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

//The Wire//2300Z July 30, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: EARTHQUAKE STRIKES WESTERN PACIFIC, TRIGGERING TSUNAMI CONCERNS. AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL OUTAGE CAUSES LONDON AIRPORTS TO GROUND FLIGHTS. WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES NEW AI-DRIVEN HEALTHCARE INITIATIVE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Pacific: A major earthquake was reported yesterday afternoon off the coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching an estimated 8.8M and becoming tied for the 5th strongest earthquake recorded since records began in the 1960's. Due to this earthquake's severity, Tsunami Advisories were issued for most of the Pacific Rim, to include Hawaii, Alaska, and most of the American west coast. These concerns prompted mass evacuations for millions of people seeking refuge on higher ground. As of this morning, tsunami waves did hit Russia and Japan, though minimal damage was reported. No tsunami materialized in Hawaii or the west coast. United Kingdom: This morning the airspace over most of England was closed due to a technical issue at an air traffic control center in Stanwick. Aircraft at Stansted, Gatwick, and Heathrow were grounded for about 4 hours while the issue was being resolved. Analyst Comment: Details on the outage are hard to verify, however this outage occurred at the same facility that was involved in the infamous outage at Heathrow Airport in 2023. This has caused much fingerpointing and consternation among airlines due to the lost revenue as a result of the outage. United Kingdom: Data security concerns remain paramount as the effects of the Online Safety Act become more clear. Most websites are now locked down and everything from Wikipedia to medical publications have been affected by the act. Analyst Comment: Though it's tough to verify (and possibly fake), at least one user reported that they had to show identification papers for using a food delivery app. While this testimony can't be independently verified, what is true is that the crackdown on the concept of privacy continues to grow. Several politicians have mentioned the possibility of targeting VPN users who try to evade scanning their identity documents and their face to access most of the internet. Meanwhile, children are using certain video games to bypass the face-scanning requirements. Most of the people who wrote the Online Safety Act are of the Atari generation, and do not understand how good the graphics are in most modern video games. Hyper-realistic video games which use motion-capture technology to put the faces of real actors in the game have been extremely effective at tricking apps and websites. Most of the games that rely on this technology also have modes or settings menus for customizing characters...which allow users to strike funny poses with the character on screen...this providing the realistic head and mouth movement that is used by most AI-driven websites requiring a face scan. -HomeFront- Virginia: This afternoon an arson attack was reported in Danville, at the offices of Showcase Magazine. Local authorities have identified the attacker as Shotsie Michael Buck Hayes, who was arrested a short time after the attack. Locals have stated he was targeting Lee Vogler, a local city councilman for the town of Danville. The attacker reportedly broke into the councilman's office, and doused him in gasoline before setting him on fire on the street outside. Vogler has so far survived the attack, and is currently hospitalized with severe burns. Analyst Comment: Locals state that the attack was not due to a political issue, but rather a personal dispute as the attacker and victim knew each other. Whether or not this is true is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, this kind of high-profile (and brutal) attack vector does not occur that often in a small town such as this, so the details that are hard to verify now may become more clear over time. Washington D.C. - This afternoon the Federal Reserve decided to keep interest rates the same as before, with markets not reacting much to this news (as this was the expected outcome). Separately, the White House announced a new initiative to increase the use of AI in healthcare. This effort will unite Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Apple, and other companies to more heavily integrate into the healthcare industry. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Exactly what this AI initiative is designed to do is largely a mystery as no solid technical details have been provided as to exactly how the federal government is involved in Big Tech companies integrating into the HIPPA-protected world of patient data. Supporters of this plan have applauded the idea as advertised, however critics of this initiative point out that this is more or less a Social Credit system for healthcare as designed directly by the World Economic Forum in a policy letter just last year. In January of 2024, the WEF produced an article titled "How to harness the power of health data to improve patient outcomes". This article largely revolved around the monetization of data mining as "97% of health data goes unused". This article also highlighted the importance of total surveillance of the human body, using a person's smartphone to surveil their health habits, tracking a person's location at all times, and so on. The plan as announced by the White House today sounds nearly identical to the plan proposed by the WEF, based on the details as made public so far. This has drawn the exact same privacy concerns of the past few years as President Trump's policies become more clear six months into his Presidency. For additional context, Palantir also recently announced a partnership with TeleTracking, an AI-driven analytics company already integrated into many healthcare companies and medical facilities. Considering that a major part of the White House's plan is for all of these companies to share data with each other to build a digital profile of a person, concern is warranted. Reducing paper intake forms for convenience at the doctor's office is a lot different than a person's health insurance company handing over their entire medical record to Facebook for advertising purposes. For all of the touted benefits of this initiative, overcoming the data security and privacy concerns will be a hard sell when/if people start paying attention to what is going on. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground uh so today we're going to take a look at a sort of uh yet another uh controversial topic of ours uh but it's a topic that we feel needs to be talked about now um so today we're going to be taking a look at the different sort of factions or social groups or perhaps faction is too strong of a word in some cases or some of these groups but basically we're going to be laying out a lot of the key players and and power groups within the united states right now now we're not going to cover all of the uh groups that we have found and all of the groups that we're monitoring and and interacting with and tracking and things like that but we are going to talk about some of the major players this is one of those uh videos and for our podcast listeners this is one of our episodes that um is more about speed rather than quality so we're not going to be able to talk about all the groups just the major players and sort of what we think about them now obviously that being said our usual disclaimer is that this is going to um be kind of an inflammatory topic all right so a lot of people are probably going to be either offended or um disagree with this in some way and that's perfectly fine you know we're not in the business of keeping you know feelings uh un unaltered because you know honestly yeah a lot of this stuff is is not pleasant to talk about uh and when it comes to disagreeing with us that's perfectly fine too we we actively encourage that um it's just that we're trying to give a good broad overview for the people who have uh for lack of a better term have sort of had their heads in the sand over the past year and haven't seen these groups come to power and so suddenly when they read an article of you know with these you know people in it or or these groups that are that are mentioned and they're like oh well what is this group or you know what are they that's what we're hoping to tackle today so we're going to be talking about uh groups that are powerful in the united states and we're going to do it as objectively as we can so moving on to our first one it's probably the most controversial one so the first group we're going to talk about is antifa or the anti-fascist coalition or anti-fascist action group or their their name changes based on you know who's uh who's talking about them but their main goal that they claim is anti-fascism however we and most other people that have seen antifa at work have seen that they are very pro-fascist in their actions they are also very very prone to using violence as we all know you know antifa this is one kind of a a radical group to be sure but their views are very um violence oriented even if they don't have a specific goal a lot of times especially in portland in the pacific northwest where they sort of got their start they'll just resort to violence or violence at sake you know they claim that their goal is anarchy and you know as a side note we know that what antifa is doing you know burning things down destroying a city your sort of mad max anarchy definition is not the true definition of anarchy we know this but for all intents and purposes when normal people hear the word anarchy they think of mad max so that's sort of what we're going to define it as for the duration of this video and how we kind of how we kind of treat that um but yeah antifa is definitely pro anarchy for for a lot of their actions they're also there a lot of um uh actors within their organization are uh very pro-genocide when it comes to statements they make so we'll see a lot of times on twitter when we're following these these riots going on i will see you know them pro genocide of a certain group like you know kill all capitalists or kill all you know uh people that are anti-us essentially right so they're very much a pro genocide agency even though they don't they haven't really had the resources capabilities or tactical skills to make this happen so the movements that they're affiliated with are you know of course the blm the black lives matter movement along with socialism and communism those two latter political ideologies and economic ideologies they are heavily rooted in antifa they are very much a communist agency if you're looking at them on the political compass which by the way we don't really think is accurate anymore uh for describing the events of 2020 but antifa definitely falls into the political left um the the militant left so that's sort of where they're aligned and the groups that they're the camp that they're in you know um and just sort of reading off the slide here for our for our podcast listeners you know antifa is definitely a long-standing agency but they're also loosely organized they're a collective of individuals that you know allegedly you know like i said try to combat fascism but they try to do it violently um you know most antifa members align with some sort of extreme liberalism on you know the political compass like we just said but a lot of times we'll see more casual followers be more center left leaning and those people are like professors college professors politicians you know will will be sympathetic towards antifa means but only because they're in this their their similar ideology not because of their actions right um so most of antifa's actions now have tended to target conservative political enemies or most importantly capitalist political enemies however as recent as 2018 some antifa elements have begun deeming political moderates as enemies and therefore prone to violent attack so yeah that's something we've seen recently antifa has has declared basically if you're not with us you're against us and but some of their ideology is very confusing such as you know antifa has been known to spray paint the words liberals get the bullet too during violent riots and violent actions which sort of shows how unique of an agency they are sort of an entity they're they're extreme extremely liberal comprised of members that are extremely liberal but they also say that liberals get the bullet too perhaps implying that liberals traditional liberals are not liberal enough right and you know so antifa is kind of a definitely a very uh very unique organization so moving on to the physical description uh this is just for people to help people kind of identify you know what these groups look like and fortunately for the most part most of these groups do have some sort of rudimentary uniform such as antifa here antifa members can readily be identified by black block clothing they usually wear all black you'll see a lot of times red bandanas covering their faces you know antifa signature signals and insignia flags the anarchy symbol you know guy fox masks as well as really numerous like counter culture symbols such as you know tight fitting you know skinny jeans are definitely a huge thing with antifa and it's not to to insult them it's just that they you'll see in the image here in a second it's definitely a factor when it comes to to a lot of um antifa things as well as non-traditional sort of body piercings and sort of alterations like you know ear gauges you know different kinds of piercings in different locations uh facial tattoos things like that as well as unique you know hairstyles like your your very vibrant uh colored uh hair for your females and and things like that um yeah so let's look at an image here of what what normal like antifa stuff looks like and as you can see it's you know very much black block clothing uh not a whole lot of tactical gear um usually it's all just all black clothing um but you can definitely tell that this is there's a theme here with it with the dress and then the attire that they use and um uh yeah definitely you can like for instance if you google like antifa mug shots you'll pull up and you'll look and you'll be able to instantly tell even though you have no context as to what a person was arrested for you can definitely you can look at an image and tell you that person's antifa which is weird because it would be a mug shot which doesn't have these uh you know facial coverings or things like that you can definitely tell a lineup of mugshots that's all antifa members as opposed to some other political group and so some of the more notable actions there there have been known to do mostly just riots you know the berkeley university riots they were also present in charlottesville during that uh that whole scandal of charlottesville riots in 2017. they were also responsible for doxxing efforts against ice agents in 2018. they also were responsible for attacks against jewish population in the jewish population in new york city as part of some of the riots there which was kind of weird it was kind of a unique thing they're not really an anti-semitic group however some elements of them are they also attacked people at the dallas children's hospital in 2020 this is some more you know recent stuff this year they've gotten more definitely more violent the washington dc riots as well as the chas or chop occupation of seattle which is earlier this year in 2020 and so basically our analysis is you know despite the fact that antifa claims to be anti-fascist they are in fact very very supportive of fascism communism socialism all of which are technically on on paper very different ideologies but they definitely support them they are even though these things are attributed to totalitarianism antifa is all for totalitarianism as long as the antifa ideology is the totalitarian entity right they are also known to organize information operations so information operations is our but we in the intel community it's sort of a soft a soft code word for psyops right we don't do psyops anymore we conduct information operations right and antifa does these as well they're usually quite effective because they'll put together posters of videos they'll doctor uh documents and scan them um basically all in an effort to organize them against a political enemy um yeah so you know despite what antifa leadership may say about their own entity their true end goals right are purely destructive right there's there's no cohesive pattern to the attacks with the exception of targeting anyone or group who doesn't support them but you know antifa's violence is not a means to an end antifa for antifa violence is the end right that is the end goal right so as a result of all of this you know we highly highly recommend that um uh for people to avoid antifa actions right we assess with high confidence that antifa or anyone who identifies with antifa ideology is a very high threat to individual safety right so anytime you see antifa head the other way there is no winning for them violence is their goal violence is their tool so just keep that in mind and sort of trying to keep this quick we'll move on to the next group which is black lives matter blm and this is one where we will get a lot of flack i'm sure and probably get a lot of attacks and and things like that um but their state of objectives vary widely right the blm movement is a very extremely it's an extremely varied organization right their stated objectives depending on which cell and group it is um they they broadly started with a group with a message of equality right equality for all right but lately we've seen a lot of black nationalism black supremacy and and um things like that come out of of their official rhetoric right not just some somebody on twitter trying to troll um it's been their official doctrine right so lately in 2020 they're also a heavy heavy supporter of the reparations movement right so you know continuing on their observed objectives they also align with a sort of anarchy ideology much like antifa but not quite so much it seems like uh from where we're sitting you know broadly speaking blm will use anarchy to get their end goal of