Category Archives: History

The Base Case: Russian Assets Burned San Francisco Power Grid

December 3rd, Rinaldo Nazzaro—founder of The Base, ex-Pentagon contractor, current St. Petersburg resident, alleged Russian intelligence asset—released an audio message calling for “acceleration teams” to conduct “targeted attacks on essential infrastructure” in the United States.

December 20-21, a fire at PG&E’s Mission Street substation knocked out power to 130,000 San Francisco customers. One of the largest urban blackouts San Francisco has experienced.

The Base, fundamentally a Nazi group operated from Russia, is a designated terrorist organization in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union.

The Base, a Nazi terror group banned in most countries but not the USA, marches through Columbus, Ohio. Source: USA Today and JPost

It is not designated in the United States.

The FBI under President Trump, as a matter of historical fact, is acting today like how President Wilson did 100 years ago. Director Patel has expressly refused to investigate foreign assets and domestic terrorists threatening Americans:

…openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists.

The following is an analytical case that San Francisco just experienced a Russian-directed domestic (insider) infrastructure attack.


Context

The Bay Area has been hit by sophisticated infrastructure attacks for sixteen years. None of the related and wider major incidents have been solved:

  • 2009: Coordinated fiber optic cuts at four locations. 52,000 customers affected, 911 knocked out across three counties. Required specialized tools, heavy equipment, knowledge of underground vault locations. $250,000 reward. Never solved.
  • 2013: Metcalf substation. Fiber cables cut first, then 100+ rifle rounds fired at 17 transformers over 19 minutes. $15 million in damage. DHS assessed “likely an insider.” $250,000 reward. Never solved.
  • 2014-2015: Eleven to fourteen fiber optic cuts over 14 months. Attackers dressed as telecom workers. FBI insisted attacks were “not linked” to Metcalf despite identical methods. Never solved.
  • 2022: Moore County, North Carolina. Two substations hit with rifle fire. 45,000 without power for five days. One woman died when her oxygen machine failed. DHS had issued a warning three days prior. $100,000 reward. Never solved.

The attacks that have been solved share a common feature: amateur tradecraft.

Peter Karasev googled “explosive materials” and “infrastructure attacks” before bombing two PG&E transformers—and got ten years. The Washington Christmas attack was an ATM robbery scheme. Brandon Russell recruited a co-conspirator who turned out to be an informant.

Professional operations with insider knowledge remain ghosts.

Europe Knows

Europe is experiencing identical attacks. The difference: they’re investigating.

Russian sabotage operations in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Targets include energy infrastructure, communications cables, defense manufacturing, and transportation systems.

The operational signature matches: low-tech, high-impact, plausible deniability, locally recruited perpetrators, communications cut before primary attacks.

The institutional response differs entirely. European governments attribute attacks to GRU coordination. They arrest perpetrators. They designate The Base as terrorists. NATO describes the threat level as “record high.”

The United States has the same attack signature, the same organization openly calling for infrastructure attacks, the same founder operating from Russian soil—and the FBI response is to deprioritize.

The Base is Foreign Run Domestic Terrorism

The Base recruits through a Russian email address. It operates cells in Appalachia, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest—photos from 2025 show masked men with rifles and skull masks in American forests. Its Ukrainian wing claimed the July assassination of an intelligence officer in Kyiv. Its Spanish cell was just rolled up by Europol.

Nazzaro’s December audio was explicit:

Our long-term strategic goal is to accomplish something similar to what al-Qaida and IS accomplished in Syria. Form an organized, armed insurgency to take and hold territory.

He named only two countries with the “necessary prerequisites”: Ukraine and the United States.

The VKontakte post was operational doctrine:

…targeted attacks on essential infrastructure and resources [that] contribute to the political fragmentation of the country over time if the attacks remain consistent.

Less than three weeks later, 130,000 San Francisco customers lost power.

American Accountability Gap

PG&E’s response to the December 20th fire: hire Exponent.

