Tag Archives: NATO

The joy of a sleepless night

It all started a few hours ago. The neanderthal hate mail came in regards to the previous article. I was delusional, this never happens. If you receive hate mail, you probably have heard it before. I do not care, but I think it is nice to tell their mommies just how stupid Junior is, as such here goes.

The military have been stupid, very stupid. We see this shown Reuters (the New York Times is behind a paywall). The story (at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/man-suspected-leaking-secret-us-documents-appear-court-2023-04-14/) gives us ‘Airman suspected of leaking secret US documents hit with federal charges’ where we see “Jack Douglas Teixeira of North Dighton, Massachusetts, the U.S. Air National Guard accused of leaking top secret military intelligence records online was charged on Friday with unlawfully copying and transmitting classified material.” In addition to this, The BC gives more, gives links to gamers and a service named Discord, which has 150,000,000 active users. As such the military link is proven. What is unknown is what other stupid things he has been doing. For that we need to await the full investigation of the FBI. Although it is increasingly likely that the NSA will wield the national security flag. I would totally get that. 

Then the second setting the gaming part. For that we go to Kaspersky. They give us (at https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/coronavirus-gaming-scams) a rather nasty part with warnings. The important ones are:

  1. Only use official websites for any purchases related to the game.
  2. Use a strong password for the game login.
  3. Never click on any links asking you to reconfirm your password.

There is a lot more, but if a gamer (especially one in the military) has ignored 2 of these, the damage is likely done. There will be one stupid person in any airbase (the US does not get to be that lucky) as such there are phishing and data capturing dangers in most of the 59 of them. The Army has over 300 of them. You still think I was kidding? As I see it Teixeira is merely the tip of that iceberg. I have no idea what the danger is with the Marines, but it is likely very low, not as low as the navy, but it is still better than the other two. That is the realistic danger that the US faces and if Russians were watching Discord the US has a massive problem. You see, it is not only what the US (or NATO) knew, it is what they didn’t know that will become the achilles heel. That is two of the settings right out here in the open and the Teixeira might seem new, but the New York Times implied that this had been going on for a lot longer, as such the damage is real. 

As far as I am concerned when Teixeira is thrown in prison, they can cover the door with concrete and forget about him. The idea to put classified materials online to look cool is even more stupid to fall for a Russian 17 year old honey trap. With the honey trap we get it, hormones take over, but to look cool? I am at a loss what that man ever did in a uniform and even less why it took so long to find the link. 

But it wasn’t merely about the person Teixeira, it was about the setting for a movie or TV episode. You see, phishing has been going on for decades and the lack of Common Cyber Sense (especially in the military) was covered by me over the last few years. I have articles that go back to at least April 2022. So this is more than a loaded canon, this is the making of more (in what direction remains open and not discussed). It has all the makings of the nightmare scenario. You see you want your data to be safe whilst not using a password, or perhaps one of the routers at the pentagon which had been implied (by an anonymous source) to have been Cisco123 for the longest of times. So how is that security going? It is a sliding scale from non existent to a revolving door for anyone that wanted to read some. It might be my point of view, but the released facts seem to fit the profiles I set.

In addition, for some weird reason, I seem to dream up all kinds of advertisements. One was for AA, where I used the phrase (with a nice animated bottle) “It is fine to have a drink. Make sure the drink does not consume you” I also got a girl to pose partially undressed, dancing is a slutty outfit, in a hospital bed and one more. You do not see her ‘details’ as I used a very interesting way to filter the view. The bottle has a label “Cemetery premium 45%”

The second add was about healthcare, I will spare you the details, they are not important. The weird part is that my mind designed both of them in mere minutes. I still need some things (like software) to get it done, but it is a weird setting. Especially as I never had any real intent to go into filming. Ah well, another mess to overlook I reckon.

And how do these two relate? They do not, but consider all the gaming ads you see on mobiles and tablets. Do you know the sources? Do you know what is collected? You see the FBI gives us that in 2022 $10,300,000,000 was lost due to scams and I reckon that number is low. Too many are ashamed to admit that they have been made the fool. As such all elements I mentioned yesterday were covered and anyone who had read up on the subject would know this. 

