NPR gains rare access to the Israel-occupied zone of southern Lebanon.

As many as 50,000 Israelis are leaving the country a year, study shows, tired of war and hardline politicians.

Since it’ll largely be overlooked by other Christian outlets, I wanted to add one further point to the recent debate between Anglican minister Mark Leach and Edward Schuller—one that goes to the heart of the question of how a sinner can be made right with God.

Jesus was unequivocal: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20).

The question, then, is obvious: How does a sinner obtain the righteousness necessary to enter God’s kingdom?

Moses presents two possible grounds on which a person might seek righteousness before God: righteousness based on obedience to the law, and righteousness based on faith.

The first, however, is a dead end for fallen sinners.

The law demands perfect obedience. It doesn’t grade on a curve. It doesn’t offer us a pass based on our ethnicity and bloodline. It doesn’t overlook some sins because we have done enough good deeds to compensate for them. And because we are sinners in Adam, none of us has kept God’s law perfectly.

That’s precisely why the law cannot be the means by which sinners establish their own righteousness. Its purpose is to expose our unrighteousness.

Paul explains that “whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.” He then adds: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:19–20).

The law shuts every sinner’s mouth.

It leaves us guilty.

It strips away every claim to self-righteousness.

And, having shown us that we cannot achieve righteousness by our own obedience, it drives us to the only other ground of righteousness: faith in God’s promise.

And that promise ultimately centres on a person—the promised Seed, Jesus Christ.

This is not a new doctrine introduced in the New Testament. It is the consistent way God has justified sinners throughout redemptive history.

The Old Testament saints were justified by faith in the promised Seed who was still to come. The New Testament saints are justified by faith in the promised Seed who has now come.

Abraham is the clearest example. God promised, and “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:3).

Notice what Abraham did not do. He did not present God with a record of sufficient moral achievement. He believed God’s promise, and that faith was counted to him as righteousness.

Paul makes the principle explicit: “The righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17).

And this is why the gospel is not simply that salvation is somehow through Christ. The biblical gospel is that sinners are justified through faith in Christ.

Those are not interchangeable statements.

Christ is the ground of our salvation. His righteousness, death and resurrection are the basis upon which God justifies the ungodly. But that righteousness is received by faith—not by ancestry, ethnicity, law-keeping, religious affiliation, or any other human qualification.

There is therefore no righteousness apart from faith in God’s promise, and no justification apart from faith in Christ.

That leaves no room for the idea that someone can be saved through Christ while simultaneously rejecting faith in Christ. Christ does not save people apart from Himself, and faith does not bypass Christ. The promised righteousness is received through faith in the promised Redeemer.

This is why Paul can say that there is “no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all” and that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10:12–13).

There is no ethnic exemption from the universal problem of sin.

And there is no ethnic exemption from the universal remedy of faith.

The law cannot save the sinner because the sinner cannot perfectly keep the law. The law instead exposes our guilt and points beyond ourselves to the righteousness God provides.

That righteousness is found in Christ.

And it is received by faith.

No faith, no righteousness.

No righteousness, no access to the Father

No access to the Father, no eternal life.

The top U.S. Air Force officer in Europe, who also serves as the NATO Allied Air Command leader, said he has been tasked with enacting new alliance plans to defend against cruise missiles and drones. He was responding to questions about a drone that NATO had to shoot down after it entered Lithuanian airspace overnight. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday morning that the incident was “part of a broader pattern of Russian aggression and provocation against Europe, testing our readiness and our resolve.”

The drone incursion into Lithuania took place against the backdrop of the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine and amid a spate of so-called ‘hybrid’ or ‘gray zone’ actions Moscow has been accused of carrying out throughout Europe, including a recent attempted drone attack on the Leipzig-Halle airport in Germany.

“I don’t know what’s in the mind of Putin or his fielded forces about those one-way attack drones or even cruise missiles, like we’ve seen enter Polish airspace just a few months ago. In July, we had an AS-23 cruise missile enter Poland,” Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe/U.S. Air Forces Africa (USAFE), and Commander of the Allied Air Command, said in response to a question about the drone shootdown over Lithuania. He was speaking during a media roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Conference that TWZ is attending.

Hinds added that while he doesn’t “know the why behind” the drone incursion into Lithuania, he has been tasked by U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, who serves as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), “to fully implement EVA [Enhanced Vigilance Activity] Eastern Sentry and now its Standing Defense Plan 12000, which gives the nations the capabilities that they need to defend their airspace against either one-way attack drones like the one that you described last night, or a cruise missile.”

EVA Eastern Sentry is a mission NATO stood up in September 2025 after “an unprecedented number of Russian drones and planes violated the airspace of several NATO Allies,” according to the alliance. “Allies are contributing additional capabilities and assets to NATO’s deterrence and defense – for instance, more fighter jets, helicopters, transport aircraft, air defense systems, surveillance aircraft and frigates – and improving the coordination of these assets through NATO.”

Standing Defense Plan 12000 is a new plan for integrated air and missile defense across the alliance. Grynkewich introduced the concept during testimony to Congress in March.

Hinds acknowledged that Russia could be testing the alliance.

“It’s not about the small UASs; that’s typically a national responsibility, and it could be probing,” the Air Force general noted. “Regardless of the intent behind it, what we want to be prepared for is the second that a one-way attack drone or a cruise missile is first and foremost detected – hopefully well before it enters NATO territory – we want to know it. We want to know where it’s coming from. We want to have the capability to sense it. We want to be able to have the C2 [command and control] systems to be able to decide what to do about it, and then have the right kit to be able to act.”

Despite an integrated air and missile defense system that includes Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries, NATO currently is primarily “using air power” against drones and cruise missiles “and that’s not putting us on the right side of the cost curve,” Hinds stated. “But we want to get there.”