Exponent is the infamous firm that defended tobacco companies, manufactured doubt about asbestos to deny cancer, and specializes in producing uncertainty for clients facing liability. They have even argued, to block crash victim claims, that seatbelts don’t reduce injuries. Exponent means this is not an investigation. This is PG&E narrative preparation, where the underlying pattern is clear:

  • The infrastructure is undefended (55,000 substations, effectively zero guards)
  • The threats are explicit (Nazzaro’s audio, The Base’s VKontakte posts)
  • The agency responsible has been captured (FBI deprioritizing under Patel)
  • The accountability mechanism has been privatized (Exponent)

We know the 1990 OTA (Putin KGB timeframe) found that losing three substations could blackout a region. A later leaked FERC assessment concluded losing nine substations plus a transformer manufacturer would collapse the entire grid for eighteen months.

We know from industry reports that intentional infrastructure attacks exceeded 15,000 incidents between June 2024 and June 2025 (Putin President timeframe).

We know The Base, a Nazi front group for Russian assets, called for exactly this kind of attack, from Russian soil, days before it happened.

Back to Preparedness Day

On July 22, 1916, a bomb exploded during San Francisco’s Preparedness Day parade, killing ten people. The attack was never solved.

Source: SFGate

But it was used.

Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, political organizers with no connection to the bombing, were targeted and convicted by President Wilson’s corrupted justice department on fabricated evidence and unfairly imprisoned for decades.

The institutional utility of the unsolved attack, for President Wilson, was it could be attributed to whoever served under his white nationalist agenda, which aligned at the time with German assets infiltrating America to bomb infrastructure.

Screen capture from 1915 movie “Birth of a Nation”, which President Wilson screened at the White House to restart the KKK and incite violence across America

The December 2025 blackout will likely follow the same trajectory.

Not solved, but enabled and used.

Exponent’s track record speaks for itself: 500 automotive lawsuits, zero findings of defect. Over $100 million from Ford for litigation defense. Tobacco industry work in the 1990s to keep people smoking. It will produce a shallow report that creates reasonable doubt about any specific cause to protect PG&E from any real investigation. The FBI will no longer hunt Nazis while ignoring The Base’s explicit calls for this exact attack. The pattern of unsolved professional operations is expected to continue under Trump’s puppet-like performances.

So don’t bother asking whether we can prove The Base conducted this specific attack or any others.

Ask instead why is a Nazi group openly calling for American infrastructure attacks from Russian territory, through Russian communications channels, led by an alleged Russian intelligence asset while sitting undesignated as a terrorist organization in the country that it explicitly targets.

The answer is the same as it was in 1916 when the KKK ran the White House as “America First”: the unsolved attack by foreign assets is more useful than the solved one.

The conventional narrative frames President Wilson and Henry Ford as naive pacifists, when they were the exact opposite. Ford refused to sell munitions to Britain and France, and “disappeared” millions in taxpayer money, while Germany couldn’t buy anyway due to the blockade; proving functional support aligned with the German war machine.

Ford received over $21 million in government contracts during WWI and delivered effectively nothing; $14 million for Eagle boats that were “either useless or not constructed,” $1.3 million for tractors never delivered, $5.5 million for spare parts never delivered. That’s not pacifism, because it’s sabotage through contract fraud, exactly paralleling what German military intelligence was doing with shell companies during the same period. Ford redirected $30,000 into Wilson’s 1916 re-election campaign at Joe Tumulty’s personal request, which nobody denied when challenged in the Congressional Record.

The history clearly shows that Wilson and Ford actively undermined America by sabotaging infrastructure for Allied preparedness, even enabling German agents to bomb San Francisco to kill Americans. Wilson knew. He was briefed. His fake “neutrality” rhetoric, funded by Ford, was disinformation to cover their foreign alignments.

Woodrow Wilson adopted the 1880s nativist slogan “America First” for his 1915 Presidential campaign and soon after the infamous white robe costumes appeared, based on the film “Birth of a Nation” that he heavily promoted to white-only audiences.
Nick Fuentes, a self-admitted white supremacist, claims MAGA means that 40% of staff in the White House are America First.