So enjoy Monday and consider how safe your data and details are. 

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Freedom to discriminate

This is how I see it. Lets be clear, I am all for freedom of speech, but I do believe that there needs to be a level of accountability. This applies to every path of expression. Some believe that there is an innate need to speak the truth that you personally believe. I personally believe that Microsoft is beyond redemption, but I will speak truthful on the matter, also when they have scored a victory that they were entitled too, I will make mention of it. I did so in the past. Xbox is now personally seen as garbage, but Game Pass remains a treasure. People do good things and we do shady things, sometimes we do bad things. This is not always with intent, but it is driven by our believes. I grew up believing in the freedom of speech.Yet that freedom needs to be held towards accountability. As such I am massively in disapproval of book burning. I also think it is a waste of time. It is like these Karen’s in America protesting Bud-light, buying ten 6 packs and after that destroying them without drinking them. A pointless exercise, but that is up to these people. Burning a bible or Quran is another matter. As a christian I do not think that burning a Bible is sacrilege, but I know doing that to a Quran is. So I will never do that. You see past the point that buying a book just to burn it is a waste of funds, there is the setting that burning a Quran upsets any Muslim. Why do this? So I saw the BBC giving me ‘Protesters set fire to Swedish embassy in Baghdad’ (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-66252974). There two things stood out. The person who did the act was an Iraqi refugee. Yet this is the the biggest part in all this. It as the sentence “the country’s courts ruled the protests should be allowed to go ahead, citing free speech laws.” There I have an issue. First who are the people involved in setting this court case? Who were the lawyers? Who was the judge? All matters that are not discussed. One source gave me “Following appeals from both protest organisers, the Stockholm Administrative Court overturned the decisions, saying the cited security concerns were not enough to limit the right to demonstrate.” So exactly who were these protest organisers? Rasmus Paludan is seemingly one of the protesters, but who is the other one? There is also the new setting that this is the case that allows for discrimination. Free speech warrants discrimination, it is one of the most dangerous of all settings. Not in the first for Sweden who will see more and more objections to its membership into NATO and that might have been the reason for Rasmus Paludan acting the way he is. And when that happens and there is a problem with Russia, make sure that Rasmus is kept in captivity IN Sweden, so he could experience the accidental bombing (if it ever gets to that point). 

My issues is that we have forgotten to respect the believe of others, a setting that could work out well for me, but not that much for Sweden and a few other players. Reading “Swedish politicians have criticised the Quran burnings but have also adamantly defended the right to freedom of expression” reads to me like that same politician stating that these are very naughty people, the same people beating his (or her) child to death with a stick stating the freedom of speech of the tree that was cut down resulting in the stick. Yes, it does not make sense, but free speech to endorse discrimination never ever does. I personally believe that this will get a lot worse soon enough, how? That I anyones guess, yet the population of Swedish Muslims is at present 8.1%, as such a reaction will come forth and it will not merely be Turkey objecting to Swedish entering NATO. This is the consequence of sheltering discrimination under the roof of freedom of speech. Will other nations face the same issues? In France it is a different matter “It is difficult to know exactly how many Muslims of different nationalities live in France because the state does not collect religious or ethnic census data”, some estimation hand that in France 4% is Muslim, with a 67 million population that becomes a rather large number. In the UK this is 4.4%, as such we better start reconsidering the freedom of discrimination, because when these two groups get angry (and they will) thee two nations will be in serious trouble, both economies will grind to a halt when they cannot afford even one Euro to economic downturns. Germany has even more problems, there the Islamic population is expected to be around 7%, but no clear numbers were found by me. The three largest economies in Europe and they want to play footsie with idiotic christians like Rasmus Paludan and whatever national pitchfork wielding idiot they have as an anti-Islam champion? As I see it, it represents a new form of Hook and Cod wars, a war the Netherlands had between classes. The cods (conservative nobles) won, but the one element that is too often ignored is the fact that this was active for 140 years (1350-1490). Now consider the impact of a religious class war all over Europe that lasts for that long. What do you think will be left of Europe after that? There was a reason why people were speaking out against discrimination. The principle of that matter was not the largest one, it was greed and when that greed is drowned in these kinds of outbursts the people (all of them) tend to end up with the short straw. This is why I voted in favour of expelling that refugee back to Iraq (see what happens there) and putting Rasmus Paludan in Halden Prison and forget he ever existed after that. You see everyone is ‘relieved’ that Turkey is no longer stopping Sweden from entering NATO, but that does not make it a done deal yet. I reckon that several complications could possibly erupt and that would extent the timeline by months, of not well over a year. Still this last part is not based on any evidence I have and should be regarded as speculation. Still, Sweden’s place in the Middle East and parts of Africa will not be a good one for some time to come and it better realises that it needs both these places to make economic headway of any kind. 

