Intel Update - Oct. 3 - False Flag Season

Hello again everyone and welcome back to The Underground. This is the intel update for September 27th through October 3rd 2026. This week has witnessed a major intensification of the information war with a whole lot of sketchy situations taking place and a whole lot of lies being told. So let's get right to it. Within Europe this week, the riots in France have continued to escalate with most of the unrest transitioning out of the realm of school protests and into the realm of civil unrest carried out by mostly migrant populations around the country. In the United Kingdom, the details surrounding the RAF Fairford Air Base incident continue to be extremely sketchy and very contradictory as the United States doubles down on the incident being a genuine terror attack despite the raw and unfiltered evidence indicating otherwise. In the Middle East, the attempted hijacking of the Flydubai aircraft has generated more questions than answers, and many details of the incident as described do not really align with the raw evidence that we have, which we will get to later. Within the homeland this week, the fuel crisis has continued to deteriorate with several more states enacting emergency procedures to bring the price of diesel and gasoline down, all while the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is reaching emergency levels. So let's start right there and discuss the current status of the SPR. As of September 25th, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is currently sitting at two hundred and eighty-three point eight million barrels. Earlier this week, the Department of Energy offered a contract to sell off forty million barrels of oil on loan. To be clear, this forty million barrel exchange contract was already authorized months ago, and they tried to offload this crude back in June, if I remember correctly, and nobody wanted to take it then because prices were so high, so they are trying it again now. As a reminder, most SPR releases are actually loans. The federal government loans oil to oil companies from the SPR, which refine it and sell it on the open market, with the implication that they will have to refill the SPR within a certain time frame. So whatever they take out, they have to put back in plus some extra. As it stands, this forty million barrel contract is still unfulfilled to the best of my knowledge. I don't think there have been any takers just yet, and I highly doubt that all forty million barrels will be sold. The distinction is that technically speaking, the White House has made the decision to dip below the statutory limit of two hundred and fifty-two point four million barrels. That magic number, that two hundred and fifty-two million barrels, is the magic, uh, floor so to speak, of how much we can drain the SPR legally without an emergency declaration being put in place. Because from the engineering side of the house, that two hundred and fifty-two million barrel limit is the limit at which the caverns themselves start to break down in theory. Some caverns can only be withdrawn, or they're only rated or certified to be withdrawn a few times, some to certain levels. It's hard to say really what the actual no kidding limit is because once again this is kind of a national security thing. It's not exactly public record, but two fifty-two is the magic number that most people would agree is the break glass in case of war kind of level. And as it stands, the White House has authorized the sale of about fourteen percent of what little remains in the SPR right now. So this contract, this little bit of paperwork that the Department of Energy has filed, is a de facto acknowledgment that we are operating in a state of wartime emergency. If they sell all forty million barrels, which I don't think they're gonna do, but if they do it, we will be well below an official wartime emergency limit, and we will be risking these caverns collapsing, at least some of them collapsing. Now will that happen? Well, nobody really knows, but the White House has already authorized dipping below the limit set by Congress, a limit which was specifically set to prevent the salt caverns from dipping low enough to cause damage. So that is where we're at right now, and this is why many states around the country are scrambling to do what they can at the state level to ease high fuel costs. As of this morning, the national diesel average is six thirty-five a gallon and prices have remained pretty volatile for a couple of weeks now. The Joliet refinery coming back online has started to bring down those diesel prices for the Midwest, which is a good thing to see, but generally speaking, fuel prices are still pretty high. As of this morning, it seems like diesel has stabilized a bit below the six forty-eight a gallon that we saw, uh, last week, but prices are still very high at the moment. The good news in the short term is that the G7 nations agreeing, basically at gunpoint, to release their own diesel stockpiles will probably grant a short-term drop in prices here in the US, but that will of course lead to problems later on since the world is dipping into emergency wartime reserves. How this is going to work out, I guess we'll see, but I would bet that a lot of people, myself included, will be topping off diesel tanks when or if any significant drop occurs due to European and American reserves being released. At this stage, we might not see significant drops in prices. I don't even