Using NATO jets to take down drones “is very effective, just like what you saw last night, and many other times,” but not necessarily efficient, Hinds explained. 

“I think there’s been at least five other cases of allied nations providing air power to shoot down one-way attack drones,” he proffered. “I want to get to the point where we’re doing it efficiently, using lower-cost interceptors, hopefully ground-based, and in some cases air-based that are cheaper to use, so we’ll see what the intent may be. Intelligence organizations are going to provide us with that intelligence later on, but I just don’t know yet.”

You can see one of those NATO jet engagements with drones in the following video.

It should be noted that Europe is starting to follow the American lead in using less expensive laser-guided, air-to-air rockets as drone-killing weapons. TWZ was the first to report about the use of 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) rockets by the U.S. The U.K. Royal Air Force announced in May of this year that its Typhoons were now equipped with APKWS rockets while the French recently tested their own 68mm laser-guided rockets from Rafale fighters.

As the threats have evolved, NATO has “transitioned away from air policing, and we’ve transitioned to air defense for some specific reasons,” the general pointed out. “One is readiness. Air policing is a readiness decrementing mission that the alliance has done for years. There’s also an assurance mission that we did for 32 nations. That’s transitioned to air defense now. Air defense means we have the right kit, multi-domain, to be able to be put in the right place based on indications, warnings, or real threats, like you saw last night, inside of the Baltic nations, to be able to respond decisively and quickly.”

“There’s also a deterrence value there,” Hinds added. “So if Russia does fly a one-way attack drone or a cruise missile, they know that we’re going to be in the right spot to be able to detect it and then defend against it.”

“These are limited incursions, right? Small numbers. Here’s what I see: hybrid activities may, in fact, only be one of the few levers that Putin has available to him, because he sees that he does not have an advantage in geography, domain, or readiness,” Hinds suggested.

“Think about that,” he urged. “So what are we seeing? We’re not seeing a massing of forces across the opposite side of Finland, a new NATO nation. We’re not seeing a massing of forces whatsoever in any domain opposite of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia. You’re seeing a significant number of one-way attack drones in the Black Sea targeting Ukraine. Some of them are entering Romania. What you’re not seeing is a direct confrontation in geography. We’re not seeing direct competition in domains. And I think Putin knows that we are ready. I know he knows that we’re a defensive alliance. I know he knows that we have an advantage in every domain against them, and I think that’s likely why you’re seeing things like what you’re seeing with hybrid activity.”

Though below the level of armed conflict, these Russian activities raise the potential for something worse, Hinds posited.

“The risk about hybrid activity, from my perspective, is it could lead to escalation, and that’s where I hope that we get back towards deterrence again, and that the nations they’re going to decide to do what they want to do when it comes to these hybrid activities,” the general said. “Some of them are law enforcement. Some of them are military responses, and that’s up to the nations to decide how they’re going to deal with that. Not me.”

“But what I owe General Grynkewich is to ensure that we are demonstrating our deterrence each and every day, and we’re doing that effectively across all domains,” Hinds added. “And to ensure that Putin knows that if he tries something against the alliance, that we will be there, and we’re ready to win decisively if challenged.”

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The post NATO Air Commander Details Thinking Behind The Alliance’s New Air Defense Plan appeared first on TWZ.

The 2028 Digital ID Deadline Approaches

LewRockwell,com

Madge Waggy | MadgeWaggy.blogspot.com

Something shifts beneath the surface of ordinary life. Not with announcements or spectacle, but through the quiet consolidation of systems that now track, verify, and gatekeep nearly every exchange between citizens and the institutions they rely upon. By 2028, according to timelines established by international bodies and echoed in domestic policy papers, Americans will face a choice that is not really a choice at all: accept a federally standardized Digital ID or find yourself locked out of the economy you helped build.

This deadline is not speculative. The World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the World Economic Forum have all converged on 2028 as the target for universal digital identity implementation. Within the United States, federal agencies have accelerated pilot programs linking biometric data to financial access, travel privileges, and social services. What appears as technological modernization is, upon closer inspection, the construction of a comprehensive control system—one where participation in society requires continuous verification, and where verification can be revoked without appeal.

The warning signs have accumulated for years, visible to anyone willing to look past the marketing language of convenience and security. Contactless payments normalized the idea that physical currency is suspicious. Vaccine passports established the precedent that health data serves as an access credential. Banking apps demonstrated that accounts can freeze instantly based on algorithmic risk assessments or political criteria. Each precedent seemed isolated. Taken together, they form a clear trajectory toward a society where identity itself becomes a conditional privilege rather than a fixed right.

We are not discussing a distant dystopia. The infrastructure is being built now, in real time, through partnerships between government agencies and technology firms that operate with minimal public scrutiny. The consequences of this transition will not be temporary adjustments but permanent alterations to the conditions of freedom itself. To understand what is at stake requires looking honestly at the mechanisms being assembled, the dependencies being engineered, and the alternatives that are rapidly disappearing.

How Digital ID Actually Works

1. Digital ID functions as a gateway mechanism rather than mere identification—a switch that can be toggled to sever individuals from essential services without judicial oversight or evidentiary standards.
2. Biometric integration, including facial recognition, retinal scanning, and behavioral analysis, creates immutable identifiers that cannot be discarded or temporarily borrowed, eliminating the anonymity that cash transactions and informal economies once preserved.
3. Cross-referencing capabilities allow real-time correlation of location data, purchasing patterns, social associations, and digital communications, constructing predictive behavioral models that anticipate dissent before it materializes into action.
4. Technical architecture relies on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies that claim immutability as a feature, meaning erroneous data entries or punitive designations become permanent elements of one’s digital record.
5. Private sector participation ensures that compliance extends beyond government mandates into corporate policy, where exclusion from banking, housing, and employment can be enforced through Terms of Service rather than legislative action.

