GATEKEEPERS OF THE GRID, AND HOLLYWEIRD’S WARNINGS

Before we get down to this week's blogs, there are a few housekeeping items that I need to discuss. (1) First, little Shiloh seems to be almost back to her old self. She's still occasionally a little unsteady, but ok. The biggest problem is the upset to her routine, and she is not eating her kibble,  but only soft food. I'm at a bit of a loss on how to get her back on her kibble. Anyway, thank you all for your good thoughts and prayers for her. (2) We are good for our vidchat this coming Friday at 2PM central, which means get your questions/comments posted to me no later than 10PM central this Thursday. Weather permitting we are having our vidchat! (3) I've been doing News and Views recently on Youtube again, but some people have complained, so I might return to just an audio news and views for those who like the MP3 files. But I will probably continue with the video blogs. With that said, down to business...

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This article was shared by V.T., and with exploding munitions factories in Italy, I thought I should pass this along, together with my high octane speculations:

The Gridkeepers: How Three People in a Room Can Turn Off Your World

The article starts out with a bang, an unequivocal statement that what we've suspected for a long time about some "power outages" is entirely true:

I still remember the exact moment when I stopped believing in coincidences. It was August 2022, and I was sitting in my apartment in Austin, Texas, watching the thermometer climb past 110 degrees while the power grid—supposedly one of the most advanced in the world—collapsed for the third time that summer. The official story was “unprecedented demand” and “aging infrastructure.” The same story they’d told us in February 2021, when people froze to death in their homes. The same story they always tell.

But that night, as I sat in the dark sweating through my shirt and listening to the distant sound of transformers exploding like artillery fire, I got a phone call that changed everything. It was from a guy named Marcus—Marcus H., I’ll call him—who I’d known back in my journalism school days. He’d gone corporate, taken a job with one of the big consulting firms that nobody’s ever heard of but that somehow touch every major infrastructure project in the country. I hadn’t spoken to him in maybe six years.

“You’re looking at this wrong,” he said. No hello. No how are you. Just that flat statement in a voice that sounded like he’d aged twenty years in the six since we’d last talked. “It’s not the heat. It’s not the grid. It’s not incompetence. You’re looking at a demonstration.”

But a demonstration of what? By whom? For what purpose?  This is where it gets nasty. Indeed, my questions were asked by the article's author, who received a very curious response:

I remember laughing. I actually laughed, there in the dark, because the alternative was to start taking him seriously, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. “A demonstration of what? How to kill people in a heatwave?”

The silence on the other end lasted so long I thought we’d been disconnected. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, almost a whisper, and I could hear something in the background that sounded like the hum of a server room or maybe a generator. “Meet me tomorrow. The old coffee shop on Guadalupe. And bring a recorder. Not your phone. Something analog. Something that can’t be hacked remotely.”

He hung up before I could answer.

Note that bow to analogue technology. In any  case, the author of the article notes that he was suspicious of the "high demand/power brown-out" narrative from the beginning, as the story appeared "paper thin" and more like "choreography" than a real failure. In any case, the two men met, and the author's friend shoved a parcel containing stolen documents across the table to him, indicating he was going to disappear after their meeting, and never be seen again because his life would be in danger for sharing the documents.  Then his "contact" came to the heart of the matter:

“What you think of as ‘the power grid’—this vast, complicated network of generators and transformers and transmission lines that keeps the lights on for three hundred million people—that’s not the real grid. That’s the surface grid. The show grid. The grid they let you see on those cute little websites that tell you how much solar power California is generating right now. Underneath that, there’s another grid. A control grid. And the people who run that one don’t work for the power companies. They don’t work for the government. They don’t work for anyone you’ve ever heard of.”

...

“The outages you’ve been experiencing? The rolling blackouts, the ‘unprecedented demand’ failures, the infrastructure collapses that always seem to happen at the most politically convenient moments? Those aren’t accidents. They’re tests. They’re calibrations. They’re proof-of-concept demonstrations for buyers who want to know that the product works before they commit to purchasing it.”

...

“The product is control, you idiot. The product is the ability to turn civilization on and off like a light switch. And there are people—organizations, governments, corporations, call them what you want—who will pay any price for that capability. Any price at all.”

