Riot Medicine

Having lived in HK throughout what's now been a full year of protests, I've been amazed at the resourcefulness of the protest movement there. They are leader-less and completely organic, but have self-organized all kinds of system to deal with all the challenges thrown at them.

The police is constantly shooting tear gas, but they've found quick ways of extinguishing it with traffic cones and water. I've now seen videos of them using leafblowers to blow the gas away before extinguishing it.

To prevent police vehicle movement, they've come up with a system of digging up brings and putting them in a three-brick formation onto the roads in such a way to prevent cards from moving through (bricks would get into the wheels assembly).

They have networks of people with supply station throughout the protests, distributing water, first aid, umbrellas, masks, etc.

I've seen them build entire roadblocks with actual brick and mortar during the week of the university siege.

It's truly incredibly what a motivated and organized group of people even when lacking formal leadership. In fact, it makes them far more resilient. Without leadership. you can't "cut off the head" of the movement, so to speak.

The target audience is different, but this made me think of the book:

Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook

It was discussed a little here over year ago at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19431005

It can be purchased in book form, or the individual chapters can be downloaded as PDFs at:

https://hesperian.org/books-and-resources/

I don't want to downplay the importance of the protests, but as Max Keiser pointed out in his show, if people burn the bank buildings, the central banks will just print more dollars to rebuild them. Moving money out from the banking system to Bitcoin is a much more effective, peaceful protest for those of us who can still afford to do that.