The implementation proceeds through incremental acclimatization. Initially, Digital ID emerges as optional convenience—a faster lane through airport security, a streamlined method for tax filing. Early adopters receive minor privileges that validate the system for skeptics. Then comes soft mandate: certain services become available exclusively through digital verification, justified through appeals to security or fraud prevention. Finally, the hard deadline arrives, the 2028 threshold where non-participation becomes synonymous with non-existence within the formal economy.

Biometric capture represents the most irreversible aspect of this transition. Unlike passwords, biological characteristics cannot be changed if compromised. Once your iris pattern or facial geometry enters centralized databases, it persists indefinitely, accessible to systems and actors you never authorized. The convenience of unlocking your phone with a glance extends seamlessly into accessing your funds, your transportation, your medical care. Each verification provides data. Each glance refines the model of who you are, what you want, where you go.

Recent years have demonstrated how these systems function in practice. Canadian authorities froze the bank accounts of protesting truckers without judicial process. British citizens discovered that certain political donations triggered financial surveillance. American businesses learned that ideological deviation from prevailing narratives could result in debanking and commercial exclusion. These were not aberrations. They were rehearsals for systematic financial control through Digital ID infrastructure.

Cash Is Disappearing, and Taking Privacy With It

Paper currency and metal coinage represent the final domain of transactional privacy—the last space where exchange occurs without intermediaries, surveillance, or permission. Its elimination constitutes not merely logistical change but a fundamental redefinition of money itself, from tangible asset to conditional privilege.

Physical cash carries properties that digital systems cannot replicate: immediacy, finality, anonymity. When you hand a twenty-dollar bill to a merchant, the transaction completes without third-party verification. No bank records the exchange. No algorithm flags the purchase for analysis. No institution maintains the capacity to reverse the transfer or freeze the funds. This directness offends control systems because it escapes monitoring.

The campaign against cash proceeds through multiple vectors. Banks cite storage costs. Governments cite tax evasion concerns. Economists cite inefficiency. Each argument contains partial truth, sufficient to mask the deeper agenda: the elimination of economic activity that escapes surveillance, taxation, and administrative oversight.

When money exists only as database entries, you possess not wealth but conditional access. The distinction matters. True ownership implies control—your property remains yours regardless of external opinion. Conditional access implies permission—your resources remain available only so long as you maintain favorable standing with gatekeepers.

Consider the implications of total digitization. Every transaction becomes data. Every purchase enters your behavioral profile. The books you buy, the medications you need, the establishments you frequent, the hours you keep—all recorded, categorized, analyzed. Patterns emerge. Predictions form. And predictions enable preemptive intervention. The system need not wait for you to commit a crime; it can identify statistical probability and adjust your access accordingly.

The elimination of cash also destroys the informal economy that has sustained communities through turbulence. Side jobs paid in cash. Yard sales conducted with neighbors. Charitable giving that leaves no paper trail. Emergency reserves hidden in homes. These practices, essential to resilience and independence, become impossible when all value flows through monitored channels. The grandmother who slips cash to a struggling grandchild, the neighbor who pays for informal childcare, the teenager who earns under-the-table wages for yard work—all these transactions enter the light of surveillance, taxed and tracked and stripped of human immediacy.

Artificial Intelligence Is Now the Gatekeeper

Machine learning algorithms do not merely process data; they generate reality. They classify, categorize, and condemn through statistical correlation that requires neither evidence nor explanation. When integrated with Digital ID systems, AI becomes the invisible arbiter of social participation, rendering judgments in milliseconds that human bureaucrats could never process.

The marriage of Digital ID and AI creates automated social sorting at scale. Your digital identity feeds data to algorithms that assess your creditworthiness, employability, insurability, trustworthiness as a tenant or traveler. These assessments occur constantly, invisibly, without your knowledge or consent. You do not apply for exclusion; it finds you through accumulated flagged behaviors and statistical anomalies.

Historical patterns of discrimination, embedded in decades of banking and criminal justice records, become encoded as algorithmic neutrality. The AI does not hate; it recognizes patterns. If certain zip codes correlate with loan defaults, the algorithm avoids those zip codes. If certain political affiliations correlate with chargebacks, the algorithm flags those affiliations. The result is discrimination without discriminatory intent, exclusion without explicit policy.

The speed of AI decision-making outpaces human comprehension and recourse. By the time you discover that your Digital ID has been flagged, that your access has been restricted, that your transactions have been blocked, the algorithm has already assessed thousands of other subjects. Appeals processes, where they exist, require you to prove your innocence to systems that presume algorithmic infallibility. The burden of proof inverts: you must demonstrate why you should not be excluded.

Predictive algorithms introduce temporal tyranny—the punishment of future crimes that have not occurred. If your purchasing patterns resemble those of previous criminals, if your social network includes flagged individuals, if your travel patterns suggest suspicious intent, the system can restrict your access preemptively. You are punished not for what you have done but for what you might do, according to statistical models you cannot examine.

Social Credit Arrives Without the Name

The Chinese social credit system, once viewed with Western condescension as authoritarian overreach, now serves as the template for behavioral modification through infrastructure. Its principles—rewarding compliance, punishing dissent, gamifying obedience—translate seamlessly into democratic contexts when wrapped in the language of convenience, security, and public health.

Digital ID enables the construction of citizen scores that amalgamate financial responsibility, social conformity, political reliability, and lifestyle compliance. These scores determine not merely access to loans but access to transportation, housing, education, and healthcare. They create a caste system more rigid than hereditary hierarchy because it claims the legitimacy of data and the neutrality of algorithmic assessment.

The architecture of obedience relies on visibility. When citizens know they are watched, they watch themselves. When they know their transactions are analyzed, they self-censor their purchases. When they know their movements are tracked, they restrict their associations. This internalized surveillance proves more efficient than external enforcement because it operates continuously, automatically, without cost.