black supremacy some groups of course but other groups will not so it's it's extremely varied you know some groups just like i have here on the slide some parts of blm are 100 proponents of genocide against you know whites and you know other uh non-uh african-american or non-african descendants so but other groups aren't so it's a huge huge varied uh thing um so some of the affiliated movements with blm are the nfac the not effing around coalition um despite the fact that the blm and nfac say that they're not they are staunch enemies that's what they say that's not true they are definitely affiliated with each other however the nfac is far more radical we'll talk about them in a second some of the more older members of the group will remember the black panthers and the blm is is definitely bringing back some of the black panther's uh tactics and ideology even though the black panthers technically weren't quite what people remember them to be and also blm is very very heavily intertwined with antifa mostly because they both you know blm and antifa use violence in their riots right riots are their thing right um so the characterization of the blm movement is extremely extremely varied right you know originally blm was a large uh largely decentralized civil rights you know oriented agency but you know other you know but recently you know other peaceful protests have been organized with the purpose of rioting and destroying public infrastructure so you know originally back you know a few years ago when uh really back in 2014 when the blm movement started getting notoriety most almost all other protests were peaceful they were legitimately peaceful protests however the the blm infrastructure and entity and sort of organization has changed right now they are organizing peaceful protests that they're calling peaceful but they're telling people to bring things like bats bring eye protection bring helmets br you know bring things that will help us destroy things but they're not outright saying it a lot of places and a lot of places they are outright saying it you know some of the more radical elements of blm are huge proponents of a sort of anti-white genocide and have frequently called for whites to be murdered in the street and we're seeing that actually happen uh portland washington dc you know you know kenosha we're seeing uh the the the flavor of sort of killing people based on their race uh to be a definitely a a part of blm protests and riots right uh most of the official blm senior leadership are supporters of reparations for slavery you know monetary payments right which they believe should take the form of you know uh money but not not only money but also a land right sort of like how native americans were granted you know reservations however if you go to even just the blm website which is the the you know run by their senior leadership they continue to make statements that say that they will not stop the violence until their demands are met that's something they put they plainly and clearly say they're going to do so the blm movement is 100 a non-peaceful organization anymore and you can even make the argument an analytical argument that they weren't peaceful in the beginning so the physical description it once again extremely varied it's you know obviously by the name of it it's going to largely be african-american however um yet previously and even currently a large amount of of whites are also part of blm so you can't really say that the blm movement is purely about race even though it technically is on paper if that sort of makes sense um you know some of the most notable actions are you know going back in time the summer of violence which is what we're kind of calling the the the rash the the um spreading of rioting around the united states following minneapolis in 2020 they're also known for destruction of minneapolis kenosha they're also known for the assault siege on the white house the siege of white house is pending that's not that's going down in about seven days we'll see if that happens for those of you listening to this episode in the future we'll we'll see if the siege actually goes down but they they've been known for the assault in the white house following the destruction of minneapolis and the riots that kind of picked up after that previously to that they had a few years where they didn't really do much and were just mostly a community-based you know civil rights entity but they were also heavily involved in the ferguson riots following the shooting of michael brown in 2014 and also the new york city riots following the shooting or the death of eric gardner in 2014 he wasn't he wasn't shot but i don't i don't think um but yeah so let's let's take a look at the physical description and you know we tried to pick the most non-biased images to display uh talking about a a blm protest but even if you google even if you google which we know google is controlled by the these entities or at least caters to them a lot even if you google blm protest and then clicking images it's hard to find a blm image of a peaceful protest the only one that we could find was one in the top right but even then we found four or five other images that showed that these exact people in this image were breaking things at their own molotovs and stuff like that so this is what your typical blm protest looks like i'm sure everybody's seen it in the highly inflammatory and dramatic movie action style uh news footage that has been around and been assaulting our news feeds over the past few months but yeah for those of you who don't know this is what a blm riot or protest looks like and then so for our analysis and yeah i know this one is once again very inflammatory but you know we have to call it like we see it and blm is not a peaceful organization you know despite an initial you know message of peacefully protesting and civil disobedience which is fine you know that that you know echoes the original civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s right but despite this the blm movement has become increasingly more radical over the years blm's common they have a common tactic right they like to use um force random citizens to be uncomfortable right in order to make them see their message so for instance screaming at restaurant patrons you know stomping traffic assaulting cars you know this has become exponentially more aggressive in 2020 and people are just being instead of being screamed at while trying to eat their dinner at a restaurant people are being swarmed in their vehicles right [Music] so you know in 2020 you'd be very hard-pressed to find a blm protest that did not dissolve into a riot at some point you know in early 2020 an observed tactic that we did see was for a genuine blm protest to break out for instance in minneapolis before it got bad on that first day this was a good case study there was a genuine peaceful blm protest in minneapolis in a sort of little march through the community as well they had speakers from churches they had speakers from politicians they had high level leadership from blm very prominent uh celebrities come in and speak and then you know after that sort of main rally or protest was kind of winding down and all the senior leadership was gone then the writing broke out so at that point things switched almost instantly and then um the rioting started right so we're seeing that be a tactic with blm protest that's why we say for no that's why we recommend for people to not go to any blm activities because you know now that at some point that's going to turn into a riot at some point that's going to turn into something bad that's just a fact of life now in 2020 you know and i know that people are going to probably get upset with us but about you know us calling it like we see it but hey we we have to uh we have to call it like we see it for you know safety's sake you know um also it's kind of a side note going back to the whole genocide thing you know many of the speakers at recent blm protests and riots have publicly and openly called for a genocide against whites you know and actively encourage the targeting and and killing of whites blm senior leadership historically has distanced themselves from this but they're not doing that anymore they have not downplayed or distanced themselves from these sentiments they've just kind of let it happen which to us signals a de facto approval of this behavior even if they don't believe that that's a rightful thing to do they're letting it happen anyway you know so consequently you know in conclusion we assess with high confidence that the blm movement has become a radical sort of fringe movement despite the previously wide-ranging spectrum of opinions and viewpoints and ideologies you know as such we recommend avoiding all blm activity and demonstrations as there is a high chance that a seemingly peaceful protest will instantly become a violent riot so hopefully that sort of is is helpful on on this slide and um yeah so we'll move on to the next one which is the nfac the uh not effing around coalition now these guys are far more radical than blm they actively say that they are not blm but their stated objectives this is what they claim to support um they claim to support black supremacy the mass murder of whites uh reparations and and black separatism they're different in the terms of black separatism is different from black nationalism but they are supporters of both mostly black separatism and of course their observed actions are quite the same they're what what they say and what they do is very very similar so some of the more affiliated some of the movements they're affiliated with are of course blm like we just mentioned they're also loosely take some of their membership from the black panthers but also the nation of islam but mostly they're aligned with nation of islam because of the older members of the group who are around to remember the nation of islam as well as the fact the nfac is very anti-semitic and their their leader grand master jay was heavily involved in the nation of islam movement growing up so for those that have not heard of the nfac which would be surprising but in any case the nfac is a militant black separatist group which is comprised of roughly three to 500 members whose stated goals have changed considerably over the years but they're still they've still always been a radical group it's not like they've become uh radicalized every time they've always started as being radical and they're sort of their leader there has a has an air or flavor of of occultism um he's he calls himself the real grandmaster jay and uh he's made increasingly just plain weird and uh also radical statements over the years um regarding his you know role within the organization uh so recently the nfac they've included uh amongst their goals uh the goal of giving the entire state of texas uh to black americans as reparations for save of slavery um they've also which is going back to the weird comments they've also made extremely anti-semitic stigmas over the years you know with senior leadership including grand master jay often praising adolf hitler and other nazi leadership which is just plain weird which kind of shows the the fringe movement that these guys really are um you know they also claim to be highly trained uh ex-military members they only they claim to only let veterans in who are you know seen multiple combat tours however this is extremely false all of their demonstrations and actions have indicated that their tactical and technical proficiencies with weapons and combat is extremely lacking and basically non-existent nfac riots or gatherings have had multiple negligent discharges and a lot of the when they did their march on stone mountain the nfac a lot of the guys have obvious weapons malfunctions like stove pipes and their weapons and you know magazines being inserted backwards uh weapon sights being installed backwards foregrips being installed in the wrong position or weapons without sights altogether so that's kind of a sort of characteristic of their organization so physically we'll bring up some images here in a second but the nfac standard uniform they actually do have a standard uniform which is basically just a loose collection of black block clothing once again same as antifa but they also wear the black berets of the black panthers if anybody remembers them and also you know in a departure from antifa these guys also wear they basically dress like your cheesy video game character from the 80s of any sort of first person shooter with as many chest rigs rifles drop leg rigs you know all kinds of tactical gear as well as a random assortment of ammunition like bandoliers you know for shotguns you'll see a guy carrying a shotgun with five or six bandoliers on you know all of which is randomly slung in a very poor military fashion they also like to attempt to march in a loose formation up and down roads and things like that so let's take a look at some of these guys from the nfac so in the upper right hand corner with the uh the ar-15 there is uh grand master j and uh as you can see they're using um bowel fangs for their comms so they're probably you know running uh unencrypted comps that you could easily easily intercept and and overpower if you needed to but you can see the weird collection of of um of things you see people with you know some people have custom ars and other weapons other people don't so um yeah that's just sort of their their uh organizations what they look like when they riot or march or whatever um and the nfac is a relatively new organization they have not been around for very long despite the fact that they're you know the real grand master jay likes to claim they've been around for a long time really they're they only gained notoriety from their march on stone mountain earlier this year in 2020 however they also made the trip to louisville kentucky and uh commenced to destroy a lot of stuff there so um you know moving on to our analysis you know many people have sort of lampooned their their actions many people made fun of them because of their obvious obvious uh downfall of not being tactically or technically proficient despite this they still remain a current threat you know you know they don't really meet the label uh they don't really meet the criteria of being a a traditional insurgent threat but their ideology and previous actions indicate they still fit the quote-unquote terrorist label which we of course don't like to to throw out but they're definitely that's their goal they're they say it so that's what they claim to be you know their statements have called for the genocide of whites you know that that sort of that's made their message extremely clear you know and despite the fact that they this has all been talk for the nfac a lot of people trying to say the nfac is nothing but just they're all talk they're just they're not really a threat you know it's only a matter of time before they you know they continue people uh and law enforcement agencies continue to allow this type of behavior and it's only a matter of time before they take their ideology in earnest you know and start acting on uh some of those sentiments that they've been uh portraying so consequently despite the fact that these guys don't seem to be the you know the sharpest tools in the in the drawer we assess with high confidence that the nfa presents a genuine threat uh to individual safety and we recommend avoiding all nfac functions and demonstrations you know just be aware of what's going on be aware of where they're at and take take steps to avoid uh them at all costs if nothing more than the the the the accidental negligent discharges that they have at their their famous fourth or rallies all right so switching gears for a second uh but still talking about an equally inflammatory uh group up next is the boogaloo boys so uh the these guys this uh movement is also known as the big igloo large ice house whatever we all know everybody knows what you're talking about when you talk about the boogaloo nowadays so this group is once again not really a solidified group they're not really a a succinct set of ideology however they do have a few different state of objectives so for one this group is largely anti-government they see larger government as a problem a lot of the people within the group would would support no government at all some of the members of most of the members are actually pro second amendment very very heavily invested in the second amendment and the protections it provides and also uh there's a large sort of flavor of anarcho-capitalism from the early onset in when this group was sort of came to fruition in 2019 lately a lot of the sort of boogaloo enthusiasts i guess we could call them are mostly you know largely anti-law enforcement and once again you know a lot of their state of stated objectives are pretty much the same as the objectives that we observe from them however with the flavor of so the boogaloo members or the sort of people that portray that ideology tend to be more far right than far left so however however far right that is is it depends as we can sort of see by the affiliated movement so the bugaloo movement is very heavily steeped in libertarianism however over time they have been sort of linked and associated with movements such as the proud boys and various other militia conservative groups so characterizing the boogaloo movement is is kind of a difficult task um so the the term originates from the depths of you know 4chan internet memes really just you know instagram memes uh in 2019 um but the boogaloo movement is very is a it's a movement that's representative of a very wide ranging set of ideals the term itself is a reference to the coming of a second american civil war or another war for independence is sort of a tongue-in-cheek reference to that however while some boogaloo enthusiasts are quite serious about preparing for a civil war and you know and actively trying to encourage that um other sort of boog boys you know don't view the movement as a true sort of insurgent group and identify with the boogaloo movement out of solidarity for liberty you know and not to engage in a true civil war they don't really you know there there are definitely moderates within this group you know and once