This may sound like the wildest fantasy, except that I am inclined to believe it for what amounts to a very odd - and most would say, "crazy" - reason, namely, that the gentleman's thesis has already been used as the storyline for an episode in a television series, the series Leverage: Redemption, a reboot of the original series Leverage. For those who do not know, both series are about a team of professional criminals and grifters who put their skills to the service of ordinary people who have been done wrong by big corporations or the government. In the very last episode of the series reboot (Leverage: Redemption), the team is confronted by a massive corporation that quite literally stages a massive power blackout before an audience of "buyers" to prove that they can do it. The corporation is defeated because one of the team members has literally stolen documents ("no one remembers paper" becomes a recurring mantra in the episode) and the servers containing the documents. The corporation staging the demonstration is then hacked by the team (which has two capable hackers), and the corporate logo is proudly displayed on the skyscrapers' lighting systems, indicating who had done the deed.

So what we have is a TV series with an episode with almost exactly the same plotline as is being outlined in the article. I do not know about you, but I frankly doubt that the author of the article and the writer(s) of the screenplay knew each other. In any case, the author arrives at a stunning whopper doozie of a conclusion: like pretty much everything else in our sick and twisted "civilization", the power grid itself has been weaponized by ubscrupulous and immoral greedy people bent on accumulating more power, this time through the manipulations of access to power in yet another version of a pay-to-play scheme:

That was my introduction to what I’ve come to call, in the years since, the Gridkeepers. The people in the shadows who don’t just manage electricity but weaponize it, who have transformed the most fundamental utility of modern civilization into an instrument of coercion so subtle that most people never realize they’re being manipulated even as they sit shivering in the dark or sweltering in heat that can kill.

But there was still more. After searching unsuccessfully to find his friend, who had by that time made good on his promise and literally disappeared, he turned to the documents:

But he left me the documents. And he left me a name—just one name, scrawled on the back of the last page in handwriting so shaky I could barely read it: “Praetorian.” That was my entry point. That was the thread I pulled that unraveled everything.

Now if you're like me and a "thriller junkie", you may remember the 1995 movie The Net, starring Sandra Bullock as a computer programmer and cyber-security specialist, who inadvertently stumbles into a hidden network of computer hackers planning all sorts of havoc. They call themselves - you guessed it - "Praetorian", and they are linked directly to a Baal Gates-like character who is a billionaire several times over, who wants to expand his digital network into the government itself by providing security against his very own Praetorian hackers. (How very Hegelian of him.)

The article's author's version of "Praetorian" was a little more nuanced and subtle, but amounted to the very same thing:

The first thing I learned is that the Gridkeepers are not a conspiracy in the traditional sense. They’re not a secret society with robes and rituals and a headquarters in an ancient temple somewhere. They’re a network. A loose, constantly shifting coalition of engineers, intelligence operatives, corporate executives, and government officials who share a common interest in maintaining the capability to disrupt electrical supply at will, and who have discovered that this capability is worth more than gold in a world where every aspect of human existence depends on reliable power.

The second thing I learned is that this network is old. Much older than I expected. The origins of what we now call “grid management” as a tool of social control can be traced back to the 1960s, to a classified research program run by the RAND Corporation in collaboration with the Department of Defense. The official purpose of the program was to study how electrical infrastructure could be protected from Soviet attack during a nuclear war. The unofficial purpose—and this is documented in memos that I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request that took two years to process—was to determine how electrical disruptions could be used to pacify domestic populations in the event of civil unrest.

Think about that for a moment. In 1962, while the public was being told that nuclear war was the greatest threat to American civilization, the actual greatest threat in the minds of defense planners was the possibility that American citizens might decide they’d had enough of the system that was supposedly protecting them. And the solution they developed was to figure out how to turn off the lights until the population calmed down.