Social credit systems also weaponize social relationships. Your score affects those with whom you associate; their scores affect yours. This creates powerful incentives for exclusionary behavior, for cutting ties with controversial figures, for policing the behavior of friends and family. The system externalizes its enforcement costs onto the population itself, transforming citizens into informants of their own subjugation.

The normalization of public shaming through digital platforms has prepared the ground for social credit implementation. We have already accepted that individuals can be deplatformed, debanked, and demonetized based on public opinion or algorithmic assessment. We have grown accustomed to the destruction of livelihoods through viral campaigns and corporate compliance. Social credit merely formalizes these practices and renders them systematic.

The End of Work Means the Beginning of Dependency

Artificial intelligence and automation threaten not merely employment but the concept of productive citizenship itself. As algorithms replace white-collar analysis and robotics replace blue-collar labor, the relationship between effort and survival severs. The proposed solution—Universal Basic Income—represents not generosity but the final consolidation of control through dependency.

UBI transforms citizens from producers into recipients, from contributors into supplicants. The income is unconditional only in rhetoric; in practice, it flows through the same Digital ID infrastructure that monitors all other aspects of existence. Acceptance of payment constitutes acceptance of the system, the infrastructure, the terms. Those who refuse Digital ID find themselves without income not through punishment but through exclusion from the distribution mechanism.

The amount provided always hovers at subsistence level, sufficient to prevent destitution but insufficient to accumulate independence. Recipients remain perpetually precarious, aware that non-compliance risks withdrawal. This creates a population easier to manage than any previous arrangement because it lacks both the resources for resistance and the productive independence that might sustain alternative communities.

The elimination of work destroys more than income; it destroys meaning, community, and the social fabric that binds individuals through mutual dependency. The barber, the mechanic, the local shopkeeper—these figures provided not merely services but social connection, neighborhood knowledge, informal support. Their replacement by automated systems and centralized distribution eliminates these nodes of community, leaving isolated recipients connected only to administrative apparatus.

The transition to UBI also facilitates the elimination of cash. When all income arrives digitally and all expenditure occurs through monitored channels, the informal economy vanishes. No under-the-table work supplements the official payment. No cash transactions escape the net. Complete visibility of economic life enables complete control, with restrictions applied seamlessly to those who deviate from prescribed behaviors.

When Food Becomes a Leverage Point

Agricultural land disappears beneath solar arrays while data centers consume energy equivalent to small nations. Farmland is purchased by institutional investors and converted to conservation easements that prohibit cultivation. Supply chain disruptions create the perception of permanent shortage. These developments converge toward a specific objective: the control of food as a mechanism of population management.

Digital ID enables rationing with precision impossible under previous systems. Your dietary allowances can be calibrated to your health data, your carbon footprint, your social score. Certain foods become available only to certain categories of citizens. Meat consumption is restricted based on environmental impact calculations. The carbon content of every meal becomes part of your permanent record.

The promotion of alternative proteins—insect-based foods, lab-grown meats, synthetic substitutes—proceeds not merely through marketing but through the elimination of alternatives. When traditional agriculture becomes economically unviable through regulation, when distribution networks prioritize approved products, when Digital ID systems restrict purchases of high-impact foods, the population transitions to substitutes not by choice but by necessity.

Food control represents the ultimate leverage because hunger admits no ideology. The individual who might resist surveillance for principle will compromise when children require nutrition. The system recognizes this asymmetry and exploits it ruthlessly. Compliance with Digital ID, with carbon tracking, with behavioral requirements becomes the condition for access to sustenance itself.

The rhetoric of sustainability masks the reality of control. Environmental concerns are genuine, but their exploitation for authoritarian ends does not address ecological crisis; it merely weaponizes it. The same systems that claim to reduce carbon footprints through dietary control maintain the industrial infrastructure of surveillance, the energy consumption of data centers, the elite consumption patterns of the managerial class. Restrictions apply downward, never upward.

Why This Cannot Be Undone

Physical infrastructure can be dismantled. Laws can be repealed. But digital systems, once established, develop path dependencies that make their removal nearly impossible. The databases exist. The algorithms are trained. The population has adapted. Reversion to previous arrangements becomes unthinkable not because it is technically impossible but because the social and technical infrastructure for alternatives has been destroyed.

Cash elimination illustrates this irreversibility. Once physical currency ceases circulation, the knowledge of its use atrophies. Young people raised on digital transactions cannot conceptualize economic life outside monitored channels. The physical infrastructure of cash—printing presses, distribution networks, retail cash handling—deteriorates or repurposes. Reintroduction becomes a massive undertaking that few politicians will attempt.

Similarly, the skills of anonymous living—navigating without GPS, communicating without digital trails, transacting without records—atrophy through disuse. Each generation becomes less capable of independence from digital systems than the last. By 2028, the cohort that remembers genuine privacy will have aged, diminished, lost influence. Digital natives will accept their condition as natural, as the only reality they have known.

Institutional capture ensures that no electoral victory suffices to reverse these trends. The bureaucracies implementing Digital ID transcend political cycles. Corporate partners maintain influence across administrations. International agreements commit nations to implementation regardless of domestic political shifts. Even sincere opposition confronts machinery too vast, too entrenched, too essential to daily functioning to dismantle within constitutional timeframes.

Why People Will Accept This

Populations do not resist comprehensive control because it arrives not as catastrophe but as convenience. Each step toward Digital ID is rationalized, justified, made appealing. The public accepts surveillance because it is packaged as security. They surrender privacy because privacy is framed as suspicious. They embrace dependency because dependency is marketed as freedom from want.