again while it's not exactly a solidified group you know participants and you know ideology um it is largely shared by a certain uh set of society right you know anti-government sentiments run deep within this you know within this movement you know as well as anti-law enforcement uh sentiments you know some of the more radical members of this movement are you know aligned with more traditional militia type movements you know even with white supremacy groups which is interesting considering that the the boogaloo movement and prominent names within the boogaloo you know movement have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from white supremacy but despite that there are there is a flavor of white supremacy to some of the boogaloo movements along with some of the more you know anti-semitism you know racism things like that are definitely prevalent within the boogaloo movement now uh in some very limited aspects how wide ranging that is who knows you know uh also you know many boogaloo boys have been observed to be protesting alongside antifa and blm who technically are ideologically opposed to them it doesn't really make any sense you know blm and antifa are very heavily socialist and communist and the boogaloo boys are very libertarian very very conservative and things like that to you know broad speaking broadly however the you know hatred that the boogaloo boys have for government you know it's sort of in uh helps helps them be sort of affiliated with antifa in some some aspects you know if antifa and blm are going out there to protest the government yeah sure the big boys will show up and support them but the big boys don't quite realize that antifa blm are their enemies they're they're they're sworn mortal enemies essentially right so it's kind of a very complex and and hard organization to define because it's not as solidified as blm or nfac or anti for any of those other ones but physically the physical description is um hawaiian shirts and luau patterns are a common indicator the boogaloo movement you know nowadays you know same thing with more traditional 2a symbol symbol symbols such as you know don't tread on me flag you know if the you know boogaloo enthusiasts sort of show up at a rally or protest you're going to almost always see them wearing plate carriers helmets carrying rifles and wearing hawaiian shirts that's just they're just their mo that's what they're going to be wearing it's going to be pretty obvious what they're supporting you know some of the more notable actions that they have been engaged in um really most late uh you know uh the latest one they've got notoriety for was the the defense of salon a la mode that uh salon hair salon in texas that was being forced to be shut down and uh yeah they sort of laid a protective siege of that to prevent law enforcement from arresting the salon owner same thing with a lot of different bars in texas when texas political leadership decided to shut down the bars the boogaloo boys were there to try to prevent that they're also sort of linked to the sort of whiskey warrior 556 incident which if you haven't uh if you haven't heard of what that was that was an incident back in 2019 where a uh a guy was claiming that live streaming on i think i think it was i think it was facebook if i remember correctly he was live streaming that uh a red flag raid was being conducted on his house to come take his guns right and it went instantly viral because he had he was a very prominent 2a person and that turned out to not be the case but it did sort of uh result in the arrests of a lot of these boogaloo members because they came to his aid the sort of sentiment of a red flag raid going down to go confiscate someone's guns is there was a limited attempt for the boogaloo effort and boogaloo boys to set up a um a sort of uh notification network right so if somebody was in trouble they could send a qrf a quick reaction force out this was completely ineffective it did not work at all it's still people still try to do it but since the boogaloo boys have been labeled as essentially terrorists by the large um by the federal government it's uh that's sort of died down a lot they've been arrested and targeted even more so than blm which is interesting um but let's take a look at some of the pictures of these guys so these guys yeah were this is um pretty typical pretty typical for um the boogaloo boys to show up at a sort of rally or protest or something like that so if you see this this you can almost be certain that these guys are boogaloo boys just based on hawaiian print alone that's a very good reiki feature and you know sort of our thoughts on it we have you know we've had a whole um longer than an hour long podcast episode talking about this particular movement and our frustrations with it because you know obviously we um a lot of our members are have the very unique political ideals that are sort of um sort of aligned with a lot of the stuff that we talk about for instance you know the s2 underground project is very very liberty minded you know the boogly boy is also very liberty minded you know we're very you know 2a and and um constitutional rights oriented and so is so are the boogaloo boys so we have a lot of people in common and that's why a lot of people are probably going to be listening to this section a lot more than normal because you know we've we've talked about it in at length but you know just to get through our sort of analyst comments here you know while not as violent as their counter movements like blm and nfac and not quite fitting the description of a quote-unquote extremist group you know the boogaloo room is still a comparatively radical organization despite being a very loose ideology right you know while their message is positive you know we must recognize that other far far more militant and hostile groups are definitely using the boogaloo movement as a way to rebrand themselves and make their ideology more palatable such as for instance the the proud boys you know starting to to get involved with the boogaloo protests you know those two groups don't have anything in common but the proud boys are you know say you don't like the government right we don't like the government either so we're friends you know and that's not how it works right um you know we cannot ignore the fact that a significant portion of you know boogaloo enthusiasts have originated from white supremacists terrorists guerrilla or other insurgent groups within the u.s that's just a fact that has happened or it may not have started that way but it definitely is the case now as such you know we recommend avoiding all demonstrations and activities that are solely aligned with the bugaloo movement you know so if there's a sort of boogaloo rally or something like that which is going to be hard to see nowadays or if there's a boogaloo counter protest to a blm avoid that like the plague that's what we recommend now if you show up to something like you know a 2a rally or something like that you know we wouldn't even recommend doing that nowadays but if you wanted to that's that's fine that's not a a huge risk right to go to a a liberty rally or some kind of even like a trump rally or something that's not as it's not really a security risk i don't think but you know those guys these guys will show up to those conservative type political events and rallies as we get closer to election time and you know that's going to be a lower risk you know i would it's not like where if i show up to a political rally and i see the nfac there i'm going to leave immediately or you know but if i show up to a political rally and i see the boo some boogaloo guys there or guys that hawaiian shirts i'm not going to i'm really not going to leave immediately because they really haven't been they haven't been violent at all but you know events that are intended to solely promote the boogaloo are an extreme high risk for things like violent counter protests you know as well as threats from law enforcement and federal authorities you know let's not get to get misconstrued here the boogaloo boys are definitely targeted by law enforcement and federal authorities they are not friends at all and the feeling is mutual i think based on what we've been able to tell so these guys anybody who talks about this sort of thing i'm sure that just by talking about the the boogaloo we're on a watch list now or or some analyst in a government position is probably listening to this podcast and watching this youtube video because we're talking about it so we you know we might even get censored from youtube because we're talking about it so it's that inflammatory but if you want to learn more about this go go listen to our our uh our episode on that so we have we talk about that a little bit more in depth but moving on to what we've kind of mentioned already which is sort of we're going to lump these three agencies and entities together because they're kind of the same thing and kind of have sort of the same leadership and um numbers so the three percenters the proud boys and the oath keepers so for those of you that have been around for a while you may have heard these terms very loosely and you kind of know that they're sort of a militia movements and that's pretty much what they are their their goals are all pretty much the same you know freedom oriented anti-government but a lot of times they're pro-law enforcement which is odd um for some of these views that's what they say they are you know what we've observed them to be is very different right there a lot of these groups like the proud boys are very white supremacists um you know they're also very gov anti-government which they claim to be but they're you know also anti-lgbt they're they're basically far right extremist groups for the most part you know it did not used to be this way but they have over time become that way and some more than others for instance the three percenters are far less radical than the proud boys in some areas and in some areas they're not same thing with the oath keepers so the oath keepers are far more radical in some areas than the three percenters and then in other areas they're not um but affiliated movements you know obviously they're affiliated with each other but also loosely affiliated with the boogaloo movement which you mentioned before um but you know moving on to the characterization these groups and others like them that there's dozens of others that sort of have the same ideology um these have been some of the longest standing armed militia movements in the united states the three percenters the proud boys and the oath keepers you know over the years these organizations have had a very prominent uh very prominent members with varied ideology for instance you've had congressmen and and very high ranking politicians align and say they're members of or support the three percenters the proud boys and the oath keepers over the years however they have kind of distanced themselves from more radical elements like the proud boys you know over the years you know these um the the override the overarching ideology has loosely been based in defending the riots laid out in the constitution the bill of rights so they're very much a constitutional right-wing agencies you know some of these some of the more radical elements of these sort of align with the bugaloo movement in that they are enthusiastic regarding the potential for civil war so like for instance the proud boys a lot of times you'll see events where they're actively trying to goad or you know stoke that you know fan the flames of of civil unrest in the united states because they want to race war um so that's sort of what a lot of these agencies are you know many of these organizations are pro-military with several incidents being recorded of oath keepers and guarding soldiers from being attacked at recruitment centers so that was a big thing a while back there was a shooting at a a recruiter office a recruiting station and i think tennessee a few years back and uh in response to that because the military for those of you who don't know military members including recruiters cannot carry weapons uh personal weapons for defense uh on base or even in their offices if their recruiting station is off base they can't they can't do that that's a regulation and so these groups oath keepers of course saying that's a huge infringement on the second amendment we're not going to stand by we're going to go guard the recruitment centers well it turns out that that you know that would stand outside recruitment center is heavily armed um but uh yeah the the recruiters were issued statement you know issued guidance of hey don't interact with these guys because it's just kind of a complex situation right so a lot of times the recruiters didn't want them there but you know they're it's a free country allegedly so that was kind of the mentality back then you know you know that being said other members and other fringe movements within these movements have definitely engaged in guerrilla warfare and insurgency and terrorism within the united states carrying out attacks on governmental complexes and and things like your more traditional al-qaeda tactics of attacking government facilities right so there are definitely there's definitely a huge threat there and moving on to sort of their physical description um you can kind of see what their uh what they all look at you know the three percenter tabs and morale patches are extremely common basically if you if you see somebody at a rally with a plate carrier on with like 50 morale patches velcro to it that's pretty much going to be somebody like a three percent or proud boy or other keeper that's usually what their their mo is um uh they they also stick by traditional pro 2a stuff you know like the modified betsy ross flag like the icon we have in the upper right hand corner the the the stars from betsy ross flag but with the roman numerals uh for the three the number three in there um you know various versions the gadget and flag you know uh stuff like that and some some parts of these you know like for instance the the proud boys are specifically male only they do not allow women into the proud boys so that's kind of another recce feature there's other more notable actions like i mentioned uh earlier earlier this year the summer violence these agencies were there not in force and not really not really in significant numbers but for instance the kenosha shooting they were definitely there also the the violence at the charlottesville riots in 2017 was a direct result of these organizations also they had a huge a huge hand in the malachi refuge siege back in 2016. if you remember that with the bundys they were also heavily involved in the kim davis incident which is in 2015 which i think was a county clerk and i think kentucky who refused to sign a uh or refused to issue like a gay or an lgbt marriage license or something like that they're also a part of the ferguson riots in 2014 2015 and the original bundy ranch standoff it's it's cut off but it wasn't on the slide here but uh i'm sorry about that but the it was the bundy ranch standoff in 2014 they were also there and most of those guys were part of these organizations so let's take a look at what these guys look like and as you can see yeah very militant very you know military-ish you can kind of see that they they heavily armed with various accoutrements of tactical gear you know some people wearing um you know gas masks things like that uh military type uniforms but there isn't really a uniform standard we've seen multi-cam patterns be be very popular lately so chances are if you see somebody wearing a multi-cam uniform and they're obviously not a cop they're not obviously not a cop or members of the military then they're probably parts of these groups so moving on to a kind of our assessment these groups are you know extremely diverse in both ideology and membership you can have guys that are legitimate like like your you know county or city rotary group or you know like the your boy scout troop could have you know oath keepers in it but you know on the other hand you can also have literally domestic terrorists that claim to be proud boys keepers of three percenters right you know um and also due to recent events a shift towards extremism has definitely been observed especially as opposition groups like blm and the nfac have gained power right you know also the sort of perceived double standard of blm being allowed to attack cities has resulted in great discontent from these groups which in turn has resulted in greater participation and counter protests from these groups you know and this is something that we're going to you know watch out for in the future this is definitely a thing to watch out for as we get closer to election time these groups you know these groups specifically are going to show up in greater numbers when it comes to protests and riots so we're going to start see just like we started to see in kenosha there was in kenosha there's a large blm contingent and a pretty good contingent from these guys as well so just keep that in mind that these counter protests are going to happen a lot more often and these guys are going to bring the heat when it comes to conflict so if these guys and the blm guys are protesting in the same area um things could go bad very very quickly you know you know it's very rare for these groups on their own when they're holding their own rallies and there's nobody else around but them they're not gonna they don't riot right that's just not what they do um but the likelihood of conflict that one of these groups protests or rallies is high um if the likelihood of a counter press protest breaking out is high as well you know these days nowadays um if you put out like on the news there's going to be a 3 rally somewhere there's going to be a blm rally pop up right there same day and they're going to try to start start stuff between each other so you know as a result once again this is another group we say just avoid at all costs avoid these guys with the same fervor and uh expediency that you would avoid the nfac or the blm so moving on to a way more extremist group the kkk which is an agency that we have seen come back out of the woodwork when it comes especially as the blm has gained power so obviously this group is very transparent in their extreme ideology they state that they are for white supremacy and genocide of anyone who's not white and that's also what they stand for that's what we observe them to be um doing right their actions meet their meet their uh stated goals right they these guys are also heavily affiliated with the oath keepers supercenters proud boys boogala boys neo-nazis things like that now we don't want to lump in all of these groups together for instance we think that the proud boys are more far more radical than you know the three percenters but and the boogaloo boys probably don't even deserve to be talked about in terms of the kkk because there's really not a correlation there however they are linked right and i'll talk about that in just a second but character characterized the kkk the ku klux klan is is pretty much the oldest white supremacist group still operating within the united states they have a long long history of violent murders and lynchings just go on their wikipedia page it is there have been novels and novels written about the kkk you know most p

