things up a little bit, let's move to Western Europe before we get into the actual homeland for this week's, and and let's talk about some developing incidents that are going on right now throughout France. The spotlight has been on France in the headlines over the past few days due to a couple of different incidents which have recently uh a lot of attention. The first incident is the stabbing attack that took place yesterday at the Arc de Triomphe by which a known and convicted terrorist conducted another police stabbing uh wounding one soldier at the uh flame lighting ceremony for their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This is a fairly standard ceremony, I think. I'm pretty sure they do it every day at 6:30, but either way they end up, you know, rekindling the flame at their uh Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and there's usually a small crowd or uh either of tourists or people who, you know, want to you want to pay their respects and things like that. And last night an assailant tried to uh stab everybody at this event. So, the attacker has been identified as Brahim Barrir, who was also tried, convicted, and imprisoned for doing the exact same thing in Brussels back in 2012. So, he used to be a pretty high-ranking member of a lot of different extremist cells throughout Paris and was kind of uh a figurehead for a lot of things. Uh maybe not so much a public figurehead, but he was very heavily involved in a lot of extremist uh groups and things like that in Paris over the past, well, decade or so. Back in 2012, he actually traveled from Paris, where he was known to be an extremist, to Brussels specifically to target police officers, which he did. So, he got caught, tried, and convicted for that and at some point he was either let out or just mysteriously appeared back in civil society once again and conducted the stabbing attack again last night. So, not entirely a great look, especially considering the hard times that seem to have fallen upon Paris over the past few years, but down south in France a much more serious situation is underway, which has involved of civil unrest. So, in the town of Lyon, Antifa has gotten quite a bit upset over the past few days after anti-immigration activists in the south of France have started to kind of voice their opinion a little bit more and that's just made uh Antifa quite a bit upset and a lot of these French anarchist groups upset. They have the same same kind of cellular arrangement that we have here in the US when it comes to our far-left extremists. They've got the same thing in France, except their guys are a lot more violent in in case. So, they actually beat a man to death, one of the security guards or uh an activist who was serving as an inner security role for a French feminist movement group was trying to conduct a protest and you know how in the US we have a lot of protest and then counter protest. Well, the same thing in France. So, a few days ago or a couple of days ago, one of the French feminist groups who is more along the lines of stopping violence against women from the immigrants. That's kind of the way these groups are starting to form. One of these groups was mobbed by Antifa and it turns out one of the guys that they had gotten to help protect them, one of those guys got beaten pretty severely and unfortunately he passed away last night. So, as a response to this, the French nationalists have come out and a lot of nationalist groups have come out to oppose Antifa and suffice it to say things are going to get pretty spicy over the next few days. So, we'll be watching this pretty closely simply because there are a lot of parallels between France and the United States and of course, you know, France is Europe, right? It's Western civilization, right? So, they share a lot of the same societal goals that we do even though our cultures are very different, it's still still the same thing. It's all Western Europe and the United States. So, we're all in the same slop bucket together. So, a lot of times we have the same adversaries and same enemies and that is certainly the case in France, the UK, Germany, wherever you want to name it. So, keeping an eye on these things is going to be important over the next few weeks. Similar story throughout Western Europe in terms of the Epstein files. So, while many here in the United States may be lamenting the fact that nobody's really been arrested kind of at all with regards to the names that have come out of the Epstein files in Europe, they actually have been doing something. Now, I think many Europeans, like many Americans, don't exactly have a whole lot of faith in their judicial systems, but at least they've done something. So, Norway has actually launched a criminal investigation and I think they actually dropped criminal charges on a former prime minister of Norway for his association with Epstein, but the the crimes that they're all that trying to prosecute are all corruption based, so they're not like human trafficking based. So, that's kind of how Europe is handling it right now, and so far they've got three major diplomats in Norway, which are implicated and are being investigated. So, at least they can say that they're investigating their guys. Now, they probably won't be arrested or anything, but I don't know. Who knows? Hard to say. There are grumblings and rumors of the same thing, same kinds of investigative processes being undertaken in France and also in Slovakia. Again, hard to say how all this is going to work out, but I wanted to mention it in any way because a lot of people here in the US are saying, you know, nobody's been arrested, nobody's even been questioned or interviewed, whereas in Europe they actually kind of are. So, that's kind of interesting, but again, the bar could not be any lower when it comes to getting some sort of accountability or justice for the whole Epstein thing, but we'll get into that in just a moment. Here in the homeland for this week, the big flare-ups have died down a bit, but the violence has continued as far left activists continue to figure out that terrorism actually works. Ever since ICE pulled out of Minneapolis, or technically reduced their posture there, far left activist groups have perceived this to be a victory, especially since the FBI has basically ignored all the terrorist groups which have been running rampant in Minneapolis for years. So, as of right now, the mood among many far left groups is that of sheer unchallenged victory. They certainly think that they have won by kicking ICE out of their city. Now, is that entirely true? Uh, probably not, but that's up for you to decide. It's certainly complicated. What is very clear is that the inaction of the feds, not just ICE, but say like other law enforcement groups which are in charge of maybe, I don't know, counterterrorism, in many cases this inaction has encouraged far left groups to think that violence, arson, vehicle ramming attacks, and terrorism in general is an acceptable line of effort to achieve their goals. Even though it certainly is not, they certainly think it is. Thus, the middle-aged women who should be picking up their kids from school rather than trying to firebomb empty buildings without even trying to conceal their identity. So, we've got that going for us at least. Otherwise, the situation remains pretty much the same as before nationwide. Locals in Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. have reported that the stench in the air has become palpable and there's also a major sewage leak as well. Almost a month after roughly a billion gallons of raw sewage was dumped into the Potomac, locals have been advised to avoid all contact with the Potomac. Unless you're from Mumbai, then you should be all right. But, for the rest of us, the levels of E. coli are few thousand times the safe limits. And if you've been fishing or boating in the river over the past month, you probably have some kind of giga turbo aids by now, which is interesting because when the spill was first announced, the local water utility claimed that the levels of E. coli were at safe levels. But, it turns out they messed up the decimal point because, of course, they did and it was actually 100 times what they initially reported, which is slightly suboptimal news for anyone living in Northern Virginia or Maryland who has been in or around the river over the past month. And speaking of foul toxins from whence there is no escape, the Epstein files situation continues to grow more and more as investigations start putting pieces together. Right now, it's been pretty hectic as there's a disconnect between the big voices talking about the Epstein files and those little voices actually doing the legwork to look through the Epstein files. An influencer or politician finds one document and shouts about it on the internet only to look like an idiot because they didn't understand the overall context. Yes, Epstein's network did very bad things, but if we actually want to eventually make progress towards stopping the harm, we have to have some sort of structure, which is what I'm working on myself. I'm just warning everybody that over the next few weeks, the headlines are going to flash by in a blur with everyone jumping from one conclusion to the next without any weight added to the outrage. So far, there has been a severe under-reaction on the Epstein case simply because I think a lot of people either can't or don't want to understand the scale of it all. I mean, Epstein was a very bad dude, but I personally don't think he was the worst. I think there's far worse out there. I don't even think his network was the biggest. I think the reason he got rolled up is because a competitor got a hold of it and started to chip away at his own network. So, it would be wise to operate off of the assumption that there are very big and bad fish out there that we have got to do something about. I mean, think about Epstein's network like a big Fortune 500 company, right? I mean, when Enron went under, all the dudes who worked for Enron at the like the middle management and you know, lower levels, they went on to work for other companies, right? So, the same thing happened with Epstein's network. Yeah, you may get the head of the snake. You may get Epstein and Maxwell and a few others at the very top, but the middle managers, the dudes who facilitated all the stuff and the low people on the totem pole, all those people escaped and got away along with all the the big whales and the big fish out there that were the clients. So, we've clearly got our work cut out for us, which is why you might see a lot of hesitancy to prevent the Epstein files from being released. I mean, they're not just trying to cover up past crimes, they're trying to cover up current operations. At least that's my own opinion and right now opinions don't matter a whole lot in a court of law. So, we've got to be able to prove a lot of this stuff with data. Like we all know what was happening with the Epstein network. We all know who was running it. We all know who was behind it. Okay, maybe not all of us, but some of us know. But in terms of actually getting some traction and shutting these networks down, we've got to have a lot more data. We've got to have a lot more to go off of. We have to have an overwhelming burden of evidence here and that's going to take a lot more than just some guy with a comically large microphone on a podcast yapping about it. It is very clear that Epstein did not traffic people to nobody. He trafficked people to somebody. And those somebodies met those kids at a geographic point on Earth. And that, dear friends, I can plot on a map. Knowledge is half the battle and we don't just need to know names, but we also need to know places. Again, knowledge is half the battle and I don't want to be too biased here. I know this is quite self-serving cuz I work on a lot of map stuff, but the reason I do that is because I really do think it helps to visualize where these things are taking place. But anyway, enough about Epstein. More information's going to come in time. The goal right now is to add some method to the madness and not get caught up in the whirlwind of gotcha journalism on this sort of thing. These people aren't going anywhere. They are quite proud and very smug with the fact that they got away with it. They don't really care that their names are in the files, right? Well, we'll see about that in due time, but for now a lot of long nights crunching numbers are ahead, and that's what I'm going to work on at the moment as safely as I can. Moving down to the Southwest for this week, I wanted to briefly touch on what happened in El Paso a few days ago because this was kind of an interesting item of note that came about a few days ago, which has brought about a lot of rumor and speculation regarding what in the Sam Hill actually happened. And here's what we know so far. Just before midnight on February 10th, a series of two airspace closures went into effect in El Paso, one of which was centered on the El Paso Airport and grounded all of the aircraft at the airport for some time. This, of course, freaked a lot of people out because shutting down one of the most heavily trafficked airports in the United States for 10 days is not something that is done lightly or on a whim. The complete lack of notice whatsoever also adds to the seriousness of this event. When the NOTAM dropped, routine flight operations were being carried out, and there were even aircraft on the taxiways preparing to take off with the air traffic control personnel being just as confused as everybody else when the airspace closure went into effect. For about 7 hours or so, rumors were the only things flying during the ground stop, and speculation