really know at this point because the situation is so desperate, because releasing a hundred million barrels of diesel into Europe might not actually do too much. You might not even notice, um, but I guess we'll see. We'll just have to, uh, play it by ear I guess. And speaking of Europe, let's catch up on the latest chapter in the saga of the RAF Fairford Air Base situation. So far, the official story has changed so much that I don't even know what the latest official stance is. Uh, from what I understand, the official story is that the US is claiming that this was a deliberate terror attack while the UK has not called it that just yet. The UK released all of the assailants and they did not find any traces of explosives at the scene. What they did find were barrels of fuel inside the three vans parked on a residential street near the air base a few days ago. As of this morning, the UK has arrested a sixth member of the gang claiming to have found the Iranian connection. So they got their guy, right? Well, not really because they also released him as well. So he's out on bail just like the other five. So there we go. Just to cut right to the chase, what do I think really happened here? Well, based on the details that have been made public, I think that these were five guys who were stealing red diesel or gasoline from somewhere in the general area, maybe the farm that they were parked at, I don't know. But my guess is they pull over to split the fuel between themselves because they were all kind of backed up towards each other, you know. The, the vans were kind of all there ready to, to exchange fuel between themselves and they got caught by a local citizen coming home late at night. From there, I think the US said, "Aha, let's blame Iran for this for obvious reasons." The problem is that the US forgot to tell the British and they released all the details that line up to support a fuel theft ring. A few days later, Trump probably called Burnham and now the UK is on message and supporting the Iran link because the Brits desperately need our diesel fuel That's what I think happened. I already covered all of the technical reasons as to why this makes no sense for this to be a terror attack, which I wrote up on September 28th. Two separate reports for that day, so if you want the deep dive on the reasons for why I think this, I, I think this is not a genuine attack, go check out those reports. I think this was a ring of stupid thieves that got caught, and now the US and the UK, going along with it, are trying to retroactively make this into a false flag. And as a result, that has not gone over super well, because it's just too much of a stretch for the public to believe. Nobody really believes the official story here. So the other side of the coin is that this does not automatically mean that there is no threat. So another theory which bears some consideration is maybe two separate things happened at the same time. It's possible that the threat of an attack on this air base was genuine. It's possible, even quite likely I would say, that security had been heightened at this air base because Iran directly threatened this air base a couple of weeks ago. And against that backdrop, when these guys showed up and the local police got all spun up, everyone thought this was the big one that they had been expecting, when in reality it was something actually completely unrelated. It was a group of criminals just causing them to jump the gun. That's a pretty decently likely theory as well. I don't really know. There's not a whole lot of information, so we just have to guess. But those are two educated guesses that are supported by the evidence that we have. Clearly, every single official is blatantly lying about what is going on, so that's what I think. And until more information becomes available, I myself am not going to treat this as a genuine terror attack. It would be a good idea to remain vigilant just in case, you know, more incidents like this take place. But overall, there's too much manipulation with this case to know what the full truth really is. Around the region itself, the war on Ukraine continues to escalate as both sides continue attacks on each other. Ukraine has been hitting Russian refineries for weeks, and Russia has responded with substantial missile strikes throughout Ukraine, but mostly in Kyiv. Neither side is particularly keen on, uh, ceasing the fighting at the moment, and as the oil crisis has gotten worse, so has the fighting. This week, Ukraine conducted their very first homegrown ballistic missile launch, launching their homemade FP-7 ballistic missile for the first time operationally yesterday. Russia has not yet responded to this missile launch, but missile strikes on Kyiv have intensified to the point that even the mayor of Kyiv has stated that the Russians are tearing the city apart. As a result, these attacks are very likely to continue for some time, and peace is very much off the table for now. Switching gears to talk about the Middle East, there have been a lot of developments taking place this week. However, there are a few things to be aware of which affect our understanding of what is happening on the ground, or more specifically, on the high seas. There has been quite a bit of shenanigans on the information front this week, and I don't really know what to make of it, so let's dive in. Within the Strait of Hormuz, the UKMTO reported a total of three time late reports of three different vessels being