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the Intel update for January 18 2023 happy New Year everyone looks like this New Year is already getting pretty spicy so let's go ahead and kick things off by talking about significant incidents and concerns in the Northeast region one of the biggest incidents that got a lot of mainstream news media coverage was the polar vortex or whatever kind of buzzword you want to call the winter weather storm that hit around the beginning of December uh last month particularly the actions uh that actually happened within the City of Buffalo New York now a lot of people got got a lot of news coverage on this so I'm not going to beat it to death but the situation in Buffalo New York and how that whole winter kind of situation worked its way out was very indicative and a very good demonstration of a lot of the issues that we've been talking about previously we had a lot of infrastructure problems we had a lot of traffic incidents we had a lot of you know censored medical issues I'll say it like that and we had a lot of um release date actions right so there were a lot of issues to kind of unpack with this incident and though none of these are particularly surprising it's very important that we all kind of keep these in the back of our mind here right for instance one of the biggest elements of this whole incident that kind of caught my eye was the implementation of military police to serve in a domestic policing role in Buffalo New York uh to keep drivers off of the roads and you know underneath the kind of Quasi curfew that was uh that was enforced really it was just a ban on driving personal vehicles on the road during the snowstorm now I know a lot of people whenever I talk about curfews people don't really like it because there are a lot of people out there that actually support curfews for whatever reason but I'm just saying it's probably a good idea to kind of keep an eye on incidents like this especially considering that now we have the word curfew as part of our daily vocabulary in a lot of a lot of cases around the country there are a lot of persistent curfews that have been in place for years and they're just keeping they just keep popping up in a lot of places around the country and I you know don't think that's a super great thing so that's why I want to keep talking about these kinds of incidents because I think we all kind of have a a shared understanding of the seriousness of curfews and any kind at any time you're using the National Guard or any uh green Suiter military force in in the United States against uh potentially against citizens that's not a good thing I don't care how friendly the relationship seems It's not a super great thing so the Buffalo incident was not great uh granted it was a very serious issue and really highlights a lot of um you know prepping concerns about how you really need to be prepared for extreme severe winter weather uh I think way more severe than is is kind of normal for the area but at the same time you also need to be concerned about the things that nobody likes to talk about like uh you know domestic policing actions that's kind of a Hot Topic that again really people don't want to think about uh but you're not really going to see a whole lot of prepping you know kind of culture publicly embracing the idea idea of all right well now this is part of our daily life here you know to talk about curfews and driving bans and okay now there's a you know a uniform Soldier telling me I can't drive on the road you know we're here now um and as scary as it is we kind of have to acknowledge the fact that this has become a norm in the country and that's why I wanted to mention it moving on to some more unfortunate news of a green Suiter nature I wanted to talk about an incident that occurred in New Jersey way back in actually in November of last year but I'm just finding out about it now uh the short and sweet version of this incident was a a parent in North Hanover posted a photograph and made a post on Facebook of illicit content explicit content uh that was displayed at the entrance of her child's school now I think that we all know what kind of content this is I'm not going to go into many more details than that because you can easily Google this and find out the real story here and I'm not going to show the photo because I consider that content to be explicit and I'm trying to be you know at least a little bit more family friendly with these kinds of videos so I do want to say though that nothing in this original Facebook post uh was threatening in any way it was just a photo of the explicit content that this parent's child saw at the entrance of the school no no hint of violence it was anywhere near the social media post well despite this an Army lieutenant colonel took issue with this mom's Facebook post and immediately reported it directly to the local police chief using the internal lines of communication that were pre-established per their own words this military base communicates directly with the police chief for security reasons it kind of makes a lot of sense if you think about it in in a in a perspective of like a peacetime military you want to make sure that you know your guys with guns on the military base also are kind of tied in with local law enforcement because there's a lot of incidents that occur you know there's weird jurisdictional things so there being a kind of shared understanding between a federal you know service like a military base and a local law enforcement agency it makes a lot of sense for lines of communication to be open however that's basically where the common sense stops because these lines of communication in this case were used to Target parents just as we saw the FBI do with regards to targeting parents all over this country for you know voicing their opinion at school board meetings so long story short parent posts a photograph and and a post showing the the explicit content at her child's School some Army Lieutenant Colonel sees the post and gets the police chief to investigate and harass the local parent now on a brief admin note I'm not going to drop this specific lieutenant colonel's name right now because of several reasons uh for one this guy is clearly trying to Target people so uh you know that's that's not good but also I want to make absolutely certain that this actually is the guy because so far the documents that I have seen and reviewed uh have had many names okay so it's not just this one guy there are a lot of people in this this chain here right so I just want to make sure before we drop any names or if we drop any names you can easily Google this this guy's name you can once you figure out you know hey just Google the story this is made national press uh back in November or actually I think in December is when I think Fox News picked it up either way I can tell you that the interesting part about this story is the next part so I started looking into this Lieutenant Colonel right and I just Googled his name and one of the absolute first results that popped up was this stock photo from a stock photo website uh detailing his recent change of command and wouldn't you know it look at what unit he was the commander of a military information support Battalion hmm would you look at that you might know this kind of unit colloquially as psyops so what this story looks like is a psyops commander directed a local police chief to Target a parent because her child saw something obscene at school man I I tell you I I don't think I can comment on what that means and how serious this is so so I'm just gonna move on and let this kind of stew for a bit and if you guys want some homework go read into this story a little bit but I can tell you that this doesn't seem to be an isolated incident okay uh this has happened before and this is not the last time this is going to happen I can guarantee that so moving to the Southeast region we get to more traditional stuff uh and that is the well let's start with the Gulf Coast for a minute um there have been an awful lot of Refinery and Pipeline and terminal issues down in the Gulf Coast uh for a variety of reasons it's really kind of hard to explain we could probably talk about this for for quite a bit more but let me just give you the kind of short and sweet version is that the the winter weather that we had last month the kind of you know whatever buzzword Arctic blast uh went through the country uh broke a lot of stuff but not just that because we can kind of compensate for maintenance issues a lot of times but things that we can't really fix that that quickly are staffing issues and someone who doesn't know how to do their job and just other maintenance deficits or or other kinds of problems it doesn't appear like all these refineries at least in the Gulf Coast in this specific instant I'm talking about all these issues that we saw with the winter weather or that you know kind of popped up around the the same time last month these don't appear to be particularly nefarious because it just looks like there's there's a lot of things going on here and it's just kind of snowballing into just bad stuff right parts not being there staff not being there cold weather breaking things people not knowing how to fix things people not knowing how to prevent things from happening you know we're getting to the point now where our infrastructure is crumbling and I think it's quite obvious and when you look at places like Pol refiner areas and pipelines places that have some of the most skilled work in the entire country you know what happens when you have a a non-skilled person or someone who's not experienced working at some of these places you get a lot of a lot of issues now that doesn't I want to separate these issues out from all the other ones we've seen I don't think that anyone in the country can look at refineries Catching Fire all over the country in the past year and say that that's normal it's it's not it's clearly not we know this instinctively it's just a gut feeling we don't even need to look at any data to to see how often refineries Catch Fire however when it comes to you know severe weather or or any kind of slightly out of the norm weather we have a lot of problems that pop up and are the result of many things it's really hard to pinpoint and point the finger at one thing all we know is that it just sucks and that's just the way that it is now I'm going to keep an eye on the refineries as usual and see which ones you know kind of miraculously have an accident next because that's a norm apparently every time we brief something something else has had some kind of incident at it but so again we'll keep keep an eye on this stuff and I just want to let everyone know that you know we're not out of the woods yet with our infrastructure we still have a long way to go and we're just beginning to see I think uh the the the the the snowball at the top of the hill right and we're about to see it uh accelerate rapidly uh just based on the amount of uh things we've seen happen right even just none taking nefarious things out of it even just some out of accidents we've seen happen genuine accidents and the amount of genuine maintenance problems that alone uh can be very crippling to any infrastructural system moving on to the topic that has United many Americans more than I have seen in recent years uh the potential gas stove ban so the Biden regime is planning to or floating the idea of potentially outright Banning natural gas stoves uh the reasoning behind this ban is very much unknown at the moment we're hearing about this from the consumer product safety commission and they have not provided really any of the research but we're getting anecdotal evidence as a brief side note many of you have noticed that apparently news headlines are law because that is the way that a lot of companies and entities and agencies have been treating things over the past year or so we all remember how for instance the IRS came out with that whole uh 600 limit thing you've got a report you know his income kind of thing well guess what all of the platforms out there PayPal venmo uh cash app all of these Services went ahead and implemented that policy even though no one had ever actually seen the policy so it's like what's going on here so I think that's what's happening with this gas stove ban thing it's not an official policy nothing has been signed nothing has even been written just yet it's just kind of an idea that has floated to the news media and since the news media now apparently make law or something to that effect what I think is going to happen is a lot of states and localities are going to ban gas stoves at the local level without the feds having to get involved in it it's brilliant honestly if you think about it from a nefarious like you know Devil's advocacy kind of situation if you were the Biden regime what would you do because remember we've been briefing this for a couple of years now The Binding regime has actually had a pretty hard time in some cases with virtue signaling a lot of times the news media doesn't know how to spin a story so and the Biden regime is not able to answer you know hey how should I spin this story and I'm CNN writing an editorial on something around the Atlantic writing an editorial on something and they they don't know how to spin the story because they don't know what the federal government wants they don't know what the Biden regime wants them to say so they just kind of wing it and really that's a problem because sometimes they get it wrong well this is quite clear the Biden regime has signaled to all of the virtue signaling entities your media your local governments your local city council your local your local County Commissioners all of these agencies in entities now are fully aware of what the feds want and they want a ban on gas stoves right so the feds don't have to lift a finger they don't have to write anything because again Biden can just sit at his desk and wave his magic wand and apparently a news head news news headline will become law so that's kind of the situation as as I see it and the really really the big concern moving forward we don't have any information other than that nothing has been signed nothing's been published we don't even have the research that led the consumer product safety commission to say that gas stoves are harmful for people we just have General anecdotal evidence I challenge you to find what the what the consumer product safety commission is actually talking about because so far all I've seen is circular reporting One news agency says oh well the cpsc says they're harmful well and they cite another news agency who then cites another news agency who then cites some guy on Twitter who then cites some random employee at cpsc and they can't actually find me a directive for something so again by the time this goes out I'm sure they will be something in writing because the modern regime doesn't like to wait on things like totalitarianism but it's interesting this is another illustration of how laws can get in effect made like it's a de facto law it's a de facto regulation people are following laws that don't exist yet and it's happening all over the country so I would very much recommend people to kind of look into this a little bit more now to walk a lot of this back and to bring this back to a more uh a more clear perspective I guess we have to be aware that this might quite literally be the most palpable case of gaslighting we've ever seen okay and I trust me the irony is not lost on me on this now what I mean by that is the Biden regime can float this idea okay they can float this idea they can leak it to the press the Press freaks out every American freaks out because guess what I've seen some data you know again studies and and statistics are made up nowadays so who knows if this number is accurate but apparently rarely as many as 30 percent of the entire country thirty percent potentially a third of the citizens of this country use gas stoves so you're now telling them that they're going to have to go buy a new uh stove or something we don't we don't know when the government's telling us right because there's no information but either way what I mean is if this is going to happen this is going to be very very very severe and the impacts of this will be very widely felt now where the gaslighting comes in is the vitamin regime can say oh no no no you misunderstood we never meant to ban gas stoves we meant to ban like this kind of gas stove or like this kind of connector that nobody uses or or some some specific technical jargon that nobody understands or that isn't actually used right so they can walk it back and they can say well no no you were spreading misinformation we weren't going to ban gas stoves despite the fact that's exactly what we said uh we were never going to ban gas stoves and you're just spreading misinformation and shame on you and you know know there you go so they can walk it back very easily and Gaslight the heck out of us if they want um which I think is probably what's going to happen because man I tell you if you if anybody bans gas stoves oh boy uh man I I don't know the