In this I could be wrong, I have been wrong before.

Enjoy the day.

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Son of Kristallnacht

This happens, things happen again. Things are reprised and even the stupid parts are redone over and over again. I never understood the act of book burning. It does not matter what is burned. The acts of November 9th 1938 were short sighted and stupid and they reminded me of the events that led to the Bonfires of the Vanities. This event was on February 7th 1497 instigated by Girolamo Savonarola. Two events started by stupid christians (Savonarola and Hitler) as such it is a setting of a stupid event that led to the burning of Qurans. The second event was covered by the BBC (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66052670) here we learn “Salwan Momika, said to be an Iraqi living in Sweden, set fire to a copy of Islam’s holy book outside Stockholm’s central mosque on Wednesday. The Quran burning was condemned by many Muslim-majority countries.” This set of a few thoughts in my mind. The first was ‘who on earth is Salman Momika?’ You see, Iraq has up to 10% that is not Muslim. This happens in many nations that has a muslim majority. So why would this person to set fire to a Quran? I am not trying to decipher it, but the irony is that the Iraqi people overtaking a Swedish Embassy whilst it was one of their own civilians to set fire to it in the first place is pretty ironic. There is a second setting that is less impressive. This is the second event that Sweden has and now if Turkey obstructs NATO entry, that is all on Sweden. They have the option to prosecute those who knowingly burn religious texts (any religious texts), they have the option to make Salwan Momika persona non grata, sending that person BACK to Iraq. At that moment Salwan’s goose is cooked, thoroughly. Something needs to be done. This is not about freedom of expression, this is about intentionally causing grief. I know that the matter is more pressing and more complex. Yet the larger station is that this was intentional, this is about someone pushing the buttons of Salwan Momika, the question is who and why. Is it Russia trying to set delays, it is a third party to create chaos? So many directions to go into and so many options to consider. The fact that someone OK’ed this is also an issue. They knew what would happen, there is no way that they did not. In the meantime Deutsche Welle informs us “Morocco has withdrawn its ambassador in protest”, which is not entirely unexpected. Sweden should expect a few more Muslim nations to be upset about the actions that were cause of them. This is not about freedom of expression, this is about creating mayhem and Sweden is letting this all happen threatening their ascendancy into NATO. There is no other way to see this. How this evolves is beyond me but Sweden is in for a few hard months and perhaps even more. But there is a larger station here and until we see a much more clear picture whatever I see is based on mostly speculation. 

On the upside, my mind came up with another game and another piece of IP, too early to tell where either will go, but the mind is firing on most thrusters.

Enjoy the weekend.