struck sometime in the Strait over the past few days. No further details have been provided on the timing of these attacks, but the reports were all published at around the same time on Wednesday. These latest reports are more evidence of something that has been building for a few weeks now, which bears more consideration. As a reminder, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization, or UKMTO, Operations Center is a joint venture between the British government and the US Navy, and this agency, this organization, is the main official source for reporting incidents involving merchant shipping in the Middle East. The way that they get their information is either directly from the ships themselves, they have satellite phone numbers, or from US NAVCENT alerting them to an issue involving mariners. Over the past few weeks, there has been a little bit of concern or suspicion that this organization might be under-reporting incidents in the Strait. Specifically, the UKMTO has been issuing disclosures of strikes on merchant ships several days after the fact, instead of immediately after the incident takes place like they used to do. Sometimes they'll report an incident immediately, but other times, like right when it's a, uh, politically challenging time, there will be no reports, and then a few days later, we'll get a bunch of these time late reports. In this case, pushing out three separate reports of three major strikes on merchant shipping lines up with the strikes that were reported earlier this week, as the United States was observed attempting to increase the size of convoy operations. The US has been trying to increase the size of these convoys to try to get more ships through, but the Iranians are not stupid, and they have seen this, and as a result, many missile launches have been observed by locals in Iran. Now, once locals observe the missiles being launched, they don't really know where they go or if they actually hit anything. But since the UKMTO did not report any impacts on merchant vessels, many assumed that the missiles were either intercepted or otherwise missed their target. In truth, Iran did respond at that time and struck several tanker ships. But due to the UKMTO or NAVCENT withholding these reports, other vessels did not know that a major series of strikes on shipping had occurred. As such, ship captains who were trying to make the crossing overnight, other vessels who were not involved in the American operations, they did not know that they were sailing into a hot zone where several ships had just been struck. All in all, this is just evidence suggesting that at some point along the chain, somebody is withholding critical information from the maritime community. Considering the hindsight of the past few months and this trick being used numerous times at this point to coax merchants into assuming more risk, it's likely that this is happening once again. This will matter a lot when it comes to not just the safety of the crew, but also the risk to insurance companies. If the White House is pressuring the UKMTO to delay their reporting on strikes, insurance companies are going to err on the side of caution and just not trust the official reporting agencies in terms of the risk, and shipping rates will probably get more expensive than they already are. The US has tried to get around this insurance problem by relying on a complicated arrangement of policies and the Omani shuttle operation, which places the risk on a handful of ships that are running back and forth through the Strait. But if these time late reports are gonna become more common, or if they're going to be strategically delayed, if they're trying to soften that blow, this is going to muddy the water and complicate the truth of what's actually going on in the region. And along with this lack of timely information, more strikes have taken place. As of right now, a total of eight merchant ships have been struck in the Strait of Hormuz over the past few days. So again, we really have to ask ourselves with the sourcing and the phrasing of what we're seeing, is it being reflected by the reality of the situation on the ground? And I'm starting to think that there might be some shenanigans afoot, either intentionally or unintentionally. This is obviously the case. Shenanigans are always afoot. It's the Middle East. But if a missile hits a ship in the Strait of Hormuz and the UKMTO doesn't report on it, did that missile really hit that ship? That is the level of deception that we're kinda working with here, either intentionally or unintentionally, and it really makes it hard to figure out how much more likely we are to escalate this war. Continuing that similar vein, also this week, suspicions have been growing regarding some of the data that we have been getting out of the Middle East over the past few weeks, which again, does not exactly jive with the reality of the situation on the ground. Over the past two weeks, the Belgian analytics firm Kepler, and also tanker trackers, have claimed that more and more oil has been exiting the Strait of Hormuz and the region at large. By now, they are claiming that upwards of 16.5 million barrels of oil are exiting the region every single day. This is getting pretty close to the pre-war levels of 20 million barrels, and of course, the specially handpicked and authorized media groups have reported on this quite positively. So great victory, right? Well, not so fast. Uh, if we step back just a minute and take a