The human capacity for adaptation proves fatal to liberty. We normalize what should horrify. The frog boils not because it lacks the sense to leap but because the temperature rises gradually, each degree feeling like the previous. By the time the water scalds, the capacity for escape has atrophied. We tell ourselves that we will resist when the line is crossed, failing to recognize that the line moves continuously, that we have already crossed dozens of lines our ancestors would have defended.

The mythology of resistance sustains complacency. We imagine that when tyranny becomes obvious, we will act. We will opt out. We will go off-grid. We will resist. But the infrastructure for resistance requires preparation that few undertake. The skills, the networks, the alternative systems—these require years of cultivation that digital convenience discourages. When realization arrives, the capacity for effective resistance has already been dismantled.

Digital ID exploits the human desire for belonging. Exclusion from the system is not merely inconvenient; it is social death. The individual without Digital ID cannot participate in the economy, cannot travel, cannot access healthcare, cannot maintain normal social relationships. The cost of resistance is total, immediate, and visible, while the cost of compliance is gradual, deferred, and abstract. This asymmetry ensures that most will comply, that resistance will remain the province of those with unusual resources or unusual conviction.

The normalization of surveillance has already occurred. We carry tracking devices voluntarily. We share our locations, our preferences, our relationships with platforms that monetize this data. We accept facial recognition at airports, fingerprint scanning for phones, voice analysis for assistants. Each acceptance trains us for the next, larger surrender. Digital ID merely consolidates these separate acquiescences into unified control.

The 2028 Horizon

International organizations have established 2028 as the target for universal digital identity implementation. The World Bank, the UN, the WEF—all coordinate toward this deadline. National governments align their policies accordingly. The infrastructure is built, the legislation drafted, the populations prepared through incremental conditioning.

This timeline allows sufficient years for normalization, for the retirement of resistant populations, for the maturation of technical infrastructure, for the resolution of competing systems into unified standards. It represents the culmination of decades of preparation, the final phase of a transformation that began with credit cards and accelerated through smartphones.

The window for effective opposition narrows daily. Each new pilot program, each new banking regulation, each new digital service that requires verified identity—these build the scaffolding of the control system. Opposition becomes more difficult as the system becomes more comprehensive. The individual who refuses participation finds not a community of resistance but isolation, as the digital majority cannot comprehend or accommodate analog existence.

By 2028, the question will be settled not through debate but through fait accompli. The infrastructure will exist. The population will be enrolled. The exceptions will be marginalized, impoverished, forgotten. The warnings issued today will be dismissed as paranoid speculation, even as the reality they described becomes the water in which everyone swims, invisible because ubiquitous.

The Last Years of Analog Existence

We stand at the terminus of an era. The decades ahead will be defined by the struggle between digital totalitarianism and the remnants of human autonomy. The outcome is not predetermined; the machinery of control, however advanced, requires human compliance to function. But the trajectory favors the controllers because they act with coordination, resources, and long-term planning while the population sleeps, distracted by spectacle and comfort.

The 2028 deadline is not merely a policy target. It is the closing of a door. After it, the world of cash transactions, anonymous movement, unmonitored communication, and unverified identity becomes inaccessible not through law but through infrastructure. The past becomes literally unreachable because the means of reaching it have been dismantled.

Those who recognize this moment have limited options. They can prepare alternative systems, cultivate analog skills, build communities of mutual support outside digital channels. They can resist enrollment as long as possible, accepting the costs of exclusion. They can document these developments, preserving knowledge of what freedom meant for future generations who will have known only conditional access.

But they cannot stop the tide alone. Effective resistance requires collective recognition that has not materialized and shows little sign of materializing. The seductions of digital convenience prove too powerful, the costs of non-compliance too severe, the capacity for denial too robust.

What remains is witness. The documentation of this transformation, this closing of the frontier of liberty, this assembly of comprehensive control. We write now so that future readers will know that warnings were issued, that alternatives existed, that submission was chosen rather than inevitable. We write so that the record will show that some saw clearly, that some refused the anesthesia of convenience, that some maintained their humanity when the system demanded its surrender.

The years between now and 2028 will determine whether humanity retains the capacity for unmonitored existence or surrenders finally to the administered life. The clock ticks. The door slowly closes. And most stand watching, wondering why they feel a draft, not yet understanding that the walls are moving inward, that the space for liberty contracts with each passing day, that the world they knew is being dismantled around them, replaced by something colder, more efficient, more total, and more permanent than anything previous generations could have imagined or feared.

The warning has been given. The deadline approaches. The choice, for now, remains yours. But the window narrows. And the machinery does not sleep.

Source: https://madgewaggy.blogspot.com/

Image: Source [Edited]

Original Article: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/09/no_author/he-2028-digital-id-deadline-approaches/

U.S. Space Force’s top officer has shared new details about his service’s use of electronic warfare capabilities during Operation Epic Fury against Iran earlier this year. This underscores how space is steadily becoming an arena where conflict actually occurs, and the implications this has for forces operating inside and outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess highlighted the actions of a member of the 42nd Electromagnetic Warfare Combat Detachment (EWCD) in support of Epic Fury during a keynote speech earlier this morning. Schiess’ remarks came at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, at which TWZ is in attendance. This is his first major engagement since taking over as head of Space Force less than two weeks ago.

“During Operation Epic Fury, our components, notably at U.S. Central Command and Space Command, with support from our components at European Command and Pacific Command, demonstrated that Guardians [the official term for uniformed Space Force personnel] are not supporting from the sidelines as a nice-to-have [sic], but we are delivering space power directly into the fight as a need-to-have,” Schiess said. “One of those impressive Guardians is Specialist Gray, who hails from Tampa, Florida. She joined the Space Force just two years ago, but listen to the impact she [has] made in her short term already.”