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Success of terrorism

That is the shout and plenty of you will not agree, I get that but lets look at the stage that we ourselves created. 25 years ago the Taliban was small, insignificant, just another wannabe party. Then Osama Bin Laden made a failed attempt on the US. The action was successful, the outcome less so. You see, he wanted the Twin towers to burn throughout the day and night. At night billions would see the twin towers burn and like torches illuminate New Yorkers, it would have been some sight. In one strike a demoralised America. The outcome was different, the towers collapsed and America got angry, really angry and you know what happened next. On May 2nd 2011 he was killed. One martyr and now the Taliban are in charge in Afghanistan. NATO and America lost. They got beat. The one word that got them there was ‘indecisiveness’, when they acted they did not. Actions I saw coming a mile away on 2005 onwards were ignored and the Taliban went largely asleep, only to awaken when America pulled out and within a week the Taliban had control of over 80% of all hardware, they took the country in less than a week. This you can look up, this is all there for the reading and now we are about to face the same setting again. The Taliban (via the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan) will do this again, now they are going for Pakistan. So what will be the epitaph of the west? “If only we acted” that is today’s lesson. The first part we get from ‘Pakistan mosque bombing survivors traumatised but undeterred’ (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/31/never-imagined-pakistans-blast-victims-mourned) we see all the grandstanding as we are told that “At least 100 people killed and more than 225 wounded in a suicide attack in the northwestern city of Peshawar” a mere 150 kilometres from Islamabad. We also get “The sheer scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable, This is no less than an attack on Pakistan.” We get this from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and we get his answer, we really do. But the USA and NATO showed the Taliban the path to success the last time around, as such this time around the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan knows what to do. They are willing to fight 25 years to get the job done. And there is a clear setting. For whatever reason Pakistan has been left weaker through years of sanctions and other actions. Now that there is a path to success the 

Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan are grabbing their options. So, as we also are given ‘What is behind the rising violent attacks in Pakistan?’ (At https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/2/2/what-is-behind-the-rising-attacks-in-pakistan) we need to realise that the quote “Pakistan decided to cooperate with the US when it invaded Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks. US forces targeted armed groups, including TTP, along the Pakistan-Afghan border for decades. Washington-Islamabad ties have remained cold since 2011, when al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. The US accused Pakistan of sheltering the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.” And all that could be true, but the aftermath was not properly taken care of and now that these forces are reinvigorated in part by the success that the Taliban has by governing Afghanistan these two players are ready to tackle a much larger target. They are ready to take the war for governing to Pakistan, which will also have larger impacts in India as well. The Ukrainian situation merely works FOR the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan as both the US forces and NATO forces and their equipment is spread too thin all over the theatres of action. We see the news of actions intensifying in Al Jazeera but the other places do not mention it as much, it is not sexy enough. But I reckon that this changes when the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan makes one successful blast in Islamabad. That will wake people up, but depending on the damage there it might be too late. I reckon that if Pakistan is left without serious resources the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan has a decent chance of changing governments by 2030, perhaps in time to attend festivities in Riyadh, that is the jackpot for them and if you say, this is one event, you would be right, but the setting is that TTP spokesperson Mohammad Khurasani has been blamed for more than 100 attacks since walking out of a ceasefire with the Pakistani government last November. 100 attacks in three months. That shows that they have resources, equipment and a mindset to resolve the issue with that plenty of people willing to be a martyr. Pakistan is in serious troubles and we need to take heed, because Afghanistan was merely one nation. Pakistan is the 23rd-largest worldwide in terms of GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP). According to a 2021 estimate, the country has a population of 227 million people (5th-largest worldwide). That is not merely a nation that is the jackpot price that the Taliban awaits getting. And make no mistake, this time around the indecisiveness of the USA and NATO will have a long lasting global impact. That is what we face. Feel free to check data, feel free to check the papers, but also realise that any new day of inactions merely helps the TTP (Pakistani Taliban) to get closer to THEIR goals and they are not YOUR goals. 

Enjoy the weekend!