impacts of that uh I can tell you it's not going to be good um oh boy and then the next question is all right well what about gas heat because good let me tell you something a lot more people rely on gas heat uh than you think and uh that's not going to be good um I did see one Theory and and I I agree that it's kind of an interesting idea is that I forgot where I saw it so sorry if if you know you had this idea first I've literally just forgot where I saw it uh somebody had the idea that this might be the result or or it might be intended to drive a wedge between urban and rural populations yet another divide right and it's not a bad idea because uh natural gas is not available in the middle of nowhere like I live in the middle of nowhere now and I there there's no gas line anywhere near me I don't think there's any natural gas in my entire County to be honest you know that's a interesting thing you know natural gas is really kind of a big thing in cities but not so much in the rural areas so rural people are not going to be affected by this really at all but people in cities will be it's an interesting Theory I just wanted to mention it because like I said I saw it somewhere or maybe it's just a fever dream I had I don't know but I thought I wanted to mention it so very very severe stuff very uh significant stuff if it actually comes to fruition the other thing I wanted to mention and I'll mention it here because the decision took place in Washington DC so I figured I might as well throw it in here and that is the pentagons floating idea or submitting The Proposal I suppose is the best best way of describing it for a zero trust infrastructure for well the internet at large I guess now the idea of a zero trust infrastructure in the field of cyber security fairly a fairly simple construct but it gets really complicated in actuality uh now I again have stated many times I am not a cyber security expert so I am most certainly not going to go into the details of how this all works but I can say that I know enough to to know that this kind of thing is very concerning now to explain zero trust concepts for the layperson which includes me it really is kind of a a complex idea think of it like this in the past or even today actually uh you have passwords for things right you have a username you have an email account and you log into a website with a password even physical security you have a physical badge that gets you access into facilities or a PIN number you can put in to open or unlock a door okay once an entity or a company or an agency has given you access to something you have access to it right you may not have Total Access real it's not how it usually works like after all I can't log in to you know say Gmail for instance and get access to Google servers no no I just have access to the client side kind of stuff right if I were to use Gmail and likewise if you have a badge or some kind of key code to get into a building chances are you're not going to have you know a master code right the whole concept of access to things whether it's cyber security or physical security relies on a person being the the the vector by which trust can be given it's not so much talking about trusting an individual person or not trusting a traditional person it's about removing this this this construct altogether because here's the thing we gave Edward Snowden trust right he was trusted by the NSA he got he got a really high security clearance and he got a lot of passwords and logins and a lot of stuff same thing with Bradley Manning right so maybe using the concept of you know access or no access is not really the construct to move forward maybe we need something else maybe we need something that is you know various applications various you know tools that that are on the software side of things that can make sure that everything is running smoothly because as we all know we're in an age of cyber attacks right someone gets access to a system they can shut it down whether it's a you know a tractor sitting in a field that's connected to some server you know or cell tower or something or if it's you know a colonial pipeline right either way using if you remove the the the understanding of providing access to someone based on a trust or no trust you know criteria if and if you go to a whole new system itself that's kind of the way forward with regards to cyber security that's a little bit hard to understand and I fully admit I don't completely understand it myself either because there's a lot of there's a lot of ways to kind of get to where you want to go with with zero trust infrastructure the bottom line for why you the average citizen should care about this is that this is a fantastic way to lock you out of the internet if they don't like you on it and here's what I mean by that one of the closest ways that you get to kind of a zero trust infrastructure is what we already kind of know throughout the cryptocurrency world and that is the dreaded kyc or know your customer in other words the bane of anyone who has ever tried to buy cryptocurrency newsflash it's not exactly 2010 right you can't just go online and buy cryptocurrency with the you know with a credit card or something uh anonymously it doesn't work like that even if you were using you know a credit card that wouldn't be anonymous but the point is is that if you want to buy cryptocurrency today in 2023 you're gonna have to put your social security number in somewhere uh now there are some things and ways around this but to be honest in terms of most cryptocurrency there really isn't especially the most common cryptocurrencies so this is kind of one of those the kind of the closest way I can think of explaining a zero trust infrastructure is I can guarantee you kyc requirements are going to be a huge part of a zero trust infrastructure um or at least while the system's kind of getting its way out you know getting working its way out through through the development and stuff like that so again bottom line this is your indication and warning this is the video that you can look back in a couple of years time and point back and say I Told You So when you are locked out of your email account or your bank or your company because of something you said or thought or something you didn't say this kind of infrastructure the zero trust infrastructure for me not being a cyber security guy not being a technical expert it on the one hand it seems kind of the way forward when it comes to cyber security but on the other hand it seems like a great way to prevent me from getting on the internet at some point right it's it's a great way to build a off an authorized list of users on the internet which is going to be kind of a basic requirement for this moving forward and go from there again I'm not doing a super good job of explaining this and you I'm sure far more technical experts will pop up in the in the comments to to kind of explain this a little bit better but the point is is here's the timeline 2020 7 this is from their own slide this is the dod's actual product that explains what the dod is working on and I don't know about you but look you know living in the world today and knowing how the world Works anytime the dod does something I'm very suspicious okay you know I I've hey I hate that I have to explain that at this point but anytime the dod develops something it's going to be used against Americans at some point so I'm really kind of concerned that the timeline for this is so short and the dod is going to figure out a way to do this and this would be a great way to implement you know social credit this would be a great way to implement you know some kind of you know social ban on any kind of any any of the systems that keep our society running so I wanted to kind of bring this out as kind of homework for you guys if you were more interested in this I'm not particularly surprised and honestly you don't really need to know much more information beyond what I've already told you to make a decision and the decision you know it should be look hey you need to start kind of moving away from these kinds of systems because let me tell you something the reason that we don't have such a great Communications infrastructure as is is because of how big these problems are the nature of the internet uh in and of itself you know servers connected to other servers that are controlled by other people the way that https traffic works it is an infrastructure that is very helpful if you don't want people on it and if you control the way internet traffic works at the very base level you control a lot of things and I'm very concerned about that so that's why I wanted to to mention it here so I'll just kind of leave it at that and move on to the next wildly different topic which is something that I realized recently has a name which I didn't think it did and that is transnational repression transnational repression is fascinating and terrifying and here's what it is transnational repression is something that we kind of we know happens we know this happens but we think that it's on a small scale so small in fact that I didn't even think that it had a name I thought it was just oh wow okay that was kind of a rare thing this is when a foreign government chooses to intimidate assault imprison arrest or whatever its citizens while they are in another country now that should ring a bell because CNN ran this article from a while back I think it was last month yeah in which CNN of all places admitted that China is operating over 100 police stations across the world with the help of some host Nations report claims that's the actual headline of this news article from CNN I'm shocked right again this is something that's not new at all we we have known that this occurs all over the world particularly with China China is a nation that is obsessed with its citizens and more accurately I suppose obsessed with controlling its citizens because that's how it maintains power it China is a communist Nation they quite literally are Xi Jinping or Xi Jinping however you pronounce his name he is not the president of China China does not have a president he is the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party it's right there on this Wikipedia page so when communist Nations do things like this when they are very concerned with citizens of theirs outside of their Nations uh we have things like the East-West Berlin Dynamic back during the Cold War we have very interesting things occur well the same thing's happening today and we now know it's become public record that there are secret Chinese police stations all over the United States that secretly detain and sometimes torture their citizens for saying or doing something and thinking that being in the US they're outside the reach of China well they most certainly are not the scary part about all of this you might think okay well this is kind of this is still pretty rare right it's pretty fascinating and and slightly terrifying that China you know is concerned about their own citizens this much but you know any historian is going to tell you this is not surprising at all so if we recognize this is happening and you know even though your average citizen out there in the United States is going to say well you know how does this affect me I you know after all I'm not a Chinese National living in the United States you know for those people man it sucks and you know I would be very concerned about you know being either you know assassinated or captured or imprisoned you know in some safe house that the Chinese government has set up in New York I'd be very concerned about that if I was a Chinese citizen you know not so much if I'm an American here's where it gets a little concerning for the American citizens listening and that is that the feds are now on to this and it has become so much of a problem that the FBI has set up a a a website and a hotline and and all kinds of threat intimidation guides to help citizens Escape their own Nation now again this is the FBI and it is very clear that the FBI has their own goals and those goal goals I do not think align with anything good but I it is very interesting that now the FBI is is quietly trying to spread the word about this and trying to address this issue of foreign police officers exerting their influence and taking jurisdiction on the U.S soil I have to be very careful when describing this because I don't want the runaway trains of the past we all remember that four month period of time where I was getting about 200 emails a day regarding uh people claiming that China had invaded Canada or that uh there were remember all those um uh cargo ships off the coast of California yeah yeah those uh shipping containers were all full of Chinese agents and Chinese spies and the Chinese military were planning to invade Via San Francisco yeah I've lived that nightmare of trying to walk that back and kind of show people that yes okay concerns valid it's not true moving on when it comes to this this is very much true and it is so much true that the FBI is now issuing memos to lower uh law enforcement you know local law enforcement agencies trying to explain to them that this is a huge threat now and to what should a local police officer do if they encounter a Chinese police officer trying to arrest a Chinese citizen on U.S soil that is a huge concern because the FBI doesn't do anything unless it has already become too much of a problem too too big of a problem so I just wanted to kind of point that out that uh this is a much bigger problem than just to see in an article there are actual agencies tracking this and trying to figure out what to do about it because again this is a foreign Nation conducting policing actions on U.S soil and that's a huge problem again for the average citizen out there what can you do about it I don't know I mean I'm just going to be completely honest with you and say look I don't think that the you know you can contact the FBI you know they've got a hotline they've got a number but I don't think it's going to help because at that stage good grief you know it's kind of a serious problem so so again I wanted to bring this up and make everyone aware that this is an issue so that when it becomes more of an issue in the in the future we can under have a basis for understanding of how all this works now again let me walk it back a little bit and say look I don't think you're going to walk into a Chinese police officer in your everyday life this is going to be a very select problem for a select few but hey if you're at a university you know and you've got the majority of say a nuclear engineering class is you know Chinese Nationals I mean when I was in college I had to take a few uh courses and uh the courses which were about things like uh energy policy and nuclear engineering turned out to all be Iranian students in one class I was one of three U.S passport holding American citizens and the rest of them were um either Iranian or Chinese Nationals so that's another problem for another day I suppose but for these people um you know if they're not spies themselves which I think you know a good portion of them are uh it's it's a it's a concerning thing especially for Chinese Nationals trying to flee China or flee Hong Kong or or things like that or or you know big names that have already left the country uh China is again a nation that is obsessed uh with not being humiliated and uh if you tend to humiliate China and you are a Chinese National well that doesn't tend to end well for you so again just wanted to bring it up and make everyone aware of this because this is going to be a huge problem for the foreseeable future I think moving on to the East Central midwestern region let's bring it back to our old standby of chemical manufacturing plants catching on fire and in this case our our winner for this time around is LaSalle County Illinois specifically Keras chemical hopefully I pronounced all that right uh they had a very large fire slash an explosion at their chemical plant and this one is very suspicious because the ex it started first of all with an explosion that began from inside a shipping container and um yeah kind of kind of suspicious there of course was nobody around the I don't know if the facility was occupied at the time of the explosion or not uh but there was no one around the shipping container when it exploded and also there is uh apparently Hazmat concerns because immediately following the explosion and multiple alarm fire uh a green oxidizing substance was observed to be leaking from the facility uh which had to be neutralized uh via you know various you know chemicals uh by firefighters so again not a super not a super great thing again when we talk about factories or or chemical plants or stuff like that you know blowing up or Catching Fire we have to look at you know everything we have to look at all sources right and one of the major things that I personally look for is all right was a facility abandoned at the time because if it was abandoned at the time that's going to be a a huge indicator that it it might not be as nefarious as you think because what is the point of a Black Ops wet work team you know attacking a facility that has no one working at it what is the point of some kind of social movement or domestic group I should say attacking a facility that's not in use right however we do see places that are abandoned burned down all the time due to drug use due to vagrancy due to a variety of factors right even even accidents or lightning strikes are the result of a lot of this with this plant they had just Broken Ground on a 20 million dollar expansion of the plant in August of 2022. so they were doing pretty good it seems they were expanding the plant they were looking at growing I've got a dozen photos online about you know showing their their grand expansion right and now suddenly their plant gets crippled by some kind of incident that we're not really sure about that started inside a shipping container very interesting I don't know if this plant has a history of safety violations my quick you know Google Foo did not really reveal anything usually if you Google one of these company names like the one last time I forget the name they had like a laundry list of fires and and and maintenance problems and staff