A Bridge Too Far
O say, why can't you see?
Hey, everybody!
So you remember last February, when a train loaded with 100,000 gallons of toxic chemicals derailed and burned for days? Remember how the Ohio governor ordered the still intact portions of the train to be blown up with shape charges, sending up an mushroom cloud of ominous black smoke? Remember how the EPA just kind of yawned about it all?
Remember the bizarre, contradictory and incompetent evacuation orders? The massive fish kills in the weeks to follow? All those woodland creatures staggering about residential hoods in a sickly daze? The reports of strange rashes and lingering chemical smells? The spikes in cancer rates? Remember?
Ooh, and remember how the bold investigative journalists of our noble Fourth Estate doggedly pursued this crazy story, then and now? How they exposed evidence that the derailment and the government’s response sparked off a trio of major biomedical, ecological and agricultural crises, which persist to this day?
Hahaha!
Me neither. Just pulling your leg.
Oh, and you remember Lahaina, Hawaii: that paradise of insanely valuable beachfront property, rudely occupied by a bunch of pesky natives, blue collar honkies and other useless eaters? Remember how that massive and unprecedented firestorm just whipped up out of nowhere, because-climate-change-and-grass-and-stuff?
And remember the multitude of eyewitnesses who claimed their vehicles were forced to turn back towards the inferno, by armed men who barricaded major routes of egress?
And do you remember how the water needed to fight those flames was held up in committee by a slimy bureaucrat, who was basically William Atherton’s villain from Ghostbusters in ESG form?
Remember how that “wildfire” killed over a hundred people, and caused 5 billion dollars in structural damage that conveniently managed to drive off all those underinsured survivors? Remember all the literal fire sales and “disaster capitalism” land grabs that flowed in its wake?
How about the Canadian version of the “wildfires”? Or the Chinese Spy Balloon? Or the Nord Stream pipeline bombing? Or the Cl0p hack of the MOVEit file transfer platform, in which the health, education and financial data of 2,770 organizations and 94,944,377 individuals was stolen by unknown actors?1
Hello? Buhler?
Does any of this shit ring a bell?
More importantly, do you remember any of the “official” narratives that emerged from these and other events.2
Does anyone notice an almost ritualistic pattern, snaking through all of this unbelievable bullshit? A kind of fire-and-forget tactic, by which everyone seems to file away reasonable questions about reality on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis?
If I had to name it, I’d call it the Normality Spell. While the casting elements and effects vary somewhat, it could be boiled down to the following statement:
Everything is under control.
Whatever the latest disaster may be, no matter the extent of the immediate damage and crippling network effects, it is nothing to worry your pretty little heads about. It was just an unfortunate accident. Or it was Climate Change. Or both. The experts are in charge, here.
And coincidentally, they always just happen to agree with each other about the answer, which also happens to buttress whichever answer best serves the regime at the moment. Just like all good experts have always done!
Which brings us to Baltimore. “Charm City” as it’s often called.
And what better place to cast a spell?
Oh say can you see,
By the dawn’s early light?
I’m not sure how many of you have reviewed the raw footage above, which includes both multiple power outages and a sharp change in bearing just prior to collision. All of the regime media presentations I’ve seen so far have omitted these details, only starting their clips after the turn is already completed.
You can see this editing trick in action, starting at 0:22 of the “Special Report” below.
Within a few short hours of the incident, the alphabet agencies (including the NSA’s cybersecurity division) ruled out a cyberattack. Hadn’t even had the chance to review the onboard data yet, or even to do basic forensics on the wreckage, or to interview the crew. No need, because…
Everything is under control.
Makes sense. After all, there’s just no way a group of highly motivated black hats could possibly hack the Dali’s VSAT, tunnel into her onboard network, and start fucking around with her firmware and/or seizing control of various subsystems. That’s just science fiction, dude, c’mon!
Besides, even if they could do all that, the Dali’s employer, shipping giant Maersk, is internationally regarded as paragon of network securiWHOOOOPS!
In 2017, one of the most widespread and devastating cyberattacks was perpetrated against worldwide shipping giant Maersk. It started on a quiet afternoon in June, when staffers began seeing messages advising them that their file systems were being repaired, while others received the message that their important files had been encrypted. A payment of $300 in bitcoin was demanded for the encryption key.
This set off a panic in Maersk headquarters; entry systems and phone networks had been rendered useless by the apparent malware spreading rapidly throughout the company’s network and beyond. By the end of the day, their networks had been so deeply corrupted that the company simply shut down. This was no small feat, however; Maersk is a global shipping titan, responsible for 76 ports around the globe, more than 800 vessels carrying all manner of goods and about one-fifth of global trade. This entire enterprise was brought to its knees by a mystery malware that had spread to every Maersk location across the globe and Maersk wasn’t even the target.