look at the overall situation, this does not really pass the sniff test. If oil is supposedly approaching pre-war levels, then why is every single country in the world tapping into their emergency stockpiles? And more importantly, why are they planning to tap into those stockpiles many months from now? Why is China banning diesel exports? Forget the actual sale price right now, why are oil futures continuing to increase when they should be reacting positively to this news and oil futures should be coming down? Why is the diesel crack spread skyrocketing? Why are the bond markets acting like the sky is falling? And why is pretty much every single indicator, except for Kepler, behaving as though very little oil is exiting the region? Even taking into account the fact that it takes a long time for oil to actually reach refineries around the world, it makes no sense for the US to order Europe to tap into their emergency reserves over a period of six months from now if we got so much oil out of the region last month. Kepler is stating that the US is back to pre-war levels of oil flow, yet the real world is behaving as if that is not the case. So when we run up against an analytical inconsistency, what do we do? Well, we take a look at our prior assumptions. We adjust our priors, right? And in this case, that figure of 16.5 million barrels per day is coming solely from Kepler. If you take a look at nearly every chart or fancy graphic on social media talking about traffic through the strait, there's quite a lot of that out there now. If you look at the fine print on these graphics, you'll see that Kepler is the source. So how does Kepler get their data? Well, most of their data comes from AIS tracking. Before the war, they were a huge AIS tracking company, multi-billion dollar corporation, and they tracked ships around the world and offered a lot of, uh, services to corporate clients for many, many millions of dollars. But due to the current war, Kepler has actually had to change the way that they conduct their analysis. They admit this on their own website. If you wanna go check out how they do things, you can go look at this, uh, webpage that they have discussing their methodology. But they admit themselves that they've had to change the way that they operate because the AIS is no longer a- an option for tracking most ships. This is why, you know Kepler, again, a very, very large company, is certainly one of the better sources out there. They've got hundreds of analysts, and I'm sure most of them are pretty good. I have actually used a lot of their work as sourcing for a lot of my own reports over the past few months. But based on what they've put out in the past couple of weeks, I now have a lot of questions. And in the world of intelligence, we simply cannot place that much weight on single source or single firm reporting. Even though Kepler is again, a multi-billion dollar company, they are not infallible. And in my personal opinion, it's worth taking a closer look at the raw data, which we can't really do. Kepler is providing a lot of the imagery to help support their argument, but they're not providing every single image they analyze, which is fine, but the synthetic aperture radar imagery that we would need to get for this region costs tens of thousands of dollars per day to cover the entire Gulf region that would be helpful for confirming Kepler's data. So please forgive me for not selling a kidney to go through the effort to independently confirm that they aren't cherry-picking the data. I know that even slightly questioning Kepler results in a lot of screeching because nearly everyone is taking their word as gospel right now, even though basically every report comes back to Kepler. This is what we in the business call circular reporting. This is some week one, day one intel school kinda stuff. When you have a dozen different reports saying the same thing, but they all are relying on the same source or the same bit of information. You don't have a dozen reports, you have one report 12 times. Since a lot of people are relying on that circular reporting, this alone is a big clue that we might not be in the right mindset. I'm not saying they're flat out lying. I don't think they are. I really don't think they are. But I also think that there is enough gray area in the data to swing the analysis in many different ways. Getting way down into the weeds really does expose how the data can be flawed. It's like this really minute inside baseball view of how intel work is done, and it really is down to the individual analyst sitting at a computer, looking at a blurry shadow, and sometimes they're wrong. That's how intelligence work is conducted. Some guy in a dark skiff somewhere hunched over a computer, debating the guy in the next cubicle over a shadow. One guy sees something, another analyst doesn't see anything at all. One guy thinks X tanker is this name, and another guy thinks it's something else. In this kind of environment where there are so few tangible things to grab onto for an analysis, you might be incentivized to make a decision one way or the other without even knowing it. That's how bias affects analysis. If you add up a bunch of these little skewed assessments often enough, sooner or later, this aggregates up to the final assessment being warped to whatever you want it to be. Everyone is biased, and when you combine that with a really hard analytical job, and when you're placing so much weight on tracking so little