Intel Update - Sep. 26 - Magic Dirt

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for September 20th through the 26th, 2026. This week has been busy as usual, so let's get right to it. Right now, both the war in Europe and the war in the Middle East have remained constant as always, with Ukraine and Russia continuing to hit each other's infrastructure. Iran has continued nearly daily strikes on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Houthis have regularly targeted various refineries and petroleum infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. Within the United States, the fuel crisis keeps getting worse with high gas prices escalating and the strategic petroleum reserve starting to reach emergency levels. The grand question remains of how the US will proceed with the war in the Middle East and the war in Europe at a time when election season is on the menu and foreign entanglements are complicating the situation here at home. Starting off today with Europe, it's been a busy week both on the overt front and the covert front as NATO and Russia inch closer to a more direct confrontation in many regards around the continent. The drums of war continue to be beaten by various world leaders who continue to state that Russia is conducting hybrid war throughout the region. Of course, on the other side of that debate are those who claim that Ukraine or other intelligence services are actually behind these attacks and are conducting false flag attacks in third-party nations so as to draw Europe more deeply into the war. In terms of which side is correct, well, the data indicates both sides of the argument have potential. It is very likely that Russia is behind a lot of these mysterious infrastructure incidents, but it's also quite likely that Ukraine, MI6, or the CIA are behind many of these attacks as well, trying to stoke up support for the war. Determining which one is which will be hard to do, but the violence and infrastructure attacks continue nonetheless. On the more kinetic front in Ukraine, Russia has hit Kyiv hard this week with many hypersonic missile strikes hitting various targets in and around the city. For OPSEC reasons, I do not have a good beat on where these missile strikes have taken place. Over the past couple of years, it's been really hard to actually get videos or geolocation of where a lot of these incidents are taking place. So, please forgive my map for being a little bare, but I have been able to personally geolocate a few of the strikes that were a lot more public. Same thing on the Russian side as Ukrainian forces have continued their drone strikes on Russian infrastructure, mostly targeting Russian oil refineries far behind the lines deep into Russia. On that note, with regard to the strikes on Russian infrastructure, two weeks ago, President Trump directly asked Ukraine to stop hitting Russian oil refineries, which has highlighted the differences in management of the war itself. There is probably a little bit of deception with these statements themselves, because I suspect that Ukraine is probably not really calling the shots with a lot of these strikes, as has been the case for many years. So, if the White House is quite serious about wanting to stop Ukraine from hitting these longer-range Russian infrastructure sites, they should probably just call Langley or London and talk to the heads of the CIA or MI6 if they want to actually stop this because I think those two agencies are running most of this war. But regardless, from the Ukrainian side, since that's going to be the most hot-button topic, Ukraine is thinking only of Ukraine, which is perfectly fine for them to do. And it would make perfect sense for them to want to hit Russia where it hurts. If the US were in the same position, we would probably want to do the same thing. However, this is hurting the United States, at least indirectly. When Ukraine hits Russian refineries, their output declines—even if a lot of these strikes don't really do that much, some of these strikes, such as the ones in Perm and some of the refineries down in Rostov closer to the front lines, are quite devastating. I do not believe for one minute the claims that 40% of Russia's oil refineries are offline. I think that's a propaganda number that is being pushed by the West. But it's also very clear that Russia is hurting due to these strikes. More specifically, Russian exports are hurting, and I'm sure the Ukrainians are quite happy about that. But once again, this is why the United States is suffering by Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil facilities. Russia is not exporting oil to Europe. These exports were shut down years ago when the war first started. These attacks are instead actually hurting the other side of the planet when it comes to Russia's customers for oil. This is an oversimplification, but follow me for just a moment. Ukraine hits Russian refineries and Russian exports suffer. Right now, one of Russia's biggest customers for petroleum products is China, with up to 50% of China's oil demand being filled by Russia. Well, when a refinery gets hit and the ecosystem suffers, Russia can't export as much. And since China's demand remains the same regardless, China has to buy that oil from somewhere else—the same sources the US is buying from in the Middle East. Remember, due to the nature of the game, a lot of times the petroleum market ends up being a zero-sum game. A barrel of oil that China buys is a barrel of oil that we can't buy. So, the Western markets start competing for the same oil and prices go up here in the US. And when the US is suffering here at home, the first thing we cut is foreign aid. Again, an oversimplification, but that's how Ukrainian strikes hurt Europe and the United States. Russia is not exporting oil directly to these nations. That's