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One issue, more to come

The first issue is known. I wrote about it on January 23rd (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/01/23/a-national-consequence/) it was ‘A national consequence’ where we see the events unfold between Turkey and Sweden. I want to side with Sweden, but this time they broke their own windows and now we see (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-64457233) ‘Swedish flag burnt in Jakarta amid Turkey Nato row’ it took a few days but now the anti-Sweden issues start rising and that is before Egypt and Pakistan wake up to the issues that Sweden allowed to be mainstream issues. As I personally see it Rasmus Paludan started this and is not only cause to Sweden being halted from entering NATO, Swedish tourists will do well to stay out of Islamic nations for a while. You all it freedom of expression, most others will call it targeted racism, but the Swedes will get all time to ponder that stage. As we get “Other anti-Sweden protests have also taken place in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Lebanon this month.” We see that Pakistan is awake, not sure about Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but that cannot be far away. Even as we are given “We urge the Indonesian government to not just condemn this, but to also join in boycotting everything Swedish,” said one protester in Jakarta, Wati Salam. What they [the Swedes] did was an insult to our holy scripture,” said another, Junaedi Abdilla.” We recognise the Swedish defence with “the burning does not reflect the government’s opinion” which came from their embassy in Djakarta, but the truth is that they allowed the extremist to start the fire and now it is an international problem. Rasmus Paludan played you and you let it escalate. For me it does not matter, at some point one of the Arabic nations will consider my script ‘How to assassinate a politician’ and that works well or me. It was designed with the Dutch politician Geert Wilders in mind, but it can be easily reset to Denmark (or Sweden) with Rasmus Paludan being the target. There is a consequence of insulting Islam and we need to accept that these consequences have far reaching consequences. Drawing the image of Muhammad, burning Qurans. These are mere two events and the far right keeps on going to these two places. They have been doing it for years and at some point something will have to give. So what happens when Iran and Saudi Arabia stops delivering oil? Will Europe pay premium for American oil, or will they consider Venezuela as a supplier? Something has to give and in this day and age, the available options are not out there in numbers. You did realise that, did you not?

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Pussies in the Pentagon?

OK, that is not really true, I get it. This all reminds me of an old joke. The doctor arrives in the morning asking the night nurse if something happened during the night. She says nothing, and then ohh yes, the hypochondriac they brought in during the night died. 

You think it is funny and of course to some extent it is, but there is another side. For decades we were kept in fear that Russia was the big bad, the great evil, the big fighter. Yet at present, a year after they tried to overtake Ukraine, a nation with the 21st largest armed forces is fighting off and winning against one of the top three nations (there will always dispute whether China, Russia or America is number one). Russia is becoming the defence joke of all time. Their army is demoralised and unable to keep any kind of battle tactic in play. They are for the most nothing more than rapers and war criminals. Their materials are buckling under minimum pressure and whatever is abandoned by Russian armed forces is repaired and added to the Ukrainian battle tactics. They rely on the Wagner mercenaries who are getting killed as easily as the Russian armed forces and their commander ran to Norway to defect. That is the army we all feared for decades. Or as some might say, their trains cannot run as they have flat tires. We see the introduction of horses carrying the wounded and in the demonstration the horse kicks the bed dummy of its saddle. The Russian army is failing on many fronts. Their missiles are not as they pound civilian targets again and again. And the west does very little. I saw week after week some debate on leopard 2 tanks. They are apparently finally shipping to Ukraine. 

So is the failing Russian army the best kept lie in NATO? There is no way that these failings were not on the visors of the CIA, and if they were not how massively did they fail? It is like the Dutchman Rob de Wijk, we need to acknowledge that Russia is a nuclear power (if that part works) so we need to tread carefully, but there is a difference to tread carefully and there is treading cautiously letting Russia get away with war crimes and crimes against humanity and the second part has been in play for much too long. 

To be honest, it would be an idea to try my contraption on one of the 38 nuclear plants Russia has. Three or four would be enough to show Russia what an energy crises really feels like. I got the idea from a snow globe, so it could be flawed, yet isn’t it better to test it in Russia at present? In Russia alone there are enough people willing to try that idea out. The setting is however not that simple. We see all the nations contributing weapons and armour, but at present for the most the Ukraine at present is alone when it comes to soldiers and I wonder why. We see Russia rely on Wagner mercenaries who are even less effective than the 122,000 soldiers they lost at present. 