information amidst a sea of propaganda, this is challenging, and it's a consideration to think about. So taking a step back for a moment and looking at things from a 30,000 foot level, what can we observe considering all other factors this week? What do we have? We have the UKMTO giving us time late reports, leading to suspicions that NAVCENT might be pressuring them to delay their reporting to make it look like their convoys aren't getting hit all on the same night. So that's thing one. We have Kepler giving us data that indicates we are approaching pre-war levels of oil through Hormuz, despite multiple ships getting hit on every single convoy that's transited the strait over the past two weeks. We have China being so concerned about the fuel levels that they are banning exports of fuel. Again, they are doing this based on the assumption of what the price will be when all of this-This glut of oil should be arriving in their country, and yet they are expecting very little. Even accounting for the fact that these things take time due to the slinky effect of oil taking time to transit the oceans, these things sometimes take months to get across the oceans. I think these estimates are a little high based on what the markets seem to think. To be absolutely clear, if September exports skyrocketed back to pre-war levels, I would not expect that to be immediately reflected in the price at the pump right now. It's gonna take a while. I understand this fully. But I would expect that good news to be reflected somewhere outside of social media and influencer talking points. Right now, you've got Kepler and the United States saying, "Look, see? The war doesn't even really matter because the, the oil is back to pre-war levels." Those are the only two people saying that because every other world government is making decisions right now indicating that they think the oil crisis will continue to worsen for many months from now. Even the United States thinks this too, based on the actions of what they've done, i.e., the selling of SPR resources, the continued draining of that. They've slowed down because they're kind of reaching the bottom of the SPR at this point, but they're still trying to sell off what little dregs remain in the tank, so to speak, and the US is trying to get Europe to, uh, tap into its diesel reserves. So those policies are gonna take the same amount of time that it would be for oil to start flowing through the Middle East again. So if oil was indeed flowing, like it was before the war, then why are we still doing any of this? And considering what's actually happening on the ground in the Middle East, this also plays into what might be building on the strategic front in a few months' time. So let's switch gears and discuss how the war might be host to more escalation over the next few months. Throughout the Persian Gulf right now, we are entering the high-risk period, as several different developments are underway or are on the calendar. This is the last briefing before the anniversary of the October 7th attacks, so I wanted to mention this right now because the coming week presents some level of increased risk for both real and false flag operations in the region. Break out the holiday decorations. It is once again false flag season. It's also two weeks before the elections in Israel, and politicians and officials in Israel are openly saying that Prime Minister Netanyahu is overemphasizing the threat. Gadi Eizenkot, who was the chief of staff of the IDF for 10 years and was effectively the uniformed leader of the IDF during the October 7th attacks, this was the guy who was there running the military at the time, even he has openly stated that Netanyahu is overstating the threat solely to keep himself in office. In fact, two years ago, after the October 7th attacks and subsequent cratering of Gaza, Eizenkot resigned in protest and has become one of Netanyahu's biggest critics solely because of how he handled the situation in Gaza from a military perspective. So this guy is a pretty big deal in Israel. He's heavily embedded in this whole thing, and when a guy like this is openly saying that Netanyahu is fabricating a terrorist threat so as to have an excuse to cancel elections, that to me indicates a pretty high risk for false flag operations, if you know what I mean. Netanyahu has been going from media interview to media interview, talking about how they can get you anywhere at any time. They can put a pager anywhere. He even brought a pager to the UN, right? He has been quite open about their nation's heavy reliance on subterfuge and spying and things like that, and so we have to consider that, right? I don't think anybody with two brain cells can look at the whole, uh, uh, continued use of the pager sort of reminder as anything but a threat at this point. That's a, that's a pretty clear message, if I do say so myself. And so we have to consider that, especially when it comes to other things that have, uh, taken place this week in the region. But on the other hand, just to balance this out with every possible idea here, you know, Netanyahu probably also doesn't want to draw attention to his failure to act regarding his failures to stop the October 7th attacks. That was a failure on his part, right? And it is now a mainstream revelation that Netanyahu also knew about the October 7th plot, and he did nothing to stop it. This is the Israeli media talking. This is not anybody else. This is just them. I mean, this is what