“She deployed to the CENTCOM AOR [Central Command area of responsibility] as a part of the 42nd Electronic Warfare Detachment [sic], and within hours of OEF kicking off, she received a top priority target package with one critical objective: reconfigure her weapon system and execute critical non-kinetic fires,” he continued. “She locked onto the target, optimized her weapon system, and waged electromagnetic warfare against a determined adversary. Even as ‘Alarm Red’ sirens were blaring, and incoming missiles targeted her site, she courageously held the line, protecting forces, denying adversary capability, and delivering space effects, until her commander had to literally pull her from the console to safety.”

“Specialist Gray is just one of the outstanding members of the entire enterprise of dedicated guardians, including the acquisition professionals that developed and fielded the weapon system that she operated, the intel Guardians that developed the targeting package that she used, and the cyber guardians who ensured communication, connectivity, and network defense for the command and control, the guardian instructors who trained her for combat, and the list goes on and on,” the Chief of Space Operations added.

Schiess did not name the system in question or elaborate further on how it was employed. However, previously released pictures of elements of the 42nd EWCD in the Middle East have shown personnel working with trailer-mounted multi-band antennas that have been associated in the past with variants of the Counter Communications System (CCS). CCS is a family of ground-based electronic warfare jammers primarily designed to disrupt enemy space-based communications capabilities. Prior to yesterday, CCS was the U.S. military’s only publicly acknowledged anti-satellite weapon. Space Force has now confirmed it also has weapons in orbit, which we will come back to later on.

The 42nd Electromagnetic Warfare Combat Detachment has been operating in the Middle East since at least 2024 under the umbrella of Space Force’s main headquarters in the region, U.S. Space Forces – Central (SPACECENT). President Donald Trump briefly called attention to the detachment’s “cutting-edge defense activities” during a Christmas Eve conference call with deployed service members last year.

“Sometimes we have to be within the footprint of the satellite, and so that’s why Guardians go into harm’s way,” Gen. Schiess did tell TWZ and other outlets at a roundtable after his speech this morning when asked for more details about the 42nd EWCD’s role in Operation Epic Fury, and what lessons Space Force has been learning from the conflict more broadly.

“Electromagnetic warfare was a big part of that, but also satellite communications,” he added. “The ability to keep communications, obviously GPS and PNT [positioning, navigation, and timing], were important there.”

“And then, really, missile warning and missile tracking was [sic] incredibly important. Both [Air Force Chief of Staff] Gen. Wilsbach and I talked about ‘Red Alarm’ situations,” the Chief of Space Operations continued. “Being able to tell our forces to be able to take cover was extremely important. And as we’ve seen from Ukraine to Iran, the amount of missiles and the amount of things, the folks that are doing that each and every day are incredible, and they are saving lives.”

Gen. Schiess’ anecdote about Specialist Gray and the 42nd EWCD did highlight how Iran, especially in the opening phases of the conflict earlier this year, was able to deal real blows to U.S. and allied facilities and forces across the Middle East. Iranian missiles, drones, and other capabilities were able to damage and/or destroy a variety of high-value assets, including aircraft and radars, and cause hundreds of casualties, as TWZ has drawn attention to on several occasions in the past. This has already been a sobering wake-up call with serious implications for potential future conflicts against larger and even more capability opponents, especially China.

“I think the whole joint force is learning a lot from Operation Epic Fury, the previous operation there, on exactly what needs to be in underground facilities, [and] what maybe can we do from remote locations,” the head of Space Force said at the roundtable today. “You could also look at what can we do from space to do some of those things? And so we’re looking at all those [lessons learned].”

Gen. Schiess mentioning subterranean facilities and remote operations is particularly notable. Even before Operation Epic Fury began, the U.S. Air Force had been working to expand options for directing operations in the Middle East from a command center in the United States. The service had also been looking to push certain command and control functions at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar underground. Al Udeid was among the many bases Iran subsequently targeted.

Operation Epic Fury has already added new fuel to a larger ongoing debate about balancing U.S. military base defense priorities globally, including the relative value of investing in new physically hardened infrastructure. TWZ has been following these discussions very closely in recent years. The conflict with Iran has raised serious questions about future operations of any kind at certain bases across the Middle East, and there have been reports that a larger reorientation of America’s force posture in the region could be coming.

For Space Force, operations against Iran have provided a broader opportunity for the service to demonstrate its active role in forward-deployed operations. That, in turn, has generated its own lessons learned beyond just steps needed to help better protect units in the field.

This extends to “reconstitution [of forces] in a combat environment, the logistics and the importance of that relationship with TRANSCOM [U.S. Transportation Command] and to be able to get supplies and replenishment into the theater,” Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna also said today, speaking alongside Gen. Schiess at the roundtable. That is “something we haven’t really worked on before. So definitely, it was a great lesson learned.”

Space-based capabilities including early warning, general intelligence gathering, weapons guidance, near-real-time communications, and more, are already absolutely central to U.S. military operations. America’s long-standing dominance in space is also steadily being eroded, with China, in particular, surging ahead in the deployment of new satellites to support a host of mission requirements, including intelligence-gathering and long-range targeting. The ability to leverage space is also proliferating to smaller adversaries, including Iran.

In addition, as mentioned, the space domain is no longer limited to just supporting operations within the atmosphere, but is a place where real engagements happen. The U.S. military is now capable of generating so-called counter-space effects using forces and assets within the atmosphere as well as in orbit, as was just disclosed yesterday.

Overall, Gen. Douglas Schiess’ comments today about the role played by Specialist Gray and the 42nd EWCD during Operation Epic Fury are indicative of not just what is to come in future operations, but how the Space Force is already engaged in combat missions now.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post New Details On How Space Force Has Waged Electronic Warfare Against Iran appeared first on TWZ.

The post Israel Building Ring of Space-Based Orbital Energy Weapons Around the Entire Planet—’Encircling the Enemy’ appeared first on The People's Voice.