The “target” (and tell me if this sounds familiar) was Ukraine. The attackers — a notorious Russian outfit named Sandworm — had waged a lengthy, sophisticated campaign against the country’s infrastructure, businesses and banks years before, during the Crimea showdown. If that wasn’t bad enough, the infrastructural attacks included triggering power grid blackouts in the dead of winter.
Nasty business, to be sure. But at the risk of blaming the victim, I must invoke Mark’s Axiom:
If it lives on the internet, it is by definition not secure.
But five years later, their NotPetya virus opened up a whole new can of (sand)worms. Unleashed in 2017, it was a particularly nasty, virulent and insanely nihilistic species of ransomware, and indicative of just how thoroughly our own agencies had been compromised by the leaks and thefts of the previous two administrations:
NotPetya was comprised of two major elements: a penetration tool called EternalBlue, created by the National Security Agency (NSA) and leaked in early 2017, and Mimikatz, a software application that had the ability to pull user passwords out of RAM and reuse them to compromise targeted machines. While Microsoft had issued a patch for EternalBlue, Mimikatz allowed for the retrieval of passwords, which, in turn, allowed those passwords to infect unpatched machines anywhere in the world.
Translation: the hackers deployed one of the USG’s favorite lockpicks (which I’m sure they never, ever used against their own citizens) to steal passwords from Windoze admins who were behind schedule on their security updates. There could be many reasons for that failure (including a few understandable ones that I can think of). But the most likely answer is absolute, unforgivable, systemic incompetence.
The resulting product was such an uncontrollable, tornado-like monster that the Sandworms themselves couldn’t predict the extent of the mayhem it might cause. Even portions of Mother Russia got caught in the blast zone — including the machines monitoring radiation levels at Cherynobyl.
Whoopsky, comrades!
But it gets worse.
NotPetya wasn’t true ransomware, but rather a bomb in disguise. There was no decryption key. Once you saw that horrible message3 pop up, it was “Dasvidaniya, data.” Even if you paid the piper, you’d never see your precious files again.
Enter Maersk.
True to form, the company’s lax vulnerable stark-fucking-naked security environment and vast attack surface made them the perfect vehicle to “ship” the virus around the world.4 Read the linked article above and others if you’re interested in just how much economic destruction and havoc was wrought — and particularly on global supply chains.
With that in mind, let’s return to our little “sci-fi” scenario.
In the early morning hours of March 26, 2024, a cargo ship moves in darkness towards a bridge. To date, little of detail has been released about this ship’s crew, except:
it was staffed by 22 crew members, including 20 Indian nationals and at least one Sri Lankan national;
one of the crew members was briefly hospitalized after the crash;
at least as of March 31, all crew have been sequestered on the Dali in Baltimore harbor.5
even though this has officially been declared an accident, none of their names or any other biographical/employment details have been released to the public.
The bridge in question is the Francis Scott Key bridge, which spans the Patapsco River in Baltimore. In addition to its obvious symbolic value, the Key bridge also constitutes a key node in my nation’s supply chain infrastructure, with network effects that will impact global trade. The ship itself is 948’ long by 158’ wide, and clocks in at 95,000 tons without cargo.
At approximately, 1:24 AM, “numerous aural alarms” were recorded on the bridge audio (i.e. people shouting and freaking out). The fact that these shouts were recorded establishes that the ship’s main power was still on whenever the source of this panic occurred. We can assume this because we’ve been told that the recording briefly shuts off before the auxiliary power kicks in. (Note: this is a critically important detail, which our supine regime press seems utterly disinterested in).
A minute later, the ship has accelerated to maximum speed. It then “loses power”, at which point the crew makes a radio mayday call declaring that a collision is possible, and that they want tugboats deployed (or something to that effect; we still have not heard their own firsthand accounts).
A minute after that, the recording — supposedly — has the pilot requesting the crew to drop anchor, and then making another radio call to — supposedly — report that the ship had lost power (I apologize for the frequent use of the s-word, but you’ll soon see why). This is when emergency responders started sealing off bridge traffic. Interestingly, the sole quote that we can confirm from that morning comes from a 911 dispatcher, who says the following:
(emphasis mine)
"There's a ship approaching that just lost all their steering," the dispatcher says. "So until you get that under control, we got to stop all traffic."
“Steering,” not “power.”