And at present Russia is not stopping with their acts of terrorism, willing to allow others to lose even more. At what cost and can we afford to lose the losses that the Ukraine is losing? What more should we allow to lose? There comes a time that enough is enough and we are very far past that point, but the news is shouting, they are dangerous. Are they? When the FBI (certain people) aid Russian oligarchs (Oleg Deripaska) in certain matters, we have gone long past the time of catering and we are seemingly whoring for the Russian bear. It is now time to stop that and we all need to chip in, or we become a simple Russian knave forever at their back and call, I am certainly not willing to become one of those, are you?

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A national consequence

I saw the news earlier, but I had to consider a few things, one of them not so really pro-Turkey, another set to the stage of me wondering what was going on. It all started with the BBC article (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64360528) where we are given ‘Turkey condemns ‘vile’ Sweden Quran-burning protest’, and as I was wondering what was going on I saw “Rasmus Paludan, a politician from the far-right Stram Kurs”, it made me wonder what was needed. And then it occurred to me, why was Turkey the only one protesting? What if Egypt, the UAE, Iraq, optionally Iran, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Turkey all combined their protest? What if the EU had to deal with retributions from the OPEC nations closing the oil tap a little (500K barrels a day less for the EU), the other nations stopping import of Danish and Swedish goods? Would that wake them up? We might think that a person like Rasmus Paludan can insult islam again and again, but why allow it? We have rules and laws on religious prosecution, religious discrimination and should it end there? What if we make anti religious protests that continue to insult a religion (like burning a Quran) as well. Perhaps we need to state that they need to burn bibles as well, how does that go over?

I cannot claim that I have any solution here, but the levels of inactions that I see against Rasmus Paludan are getting out of hand. As such I think inaction becomes a larger issue and there is actually no real option, so what happens when the EU gets a 10% fuel rise, does that wake them up? I do not care what religion you like, and what religion you hate, but if you go as far as openly insulting that religion things get out of hand and it becomes time to act, inaction is no longer acceptable. If you allow a chaos and hatred seeder like Rasmus Paludan to continue, I reckon you get whatever is coming to you. I personally believe that when civility goes missing to this degree nations have failed on several levels. That whilst we need to realise that Sweden has 5%-10% Muslims, that is up to a million, Denmark has roughly the same percentage size, in numbers it is about half that size, but the population of Denmark is about 50% smaller. When you go out to insult that size of a population there needs to be consequences and even as people like Rasmus Paludan think that it is merely up to 10%, so that they can easily win such fights, they need to consider that there is a larger consequence and that needs to be shown to that kind of people and I reckon that Turkey alone cannot do that, it might block NATO access for Sweden, but a larger lesson needs to be taught and that is where OPEC comes in, where the bulk of its population is Muslim, so what happens when the tap is closed even just a little? For Sweden with its shortages it might become disastrous quickly, I am not sure about Denmark at present. 

Do we need to act? Yes, we all need to act. We cannot let people like Rasmus Paludan to spread hatred to the degree they do, the consequences are too dire to consider, as such I reckon it is time to fight such hatred by letting these nations be overwhelmed by shortages and make sure that everyone knows WHY this was done. You see if you hate muslims THAT much, you can get the oil from Russia or Venezuela or America. But that gets you into other deep waters, does it not? No matter how it plays out, we are too far beyond the levels of inaction we see now and consider that OPEC could close the tap by 1 million barrels of oil a day, or more. What does that give you? Not much and until summer that impact might end up being disastrous.

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Creating a nightmare

Yes, we do that at times. I use different ways, but the nightmare that formed in my mind is one that I wasn’t ready for and it shaped in one dream. You see, in intelligence there is a saying. If you want to sell a lie, cover it in truth. This is true for them and it is also true for story writers. Getting the audience invested in the story requires a stage where they can relate to and whatever truths they are given, the ones they an verify will work a lot quicker for the story.

