It’s a good idea to take stock of things achieved and goals missed at least once a year. Personally I always failed to count the things I did manage to achieve in a meaningful manner, and instead noted only the things not yet completed, or failed. It is perhaps a somewhat unhealthy approach to life, especially in terms of teaching a balanced work/life way of living, but then, that whole idea itself was based on the artificial concept of slaving away for a wage 9 hours a day for someone else. Five hundred years ago, you worked every hour God sent on Earth just to survive and try and leave something worthwhile to your children. And since those times are certainly more likely to be upon us in the next few years and decades, it may well be much healthier to figure out what is worthwhile doing with your life and then making that your purpose for the time you have here on Earth.
Insofar as I ever had such a purpose consciously in my head, it probably was something like:
1. Get a stable, happy, meaningful relationship you can rely on 100% (which is a somewhat autistically utopic goal).
2. Share the ideas, concepts, theories, I come up with that are useful with other people through my writing (on a personal level, this ties to hobbies of mine linked to human history, ancient structures, physics, the natural order of things, reality, philosophy, the human mind, the human body, biology, chemistry, astronomy, certain aspects of mechanical engineering, martial arts, hypnosis, writing itself, language, etymology, religion (a vast area that has many subcomponents), metaphysics, art and the numinous, so-called ESP, and many other topics, some of which turned out to be dead ends, and others being topics I can’t or won’t discuss publicly).
Those were my primary modes of functioning until my early 40s. It is really only after that when I had the concept of family and children come into it, and my first attempt at it was as disastrous as can be, bar real horror stories.
Since then, however, the goal of sharing the ides and concepts has evolved considerably into:
3. Do right by my wife and children (regardless of whether they initially see or even understand the purposes of my long term goals, since these will bear fruit in due course).
4. Which in the big picture means building a civilisation and fortified community that is large enough to be self-sustaining and self-protective enough to remain as a viable human civilisation in the foreseeable and even unforeseeable future. On a purely logical basis this is best achieved by selecting the most long-lasting, enduring and reality based life philosophy and tradition available in human history that has achieved the most positive results. Historically there is only one contender for that title: The (real) Catholic Church. It has literally civilised the planet, invented science, risen from the ashes multiple times throughout history, increased human happiness and the positive humanity of people in ways no other belief system ever has, created beauty and art and charity and faith at levels unmatched by any other philosophy, and lasted longer than any other empire, system, or human endeavour ever achieved, at more than 2,000 years. The closest second place is the Roman empire, which at about 800 years didn’t even come close.
Sure, Catholicism, and hence actual Christianity that was responsible for such things is currently only real and alive in Sedevacantism, (and 1958 sedevacantism at that, let’s be clear), but as I said, the Church has risen from the ashes before. The persecution of Christians by various Roman emperors, the attacks on it by gnostics, heretics, and satanists, throughout the ages, the Arian heresy that reduced actual Catholic bishops to a handful, the dark era of about 400 AD when savagery and degeneracy ruled almost all lands and Saint Benedict came along, and so on.
So the rest of my life will clearly be dedicated to building a community of proper Catholics with the skills, will, and intent of achieving total self-sufficiency and ultimately self-governing independence. It’s a big goal, but hey, what else am I going to spend my time doing?
So in practical terms, 2023 has been a very hard year, but some progress has been made.
The first sedevacantist aside from our family has purchased a home near us and will be visiting in January to see what his next move is, which is probably to rent it to any other willing sedevacantist that wants to move here. That is a pretty decent achievement, when you consider I still haven’t achieved self-sufficiency for myself, in terms of food production, clean water, and energy production. Nevertheless it’s a promising start given we have not been here three years yet and considering the conditions we started out from.
I failed at producing a working gasifier, but not for lack of trying, and rather, discovered that due to modern considerations, the much stricter tolerances of modern engines and the abandoned practice of drying wood in most places, it is really not very practical or viable to create a functioning one, and if you do, it will most likely gum up your generator very quickly.
I also suffered some health issues, damaging my back, knee and elbow joints somewhat, due to overworking on the farm, but the up side is that it’s teaching me some patience, a virtue I never had in the first half-century of my life.
On more mundane, but important for me in the scheme of things, I have also achieved a few personal as well as more public goals.
I finally completed the first trilogy of my fiction books, culminating in the compendium of it: NAZI MOON. That was a fully formed story I had in me since the mid 1990s, so it took almost 30 years to get out.