still abounds regarding what this was all about. After a few hours uh shortly before sunrise, the White House officials stated that this airspace closure was implemented due to cartel drones breaching US airspace and presenting a threat to aircraft in El Paso. But beyond this vague explanation, not much else is known with reasonable certainty. It's certainly possible that this is the truth. However, cartel drones have come over the US border like daily for the past, I don't know, 10 years or so. However, if this was a cartel drone or a swarm of cartel drones trying to smuggle drugs over the border or cause some kind of mayhem at the airport, which is a kind of a long way from the border, but anyway, if that's what it was, then clearly it's something that was different from the nightly drone flights that are usually picked up every single day along the border. So, clearly it was an anomaly of some kind and I very highly doubt we'll ever know what it is. Now, once daylight broke and everybody was trying to figure out what had actually happened that night, another potential theory came out, which I'll I'll mention even though it's completely unsubstantiated rumor, but I'll mention it just in the context of wider situational awareness. So, some politicians and other officials, which have leaked this to the media, they've made the claim that nothing actually happened the other night, but this is actually the result of a personal vendetta by FAA Director Brian Bedford, who was upset that the US military was testing a laser-based directed energy weapon for shooting down drones at Fort Bliss last week and they were doing that without telling the FAA about it. All of this is kind of coming out now. It wasn't really talked about that much in the media when it actually happened, but last week the US Army downed you know, they shot down what they thought was a drone. Turned out to actually be a party balloon from Fort Bliss and when they did it, they didn't actually tell the FAA about it. So, again, this is all rumor, but this would explain what might have happened. The FAA personally intervened to drop a NOTAM on top of El Paso solely to piss everybody off and hold the El Paso airport hostage and thereby drawing attention to his personal gripe about coordinating with the military. Anybody who's ever worked in government knows that this is a possibility. After last week's laser weapon use, the FAA probably made the passive-aggressive decision to drop a blanket NOTAM on El Paso the next time a drone was spotted, which took place a couple of nights ago. So, if this is what happened, it would be the most embarrassing, yet least surprising outcome. But, again, this possibility is solely based on the whispers of journalists and not any real concrete data. So, there are probably many details that are false. Another theory, which has gotten some level of traction on the internet, is especially amongst the, you know, quieter communities out there, is that this was actually not really a drone, but maybe something else. El Paso, specifically, has been ground zero for a lot of new and developing cartel tactics and activity due to Juarez being a major port of entry. And El Paso was at the center of the concerns of smuggled MANPADS 2 years ago, a case which faded into obscurity with nothing more than assurances being made via the telephone game of, "Well, I just heard that got resolved." Which is why a lot of people are theorizing that this was about MANPADS instead of drones. For the record, I don't think this was about MANPADS. I think if it was, the NOTAMs would have been a lot larger, I think. Plus, there are a few other things I would have expected to have seen. I know a lot of people are bringing up this MANPAD theory because the format of the NOTAM made many people think, myself included, that the NOTAM was trigger-based. As in, something got detected on some mystical system the US government has, and this NOTAM was either issued automatically without a human involved in the process, or somebody hit that big red button on the wall to shut everything down while they were figuring out what was going on. This part of the theory is quite accurate, I think. The format of the text NOTAM was non-standard and very quickly typed out. None of the usual national security airspace verbage was put in there. It was It was basically just a hand-typed very short notice. The fact that this notice did not have any deconfliction information, no frequencies to contact, or any exceptions for medical aircraft is a strong indicator that this was a custom NOTAM built for something, and was probably triggered upon a certain event happening. Now, was this event a handful of cartel drones, or a man pad or was it just a personality spat between Fort Bliss and the FAA? That I don't know and I don't think the public will ever know with any certainty. So, something to keep an eye on, especially since the other NOTAM, the trapezoid-shaped one to the west of the city, that one's still active and it's going to be active for a while. So, most certainly something to keep an eye on, especially as the situation around the country gets hot and stays hot. So, that pretty much wraps us up for this week. I've run out of time today. I wanted to talk about more about you guys know how it is. I've been troubleshooting a lot of things that I've been working on over the past couple of weeks and there are just not enough hours in the day anymore to do all the things I want to do, but but that's okay. Some weeks are like that. I know the past couple of weeks have been a random assortment of world events, but that's the way it goes sometimes. So, wrapping things up with the Ghost Net Reports for this week, it was a good net all around. This week I switched up things and chose a web SDR located out in the middle of the country to try to pick up different stations exchanging information on the airwaves this week. And I got a few here and there, but not as many as I usually get on the East Coast. So, that's just the way that it works sometimes. Some of the more remote areas of the US have web SDRs and not a whole lot of people live there. So, you're not going to get a whole lot of messages. The range on HF radio is always farther than you think, but it's never far enough, is it? So, sometimes that kind of gets in the way of things, especially if you're out in the middle of nowhere like middle of the Dakotas or something like that trying to get on HF radio. You might need to choose a different frequency and different antenna arrangement, but all in all the work continues on and boy, do we have a lot of work ahead. So, let's get after it and do the best that we can. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you again everyone for sticking around and we'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

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

//The Wire//2300Z December 11, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: AUSTRALIAN AGE VERIFICATION LAW COMES INTO EFFECT. ARRESTS MADE IN LAST WEEK'S STABBING ATTACK IN CHARLOTTE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Australia: Yesterday Australia's Age Verification law came into effect for most websites, effectively blocking the vast majority of social media to the entire nation, unless users upload a scan of their face to prove that they are over 16 years old, and thus allowed to be on social media. Caribbean: The tanker vessel seized by the United States yesterday has been identified as the M/T *SKIPPER*, one of the infamous "shadow fleet" vessels which is used to smuggle oil around the world. The *SKIPPER* was her most recent name change, and at the time of capture she was flying the flag of Guyana (though her registration status is dubious at best). As of this afternoon, AIS ship tracking platforms noted her position being just off the east coast of St. Lucia, heading north at around 10 kts. -HomeFront- North Carolina: More details have come to light regarding the stabbing attack that took place on the Blue Line commuter train in Charlotte last week. Back on December 5th, a stabbing was reported on the train, with the assailant eventually being arrested. At the time of the incident, the attacker was not identified, but after a few days authorities said the attacker was Oscar Gerardo Solorzano-Garcia, an illegal immigrant from Honduras who had multiple warrants out for past violent crimes, to include aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. Analyst Comment: From here, the situation takes a rather unfortunate turn. Solorzano stabbed a man on the train, who was hospitalized with severe wounds. Earlier this week, the victim was identified as Kenyon Dobie, and was lauded as a hero during the attack because of his efforts to confront the attacker to stop him from harassing other commuters. Dobie did intervene, and prevented the attacker from bothering other passengers, which resulted in him getting stabbed in the process. However, after this news story hit the local media, and the victim made statements in front of the camera, Dobie (the victim) was arrested. Turns out, he had open warrants for his own arrest for beating a pregnant woman so severely she received skull fractures during a domestic dispute. Both Solorzano and Dobie are being held in jail due to Iryna's Law preventing their release. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comment: Unlike many other cases of Digital ID being mandated around the world, Australia has implemented even more dystopian procedures to take effect during this rollout. Of note, the social media platforms which are known to cause extreme harm to children (such as Discord and Roblox) are exempt from the social media ban. However, the platforms that are affected, are impacted in very specific ways. As one might expect, VPNs are popular ways to circumvent such crackdowns on speech. However, the IP addresses associated with VPNs are public record, so social media companies can easily blacklist those IPs, effectively making VPNs useless for evading the ban. At least some platforms have been observed using these blacklists (but not all). For those in the United Kingdom wondering about how their own Digital ID scandal will play out, this might be a clue; Australia is providing a case study for what a more totalitarian crackdown on communications throughout the global West might look like. How serious platforms are taking this plan is anyone's guess, and reports vary widely. Some users report no issues whatsoever with being prompted to verify their age, whereas others have reported every app they have now requiring a face scan. Some users report that they can simply put in a false date of birth with no verification at all, and others report their accounts being hard-locked even though the mandate doesn't apply to them. This wide variance is because most of the ID verification needs are being driven by AI in conjunction with a person's advertising ID; the way that this is rolling out in practice is that the ID verification requirement is being tailored for each individual human being and not simply a blanket policy for all platforms. In short, the AI models being relied upon already know if a person is over 16 years old, simply based on their online signature, and the digital fingerprints they leave behind. This is why some people don't notice the law taking affect at all, whereas others are hit pretty hard with the ID check requirements. But, the system isn't perfect, and many times users are prompted to give over extremely precious biometric data anyway. Many users have reported successfully bypassing the 3D face scans by using a classic trick...video games. Many popular video games have a character creation menu which people can hold their phone up to in order to pass the 3D head scan requirements which have become common now. Users have reported even more effectiveness by using the video game Death Stranding, which features a mode in the settings menu to make the character assume different facial expressions, opening and closing the mouth, and various other poses which are still effective in bypassing the AI-driven face scanning technology. In short, it's probably fair to assume that there are potentially tens of thousands of Norman Reedus's living in Australia and trying to access TikTok. This trick was discovered by children during the lead up to the implementation of Digital ID in the United Kingdom, and it still works for those who are trying to bypass the ID check systems. There is also a side-benefit to this effort, even for people who are legally accessing the internet and not trying to bypass the law. A major motivating factor for all of this crackdown on communication is the financial aspect....there's a LOT of money to be made from selling biometric data. Since there's now a massive pool of biometric data being collected and sold to the highest bidder, it's very likely that AI models are being trained off of this data....data which will 100% be used in other ways later on that have nothing to do with accessing Instagram. A high-resolution 3D scan of a person's face is very valuable, and once it's collected *and associated with a person's online identity* this is quite literally impossible to dissociate. Once Palantir has that data, that genie can't be put back into the bottle. As such, everyone using the same face is very likely to skew this data and make it harder for many other AI models to recognize faces in the future, so this little civil disobedience at least helps somewhat. This is very important information for the future of digital security, and the rollout of even more draconian Digital ID practices around the world. 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 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.