After running a historic campaign to unseat a criminal court judge for the first time in Nashville, Courtney Teasley created the legal education company emeffen to inform working-class communities about their civil rights. From combating police abuse to supporting vulnerable populations targeted by the criminal justice system, Teasley is a business and legal powerhouse redirecting people toward civic engagement and political-economic acumen. In this heartfelt interview, Mansa Musa and Courtney Teasley discuss grounded community organizing and political education that subverts the carceral system’s goal of turning citizens into captives.

Related links:

• Follow Courtney Teasley on Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, website.

Credits:

• Production/Post-production: Cameron Granadino

The Fourth Amendment Does Not Have An Exception Saying Government May Watch Everyone If A Private Corporation Owns The Cameras

LewRockwell.com | Martin Armstrong

Welcome to America, where apparently standing around is now enough to have your movements searched through a nationwide surveillance network.

Records obtained from the Plano, Illinois Police Department reveal more than 1,200 searches involving the category “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.” That is from cameras controlled by ONE small police department, with law enforcement agencies elsewhere accessing those cameras as part of their searches. Additional audit records collected around the country show hundreds more searches under the same category. Flock has more than 120,000 cameras spread across 49 states, and its network has expanded into thousands of communities. This is no longer some camera sitting outside a convenience store recording a robbery. They have constructed the infrastructure to reconstruct where ordinary people travel, and police departments across jurisdictions can search that information.

This is precisely what I wrote about when I said, “Your Car Was Never the Target.” License plate readers were sold as a tool to find stolen vehicles and dangerous fugitives. Then the systems began recording the make, model, color, location, and movements of vehicles. Now Flock is developing AI systems capable of doing considerably more. Its newer investigative technology can combine camera information with police records, dispatch logs, and commercial identity databases, while other tools can search camera networks using written descriptions. Once you combine AI with a nationwide camera network, you are no longer investigating a crime after it occurs. You are constructing the machinery necessary to search the movements and associations of an entire population.

Flock’s newer AI tools can allow police to continuously search cameras in a defined area for someone matching a written description. A Texas deputy previously searched tens of thousands of cameras looking for a woman who had obtained an abortion. Officers have been accused of using Flock to track former romantic partners. Illinois discovered that federal immigration agents had gained access to state camera information despite restrictions. Now we learn the system is being searched for loitering and vagrancy. Yet they continue telling us not to worry because safeguards are coming. Flock has announced shorter default retention periods, case codes, auditing, and other controls. Fine. None of that changes the fundamental question: Why should government possess the ability to reconstruct the movements of millions of innocent people in the first place?

The Fourth Amendment was not written with an exception saying government may watch everyone so long as a private corporation owns the cameras. I wrote earlier this year about the FBI admitting that it purchases commercially available location information on Americans. This is the loophole they have discovered. Government does not always need to build the surveillance system itself anymore. Private corporations collect the information, construct the databases, and develop the technology. Government simply purchases access or contracts for the service. The private sector builds the cage and government gets the key.

People keep saying, “I have nothing to hide.” That is perhaps the most dangerous response imaginable. Liberty was never based upon proving to government that you have nothing to hide. Government was supposed to prove that it had probable cause to investigate YOU. We have turned that principle upside down. Everyone is monitored first, the information is stored, and government searches the database later when it decides somebody has become interesting. You do not need to commit murder. You do not need to rob a bank. You apparently do not even need to steal a car. You can be searched because somebody decided you were loitering.

We are all criminals now. That is where this mentality inevitably leads. Every citizen becomes a potential suspect because every citizen generates data that can be searched. Your car identifies where you travel, your phone identifies where you sleep, your credit card identifies what you buy, your bank identifies who you pay. Facial recognition identifies where you appear in real time. AI can connect information that once required hundreds of investigators and months of work in seconds. Governments of the past could only dream of possessing this kind of power.

This is how a surveillance state is created. There is no announcement from Washington declaring that privacy has ended. There is no single law abolishing the Fourth Amendment. It happens camera by camera, database by database, emergency by emergency, until one day people realize that anonymity in public has effectively disappeared. The government will insist that only criminals need to worry right up until the definition of “criminal” includes standing somewhere too long. [Or someone who refuses a deadly 'vaccine', or to wear a mask during a fake pandemic, or speaks against war, the government or their narratives...]

Source: https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/government-surveillance/flock-cameras-watching-you/

Original Article: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/09/martin-armstrong/flock-cameras-watching-you/

Note: Comments placed in [ ] are added by Truth11.com editor.  For example; [Flu]

Over 100 of the world’s largest technology and financial corporations—including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Visa—issued a joint warning this week that AI-powered cyberattacks will surge dramatically within months, threatening to cripple hospitals, water systems, and [...]

The post AI Companies Raise Alarm on “Devastating” Cyberattacks Within Months—Following the WEF’s Playbook to the Letter appeared first on The People's Voice.

Lockheed Martin has unveiled a modular airframe concept for its stealthy and combat-proven AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) family that could support multiple configurations, launch methods, and sensor packages while making use of the existing JASSM and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) production infrastructure. Highly survivable, the missiles are an incredibly important and staple weapon for the U.S. military, and for select export customers.

Called AGM-158 FLEX, the new concept is centered on a common airframe with interchangeable components. Lockheed Martin says it has invested more than $35 million of its funds in the effort so far, including airframe design, testing, prototype production, subsystem qualification, and work with suppliers.

The company says the FLEX design will use removable nose sections that can accommodate sensor suites associated with the AGM-158 family. A removable boat tail would allow the same basic airframe to be configured for different launch methods, including air, surface, and subsurface launch. That would open the AGM-158 architecture up to ground-, ship-, and submarine-launched applications, although Lockheed Martin has not provided details on the specific launchers, platforms, or configurations envisioned. It’s worth noting the LRASM has been tested in vertical launch configuration for vessels equipped with the Mk 41 launch system.