Just a miscommunication? Semantics? Maybe.
But allow me to propose an alternate theory, based on everything we have seen and can (even mildly) independently confirm.
Look at the raw footage I posted above. Notice how the the power is on at the start of it, then blinks off twice. The order is as follows:
0:00 — POWER ON. Ship’s heading is off-course from the pylon.
0:04 — POWER OFF.
0:13 — POWER ON. The instant power is restored, the ship makes a very sharp turn hard to starboard, putting it on a collision course with the pylon.
0:24 — POWER OFF.
0:29 — POWER ON. The ship continues its starboard turn.
0:40 — POWER ON. With the power still on, it straightens its bearing, putting it on a direct collision course with the pylon.
0:43 — POWER ON. One final, small course adjustment, this time to port. It does not — and cannot — avoid collision. But it does make it a little less direct, thereby potentially saving some lives in the pilot house.
0:48 — POWER ON. The Dali makes contact (again, with the power still on).
Directly after the footage, you can of course see the familiar edited version promoted by the regime press, trimming out the entirety of the power struggle and course changes. That they would agree to do so is laughable in one sense, horrifying in another. Welcome to Clownworld, buddy.
Anyway, here are all the possible explanations as I see them, listed in order of likelihood from most to least.
The “aural alarms” (i.e. pants-shitting terror) that we hear from the bridge crew isn’t because of any power outage — which is in fact impossible, given the recording itself required power, and shut off after the screaming started. When coupled with the dispatcher’s quote — and the obvious fact the ship was capable of steering, right up until the last moment — what freaked them out is that they had lost control of at least one of their steering/propulsion systems to hackers. So what we saw towards the end was not a struggle by the crew to keep the power ON, but one to shut it OFF, and then hopefully drop anchor and/or buy time for assistance.
The hackers were only able to exploit a system that killed the power, but were sophisticated enough in their maritime knowledge and timing to know when and where to do so in order to “steer” the ship negatively towards its collision course. In this situation, the crew was indeed trying to keep the power on, but only in an attempt to counteract the negative adjustments.
One, several or all of the bridge crew are mercenaries or terrorist agents, assigned to this sabotage mission for fun and/or profit. The blinking lights were merely a ruse meant to establish their cover story of having lost power or control.
The terrorist/mercenary is a stowaway who hacks the onboard systems, compromising or commandeering control/power/propulsion from inside the Dali itself.
Aliens from Krylon-7 possessed the ship’s pilot using techniques they picked up from Sam Harris. Deepak Chopra and Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network.
Everything is under control.
So my question now becomes this:
When will it be enough?
I don’t mean for you and me. We passed that test a long time ago. Our success wasn’t due to our intelligence — or, at least, not to that alone.
For instance, when I raised the specter of this theory to a highly intelligent friend of mine, he immediately dismissed it for a very disturbing reason. You see, he’d been trained by his thought-masters to reflexively think of “Russians” as humanoid monsters, who spent most of their spare time drinking the blood of children and whatnot.
“Why wouldn’t they do it during daylight hours,” he said. “Then they could’ve killed a lot more people!”
To be fair to him, the situation we found ourselves in at the time didn’t allow me the opportunity to elaborate. Maybe if he reads this piece, he’ll arrive at a different conclusion. But only maybe. The spell is very strong.
And it must be something akin to a spell. As I mentioned to my buddy
recently: I’m really not all that smart. At least, not compared to some of the weird rooms I’ve found myself in, over the course of my weird-ass life.But what I seem to be able to do quite well is to notice obvious things, and then to ask obvious questions about them.
And if your superpower is anything like mine, it says much more about the bewitched, benighted state of the world than it does about us.
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Never heard of this one, you say? Bear it in mind regardless; it will be important.
For posterity: I was in the middle of typing this sentence when I experienced an earthquake.
Does it say anything about me that I’ve had literal nightmares about seeing such pop ups? Although to be fair, mine are more like music videos starring demons from Hell, or the flight recorder video from that flick Event Horizon.
For example, an audit afterwards showed they hadn’t updated their servers in at least four years.
There have been no crew status updates I’ve been able to find since that date, but I could be wrong.
I can think of a very simple reason why, if it WAS an attack, they minimized casualties.
The last time the US had a mass casualty attack from a foreign actor, you invaded two different nations and occupied them for more than two decades.
There’s a huge difference between a demonstration of capability, with the subtext of “Stop screwing with us, because we CAN screw you back.” and a terror attack.
Funny, my wife asked the same question about attacking during daylight hours. That assumes human casualties were the point, vs. economic/supply chain mayhem.