Weekend Reading

• First up is another Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. Some of the links that caught my attention:
• At the top of this list is an article form Guns Magazine entitled "No, The Sky Ain't Falling" which is a weird title for an article about really useful prepping gear that you may have overlooked: everything from water filters and dust masks, to dental repair kits and a crowbar. Go over it and see if there is anything that you are missing.
• An article going over the benefits and uses of a having a triangular bandage. The author really likes the "Cravat Triangular Bandage" from ChinookMed.
• On this note, Greg mentions that Amazon currently has a sale on Israeli style bandages.
• An article with advice on how not to get car jacked. I laughed at one of the specific, enumerated points: don't go to Detroit.
• An article looking at the pros and cons of red dots on concealed carry pistols. I've been experimenting with this lately, and I can tell you a couple real quick cons: the optic gets a lot of lint and dust on (I just carry it under a jacket), and it is just one more thing to dig into your side. I was also watching a video lately where the author had stuck a red dot on a pistol he normally carried in the pocket. Of course, with the optic, it would no longer fit in the pocket holster he had for the weapon; so he was having to get a bigger holster and I was left with the the question of whether he would even be able to fit it into a pocket. I think there is a definite place for optics on a duty sized pistol, but I don't see them working well for deep concealment or pocket carry; and in between those extremes, it probably is going to come down to a individual circumstances. 
• It appears that the Left is going to be trying to force the rest of the country to give into their demands, and so Greg has included a link to a timely article on the topic of "What If Your Neighborhood Is Attacked By An Angry Mob?"
• And an early look on the impact of the elimination of the $200 suppressor tax: "Knox Williams, executive director of the American Suppressor Association (ASA), reported after meeting with ATF officials during SHOT Show here in Las Vegas that, to date, more than 260,000 eForms have been processed this January."  
• "Woke never really died, it’s coming back with a vengeance — and we should be terrified" by Rikki Schlott, New York Post. 
• And some from Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man:
• "Fifty people control the culture" - Media (streaming, movies, record labels) is highly concentrated. Google controls most of the internet. This concentration means that just a small group can choke off the flow of information to and between members of the public. 

    What it means, of course, is that if anyone wants to do anything that the "favored fifty" (or enough of them, at any rate) would rather not see succeed, they can throttle it to the point of strangulation without even raising a sweat.  If they don't publish it, nobody will be able to access it.  If they don't publicize it, nobody will know about it.  If it becomes any sort of a threat, they can buy it with their pocket change and simply shut it down.  The developer or author or owner won't be able to refuse their offer, because he/she/they will go broke if they don't.

    A prime example may be seen in Minneapolis and Minnesota right now.  All the focus of the news media is on ICE's law enforcement activity there - ignoring the truly massive fraud investigations going on into multiple aspects of the state's government, ...

•  "Minnesota: Both sides are caught on the horns of a dilemma" - This article begins with a warning of how the anti-ICE protestors going into a church crossed a red line, including a quote from, of all people, Rod Dreher warning that this type of behavior is how civil wars start because, at some point, conservatives are going to react. But I also found the second half of the post interesting because it notes how these confrontations are being orchestrated, to-wit, this example:

January 15, 2026. Tore Says monitors document simultaneous Zoom calls across every major activist network in the United States. Sunrise Movement. Federal employee resistance groups. Military reservist networks. Senior Executive Service officials. Antifa organizers. Ideologically opposed groups, different platforms, never having worked together publicly.

Jake broadcasts intent to burn a Quran to provoke the left.

Pink broadcasts alerts about an “anti-Muslim rally” to mobilize the Left.

They both specify the exact time. They both name the location.

On the surface, they are enemies. In the intelligence chatter, they are the same network. One operative amplifies the threat. The other provides the violence. Two hands of the same foreign-funded clock.

Every Zoom call Tore documented discussed the same objective: create sufficient unrest that the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

• "Minneapolis has been planning its insurrection for a long time" - Another post describing the organized efforts on the ground to identify ICE activity and provoke confrontations. An excerpt:

Minnesota has spent years building an infrastructure of ICE watch patrols, NGO backed rapid response teams, and politically wired nonprofits that can flip from ordinary life to street mobilization in minutes. 

The key to Minnesota’s rapid mobilization is not Twitter activism. It is an on the ground surveillance and response network that local reporters have already documented in detail. A Star Tribune investigation into the “organized resistance to ICE” in Minnesota reads like a field manual for modern grassroots intelligence operations.​

In south Minneapolis, volunteers spend hours driving what they openly call ICE patrols. Phones are mounted on dashboards. Every sighting of a suspicious SUV, every cluster of federal jackets, is recorded and dropped into Signal and WhatsApp groups that run silently in the background of daily life.​

•  "I agree" - Noting that there is a lag between the collapse of a central authority and full-insurgency. And in that lag period?

[There are] large numbers of people armed and ideologically primed for violence, yet most still hesitate to cross the line into open, sustained conflict. Instead, we see the precursors: fireworks thrown as provocations, screaming crowds, disruptive "stupid games," and tantrum-like escalations when people don't get their way. These are the behaviors of spoiled children testing boundaries. 

 He believes that we are in that lag period. But the key point, at the end of his post, is that we have a situation (he refers to the deportation of illegal aliens, but it also applies to many other divisive issues) where no reconciliation is possible.