Category Archives: Security

Energy, Poetry, Security

EU Solar Wins: Infrastructure Warfare Prep in Plain Sight

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EU Energy Revolution is a National Security Upgrade

June 2025 marked a quiet turning point: solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time, generating 22% of the grid’s power. Not the largest renewable—the largest source, period.

Nuclear came in second at 21.6%—a position it’s going to have to get used to. With 350 GW installed and another 60+ GW being added annually, future solar has crossed from an “alternative” to the present “foundational infrastructure.”

Slovakia is in the best position to accelerate this further. The country currently sits at 22.1% renewable generation—among the EU’s lowest. But with rapid solar deployment options now on the table, Slovakia could leapfrog directly to the distributed generation model that’s reshaping Europe’s grid.

This transition is strategically sound: solar eliminates fuel logistics, severs dependency on energy imports, and distributes generation across millions of sites that can’t be targeted kinetically. No one misses worrying whether Russian billionaires will turn off pipelines from emotion, US billionaires will explode pipelines from neglect, or undersea infrastructure will be undermined.

At the same time we would be remiss to ignore how speed of technology adoption has outpaced security oversight (as usual). The gaps are creating risks and opportunities for controls that most existing frameworks weren’t designed to address.

What Changes in Transition

The shift to distributed solar fundamentally improves energy security—but in ways that require rethinking safety of power infrastructure.

Physical resilience through distribution: You can bomb a gas plant or a pipeline. You can’t meaningfully attack millions of distributed panels at scale. Solar is a genuine upgrade. Wars destroy centralized infrastructure; distributed generation systems simply reroute and carry on in scenarios that would cripple traditional grids.

No fuel supply chain: Once installed, solar has zero operational dependencies. No rail cars to intercept, no tankers to blockade, no refineries to sabotage. The strategic autonomy is real. No mines to send explosive drones into and shut down permanently, burning all the workers to death with a horrific fireball—you know, that famously clean coal dust Trump told the UN about. But I digress…

Faster recovery: A destroyed solar installation can be replaced in days or weeks. Rebuilding power plants takes many years. At scale, this means better grid resilience even if individual assets are compromised. Distributed resilience works under pressure—just look at Tokyo under occupation in 1948, which deployed hundreds of electric cars charging from hydro when the city had no fuel.

Nissan’s car making origin story is this Tama electric vehicle from 1947 with rapid “bomb bay door” rapid battery replacement on both sides.

These advantages are why the transition makes sense. But solar also introduced something new: millions of internet-connected control points with unclear security ownership.

The New Architecture Exposed

The computing analogy is familiar: mainframes had physical security and limited access. PCs introduced millions of endpoints requiring patches and antivirus. Mobile phones added cellular networks and location tracking. Each transition improved capability while requiring new security paradigms.

Solar’s transition is from physically secured, professionally operated generation to IoT devices managed by homeowners, monitored by installers, and remotely accessible by manufacturers.

The SPE report (SPE 2025 Solutions for PV Cyber Risks to Grid Stability) documents the concentration: thirteen manufacturers maintain remote access to over 5 GW each. Seven control more than 10 GW. Huawei alone shipped 114 GW to Europe between 2015-2023, with estimated remote access to 70% of that installed base. Chinese firms overall supplied 78% of global inverter capacity in 2023.

Individually, a compromised home solar system means nothing. Collectively, manufacturers have remote access to capacity equivalent to multiple large power plants. The report’s grid simulations found that coordinating just 3 GW of inverters to manipulate voltage through reactive power switching could trigger protective relays on nearby generators—potentially cascading into broader outages.

This mirrors early botnet dynamics: individual compromised PCs were nuisances until aggregated into DDoS networks capable of taking down critical services.

“No Operator” Problems

Traditional power infrastructure has clear security ownership. A nuclear plant has a security team, regulatory oversight, 24/7 monitoring. A rooftop solar installation has… a homeowner who set it up once and moved on.

Current EU cybersecurity frameworks (NIS2, the Cyber Resilience Act, Network Code on Cybersecurity) assume there’s an entity responsible for critical infrastructure security. For distributed solar, that entity often doesn’t exist legally. The installer completed their short job. The manufacturer is headquartered abroad. The homeowner thinks it’s appliance-level technology that someone else is responsible for, which would be fine if their Chinese-made-and-controlled toaster couldn’t accidentally destabilize the entire German power grid, but here we are.

