Intel Update — Dec — 6 — Mostly Peaceful Terrorism Season

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for November 30th through December 6th, 2025. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived once again at that magical time of year when holiday festivities are underway and we get to talk about everyone's favorite topic, operational risk management and general personal security practices. Oh, I know many of you are struggling to contain your excitement for the inevitable risk management chart this week. But first, let's start with global strategic concerns. Most of the events that have taken place around the world this week are fairly standard. Uh the UK is continuing to be more or less an example of a dystopia. Holiday cheer and diversity barriers have gone up all over Europe. Multiple terrorists have been arrested this week in the United States. Somali continue to defraud the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars in Minnesota. And the ground component of the war in Venezuela is about to kick off. So pretty usual week at this point. Uh I think our scale has shifted for what is considered to be normal these days. But either way, that's the general overview for what's going on this week. For strategic movement this week, all eyes again are on Venezuela, mostly because the president of the United States has confirmed that the ground war is to begin soon. On my end, the indications and warnings of an impending ground operation in Venezuela are continuing to grow. Of course, there are a lot of deception tactics being used to obuscate what is actually going on. So, we're not going to know the exact date and time of when the operation is to begin, and we might not even know what the operation consists of. It may just be initial strikes. It may just be more of a special operations effort to snatch Maduro. Who knows? I know we all get tired of mentioning Venezuela because, well, we've talked about it for months now and nothing has happened. But rest assured, I think that we're going to get an answer one way or another very soon whether or not this is a giant bluff or whether or not we're actually going to go into Venezuela. And personally, I I think we're going to do it. But again, this is all speculation and we're just going to have to see how it works out. Moving to kinetic events for this week, we unfortunately have a very tragically full map. This week has been very busy when it comes to extremely violent attacks and terrorism concerns around the US. But starting off with the terrorist attacks that were halted before they were conducted. There were two this week or at least allegedly two. You can never really be certain with these sorts of things. So the first one was in Dallas. An Afghan man was arrested after he hopped on TikTok in what I suspect is a drunken rant and said he was going to blow up a building in Texas because of this that or the other. It's not really clear as to what he was arguing for or about, but either way, somebody reported him. He got rolled up for making terroristic threats online. So, pretty standard arrest there. There was also the more suspicious arrest which occurred in Delaware. This was again another possibly Afghan, possibly Pakistani national. It's it's hard to say. I haven't been able to confirm that one way or the other. Either way, a man from that general region was arrested after a traffic stop revealed that he was planning a terrorist attack at the University of Delaware Police Department. Once again, details on this incident are kind of sketchy, so there's not a whole lot that we can go on to figure out what this guy's deal was. However, the gist of the story is that man gets pulled over or approached by police in some way. He becomes quite hostile, antagonistic, uncooperative. And what does that do in every single jurisdiction in the United States? Well, you get arrested. And that's exactly what happened. They searched his car, found a bunch of weapons. Well, not a bunch of weapons, just a couple of weapons. But in anyway, they found a notebook which detailed his attack plans and had sector sketches and uh the floor plan drawn of the UD police department. So obviously the investigation continues. They search his house, find a Glock with a switch and an AR, few mags here and there. Not a lot of weapons to be honest comparatively, but a lot for a potential Afghan Pakistani national who's going to UD, right? Once again, like I wrote in the wire, there's a pretty big uh disinformation campaign on that one. So I don't know what the truth is just yet. But I just wanted to kind of briefly mention that. Either way, that's another potential attack stopped before it began. Concerning the attacks that actually went through, there were several this week. Some were just general crime, some were more uh terroristic in nature. The more terroristic attack was, of course, the Molotov attack that took place in Los Angeles at the federal building there in downtown LA, which took the form of an individual throwing molotovs at the entrances to the building. This attack did fail. the suspect was arrested at the scene and the Molotovs didn't actually go off or they weren't lit or something like that. But this does go to show that the pressure continues to mount uh and we continue to have daily terrorist attacks around the around the country when it comes to things like immigration. We have sleptwalked into accepting terrorist attacks because they're against ICE agents and because they're against federal officials and federal facilities. And these attacks will continue because there