the Israelis themselves are saying right now, and Netanyahu might not think it's worth staging some kind of false flag attack to interfere with elections. What is quite clear, though, is that this coming week, things are gonna be pretty up in the air, and the risk of something very shady happening is pretty high. Now, addressing the elephant in the room, and speaking of questionable incidents, let me briefly digress for a moment and cover the events surrounding the hijacking of the Flydubai aircraft a few days ago. Officially, the story with this aircraft is that the co-pilot of the aircraft attacked the pilot with some sort of bladed instrument, either a pocket knife or the crash ax that is located within the cockpit. We don't know. Either way, he attacked the pilot quite brutally and attempted to crash the plane, and during the attack, somehow the pilot was able to, uh, kind of scuffle around with the guy and get over to the cockpit door, open the cockpit door to let passengers and cabin crew inside so that they could help halt the attack and save the aircraft. Allegedly, a passenger was able to drag the co-pilot out of the aircraft after he was trying to tamper with the, uh, destroy the, uh, cockpit controls, and that same passenger was able to recover the aircraft from the dive and save the day. That is the official story as, uh, being told right now. Of course, details will change with time, but that's the official story as it stands right now. One big bit of evidence that I'm still trying to run down is any footage or videos taken during the rapid descent of the aircraft because so far, I have only seen videos from passengers taken after the scuffle in the cockpit. Now, I may be all wrong, but I downloaded the raw ADS-B transponder data and examined the metadata of the transponder pings during the incident, and by my math, a nosedive resulting in a loss of about 14,000 feet of altitude in 37 seconds would have meant that the passengers would have been nearly weightless for about half a minute. This was a very sharp decline. All right? This was a very sharp nosedive, and if this data is correct, the passengers should have been experiencing the same effect as a reduced gravity aircraft, colloquially referred to as the vomit comet. And yet all of the videos I have seen show passengers very clearly standing up with a bit of trouble for sure, but nowhere near weightlessness or a very steep angle. There's also very little debris thrown about the ca-Cabin, which would absolutely have happened based on the data that we have from the transponder. So in this case, we have major inconsistencies. The math and the raw data indicates a very sharp descent, but the videos from inside the cabin do not reflect this at the moment. I am awaiting more videos, hopefully taken during the dive, which can help us corroborate the inconsistencies here. Uh, also up for debate are the events that transpired to recover from the dive, trim out the aircraft, and return to straight and level flight with most of the rudder gone. If, uh, every single event actually happened as described in the official story, then the NTSB should be involved in finding out exactly how this aircraft survived, because this would be a groundbreaking and revolutionary study in terms of aircraft survivability. Nothing like this has ever happened before, especially when it comes to an untrained passenger operating the controls of an aircraft during a steep dive, which had already been damaged by the co-pilot and a part of the rudder breaking off at a certain point, and yet he was able to recover to straight and level flight without a hitch. So very interesting and I'll, I'll just leave it at that for now. In terms of the actual force movement this week throughout the region, there have been some major movements over the past few weeks. For one, the US Navy blockade line has pushed way farther out, with most naval operations being conducted way down in the Arabian Sea. After the incident involving an American carrier having to dodge an Iranian missile a couple of weeks ago, the US Navy has been holding farther out from the Strait of Hormuz. The Teddy Roosevelt carrier strike group left San Diego, uh, last Sunday, I think, and earlier this week, the USS Makin Island also departed Port San Diego, both of which are headed for the Middle East. Like I mentioned yesterday, the absolutely critical part of these deployments is whether or not these vessels are intended to replace or supplement the assets already on station. These vessels will be overlapping somewhat in their deployments, and all will be on station at the same time within a couple of weeks. Remember, this was a trick that has been used both in Venezuela and in, uh, the war in Iran. This actually happened both times. We thought that, okay, there's gonna be a carrier leaving port to replace one that's already there, and the one that was already there stuck around, and then things happened, right, both in Venezuela and Iran. So again, if this is a normal changeover deployment, fine, that's good. But again, we have to be a little schizo sometimes and focus on things way more than we, you know, ordinarily would, simply because of the timing of all of this. This also matters in the context of what has not been happening, because the US Navy has not been striking merchant vessels, which is very interesting. Remember last week when Pete Hegseth and Admiral Cooper directly stated, they directly stated in as clear terms as humanly