During World War II, Deming was a member of the five-man Emergency Technical Committee. He worked with H.F. Dodge, A.G. Ashcroft, Leslie E. Simon, R.E. Wareham, and John Gaillard in the compilation of the American War Standards (American Standards Association Z1.1–3 published in 1942) and taught wartime production. His statistical methods were widely applied during World War II and after (foundational to Japanese auto manufacturing)

The SPE report further states that only 1 of 5 tested inverters supported basic security logging. Default passwords are common. Firmware updates are irregular. Network segmentation is rare. This isn’t malicious—it’s what happens when residential-scale deployment moves faster than security standards.

New Model, New Requirements. Ambiguity means neglect.

The technology doesn’t need to slow. The security framework needs to catch up. This is familiar territory for any director of security with a few years of direction under their belt.

Clear responsibility assignment: Either manufacturers are liable for their installed base security (like automotive recalls), or grid operators assume responsibility, or third-party security operators emerge as a market.

Communication architecture that matches the threat model: Germany’s approach with smart meter gateways is instructive—critical control functions (start/stop, power setpoint changes) route through regulated infrastructure. Monitoring and maintenance can remain direct. This applies standard IT security principles (network segmentation, controlled access) to distributed generation.

Supply chain transparency without protectionism: The issue isn’t where hardware is manufactured—it’s that concentration creates leverage, and remote access by entities outside regulatory jurisdiction creates enforcement gaps. Solutions range from Lithuania’s 2025 law (requiring EU-based intermediaries for systems >100 kW) to hardware/software separation (devices source globally, control software must be auditable and locally hosted).

Standards reflecting actual deployment: Current inverter security standards treat them like industrial control systems. But a device installed by a contractor, connected to home Wi-Fi, and managed via consumer apps isn’t an industrial system. It needs consumer electronics-level security: automatic updates, secure defaults, encrypted communications, no exposed credentials.

State-run Opportunity and Patterns

Rapid deployment in lagging states doesn’t have to repeat the security debt accumulated elsewhere. The country could mandate security baselines upfront: require certified communication gateways for grid-connected systems, establish clear responsibility chains, ensure data localization for operational telemetry.

This isn’t exotic technology. It’s applying lessons from mobile computing and IoT security to distributed generation. The components exist—Hardware Security Modules, Trusted Execution Environments, regulated intermediaries, cryptographic firmware signing. What’s missing is regulatory clarity and enforcement.

Every infrastructure revolution creates security debt paid down over time. Early automobiles had no seatbelts. Early internet had no encryption. Early mobile phones had no app sandboxing.

Solar is mid-transition. Capability deployment happened fast (Europe added 60+ GW in 2024 alone). Security retrofit is lagging. That’s normal but fixable.

The unique aspect: solar’s security model should be superior. Distributed systems are inherently more resilient. But only if distribution is real. When remote access reconcentrates control with manufacturers, you’ve recreated centralized vulnerability while losing traditional plants’ physical security and professional operation.

Europe’s solar buildout is strategically sound. The cybersecurity gap is solvable with existing technology. What’s missing is regulatory clarity on responsibility and baseline security requirements for distributed generation at scale.

Any future rapid deployment can be a model—showing that speed and security aren’t trade-offs when architecture is right from the start. Or it could simply balance out tech debts and provide resilience while others catch up.

The tech works, for national security. The economics work, for national security. The climate math even works, for national security. Now the security model also needs to catch up and work… for national security.

Security

America Made Them Into Killers, Then Ignored Their Pain: The Predictable Result

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Thirteen Years of Warning Signs: Iraq War Veterans and America’s Mental Health Crisis

U.S. Police investigate the truck used in a mass shooting September 28, 2025. Source: AP

On September 28, 2025, Thomas Jacob Sanford drove his pickup truck through the front doors of a Mormon church in Grand Blanc, Michigan. He opened fire on hundreds of Sunday worshippers with an assault rifle, planted improvised explosive devices, then doused the building with gasoline and burned it to the ground. Four people died. Eight were wounded.

The day before, Nigel Edge approached a North Carolina waterfront bar by boat and opened fire with a suppressed AR-style rifle. Three dead. Eight wounded.

Both men were 40 years old. Both were Marines who served in Iraq during the mid-2000s surge and sectarian violence.

