I am honored to present a guest post from my 15 year old homeschooled son, Keegan, who will be elucidating the varieties and levels of immediate first aid kits to increase prep proficiency for the coming bad times. -BB  Put yourself in this scenario. Two people have a head-on vehicle collision and the people are in critical condition and are going to bleed out before the EMT’s can arrive. What are YOU going to do? The importance of medical kits has gone increased significantly  since it is not a safe world any more. Soldiers in Afghanistan now have advanced medical kits so they can give themselves aid. From WWII to modern day, medical kits have advanced by light-years saving many lives. The different levels of medical kits go up to level 5. Lets start with level 1 EDC (Every Day Carry). Many people don’t carry these on their person, but some people do.  Level 2 is an IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit). The kit is made to aid one person.  Level 3 is a medical kit that can aid 2-3 people. Level 4 is a Combat Trauma Bag. Basically, it’s a large messenger bag that, depending on how you pack it, can aid 4-8 people. Level 5 is a portable hospital, which explains itself. People seem to be turning their eyes away and ignoring the facts of self-preparedness, but the few who are ready will survive. First, the EDC level 1 kit is a very personalized kit that fits the needs of your work place and family. Many people do not carry EDC medical kits, which should give you all the more reason to carry one yourself. The EDC kit usually contains one package of quick clot one tourniquet and one pair of medical gloves. You can go to your local surplus store and buy a pack of quick clot for around 15 bucks and a tourniquet is anywhere from 15 bucks to 30 bucks. The gloves are dirt-cheap. It’s cheap, it’s effective, and it works. Personalizing your kit depends on if you have any allergies or have medication you need in an emergency.
28 April, 2013 /
The Boston events of 19 April 2013 would leave any sane person incredulous.  On this same day in 1775, residents of Massachusetts massed to fight and repel uniformed soldier intent on enforcing weapons disarmament provisions issued by the government.  On the same day in 2013, two suspects conducted a horrific bombing of innocents at the Boston Marathon.  The ensuing manhunt for two naturalized US citizens by the police army of 10,000 from local to Federal level resulted in one suspect killed and another found by a private citizen in his backyard. This despite the wholesale search and cordon by the constabulary to locate him by trampling various sacred jurisprudential cornerstones of property rights and again regarding the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Big Government Perpetual Machine called the Constitution.  There are already accounts verifying that the goons frog-marched the property owners out and stormed the house after the clown posse stack-up. All brushed aside in the ensuing panic of thousands of cops bullying the cowering and supine citizens of Boston.  The citizens being a pale and distant relation to the original denizens who would not have tolerated the jack-booted nonsense for a moment. Once again, the clown posse comprising the bloated domestic national security apparatus fumbles and fails in the most basic tasks.  Cops are historians in addition to their duties as heavies for whatever government clique happens to be in power.  They are a reactive element that always fumbles the ball afterwards. What heroic action they took in the contemporary or classical sense evades me during the entire crisis.  They certainly looked like pimped-out mall ninjas in their XXXL military kit and one could read the starry-eyed eagerness to respond to disobedience with maximum prejudice. Again, no conspiratorial fever swamp laps necessary to acknowledge that the geniuses at the FBI and most likely dozens of other equally incompetent federal agencies and their tentacled poodles in the 19,000 law enforcement(!) agencies in America  had been tracking the suspects for years since the lion’s share of domestic terror incidents are conducted under the careful coaching and ministrations of the undercover agents, confidential informants sympathizers and other useful idiots in the Federal entrapment industry.  In this case, the Soviet Policy Law Center may have missed successfully predicting the perpetrators of the bombing since they were not white supremacists or heavily armed libertarians or, worse yet, potential Amish beard thieves.
21 April, 2013 /
 