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 October 5th through the 11th of 2025. The insanity continues again this week, so let's get right to it. Starting off here in the home front, the general state of unrest in many locations continues as before with regards to counter ice operations, most of which is focused in Portland and Chicago as usual, but we'll get more into that in a bit. Also in the United States, mostly in the western regions of the country, the digital surveillance of Christian churches continues at the behest of one particular foreign nation. And also this week there have been several developments with regards to disarmament campaigns. Most notably yesterday California signed into law AB 1127, which is a de facto ban on all Glocks. So, in typical fashion, there will probably be more outrage after the bill has passed rather than the lead up to it being passed and signed into law, but this bill bans any semi-automatic pistol which can accept a Glock switch or something similar to that effect, right? It's not just Glocks, but it's any other pistol that can take some sort of similar device. We all know how this goes, so I'm not going to harp on it too much, but rest assured I would be willing to bet that many other states are going to probably follow in the footsteps of California by figuring out a way of of banning firearms, not because the firearms themselves are illegal, but because they could be made into something that may be illegal. Of course, the majority of Glock switches are not actually used by proper lawful owners, they're used by gang members, and nobody ever really seems to be interested in policing that kind of activity, but we all know why that is. So, but that's the situation in the homeland for this week. And around the world, things have been a happenin' this week. We of course have the peace agreement in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, which has gone into effect and seems to be holding as much as to be expected. Either way, the general rough approximate guidelines of the peace deal that have been agreed to by both sides have been undertaken. There has been a very sharp decline in hostilities between the two main belligerents here in this conflict, so that is a positive development. But once again, we will see if this sort of thing holds for any length of time. As one can probably guess by the way that I'm describing this, I do not have any faith at all that this ceasefire will hold for any length of time. The old rule of thumb is that there's no such thing as a peace agreement in the Middle East. It's just how long is the ceasefire going to last before the war kicks up again. I don't know how long it's going to last this time, but my guess is that this will not end, especially because Gaza still remains, right? That's that was a major strategic goal for Israel is to completely take over the entirety of Gaza and basically just make it not exist anymore as a region and just kind of absorb it into Israeli control and push the Palestinians somewhere else, right? That was a major strategic goal for them as a nation, and internal Israeli politics indicate that a lot of politicians in Israel are not happy that Netanyahu agreed to this peace deal. So, he is facing a lot of internal criticism because he is letting Gaza remain, at least for now. We shall see, but enough on that for now. Moving over to the Far East, that particular conflict has reignited in the form of both China and the United States engaging in a little bit of economic warfare on their own. Things have been rather tepid over the past couple of weeks with regards to China and the United States negotiating their trade deals. Things were looking up there for quite a while, and then China decided to, as of November 1st, implement a whole lot of export controls on things that the United States needs quite dearly, such as rare earth minerals like lithium and a few other things as well. So, that of course angered Washington quite a bit as you could probably expect. So, the White House came out with a 100% tariff on China to take effect on the same day. And the the meeting between the United States and China, there was supposed to be an in-face meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping to take place soon, that meeting may or may not happen. That's really uncertain as to whether or not it's going to go forward. So, things are not really looking super great for the United States and China, but once again, this is economics in 2025, where the rules are made up and the points don't matter. So, in 2 weeks we may find out that things are doing swimmingly well and then all of this kind of goes away. Who knows? The books are being cooked to an absurd degree, so I don't know if anybody can ever really say what a country's national economic situation is at any given time, but suffice it to say that the economy kind of tanked a little bit upon the news that the White House was going to retaliate with the these tariffs once again. There were quite a few mysterious shorts on Bitcoin immediately before the White House announcement on the tariffs. So, there are already a lot of indicators of deception and insider trading and a general state of shenanigans being undertaken with this sort of thing. So, I don't know. We'll see how it works out, but that's the situation as it stands right now. Moving down south to talk about the strategic movement and the general state of the situation with regards to Venezuela, rest assured war with Venezuela is still on the menu, and the US Navy has quietly sent a couple of more destroyers down there to augment the naval forces that are still conducting lots of exercises, training, and a general preparation for war right off the coast of Venezuela. I don't think there was a strike on a narco boat this week, so we've gone a full 7 days without blowing up a cartel vessel, but the general situation still remains as before. The United States has not reduced any presence down off the coast of Venezuela. As a matter of fact, we've increased it quite a bit. So, depending on what the United States is trying to do, depending on the strategic goals, and what the US is looking to gain from any kind of action in Venezuela, we shall see. It may just be trying to strong-arm Maduro into something that the United States wants, which is obviously that's I mean that's obviously the low-hanging fruit of what's going on, but there are ways to strong-arm Maduro that don't involve actually conducting combat operations in his country. The question is whether or not the White House will decide if sending troops into Venezuela is going to be necessary for these strategic goals that we seek in Venezuela, whatever those are. Probably oil, but who knows? Either way, there's a lot of movement going on and certainly a lot to keep an eye on as we move forward. Moving back to the homeland, there have been a few kinetic events that have taken place this week. We'll talk about Portland and Chicago in in just a moment, or rather at the end, because there have been a quite a few questions as to what the overall strategic goal in these places are, and I think I can maybe clarify some things. But when it comes to actual kinetic events this week, there have been two major events. The first of which was the DC church bomber outside St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C. That was a very interesting case because even though IED attacks and just generally crazy people with explosives tends to be kind of an American tradition at this point, this case was hosted to quite a bit of information manipulation, and I think that more eyes should be on this case considering the current threats against churches around the United States. I also wanted to mention the industrial explosion that took place in Tennessee yesterday. I didn't have time to slip it into the wire, but this was a very very kinetic explosion that took place in Tennessee at a major facility that produces explosives for the military. So, there have been many many casualties from this incident, and we'll get more into that in just a second. But the church bomber up first, one Lewis Jerry was arrested in Washington, D.C. after he caused a bit of a scene outside St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C. last Sunday. It took a couple of days for the details of this case to come to light because it was initially downplayed quite heavily by the authorities and by local journalists who don't really don't really care to highlight any kind of threats against Christian churches. Initially, this was reported as just some crazy guy setting up a camping tent right on the front of the church steps here as you can see. This is why there wasn't that much focus on this kind of thing because it just looked like a crazy homeless guy who was trying to cause a scene. This happens in D.C. like every 15 minutes, okay? So, this is not really out of the realm of of normalcy for the area. Even with the, you know, deployment of troops to D.C., there's still a a lot of dystopian elements to the city, and this is one of those things that tends to kind of happen, right? So, the church noticed, or rather local authorities, I'm not sure if the church noticed first or if local authorities, who were kind of policing the area in advance, saw this guy first. Either way, he had set up his little encampment here on the front steps of the church around 6:00 in the morning before the Red Mass for the year. So again, a special mass dedicated to the Supreme Court justices at this particular church. The Red Mass is held more widely, of course, and is supposed to be a special day to pray for all of those who are involved in the criminal justice field and the the court system and things like that. But this particular church hosts the their Red Mass for the Supreme Court justices, and over the years a couple of justices have shown up to attend this mass, which takes place the the Sunday before the court calendar begins for the year. So, DC police, DC Metro Police, initially stated that all right, they made contact with the crazy guy trying to set up a homeless camp on the steps of the church. Obviously, can't do that sort of thing, so they were trying to, you know, get him up and relocate him to another area, and they found a Molotov on him. That's the initial story they told to the media. However, that's not what happened at all. This guy set up an encampment on the front steps of the church, and when he was first contacted by police who were trying to, you know, walk up to him and ask him what it what what he's doing, he said basically stay away from me, I've got explosives. I'll throw one at you if you come any closer kind of thing. So, this was already like a hostage situation, right right up front, right to start with. Turns out what he wanted police to do was read his nine-page manifesto of what seems to be mostly just insanity, which is what they did, and he they were able to get him to surrender and arrest him and move on from there. But the bomb squad showed up because of the IED threat, obviously, and they found 200 IEDs scattered throughout his possessions and inside his tent and backpacks and stuff like that. So, I have no idea what these IEDs looked like, but looking at this guy and the context of this and the alleged contents of his manifesto, I'm going to venture a wild guess that these 200 IEDs were probably Antifa specials, right? Little tiny um fireworks grade explosives which have shrapnel probably glued or taped to the outside of them. We see these a lot. So, they're still explosives. They're still lethal. They're still like a very dangerous terroristic threat, but it's not like this guy had 200 155 shells with pressure plates in his tent here, right? So, these 200 IEDs are probably very Antifa grade, meaning that they're very very small, but you know, they're still very dangerous. They're still like, you know, it's still a terrorist attack, right? And considering that the White House has really tried to sign a bunch of executive orders talking about domestic terrorism and things like that, here is your case. This is exactly the type of guy that you said from the White House that you were trying to target and there's been no comment on whether or not this guy's going to face federal terrorism charges. So, something to be aware of. We know this is not surprising in the slightest, but I did want to highlight it because there hasn't really been very much detail on the nuances of this case and I did want to highlight that. Now, moving down to Tennessee, the very unfortunate explosion at the Accurate Energetic Systems Explosives Factory in Bucks North. This was a major manufacturer for military grade explosives. You can see here from their website, these are all of the things that they manufactured at this facility, and you can see it's a lot of very very heavy heavy military explosives here. And as you can see by the helicopter footage of the blast, the place is gone. It's it was just a catastrophic detonation that occurred there. Whatever the cause was, we may never know as a matter of fact because there's just there's nothing but a crater left. As far as casualties go, officially 19 people are still missing, but looking at the before and after photos blast, I think we can be fairly confident these are all are all going to be fatalities, unfortunately. Once again, there is no indication of what took place here. There's