This should not be treated as a coincidence, given a thirteen-year pattern anyone can plainly see.

A Pattern Demanding Somebody Care

Since 2012, at least nine Iraq War veterans have committed mass shootings in the United States, killing 24 people and wounding dozens more. The locations vary—churches, bars, airports, military bases—but the warning signs remain hauntingly consistent:

Benjamin Barnes (2012): Sent “I want to die” texts before killing a park ranger. Ex-girlfriend had documented his PTSD, weapons arsenal, and suicide threats in custody court papers. No intervention came.

Ivan Lopez (2014): Being evaluated for PTSD at Fort Hood when he killed three soldiers after an argument over leave paperwork. He was taking Ambien and antidepressants. His mother had died five months earlier. He had $14,000 in debt.

Esteban Santiago (2017): Walked into an FBI office claiming the CIA was controlling his mind, was held for psychiatric evaluation, then released. Two months later, he killed five people at Fort Lauderdale airport. His family had begged for help.

Bryan Riley (2021): Under the influence of methamphetamine and divine delusions, he murdered a family of four including a 3-month-old baby. His girlfriend knew he had PTSD. He believed God told him to save someone who didn’t exist.

Matthew Livelsberger (2025): Detonated a truck bomb outside a Trump building in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day to “relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took”. He had PTSD, depression, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. He was in the Army’s mental health program. He’d had three counseling sessions in the five months before his attack—then stopped seeking help because of Special Forces stigma.

Michael Brown (2025): Killed four people in a Montana bar next door to where he lived. His family had warned authorities a “snap could happen.” The VA allegedly told him he “no longer qualified for assistance.” Montana State Hospital refused admission unless court-ordered. He refused his schizophrenia medications.

And now Sanford and Edge, within 24 hours of each other.

Ideology Serves as a Distraction

The early reporting tried to frame Sanford’s attack as anti-Mormon extremism, with the President even calling it anti-Christian. Investigators suggested “possible anti-Mormon rhetoric.” The narrative was ready: religious hatred, domestic terrorism, the usual script was rolling immediately. But that’s NOT what the evidence so far really shows. Sanford drove past several other churches on the way to target the one he had no documented connection with.

What he did have was a ten-year-old son born with a severe medical condition requiring multiple surgeries, lengthy hospitalizations, and experimental treatment. The financial strain was crushing enough that he’d started a GoFundMe in 2015. He’d taken leave from his job as a Coca-Cola truck driver just to care for his child.

Edge had sued the VA just four days before his attack, alleging they conspired to block his treatment. He’d filed multiple frivolous lawsuits fed by social media memes, claiming his parents were “LGBTQ White Supremacist Pedophiles.” His ex-wife hadn’t heard from him in a decade. He’d legally changed his name. He was drowning in documented mental health crises his family couldn’t stop.
These weren’t ideological attacks. These were men in crisis—financial, medical, psychological—who had been failed by every system meant to care about them.

An Invisible Damaged Generation

Sanford and Edge represent a specific cohort: the Iraq War veteran generation, now entering middle age.

They enlisted young, served in Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad during the height of urban combat and IEDs. They came home to a country that had moved on, to a VA system that was overwhelmed, to civilian jobs that didn’t exist or didn’t pay enough.

Now they’re 40. The adrenaline has worn off. The coping mechanisms that worked at 25 don’t work anymore. Marriages fail. Parents die. Kids get sick. Medical bills pile up.

And the mental health system that was supposed to be there? It disappeared.

America’s Failed Basic Duty of Care

After sending its citizens into harm’s way, America ignored the basic health care they required. A ProPublica investigation found that half of routine VA inspections revealed mental health care failures—botched suicide screenings, failure to follow up with at-risk veterans, wait times stretching for months. Sixteen veterans who received substandard VA care have killed themselves or others since 2020.

Over three-quarters of the VA’s 139 networks report “severe” shortages of psychiatrists and psychologists. Rural veterans—who comprise 27% of those with serious mental illness—use intensive mental health programs at rates 58% lower than urban veterans. The further an American lives from urban areas, the higher the dangers.