not what's happening. Russia is exporting oil to China, and when they can't export as much to China, China has to buy it from somewhere else. And when they buy it from somewhere else, the market shrinks. The number of refineries that they can buy from shrinks and prices go up because demand remains the same. It's simple supply and demand. That's all this war has ever been really. Ukraine might be doing the things that make sense on a tactical level by striking Russian infrastructure. But on the strategic level, at the higher level than just a tactical level, this is absolutely going to come back to bite them and us despite all of the hysteria on all sides regarding this war. That's what the data shows. But despite that, the war drags on and there's really no end in sight at this point. So those are the main concerns in Europe at the moment. The energy crisis and the practical zero-sum game nature of the oil market, at least in terms of the immediate supply that's available right now, is causing a lot of problems and it will continue to do so for a long time. Switching gears quite significantly, let's talk about the homeland this week. And I wanted to update my tracker chart for all of the abuses that have publicly been disclosed regarding Flock cameras and other similar technologies. Many of you know that I've been tracking this for a while now because this is more of a clear and present danger to us here in the homeland. So, it's kind of important to be aware of. And every month, I'm trying to highlight all of the cases that are public, at least regarding the nefarious activities that are undertaken by agencies using these cameras. So, this map shows all of the arrests or firings or disciplinary actions that have been issued to various agencies regarding Flock cameras and other similar technologies. Again, Flock cameras are just kind of the poster child for this sort of thing. But really these are intelligence collection sensors and Flock is just the main brand which has been getting a lot of flak about this. So this data here incorporates Axon, Motorola, all the other companies that are doing the same thing and actually have in some cases worse sensors or more concerning sensors. So again, kind of a busy chart. I'm trying to figure out better ways of depicting this stuff on a map because once again we're having overlapping icons on the map. So yeah, it's quite a bit. This is just again for the month of September and we've got four days left in the month. So yeah, not super great, but this is just a reminder that this is a persistent issue and this is already a major problem around the nation as we move forward. Otherwise, within the United States this week, the main item of note has been the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The summit carried on throughout the week with various world leaders giving speeches as usual, and nearly all speeches given at this assembly were directed at Israel, highlighting and condemning their behavior in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Syria. I kid you not, that is pretty much what every single world leader said. I don't know of a single world leader that actually did not use their time at the podium to condemn Israel in some form or fashion. So maybe that's a little bit telling there. But otherwise, not really much else of note was discussed. President Trump did speak at the assembly, but it was his usual kind of speech—not really a whole lot particularly surprising, and it was really overshadowed by the state visit by Xi Jinping, which took place this week as well. Not much has come out of that visit either. It's just been kind of the standard diplomatic state visit. So, we'll have to see how things work out. But back at the United Nations, there were rumors circulating that the United States was having direct talks with Iranian President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi, who were both surprisingly allowed to attend the General Assembly. But as of the past few days, nothing has really come out of those alleged meetings that was positive. There were some talks that negotiations were ongoing and then there were also other rumors which counteracted that. So, I don't really know what the truth is. I guess we're just going to have to wait and see like most things. So, also this week in Washington, one of the more low-level issues that is starting to cause problems is the White House media ban. Earlier this week, the White House banned CNN, Politico, and MSNBC from the White House grounds. And as a result of that, most other media groups have boycotted the White House, and they're not really covering a lot of the White House events that are ongoing. What this has effectively translated to is there being effectively no White House press pool for most of this week. Now again, ordinarily I personally would not care about this at all because it doesn't really matter that much. But unfortunately, as war is on the menu once again, it kind of does matter. Now, legacy media is incredibly biased, but the practical effects of this scandal are going to create problems simply because it's like trying to prove a negative. If there's no media coverage of something the president says, we literally don't know what's happening. Independent journalists are not allowed into the White House, and even the quote-unquote new media seat that they kind of pushed right when President Trump was inaugurated, that specific seat in the press pool is filled by those who are handpicked by the administration. And surprise, surprise, they don't exactly put critics there. So, simply put, when it comes to the happenings inside the White House grounds, the only view that the American people have into that world comes from the legacy media or leaks from staffers, which is not exactly good footing to be on when we're