This September was supposed to be RebootCamp2025, where we’d reprise the first month this Substack was active back in 2023, learning how to batten down your hatches, and then setting sail in less than optimal conditions. Recall what it says right there in the description of this site:
Tactics, techniques & procedures (TTP) for an increasingly unsafe world.
We started September trying to figure out if the cabinet was going to invoke the 25th Amendment. We had to figure out who was responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and we arrived at Finding Out Starring Nick Fuentes. Then we survived Just Another Non-Rapture. Capping the month off with whatever is happening tomorrow at Quantico, there was simply no time to tend to the mundane.
So today we’re going to mourn our stillborn Q4 project - P.I.A.T., short for People Investigating Annoying Tankies. This would have been akin to the Malign Influence Operations Safari, but I’m not going to be jabbing the fringe left while the administration is actively hunting them.
And what even do you people want for Q4? I mean besides benzodiazepines and permission to build pillow forts as adults?
Attention Conservation Notice:
Our plan for Q4 has been OBE - overtaken by events. The top ten articles for this site that follow this post are looking pretty prescient. Maybe building pillow forts is precisely what you, constant reader, need the most?
PIAT:
I guess maybe PIAT now stands for Previously Interesting Analytical Task. We’ve got that cache of information from MIOS: Iran’s PressTV, and if you had insight into that world (I do) there’s stuff in there to explore. I don’t think letting Iranian influence ops run wild is a good thing, but nobody asks me until after the fact, when they ought to be listening closely years before events begin to unfold.
This shutting out of hostile foreign actors would have made sense at any point in the fifteen years leading up to 2025. Now? Things have obviously changed, even if the mass of society is still just at the milling around chattering stage, rather than taking actions to deal with this brave new world.
Pondering Predators:
Have a listen to Nate Hagens on society & psychopaths.
One in a hundred human males are clinical psychopaths, while only about one in a thousand women qualify. Tolerating this in times of peace and plenty is the evolutionary price we pay for having such people handy when times are tough.
Clinical psychopaths are uniformly bad - that’s implicit in the “clinical” part. But those of us on that long tail are not wholly useless. The classic example of this? Trauma surgeons. “Good, we’re got most of the pieces and blood is still pumping, let’s get to work stitching this fellow back together.”
I did use the collective “us” there. I’ve taken a couple of those tests. I’m often bold and disinhibited. I’d have said “lacking a functional sense of self preservation” rather than “immunity to stress”. I lack the circuit breaker that keeps most people out of trouble, which is why closing sentences in articles here sometimes begin with “I don’t expect any of you to do what I did, but …” Luckily the combination of my fundamental nature, a small town upbringing, long term sobriety, and Buddhism keep me clear of the socially unacceptable portion of that spectrum.
So I am much more like Sheriff Seth Bullock than crime boss Al Swearengen …
Punishing Predators:
I am quite pleased with my role as Brand Defense Strategist for Cicada 3301. The more I learn of what happened there, the more I enjoy my overwatch duties. There was some initial stuff to do regarding Schoenberger vs. Dilley, then I had to go sneak around and arrange some things to my liking, and now we’re in a wait and see period. That some of the players once personally troubled me is just the cherry on top.
I’m supposed to be retired, at least in a (geo)political sense. But since what I do is self directed, informal, weak ties network connector stuff, it’s nothing like being a cog in the machine. If you’re a repairman at a factory for a multinational, you retire, you get a nice watch, a going away party. If you’re a fixer, you get a squirming mass of loose ends and a gap in your life like a newly removed tooth. So I periodically hear something like this from any number of associates.
What the heck are you thinking? That doesn’t sound very retired to me. Maybe that’s none of your business now, didja ever consider that?
And thusly I must confess that the Red Sparrow Reality may remain a squirming loose end. When you put a message in a bottle, which is what I decided to do, you don’t get a read receipt. Given causes and conditions at this time, I will probably never know the outcome. Perhaps the problem was well understood and nothing will be done because there’s a fly on the wall somewhere. I guess “Maybe, but no way to be sure” is absolutely a proper SVR story ending. So it goes.
So am I constrained, like a railroad conductor whose retirement is building a model that takes up his entire basement. I roam the perimeter of my commercial endeavors, making the watchmen nervous every time I’m noticed to be quiet and focused on something that’s not on the calendar.
All that’s left of the old days is this sad little pack of disordered characters, whose tiny little minds can’t open wide enough to get any purchase on Cicada 3301. I finally lured the #Weird Bugs crew into watching them flail, so I don’t even have to look for myself, unless I hear some new failure mode is being revealed. And social media junkies can’t shut up, not even to save their futures, so there have been periodic slips.
Q4 Plans:
So what do we do with ourselves for the end of 2025? We’ve set aside PIAT, so there’s no expanse of puzzles to examine, no review of the tools introduced in 2023. There will be a lot of chaos, that’s obvious, and that’s always good fodder for observation posts. But I feel strongly we should be doing SOMETHING for the sake of safety & readiness.
I think here is something I can do that fits with my commercial duties and which benefits you guys, too. I am doing Personal & Organization Safety Consults, that’s just me, a thing I’m doing while the pipeline fills for the other stuff. I think what makes sense for the conditions and readership here would be to focus on security rituals for the devices and systems everybody uses. This means:
Android
iPhone
Mac
Windows
Phone network
Home & away wifi
Email services
Chat services
Device loss, seizure, theft, backup issues
And we’ll exclude some of the more technical stuff we used to do around here:
Virtualization with VirtualBox, Parallels, VMware, Proxmox.
Specialized systems like GrapheneOS and Qubes.
Esoteric networks like Tailscale and Tor.
Conclusion:
As I write this I’m thinking about the bridge scene in Titanic. Some things are obviously inevitable, but not everyone gets to know at the same time. We’ve been putting observations into W.O.P.R. but if you know history you don’t need a GPT to figure out what’s happening in Europe. Some say Narva, some say Suwałki, there are theoretical discussions about other moves, things that the combination of OSINT and personal connections do not reveal. It was ever the linkup to Kaliningrad during the Cold War, but I’m not sure
This will appear on the 29th, a day before the purported rousing speech Secretary Hegseth will give at Quantico. Nobody above an E5 believes that is what is happening. The consensus seems to be the firing of many, and likely arrest of at least some of our generals. A huge readiness gap favors a Russian move in that moment. We’re not just pivoting to homeland defense, this seems like a sellout of our allies in the works.
I didn’t bother to bookmark, but I saw a piece about Portland antifascists being advised to delete everything and go to ground. If you’re a regular reader here you know I preach readiness and worst case estimates. The time to begin preparing for this week, and what will come after, is not this Monday. That day was September 4th, 2023, the first Monday this Substack was active.
If you start today and work diligently you might be ready for October of 2026.
Background:
Tankies are pro-Kremlin lefties, it’s an archaic term from the time when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The guy in the foreground has a Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank, a British WWII weapon that filled a role similar to the American bazooka, but it’s a spigot mortar, a propulsion method that disappeared from man portable weapons two generations ago. The world remembers this due to a line in a famous scene in A Bridge Too Far, which premiered just a few years after the last PIATs were retired by India.