And this brings the author to yet another whopper doozie of a conclusion: that "smart grid" and "smart meter" on your home has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the environment, and everything to do with building out that ability to shut down your power if you're saying or thinking things "the Praetorian" does not like:

By the 1970s, this research had been operationalized. The first “smart grid” technologies—presented to the public as efficiency improvements—were actually designed to enable precisely targeted outages. The switches that could isolate specific neighborhoods, specific buildings, even specific apartments, while leaving adjacent areas fully powered. The monitoring systems that could track consumption patterns in real-time, identifying “anomalous” usage that might indicate resistance activities. The remote access capabilities that would allow operators to shut down power from thousands of miles away, with no local personnel required and no physical evidence of tampering.

I found a manual from 1978, buried in an archive at a university that didn’t know what it had. The manual was titled “Civil Emergency Power Management Protocols” and it was marked “EYES ONLY” in a way that suggested it was never supposed to leave the Pentagon. It described, in bloodless bureaucratic language, exactly how to use “controlled service interruptions” to manage populations during periods of “civil disturbance.” The recommended duration was 72 hours—long enough for the psychological effects to set in, not so long that permanent infrastructure damage would occur. The recommended targets were “high-density urban zones with demonstrated histories of noncompliance.” The expected outcomes included “reduced civil disobedience,” “increased cooperation with authority figures,” and “enhanced appreciation for restored services.”

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But the truly shocking part—the part that took me years to fully grasp and that I still struggle to accept—is that this isn’t just an American phenomenon. The Gridkeepers are international. They’re transnational, really, operating through a web of corporate entities and treaty organizations that transcend any single government’s authority. When I started following the money, I found it led to the same handful of institutions no matter which country’s grid I was investigating: BlackRock and Vanguard, of course, the asset management giants that own significant stakes in virtually every major utility company on Earth. But also stranger entities with names like the GridWise Alliance, the World Energy Council, and something called the International Electrotechnical Commission that sets “voluntary” standards that somehow become mandatory in practice.

And behind these institutions, always just out of sight, the same names recurring with suspicious frequency. The same former intelligence officials rotating onto corporate boards. The same defense contractors receiving “grid security” contracts that somehow always involve offensive rather than defensive capabilities. The same “philanthropic” foundations funding research into “resilient infrastructure” that always seems to require more centralized control and less public oversight.

In case you're not convinced yet, the author of the article zeroes in on a methodology that will be familiar to readers of this website.  That methodology is to be suspicious of a so-called "natural disaster" that occurs in close temporal proximity to certain political and/or financial events. Two examples, the first pointed out by Catherine Austin Fitts, and the second by me and many others: the Indonesian tsunami that killed so many people is understood by many to be a "natural disaster". Except that Ms. Fitts noticed, a full week before the tsunami occurred, a sudden and inexplicable sell-off of Indonesian sovereign securities. Someone, in other words, knew what was coming, and if they knew, had access - minimally - to a technology and science enabling its prediction, and potentially had access to a technology actually making it possible to engineer such an event (for financial and political gain). The second example is the infamous Fukushima tsunami and earthquake (and the resulting nuclear disaster that accompanied both). The incident did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum, as the then-Japanese government had made serious overtures not only to China, but had reiterated its oft-repeated demands for the USA to shut down its Okinawa base. The American response? A clear threat from then US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that Japan had better quickly change its tune, or face dire consequences. Japan didn't, and the tsunami and earthquake followed, as did the American disaster relief and aid to a now much more docile and compliant Japanese government.

The author of the article proposes a similar methodology with respect to "power outages":

I spent six months in Europe tracing the patterns there, and what I found was disturbing in its familiarity. The same “unexplained” outages that always seemed to coincide with political moments—Brexit votes, Yellow Vest protests, the various populist uprisings that have shaken the continent in recent years. The same official explanations that never quite accounted for the timing or the targeting. The same media silence about the obvious patterns, the same academic dismissal of anyone who pointed them out as conspiracy theorists or science deniers.

In this context, the author ran into a real-life version  of Sandra Bullock from The Net, who in his turn allegedly encountered real life evidence of the existence of this Shadow Gatekeepers' network:

In Germany, I met a former grid engineer named Klaus who’d worked for the national utility until 2019, when he’d quit rather than participate in something he’d discovered by accident. He was living in a small village in Bavaria, growing his own food, completely off-grid by choice, and he only agreed to talk to me because a mutual contact vouched for me and because, as he put it, “someone needs to know before it’s too late to do anything.”

