From blog of bile comes news of an exercise that Comrade Bosco calls a “Police State LARP.”

According to The Carroll Daily Times-Herald:

The purpose of the April 2-5 drill will be to gather intelligence, then search for and apprehend a suspected weapons dealer, according to Sgt. Mike Kots, readiness NCO for Alpha Company.

Citizens, law enforcement, media and other supporters will participate.

Troops will spend Thursday, April 2, staging at a forward operations base at Carroll. The next day company leaders will conduct reconnaissance and begin patrolling the streets of Arcadia to identify possible locations of the weapons dealer.

The primary phase will be done Saturday, April 4, when convoys will be deployed from Carroll to Arcadia. Pictures of the arms dealer will be shown in Arcadia, and soldiers will go door to door asking if residents have seen the suspect.

Soldiers will knock only at households that have agreed to participate in the drill, Kots noted.

“Once credible intelligence has been gathered,” said Kots, “portions of the town will be road-blocked and more in-depth searches of homes and vehicles will be conducted in accordance with the residents’ wishes.

“One of the techniques we use in today’s political environment is cordon and knock,” Kots explained. “We ask for the head of the household, get permission to search, then have them open doors and cupboards. The homeowner maintains control. We peer over their shoulder, and the soldier uses the homeowner’s body language and position to protect him.”

During this phase of the operation, troops will interact with residents and media while implementing crowd-control measures and possibly treating and evacuating injured persons…

Kots said the exercise will replace Alpha Company’s weekend drill for April.

“We have a lot of extended drills this coming year,” he added.

In addition to surveillance, searching and apprehension, the exercise will also give the troops valuable experience in stability, support, patrol, traffic control, vehicle searches and other skills needed for deployment in an urban environment…

Some may think of this as a simple PR and recruitment stunt. But as I have said before, the experience that the military gains in subduing foreign populations is applicable to subduing any population. Have you noticed that new armored vehicles like the MRAP and Stryker are primarily designed to protect troops deploying against insurgents? Who exactly is the government protecting us from?

ADDENDUM: The military has done training exercises involving civilians for a while. It would be interesting to study whether the frequency and focus of such exercises has changed. It should also be noted that an Army brigade has recently been deployed for domestic roles including crowd control and dealing with civil unrest.

Rational Review News Digest carried an interesting story from the Washington Post today.

The government of Pakistan, facing pressure from the West and increasing concern among its own citizens, has been struggling for months to contain an epidemic of religiously cloaked mayhem that is spreading from tribal havens along the Afghan border into the surrounding belt of “settled” areas that are theoretically protected by the state.

Authorities have tried various methods, first using the army to attempt to quash the [fundamentalist and criminal] rebels, and more recently negotiating truces with individual militia groups. Thousands of conflict-zone inhabitants, terrified by government bombing and insurgent brutality, have fled their homes. Few local officials dare visit their constituencies without military escorts.

A few tribal leaders, however, have refused to budge and are urging others to do the same. One of the first was Anwar Kamal Marwat, a former member of Parliament, who decided to organize a self-defense force in 2007 after Taliban militias began kidnapping and threatening people in his native Lakki Marwat district, demanding their support for a holy war.

“We are Muslims, and we know what holy war is. What they were doing was committing crimes,” Marwat, 60, said last week in Peshawar. “They kept threatening us, but our tribe is very united and every village went on alert. We wanted to stop them before the cancer spread. It took many months, but now all their camps are gone, and they have not been back.”

Marwat’s success has been both an inspiration to other vulnerable communities and an embarrassment to the government, whose police are supposed to keep order and whose army is supposed to fight extremists.

A statement likely to resonate with anti-authoritarians came from village council head Fahim ur Rahman, who would probably be called a “warlord” by Western media if he wasn’t fighting against the same people the United States is:

If our tribe were not so united, we would have no hope of defending ourselves. We do not have permission to do this, but we have no choice.”

I call shenanigans on the Washington Times article “Study Finds Eating Red Meat Contributes to Risk of Early Death”. What the study actually found was that eating excessive amounts of red meat increases the mortality rate of people over fifty.

The times article says that the study accounted for “other variables that might confound the findings, such as smoking and physical activity.” Since I didn’t find a link to an actual overview of the study, I’ll take that as probably true.

It’s also probably true that people who get most of their nutrients from meat aren’t eating enough of other foods. I have read that the healthy effects of the Mediterranean diet were not decreased at times when meat consumption in Mediterranean countries increased, but I can’t find a source now.

I would also suggest that the dietary needs of the average active twenty-something are different from the needs of the average sixty-something.