looking to reignite the war in a couple of months, which we'll get to in just a minute. But more generally, speaking of war, let me transition to a brewing situation in the Red Sea region before we get into the Middle East, because it seems rather pertinent in the context of what's going on to the north with Iran. I am referring, of course, to the trouble that is continuing to bubble in Ethiopia. Right now, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) has formed a coalition with several other smaller armed groups and has broken the fragile peace deal that has been in place for a few years concerning the administration of the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia. They've made quite significant gains over the past few days. There have been mass surrenders of government forces to these militia groups, and they've taken over a total of four airports in the northern regions of Ethiopia. So they're taking some ground. We'll see how far they go. But right now it's a pretty hot shooting war, at least in terms of the use of small arms, which is mostly what they're using. Small arms and crew-served weapons are really mostly what they're using right now. But they are capturing a lot of government equipment, and there's a lot of old, rusty stuff in Africa that has the potential to be rather serious weaponry. So once again, we'll see how it works out. But right now, they're taking a lot of ground. At face value, this seems just like another African tribal war that nobody cares about except for the people who live there, obviously, and any humanitarian efforts in the region. And it certainly doesn't seem like there is any sort of link between this small tribal war in Eastern Africa and the conflict up north in the Middle East. After all, this is Ethiopia, which really doesn't have anything to do with what's going on up north, right? Well, one of the major players in this sort of weird, nebulous conflict zone does actually have a link to the region up north, and that link might be strong enough to cause some complications over the next few months. Culturally speaking, the population of this Tigray region in northern Ethiopia—the people who live there—actually have a lot in common with Eritrea, the small nation just along the border with the Red Sea. And a lot of the terror groups or freedom fighters (however you want to call them) in this region have been funded by Eritrea as a way of destabilizing their neighbor. Think of this as like the Kashmir region of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both of these nations have historically been quite hostile to one another over the past few centuries, but they had a tenuous peace for a while there, at least until the TPLF started getting a little bit more spicy than usual. And they've caused a lot of problems within Ethiopia, and Ethiopia has accused Eritrea of essentially funding all of this destabilization within Ethiopia. So the link up north is quite interesting because one of Eritrea's most important, but almost never discussed, allies is Israel. That's right—Eritrea and Israel are quite buddy-buddy, even though they really don't want people to know that. So Eritrea is extremely close to Israel after the Israelis supported their independence movement, just like the Israelis have recently done next door with Somaliland. There are a lot of Eritrean refugees in Israel, and there's actually quite a bit of a diaspora of Eritreans in Israel, surprisingly. And more broadly, just as an example, there are only two nations in the entire continent of Africa which have not formally recognized Palestine. One is Cameroon (which is kind of interesting), and the other is Eritrea. So Eritrea has not weighed into that issue because they are deeply in bed with the Israelis and have been for a long time, even though not that many people seem to know this. As a result, some mutual back-scratching might be on the menu over the next few months. It is purely a hunch at the moment, just to put that caveat out there, but it would be extremely profitable for Israeli interests to use Eritrea to cause chaos in Ethiopia, which would allow for an expansion of Israel's sphere of influence in the region—maybe to one day eventually include military expansion. If this sounds far-fetched, don't take my word for it... Let's examine what the Israelis say themselves. A 2021 white paper written by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University specifically states that the TPLF had close relations with Israel, not the Ethiopian government. TPLF specifically is name-dropped in this report. And it goes on to say that though Israel should above all exercise caution with regard to picking a side during this conflict, they should not offer military support to Ethiopia's government. So this white paper that is freely available on the open internet is a pretty decent smoking gun that tells us what side the Israelis are on in this conflict. And that is important moving forward. Though it won't be happening overnight, if chaos remains constant in Ethiopia, this would be good for Eritrea, who in turn might scratch the back of the Israelis, who absolutely have the incentive to gain a foothold in this region—specifically a military foothold right here, the Dahlak Islands, an archipelago in the Red Sea on the eastern coast of Eritrea. Now, most of these smaller islands are uninhabited, but the scuttlebutt over the years has been that the Israelis secretly have a recon base somewhere on one of these islands. There are also claims that the IDF has emplaced a signals outpost or some kind of SIGINT sensor suite somewhere on Emba Soira mountain over on the mainland. It's not that big and it might be just a sensor outpost or some kind of weather station that's really just a SIGINT collector site, but that rumor has been persistent