What Klaus discovered, during a routine maintenance check on a supposedly decommissioned substation outside Berlin, was a hidden control room. Not part of the official facility. Not on any blueprint. A room that had been constructed within the walls of the existing building, accessible only through a disguised door that he’d found only because a cable tracer had malfunctioned and led him to a junction box that shouldn’t have existed.

Inside that room, he found equipment that he didn’t recognize—technology that was years, maybe decades, ahead of what the public utility was officially using. Quantum-encrypted communication systems. AI-driven load management software that could predict consumption patterns down to the individual appliance level. And most disturbingly, a direct physical connection to a separate network that bypassed the official grid controls entirely, running on dedicated fiber that wasn’t supposed to exist.

“They called it the ‘shadow grid,’” Klaus told me, his voice still carrying the wonder and horror of that discovery years later. “The official grid—the one we all maintained, the one the public knew about—that was just the surface. The shadow grid was the real control system. And it wasn’t controlled by the German government. It wasn’t controlled by the EU. It was controlled by something else. Something that didn’t answer to any democratic authority.”

He’d tried to report it. That’s the part that still makes him angry, still keeps him up at night. He’d gone to his supervisors, then to regulators, then to journalists. And at every step, he’d been stonewalled, threatened, or simply ignored. When he’d persisted, when he’d tried to document what he’d found and share it with opposition politicians, he’d been arrested—charged with espionage, believe it or not, for “unauthorized access to critical infrastructure.” The charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence, but the message was clear. The shadow grid was real. It was protected at the highest levels. And anyone who talked about it would be destroyed.

Klaus wasn’t the only one. Over the course of my investigation, I found dozens of similar stories from engineers and technicians across Europe, North America, Australia, and parts of Asia.

Let us note that this weaponized power grid is the precise fulfillment of the idea first suggested by Nikola Tesla over a century ago when he was trying to "sell" his wireless power system to "the elite"; he pointed out that his system could be used to compel compliance simply by turning off people's access to it by refusing to broadcast power to a particular region.  So where's today's high octane speculation? It's just this: the wired system of power, as opposed to Tesla's wireless broadcast system,  became the preferred method precisely because the wired system permits the system to penetrate directly, and to be monitored directly (J.P. Morgan, recall, was opposed to the wireless system because it could not be metered), on an individual and household-by-household basis. In other words, by building the system they did build at the turn of the century, they had already decided to follow Tesla's suggestion to weaponize the system against its users in order to force "compliance."

What is their agenda and binding core principles? This is where the author echoes conclusions I and others have already reached:

Whatever the Gridkeepers were, they operated globally, with resources and reach that suggested either state-level backing or something that had transcended the state entirely—a private power structure that had effectively captured the infrastructure of civilization and was now using it to enforce compliance with whatever agenda served its interests.

And what was that agenda? That was the question that haunted me through years of investigation, that I still don’t have a complete answer to. Because the Gridkeepers don’t seem to have an ideology in the traditional sense. They’re not communists or fascists or religious fanatics. They’re not trying to build a better world or save humanity from itself. If they have a philosophy, it seems to be pure instrumentalism—the belief that power is its own justification, that control is its own reward, that the ability to make populations obey is simply the natural order of things and doesn’t require any further explanation.

But if I had to guess—and at this point, that’s all any of us can do—I would say that what we’re seeing is the emergence of a new form of governance that doesn’t need democracy, doesn’t need consent, doesn’t even need visibility. A governance system based on the management of infrastructure rather than the management of populations directly. If you control the electricity, you don’t need to control the people.

Of course, the problem with weaponizing the power grid is that the weapon can not only be turned against its users, but also against its fellow gatekeepers. And that's when it gets interesting, especially if you also have access to technologies able to create electromagnetic pulses to order: any size, any region, any area.  And it becomes an even bigger headache if the gatekeepers on this little blue ball in space are not the only ones with access to it... but that's another topic for later this week (chortle chortle, nod nod, wink wink)....

See you on the flip side...

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