The “America First” administrations, both then and now, know foreign-directed sabotage is spreading, suppress investigations, and use overheated “immigrant” rhetoric to obscure right-wing extremist domestic terror cells operating with impunity.

Bitchin’ Camaro From Cambodia to the Caribbean: American Production of War Criminals

Joe – Uh, how you gonna get down to the shore?
Rod – Funny you should ask, I’ve got a car now.
Joe – Oh wow, how’d you get a car?
Rod – Oh my parents drove it up here from the Bahamas.
Joe – You’re kidding!
Rod – I must be, the Bahamas are islands, okay, the important thing now, is that you ask me what kind of car I have.
Joe – Uh, what kinda car do ya’ got?
Rod – I’ve got a BITCHIN CAMARO!

The most dangerous actors aren’t the incompetent or the overtly malicious, they’re the genuinely skilled professionals who understand that what they’re doing serves no legitimate purpose but continue doing it well.

Admiral Holsey stepping down suggests at least one officer has decided not to be that person.

Alvin Holsey, Admiral Who Oversaw Boat Strikes Off Venezuela’s Coast, Retires: The admiral had abruptly announced that he would step down as the head of the U.S. Southern Command.

Understanding why requires looking back fifty years.

Creighton Abrams was arguably the most capable American tactical commander since Ulysses Grant. Both demonstrated mastery of logistics, both operated under severe political constraints, and both accepted operational risks their predecessors had avoided.

26th December 1944 Commanding 37th Tank Battalion, CCR, 4th Armoured Division, Lt. Colonel Abrams requested he be allowed to dash his Sherman tanks through Assenois to breach German defenses and reach Bastogne to relieve the surrounded 101st Airborne. Abrams was right, and for this Third US Army Commander, General George S. Patton called him the “world champion” tank commander.

A critical difference between these two men lay in civil-military alignment: Grant’s civilian leadership shared his strategic objectives, while Abrams served an administration whose domestic political imperatives systematically undermined coherent strategy.

The constitutional position on Abrams’ tactical work under President Nixon is unambiguous. Congress never authorised military operations in Cambodia; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution’s writ extended to Vietnam alone. More significantly, the military maintained dual reporting systems that recorded ordnance falling on South Vietnamese coordinates when it actually struck Cambodian territory.

This went far beyond unauthorised action into being a deliberate falsification designed to deceive the branch constitutionally empowered to declare war.

A crime.

It occurred within a broader pattern: Nixon had intervened to obstruct the 1968 Paris peace negotiations to secure electoral advantage, then required the war’s continuation through 1972 for re-election. American casualties served the GOP’s domestic political purposes, literally throwing soldiers’ lives away to win votes.

Abrams’ role was executing Nixon’s strategically incoherent and illegal policies whose consequences extended far beyond military failure. The destabilisation of Cambodia, while not solely attributable to American mistakes, was materially accelerated by it, contributing to state collapse that enabled Khmer Rouge consolidation and genocide.

The Khmer Rouge were teenagers wielding the latest weapons technology to destroy a country from within, a pattern I’ve traced to DOGE staff weaponizing AI to systematically dismantle American state capacity. Two million died from Pol Pot; current projections suggest two million a year dead from DOGE cuts.

Abrams’s culpability should not be reduced to mere order-following. The Abrams Tapes, declassified two decades after his death, demonstrate that he understood the conflict was “basically a political contest.” His failure was therefore not one of comprehension but of institutional role: generals propose military solutions because military solutions are what generals are positioned to propose. His legitimate concern, that American withdrawal was outpacing South Vietnamese military capacity, was correct. His proposed remedy, however, reflected the persistent American misapprehension that a complex insurgency with deep political roots could be addressed through conventional operations against geographic sanctuaries.

The hunt for COSVN epitomised this confusion. American planners conceived of a simplistic targetable headquarters, a “jungle Pentagon”, despite evidence they faced a distributed network of cadres. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan compounded this Americanization error by treating military capability as the binding constraint when the fundamental problem was political legitimacy. The Saigon government’s inability to command popular loyalty was never a problem that American firepower could resolve, especially from 90,000 feet.