no indication of well, you know, what what happened to cause this catastrophic explosion. This facility does have a history of safety violations, but that's not entirely abnormal for most industrial facilities these days. I mean, pretty much every explosives manufacturer has a history of safety violations at this point. So, I don't know if that's something that would factor into trying to establish causation. I don't know how normal that sort of thing would be at this type of facility. And I also don't know the nature of the safety violations because, again, they're making explosives for the military. It's not like they're really forthcoming with their information on on what exactly they do there and the exact nature of safety violations. This is definitely one of those national security things, so we're probably not going to get the truth as to what caused this catastrophic blast, but yeah, not not a great thing, for sure. And it does highlight every time one of these things happens, it does highlight the importance of being aware, paying attention, and each one of us doing what we can to make sure that we are as safe as possible, especially those who work in the industrial field. It's a very dangerous world out there just in general, and it would be a very good idea to try to make the world a little bit less dangerous, however you can do that. If that means being a little bit safer, being the OSHA stickler, you know, I know nobody likes to be that guy, right? Nobody likes to be that guy on the work site, but look, man, if your work site has the potential to turn into a crater, please consider being a stickler for safety and doing what you can to make sure that everybody goes home at the end of the day. Now, moving out west, something quite concerning that I wanted to mention again. I wrote a longer wire than normal on this topic, which of course is going to get a lot of pushback due to the nature of the nation involved with this, but I did want to mention once again that there is a targeted geofencing campaign underway at many mega churches in the western United States. So, for those of you who did not read the the wire report on this, there has been a major push by the government of Israel, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to increase their image and increase their presence in American Christian churches. So, the Israeli government is trying to teach you about Christianity and how Christian churches need to support the government of Israel, specifically with regards to the October 7th attacks. Again, this is literally the most forbidden topic I have found so far to discuss, so, you know, there's really not much I can say, honestly, about it, but I do want to highlight the geofencing concerns because that's kind of a security thing. You guys can look into the media blitz on your own, but the the geofencing thing is something that's interesting because it's the first time that this sort of thing has happened specifically by a foreign nation-state in the context of targeting a place solely for the Christian faith. Just to get the disclaimer out, of course, targeted geofencing for advertising purposes happens literally all the time. As you're watching this on your phone, you are probably being surveilled by at least Google, who is associating your advertising ID with this particular content if you're watching it on, say, YouTube for example. And geofencing for advertising purposes has definitely been undertaken for a while now, right? How many times have you been in a city or been in a place without a VPN turned on and you suddenly start getting ads on Twitter, for instance, about a specific city policy or something like that? Or if you turn on a VPN and say you're, you know, you start getting ads in different languages from the nation where your VPN is located, right? Some of these are based on IP address, right? So, where your internet service provider is telling advertisers where you're located physically, but other times it is geographic, right? How many times have you gone into a store, for instance, and you go to your shopping at a particular store and then you go back out to the parking lot and you're sitting in your car getting ready to go home and you get in a pop-up ad from like Google Maps or something saying, "Hey, we see you visited the store. Would you like to leave a Google review for the store you just visited?" That is a geofenced advertising thing that links your geographic coordinate with your advertising ID. That's the kind of thing that is happening right now. The reason that I wanted to highlight it is because it's now happening to target specifically Christians who go to a Christian church. So, the way that this geofencing ad campaign is being undertaken, and once again, this is using their own documentation from their FARA registration paperwork. So, please, please, please, please, please look at this document. Do not believe me in my explanation of things. Go read the document yourself and you'll see how dystopian this kind of thing is. But the general gist of how this works is you've got your cell phone in your pocket, you show up to worship services on Sunday morning at a specific time before services begin, and you take your cell phone into the church. Well, now your cell phone, because it has location services turned on and because your smartphone has an associated advertising ID, now the Israeli government is able to discern that your advertising ID is now linked with this establishment. And because you're standing in a specific circle, a geographic circle, around that church, because you're standing there at a certain time, they can push ads to your phone specifically that have one purpose, at least according to their documents. The one purpose is to encourage you to think a certain way about the October 7th attacks. Now, how will this work out in in practice, right? It's not like you're going to get an emergency alert push notification from, you know, like the emergency alert system or something like that. What it what it means is you're going to see ads apps. So, if you were so inclined to pull up Twitter, for instance, at a certain time of day while standing in church, you will probably get an ad that is encouraging you to think a certain way about the nation-state of Israel or about the October 7th attacks. That's what this media campaign is for. Depending on the apps that you have on your phone, it could also be a cross-platform sort of thing. So, a lot of people have a weather app on their phone, right? And that weather app is generally going to request location services. And a lot of people also have push notifications turned on for their weather app a lot of times, and depending on the weather app that you use, you may get ads as push notifications. If you've got like a kind of a more sketchy weather app, right? A lot of the free ones are like that. So, this is just speculating, but this is how I can see this working out in practice is you may get a push notification from your weather app that says, "Hey, by the way, look at this documentation about the October 7th attacks while you're standing in church." That's what this whole campaign is about, and that's what their own documentation states. So, that's why I wanted to focus on this because, you know, this is a foreign nation-state targeting Christians for simply being inside a church. And what are they targeting them for? They're targeting them to get them to think a certain way about a nation-state and to get them to think a certain way about a historical event. That's how you know that the narrative is true, by the way, when you have to get advertisements rammed down your throat when you're trying to worship the Lord Jesus Christ. So, yeah, that's probably the most I can say about this sort of thing. I would encourage you to just check out the primary source documents right from the dot gov website yourself and form your own opinions about what's going on here because there's only so much I can say. Now, when it comes to what to do about this and what to do to mitigate the effects of this strategy, the first thing to do is to check out the list of churches that are being targeted by the Israeli government so far. I will put in this video, I will embed in it so that it makes it onto as many platforms as possible, a scroll, a video scroll, of the list itself. It's a few hundred churches, so I will make sure to to put this in in its entirety. I know it's kind of boring to scroll through, but I'll put it in here anyway just so that you guys can have it for the record. But in terms of what you can do to mitigate this sort of thing, it must be noted right up front that this is not new, okay? This is not a new thing. I'm only mentioning it because it is faith-based and it is a foreign government who does it, and because I have the documentation, right? The Israeli government did what they're supposed to do, and they filed a FARA registration, right? This company filed a Foreign Agent Registration Act packet to the US government. So, we have the documentation. If they were a little bit more surreptitious, or if they went through the effort of cloaking this more in a shell corporation sort of thing, then we wouldn't even know. We would not know about this. We would not have their PowerPoint slides. We would not have any of the data that this is occurring. Again, this is 100% a case of survivorship bias. We have the paperwork in front of us, so we have to make decisions off of the paperwork we have. We cannot make decisions based off of the paperwork that we don't have, but, you know, surveillance operations that are still ongoing. So, maybe, just maybe, this will be a way of encouraging Christians to think in terms of not just them to being targeted because they are Americans, but being targeted because they go to church, because they are at worship services by foreign nations. And, of course, the follow-on effects from all of that, you know. The government says this is 100% legal and is not doing anything to stop this, obviously, because of the nation involved, but also because, well, you know, they've pencil-whipped this sort of thing into being legal over the years. So, in terms of mitigation, there's not a whole lot you can do. You can go all Jason Bourne and put your phone in a Faraday bag when you go to church, or before you go to church, turn off location services, put your device in airplane mode. At the very minimum, that may help. It may not help, but it may help. A lot of times, Bluetooth is also being used to link advertising IDs together. So, even if you are you turn your data off, even if you turn off your location services, your advertising ID is being linked with other Bluetooth devices around you. So, your phone is listening for any Bluetooth devices that are around, and it can be used to associate you that way with your advertising ID. Yeah, this is pretty much squarely in the realm of digital panopticon kind of thing, and it's pretty dystopian, but welcome welcome to the reality of the way the world's been for about 20 years now. It's just getting a little bit more interesting because even foreign nation-states are doing this sort of thing. They're doing it openly with very nice PowerPoint slides on this sort of thing. So, you can do it if you want. You can put your phone in a Faraday bag before you go to church, so that maybe your phone isn't going to know that you're sitting in church. You can turn off location services. You can some depending on which apps you're using and which operating systems and stuff like that, you may be able to go in and reset your advertising ID. I think Google has that as an option, but yeah, there's not a whole lot you can do. This may have happened before in the past. We just didn't know that it was being very subtle, you know? But, there's a big difference between minor surveillance that is being conducted in secret, or the general gist, or the general understanding that all Americans live under that, yeah, the NSA is probably surveilling me, right? Every American kind of operates under that assumption nowadays, but it that's a that's a big difference from that general abstract, yeah, the feds are probably surveilling me for some reason. The Palantir databases, right, are sucking up every bit of data about me, right? There's a big difference between that general gist, that abstract view, and a foreign government openly advertising, proudly so, proudly advertising that they are targeting Christians in the biggest ever geofencing campaign where they are siphoning up your data solely for the purposes of propaganda. They're not trying to sell you a T-shirt. They're not trying to get you to buy a cheeseburger, right? They're trying to sell an idea about a historical event to you. So, maybe you see why I'm a little bit concerned about that sort of thing. Again, because it is a targeting of Christians, there will be very little media coverage of it, and people will generally not want to care about this sort of thing because, again, that's just kind of the way things are nowadays. But, I wanted to focus on it because this is very important to me. Even though the churches that they are targeting are are not my churches, right? They're mostly mega-churches out west, but still, something to keep an eye on, something to be aware of, and something to start prodding people to be a little bit more serious with regards to living daily