The pattern is clear of veterans who seek help, show warning signs, even directly alert authorities, and then get no understanding or care. FBI evaluations release dangerous individuals after days. VA offices deny help even with diagnosed schizophrenics. Families file explicit warnings only to be told nothing can be done without court orders. Mental health programs abandoned due to systemic military and cultural stigma. Every case above represents a missed intervention point for public safety and healthcare, a system-wide failure, a preventable tragedy.

Every single one showed very obvious warning signs and American “safety” experts closed their eyes. Every single one fell through gaps in the system.

When Combat Trauma Meets Middle Age

Research on Iraq War veterans reveals the kind of simple truths most Americans still don’t seem to want to recognize:

They have 3-4 times higher violence rates than the general population—but that still means 91% never engage in severe violence. The 9% who do share specific risk factors: combat exposure during the surge or sectarian violence periods, traumatic brain injury from IED blasts, PTSD or moral injury, major life stressors, social isolation, and inadequate mental health treatment.

Combat trauma doesn’t fade—it compounds. PTSD symptoms often worsen in middle age as veterans lose the energy to suppress them. The hypervigilance that kept them alive in Fallujah becomes exhausting in suburbia.

Add civilian stresses: Sanford’s son with catastrophic medical needs. Lopez’s mother dying and $14,000 in debt. Santiago with $5-10 in his bank account. Livelsberger’s wife leaving after infidelity disputes. Barnes in a custody battle with restraining orders.

The “perfect storm” of mass murder symptoms emerges: unresolved trauma + life crisis + failed mental health system + military firearm access = catastrophe.

That should terrify everyone living in the neighborhoods where thousands more just like them are struggling in hidden pain while arming themselves for sudden action.

What Other Countries Do Differently
UK Iraq veterans show similar PTSD rates to Americans—9.4% compared to our estimated 11-20%. But they rarely commit mass shootings.

Why?

Basic gun control means mental health crises don’t escalate to mass casualties. Australia’s comprehensive mental health approach achieves better outcomes despite 22% of defense personnel experiencing mental health problems. Canada emphasizes immediate care access without bureaucratic barriers.

The US has 1.2 guns per person. Australia has 0.13. When mental health crises occur, gun availability determines lethality.

We could have both—the Second Amendment and proper mental health care.

We’ve chosen neither.

This isn’t complicated. Research identifies clear protective factors that reduce violence risk by 76-92% even among high-risk veterans: stable employment, meeting basic needs, social support, comprehensive mental health care, and temporary firearm restrictions during acute crises.

Critical intervention points include:

The transition period: First 3-5 years post-deployment require mandatory mental health screening and follow-up. Each year of delayed PTSD treatment increases symptom persistence by 5%.

Major life stressors: Divorce, death, financial crisis, medical emergencies—these trigger violence regardless of time since service. Brown’s mother died in 2021, twenty years after his Iraq deployment. Sanford served 2007-2008; his attack came seventeen years later.

Crisis presentations: When veterans show up at FBI offices claiming mind control, when families file warnings, when lawsuits get filed against the VA days before attacks—these demand immediate, aggressive intervention.

Comprehensive care: Mental health can’t be separated from financial stress, employment problems, and social isolation. Integrated support addressing all factors works. Fractured, bureaucratic systems fail.

The cost of doing this? Billions annually. The cost of not doing this? We’ve seen it nine times since 2012. We saw it twice in one weekend in September 2025.

We’ll see it again until mental health is prioritized for warriors.

The Human Cost

Twenty-four people are dead across these nine incidents. Dozens more wounded. Families destroyed. Communities traumatized. And nine veterans—who might have been saved with proper care—are dead or facing life in prison.

Everyone lost.

We can’t call these incidents random or ideological.

We can’t frame them as isolated acts of evil. We can’t focus on gun control or security measures or whatever fits our preferred narrative.

We can acknowledge the uncomfortable truth: we created these men. We sent them to war during the bloodiest years of urban combat and sectarian violence. We brought them home with blast injuries, PTSD, and moral injury. We promised them care, then systematically defunded, privatized, and bureaucratized that care until it became effectively inaccessible.

Then we acted shocked when Santiago walked into the FBI saying the CIA controlled his mind—and we sent him home. When Brown’s family said he might snap—and the system said it couldn’t help without a court order. When Edge sued the VA four days before killing three people—and nothing happened.

This is Gross Abandonment of Veterans

Nine Iraq War veterans. Thirteen years. Two dozen dead. Dozens more wounded.