The sixty-day operational limit also telegraphed the campaign’s own negation plan. Any adversary capable of basic strategic patience would disperse, wait, and return on schedule. That anyone would claim American success was measurable in captured rice and destroyed bunkers merely confirmed total absence of meaningful strategic metrics. The North Vietnamese simply relocated deeper into Cambodia, the Cambodian state authority collapsed further, and so the Khmer Rouge recruitment accelerated.

Most damning is how the promised “breathing room” was a shrewd lie, exposing the American Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon as a delusional sycophant. His saccharin cables consistently contradicted accurate CIA assessments and field reporting, to give Nixon what he wanted to hear instead of reality. The Paris agreement that Nixon celebrated as his gift to the world was immediately ignored and within months the North Vietnamese were rolling into Saigon after domestic American backlash had accelerated withdrawal timelines.

None of this absolves Hanoi’s strategic choices, Thieu’s venality, or the Khmer Rouge’s ideological pathology. It shows American ideological intervention created conditions that other actors easily exploited. Whether Abrams’s resignation, like Holsey’s, or public dissent would have altered this trajectory is unknowable. What remains clear is that his silence stands as complicity in an illegal campaign whose strategic bankruptcy he understood.

Nixon knew peace talks were potentially ending the war in 1968 but he convinced America to elect him by scuttling them. He repeatedly lied to the public and to South Vietnam to take power, which meant expansion and prolonging of war while declaring himself the anti-war leader. Tens of thousands more Americans were killed needlessly by him, just to abruptly abandon South Vietnam and let it fall catastrophically in 1975.

Cambodia’s genocide followed.

Abrams had to hide his knowledge that the President’s war plan was strategically bankrupt. Today Hegseth doesn’t have to hide anything because his audience doesn’t care.

The cruelty is the point now; the incompetence is a feature. You don’t need competent complicity when there’s no accountability mechanism left to evade. You just do the crimes, lie about them badly, contradict yourself publicly, and get rewarded because the crimes signal tribal loyalty.

The system that produced Abrams’s silence has decayed into one that produces Hegseth.

Admiral Holsey walked away. Under Trump there will always be someone who won’t.

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I ran over my neighbors
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Now I’m in all the papers

My folks bought me a bitchin’ Camaro
With no insurance to match
So if I happen to run you down
Please don’t leave a scratch

I ran over some old lady
One night at the county fair
And I didn’t get arrested
Because my dad’s the mayor

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Donuts on your lawn
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Tony Orlando and Dawn

When I drive past the kids
They all spit and cuss
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And they have to ride the bus

So you’d better get out of my way
When I come through your yard
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And an Exxon credit card

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Hey man where ya headed?
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I don’t want unleaded

“Bitchin’ Camaro” by the Dead Milkmen, released on their debut album “Big Lizard in My Backyard” (1985).

Remembering the Encryption of Painter Rudolph Wacker

The remarkable thing about the paintings of Rudolph Wacker may be how unremarkably good they are (“New Objectivity”).

Sitting with friends the other day, I noticed every single person was saying their favorite painting of a set on the wall was by Wacker.

Winter Landscape, 1934. Rudolf Wacker

I mean, it’s like he had a way of capturing a scene in such an authentic way as to beg the question of why it’s even a scene. It’s a literal depiction of nothing in particular, a pleasing still life “magic of the everyday” that draws you in to wonder why.

During the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Rudolf Wacker created encrypted still lifes, which, in a subtle manner, allow us to relate to the abysses and threats of the time.

The Nazis certainly didn’t appreciate his perspective, as they tortured Wacker to death in 1939.

MIT Operationalizes CIA Robotic Insects: Precision Lethality at Paperclip Scale

MIT has materialized what the CIA has wanted since early in the Cold War: deniable, unattributable, precision lethality.