has not been a very harsh crackdown on terroristic threats like this. And it's also uh something that's very hard to prevent from happening in the first place, especially considering the tens of millions of American citizens which are now taking the side of the cartels, taking the side of the gangs, taking the side of the illegal immigrants, and are now essentially insurgents. This immigration issue has been the catalyst to prod many people into accepting a lifestyle of terrorism. We all know that ICE can't go anywhere in this country in a convoy without some random soccer mom seeing them and ramming her vehicle into the convoy. These kinds of attacks have just slowly become accepted as norm now. And now arson attacks and molotov attacks are becoming just as common. So that's a big concern moving forward. The other two attacks that I focused on this week that were more high-profile incidents were the shooting in Omaha, Nebraska and also the stabbing on board the Charlotte light rail system once again that occurred a couple of days ago. The Omaha incident involved a shootout between police and what is now very likely to be an illegal immigrant, although that's that's a little bit unconfirmed at the moment. The short version is an illegal shoots a man right in the chest while he's shopping for groceries at a local convenience store. Manh hunt ensues, suspect located by police and shootout commences. Two police officers were shot during this incident and a third was wounded by shrapnel. All of which are going to be fine from what I can tell by local media reports. But the suspect was very heavily ventilated during the incident and he uh did not survive the encounter. And finally in Charlotte, there was another stabbing on the Blue Line light rail system throughout the city. Looks like it was a pretty kinetic event. And in the context of the whole Arena Zeritzka stabbing from a while ago, this has kind of put Charlotte back in the spotlight once again because even though that initial Zeritzka murder got a lot of attention because of just how horrific it was, this latest incident has shown that things have changed in Charlotte, but they've changed for the worse uh since that initial murder. Crime has not gone down on the light rail system. As a matter of fact, it's gotten worse. And the same very horrific concerns remain as before. Charlotte has become kind of the poster child for public transit violence. There were a couple of shootings and murders on uh the bus system as well over the past couple of weeks. So, this does highlight once again that Charlotte was a pretty nice city even just a few years ago, but now it's become an utter uh dystopian uh place to be. So, so that's gotten the spotlight put back on Charlotte once again. And speaking of dystopian incidents, yesterday an event came to light in Portland, which we'll talk about in a moment, which is definitely going to have more widespread concerns for public transit safety throughout the nation. And this is yesterday's acquitt of a suspect who stabbed a man, conducted a stabbing attack a couple of months ago. He was acquitted yesterday by a jury who stated that the victim's use of a racial slur after the stabbing attack justified the stabbing attack. So, yeah, you did hear that, right? uh we'll get to it in just a moment, but once again, very kinetic week. It's very likely to be a kinetic week as we move into the holiday season. So, we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go along. Now, moving down into the regions for this week, I guess we'll start with the Southeast, although this is again a national issue. For those of you who did not know, CloudFlare went down yet again yesterday. It was down for a couple hours. This is the second Cloudflare outage to strike within just a very short period of time, taking down a good chunk of the internet while the uh issue was being worked. This time around, Cloudflare states that this outage was intentional. They had to briefly uh take things down to work a security patch, right? To to patch a security issue. I'm sure that the software engineers will come up with a very good logical explanation for why these things are happening. However, from my wheelhouse, the end customer, right? I'm not a software engineer, and maybe it's just me, but I think that it's probably a little concerning that we're now starting to have regular and routine, nearly total outages of the internet at large. Even if it's just for a short period of time, these things are fairly catastrophic problems that highlight a lot of stuff that needs to get fixed. So, the average consumer doesn't really care about the meat and potatoes of how all this stuff works. They just want their internet to work. And if Cloudflare is going to start having regular issues, even if it is something that they cause themselves, that's a problem, right? So, it also means that the average citizen is going to have to start thinking more and more about off-grid communications. And being able to have a plan, even if you don't have an off-grid communications method, like radios or something like that, even just having a plan of what to do in the event that communications go out, is probably a very good idea at this point because these things are becoming vastly more common than they used to be in the past. So, something to keep in mind for sure. Now, digging more into the North Carolina stabbing incident, there aren't a whole lot of details that have come to light yet because this just happened as I'm recording this on Saturday morning. Of course, anytime a situation is still developing, it's