LibertyActivism.info has the latest issue of ALLiance available for web viewing or downloading as a pdf. It includes a short essay by myself concerning elections. I look forward to reading the rest of the issue.

Kevin Carson’s Making the State Irrelevant commentary is another good read on the topic of political action.

Says Wikipedia:

The Blyskawica (Lightning) was a submachine gun produced by the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, a Polish resistance movement fighting the Germans in occupied Poland. A successful construction, it was most probably the only weapon designed and mass produced covertly in occupied Europe.

Lessons gained from Open Source Ecology could be useful for a variety of libertarian projects.

Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid “resilient communities.” By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and “evolve to freedom.”

HT: Shawn Wilbur on Facebook.

“Power” or even specifically “political power” should not be the target for anarchists to attack. The enemy is what the current political power is based on: authority, the notion that some people have the right to command others due to their rank.

Solidarity and principled opposition to authority can form the basis of a different type of political power. To topple the current political power, we must create an environment of individual empowerment. Empowered individuals must rely on each other and the commitment to liberty in order to to live without authoritarian political powers and then replace authority. The social power of solidarity, and the economic power of the counter-economy can provide political power that undermines authority, instead of having a symbiotic relationship with it.

Because the goal is not to seize the reigns of authority but to sever the bonds, our actions should always work toward the goal of building a free world. Things will need to be seized and subverted, but the creation of a libertarian society is the guiding star.

We might be living in a very different world five years from now. If we want this to be a better world, we have to put our hands into history.

Notions of stability, freedom, and personal identity are tied up with authoritarian ideas. This must be broken.

A weakened political system provides unprecedented opportunity to carve out anti-authoritarian autonomous zones. To do so requires networking, spreading ideology, and working for resilience. Providing valuable services and goods can help gain influence (see A Quick Look At Insurgent Political Influence). Think counter-institutions – economic and social counter-power.

Be careful – authority will attempt to co-opt what it is unable to destroy with force.

Thoughts?

(cross-posted at fr33 agents)

I thought I’d share some neat stuff I found while doing research for my next book, Trade War.

That’s a Russian VSSK 12.7mm silent sniper rifle.

This .pdf document studies the U.S. infantry combat load.

BulletProofME contains a wealth of information on soft and hard body armor.

I also found a couple of amateur tests of various bullets against some kind of steel: rifle and pistol.

And that reminded me of the lock shooting test.

The latest issue of ALLiance: A Journal of Theory and Strategy can now be viewed at Scribd and Liberty Activism. I just read it beginning-to-end and I’m very impressed.

This issue of ALLiance includes an essay by me, “Don’t Tell Me, Show Me: A Quick Look at Insurgent Political Influence”.

That’s right, I said propaganda. If we want to see our ideas realized in the world, we need to propagate them in memorable form in every media available. Neglecting to do so allows, almost requires, others to define our position.

To this end, I wrote “The Strategy of Propaganda” for ALLiance: A Journal of Theory and Strategy. Chris Lempa, publisher of ALLiance, just posted the essay for online viewing at his blog. Thought I’d pass the word along.

I’ve been doing some research and planning for Trade War, my novel-in-progress. One of the downloads I had was a copy of Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency. It is surprisingly readable. Though there are definitely sections that non-military people can skim through, FM 3-24 is certainly worth reading for anyone interested in 21st century politics. So I uploaded it to tradewarbook.com and you can read it by clicking the link above.

Other possible sources of information that I haven’t looked into yet are:
Mao Zedong On Protracted War
War and Social Guerrilla Struggle in Iraq
FM 7-8 Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad

The book Getaway: Driving Techniques For Escape and Evasion by Ronald George Eriksen 2, is a nifty little book on vehicular survival. It’s worth a read for any action novelist. It’s apparently not allowed in Canada.

However, Getaway contains information contradicted by the Buick O’ Truth tests. Eriksen says that “No pistol round can be counted on to penetrate the vehicle body or glass or to flatten a tire” and that “Shotgun loads with the exception of slugs…won’t penetrate the glass, body, or the tires. Slugs, however, will blast huge holes through the vehicle and will almost instantly flatten a tire.”

The Buick O’ Truth testers say “ALL the pistol rounds fired penetrated through the driver’s door into the passenger compartment, with most lodging somewhere in the passenger door” and that “buckshot essentially performed like several slow 9mm rounds, penetrating a single door, but being stopped somewhere in the passenger.”

I’ll go with the source that has pictures. Unfortunately the Buick O’Truth test doesn’t seem to include tires.