for a few years. So why are the Israelis interested in this particular island chain? Well, look where it's located. It's in a prime spot to do two things: spy on Red Sea shipping, and spy on the Saudis. It's in a perfect spot for intelligence collection considering the expansion of the war in the Persian Gulf down to the Red Sea. Now, it's possible that these islands could be quite handy. Of course, there have been efforts within Eritrea to specifically fact-check these claims and flatly deny that any sort of Israeli cooperation exists whatsoever. The Eritreans again are trying to distance themselves from the Israelis. You can see this all over Eritrean media. There is actually even a hit piece put out on these ideas by Eritrea just a couple of months ago after more eyes started looking closer at what is normally a rather nondescript nation. So this is again quite fresh. This article tries to gaslight the reader into thinking that the entire premise of Israeli positions in Eritrea is just preposterous, and the fact that the author of this article got triggered over these claims is pretty interesting. I will let the reader come to their own conclusion, but it is important to denote that nobody is claiming that there's a whole IDF base on one of these tiny islands. Maybe in the far-flung regions of Ethiopian internet—whatever scary place that is—there might be some rumors, I don't know. But generally speaking, these are pretty tiny islands, so nobody is saying that there's a whole IDF air base there. I think there's probably a sensor suite somewhere on one of these islands, maybe an observation post at the most. Some time ago, Al Mayadeen stated that there was an Israeli recon post there and actually a missile strike from the Houthis struck that place and killed an IDF officer. Again, this report was complete rumor at the time. There was no corroborating evidence whatsoever to suggest this, but again, the region is not really known for telling the truth on any side of the issue. So once again, getting to the bottom of the matter here and just finding out the truth is pretty hard to do. But if you will permit me to go out on a limb for just a moment, we're going to take a little bit of an analytical leap, if you will. I think that the Israelis are funding the militia groups in Ethiopia to try and stoke a civil war, which Eritrea will benefit from due to cultural reasons. After all, the Tigray region in Ethiopia has the same culture as Eritrea. So Eritrea views the war as kind of a war of independence for Tigray among their own people. So in supporting the TPLF quietly, the Israelis curry favor with Eritrea, who might be inclined to let them have military access to Dahlak more formally. If this sounds rather far-fetched—if this sounds like a hairbrained idea—remember that the Israelis are openly doing the same thing with Somaliland right now. They are supporting the breakaway region of Somaliland in Somalia so that they can plant a naval base in the port of Berbera. Very clearly, the Israelis are 100% interested in maintaining some footprint down at the southern end of the Red Sea, which makes sense for them. But if this ends up resulting in yet another hotspot emerging within the next few months, this is probably going to result in some more problems for the region at some point, especially since there's a major American base down there in Djibouti, which is surrounded by Ethiopia. Once again, this is not an issue that's going to be a dire emergency for world trade anytime soon. This is something that not a lot of people are talking about right now, so I wanted to mention it, but I just wanted to lay the groundwork for one avenue that will be worth keeping an eye on over the next few weeks. So, with all of that brewing in the background, let's wrap things up with the Middle East, where many indications and warnings are growing, suggesting that the US is going to have to do something soon. And we might be inclined to lean on military action once again. Perhaps the strongest indicator to be aware of is not what has happened, but rather what has not happened. The numbers are in, and over the past 2 weeks, what we have not seen is the ability for the US to get traffic through the strait back to pre-war levels. As confirmed by TankerTrackers and Kpler, two of the most decently independent and pretty reliable sources there are, at the absolute maximum, the US is achieving 10 to 12 million barrels of oil per day for the past week, which is about half of pre-war levels. Since the Saudi East-West pipeline is down to absolutely zero barrels right now due to being offline, this has really been it. Credit where credit is due: most certainly, the US has increased the average. The amount of oil that is coming out is higher than it has been and it has been steadily increasing, which is a good thing as I mentioned last week as well. However, the Houthis have negated these efforts because the East-West pipeline being offline has balanced out any possible gain coming from the strait. What's more concerning at present are the claims that the United States has already made the decision to continue the war and go back to fighting once again. As hard as that is to believe at the moment, last night several mainstream media sources claimed that President Trump has decided to reject the Iranian deal and go back to a full-blown war after the midterm elections. This comes after the deadline for the Iranian offer to settle the situation diplomatically came to an end, and various staffers at the Pentagon and the White House have leaked that the decision has been made to go back to war after the midterms. Whether or not this is true is up for debate and not really something that can be known with any certainty until it happens. This is all just rumor for now, but in addition to the routine cargo flights