I also finally launched an estore that already has several of my books on it, and where eventually all my ebooks will be available exclusively, and cheaper than if I had ebooks on Amazon. The physical versions will still be on Amazon at this stage. The estore will also feature other products, some of which will go online in 2024.
I had many other physical achievements in terms of fixing up the house here, which might be unappreciated by most, including me, but that make a real difference. A big one is that the home can now be well-heated without relying on gas at all, only our awesome wood stove, which in a pinch also doubles as cooker and oven, and if deemed worthwhile, can, in future, be adapted to also heat the potable water in the home. We also became aware and verified that if tended to properly our olive trees can produce a lot of the literally best oil in the world. Not a joke, it literally is, and has been voted such two years in a row. Hopefully 2024 will see that develop into some sort of ongoing viable business.
I also launched Kurgan TV in 2022, which has been moderately successful and will pick up again in 2024.
The sponsorship of the first 50 trees, to be named after a Catholic Saint and for the spiritual benefit of a person of your choice, as well as your own, has gone relatively well too, while only about half the trees were sponsored, over 60 years of prayers/sponsorship was achieved, increasing the number and frequency of people prayed for. A Holy Mass was indeed dedicated to all the sponsors, and it’s helped me get into more of a habit of regular prayer, which is an important practice to make habitual.
I have made a few new, yet very reliable friends, that think along similar lines. We get all the natural real honey we need for the year by the guy who leaves his bees on our property. I have a buddy that I can call upon day or night that I will also help if ever needed in whatever situations arise, and I am busy making more such friends.
And then, of course, is this blog, which in a way is my repository for all things and that I hope is also becoming a source of some positive effects for you readers too, so here are the all-important stats:
2023 Original (realistic) Target:
Visitors: 30k and Views: 100k
2023 Blue Sky (unrealistic) Target:
Visitors: 100k and views: 200k
2023 Revised (ambitious) Target:
Visitors: 50k and Views: 150k
2023 Actual Achieved:
Visitors: 47k and Views: a shade under 159k
So I shall now announce the 2024 goals for the blog.
2024 Original (realistic but ambitious) Target:
Visitors: 100k and Views: 300k
2024 Blue Sky (unrealistic) Target:
Visitors: 200k and Views: 500k
General Notes:
while my 2024 Original Target is realistic, I also think it will be harder to achieve, comparatively, than my 2023 Original Target. A number of reasons include:
- Generally, literacy around the world continues to plummet.
- My content tends to be more in-depth/eclectic so it’s essentially geared to actual readers not general “clickers”.
- The stats have been fairly stable for the last few months, which would seem to indicate a plateau of some sort. I don’t have enough insight into this after a year to know the root causes or how long such a thing can last, but I am sure it can be years.
On the positive side, I use practically ZERO SEO, so the visits I do get are fairly organic and by real people. I am not sure what the effects of starting to use at least SOME SEO would be on readership, but I suspect it would inflate it but also be composed of a higher percentage of “clickers” instead of readers, and I’d much rather have the latter than the former.
Another positive effect is that due to my brutal policy of spamming without any warning whatsoever anyone that breaks any of the rules (which are not exactly prominently displayed) and/or who behaves in typical annoying gamma/troll behaviour even a single time, the actual commenters that exist on the blog are ones that are engaging with the topics posted and generally of a higher quality. That is a trend that over time, if sustained, will bring the type of commenters that actually increase the value of the blog for the type of reader I enjoy having.
As I said, 2023 was very hard, but some decent progress was still made.
2024 will hopefully produce even more progress and one hopes, also with the help of you readers to spread the knowledge of this blog, things might not be as hard.
So, onward and upward, and may you all have a great 2024.
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Thinking like a Paranoid Person
I have written various posts on guns, (use the search me function) and discussed why ultimately in a real life situation, (with handguns) a LOT of the discussions about calibre, specific gun etc are, at best a kind of salad dressing.
The recent post I did for Tarcisius on what guns to get for a guy starting out made me consider a bit more in general terms the important points about personal safety and so on.
I have a tendency to skip over what to me are the obvious aspects of a thing, because I tend to assume most people will already know this. The last 4 years have demonstrated that most people are, regardless of their personal ethics, comparatively, a bunch of morons, and in fact a lot less capable and intellectually aware than even I, in my most misanthropic levels of disgust at humanity in general, could have conceived.