"Jesus turned water into wine, I turned it into damn likker" - Popcorn Sutton
Appalachia's history is largely comprised of tales of resistance of one form or another.  The poster child of Appalachia’s rebellion against unjust authority has always been the Moonshiner, the maker of non-government approved distilled spirits. These spirits were commonly referred to in the southern lexicon as moonshine, mountain dew, white lightning, “painter piss,” or perhaps more simply “likker.” There is no moonshiner more infamous than the Smoky Mountain’s own, Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton. He was not only one of the most famous makers of illicit liquor, but he also led his entire life in defiance of government authority and was quite a character to boot. Sutton was born in Haywood County, North Carolina, a rural mountainous county on the Tennessee border. At an early age he learned whiskey making from his family and local whiskey makers a like in Haywood and neighboring Cocke County, Tennessee. In due time, he became a well-known whiskey maker in the region. Taking full advantage of the legal jurisdictional confusion between the two states, he plied his trade to the fullest. This was a very common practice employed by bootleggers and moonshiners in years past, when one sheriff would get on your trail you hopped across the state or county line and continued your business. The tradition of whiskey making as employed by mountain folk originates further back than many people realize. It comes from the Poitín tradition popular in the peat bogs and mountain regions of Scotland and Ireland where most of the ancestors of the southern mountain people originated. While the mountain region of the Southern states lacked wheat, rye or barley for malt historically, residents of the region adapted using Indian corn and malted corn for the fermenting agent. Whiskey making is considered as sacred a right as bearing military style and cosmetically offensive “assault weapons” or keeping livestock. Moonshining in the southern mountains is not only justified on the grounds of natural rights, but also on even simpler grounds. Many makers of illicit whiskey, when asked why they do it have the simple answer of "... my daddy made whiskey, and his daddy made whiskey, and his daddy before him made whiskey, so I'm just gonna keep makin’ it to." Popcorn was a dyed in the wool capitalist and largely libertarian in his dealings and belief system. What set him apart from the rest was his unique marketing strategy. He boasts in his book "Me and My Likker," that him and his father were not political beings, but instead sold moonshine to folks at the polling place on Election Day. This is a much more effective use of time than trying to vote yourself free. He was fiercely independent even to the extent of purchasing his own casket, flowers and the shovels needed to bury him before he died. He is on record of stating that even though he was extremely sick late in life and had amassed a pile of medical bills, "the government nor the county doesn’t pay my bills, I do." Popcorn's first run in with the law was in 1974. He was arrested and later convicted on illegal production of untaxed whiskey, among other charges. In typical mountain fashion, the day after he was released on bond after his arrest, he went right back to the same spot where he was arrested and set his still back up. He figured that was the safest place to be back in business.  When speaking of his arrests he was fond of saying “I didn’t steal anything here… I paid for the copper, the sugar, the corn…so I don’t see where I broke the law anywhere.”
15 April, 2013 /
[caption id="attachment_2967" align="aligncenter" width="160"] Georgio Grivas[/caption]

Publisher's Note: Joshua is a former student of mine and I am honored that he is inaugurating our new series, Profiles in Resistance, with a real firecracker of an opening salvo.  Every new millenium is filled with hope of changing the eternal dynamic and ratcheting back the factors in human slavery.  Many suggest this may well be the Chinese century and I would like to hope that may not be the case at all; it may very well be the final century that the predatory state and its apparatchiks retain humanity in its clutches.

Joshua's timely Cypriot observations dovetail nicely with the frustrated British experience trying to keep the Irish under their thumb from 1916-22. -BB 

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed." - Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Resistance is not a new part of the human experience. Resisters have challenged the meddlers of the world for as long as anyone has asserted authority where it ought not be asserted. Those that challenge the meddler known as the state have several unique qualities that enable them to resist and, in many cases, win against overwhelming odds. The principles that make resisters successful are critical thinking, forcing the enemy to fight on the resister’s terms, exposing the vulnerability of the state, and economic sustainability.

    Critical Thinking

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

- H. L. Mencken

Resisters are the contrarians among us. Skeptics by nature, resisters ask “why” until the answers become insufficient. The ability to ask these types of questions requires critical thinking. Therefore, the resister is often middle class, highly educated and skeptical. For example, Fidel Castro and Mohandas Gandhi studied law before leading revolutionary social movements. Both Abimael Guzmán, of the Shining Path, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had PhDs in philosophy before they challenged their respective governments. Mao Tse-Tung worked as a librarian before taking on both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Ernesto “Che” Guevara  was a  medical student before joining Castro in Cuba.

Not only must the founders of revolutions be critical thinkers, but the foot soldiers and junior leaders of a resistance movement must also be independent-minded. Often operating using a de-centralized model, the resister must be able to think for himself and act in the absence of orders from his chain of command. A good example of this is the cell structure implemented by the Shining Path. Although highly centralized at the strategic level, at the tactical level, the Shining Path’s decision making was left to individual commanders:

Local militants were organized into cells, similar to contemporary terrorists cells, and for security reasons had limited contacts outside their immediate five- to nine-member unit. Even a regional commander had direct contact with no more than eight other insurgents.[1]

The Shining Path, like many resistance movements, was forced by military necessity to operate independently, thereby enabling its fighters to adapt their plans to the situation on the ground. Such flexibility and the capability to operate without guidance from higher headquarters allows the resister to out-think and out-maneuver his government opponent, whose focus is not on critical thinking.
04 April, 2013 /