around the region, there have been some actions taken on the Iranian side which might give us a clue about what comes next. Bringing up everyone's favorite satellite imagery and zooming into Natanz, we can see that a situation is beginning to manifest once again at Pickaxe Mountain, which is the nickname for the underground bunker sites south of the Natanz nuclear research facility, which was heavily struck during Operation Midnight Hammer last year. We hit Natanz. We hit the actual base itself to the north quite heavily—took out a lot of infrastructure there. They have rebuilt quite a bit of that and at least put temporary structures over some of the buildings. But the main story is down here in these rather desolate-looking mountains. This imagery that you see here is from September 11th, so it is pretty fresh and it indicates the activity level at several of the tunnel entrances. If we zoom in quite a bit, we can see these little bumps right above the tunnel entrances. For those who are not aware of what this is, these are extremely common to see. These are what we call spoil piles or just spoil. These are basically little piles of dirt or rock that get deposited by a dump truck. So we see this all the time whenever there's a major excavation project. And depending on the scale of these spoil piles, we can sometimes determine how much work is being done at a particular location. In this case, they are digging these tunnels deeper, bringing the rock outside, driving the dump truck up to the top of the mountain there, and dumping the load above the tunnel entrance as sort of a fortification effort. They haven't smoothed this out yet, so you can see each individual little dump truck load, which is why it looks kind of bumpy like that. But the rock and dirt has to be deposited somewhere, so it might as well be used to thicken the amount of rock above the tunnel entrance. Again, every little thing is a little bit of a fortification effort. So, in the open spaces, we can't really tell exactly how much digging is being conducted because we don't have a clear understanding of how big this facility really is. But it appears to be getting bigger because of the fact that there's digging being conducted here at all. So, that's quite telling. And what's more, the National Reconnaissance Office or the NRO guys—those spooks with the satellites—they absolutely have better imagery than we do on the open marketplace. As a result, high-resolution images of this activity are probably being put in front of the president to say, "See, look, they're fortifying Pickaxe Mountain." We can see this on the rhetorical front as well, because countless influencers and people who have direct lines of communication with the president—so not just random people with a podcast, like people who actually have the president's phone number—these people have been urging a more strategic strike on Pickaxe Mountain for many weeks now. And I think that this recent activity at this mountain complex will be used by insiders to justify strikes once again. Clearly, the Iranians think they're about to get hit here. That's why they're digging more, that's why they're fortifying more, and we have to take that into account when we talk about some planning factors here. It is certainly possible that the claims of renewed fighting are false, and they're not exactly going to come to fruition. It is certainly possible that the US is posturing and trying to pressure the Iranians to come back to the table by threatening more military action at some vague date later on. And it's also possible that this is all just a lie that was put out there while a quiet peace deal is being negotiated. All of this is possible. But if you want to know what I think, I think it's almost certain that the US will return to some kind of military action in the immediate future, either before or after the midterms, but probably after, both for the political implications, but also due to the logistical demand. Right now, the US does not have the resources to do much more than just a few days' worth of bombing. But by November, that might change. We aren't going to be making bombs quick enough to meet that deadline, but we might be able to siphon off a lot of other munitions from other theaters of operation, which might be able to enable one more big push in terms of a bombing campaign. EUCOM (European Command), INDOPACOM (Indo-Pacific Command), and I think SOUTHCOM all are rather quite upset that their missiles and bombs and stuff are being taken from them to give to CENTCOM. So, usually we can tell how serious things are by how loudly they're complaining about stuff. And so far, all of the combatant commands that are not CENTCOM are rather upset because they're having a lot of their toys taken away and given to CENTCOM. And why are they being given to CENTCOM? Well, because the war is probably going to continue on. Now, in terms of timing, we can't possibly know. It could be tomorrow or it could be after the midterms. I'm inclined to think it's going to be a while. However, another factor worth considering in terms of the timeline is the weather. Once again, the nerd stuff nobody cares about is actually kind of important. Wintertime is approaching and that is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have more hours of darkness to work with—so, we call it period of darkness or POD. So, you have more POD to work with because the nights are longer. So, you can theoretically have more convoys coming out through the Strait of Hormuz. You can do this for more hours of the night. Instead of 2 or 3 hours to work with, you might have 4 or 5 hours. So, again, you've got more time to work things through, which can take advantage of the darkness. Same thing with the bombing runs themselves in Iran. The daylight alone is a pretty big factor