In addition to the Navy vertical launch tests, the idea of moving the JASSM family beyond its traditional combat aircraft launch platforms is not new. The Air Force’s Palletized JASSM concept, better known as Rapid Dragon, has demonstrated the ability to deploy JASSM-ER from palletized launchers carried inside cargo aircraft, using an expendable airdrop system. FLEX takes a different approach by building those kinds of launch options into the airframe architecture itself, with modularity supporting various launch configurations for the same basic weapon.

For aircraft-launched weapons, Lockheed Martin says FLEX will retain compatibility with current and future JASSM and LRASM launch platforms.

The company is also proposing multiple airframe lengths. A 206-inch configuration is associated with the supersized JASSM-XR, while a 168-inch version is consistent with the dimensions of JASSM-ER. Lockheed Martin says JASSM-XR will be the first configuration of the FLEX airframe.

The AGM-158 family has already grown well beyond the original JASSM. The AGM-158A is the baseline stealthy air-launched land-attack missile, with a publicly reported range of roughly 230-330 miles, while the AGM-158B JASSM-ER uses a more efficient engine and additional fuel to roughly double that reach, to around 575 miles or more.

Alongside the land-attack variants is the AGM-158C LRASM, which uses the JASSM airframe but substitutes a sophisticated imaging infrared anti-ship seeker, electronic support measures, datalink, and other capabilities, for operations against heavily defended surface combatants.

Finally, the much larger JASSM-XR is being developed with a substantially stretched fuselage to carry more fuel and a larger 1,000-pound-class warhead, with a range expected to approach or exceed 1,000 miles. This would give it a similar striking capability as the Tomahawk cruise missile, although in a stealthier package.

Beyond range and launch options, the company is pitching its new FLEX concept as a way to simplify future upgrades. Components could be replaced as they become obsolete or new capabilities become available without necessarily requiring a completely new missile design.

That approach could have an industrial-base advantage, particularly as the United States seeks to increase production of long-range weapons. Lockheed Martin says FLEX would use the existing JASSM/LRASM production line, supply chain, mission-planning infrastructure, and software ecosystem rather than establishing an entirely new manufacturing and support architecture.

The company says its JASSM/LRASM production infrastructure includes a 225,000-square-foot facility opened in 2022 with increased automation and a robotic paint line.

Notable, however, is the fact that FLEX is being proposed at a time when the U.S. Air Force is pursuing affordable mass as a key priority.

For example, as part of a slew of low-cost cruise missile offerings, the service has been moving ahead with the Extended Range Attack Munition, or ERAM, a new air-launched missile explicitly intended to provide a relatively low-cost, rapidly producible standoff weapon. The Air Force conducted a live-warhead ERAM test in January of last year, less than 16 months after the program received its initial contract, and described the weapon as a means of generating mass against fixed targets. ERAM is understood to have a range of between 150 and 280 miles, putting it below the reach of the baseline JASSM, let alone the JASSM-ER or XR.

However, the emerging class of lower-cost weapons are intended very much more to complement than compete with JASSM. While the Air Force plans to buy thousands of the cheaper missile, the JASSM will still be needed to take up the higher end of the cost and capability list.

Lockheed Martin mentions that FLEX should “unlock future cost savings,” but this sounds more about giving customers the ability to swap out components and upgrade capabilities on existing missile rounds, to avoid obsolescence, rather than facilitate mass production.

As it stands, JASSM has evolved into a family of increasingly capable and longer-range weapons, but those capabilities necessarily come with a different set of cost and production considerations than a weapon designed from the outset around large-scale production. Lockheed Martin’s announcement does not disclose a target unit cost for FLEX, nor does it explain how the eventual cost of a FLEX-derived weapon would compare with a baseline JASSM or LRASM. The unit price of the latest subvariants of the JASSM-ER is around $1.2 and $1.5 million, according to official budget documents.

The new weapon is a way of getting more variants and launch options out of the established JASSM/LRASM architecture, potentially with less development work than creating entirely new weapons. Whether that translates into enough savings or production capacity to satisfy the military’s growing demand for large numbers of standoff weapons remains to be seen.

For Lockheed Martin, the proposal also offers a way to extend the relevance of the AGM-158 family as the company and the Pentagon pursue additional range, new launch platforms, and potentially new launch methods.

The flexibility of the missile could be particularly relevant to the Agile Combat Employment concept, and the wider U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific, where forces are expected to operate from a larger number of dispersed and potentially austere locations. A common missile architecture that can be adapted to different launch platforms and different target sets could allow weapons to be positioned and employed across a distributed force rather than tying particular missile variants to particular launchers.

The original JASSM/LRASM has also become a significant export weapon, with Australia, Finland, Poland and several other U.S. allies cleared to acquire variants of the missile. While the advanced capabilities of the weapon have seen its export opportunities carefully controlled, FLEX could potentially open up the market to more customers, including less-advanced, ‘sanitized’ versions.

Lockheed Martin’s announcement provides few details on FLEX’s eventual cost, production rate, schedule, or specific performance beyond the stated airframe dimensions. For now, the concept demonstrates that the company is seeking to create a more adaptable architecture around an established missile family, one that has played a critical role in numerous operations since its introduction.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post Lockheed Flexes To Modular AGM-158 JASSM Missile Concept appeared first on TWZ.

South Carolina Rep. Nancy mace declared that Lindsay Clancy—the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three young children to death with exercise bands—deserves the death penalty, and she wants it done publicly. “Her children are dead,” [...]

The post US Representative Calls For Lindsay Clancy’s Public Execution: ‘A Warning To Women Everywhere’ appeared first on The People's Voice.