going to take a long time for the details of exactly what happened to come out. So, we are of course operating on a lot of speculation at this point, but this stabbing looks like a pretty serious one. So, eyewitness statements don't really help us understand what went on. We don't really know what took place on that train, but somebody was stabbed very, very violently, very brutally on the blue line, the same line that got a lot of attention from the Zerutka murders. So, all in all, we're going to have to wait and see what the details of this case shake out to be. However, personally, I think we have enough information to make a decision. I think we have enough information to conduct our own risk assessment and risk analysis to determine that it would be a good idea to keep your head on a swivel if you are forced to take public transit at this point. If you have the option of avoiding public transit in pretty much any city at this point, it would probably be a very good idea. I know a lot of people can't avoid it. A lot of people have to use uh public transit because that's their only option, right? And it may even be a little bit safer than walking uh the streets in some cases depending on the time of day in the city. But either way, keep your head on a swivel. I'm serious. Things are getting pretty spicy out there and we'll get more into that at the end. Right for now, just know these things continue to happen. Now, moving up to Washington DC, the big story, the hot ticket this week has been the arrest of the alleged J6 pipe bomber who has been identified as Brian Cole Jr. of Northern Virginia. Now, in terms of what we actually know about the suspect and about this investigation, the details are very few and far between. So, there's really not a whole lot to go off of. However, just to cut right to the chase to save some time here, this is incredibly suspicious. This is probably the most suspect case to come out of DC in at least an hour or two. So, uh, there's probably very little trust and faith in any kind of federal investigative effort at this point, especially when it comes to the timing of all of this. But personally, I think that based on the information that we have so far, which is not much, I think there's probably two different outcomes. Either Brian Cole Jr. is the guy and they've known as the guy for years and they've just not wanted to prosecute him for uh the terrorist attacks for some reason. Uh something something prevented them from going after him or the guy who they say it is is not the guy and it's somebody else. Either way, this entire thing smells like Washington and it stinks, right? If Brian Cole Jr. is indeed the J6 pipe bomber, then all right, fair enough, I guess. But that doesn't explain why suddenly everyone was prosecuted except for this guy for many, many years because it looks an awful lot like they had the evidence on this guy for a while. Of course, the other potential is that he's not the guy and this will come out in court or they're trying to burn somebody because the blaze got really close to identifying who really uh was the J6 pipe bomber and they had to give us a name. So, a name materialized and we can tie this up in a neat little bow and we can all forget about it, right? I guess it worked though. I mean, it still muddied the waters enough to where nobody really knows what exactly happened on that day other than there are fingerprints of the CIA and the FBI all over literally every part of the J6 fiasco, right? But especially the pipe bomber. So, I very strongly doubt that we're ever really going to know what the full story of that day was. So either way, have to mention it because it's a pretty groundbreaking development, but once you dig into it, it like, oh man, there's not a whole lot we can go off of. So, switching gears to move out west, we can talk about a different incident that occurred this week, which has a little bit more specific concerns for safety on things like public transit and just out in society in general. This is the acquitt of a stabbing suspect who just shanked a random guy on the street back this summer, but the jury acquitted him for a very unique reason this week. So, the suspect, Gary Edwards, stabbed the victim, Gregory Howard Jr., just on the street in Portland back in July. Once again, fairly standard stabbing attack. It's become kind of a common thing. Uh, but the defense council's argument was just absolutely mind-boggling. So, the criminal defense in this case is that Edwards, the suspect, who is a homeless man who is known for stabbing people randomly on the street. He has a long criminal history of doing this many times before. He pulled a knife out of his pocket and approached the victim and he wanted to trade that knife for cigarettes. Now, neither of these guys know each other and that's the criminal defense. Okay, that is ex that's how the defense attorney [snorts] says things went down. From there, a scuffle occurred in some way, and the story gets a little blurry until the cops show up, in which case the victim shouted a racial slur at the attacker after he had been stabbed. And the jury in this case a couple of days ago said that that was justification for the stabbing. So, the defense council story is that this the victim shouted a racial slur at the attacker that caused the man with the knife who already had the knife in his hand to stab the victim. And that according to the jury was a perfectly acceptable reason for self-defense. Now, once again, the stories diverge, right? The defense council, so Edward's attorney, argues that the slur is