life. And, unfortunately, that now includes church life. So, now moving over to the counter-ICE efforts in both Portland and Chicago. Let's let's let's dig into this a little bit because this has become quite a complicated thing that hopefully we can discuss and and get to some sort of understanding with regards to what's going on with regards to counter-ICE efforts around the country. I wanted to highlight Portland and Chicago because these cities are both the point of consolidation for counter-ICE efforts in in these areas, but they're also very different, right? So, there's a lot of overlap between the two, but there's also a lot of differences between the two. So, let's start with Portland first. Portland is, of course, Portland, right? Portland is internationally infamous for being a very big far-left, communist, socialist, antifa Mecca, right? And, that's why they're resisting counter-immigration efforts there. Most of the counter-ICE efforts in Portland have arisen from a few different demographics. The first group are the immigrants themselves, which are a smaller group compared to the rest of the country, right? There are far fewer Mexicans in Portland than in Los Angeles, for instance. There are still enough illegal immigrants in Portland to cause trouble, but for the most part, most of the unrest in Portland is coming from the usual suspects, antifa, right? Portland is second to Seattle, a major antifa hub for the region. So, that's where a lot of this unrest is coming from, antifa trying to cause problems because they are antifa. The reason that Portland is worthy of note is because there's just a lot of them there. So, see this image that was posted by the Department of Homeland Security and a bunch of other sources, this was going around on a lot of these anarchist platforms and social media, where, by the way, they just maintain free control, right? If you're a leftist or an antifa member in the United States, you can post terrorist threats, you know, openly in on the internet, and nothing will happen to you, right? Yeah, I know, surprising because Trump's in the White House, and we have a hugely conservative government now, right? Allegedly. Yeah, no, antifa still has been given a pass by the DOJ to do whatever they want. Now, you can argue there's intelligence collection being undertaken. I very strongly doubt that because most of the people who work at the FBI, and most of the people who work at the DOJ, are far-left militants themselves, right? These people physically participated in a lot of these marches for these, you know, causes to show solidarity. So, whether or not the White House specifically, and, you know, Trump's core staff are trying to weed this out, I don't know. All I know is what's happening, which is antifa has no natural predators, which is why they're able to get away with stuff like this. Today, probably by the time this brief comes out, antifa is openly advertising and encouraging people to shine lasers at helicopters, specifically US military Black Hawks and federal and border patrol Black Hawks that are flying over the city to conduct raids. Yeah, very bold move. But, for those of you who think that the military's going to crack down on this, I would probably say probably not. The the laser thing was used in Korea for their protests a few years ago to bring down drones and things like that, and it worked quite well because people are correct in that if you are a lone, single individual, and you shine a laser at a military helicopter with very fancy optics and a laser of its own, you're going to have a bad time. But, if you've got 400 people in the street, and they're all doing it, all at the same time, and no one is interested in arresting these people, guess what? They're going to get away with it. Now, for those concerned about how normal this will become by leftist groups and leftist organizations around the country, there are some tools at the federal and military level that can help mitigate the effects of lasers being used on aircraft, but maybe we'll talk about that at a later time. I'm kind of curious as to how this is going to work out, especially in Portland, because this is the first time that they have openly stated they're going to commit a felony, and I'm curious as to how that's going to work out for them. But, anyway, that's Portland. Chicago is a whole other animal. Now, there's a lot of overlap between the two, but why is Chicago upset with the counter-ICE operations? It's not really antifa in Chicago that's causing a problem, though they do have an antifa presence there. Of course, antifa is going to be in every major city, and even some minor cities around the country, but mostly Chicago is upset for one reason alone, gangs. Chicago is upset because a gangs in Chicago run rampant, and they control the streets, and they control a lot of these places where immigrants are congregating. So, drug dealers are going to get it really upset if you remove their clientele from their ecosystems, and you remove their drug trafficking networks from their systems. So, that's why Chicago is upset, and that's why people are trying to take the fight to ICE officials there. Of course, it's also a political thing. A lot of the attacks on the ICE facility in Broadview have taken place due to the elderly, far-left, but also elderly individuals who don't really have anything better to do but protest and cause problems. That's kind of a nationwide problem, but it's also low-level stuff. The more serious stuff, like vehicle ramming attacks, shootings, snipings, things like that, those tend to be because of straight-up cartels being involved, and they don't like ICE taking taking the fight to their criminal enterprises, or far-left activism, right? So, a lot of these vehicle ramming attacks and a lot of these straight-up attacks on ICE are just due to politics, right? That's really the only way that you can encourage crime to not be policed is due to some kind of political thing, or because you're a criminal yourself. And, that tends to be how things have worked out in Chicago so far. So, Portland and Chicago are two very different cities, and they're taking the fight to ICE. They're conducting these counter-ICE operations. They're learning. They're growing. They're organizing. They're They're getting better funding, but they're two very different cities with a little bit of overlap between the two of them. So, that's why I wanted to talk about this in a little bit more depth because there's a lot of discernment that's needed. Yes, it is a very, very, very hard mission that has no real winning solution that's easy to get to. On the one hand, you've got federal agencies like ICE, which are trying, I think I think they're genuinely trying to do what they can, at least some district supervisors are definitely trying to do the best they can to prevent terrorists from harming American citizens, whereas in some other areas, we're totally fine with a foreign government, you know, surveilling Christians going to church and trying to target them with propaganda because we've pencil whipped that into being legal and we're just perfectly okay with that, right? So, there are some things that are doing good and some things that are not going so well with regards to counterinsurgency in the homeland, but we're here now, right? And we have to do the best that we can. And if we have to talk these things out without exactly knowing the exact perfect answer for things, well, that's what we kind of have to do. So, we'll continue to do that and keep an eye on the situation as we go forward. Now, moving over to the United Kingdom, jolly old England is not doing so jolly these days. There has been a lot of pushback with regards to the straight-up authoritarianism that's kind of underway in the United Kingdom, which is kind of ironic because a lot of the talk of authoritarianism is coming from within Keir Starmer's own party, right? And one of the things that's kind of come to light this past week has been the "no Coke for you" law, which is a new law that was instituted to ban restaurants and establishments who have, you know, soft drinks on tap. They are no longer allowed by law to offer you a refill for certain beverages, right? For your health, right? That's the kind of way that they're framing it. What is it really? What's really going on here? It's the same exact thing that happened in the United States with the paper straws. It has no real impact on anybody because obviously people are just going to go buy another drink, right? So, there if they want a refill, they're just going to buy another one for however much it costs. It doesn't prevent you from buying another, it just prevents a free refill. So, what is this? Well, this is a great example in power dynamics for for governments. And what this is is something trivial that the government can dominate a citizenry with that that impacts the citizenry on a personal level, but it's trivial. It has to be trivial. That's the That's the important part because what they want to say with this is we can we can impact you on such a trivial meaningless way, but we're still going to dominate you, right? The fact that it's a trivial is and has no real bearing on anything is the important part. They want to make sure that you know who's in charge. That's why the paper straws thing, which are wrapped in plastic, right? It's so trivial. It's so meaningless. It's so useless, right? But, it impacts you on a personal level and it's a way for the government to impact your daily life. It's definitely a psyop. It's definitely a The more, I guess, doctrinal term is information operation. Yet, really it's just a a domination thing. So, that's what that's all about, but the the British people have gotten a little bit upset about it. We've seen these psyops in America many times over the years and yeah, that's kind of what what that's about. So, the other thing that I thought was rather interesting is the developments with the digital ID concerns, which have deteriorated since the digital ID scheme has come to light. So, as you might expect, resistance to the digital ID scheme has been rather high throughout the United Kingdom. Basically, nobody, left or right, wants the digital ID scheme to come into fruition because of, well, many reasons. It's not just privacy, it's more of a data security thing. If you put all of your eggs in one basket, when a ransomware thief steals that basket, you've got yourself a bit of a problem. But again, it's often the little and seemingly meaningless details that kind of catch my eye on stuff like this. And this was the case with this article from The Guardian. At face value, all right, fine. You read the headline, it says, "Explainer: Why does the UK need digital IDs and what data will they include? Starmer's proposal has been criticized by rivals and civil liberties groups and campaigners worry about people without smartphones." Okay, so fairly standard mainstream media article from The Guardian, right? But here's the thing that caught my eye. This is how they chose to write this article. So, if you scroll down a little bit on the page, the whole article is is formatted like this section here on the right. And the first section is, "Why do the people of the UK need a digital ID?" And the second question is, "Why is Tony Blair involved?" Now, isn't that an interesting way of writing an article? Isn't that very fascinating? Sometimes the things that they say and the things that they choose to say and the things they choose to not say. This article to me was utterly fascinating because it is a perfect example of how articles are written sometimes, betraying what the article's really about. It's almost like reading a Soviet newspaper from like, you know, the height of the Khrushchev era, where they can't really talk about something directly, but they can definitely talk about it indirectly. So, this article's headline is trying to explain why does the UK need digital IDs and what what's the digital ID thing about. And the first two things they choose to talk about are, "Why do we even need this and why is Tony Blair involved?" The fact that they wrote these in this order and wrote about them at all, you know, why is Tony Blair involved? That shows you who's controlling the marionette strings with this, right? And I find that to be utterly fascinating to the point of hilarity that this is how they wrote this article. It's not like they started with, you know, "Well, you know, there's immigration, right?" Or cuz that's what the British government's perspective is, "Oh, we're doing this because of immigration." No, that's not what The Guardian says. The Guardian is trying to ask a rhetorical question or try to ask a question that the citizens are asking, which is, "Why do we need this and why is Tony Blair involved?" That is hilarious. And it kind of shows you what everybody's thinking about this sort of thing. Even though The Guardian's articles are, you know, it's The Guardian, right? So, anyway, I thought that was interesting that this is going over so poorly that they had to literally ask these questions and try to answer them in the most politically correct way right up front. And that's what the article's about. And I think this is interesting. For those of you who have mentally checked out because this is about the UK and you don't really care, I will I will see your Guardian article and raise you a Fox News article. This