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.

The Win: Wally Conger’s advice for “Smashing Wage Slavery One Job at a Time”. Conger lives a comfortable life without being tied to a job and he wants to help other people get there. Check his blog, and download his e-book.

The Fail: Guinness World Records set a new record for failure. Their website challenged viewers to top the September 11 attacks, and when Failblog posted a screenshot of this failure, Guinness sent them a threatening email for the “intellectual property” violation.

The other night I flipped through my copy of John Wiseman’s The SAS Survival Handbook. (Google Books shows a newer version than I have.)

The Handbook is packed with great information and helpful graphics.

A passage in the “Handling the Kill” section says:

Do not waste blood. It is rich in vitamins and minerals, including salt, that could otherwise be missing from the survivor’s diet. Cattle blood is an important part of the diet of many African herdsmen. Cannibals who drank their enemies’ blood found vision and general health improved, and giddy spells, induced by vitamin deficiency, cured: the blood provided the missing vitamins and minerals.

There you have it. If you’re ever stranded, try drinking blood. But drink plenty of water with it, since you’ll need water to digest all that life force.

Via NoState, a large collection of firearms construction books is available for download.

A new issue of ALLiance, a journal of theory and strategy, is out and ready for download. It includes an article I wrote on Libertarian Left propaganda.