So it started with the second thing I heard, but to each its place. The first thing I saw, source not recalled, mainly because I did not give it any value was “The US and UK are supporting Ukraine to stay in the war, but not enough to win” I cannot say who or why and I do not think it is true, but it stayed in the back of my mind. It was the second part that gave it a swing. The statement comes from a Dutchman named Rob de Wijk. He is the founder of The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS). He stated “Hopefully unfounded wishful thinking about Ukraine’s chances will give way to more realism. This is necessary because the West faces a tremendous dilemma: the worse Ukraine gets, the greater the chance that NATO countries will become increasingly involved in the war. The risk of a direct confrontation with NATO is also increasing. The heavy weapons that the NATO countries will then need limit the possibilities of supplying them to Ukraine now. It is now forcing Western leaders to consider how to end this war quickly.” That started the rollercoaster. You see Russia and its Kremlin people have a new stage. With the oligarchs mostly gone and loads of their fortunes now confiscated, the sugar daddies of the Kremlin are falling away. It leaves these people with whatever they have and that is not much, or it is massively below what they are used to. Their defence is still falling short, their military aren’t hacking it and local problems are increasing. 

So there we have greed driven Kremlinski’s and their need for more money, so how long until some of them strike a much larger deal with the Russian Mafia? The Russian mafia gets all kinds of support, in exchange for money and creation of Chaos all over the America’s and Europe. I reckon we can wait for that ghost to hit the brains of too many people. Now that is not enough, you see we need a plan to strike back and there I remembered a book by John Gardner called Golgotha, it was also released as the last trump around 1980. I believe that is where the scriptwriters from the New Avengers (Steed, Gambit and Purdey) with the second episode being House of Cards. That and Golgotha gives a new approach to sleepers. Added are within the team a seminole, the comm members are seminole. They are mostly outside of the team and their Mikasuki members are un-hackable. Not unlike the Navajo’s in WW2. But the larger setting is that these are 6 teams. One in the US, one in Canada, one in the UK and the other three all over Europe. They are facing Russians who are blackmailing all kinds of industry giants and governmental officials. Housing scams, grifting the rich and connected and blackmailing them in the process. 

A setting where we have a counter, a Cheyenne approach to hit and run, something the Russian mafia has never faced and their orders are simple. Kill all Russians and destroy everything they have. A new lever of John Wick, but a little more realistic and within their actions we see Russian death and mayhem. I reckon that the first studio picking up this idea will have a nice sweet advantage. Anyway there is a little more but not much. I got all these elements in mere hours (whilst I was snoring like a sawmill). 

Consider that nightmare whilst you leave your house untended for the day.

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As conditions changed

There is a movie, it was a movie that had impact. I was never in a military academy, but I do have military training, so the movie affected me in different ways. It was a good movie (any movie with George C Scott will become one) and it had Timothy Hutton from ordinary people. Tom Cruise is in it, but he was relatively unknown at the time. It might have been one of his first movies, before Legend and Risky Business.

But the movie was good (I thought it was), and it comes to mind that in this day and age (invasion of the Karens), the shift of values as well as the squandering of morality in the US there is actually a need to make a new version of it. Especially as we see Russian values move into every basement there is, the clear stage that some man will hold onto values is not too far out of place. I reckon that a movie like this in 2023/2024 could be a new start for a new generation of actors and actresses. In addition the changes that the military have faced over the last 4 decades might be an additional reason. There is actually no need to shoot this or base this on American settings. NATO an the EU would introduce a whole range of issues. The political field has changed from the rejection of military value to the embrace of its stability. There are plenty of reasons to do this, but a few to not do this either. It is more than a remaster, it has new storylines and new challenges. In all this the additional setting of an academy in shutdown could be seen as one of the main stories, but 4 decades have shown us that there is more. The gender setting has changed over 4 decades, as such this is not merely a male and a male led environment. The one part that I missed originally was the stage of why (really why) the shutdown was ordered. It was a little in the middle and now we could rectify it, or better stated, the filmmaker that takes up the gauntlet will be able to rectify it. A stage that launched Tom Cruise and Sean Penn is not something one should overlook and they did a lot more to stand out, but it was the beginning and TAPS excelled in a few ways, too bad it was never seen that way but there is hope that the new movie might also inspire the original to get more visibility.