was published a couple of days ago on October 9th and the title of this Fox News, again, Fox News article is, "UK faces backlash over mandatory digital ID. Could US be next?" Seems like a fairly standard headline for Fox News, something you should probably would just scroll past, you know, unless you're watching it on TV, I guess. But the subheading betrays what Fox News is trying to push. The subheading reads, "Digital ID expert says controversy stems from fear, poor conception and lack of education." That's why I chose the Fox News article on this because Fox News, which has historically been the conservative alt-right boogeyman news group newsflash, it's not. Even Fox News is trying to push people to accept a digital ID here in the United States. Now, I could pull any other article from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, all of these other, you know, the the the traditionally more leftist groups. Even the AP would probably have something positive to say about digital ID. But I chose this one specifically to show you that this is truly a bicameral effort. This is a bipartisan effort to try to shape perception here in the United States. So, when Fox News, of all places, is trying to get people to accept a digital ID and, "Oh, no, no, no, these fears are unjust. You just need to be educated. You need to be educated about what's going on with this digital ID thing." Yeah, that's something to be aware of. You can kind of see where where the the tides are are shifting on that sort of thing. But we all know how this goes, right? That's why I put these these images on the slide with this article because we know how this goes. We we've heard this before. The United States, guess what? We have had a national ID effort, the REAL ID effort, right? Remember that push from a few years back? In Congress, we had liberal politicians and conservative politicians unite together, uniparty style, to pass the REAL ID Act so that we had all 50 states, you know, all the states which wanted to participate in this program to have REAL IDs, right? To have identification documents, driver's licenses, which would be of one sort of same standard for things like TSA and interstate travel. There was this massive push from a bunch of conservative politicians, a bunch of liberal politicians. They both were talking about how great this was going to be for security and immigration and, you know, counterterrorism and things like that. And what happened? This week we found out that a lot of states were just issuing driver's licenses, CDLs, with no name given on them. These people can get on a plane with no name given driver's licenses because they're REAL ID compliant driver's licenses, right? So, yeah, we all know how this goes. We all know what's going on, but I thought it was very interesting in typical fashion cuz I tend to focus on things that probably don't really matter in the long run, but I found it was interesting, so I wanted to talk about it. But anyway, I find it very interesting that we're going to lock you down, we're going to make sure that you have this digital ID, but I wonder how many people in the UK and eventually in the US when this comes to the US, I wonder how many people are going to have a digital ID on their phone that says "no name given." Probably quite a few because they don't want these people's actual names, they don't want them in biometrics so that when they commit crimes, they have no record, right? Because I mean, you don't even know their name or anything about them, right? So, anyway, I thought that was kind of interesting how the digital panopticon is certainly here. However, that panopticon has blind spots in a few areas. So, some people get surveilled more than others, particularly if you go to church on Sunday. But if you're at an Antifa riot and you're shining lasers at helicopters, there's probably not going to be much that happens to you. So, anyway, selective digital panopticon sort of situation, which contributes to the very interesting times that we live in and the challenges we have to work through. So, so that's pretty much all I have for today and let's roll up with the intercepted Ghost Net reports where we can try to get a little get ahead of the information crackdown and try to increase our resiliency in a more off-grid, more radio-based way. This is the Ghost Net communications plan. It's a ham radio plan mostly, shortwave radio or HF high-frequency radio is a very interesting tool that we can use to communicate with people over long distances without having any sort of infrastructure in between. We created this Ghost Net plan so that we could all kind of get on the same page and have a more resilient way of exchanging information, not just for an emergency use or more of a hobby sort of thing, but more of a practical thing. I have been working on improving the Ghost Net over time to try to integrate some other systems and things like that. So, there is a MeshTastic channel for the Ghost Net. There There are also VHF and UHF options for those of you who just have the ubiquitous Baofeng, right? The infamous little radio that could, right? So, if all you have is a a cheap radio, don't feel left out. You can definitely engage with it. It's probably not going to be very effective for line of sight stuff. This is more of an HF thing so that we can connect people from all over the world together kind of at the same time. And that's kind of hard to do with line of sight, especially if you don't have repeater networks. This is heavily more of an autonomous kind of thing, decentralized sort of information exchange system. And as we can see, there's a lot of information being exchanged every week and even throughout the week. It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it is one way that we can stay connected, especially if if everything goes out, if the internet goes out, if power goes out, if everybody's disconnected from one another, this is how we can exchange information over long distances fairly effectively. So, thank you to all of you who make the Ghost Net great. Thank you to all of you who participate in that and thank you to all you guys out there who are just listen only. Even if you're just listening and you and you don't have a license and so you can't transmit, it's good that you're participating in it anyway and trying to do the best you can to stay informed. So, that's all I have for today. Here are the sources for this week's reports. You can also grab the links and primary source material if I can if I can snag it on each Obsidian page for each wire report throughout the day. So, so even though I'm taking the wire reports from Obsidian and pasting them into social media, right? You don't see the source material on social media, you can click that link and then go to my Obsidian page where I have all of the other links. I have to do it this way because a lot of social media pages simply just deprioritize if they see that I have a lot of links in a in a post, they will just block that post and only I can see it, right? This is the way the world works, unfortunately. That's why my wire reports don't get pushed by Twitter's algorithm too much because even one link is enough to deprioritize this. But my priority is the information, not necessarily reach a lot of times on Twitter at least. And I want to make sure you guys can get access to the the primary source material if you want to investigate further, which you definitely should if you want to look at the primary sources that I use to make each wire report. I do the best I can to try to put those there. So, there's always more research to be had. There's always more ways to verify that information is true in today's age of significant information manipulation efforts, it's always good to try to get to the bottom of the truth as best you can, right? So, thank you to all of you who have stuck around. Thank you to all of you on Patreon who support me there and keep this work going. I really do appreciate it. Couldn't do it without you guys. So, thank you for 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 April 20th through the 26th, 2025. It's been a busy week as usual, so let's get right to it. Starting off with the global overview here on the home front. Most of the concerns this week have been really related to various immigration issues such as a couple of judges who are arrested for aiding and abetting illegal operations. And the fallout from that will probably be a little bit more concerning as time goes on, but we'll get to that in a moment. Overseas, various diplomatic efforts continue via the pen and the sword, depending on where you're at in the world. Diplomatic negotiations continue with regards to the war in Ukraine. As things are happening rather quickly with that conflict, higher and higher levels of diplomatic activities are being conducted. For instance, President Trump met with Ukrainian leader Zalinski at the Pope's funeral and American diplomat Steve Woodco has been taking part in various peace talks and uh negotiation efforts in Moscow over the past few weeks. Nothing really solid either way though. It it does look like we're entering the final stages of the war when diplomatic activities are starting to become a little bit more common and the restrictions and face saving activities of the past few years have kind of fallen away. Now we're just getting essentially down to brass tax with this. It will probably take a couple of more weeks for things to reach a good point of stability, but right now Russia is at the table, Ukraine is at the table, and the United States is kind of facilitating the whole thing. NATO is keeping quiet as they probably should at the moment and we're actually starting to make good progress by getting all of the belligerents involved in this. So when it comes to things like this, peace is very very close, but it can also be very very far away. So we will have to see how things shake out. But right now things are tenuous at best, but it's uh it's continuing. Diplomacy is continuing which is probably a good thing. Similar story with the Iranians. really nothing of of note has come from the past few weeks of talks, negotiations, rhetoric, all that kind of stuff. There have been some casual remarks and rumors, but for the most part, there really hasn't been any major development there. Same thing in Yemen. The United States is continuing to bomb pretty much everything there is in Yemen. I will mention that there are local rumors uh or at least there are statements being made that the actual Yemeni government as in not the Houthis like the actual elected quote unquote legitimate if you want to call them that government of Yemen is attempting to take on the Houthis with the sort of passive help of the United States along with Saudi Arabia and all the other nations that are involved in this conflict. I don't know how legitimate that is. We're talking maybe 30,000 20,000 at best of uh Yemeni citizens who are not Houthi who are not ethnically Houthi and they don't really control hardly anything. They're just out in the eastern part of the country whereas the capital city all the major ports they're all controlled by the Houthis who control the country. So this really gets way down into the weeds and it's not super critical to understand the the minute details of this to understand the larger picture which is that conflict continues in Yemen. The United States is losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drones because of Houthies keep shooting them down. So, you know, the United States military is learning a lot of defense lessons here and I would be very curious from a more doctrinal standpoint the lessons that are being learned in Yemen. But so far, the status quo remains more or less in the Far East. The various retaliatory actions undertaken by China with regards to American trade and the tariffs that they are potentially facing. These efforts continue. This situation deserves a lot more time than I can give to it today, but both the United States and China might be speaking past each other and not necessarily to each other with with regards to what's actually happening in the diplomatic space on this one. What I mean by that is the United States is speaking to China and is approaching this issue purely from an economic situation, purely from a fairness, from a tax, from a tariff perspective, whereas China is speaking a different language on on their outlook on the world. So the Chinese economy while it is not purely a communist sort of Soviet Union style economy, it's not that it's definitely something different. However, we always have to remember that China is in fact a communist nation. The Chinese Communist Party is running the country, right? So you can't entirely say that the Chinese economy is a free economy. It's most certainly not. Now, it may not be as strict as the Soviet Union was back in the day, but still it's uh it's hard to get any sort of reliable economic data out of China because again, they are a very much closed society. They have a lot of closed cities. It's, you know, they've they've brought the era of secrecy to their modern economy and it's really hard to determine how an economic trade dispute will impact China. People will argue about this till they're blew in the face, but the bottom line for now is that things are not as simple as they seem. I'll just I'll just leave it like that. That China may