…tiny flying robots could be deployed to aid in the search for survivors trapped beneath the rubble after a devastating earthquake. Like real insects, these robots could flit through tight spaces larger robots can’t reach, while simultaneously dodging stationary obstacles and pieces of falling rubble. So far, aerial microrobots have only been able to fly slowly along smooth trajectories, far from the swift, agile flight of real insects — until now. MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can fly with speed and agility that is comparable to their biological counterparts.

Insect sized robots at MIT, offering autonomous targeted micro lethality. Reminiscent of 2018 Micro Air Vehicle Lab (MAVLab) bird-sized versions. Source: MIT

The “humanitarian” framing is the… beard. All the “cameras and sensors” they mention as “future work” is sheer euphemism. A payload at this scale doesn’t need to be explosive; a guided needle, a directed toxin, a micro-charge at close range even inside of critical infrastructure.

The evolution from surveillance drone to armed drone to precision kinetic strike happened over roughly two decades. In terms of recent Lebanon and Caribbean strikes, we’re talking about people who market the R9X Hellfire (“Ninja”) blades as precision reducing collateral damage — amputation and destruction as humanitarian language.

Same rhetorical pattern here.

The argument that smaller and more precise is more ethical has been the justification for every escalation in targeted killing capability starting even before “Tarzon” (TAllboy, Range and aZimuth ONly) bombs or shoulder-fired mini-nuclear “Davy Crockett” rockets were claimed to be how America should win the Korean War cleanly.

The American racial encoding of this “frontier” weapon named after a genocidal folk hero (M28/M29 Davy Crockett) entered service in May 1961. It was promoted as a “surgical” strike, in photos like this one, where a white soldier poses as a “big dick” who needs soldiers of color to load and unload him. The Crockett rocket fired an “atomic watermelon” with 20 tons radioactive TNT equivalent up to 3 miles away.

This new technology announcement compresses the “precision” death timeline even more significantly because:

  • Scale advantage: A paperclip-weight robot is essentially undetectable. No radar signature. Visual acquisition nearly impossible.
  • Penetration capability: Explicitly designed to go where “traditional quadcopters can’t” — through rubble, gaps, screens, gates, grills, broken windows
  • Autonomous targeting: The saccade movement they’re celebrating mimics how insects localize and identify — that’s targeting behavior, not just navigation

And look at the funding: Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The search-and-rescue framing is a dual-use press release. The money trail tells you the most likely uses and customers.

The CIA failed in the 1970s to get their Insectothopter (let alone robotic birds of Project Aquiline) operational, for precisely the reason this MIT team solved: crosswind instability.

The Insectothopter. Source: CIA Archives

The 1970s robotic dragonfly design couldn’t handle more than a light breeze, an important context for everything MIT just demonstrated:

  • Wind disturbances of >1 m/s handled
  • Aggressive maneuvers with <5cm trajectory deviation
  • Autonomous control (AI) architecture that compresses decision-making to distributed and real-time

Sarah Bergbreiter explicitly notes in the news release by MIT that while the controller still runs externally, they’ve demonstrated onboard execution.

“This work is especially impressive because these robots still perform precise flips and fast turns despite the large uncertainties that come from relatively large fabrication tolerances in small-scale manufacturing, wind gusts of more than 1 meter per second, and even its power tether wrapping around the robot as it performs repeated flips,” says Sarah Bergbreiter, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved with this work. “Although the controller currently runs on an external computer rather than onboard the robot, the authors demonstrate that similar, but less precise, control policies may be feasible even with the more limited computation available on an insect-scale robot. This is exciting because it points toward future insect-scale robots with agility approaching that of their biological counterparts,” she adds.

That’s the tell.

External computation means tethered, lab-bound demonstrations with oversight. Onboard computation means operational without oversight. She’s essentially confirming a roadmap to fly around and find out.

Search-and-rescue framing isn’t just cover for academic institutions appropriating funds, it’s how the Lincoln Laboratory gets graduate students to create weapons without moral injury or considering what happened when MIT’s death machines, known as Operation Igloo White, illegally destroyed Cambodia (Operation Menu).

Scene from “Bugging the Battlefield” by National Archives and Records Administration, 1969
Cambodia Genocide Map: US Bombing Points 1965-73, Source: Yale