Weekend Reading #66

 Some longer or more involved reading:

• Up first is Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump.  Some of the links that caught my eye in particular:
• Near the bottom is a link to an article called "Dark Arts for Good Guys: Break on Through to the other side," which is about how to ram a roadblock. The author of that blog did security and investigation work, including some that took him oversees. As such, he has a bunch of other articles on "dark arts" that cover topics useful if things go FUBAR. Here is a link to the page listing these other articles. He also just has a generally interesting blog, so check out other posts.
• An article on starting a rucking exercise routine/training program. Probably a good idea for anyone who thinks they might need to bug out on foot.
• A link to a video with tips on concealed carry in hot weather.
• An article with some advice on using tactical pens for self-defense; but if this interests you, probably the better course is to simply read and follow Greg's advice in his comments concerning the article.
• An article on why you should use "target depth training"--i.e., have your targets are varying distances. 
• The second part in a series entitled "Defeating the Covert Accomplice" because robbers rarely work alone. 
• For those willing to do some of their own basic gunsmithing work, an article on some simple upgrades and modifications for the AK you can do at home.
• A couple articles warning about how you dress, the bumper stickers on your car, and more, can make you stand out as a gun owner--it's no different than how other types of clothing, hair styles, makeup, etc., can identify you as belonging to certain "tribes". 
• In the event that you are in need of a chuckle or two, be sure to check out John Wilder's latest: "64 Or So Pieces Of Very Bad Advice." I can envision a leftist going down the list and thinking "sounds alright to me". 
• "The DSA's Plan to Remake America"--The Everyman Commentary.  The DSA has released a manifesto which reads:

 “For the working class to govern, we need a new political system. End political corruption and legalized bribery: get rid of lobbyists, dark money, and Citizens United, and publicly finance all elections. Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate.”

The article explores what each of the elements of this communist wish-list entails, together with this warning:

    Our republic was created to tame the appetites of would-be autocrats, making tyranny unlikely, if not impossible to implement. Communists, by contrast, consolidate power.

    Lenin, for one, was notoriously unwilling to share power. He led a small faction of the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party—Democratic Socialists’ presumed namesake—called Bolsheviks, or the majority. He labeled his opponents, usually in the majority, Mensheviks, as being those in the minority and it stuck. It’s not that his ideas weren’t attractive to the majority of socialists—they weren’t—but the future dictator deliberately cobbled together a cell of dedicated yes-men.

    Even after the coup, Lenin was unwilling to share power with fellow socialists which earned him criticism from old school Bolsheviks like Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev and the famed socialist writer Maxim Gorky. He survived an assassination attempt by the Socialist Revolutionary party member Fanny Kaplan who felt that the mastermind of the government takeover betrayed the revolution.

    After Lenin’s passing, Stalin placed his henchmen in local party cells and purged the opposition, starting with Lenin’s acolytes like Mikhail Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev and the sometimes acolyte Lev Trotsky. Successive waves of repressions followed. By these and other methods, the population of the Soviet Union was successfully terrorized into obedience.

Reading this about the DSA brings to mind the famous quote from Rafał Gan-Ganowicz, a Polish anti-communist activist, mercenary, and writer. When a journalist asked him what it felt like to take a human life, he replied: "I wouldn't know, I've only killed communists."