possible, that they were adopting an eye for an eye targeting policy. They specifically stated that the US will strike a tanker for every tanker the Iranians hit through the strait. That was the official policy, and it, as far as I know, it still is. But the Iranians have hit eight merchants in seventy-two hours, and as I'm recording this, it looks like they may have hit a couple more. And they have struck every single American convoy nearly every single day this week, and the US has literally done nothing about that at all, which is pretty interesting. Personally, I think they're saving up what munitions they have for another round of targeting later on. But I guess we'll see. You never really can tell. Also today, as I'm recording this, within Saudi Arabia, locals are reporting that the local government is hiding missile and drone strikes from the Houthis, because the Saudi Civil Defense Agency has not issued a missile alert to locals in several days. Yet right now, as I am speaking, a refinery in Riyadh is burning because it was hit by a Houthi drone or a missile or something. The Saudis also continued to stage resources along their border region with Yemen, and they have convened, I think, two meetings of the Mecca Defense Pact specifically to address the concerns of Houthi engagements. So once again, taking a step back to the very way of top level, things are happening and the flow of information is being heavily manipulated. The US is staging a lot of forces in the region that could be normal, but they will be on station all together at the same time during the exact window for escalations to occur. On the political front in the US, grumblings are growing, suggesting that President Trump is going to escalate the war after the midterms, probably for several different reasons, either because he feels like he has nothing to lose after that point, or it can only be so bad. You know, it can only get so, so bad when it comes to the midterms. I, I don't know. That's all speculation and, you know, really something that we're just gonna have to wait and see. But so far, the data does support an escalation of the war after the midterms, and the logistical efforts to bolster DAU Garcia have been underway for a few we- actually a few months now. Within Iran, they have also likewise shifted into full-blown civil defense mode, and citizens are preparing for everything from a ground invasion to the use of strategic weapons. The Iranians clearly do not know, uh, what we're planning to do. We don't know what we're planning to do , but they're also not taking any chances, and that alone shows where their concerns lie. So after seven months of war, they are now thinking that the US might do something to escalate, and it might not just be bombing something. As far as indicators to watch out for, the next big window of potential escalation in the Middle East will be this coming week, and also whenever the new battle groups arrive in the Arabian Sea. That might take a couple more weeks. The US midterms coming up in a month or so will also be another point of, uh, escalation potential, both domestically and overseas. Same story all the way over in Europe, as Russia seeks to really intensify their attacks over the next few weeks to capitalize on the gains they have made, but also as retribution for, uh, Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. The grand question that remains today is whether or not more direct action is going to take place in the Middle East, and what that will look like if it does happen. I'm not sure we can predict it with any reliability anymore, but no matter what happens, we here on the home front can do what we can to remain as ready as possible just in case things get crazier as we move into the next phase of the war, whatever that looks like. So in that spirit, wrapping things up today with the various reports we picked up on the Ghost Net Radio Network this week, many of you took to the airwaves once again to share information about what's happening locally and doing so in a way that is completely off-grid and really hard to censor, which is becoming increasingly more important. Something that I think gets lost a lot of the time is just how valuable it is to have an alternative economy for information, and how comforting it is to be able to turn on a radio and get the truth of what's going on, even if all other technology fails or is censored. This is quite helpful, and as we're getting into the winter months, this is just another tool in the toolbox, making sure the flow of information is as reliable as possible. Of course, getting to the truth of what's actually happening these days is difficult with so much propaganda and manipulation going around. But even if we don't know the full picture, even if we only know just a fraction of what's going on, we can still try our best to know enough to make good decisions, and I hope we can all keep doing that. So that's all I have for today. Thanks a bunch for sticking around, and thanks again to those of you on Patreon who make all of these more deep dives and more heavy data analysis possible. As always, you can find all of my research on my Obsidian page for, uh, more text-based reports and clickable links to everything that I, I talk about. And if you want my mapping data, that's available on GitHub and also my ArcGIS pages, if you're more into that sort of thing. So with that, thanks again, and I will see you all next time. And as always, fight in the shade.