what caused the stabbing incident, which first of all is ridiculous in and of itself because shouting a racial slur at someone is not permission to murder them. But either way, leave that for now. But the evidence in the case, like the actual documented history of what actually occurred, only proves that the victim shouted the slur after being stabbed. So right now, not a single shred of evidence actually confirms that the victim started anything. So the truth of what actually happened is this crazy homeless guy ran up to a guy with a knife, stabbed him, and the victim shouted a racial slur back at the guy. And that's the truth of what happened. That is what all of the evidence confirms. But because it's Portland, right, the jury said that that was a perfectly uh acceptable self-defense scenario. So, for all of you who don't live in the crazy insane wonderland that is Portland, what does this mean? Well, the bottom line for all of us now is that the jury in this case states that if you're a white guy who gets stabbed by a black guy in the street and then you yell a nasty word at the guy after you've been stabbed, that is retroactive justification for that stabbing attack. So, yeah. uh pretty dystopian, but something you need to be aware of because these kinds of things are happening all over the place. Even in the worst case scenario, let's just say that in this case, the white guy did shout a word at this guy before the attack, right? And that's word is what prompted the attack. In no way, shape, or form does shouting a word at somebody justify stabbing them to death on the street, right? This is insane, right? So, even if this guy did do it, which no evidence points to him actually shouting a bad word at the guy, there's no justification for this. But a jury went above and beyond to say that there is, right? So, no evidence in this case shows the white guy doing anything wrong. He just minded his own business on the street, gets approached by a homeless guy with a knife in their hand, and the situation devolves from there. So, that's probably the best uh lesson learned that we can kind of glean from this story is that, yeah, tensions are pretty high. Yeah, people are pretty crazy out there and stabbing attacks continue, but you also have a pretty good chance now of the attacker not just being led out of jail before their trial by a judge. I mean, that's a that's a common thing that happens, you know, all around the US, but there's also a pretty good chance that a jury will do something like this and justify someone trying to kill you because you said a word, right? We can see how we're we're moving towards that and now a court has backed that up. So now that's all I have for the United States. Let's shift gears and talk about the United Kingdom for a moment. And I will expand a little bit more on some of the events that have come to light in the grand old UK this week. So first up this week, we have a man who was arrested for the possession of quote unquote extreme music, which allegedly violated terrorism laws in some way. So that was kind of a more of a dystopian sort of situation that occurred this week. separately. Another man was arrested this week for posting photos of of himself going to the United States to engage in the timehonored tradition of shooting stuff in somebody's backyard. Well, he posted these photos of his trip to the gun range of him firing, you know, shotguns and rifles and such. He posted those images on social media in the UK and got a visit, got a knock at the door, which turned into an arrest, as that always does. And finally, probably the more disturbing case this week is a woman who was arrested for using a slur in a private text exchange with a friend, former friend, who ratted her out to police because she called the man who attacked her a bad word. Right. So, regarding the extreme music arrest, the suspect in this case, the hardened terrorist criminal, the man who was arrested was identified as Norbert Gears, who was a collector and reseller of vinyl records. And he was arrested after at least one record from his several thousand record collection contained music that the UK classifies as illegal. So, this guy had a few thousand LP records in his collection. He's just kind of a buyer and seller of records, both for hobby purposes, but also probably more along the lines of kind of like a side hustle sort of thing. But either way, in the process of buying and selling a bunch of records, right? Turns out he had not one but two naughty records, right? They're songs. They're vinyl records of songs that were made by a professional recording studio. And when he listed these particular records online, somebody ratted him out. Somebody he probably listed it on eBay or if there was maybe a local version of uh British eBay. Somebody ratted him out and of course having no no records, having no no speech in the UK is uh very much policed. So they ransacked his house, raided his collection and found the two offending LP vinyl albums. And for this, for owning two music records, he got 40 months in prison. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison for owning music. Honestly, at this point, I'm very curious as to what records he had because I kind of want to buy them now. So, if anybody knows what music albums he had, I'm very curious as to what in the Sam Hill music is so bad. Like even lyrics-wise, like I mean there's some pretty bad music out there, but nothing you should go to prison for 40 months over. Good grief. Either way, that's a pretty dystopian case to come to light. But in the UK these days, it's completely unsurprising. This case, the forbidden music case, came to light after another, probably more disturbing case, to be honest, in which a woman who has been identified as Elizabeth Kenny was arrested and criminally charged for calling a man who had beat her a [ __ ] in a text exchange with a friend. That now former friend reported her use of the word to police and she was arrested. She used the word to describe the man who had assaulted her so severely that she required hospitalization. And what's more interesting is that the judge in her case, JP Robert [ __ ] specifically stated that he personally uplifted her sentence. He personally is throwing the book at her for personal reasons due to her alleged homophobia, which is a severely punished crime in the UK. Like that's worse than murder in many cases to be honest. But nevertheless, the man who attacked her, she was talking to her, you know, what she thought was a friend about a man who had beat her so severely she was in the hospital. But that man who was being described in the text exchange, nothing has happened to him. He has not been charged or arrested uh in any way for nearly killing the woman. So, if we read past the headlines in this case and we dig a little bit deeper, we can see that this is probably a textbook case of people using the criminal justice system to target others for personal reasons. Remember, Kenny was texting a person who she thought was a friend and discussing the brutal attack that the as yet unnamed man had conducted right at that time. She did not know that her friend actually took the side of the attacker. Uh so when Kenny sent photos of her wounds that she had uh sustained from this guy beating her, right? Her use of the word [ __ ] in that text exchange was her former friend's jackpot, right? That was that was the clincher. and the use of that word served as an easy way to get her arrested. So, the British authorities of course dutifully did their part as speech crimes are by far the most heavily police crimes in the UK right now. So, so that's kind of the situation we're at. Both the UK and the US have this uh problem here. In the UK, you say the wrong word to the wrong person, that's justification to throw you in jail forever. Whereas in the United States, if you say the wrong word to the wrong person, that's permission for that person to kill you. Very interesting times in which we live. But either way, continuing the trend, another case of speech crime policing has come to light. Uh, which occurred some time ago, actually, but it came to light this week because criminal charges were filed, which revolved around a man being arrested and criminally charged for posting a photo of himself holding some firearms during a trip to the United States. The man in this case has been identified as John Rishilu Booth and he was arrested by Yorkshire authorities after posting some photos from his trip to America. And we all know how this goes, right? Now, these types of events, the one where the guy posted some photos of himself uh shooting guns in America, these types of events are quite useful for understanding how the British and even American authorities operate. And digging into this case is kind of fascinating. So, Booth was initially visited at his home by police who hit him with the classically British, and I mean classically British warning, right, to be careful what you post online, right? The Br, for those who don't know, the British police love to do this. You You do something that they don't like, but isn't illegal. They will show up at your door and issue you a warning. Warning, citizen. And really, what they're trying to do is both intimidate, but also fish. They're trying to fish for something. They're trying to get you to talk. They're trying to get you to incriminate yourself. And here in the United States, this happens all the time, too. Yes. Even in the land of freedom, uh we have the same exact tactic being used. something that's not illegal that's being done, but we're just going to come to your door and warn you about posts that you've made online. Right? This is a very common thing that happens. And in nearly 100% of cases in the UK, at least whenever someone gets this visit, this knock at the door by the the British police at their door, they're just going to show up a few hours or a few days later and arrest you anyway. So that's just the way things work out. And in this case, he was arrested for posting a photo of himself holding a gun in an entirely different country. So, he wasn't even holding a gun in the UK. He posted vacation pictures that were taken in an completely different country. But, of course, that doesn't matter to British police. They're just following orders, right? Somebody wanted this guy arrested and the police obliged. In the UK at least, it is a very, very bad idea to post a photo of yourself on the internet holding a gun because in the UK at least, the mere sight of a firearm, right, the mere photographing of a firearm, that is enough uh in many cases to catch that criminal uh intent to cause fear of violence charge, right? That's a very broad charge. The police love to to wave it around in the UK. A lot of laws in the UK are kind of like this right now. There's a whole class of laws where essentially they're if you make someone uncomfortable, if you make someone fearful, you know, like these very subjective things that there's no way you could prove it in court, well, guess what? It doesn't matter. Going to jail forever anyway. So, this is a very common thing in the UK now. There are a whole class of