for any kind of operation that's going to happen in Iran. However, the other side of the coin is that clouds roll in and the intelligence collection sensors which are finding these missile and drone launch sites that are targeting the Strait of Hormuz—these sensors can't see through the clouds. This is a tale as old as the military use of aircraft itself going all the way back to World War I. If there is a cloud layer between the aircraft and the ground, that aircraft is not seeing anything. Of course, satellites and more capable sensors absolutely can. But the aircraft that are going to be conducting close air support, ground attack aircraft—these aircraft and these platforms are not going to be able to operate when there's a cloud ceiling that's pretty close to the ground, which is very common throughout the entire Middle Eastern region. That hazy overcast sky has been more deciding for a lot of our military operations than we'd care to admit, but that's just the truth of the matter. And it is absolutely certain that during the winter months, which we are approaching, the US will have degraded targeting capability throughout the region. That's just a fact. Once again, this will not affect things like Tomahawk missile strikes or the heavy-level bombers, which are going to be dropping stuff from 30,000 feet. It's not going to affect those. But if you've got a Reaper drone at 30,000 feet and you've got a cloud ceiling, an overcast sky at 10,000 feet, that Reaper drone is not launching a Hellfire at anything. So, same thing with the helicopters and again low-level close air support aircraft which are currently providing the escort capacity for the ships going through the Strait of Hormuz. When there are clouds up, they might not even be able to fly at all. So, if the Pentagon wants to restart the war, they will probably not be able to do what they did earlier this year, which was to play whack-a-mole and strike missile launchers, trucks, and other mobile drone launchers when they see them visually on the ground. You can probably try to get some F-16s and some Apaches to go up and down the coast of Iran and try to play whack-a-mole with missile launchers and whatnot, but good luck. Probably not going to be super effective in that region in the wintertime. Deeper into Iran itself, if the US were to conduct some kind of strike on Pickaxe Mountain, be it a strategic release or more of a conventional approach, weather's not really going to matter a whole lot for that. So, the timeline doesn't really matter in terms of the seasons. Unless the US wants to get photos and videos of the detonation, which they probably would want to do. But generally speaking, if Pickaxe is the goal, then anytime from right now until after the midterms is going to be the window for any strike on that particular site. So if they're trying to hit Pickaxe, they can hit it anytime they want. The good news amongst the very bad news that the US is probably heading back toward a renewed period of escalation (whatever that looks like)—the silver lining for all of that is that we have some time to prepare domestically for instability to erupt. We might not have that much time. It's hard to say, but right now, if the US were to escalate things, they're going to have to move a lot of aircraft and we're going to see it and we're going to be able to write about it. So, right now, timeline-wise, it does indeed look like those initial rumors and leaked reports of "after the midterms" look like the most realistic timeline for now. So, as for me personally, I am making plans and preparations as if the war is going to escalate after the midterms because I think that right now is the calm before the storm and things might get rather kinetic once again by the end of the year. This does not mean that it's a surefire thing. The president might change his mind again—he's famous for doing that. And the war might not escalate more than where we are right now. But in a world of uncertainty, we have to have planning factors. And my own personal planning factor is to prepare for the war to sharply escalate after the midterms, possibly to include the use of strategic weapons, specifically at the Natanz nuclear research facility. I hope it does not happen, and I hope I am wrong, but that's my own benchmark to plan from. Though of course a lot can happen in 2 months and who knows—we might have cut a secret deal already. It's impossible to know for sure. But what is quite clear is that all sides are making plans of their own based on the timing of the midterms. Both the United States is doing this and Iran's doing this. And we lowly citizens down here at the bottom who have no say about any of this whatsoever, we should probably be doing the same thing to some degree. Fuel and energy prices are the most immediate short-term risks to prepare for. Like everyone's been saying for a while, don't need to beat that dead horse. Diesel prices as of this morning are hovering at around $6.50 a gallon and regular unleaded is around $4.48 a gallon as per AAA as of this morning. Within a couple of months, these high prices will start to be baked into consumer goods and food prices. A lot of these price increases have already started to take effect, but it's going to be probably worse later on since it's peak harvest season and it will take a month or two for these prices to trickle down to the consumer. Shortages of certain engine oil products have been underway for some time, and the price of engine oil itself has also skyrocketed to nearly double pre-war levels for some weights. So, if you got a really rare or strange oil weight that you need for your engine, I'm sorry for you. Might want to get that now before it gets harder to find and more expensive. So, all in all, we have to do the best we can with what we have and really look inward