Just a thought, do with it what you will. In the mean time, it is back to the drawing board. I just had a new idea for a video game. Perhaps I will be able to tell a lot more about it in tomorrows episode. 

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S.P.I.D.

Yes, we do love our acronyms. There was SPQR (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus), there is RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging), there is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) and my favourite SPID (Stupid people in defence). The last one gets a new level of non-intelligence when we see the BBC article ‘Nato investigates hacker sale of missile firm data’ (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62672184). The article alerts us to “Nato is assessing the impact of a data breach of classified military documents being sold by a hacker group online. The data includes blueprints of weapons being used by Nato allies in the Ukraine conflict.” And to show you just how stupid this is, lets take a look at ‘What did they not see?’, which I wrote on May 1st 2021. There I wrote “Ransomware gangs are now routinely targeting schools and hospitals. Hackers use malicious software to scramble and steal an organisation’s computer data”, in addition to this we have ‘Exposing lies?’ Which I wrote on July 23rd 2019. There I gave the readers “The FBI send their cyber experts and behold, they too agreed that it was North Korea. Even as we were extremely aware that they had no way of doing it, the FBI stood firm on their findings.” These elements matter. They matter because on July 30th 2021 I wrote ‘In retrospect’ where I gave the readers “It goes back when I designed an intrusion system that stayed one hop away from a router table between two points and to infect one of the routers to duplicate packages from that router on that path, one infection tended to not be enough, 2-3 infections needed to be made so that the traffic on that route between two points could be intercepted, I called it the Hop+1 solution, I came up with it whilst considering the non-Korean Sony hack. That  thought drove me to think of an approach to find the links.

So when we see ‘now’ (8 hours ago) that “The pan-European company, which is headquartered in France, said its information was hacked from a compromised external hard drive, adding that it was cooperating with authorities in Italy, where the data breach took place. It is understood investigations are centred around one of MBDA’s suppliers.” This is important because I learned basic issues like data at rest and data in movement A DECADE AGO, as such, how stupid were these people? And that is before we start digging into the ‘compromised external hard drive’ part, who got it compromised, where was IT, how did SE-Unix fail, or are these people even more stupid and they relied on Microsoft? So whilst we understand “a Nato spokesperson said: “We are assessing claims relating to data allegedly stolen from MBDA. We have no indication that any Nato network has been compromised.”” Yes, because admitting to a faulty network is a bad gig for all around. I reckon that this gets shovelled under any carpet as soon as possible, and the criminals? They get to fill their pockets. A stage that has a few issues from the get go and that is before we start digging into “Cyber criminals, operating on Russian and English forums, are selling 80GB of the stolen data for 15 Bitcoins (approximately £273,000) and claimed to have sold the stash to at least one unknown buyer so far.” There is still the issue whether the claim is true, who was the culprit and where did it all go? There are all kind of questions and that is not on the BBC or their fault. What one person claims is another person’s believe and yet another man’s doubt. But there is a rather large problem, the fact that there was an external hard drive, the fact that it allegedly was compromised implies that there are failing policies in place, there are failing IT divisions in play and there is a large amount of military IP in the open. There is a lack of questions and the fact that it is not front page news in EVERY paper is yet another matter. So when we take notice of “A former Nato official said: “There’s a lot of over-classification in Nato but these labels matter. They are applied by the originator of the information and NATO SECRET is not applied lightly.

“This really is the kind of information Nato doesn’t want out there in the public.”” We seem to see the change of a dance, what direction and which tempo is unknown to me. It gives a speculated view that there might be additional damage, but that is speculated and in light of one compromised device the question becomes how was this one undetected for so long and whatever more could be compromised? So when you take a dab at my hop+1 solution, consider that a compromised device indicates that some people of rank in that place were especially stupid. But that could just be me and I merely wonder how the relationship of mundane workers at place X versus the amount of SPID’s in that place becomes an interesting investigation. Merely because there are a whole range of players who would want that data and they are all willing to pay, so these hackers could end up with 10-50 times what they have now. 

Enjoy the day!

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