laws that uh essentially make it illegal to cause anyone any kind of offense or any kind of fear. Depending on the context, you could be arrested for basically anything in the UK at this point. I mean, you hit the brakes too hard. You put a letter in the mailbox aggressively. You say, "Excuse me," in the wrong tone of voice to someone in a grocery store, and you could get thrown in the slammer for life. So, treading lightly has become kind of a skill in the UK. Uh, it's just the way things work out. But these things are, of course, worth being aware of here in the United States. Not only because, well, we have a a bit of kinship with those in the UK, but we also tend to get a lot of the things that trickle down from the UK to us here uh sometime. So yeah, all around all of these issues are are just a culmination of uh things that are not super great. However, it's also something that I would not personally dwell on or focus on so much that you just kind of let it consume you, right? That's that's not something that's very productive. We want to acknowledge the things that are happening that are concerning, but we also want to take steps to move through some of this stuff. And today, like I mentioned in the beginning, I wanted to focus a little bit more on managing risk. Right? I know, I know. everyone's favorite topic uh when we talk about risk. But a lot of people these days are asking what can I do? What can I do to stop this madness or at least try to reduce it somewhat? And to be honest, I don't know. I don't know how to fix the world. But I do know some things that might help. And the these are easy things that you can do on your own. Things like risk management, right? That's a very easy thing to do. So when we say, you know, somebody's got to do something, well, this is what you can do, right? It's not very productive to sit there and doom and gloom about the situation you may be in and the situation that western civilization may be spiraling towards right without trying to do something and this is something that you can do right you want a solution here it is or at least one of them so when it comes to managing risk during the holiday season I think this is a very important thing to consider as we move forward through these very risky times right terrorist attacks in terms of like the classic you know jihadi style terrorist attacks are spiking or at least it seems like they are statistics-wise I don't actually No, because a lot of these are not classified as terrorist attacks because they want to skew the demographics of who's actually conducting violence. But at least here in the United States, we've had several high-profile terrorist attacks either being conducted, becoming routine, like with the ISIS stuff, the counter ICE stuff, you know, vehicle ramings, molotovs, those have become routine. But we also have things like general crime. Like I've said before, public transit in the United States is very much a death sentence in certain cities and at certain times of day, right? The chance of you being involved in a stabbing or a shooting in some parts of this country are astronomically high during certain situations. And because of that, we have to conduct risk assessment and risk mitigation from a very wavetop level. We have to both balance the way the world is today. We have to see the world for for what it is. We have to see the risks for what they are, but we also have to balance that with living our lives. On the one hand, we cannot ignore the extreme risks to our personal safety and the personal safety of those around us. But we also can't, you know, live like Rambo every minute of the day, right? Even if we may want to. On the one hand, risk aversion is not the answer, right? A lot of the classic prepper arguments are that, well, you should never do anything at all because you might have a bad thing happen at some point, right? Well, that's that's not a realistic view of the world. But on the other hand, we have to acknowledge that there are pretty severe risks sometimes and it's a very delicate balance, right? You have to assess the risk. You have to manage the risk as best you can, but you also have to not let things get too paranoid and too paralyzing so that you don't do anything at all. A good example is public transit, right? A lot of people are forced to take it. They don't have any other feasible option, right? Or it may be the least of two bad options. If you have to take a train or a subway into work and the other option is to walk, you know, a dozen blocks or so past all kinds of very very bad things on the street, you might be better off on the subway system. But that doesn't mean that you can't be a little bit more attentive. You can't be a little bit more prepared, right? You can't be a little bit more ready and aware just in case something does happen. And that's kind of hard to do sometimes because being responsible and assessing the risk and mitigating the risk as best you can is often very inconvenient. Like I've said a few times before, do you think that I personally enjoy carrying, you know, a tourniquet in my pocket everywhere I go? No, it's not convenient, right? Do I enjoy carrying around a lot of medical gear every day? No, I don't. But I do it because the alternative is to not have anything at all. That's not being paranoid. That's mitigating risk. But of course, everyone's going to have to conduct that analysis on their own. And one of the ways that you can sort of start thinking about this mentality is just look at what you did yesterday. Did you go to work yesterday and have the ability to