The Washington times also notes that “a major reduction in meat consumption would probably have a host of other benefits to society: reducing water shortages and pollution, cutting energy consumption, and tamping down greenhouse gas emissions — all of which are associated with large-scale livestock production.” That sounds like a call for more hunting to me! Break out the buckshot, and remember to plant your veggies.

So, yeah, it’s a good idea to not eat too much red meat, but please don’t act like meatballs are cancer pills. And give me the grape juice that hasn’t spoiled yet.

Recently in the USA,

St. Paul, MN police are still on the lookout for anarchist types, using video footage obtained at anti-RNC actions for evidence. They appear to have ransacked a Macalester dorm room and seized political literature. According to a firsthand account,

The police were extremely thorough, going through every part of my room, every single book and CD. They took a copy of the communist manifesto, a copy of the book Dancing in the Streets, a number of anti-war flyers and stickers, a guide to the organizing behind the Seattle WTO protests, a copy of the rebel workers organizing handbook, and attempted to take an ink drawing before I pointed out that it did not constitute “anarchist material”, and thus not covered by the search warrant. I was given a receipt for these items, and the police left my room in a state of complete disarray.

Elsewhere, some libertarian activists are very offended at a recent Missouri law enforcement agency report that associates them with right wing terrorists, and equates the anti-tax film America: From Freedom to Fascism with the Neo-Nazi novel The Turner Diaries.

In Nevada,

Four members of an anti-government movement, known as the “Sovereign Movement,” have been arrested after a three-year investigation by the Nevada Joint Terrorism Task Force on allegations of money laundering, tax evasion and possessing unregistered machine guns.

We might also remember that the government of Pennsylvania considers “anarchists” and “anti-government groups” likely to be terrorists.

Interesting times, to say the least.

H/T Knappster and NoState.

As I’ve said before, when people rely on themselves and their friends for protection, there will be less use for the protection racket known as the state. The dissemination of weapons and combat information is one way to peaceably bring about this change.

In that spirit I present an interesting link, The Box O’ Truth. It started with testing what happens to different things when they are hit with different projectiles, and expanded to include other neat firearms stuff.

My readers might be interested in LibertyActivism.info, a site that “exists to provide resources for those who wish to promote liberty.” It is a budding wiki on all sorts of subversive info.

When people rely on themselves and their friends for protection, there will be less use for the protection racket known as the state. The dissemination of weapons and combat information is one way to peaceably bring about this change.

Gun Safety

Gun Manuals

Surplus Rifle and Pistol Information

Firearms Disassembly Videos

Beretta 92

M1 Garand

FAL

Remington 870

AK 47

AR 15

Sheldon Richman recently posted a report aboout Israeli funding of Hamas. It contains other lessons for left libertarians.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da’wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

“Social influence grew into political influence,” first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity…

…A further factor of Hamas’ growth was the fact the PLO moved its base of operations to Beirut in the ’80s, leaving the Islamic organization to grow in influence in the Occupied Territories “as the court of last resort,” he said.

The implications for radicals are broad, but not too hard to find. A movement to abolish political power could greatly benefit by providing useful services to people it wants to influence. This idea can be put into a framework of counter-economics or mutual aid. A “court of last resort” sounds suspiciously like those Dispute Resolution Organizations you frequently hear about in market anarchist literature.

Related to this post are Jeremy’s observations of Richmond Food Not Bombs:

The hours spent working with the group seemed to obscure the usual skepticism I hold about the larger anarchist project. The joy with which the group brought food to grateful people, making a political statement without having to spell it out, floored me. Spontaneous organization is not just about abstract social dynamics; it requires the human touch of good will and love to work. Any organization that wants to empower and free people must care about them, appreciate them, and provide a space where they can form that community of equals.

As I have said before,

When desired goods and services are provided in a revolutionary context, the consumers then join entrepreneurs in building revolution. A revolution based on libertarian principles ought to build liberty outside of the system. It is not enough simply to tell people that the free market can do things better. They must be shown that we will make it do things better.

To help you save money in these difficult times, I present two good resources for downloadable targets you can print.

Targetz.com

Glock FAQ Targets

Should you need a target larger than your printer can handle, you can always tape your printed target onto a large piece of paper (even packaging paper).

Happy shooting!

Brandon Michael Darby, an FBI informant who reported on the anti-RNC activists, released a statement to the public. He essentially says that he feels good about sending people to prison because they wanted to do more than passively express disagreement with the Republican party, and that wouldn’t be noble.

Comments and pictures can be found at Snitch Wire. I suggest avoiding any interactions with this treacherous tool of the state.