There is no inherent danger from veterans. Ninety-one percent never engage in severe violence. This is about the causes of violence, which means systematic institutional failure to provide promised care to people we trained to kill, sent into impossible political wars, and then left them behind and broken without hope or help.

Until we decide to address this—with funding, with commitment, with the same determination we had when we sent these men to war—it will keep happening.

The warning signs are clear and continuous like a flashing light cutting through the fog. We’ve seen it for over a decade. We just don’t seem to care enough as a nation to provide sufficient mental health care to our wounded warriors.

History, Security

Trump Orders Shock Troops Into Oregon to Protect Loyalists and Crush Political Dissent

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Today marks another page ripped straight out of fascist history. Those familiar with Mussolini know he promoted state violence not primarily to maintain order, but to protect his own political instruments deployed to intimidate opposition.

Trump is clearly inverting state protection, just as Mussolini would.

Instead of the state protecting citizens from violent groups, the state protects the violent groups from citizens. Mussolini used the army and police to shield the Blackshirts as they attacked socialists, trade unionists, and political opponents. Trump today announced deploying troops to protect ICE operations (which have been conducting aggressive raids) from protesters.

Of course the tactic is based on abuse patterns, which are known well by those allegedly on the Epstein list of abusers. Victims of aggression are labeled as the aggressors, to strip away protections.

…people have kicked tear gas canisters back at them. […] Court documents also show federal officers have been impacted by their own use of chemical munitions. In one case, a person knocked loose an officer’s gas mask, causing the officer to “suck in a large amount of OC spray and pepperball dust.” The agent later vomited and dry-heaved for half an hour.

Mussolini chaos agents were presented by him as defenders of order against “Bolshevik chaos,” just as Trump falsely frames federal agents attacking protesters as him handling “domestic terrorists”. Local officials meanwhile describe Portland as “safe and calm” with declining protests, even during violent federal escalations.

Lawmakers cited recent incidents, including the detention of a father outside his child’s preschool and a wildland firefighter who was arrested while battling fires in the Olympic National Forest. They also pointed to a statistic… that 65% of people detained by ICE had no criminal convictions.

Mussolini normalized the use of state power against political opposition. Similarly, Trump is regularly deploying troops to multiple politically targeted cities – Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Portland despite clear local opposition and questionable legal authority.

As an aside, the economics of militancy also are terrible. In 2020 Trump spent almost 10X more on troops to police a court house than it would have cost to improve the space itself.

The estimated cost of the federal action in Portland was $12.3 million, according to the report. Damage to Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland was about $1.6 million.

That was the kind of lesson from back in 2020, which in theory could itself prevent a repeat through basic fiscal responsibility. It shows how wasteful federal militancy can be, begging the real motives.

Mussolini circumvented logic of parliamentary processes. Trump is also proceeding without proper congressional notification or local consent, with Pentagon officials reportedly surprised by the deployment announcement. Mussolini loved to announce faits accomplis that his subordinates had to scramble to implement, symptomatic of how he would force the center of attention onto himself by being chaotic and unreliable. It turns leadership upside down by destroying direction and purpose, shifting everyone into excessive, unsustainable whimsy that by design only a few could survive.

The headline news, in other words, is describing America experiencing 1930s Italy and the actual mechanics of how democratic institutions are dismantled from within by fascism.

A state apparatus is obviously weaponized to protect the ruling party’s enforcement mechanisms and criminalizing all resistance. This is a textbook case of authoritarian progression presented by MAGA. Knowing about violent and chaotic descent of Italian life under the shadow of Mussolini (let alone Somalia under Siad Barre) is essential for understanding the pattern.

What makes it particularly dangerous is that Americans infamously lack historical literacy to the point that they think Nazism boldly on display is proof of healthy freedom.

“Skokie was chosen as the hub for American Nazis in 1977 and 1978 because of the number of Holocaust survivors who called it home.” ABC News

People are looking for Blues Brothers simplistic depictions of goose-stepping soldiers marching around with swastikas waving, instead of recognizing far more dangerous rhetoric about invasion, gradual institutional capture and political targeting with state violence. Look at Italy on this chart:

The mechanics of using troops to protect violent political enforcement agents in ICE while criminalizing resistance, all bypassing normal governance through unitary executive chaos, are… unmistakable five-alarm sirens telling you that authoritarian consolidation in America happening right now and fast.