render aid to someone or yourself who has been slashed in the face by an attacker? Did you have the ability to mitigate that situation? Where is the nearest tourniquet to you when you're sitting on the subway going to work in the morning? There is a lot of focus in the prepping and prepared citizenry and the serious citizenry world on things like firearms to stop threats before they get worse or stop threats before they begin hopefully. And that's all well and good. We do need that. We need all this gun content, right? We need this self-defense, concealed carry kind of stuff. We do need all of this stuff, but what we also need for a lot of people who that's simply not an option for, what we also need is a focus on risk mitigation in other ways, such as medical stuff. There needs to be an increased focus on a lot of this stuff. As important as these tools are, they are not the end all beall solution to everything. If we look around at the headlines for the week and if we look around at a lot of the incidents that have occurred, yes, firearms would have made a difference in many of these attacks. But we also have to remember that in many cases firearms would not have helped very much. Not to armchair quarterback or anything like that, but just to kind of solidify this idea looking back at the Arena Zerutska attack, having a firearm on her would not have helped that poor girl a whole lot. It just would not have. It would The attack was too quick. It was from behind. there's she would not have had time to draw. It would not have helped. You know, it's hard to say based on one case study, right? But it's also quite likely that medical supplies would not have helped her either. But in other cases, having the tools on hand to do what you can would have been helpful. And when it comes to the larger example of, you know, risk management, we see this in Europe as well, right? All over social media this year. People in Germany have been taking photos and videos of the diversity barriers, right? the big concrete ballards that they try to make a little bit more festive by putting bows and decorations on and such that are meant to protect a lot of these Christmas markets from vehicle ramming attacks. Well, what does that tell us from a riskmanagement perspective? You know, if if you're going to a Christmas market and there are D-Day level anti-tank fortifications surrounding the market, you've got armed police everywhere. There's metal detectors, there's all kinds of security in place, then doesn't that show you that at least somebody in government thinks that this this place might be attacked? And if that's the case, don't you think that maybe there is something that you can do to help assess risk in that situation? For instance, you can look at a lot of these fortifications and see, well, they're not going to be adequate. Such as this photo that I found circulating the internet uh with regards to the security practices at a few Christmas markets around uh around Europe. I think this one was uh in Germany. Now, anyone, but especially a terrorist can look at the these barriers and see these are not going to stop a vehicle by any means. So, what have the authorities done in this particular case? Well, what have they done? They have identified a vulnerability. So, they've pointed out, hey terrorists, look at this one particular area. We're concerned that you might drive a vehicle here and that this might be a a pretty good target for you, but also we're not going to take the efforts to mitigate the risk. So, we're going to identify which places would be good for a terrorist to attack, but we're also not going to take efforts to mitigate that because we have very inadequate barriers up. In this specific example, having a piss poor barrier in place is worse than having nothing at all. Because if you had nothing at all, a terrorist might not identify this place as being a target. But now that you've put the barrier up, you've pointed out that you're scared of an attack, but also that barrier doesn't do anything. These are the kind of things that we have to think of when it comes to managing risk during the holidays. Yes, it is very very good that in places like Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the more traditional places where Christmas markets tend to be a a big thing. I mean, it's a [snorts] huge thing in Germany, right? So that's why I'm using Germany as the example because they're kind of the forefront of the the Christmas market, the town square that gets transformed into kind of like a winter wonderland for for every season, right? These things are amazing uh to go to and see, but they're also huge security risks and they're a good example for average citizens to be able to look at a situation and assess the risk on their own. And tying all this back to what I said in the beginning of we don't want to just live our lives being ultra paranoid for no reason, right? I'll give you the example, right? If I were to look at a Christmas market and I see a lot of vehicle barriers up, if I see a lot of police standing around, if I see a pretty big security presence, there's a double-edged sword there, isn't there? Because on the one hand, you see, all right, these are good risk mitigation efforts, right? I feel a little bit more safe when there's a concrete barrier beside me that I can hide behind and just in case something goes wrong when you're trying to pick out presents and stuff like that, right? But on the other hand, it does point out that there have been very little mitigation efforts in other ways throughout Germany that would prevent