be approaching this whole trade dispute from a more military angle than the United States is, even though the United States is most certainly trying to treat this tariff situation as a sort of soft embargo. So, there's a little bit of military uh tactics going on here, a little bit of military strategy sprinkled over the top of what most people seem to think is purely an economic thing. And it's not a purely economic thing. And because of that, it's uh complicated. And it's really hard to describe both what is actually happening and what is going to happen. So something to keep in mind for the future, but for now we're just going to have to leave it there. And finally, in India and Pakistan in the Kashmir region, it would seem that war is most certainly on the menu at the moment. Whether or not straightup hostilities will commence again like in 2019 is hard to determine at the moment. But right now the diplomatic situation definitely seems worse than in 2019 when the fighting flared up in Kashmir after a period of lull and a sort of tepid peace. Right now the diplomatic situation is much worse. India and Pakistan have traded much u more increasingly serious rhetoric over the years. So now we're kind of at the moment where we're just kind of waiting to see how India and Pakistan go at it. So that's pretty much all I wanted to focus on this week for the global overview. Let's move over to the strategic movement. Again, very little change. The Truman carrier strike group is still uh cutting circles in the Red Sea along with the Carl Vincent in the Gulf of Aiden. And the Nimits is somewhere in the Pacific just like usual. No change from last week. Everyone's still kind of doing their their thing. The new addition this week is of course the Indian aircraft carrier, the Vicrant. I'm not sure if it would qualify as a carrier strike group. It it appears to doctrinally be so, but I'm not entirely sure about their capabilities. Either way, they're off the coast of Pakistan right now. We could see them via satellite imagery and but yeah, it seems like there are military drills, very serious military drills underway in Pakistan and India along the border. That's kind of how this conflict has worked out for the most part over the past few years. So, I'm not entirely certain if the Vicrant is on an operational deployment or if this is just a show of force. So, it's one of those things where India can easily one up Pakistan in that regard with regards to military force. So, that's pretty much it for strategic movement. Moving to the kinetic activities tracker for the past seven days. I'm just going to start covering the past week or so we don't overload with all of the icons on the map. For those of you who have not uh checked it out so far, if you're wanting a deeper dive into what I'm doing with this mapping project, I just put out last night a video explaining all of the little details or at least most of the major details that I'm kind of working on with regards to this mapping project. Those of you who watch the video will also know that I launched a tipline system so that you can contribute to this data project if you wish. There are a series of tip lines. If you want to submit a report of something, you can do so. It's very easy to do. It may be a little bit longer than you you might be used to. But for those of you who want to send me something, make me aware of a situation or maybe something that I didn't see or didn't cover. You know, I'm I'm only one person here, right? So, I can't have eyes and ears everywhere. So, if you see something that I maybe missed or think I might be interested in, you can certainly submit it to me via the tip lines. But again, a longer explanation is in that video I dropped last night. For this week, most of the new icons are clustered in New York City, specifically Manhattan. So, let's go ahead and jump to the specific regions and let's talk about what happened in New York this week for a bit. It's been fairly kinetic. It's again protest season, so we're starting to see some of these uh climate groups, these uh anti- Doge or anti-Eon Musk groups come out. Uh I don't know how well funded they are, but they are starting to conduct a few more operations this time of year. And this week is no exception. And in this case, it's rather interesting. Something to to take note of is that a lot of these protest movements are not entirely easy to determine what exactly they are protesting. So just running down the list, the Trump Tower was vandalized by a guy going in spray painting something, getting his picture taken as usual. There was a protest on Billionaire's Row, specifically outside of Bill Aman's apartment building. He has been targeted by a few groups over the past few weeks. It's been more along the lines of a long-term siege kind of thing, but every now and then they'll go and they'll protest at his uh his residence along with a few other people. It's a much larger effort than just one guy, but he's kind of the the main face of this. And finally, in Midtown Manhattan, there was a Tesla showroom that was vandalized in a variety of ways for a variety of means. Like I mentioned, all of these incidents are kind of tied together, and you can see this based on the graffiti that they leave behind. The vandalism at the Tesla showroom was not simply just an anti-D Doge, anti-Eon Musk thing, but it was also a climate thing and also a anti-Trump thing. So, all of these things are kind of getting lumped together. The climate issue, the anti-Trump thing, the at this point, I'm just going to have to call it pro-corruption because they're it's very hard to argue against the Doge idea. And now people can argue about how it's like being done, but anti-corruption efforts in government are very I mean it's a hard thing to to protest against, but they're making an effort, right? So a lot of these groups are protesting multiple things. They're they're bundling all these ideas up together in a general uh political left bubble kind of thing. And a lot of times it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. And a lot of times when it comes to some of these demonstrations, you'll see people target each other at the same event. So we saw this more palpably when it when it came to the whole Israel Palestine thing a few months ago when it kind of heated up at some of these places after you know before it got shut down really you would have protesters showing up to like say a climate protest you know to protest against global warming or climate change or whatever right and they would want to bring in their like support for Gaza and then the other people who are pro-Israel would clash at the same event so they're there to protest some sort of climate issue but their other interests are conflicting. So, we're starting to see that a little bit more with regards to some of the protests and things that are kicking up. But, you know, whenever you bundle together a lot of very different issues into the same protest crowd, it's a hard cell uh to kind of get everybody on the same page when you've got radically different ideas all the way around. So, all of that is to say, this will be a very interesting summer for kinetic activities. Also in the northeast region, the New Jersey wildfire, the Jones Road fire, has reached 60% containment as of I think last night. The cause of the fire has been announced as arson and one arrest has been made. One Joseph Clling, a local who lived in the area. So, this does highlight the risks that arson brings this time of year especially. One detail I wanted to mention because I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information on this and this pertains to the nuclear power plant. So, Oyster Creek nuclear power plant is well, it was in the fire zone. So the fire uh went right up to this nuclear power plant. This is a defunct power plant. It's not used anymore. So it's it's shut down, but there is a lot of nuclear material at the side. There are spent storage pools there. So there was a concern at a certain period of time that this facility would be at risk for this wildfire. So saw a lot of hysteria about that, but it was mildly concerning for a little bit there. But of course, firefighters prioritized defending this particular structure and this this compound really. So, it was never really in any very serious danger, but it is something to think about. You know, some crazy guy uh setting fire to the woods can cause a very severe incident or complicate things quite a bit. So, something to keep in mind. Moving to the Midwest, a comparatively rare instance this week of a judge being arrested was reported in Milwaukee. A Milwaukee County judge was arrested on charges of obstructing justice for her role in helping an illegal alien escape custody. Details of this incident are hard to verify, but the general gist of the story and and perhaps hinting as to why this arrest took place. This was a little bit more brazen than normal, especially considering the context of what actually happened that day. So, once again, details hard to verify, but the general gist of what happened is she had an illegal alien in her courtroom who was facing charges of assault. A guy who uh beat his roommate, his roommate's girlfriend, and one other person. He put three people in the hospital uh by beating them so severely. and he was subsequently arrested on assault and battery charges and that's what he was doing in the courtroom. So, it wasn't any kind of uh immigration thing. However, the feds found out about it and showed up with a lawful warrant to arrest him in the courtroom on federal charges. This is a very standard thing for the feds to show up and and and nab somebody in court. U it's just a common place for arrest to take place. Either way, uh once the judge learned that the feds were outside, uh she had what can only be described as a mental episode. So, she took it upon herself to leave her courtroom and started verbally abusing the federal agents out in the hallway, shouting at them and forcing them to leave out, you know, leave the hallway. She went back into the courtroom and took the defendant back into her private chambers and allowed the defendant to escape from the facility down a hallway that led to an outside door. So, once again, this is a trial taking place, right? So the prosecution had no idea what happened. The defendant just disappeared along with his attorney. And once everybody figured out what was going on, the judge had let this guy escape. Uh the guy was uh on foot. So there a foot pursuit took place outside the courtroom and the feds ended up nabbing him immediately anyway. So he didn't get very far, but this is one of those situations where left, right, or center, this is very, very illegal. So this is probably why the charges took place. This has happened several times before in the past by several other judges as I've noted before, but this one was a little bit more brazen and of course there's new uh leadership in town with regards to the federal agencies. So these are starting to be cracked down on a little bit more. Similar story down in the southwest this week. The infamous judge Keno, Joseé Luis Keno, he goes by Joel Kano, but his real name is Joseé Luis. He and his wife were arrested on federal charges for again aiding in abetting not just an illegal uh who they let they let an illegal alien stay at their guest house. So he was living at the at their home with them but also he was a known uh trenda member or TDA member and they also provided uh this individual with firearms. So the local uh neighbors uh report that the known TDA member was observed handling firearms several times on social media and also by neighbors. So most citizens who live in these areas are not surprised in the slightest. My guess and this is just just pure speculation, but my guess is that the feds probably have something on this judge with regards to his own membership in some sort of organization. So it's probably not just because he harbored an illegal alien, even though that is of course illegal. can't do that sort of thing even though you're a judge. I find it very very hard to believe and most people who uh are in the region find it very hard to believe that a judge would get rolled up for something like that. Now maybe forced into retirement, sure, removed from the bench even that might happen. Sure. But getting rolled up and arrested is something that would only normally happen if there's a little bit of a story that we have not seen yet. So it may be surprising for some, it may be completely unsurprising for others, uh such as myself. It's not surprising at all. The most surprising part for me is that he actually got arrested, which makes me think that there's probably a little bit more to this story than meets the eye. But either way, we will see. So that's all I have for the United States. Let's move over to India and Pakistan and briefly discuss what's going on there because as one might imagine there there's a lot of information flowing and not a lot of it is particularly helpful. Anyone who has spent any time on social media anytime soon, especially on uh platforms like Twitter, will know that a substantial portion of internet traffic on these platforms comes from India. Right? So since that is the case, it is very hard to determine what is true and what is untrue. Uh but I can generally uh use statements by officials, government officials in both