having problems and it was just like an accident a day for years until you know the thing finally just just had enough and blew up this one I didn't really find anything now I'm sure somebody out there knows uh the history of this plant especially locals might know uh what's going on there but uh just let everybody know I wasn't able to find any kind of significant history of negligency at this plant at least for my my brief search so again we'll chalk that one up to some kind of you know incident and we'll just keep it in our memory and move on and wait for the next one moving on to the West Central midwestern region you guys get a reprieve from the bit of bad news this time around I wasn't able to find anything uh that occurred that was worth mentioning uh this time around I'm sure next time I'll find something but but let's go ahead and move on down to the southern border region and uh for the rest of the states that are in this you know kind of area I didn't really have much I really just kind of wanted to focus on the Texas border again and like I mentioned last time uh sorry I haven't really had time to drill down and and provide a lot of the information that I wanted to for this so let me just say this and that is the Border crisis is continuing and growing worse however the response to it is getting a little bit better in some areas but it certainly looks like the events over the past month or so especially with Biden's high profile visit down there uh this is a this is a losing battle particularly with the cross-border violence that is likely to occur from the incidents going on in Mexico now I know a lot of you wanted me to have a dedicated slide on this I got it I'm working on it I'm still building the maps for this and trying to figure out what's going on because I am not a South America analyst I'm not a Central America analyst I've never been there and I'm having a lot I'm having to do a lot of learning because um just you know spoiler alert the cartel situation in South and Central America and in Mexico is kind of complicated and it goes back kind of a long way so really what you need to know for now is that El Chapo's son one of the biggest cartel leaders in the area really the signaloa cartel right everybody's everybody's seen sicario right so no further explanation needed right well no really El Chapo's son was arrested and and uh the signaloa boys have have gotten a little spicy and they've basically declared a general mobilization against the Mexican Government until they release him well the Mexican Government is not going to release him he's going to be extradited to the United States or at least that's what they claim so far either way I I will I I will delve into the the situation in Mexico a little bit more at some point when I get time to actually learn about the situation and then I can you know speak more intelligently on it all we know is that you can hop on social media right now and see an awful lot of warfare going on in pretty much all over Mexico right now because of this now when it comes to the United States uh coming into the coming into the situation uh this just makes a bad situation worse right it makes an already tense board situation where there are thousands of active duty soldiers thousands and and hundreds of law enforcement from every badge you can imagine every agency you can imagine is down there at the border and you can argue whether or not that's enough people or not everybody knows that in no operation are you going to have enough people to do what you want to do but there are an awful lot of people down there it's a very tense situation there is a very high chance for international incidents right we have already seen cartel members attacking U.S soldiers who are standing guard on the border at some of these more high profile locations and it's not good there have been dozens of incidents since the start of this whole border crisis which granted is decades in the making but the bottom line is that right now it's pucker Factor 9.5 down there and it's not likely to get any better anytime soon so please be advised that this is a situation that's going to develop further now again to to keep things in perspective I don't think we have to worry so much about you know the cartels invading the United States that's not what I'm saying is going to happen uh we certainly have to worry about the humanitarian crisis we have to worry about the the immigration crisis or we have to worry about a lot of things but I'm not so much looking for cartel members trying to invade the United States that's that's not what's going on here what I mean is you're probably going to have a lot of U.S soldiers targeted uh either for political reasons or just because they're guys with guns in close proximity to other guys with guns who are probably very upset about the situation in their country right now so even though there is really no motivation whatsoever for the violence that's going on in Mexico to spill over into the United States there might be a little bit of a reason for justification now a huge flash point to look out for is when you see start seeing news headlines saying that the extradition of ovidio Guzman the El Chapo's son right uh when his extradition has happened okay because right now uh a judge in Mexico has has halted his extradition while they figure out what's going on here so again when that extradition takes place because it will most likely take place the US has been trying to hunt this guy for a long time ever since you know we got El Chapo himself this guy's a very senior member of the Sinaloa cartel so we're not going to let this guy get away if we have to go down there and get him ourselves which is most likely what's going to happen either way uh the bottom line is that for guys down there on the border if you see this dude's extradition is taking place because you're most likely not going to know about when it takes place ahead of time uh it's going to be handled by very special people in very special ways right they're going to sneak this guy back across the border into the U.S somehow well when that happens it's going to make the news and you need to be very careful about the situation down there on the border because then all those dudes with with guns were very upset about their their senior boss getting arrested uh they're now going to have a justification to start pointing those barrels towards the border so I just wanted to bring that up and mention that this is kind of a big deal and even though I'm not an expert on it right now I can clearly see the writing on the wall and that's probably probably not very good so again something to keep an eye on for the future and moving out west getting back to the tradition of things we have many many attacks that have occurred on electrical substations so again I'm not going to mention all the ones that have occurred in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon and Washington there have been around half a dozen or so within the past couple of months and they have ranged from possible theft to vandalism to tampering to actually like shooting it you know uh Transformers and things like that it's really kind of hard to say because a lot of these things are not they're not making the press in the way that you'd want them to make the Press because the major media is running the headline there's no information there because well you know Federal authorities are not going to release the details of these attacks to the mainstream public which on the one hand makes a lot of sense because the feds are obviously not going to want to encourage or or provide targeting guidance for people trying to Target other places around the country you know so keeping those details secret is it makes a lot of sense however by keeping things secret the general public and you know ourselves included are not able to discern why these places were attacked or if there was something that we could do to prevent it because for instance we're sending hundreds of millions of dollars to another country that shall not be named uh but if we can't afford a 50 padlock for a facility then that's a problem you know if we're not going to it's cheaper to file an insurance claim to get a half million dollar Transformer out to a specific site than it is to you know buy that you know security guard to stand there and watch it all day either way the result for people like you and me is the same we don't have electricity for a few days and this is a concern especially for uh incidents like the one that occurred at the PG and E facility uh really just a small uh substation well it really wasn't a substation it's actually a solar farm it provided uh power to a lot of the casinos in Las Vegas now this incident was very interesting and this was a I'm going to call it I have it on the slide Harris probable I'm going to call it an almost certain Islamic terrorist attack really the attack Vector was this it was a guy drove his vehicle into the mega array the solar array that provides power again for MGM Resorts uh in Las Vegas he rammed his vehicle through the gate and then some press reports are reporting that he siphoned gasoline out of the tank and set the Ablaze including the Transformer or some kind of electrical apparatus that he drove his vehicle into now you might note the date on this this occurred on January 7th slash eighth right we became aware of it on the eighth and it probably occurred overnight on the January on January 7th now this coincides interestingly enough with Al qaeda's usual yearly press statement so for the past few years Al Qaeda has you know still been around there's still a thing uh and they have issued uh directives slash like a happy New Year death to America message right and the one for this year specifically recommended uh their people to carry out attacks on U.S soil I think this is just me spitballing with very little evidence to back it up so just be aware of that but I think that's what the reason for this attack was I think that your your Lone Wolf attacks probably funded by some domestic U.S agency uh carry out these kinds of attack that's why I think we saw another attack in New York City Times Square on New Year's Eve a police officer was attacked with a machete uh and I think that's also why we're seeing some of these attacks right that message came out and you know your Lone Wolf extremists here in the United States were motivated to do stuff like that again it just kind of shows you that the counterterrorism has never really been an easy job but at the same time I would be willing to bet that these kinds of things are would have been easily preventable had the right people been working in the in the counterterrorism industry and had the counterterrorism agencies in the United States actually being concerned with tracking uh foreign terrorists rather than uh trying to Target parents at school board meetings but again you know there's no real way for me to describe this these kinds of things in neutral language anymore you know I just have to call it like I see it and you know I would be willing to bet my my thought is that around New Year's time we saw Al Qaeda release their message and boom now we have uh a few a handful of attacks happening in the United States low level attacks it really didn't have too much of of an effect but still it's like man hey a rookie analyst could have could have called this you know I mean these federal agencies are spying on us no matter what and they're investigating people for for speaking out of school board meetings but yet they can't actually dedicate time to conducting counter-terrorism operations that are relatively easy to do these guys would have been very easy to find because it's always like you know they were known to the FBI beforehand but anyway that's a whole lot of speculation that I'm sure you guys don't really want to hear so I'll just end my kind of ranting and raving on that for now and let's move to something a little bit more interesting and that is uh we're gonna skip over the entirety of Europe for now sorry guys and we're gonna move to kind of the the I don't want to call it a bigger threat but an interesting threat and that is the Far East yes the invasion of Taiwan by China the ultimate will they won't they this is something that has been debated by military strategists that get paid a lot more than me for a very long time and no one seems to have a really good answer for any of this will China invade Taiwan nobody knows uh we know generally what it would look like uh very very generally and we know that China has been making very strong aspirations toward the small island nation over the past well year few years but really the past few months for instance last month they launched one of their largest uh military exercises the largest one they've ever done which was like 70-something aircraft including bombers Fighters you name it it looked like it the party was about to start but uh they would have to have thousands of aircraft in the air for that but again I am not a Far East analyst I've never spent any time at paycom and nobody else here has either so I'm having to kind of get spun up on that as well the reason you might care about an invasion of Taiwan by China is well for a few reasons but really the the main theory is the the island chain Theory which states that if China is going to invade Taiwan they're going to have to keep going and they know that if they take Taiwan it's going to take the vast majority of their military and they're going to have to kind of expand into South southeast Asia and especially the South China Sea if they have any hope of winning that conflict uh really you can kind of very generally see where China is going to have to do exactly what Japan did during World War II they're going to have to take these small island chains Island hop as far as they can before before well the world mobilizes against them will this cause World War III I don't know um back in the day man when I was kind of like a junior analyst I always though

maps are some of the most important tools the analyst has in their toolbox yeah sure we've all heard about how important it is to have a map for Land Navigation or land nav but beyond that what's the big deal are there other reasons to have maps on hand let's find out besides the obvious navigational use the main use for maps in Warfare is to create what we call a common operational picture or cop these go by a few different names by service Branch but are all really the same kind of thing the cop is simply a large map that can clearly show what's going on throughout the battle space however depending on what the mission is a cop can be set up in many ways ATAC for instance is basically a cop a map with the ability to drop overlays and see where everyone is located on a common map we've all seen this in movies some very large map with little Flags or other icons designating military units and with an assortment of Staff constantly moving these pucks around with their most up-to-date positions this we call battle tracking and we'll dive into this a lot more later but for now battle tracking is keeping the map updated with the most recent positions of units enemy locations critical intelligence gathered during the mission and so on this is a very important aspect of warfare and one of the main functions of the Tactical operations center or talk in the old days these Maps were physical pieces of paper hung on a wall or spread out on a table with operations staff and Intel analysts using clear sheets of acetate plastic to draw critical information on maps this ancient method of battle tracking is still done today during training and actually during real world operations but mostly just to keep that skill alive in the event that fancy tools like ATAC and other battle tracking software is not an option in an increasingly hostile and electronic battle space a cop that is set up purely for intelligence purposes is usually called a sip or common intelligence picture sometimes you'll see this referred to as a sip cop right referencing the two main staff directorates that work in operation centers intelligence and operations but usually at say Battalion size units or lower everything is mostly clustered together on the same map Blue forces red forces ipb stuff like key terrain and such all of this is going to reside on the same map usually on the prepared citizen side of things the average person may not be capable of or even interested in setting up a full-blown talk and that's fine but you would be surprised the talk like capabilities you'll have by Simply Having a map for me I go overboard with maps because of my role as a prepared citizen so I have to be careful not to let my personal fascination with maps cloud my recommendations for everyone anyone with military experience will tell you that many commanders sometimes view maps as a status symbol in the U.S military at least the size of maps sand tables and terrain models is often dictated by one's rank or importance the generals get super big maps that fill an entire wall or a whole wall of plasma screen screens I've seen some general officers literally have a personal cartographer who prints out big maps for them of totally random places just so they can have a random map for a meeting now I certainly don't fancy myself as any sort of military commander I personally am just not cut out for leadership but I do not ascribe to the idea that the size of the map dictates its importance it's what's on the map that matters but anyway I find having many different types of maps quite handy so what maps are needed first up is a local land nav topographic map the old standby of the usual classic right you always need to have a topographic map of your area I think that by now this is a fairly standard expectation that goes without saying but I did want to mention it anyway I usually prefer a standard one to twenty four thousand scale USGS quad map of the area that I'm going to be moving through if I'm going a long way it's a bit more practical to use a larger scale so that you don't have to carry so many different maps with a one to twenty four thousand Scale map it's great for seeing maximum detail and operating in a very small area but I have many times walked right off the edge