So, while thinking what is the baseline advice, I tried to look at the most obvious aspects of it and then tried to think how do I transmit something that for me is not even second nature, but first nature, to the average guy who has had a completely different life?
I can’t be sure, but here it goes.
The smartest, more certain thing you can do in terms of personal safety is to be situationally aware at every level of resolution.
So what I mean by that is that if you decide to go on holiday in Gaza right now, you are screwing up at the global/big picture level. If you decide to walk through a favela with a Rolex on your wrist, you are screwing up at the individual level.
For the average person, thinking as happens naturally for me, is, I am told, akin to being a psychopathic paranoid person who jumps at shadows.
While this might be the perception for the average person, I assure you it is wrong. I am not stressed by my way of seeing things. In fact, when I have been involved in dangerous, violent situations, my natural approach to it has been such that my heart rate did not change and that invariably helps make the best of the situation.
While I notice everything and I take note of the possible potential threats even while I am in the supermarket doing a weekly shop, whether alone or with my wife and kids, I am not in a state of alert. I am merely observing and noting. As I would note where the milk is and when they move the location, as they do from time to time, I note that too. And when two giant Africans talking loud, fit, and thirty years my juniors appear in the isle I am in with my teenage daughter, I automatically consider how I would take care of them if I need to. And because of my peculiar psychological makeup, and at my current level of physical fitness (which is still far from ideal) there is no requirement for me to avoid being in that isle.
A wiser man, might avoid that isle, because my natural reaction if I have to suddenly protect one of my children tends to be of the “consequences to me will/may/do happen after THESE consequences to them, so, no worries.” Which, I am the first to admit is not necessarily wise, but it is a conscious choice and how I decide to live.
The point of paying attention should be two or three times more important if you are NOT armed. If you are licensed to carry, your primary concern should be your personal weapon being retained and concealed if not in actual use. Your training in drawing and firing from concealed, with complete awareness of your backstop, should basically be the air you breathe. When I carried all the time, and coming across a bunch of potentially feral thugs, I used to cross the street if I had to, not to avoid them, but because from that angle they had solid brick walls behind them.
If I had to go through them or near them I would again angle myself to give myself the best opportunity, which generally would be to fall into a crouch, back to a wall and fire at an upward angle in very rapid succession. the bullets would fly roughly up at an angle and hopefully fall outside of general city limits or land on a roof and not some unlucky guy’s head. And I could stand to avoid a few kicks and stomps, because I trained regularly in such type of scenarios and could pretty much empty my revolver while firing it close enough to my own body I might get stippling from it but the other guy would get that plus the .357 magnum round with it.
Anyway, the point is that such thoughts, such training, such movements and practice with drawing and firing were things I did daily. And my thoughts would flow accordingly. At least on a couple or three occasions, this level of awareness certainly saved if not my life that of possibly others and certainly prevented a firefight from actually taking place thanks to the fact that I was ahead of the game of the other guy/s.
It gets a little tiring to keep telling my daughters things, like don’t walk on that side of the pavement, it’s closer to where cars drive past, notice x, y or z, because generally, women, are oblivious to their surroundings, and my daughters, though I hope to correct that over time, are still women at the end of the day, and with a few notable exceptions, everything reverts to the mean. My son, is already well-versed naturally and he pays attention to what I say in the long term too, so I am not concerned about him. and of course, everyone can have a lapse of attention, but generally speaking, if you pay attention to the world around you, you will first of all exercise a brain muscle almost no one else does today, giving you an automatic advantage and secondly, you will begin to notice all sorts of things about people, your surroundings and so on, and it actually makes your life more alive and interesting. Thirdly, it absolutely increases your chances of being in the right place at the right time, or conversely, of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Developing this skill is, without a doubt, at least ten times, minimum, more important than how fast or how accurate you can draw and fire from concealed. At minimum ten times. Minimum, I am not exaggerating. That is a minimum number. Got it? Minimum.
so, I would say, before getting all caught up in whether you should have fancy gun number 1 or number 73, and special grips X or Y, and super red dot bingo-laser or pink-dot-matrix, or whatever, learnt o read a room. A street. A parking lot. An underground garage. Your front door when you get home tired from work, and so on and so forth.
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By G | 5 January 2024 | Posted in Guns, Martial Arts, Social Commentary