the attackers from being there in the first place. For instance, you can put up concrete barriers all day long and that'll uh that'll do something. That's pretty good. That's a pretty good mitigation effort, but an even better mitigation effort would be to deport the criminals and the terrorists before they even conduct the attack in the first place. Germany has not done that. Germany has not increased their counterterrorism investigations and their efforts. So all they are doing, they're putting all their eggs in one basket and putting a lot of concrete around a soft target. And that's their primary means. No, concrete barriers should not be your primary means of counterterrorism. Concrete barriers and vehicle ballers should be your last line of defense so that after a terrorist slips through all of your other mitigating u measures, they're stopped before they can have any kind of good effectiveness. Right? So that's the higher level thinking that we have to kind of adopt even when we're doing something as innocent and wholesome as you know trying to pick out stocking stuffers for people. And once again, I know I keep saying it, but we want to make sure that we're not being too paranoid sometimes. I have to keep telling myself this all the time because look at my wheelhouse. Look at my line of work. I sit here pretty much every day and look at the horrors of the world going around. And I'm not saying that's something that everyone should be doing. I am most certainly biased to looking to threats. I'm most certainly biased personally towards identifying counterterrorism concerns. Every time I go into a large venue where there's large crowds, I look and I see the risk. I'm not saying that everybody should adopt this position entirely because it tends to be a little bit heavy sometimes. I'm just saying it might be a good idea to have a more casual approach. If you're in a town square, in a big mall, in a big crowded venue or something like that, and you see that security is quite poor, maybe factor that into your own risk assessment. I want to most certainly continually pump the brakes on a lot of the fear that goes out there. There's a lot of money to be made in telling people to be afraid of terrorist attacks. There really is. Just scroll social media, scroll YouTube, and you will see every prepper on YouTube gets on there and says, "Ah, the end is nigh. We're all going to die tomorrow from some mass terrorist attack." That's obviously not true, right? There there's a lot of nuance here and that nuance doesn't really sell, right? Telling people, "No, there's probably not going to be a gigantic 9/11 style attack occurring in the United States anytime soon." Telling people that doesn't get clicks. It doesn't get monetization. It doesn't sell. So, people don't do it. telling people that there are 10,000 al-Qaeda operatives in the United States right now. Well, you know, that gets a lot of clicks, that gets a lot of monetization, even though, you know, these sorts of things are basically impossible to predict, right? So, all in all, be careful. Conduct risk assessment, conduct risk analysis, conduct risk mitigation as best you can. You don't have to live in fear at all, to be honest. You really don't. But that doesn't give you license to be stupid. And what you don't want to have happen is to be in a situation and something happen and you be powerless and you be helpless. Trust me, I have been in those situations before where I was not as prepared as I could have been. And I think back on those situations all the time. So, you don't want to have that retroactive guilt and say, "Look, you know, I I knew I was going into a risky situation. I knew that I was going into a packed venue. I didn't carry any medical supplies. I didn't conduct any kind of analysis to figure out where the exits are. My phone battery was dead, so I couldn't even call the police when an attack happened. You don't want this to be you, right? You want to be smart. You want to be prepared. You want to do what you can without going overboard, right? Don't go overboard with all this stuff, but you want to do the best you can. And I think that's probably a good perspective to have as we move forward into the holiday season. So, that's all I have for today, everyone. We'll call it a day. Rant done. Uh, here are the sources and research. As usual, I've been updating my online maps, my RGIs maps as we go along. I've been pushing fresh KMZs out to my GitHub page for those of you who want just the KMZ part to load into your personal ATAC instance, stuff like that. All this complicated stuff. I know I haven't gone into much detail on it yet. Um, but that's coming. I've just gotten uh quite behind. Been working on a lot of stuff that has just taken so much time to do. So, if any of you have messaged me or uh sent me something and I haven't responded for a while, feel free to ping me again. I get tens of thousands of emails and messages a week and I'm sorry I I just can't reply to all of them. But but I I do try. I really do. It's just man, it's just a lot sometimes. So, please forgive me if I haven't replied to you in a while. Uh it's just taken me a long time to get kind of caught up. Either way, that's what I have for this week. Thank you guys all for all of your support. Thank you for sticking with me uh today. Be safe out there. Do the best you can. Keep moving forward. Keep your chin up. All this bad stuff in the world just means you've got an extra chance to do good stuff. So look at it like that and I think we'll be all right. So thanks again and I will see you next time.