of the map which is sometimes not a fun experience whatever you choose having a topographic map for navigation is vital but we've heard all of this before right besides land nav what other kinds of maps are useful the other type of map that in some cases is even more important than a topographic map is a simple road map that's right the ordinary roadmap you get for free at Stateline rest stops at least here in the U.S as strange as it sounds ordinary road maps have throughout history become an indispensable tool of warfare from World Wars to the modern day simple tourist road maps have been used to plan very large-scale military operations one more interesting anecdote that illustrates this comes from the defense of Berlin during the final days of World War II as the Soviet Army Advanced across the Polish Countryside towards Berlin the Iraq sphere SS himself Heinrich Himmler decided that his Grand military expertise needed to be put to use in the Northeast as commander of the hastily formed Army group Vistula setting his command post aboard his personal luxury train he established one of the worst Army headquarters in history along a railroad sighting in Schneiderman Poland having been assigned to be himmler's chief operations officer Colonel Hans Georg Eismann arrived at the rather inept SS Commander's train with an air of nervousness upon his arrival his suspicions were instantly confirmed he immediately assessed the situation as rather desperate and the headquarters itself was only a shell of a military organization apart from himmler's complete ineptitude in all things military his command post was that in name only the lavish headquarters train was more vacation spot than headquarters as it only contained One telephone and only one map which eisenmann noted as being very out of date and not containing accurate information at all one can only imagine the moral laundry this presented here was a career military officer talking to one of the most infamous humans ever to have lived a man with extreme power who had done unspeakable things and he didn't even know what units he had under his command he had no idea of basic military unit sizes formations or anything even the lowest ranking Soldier would know a rather desperate situation indeed this was the headquarters of an entire Army group or at least it was supposed to be and the map situation was so desperate that Eisman had to use his driver's road map that he had used to navigate to this Command Post in the first place he literally had to go out to his car and get the map from the glove box though the history of this incident is not quite so clear it appears that for a Time the defense of Germany's Eastern flank was conducted by a colonel with a road map moving forward to present day another similar situation occurred within the U.S army during the U.S Invasion of Grenada a commonly told story is the case of military leadership ship planning operation urgent Theory using civilian road maps this was because Grenada was such a small nation of little military importance that when it became clear that the U.S would be using military force to invade the island nation military leaders were caught without adequate maps of the area understandably planning invasions involves an awful lot of people and there are almost never enough maps to go around for everyone this is the case even today I myself have helped plan military operations using old Soviet maps of an invasion long forgotten or even Garmin base camp or Google Earth even just a few years ago I myself was in a conflict Zone printing out homemade maps on an inkjet printer I ordered from Amazon it would be nice if we could all have nicely printed Maps but as always in war things rarely go to plan National Geographic Rand McNally and Michelin have been an unwitting member of many military intelligence briefings over the years as strange as it sounds ordinary tourist road maps have been and will continue to be vital for everything from road trips to planning invasions when it comes to specific road maps I personally like the more durable National Geographic adventure maps for the United States and Europe these are fairly cheap considering they're printed on a plasticized paper but if you want to reduce cost even further you can pick up your State's roadmap usually from visitor centers or rest areas for free these are usually much more up to date anyway as Most states come out with a new one every year but even if you do go the free map route I would strongly recommend picking up a regional map as well again these National Geographic adventure maps are divided up by region at least for the U.S with four of these you could cover the entire country at a scale that's small enough to read yet compact enough to carry I usually prefer standard maps that you can fold and put into a map case this also makes it easy to stuff a map into a bag and forget about it however the spiral bound road atlas is also a very important tool as well these are perhaps better are suited to remaining in a vehicle due to their size but since my own role is often in the information space I often find myself needing a fairly detailed map of rather random locations and a road atlas is great for that if you have the space to carry one I wouldn't want to backpack very far with a road atlas but if you are setting up a talk or something these are super useful to keep on hand I would definitely expect each vehicle you have to have a road atlas as well for locations outside of the US Rand McNally and Michelin are your best bet for Nations that might not have really nice Maps I navigated all over the Kuwaiti desert with a random McNally map because it was the only one that I could find in country that was in English in Europe things are a bit easier and there are a plethora of companies to choose from which offer many different styles of road map however if you are in Russia or China I'm afraid you are out of luck for the most part during the Cold War the Soviet Union knew the utility of road maps so they intentionally made them incorrectly distances between cities were just slightly inaccurate and some roads did not even exist or were slightly in the wrong place and of course many entire cities were simply left off the map entirely since the concept of the closed city was heavily used in the Soviet Union most road maps were just wrong enough for Citizens not to notice but if an American military unit were to capture one and use it to navigate and more importantly calculate fuel consumption the map would be incorrect enough to throw off these calculations thankfully with the collapse of the Soviet Union Russian road maps are a lot more accurate nowadays however there are some ghosts of the past on some road maps that you'll find throughout Russia in Russia you can never really be sure of anything especially the truth in today's world China being the predominant communist Society on Earth has carried this idea into the 21st century China's national GPS system is intentionally inaccurate by sometimes hundreds of meters this takes from the American idea of Collective availability back in the early days of GPS satellites the American government did exactly the same thing citing national security reasons for the intentional degradation of GPS accuracy China has taken things one step further and with the cooperation of Google has also skewed the satellite imagery of the entirety of China as well in other words if you are in China using Google Maps from a smartphone you will appear to be in the right place but you don't know that both the Communist party and Google are working together to make sure that you never really know the true GPS coordinates of where you are standing at least until China outright banned Google Maps from within their country which seems to flip-flop back and forth quite a lot these days but this also applies to stepping up their Crackdown on accurate GPS receivers this is also why Coca-Cola got into some hot water with China back in 2013 since they put GPS units in their trucks for delivery drivers local Communists found the devices in Coca-Cola trucks which triggered a complaint and expanded into a full-blown investigation this is why no one in China truly knows where anything is with any accuracy unless you break Chinese law and take a handheld GPS to China specifically a GPS unit that uses one of the non-chinese satellite constellations you will always be dozens or sometimes hundreds of meters off the same thing applies to simple paper maps they can be quite inaccurate again with post-soviet Nations this is becoming less of a factor but you can again spot some holdovers from the past on Modern Maps however some Nations like India are locking down even more India does not scramble or Jam GPS data yet as far as I know but they do treat map making as a state secret with only pre-approved Indian companies being able to make any sort of map within the borders of the nation it is with this in mind that we must remember that Any Nation who possesses GPS navigation satellites can decide to one day turn that service off or degrade it significantly we have discussed how rare this scenario is in our video on satellite Communications but it is always technically a possibility it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to stop using GPS altogether right it's still a very powerful tool but it also brings modern vulnerabilities with terrestrial GPS jamming becoming a basic fundamental of Modern Warfare returning to a more traditional paper-only navigational method might be worthwhile not just as a backup but as a primary means of navigation all of this is important to consider no matter what map you choose you think you're just going to go buy a roadmap off the shelf and that might work for you but it also might be highly inaccurate some Nations might not appreciate accurate Maps being made of their country and some private companies are eager to bend over backwards to sell their customers a Lie by making a map that is not accurate another map that's helpful to have is a pocket atlas of the world the explanation of why a pocket Atlas is important it goes back to the original question of why maps are so important for the analyst or for anyone operating in the 5th generation battle space one thing that will assassinate your credibility really quickly is if you don't know where something is but somebody else does if the person you are briefing knows more about the geography than you do you probably should not be briefing but rather having a two-way conversation to exchange the information you have geography is not something that is commonly studied and analysts deployed around the world doesn't usually do too much pre-deployment work or study they're supposed to but it doesn't happen that much in the professional world because most people have the mentality of learning when they get there every single time I've deployed this has been a major issue that I've seen people being in country and not even knowing what district they're standing in that's fair enough for the average Soldier who's fresh out of basic training and got a lot of other Soldier stuff to know I can forgive them for not knowing every District in a province by heart on their first day but for the analyst you better know that country more than your own hometown no there's not much value in knowing the provincial capital of a province way over on the other side of the country but if you don't know it you'll look like an idiot analysts are supposed to know this stuff or so people think that's the curse that analysts are faced with constantly a good chunk of the learning curve for analysts is simply knowing geography anyone who studies geography and history is automatically miles ahead of their peers when working in a job that requires really any kind of analysis but say you don't want to be an analyst sure you might want to keep tabs on things and have kind of a general Intel picture of your area but you don't want to make this your full-time job right is a pocket Atlas still useful I think so yes for one it's something to study even at a very broad level knowing where certain nations are on this Earth is pretty important if nothing more than because of how our modern news Cycle Works most Americans get their news from alternative media sources these days sources which even though they're vastly better than mainstream Legacy Media they might not know this significance of an event in other words you might see a headline that reads Chinese bomber sighted off the island of Luzon if you don't have an atlas you might gloss over that headline or just not really know what's going on because you know China is always in the news with Taiwan and all kinds of stuff right but if you had a map to show you the context of where this location is you might be able to conclude that oh this is in the Philippines this might be something pretty big right this is not just your standard Taiwan stuff because that alone makes it pretty handy you increase your knowledge of the world around you simply by every time you see a news article that references a location that you're not familiar with just pull out your Atlas and see where it's at you can't usually get historical or cultural context from a map but you can get geographical context which helps if you are really lost in the sauce and thrown into a situation where you've only got your fuzzy memories of Pub trivia and 8th grade social studies to help you having a map on hand makes your life a lot easier it sounds like a really specific situation to prepare for but I myself have seen this happens so many times I'm inclined to think it's more routine than we might think after all Fubar and snafu situations are the norm not the anomaly especially in a fifth generation war with all that's happening around the world constantly it seems like it's endless right the last thing we need is to not know where things are happening and a low-cost compact pocket Atlas can help with that another useful type of map to have are aeronautical charts these are usually also called VFR sectionals these are very useful for understanding when aircraft are outside of standard traffic routes these are also useful for getting local airport frequencies again another very specific type of thing to be concerned about or prepared for but I have noticed a lot of changes within the commercial Aviation Community since covet changes which do not reassure me as a passenger from Pilots dying suddenly and Airlines exploring the idea of flying with only one pilot due to Pilot shortages and maintenance issues in parts shortages my gut feeling is that the risks associated with commercial airline travel are much higher than in the past I'm sure the aviation Community would disagree and assure that everything is just as safe as it's always been that's fine I guess but I don't want to be the statistic that proves me right and one of my own personal habits goes back to an old Aviator saying any land you fly over you may have to walk over and in many places on Earth the walking isn't good likewise anytime I am trusting someone else to transport me from one place to the next I always carry a map or usually several maps of the route we should be taking just in case I will admit in the rare occasion I fly commercially I Don't Take Along aeronautical charts of the whole route that would mean bringing along a lot of maps but I do like to have something from a military perspective on the ground I think it should be mandatory for most military units to have civilian aeronautical charts of their area of operations let's face it an awful lot of civilian air Liners in the past have been shot down by mistake by military forces around the world if a military unit plans for civilian aircraft to be in their area they need to have the aeronautical chart that the civilian pilot is using relying on civilian planes to constantly monitor 121.5 megahertz the the international emergency frequency for aircraft relying on them to monitor this is a farce because they just don't do it a lot of the time even though they're required to right but what pilots absolutely do monitor is the frequency for the Tower or controller in their area which is listed on the map the map gives you the frequencies of every tower that is in American airspace at least bottom line is that if you absolutely need to talk to an aircraft or listen to one in a life or death emergency and you need to be 100 sure that they are hearing you you need to know the frequency they are most likely to monitor which is on the map I know that for me personally I monitor all Aviation radio air traffic around me pretty much at all times certainly if there seems to be increased levels of military traffic or something strange is going on or there's a national event underway this is a very deep rabbit hole that will make a lot more sense when we cover this topic specifically so don't get all bent out of shape about it just yet for now in the middle of the woods out of cell service range really the only way you'd know the local frequencies to monitor is if you have a scanner or a scan function on your receiver or if you have the map with the frequencies on it again a really specific scenario to prepare for and it's probably not helpful for most of you but it may be for some so I thought I'd mention it sort of along the same lines as Aviation Maps nautical charts may be helpful for some or a waste of time for others when I lived by the coast I always had nautical charts on hand of the immediate area nowadays I don't really use them so much rather than using these to get radio frequencies my biggest use of nautical charts was simply navigation nautical charts list all of the navigational markers along waterways which is helpful to know if you find yourself taking fairy rides a lot certainly if you have a boat yourself nautical charts can be pretty helpful to have just in case for me since nautical charts aren't really a priority at the moment I load them onto the GPS I use daily it's a lot easier to do these because usually these are kind of a one thing you buy them and download them or get them for free and you're done whereas loading aeronautical charts Aviation maps onto your handheld GPS is a little bit more difficult because those are usually subscription based so either way