The October Surprise...

Tomorrow never comes until is too late

As a personal choice, I seldom “shill” my articles or the other publication, but I give myself the choice to do so under two, very specific circumstances. Topics that I think the majority of my readers here will benefit from reading such as cognitive warfare, or “breaking news”. The exact same everything will be presented in both publications, so perhaps a minority of the readers of Things Hidden will get two of the same e-mails.

Today, we have the second case. If you don’t read my other publication (Beyond Mathematical Odds), you will be missing some context, so I will summarize it now. The world finds itself in an oil crunch and we are at global capacity on refining said oil, there is NO, ZERO, spare refining capacity.

The biggest names on oil all state the energy market finds itself strained, and they should remain vigilant towards any further disruption. I, for reasons unknown, shared a text from the 1973 oil crisis in the other publication. One of the biggest complications of the oil crisis of 1973 was the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was invaded by its adversaries, it made a bad situation, worse.


Right on the 50-year anniversary of the war, Hamas made a (large-scale if we take into account the population) invasion into Israeli territory. It caught everyone by surprise, not only by the sheer scale but how effective and quick it was. In a matter of hours, Hamas and sympathizers took hold of large quantities of military hardware, overran many checkpoints, and military bases, and sadly enough made hundreds of victims, civilians, not military.

If you are old enough, you already come to expect the yearly October Surprise, events of a political or geopolitical nature, often unforeseen, some manufactured, that shift the entire landscape and attention of the masses. Right now social media is flooded with all levels of analysis, from armchair to “Intelligence expert”, and I write from the perspective the majority of my readers are well-informed, so I won’t take your time regurgitating common talking points.


One point brought up early by a few was the singular level of Intelligence failure, both American and Israeli on not foreseeing this attack. Israel is considered the world's second-largest surveillance state (China being first, America third), and its Intelligence service is known to be among the most advanced on the planet, even superior to America’s capabilities.

In the last years, some Spy-For-Hire Israeli companies have been caught in precarious positions because they are the embodiment of the mercenary spirit. You pay for the service or tools, you get the results, it doesn’t matter if you are spying on the bright-colored-haired student organizing protests or politicians. You get the Intel. Some of these tools developed by former Israeli spies are so advanced, that they remain effective, without proper answers.

How did both Intel services miss this ? Of course, the conspiracy comes in, and I am one to indulge in conspiracies from time to time, that the Israeli political elite let this happen so they could have an excuse to decimate Gaza. Another angle is their Prime Minister, suffering protests because of his unpopular choices, let this happen to unite the public under one banner. Nothing moves hearts and minds as the respective of an Israeli 9/11.

Another peculiar failure, one that has no conspiracy and is purely a strategic approach to war and necessity (the mother of all inventions) is the failure of Israel’s famous “Iron Dome”. For years Hamas has attempted to defeat this advanced air-defense system, to minimal success, until this fateful day. Two simple ways to overwhelm high-tech are:

• A low-tech approach

• Overwhelming numbers

Most attacks until now consisted of hundreds, if not thousands of cheaper rockets fired within the span of days. This time, 5000 rockets were fired within 20 minutes. We now also witness the effects of the Russia-Ukraine war, and the changes it brings to modern warfare (what is colloquially referred to now as The Alibaba War). Cheap, easy to produce/order, easier to weaponize drones dropping ordinance on unsuspected combatants.

Independent of the reasons for such historical failure of a leading Intelligence service, the outcomes were somewhat predictable, the Israeli government declared war, responding quickly and hitting targets that were flagged as Hamas hideouts, gathering support from most Western countries, and opposition from Middle Eastern ones. And of course, potentially baiting the US into another Middle Eastern conflict, blaming Iran, which in all truth the most likely culprit. The following is most likely the real reason Iran backed and helped to plan this attack over (most likely) weeks…

Saudi Arabia Willing to Raise Oil Output to Help Secure Israel Deal

Riyadh signaled to White House it would act if crude prices are too high to win goodwill in Congress

It is in the best interest of Iran to disrupt any normalization of relationships between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a rather suggestive byproduct is almost cementing current higher oil prices and tighter supply. If conflict spills throughout the region it can send both oil and global trade into absolute chaos, dwarfing the Suez Canal mishap of yesteryear when talking logistics, it will also spill over to Africa, and Europe, affect the flow of migration, and the rest will history as they say.

The US government has already agreed on sending aid towards Israel, and munitions. Everything goes exactly as planned by a few, while delving the rest of the planet into chaos, in a moment synthetic data and cognitive warfare weapons are being deployed Left and Right on social media, and discerning information is almost a full-time job in itself.

And who comes out laughing and better positioned after the dust settles, and it is possible to see through the smoke ? China. It surely looks as if China is operating from the shadows, using every possible proxy conflict to drain the US of resources and weaponry, so no possible, meaningful, or real opposition will happen when they decide to take Taiwan. As things stand now, saying China might waltz into Taiwan unopposed is not an exaggeration.

I personally don’t think the vast majority of elites know what they are doing, and this elite-centric decision-making and societal structuring is failing at breakneck speed. Such lack of foresight, hubris, and a certain degree of incompetence at every level add to an equation with a simple outcome. “Opportunistic Chaos”.

As a completely unrelated note, I find it rather interesting, to not say spooky that the last trailer for the new Call of Duty (Modern Warfare III, a remake) used the song Six Days War as its trailer theme. In the original games, Makarov is a Russian Ultra-Nationalist who, besides a lot of horrendous acts of unconventional war, ran false flag operations.

I often wonder who is the real world Makarov… I will leave my additional modern culture rambling to the cognitive/memetic warfare-centered articles.