to see what our vulnerabilities might be in a few months' time. Things may escalate in November, they might not. They may wait until next year. I don't think anyone who is in the know or has any sort of experience whatsoever is forecasting this war will end before January. Pretty much everybody's saying we're going to continue this war well into January of next year. Of course, everyone who says that also probably hopes to be wrong about that. I think we would all be very appreciative if things were to just go back to normal, but that's probably not pretty likely and something's got to give. And whatever happens, the current status of how things are is just not sustainable for much longer. I myself would rather err on the side of caution and use the calm before the storm to really flesh out what problems might pop up as the cooler weather arrives and trouble remains on the horizon. I know it really is quite fatiguing to have to deal with this war for 7 months now, but that's the hand we've been dealt, and we have the chance to really learn a lot—which is what I myself have been doing, especially in the world of communications such as with the GhostNet and how some of the more modern tools we have can be force multipliers these days. I am all about anything that can allow us to save time and be more efficient, and HF radio is a good tool for that because once you get set up and tuned in, a lot of it's automated. For instance, this week I could not tune in to our weekly GhostNet radio network because I had other tasks to work on. But I was able to fire up my radio, plug in my tablet, and just let it receive news reports that other people were transmitting up and down the Eastern Seaboard. And later on that night, after I was done with my work, I could scroll through the messages that came in and grab screenshots to show to all of you. Once again, we've gone down this rabbit hole so many times, but long story short: the unfortunate part about all of this is that if you need to communicate with people that are many miles away, if you need to understand the world around you farther out than what you can just see with your own eyes, and you need to do so when cell towers and the internet are offline for some reason, high frequency or HF radio is quite literally the only option we have in that extreme case. I wish it wasn't so. I wish there were other technologies out there because HF radio is quite hard to learn in a lot of cases and the hardware is very expensive, but this is what we have if you want to make point-to-point communications between two places that are separated by a lot of distance. Of course, it's only one tool in the toolbox as well. Thankfully, it would be extremely rare for the entire internet to go down at once. That might not ever actually happen. But if it does, or if it happens in a local area, being familiar with radio stuff like this can help us be prepared for whatever might happen. I can guarantee you that if we end up returning to the war in Iran with a really big bang—as in a *really* big bang—the first people to know about what happened will probably be on the radio. And I am reserving the precedents on that report in hopes that we never have to escalate to anything more than just routine. But in any case, we'll be ready no matter what. Stuff like this is probably the best thing to focus on for right now. Focus on what you have the power to control and work on, and don't worry about the stuff out of your control. At least that helps me out quite a bit in terms of not going any more insane than I already am. So, that's all I've got for today. And as always, all of my work and research sources can be found on my Obsidian page, and all of my mapping data—all the stuff you see on your screen, this firehose of information—all of this can be found in both KMZ format on my GitHub page and also my online maps on my ArcGIS pages. I have been getting asked a few questions about what each of these symbols mean because people will see this in all the wire reports and there's a lot of information all at once. It turns out there are actually far too many icons for me to put in a dedicated map legend for each video. So until I figure out something that looks good and is decently professional-looking, you can always go to my ArcGIS maps and click each individual point for more information if you would like. I'm definitely working on how to make this a little bit better. Again, the reason that I use this kind of crude and not-so-heavily-polished format for both the briefings today and also the wire reports is because I can do all of this from the field. I can do all of this standing, wearing my plate carrier, briefing from ATAK right in the middle of the woods if need be. Hopefully, we'll never have to actually rely on that, but that's a pretty powerful skill to have—being able to get information out quickly and effectively no matter what the conditions are. On my ArcGIS maps, for those of you who want to explore that more, I actually have two separate maps: one for more immigration and transnational crime issues, and the other for more counterterrorism stuff. So all of this data for me at least renders perfectly fine in ATAK, which is how I get my screen recordings for every wire report and intel update. But it's too much to load in an internet browser all at once, so I have to separate it out into two separate maps based on the topic at hand. So just a heads up on that. I'm working on figuring out how to make this data flow a little bit more palatable so it's not so overwhelming, but it's quite a lot. Maybe one day I'll figure it out, but that's kind of what I've got for now. Thanks again to everyone for watching. Thank you for all of your support, which makes all of this data analysis possible. And I will see you next time. And as always: fight in the shade.