nautical charts are something you could easily just you know one time one and done because the geography of the earth doesn't change that much whereas aeronautical charts they expire after a certain period of time they're not good permanently they're only good for I think six months at a time but they don't usually change that much when it comes to nautical charts I've I usually load them again onto my personal GPS that way I've got them if I suddenly find myself in coastal waters for some reason but again it's not going to take up any space in my bag because it's on my GPS if I was using charts more heavily for actual navigation or if I was located near near the coast I would absolutely have a paper copy on hand to supplement the GPS right another rather specific kind of map you might find interesting are the nifc fire Maps these maps are produced by the National interagency Fire Center and are really meant for firefighting Pilots responding to wildfires throughout the western United States these are really useful for monitoring firefighting operations in your area they're also handy for identifying potential hazards to Aviation firefighting aircraft and firefighting Pilots have a very unique Mission they fly at low altitude usually in very remote areas sometimes in poor visibility all in support of forces on the ground so they need a map that primarily shows everything they could potentially fly into while working a fire as a result these Maps kind of bridge the gap between aerial operations and people on the ground it's not not quite an aeronautical chart but it's also not quite a topographic map either it has elements of both which I personally find quite useful the downside is that these maps are really only available for the western United States where wildfires are more of a we're large and you know Crown fires are more of a problem right so if you live outside those areas you're you're kind of out of luck at the minimum if you didn't want to print out the map for your specific area you can easily print out the overall map of Aviation frequencies used by Wildfire responding agencies handy to be able to monitor firefighting operations in your area again if there is any kind of government agency operating in my area I want the same map that they have as a brief side note regarding you know monitoring frequencies and things like that over the years Emergency Services have made it abundantly clear that they don't want any help from citizens so I personally would never transmit on these or any government frequencies even in a life or death emergency same idea behind why many people won't do CPR on a stranger anymore the the financial liability is too great for many people things are getting nasty out there it shouldn't be the way the world works but it's just one of the things that it's a sad illustration of of the way the world is now so all of that being said I the private citizen want to be on the same sheet of music as whomever is in my neighborhood for monitoring purposes sort of along the same line are U.S forest service road maps these are handy to have if you are operating in or near federal land in the United States I personally am not too big of a fan of these but they may have some use for you so I wanted to mention it one of the biggest downsides to these is that they are not free even the digital versions you have to pay for there are no free downloads at all as far as I can see which is odd considering the U.S forest Service is entirely funded by tax dollars but anyway these maps are unique in that they show a lot of trails and logging roads that are not on other Maps these are of course only available for national forests though and sometimes they're out of date by a couple of decades I've seen of some maps in the past tasks that have not been updated literally in 30 years so these Maps can be helpful for you but one important note is to check various sources for kmz files of your local area who knows somebody may have converted these trails to a kmz for your GPS which you might be able to download for free GPS file depot.com is a good resource for this as people can download a lot of trails in their local area for free not a perfect solution by any means but it's worth checking out before purchasing anything up next another very specific kind of map but underground maps maps that detail the Subterranean environment this is something more specific to those who live in cities with underground Transportation maps of subway tunnels are critical for the urban landscape most cities publish their Metro tunnels on City or County GIS websites so if you make your own maps you can easily incorporate that data knowing where underground tunnels are located is pretty handy for when a volcano erupts in the downtown area or if a slightly more likely to disaster occurs such as a gas main explosion or a sinkhole forms the other side of the coin is that Subterranean combat is a staple of urban Warfare which is something that has become a higher priority for the US military over the past few years large training schools have been stood up to accommodate the future of underground Warfare though it's probably pretty unlikely for citizens to take to the City sewers to fight crime in some parts of the world Metro stations and tunnels have been a vital Lifeline for citizens from the Battle of Britain to modern day Ukraine citizens instinctively seek protection Underground when the bombing starts so having a map of the tunnel you may be Sheltering in is a wise forethought if you think Urban combat is likely in your area I personally would also include sewers drainage basins or large underground electrical hubs as well really any location where a person can fit underground that might offer protection from above knowing where that manhole cover in the street goes is pretty important for survival in the a very rare occasion you have to do something like this for me I do not live anywhere near any kind of underground transportation system but since I again often feel a more analytical role I try to keep on hand maps of the most famous Metro systems just so that when an incident occurs I can know where that particular stop is maps of New York City Washington DC Tokyo Paris London all of these are fairly handy to have on hand especially as Terror attacks have been a norm for a long time for those of you looking to expand your repertoire and study the geography of an area a bit more thoroughly than just looking at a map I can recommend a couple of different books first of all is the CIA World Factbook yes it comes from a very Infamous agency but a lot of people love this publication so I thought I would mention it I personally don't really find it to be that useful honestly Wikipedia is a much better source for understanding a country so that should that should tell you enough right however the CIA World effect book and maps go hand in hand at least in military circles this publication is mostly displayed online for free but you can buy a physical copy which is published every year the print copy looks a lot like a phone book though and it doesn't have any Maps but many people begrudgingly myself included have spent days pouring over the Factbook sections on the nation I would soon be going to this is a bit of an old school way of doing things but with this book and a good map of the country you're going to this can set you up pretty nicely if you don't have access to the internet but again it's not my favorite resource the information is really lackluster and and very simplistic in most cases I would much rather go with the next resource which are the Lonely Planet travel guides again travel guides are more of an old school thing but they're chock full of very useful information about a particular country or area travel guides like the Lonely Planet guides usually contain a lot of maps which in conjunction with historical and cultural context that's really really valuable maps and geography in general are only one half of the puzzle you need to know what happened on that land and why culture developed the way that it did in a particular area though a lot of very powerful people are trying to rewrite history to fit a narrative in most cases today culture history and geography go hand in hand to paint a picture of an entire country right simple tourist travel guides are pretty much the best Publications we have to help bridge this Gap and supplement our knowledge of a region yes it is true that these guides along with every other travel guide no matter what brand you want to go with they're written for the tourist someone who's on vacation or traveling for leisure and not really planning for or defending against an invasion for instance so there's a lot of information that isn't necessarily directly useful from a prepared citizen perspective on the other hand the truth is that if the average tourist knows more about a country than a military organization does that organization is not likely to be very successful this is all the more important for City citizens living in countries where their own government is trying to kill them for people living in those situations simply being familiar with political or jurisdictional boundaries can be important for survival it is for these reasons that I personally like to plan for the worst case scenario and plan for the situation of having to leave whatever country I'm in on foot I want to have the maps travel guides and knowledge on hand so that if I had to I could walk to the nearest international border and know a little bit about the country I might be egressing too is this overly paranoid probably but sometimes paranoia is your subconscious mind's way of alerting you to Danger that your conscious mind hasn't noticed yet this little trick in particular I picked up from my time overseas call it an insurance policy for if I had to make my own way home on foot before we wrap things up I really briefly wanted to touch on what I know a lot of people are going to have questions about which is the debate of paper maps versus digital copies or mapping applications on your phone or GPS personally I think there is a lot of value in both but I all always want to have a lot of physical paper maps on hand if I can especially Maps which I believe would really be only used in a situation where technology is not going to be an option so paper maps will always have a place in my gear however I can't carry every map that I may need that's just not realistic with a handheld GPS I can carry maps of the entire planet for zero additional weight or packing space so it's all a balance paper Maps GPS units and even smartphone apps all have their place with each one complementing the other I like to have every single map possible on a handheld GPS but I also prefer to have at minimum a paper topographic map if on foot along with a basic roadmap and also a more Regional map as well paper maps are easy to spread out on the hood of a car and figure out where you're going you can't really do that with a phone or handheld GPS also in some parts of the world the only Maps you might have are paper ones I myself had to resort to using old Soviet maps for Mission plan and travel all over Southwest Asia simply because nobody had bothered to make a fresh map of the area since the Soviet Union collapsed sure the srtm elevation data is available globally which is why we have global maps but in some of the more remote areas on the planet the most accurate maps to navigate by are paper maps from decades ago sometimes you can digitize a paper map to create an overlay for your GPS I've covered this neat trick in our video on ATAC overlays so check that out if you want to learn how to do this creating overlays is really for smaller scale Maps like building floor plans city parks or other comparatively small areas once you start overlaying larger Maps the map datum and coordinate systems start becoming a problem because they have to match what your GPS is using this is not a problem that's easy for beginners to solve and can seriously confuse navigation efforts so I would recommend staying away from homemade overlays that are very large and cover a large area but for stuff like drone imagery or floor plans it's a pretty cool feature you can take advantage of on pretty much any handheld GPS one of the main advantages of studying maps and becoming more familiar with your area it's a pretty serious topic locals will always know their environment better than someone from a large and Powerful organization that might be hunting them some Stasi agents sitting in a field office isn't going to be studying Maps that's for sure and even if they are they certainly will not be able to know as much as they need to knowing the land is one of the very few advantages that prepared citizens have in our modern times knowing the geography of your area might not save you from the gulag but not knowing your area makes that trip a guarantee this is why stuff like ipb is so important but it's way more than just studying the local Terrain in your immediate area if you hope to have any maneuverability in our modern world or if you have to make a run for the Border or something else you need to do more than just memorize your local area but since no one can memorize thousands of miles of terrain Simply Having a general over overview of the region around you is helpful should the worst happen on the less foreboding side of things I've found that usually the time where I need to do land nav the most is when I was not planning on doing land nav sure there are a lot of times when I'm hiking through the woods or otherwise planning to use a map and Compass to get where I'm going but there have been times where I'm in a vehicle and suddenly find myself having to navigate on foot it's never Pleasant to have a mechanical breakdown and have to hump it out on foot but over the years I've found myself needing alternative foot-based transportation quite a lot a friend drops you off across town but they can't come pick you back up again for a few hours your company bus breaks down and you've got to walk to your shift on foot the airport shuttle hasn't arrived so you've got to walk from the parking area the Convoy That was supposed to come back to you didn't arrive or it's too full so you've got to go back to base on foot okay maybe that last one is a special situation but all of the rest of these are situations that are fairly common scenarios that without a clear understanding of where you're going could turn into to a much more serious problem we may not be navigating miles through rugged mountains every day but sometimes we have to walk around an unfamiliar City for a couple of miles a map that can be discreetly referenced would be nice to have on the other hand having clean professional Maps can make your job a bit easier if you work in certain career Fields I know not everybody wants to be an analyst but man is it really slick to be able to walk into your boss's office put a map board in front of them and give a two-minute briefing on a topic people are much more likely to listen to you if you are prepared and having appropriate and professional maps to illustrate what you're talking about is fairly convincing throughout my career I've got away with a lot more than I probably should have by doing just that of course that's my own personal experience and not everyone is going to benefit from something like that but I would find it quite refreshing to see more of this in the prepared Citizen Community in that case a professional common operating picture would be great for working with others if I roll up to someone's talk and and they have one in the first place that would be great uh bonus points if they actually have accurate and helpful maps to display important information but the best part it doesn't even have to be a talk I've walked into friends homes as they prepare to defend against a riot to find the dining room table has become an operations room to me this is so much more impressive and motivating than a full-blown military talk our nation was founded and defended by dudes with maps on their dinner table so the average guy who works a day job but at night turns his kitchen table into a talk that's A-Okay in my book average people using the tools they have to work through a problem maybe that's not so average after all that signals to me that this person is ready to go to work and is prepared for problems that don't require a rifle to solve as always our goal here is to look at things from the perspective of the prepared citizen living through our Strange and pretty tough times and a lot of the time the tactics used and developed by the military are sometimes not a good fit a lot of this military Doctrine might as well be a foreign language to a lot of people which is completely understandable that's why skills like this are important having maps on hand to get everyone on the same page track events in a local area and even have a general idea of what's going on outside your local area these are important things for every citizen to be familiar with these days even if the internet doesn't think it's cool yet so try it out and see what works you'll never get any better if you don't try and it always seems to be the everyday emergencies that become life-altering events when more serious things occur speaking of my own experiences I've never regretted carrying multiple maps with me but there have been several times when I wished I had one and having one less thing to worry about would really help if you have to fight in the shade

st regimes now the interesting part is that if you can quite clearly see that this article is being considered for deletion in accordance with wikipedia's deletion policy so a lot of um i would…

…video and go google the term fifth generation warfare and you might find some information or a wikipedia article that does a poor job at explaining what it is chances are you're not easily going…

…So, all right, you got to show your passport to view Wikipedia. But if we determine that you looked at the wrong thing on Wikipedia, there's your bank account locked, rig

…re currently using a an image of wikipedia from late uh late last year before all the censorship stuff kicked off and before a lot of wikipedia articles got changed so um at that point in…