nations, both India and Pakistan to determine essentially what has happened so far. So earlier this week, there was a terror attack in Pahogam up in the Kashmir region. This is a resort town, if you want to call it that. I'm not sure it qualifies as a resort town, but either way, it's it's definitely a tourist destination for Indians in particular. So, there was a small arms skirmish. I have not been able to pin down exactly where the skirmish took place. Again, we're seeing a little bit of manipulation of information here, which may be a clue as to what's going on. But what is relatively certain is that government agencies and government officials have stated that 26 people are dead from the attack and there are many uh wounded. There were quite a few survivors from this attack and uh the testimony has been hard to verify. So verifying any of this is challenging. Similar story with figuring out who actually conducted the attack. There are several insurgent groups at this point who have claimed to have conducted the attack. Some of these groups are more traditionally Muslim terror groups. Some of them are Kashmir groups that are solely uh really supportive of Kashmir independence from both nations. Some of them are Indian groups which are ethnically Hindu but they don't like other uh casts. So it's a cast system thing. So I don't know who actually conducted the attack. Pakistan claims that it's a false flag attack that this really was the Indian government who shot up their own people as a way of justifying a war with Pakistan. Again, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's it's it's impossible to verify either way at the moment. In a larger sense though, in this part of the world, it it honestly really doesn't matter who started it or who's legitimately behind it because what's happening is happening. Very significant events have taken place on both sides of the border. So here are the things that I have been able to track down and verify that both nations have done to each other. Both nations have closed their borders to each other. There have been some exceptions on both sides for the seek population which is kind of an interesting development. Both nations have closed their airspace to each other's commercial airlines which is kind of a big deal because there's a lot of aviation traffic between India and Pakistan. Uh commercial aviation that is when that tends to happen it's not necessarily for a trade thing but it's to keep civilian airliners out of the way in case missiles start flying. Likewise, both nations have canceled all of the visas for each other's population, and they have issued deportation orders for each other's population. How likely are they to carry this stuff out? I very strongly doubt they're going to deport each other's citizens. There are just too many Pakistanis in India and there are too many Indians in Pakistan for this to occur like reliably. But either way, they've issued the order. So, we'll see how it works out. Likewise, both nations have ordered their own citizens back to each other. So Pakistan has ordered Pakistanis to return to Pakistan. India has return has ordered Indians to return to India. Same song and dance as always. And continuing the fairly standard tradition in the region. Pakistani and Indian border guards have been shooting at each other with rifles fairly regularly since this thing began really. So that's pretty much what both nations have done to each other. Uh India has has oneuped Pakistan as usual. For those who are not familiar with the region, India is generally considered by most military experts around the world to be the superior uh military fighting force. They've got a larger military, more technologically advanced. They're supported by the west uh such as the United States and Israel. So you can see how they would have the technological upper hand and also India has terrain on their side. So one of the things that India has done specifically that Pakistan can't really do anything about is they have uh cancelled the Indis waters treaty of 1960. Anyway, India has shut down uh the slle gates on roughly a dozen or so maybe 18 or so rivers that flow into Pakistan. For those that are unaware of the geography of the region, India is uphill of Pakistan or at least Kashmir is the Indian uh administered parts of Kashmir and Pakistan is very heavily reliant on the water that flows down from the Himalayas, the Anaperna range into Pakistan. That's where they get most of their water for agriculture. So India just by closing a few sloo gates has shut down 80% of the water used for irrigation purposes in Pakistan which is going to be very devastating. Of course Pakistan has vowed to bomb those slle gates to open them back up again but it's debatable as to whether or not they can they can actually do that. The Indian Air Force isn't actually any better. Uh so far there has been one reported casualty on all sides from this and this came from an Indian aircraft dropping a drop tank a fuel tank from a fighter jet. Uh they dropped it over a city and uh fuel tank landed in someone's house and killed an Indian. So that's why you'll see a lot of proakistan accounts saying that India bombed themselves. That's not entirely true. That's just Pakistan kind of, you know, poking at India. One of the Indian Air Force pilots who's been doing patrols in the area just dropped their drop tank at the wrong moment and that tank landed in an Indian village and killed an Indian. So India is negative one in terms of casualties so far in this conflict. So for those of you who don't know or don't understand why this is both a very serious situation but also not that serious and why a lot of the claims of open war uh on Twitter are probably not entirely that accurate. Let me just explain some of the common tactics that are used. I I'll just call them standard third world warfare tactics. These are things that a lot of these lesser capable militaries to include India and Pakistan tend to do to each other when they go to war. One of the major things that is occurring right now is both sides are shelling random uninhabited areas. So this is something that both nations tend to do. The even the US army tends to do this. we call it terrain denial fires, meaning you're just shelling a random mountaintop to make sure the enemy doesn't go there or in some cases just shelling the a random mountaintop for deception purposes or to confuse an enemy or something like that. Right? So when the western world does it, you know, when when more traditionally western militaries do terrain denial fires, it's more of a doctrinal process. However, India and Pakistan are very well known for the past well since artillery has been invented. Both of these nations will lob artillery rounds at each other, but not really at each other. They'll they'll pick an uninhabited area and just shoot randomly. They're not even they're not even plotting where the shells go most of the time. And this is just something that's very very common. It's you'd only know unless you're like familiar with how these militaries kind of operate, but I I'm not entirely certain if you would classify that as a serious war. But it sure does look good when they video uh themselves, you know, firing artillery rounds. Well, where did that round go? Well, you know, and you can verify that this is what's happening because both India and Pakistan have been shelling each other for 3 days and not a single person has reported a casualty yet. A lot of villages up in Kashmir. They're reporting, man, serious fighting going on, but there's not even any wounded. That's cuz they're not really shooting at each other. They're just shooting at random areas. So, similar story with uh fighter aircraft. So both Pakistan and India are very well known for taking their own, you know, air force and flying their own air force over their own villages to make it look like, you know, from the ground locals look up and see, oh wow, you know, Indian fighters in a dog fight or something like that. And really, they're just doing low passes over their own villages to make it look like they are fighting the, you know, Pakistanis or they're fighting the Indians. So again, it's more of a show of force to their own people than anywhere else. Another common tactic that is going on right now, which is very, very common throughout this half of the planet, is belligerent, soldiers, border guards, whatever, shooting at each other. But they're shooting at each other from so far away that it doesn't matter. Anybody who's deployed to the Middle East knows exactly what I'm talking about here because this is something that happens in a lot of these nations very, very routinely. And I'm seeing this or seeing reports of this occurring up in Kashmir right now. So they will get uh several miles away from each other and just spray and prey the air and they will claim that they got into an engagement with the enemy, but they're so far away that they couldn't possibly hit each other. So this tends to happen very very commonly like on a regular Tuesday up in Kashmir. It's happened like that for decades now. So it's not out of the ordinary. But would you call that a skirmish? I don't know. You know, two, you know, two platoon shooting at each other, you know, five, six miles away from each other. like that's that's not really war. That's just, you know, very dangerous uh uh power projection and things like that. But either way, both sides shoot at each other. They'll loose a few belts of, you know, HMG fire or heavy machine gun fire towards each other miles away. They'll fire off a few, you know, AK mags at each other and both sides will go home and claim they killed the entire enemy force, but in actuality there were no casualties. So, this appears to be going on right now in Kashmir. Now, of course, this isn't to say that at some point this could actually be a legitimate war, but right now it's it looks like it's just a standard power projection. There haven't really been any reports of any casualties yet, and they've been, you know, fiercely fighting. If you follow what, you know, Indians and Pakistanis are saying on Twitter, they've been fiercely engaging in an open war with each other for 2 days now. And there's there no reports of any casualties. So, I don't know. The reports may flow in. It's a very tense time. It's way more tense than in 2019 when they when they engaged in in Kashmere and there were casualties then. So, I don't know. It's probably just going to take a few days for for information to trickle down out of the mountains. But I I just um I'm seeing this really panicking style of uh rhetoric being pushed all over social media because the third world monetization of places like Twitter has really kind of destroyed the ability uh for us to get accurate information sometimes. So one of the bigger impacts which does matter and the reason why I talk about this is that the various diasporas of these populations around the planet are protesting too. So you're going to start seeing because India and Pakistan start fighting each other. You're going to start seeing Indians and Pakistanis in various western nations start fighting each other and that's exactly what's happened. So there were various riots uh outside the Pakistani and Indian embassies in London this morning and it's it's just a mess. So that's something that's going to definitely take place over the next few days and weeks. How bad it will get is anybody's guess, but we all know how this goes. So I guess we'll have to keep an eye on it. So that's pretty much all I have for today. This week I've been really focusing on some of the more historic data, so I haven't had time to dig in as much as I'd like. But uh let's go ahead and roll up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. very good week for Ghostnet. Uh it was fantastic to see a lot of really good information coming out of a lot of different places. People talking about things that I haven't that I haven't seen anywhere else. So very very interesting. Um I'm going to try to start looking at plotting a lot of this information on uh specific mapping layers, but don't want to uh spoil it for when I come out with with something on that front. So yeah, fantastic. Really appreciate all of you who contribute to the ghost net. Uh even if you're just one of the guys who just listens, uh that's a really good step in using one of the more reliable tools that we have just in case there's some sort of communications outage. I know it's not entirely the most entertaining thing in the world and it's not easy to understand a lot of times, but this is a very powerful capability that I hope to improve on in the future. So that's all I have for today. Thank you again everyone for watching. Here are the sources. If you want a slightly easier to click link, you can of course go to my Obsidian page and find all of these links underneath all of the daily wire reports that I have made throughout the week. So, it's already shaping up to be a very busy summer. So, I hope that uh some of these more organizational efforts will will pay off in the future when things start getting a little bit more crazy than they already are. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for watching and I will see you next time. And as always, bite in the shade.

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

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