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.
On the reviews…
So the overwhelming majority of my readers would like me to review books more than anything else, which is fair enough, since I have read a lot of books. So in order to refine that I will add a further poll here below, but I will also begin to cover a concept of “guns review” even though it is not a popular request, because the people that do want that I think have a fairly specific requirement that interests me and I think I have decent answers for.
So… poll first:
On the Gun “Reviews”
It was this comment that got me interested, as it clarified my own intent in asking too, and articulated it better than I had done (not hard to do since I had not articulated my intent at all), Tarcisius asked:
My first instinct was to choose any of the (3) entertainment mediums mentiond (Books, TV, Movies.)
But I gave it a moment’s thought and decided that the gun reviews and knowledge contained therein would be the most applicable to life once TSHTF. I have enough good Catholic sense to weed out the demonic garbage when it comes to entertainment. I do not, however, have any significant knowledge or experience to draw from when it comes to firearms; and it is that knowledge that I will need to protect my family and myself and my community in the days that are coming.
Strictly speaking then the question relates in a wider sense to guns in general and type and purpose of them, and only after can we get into specifics.
This is going to sound silly to some of you, but honestly, if you want to get a generic take on the overview of things, buy and read my pen and paper RPG called Surviving the Current Zombie Apocalypse. Yes it’s a game, yes you can use it to have fun, and yes it’s written in a humorous and somewhat over-the-top way, but there is a reason why militaries around the world actually game-out various real life scenarios. Bad role-players get it wrong and have spectacular losses (America), good role-players plan properly and kick the entire ass of the combined enemy forces (Russia).
You can get it in paper format off Amazon here, or you can buy the full colour PDF from me direct, and print it for cheaper, here. And yes there is also a starter module you can get that helps anyone new to pen and paper RPGs get the ball rolling by presenting you a ready made scenario with pre-created characters.
The point of the game is that it will get you thinking about your specific situation, which is ultimately what you need to identify before ANY gun review is even relevant to you other than by random chance.
In order of specifics, for me to provide a decent review of either:
1) A gun I own or owned or am familiar with through decent amount of use or testing, or,
2) My opinion on a particular calibre, weapon platform, etc based on my own life experiences (and not anything else)
I will need at a minimum for you to identify:
1. The legal restrictions/requirements of where you are and/or your specific circumstances. You don’t need to give me any self-identifying details, if you don’t want to, I don’t care, but if you live in say the UK, handguns are simply outlawed other than for very specific government mandated purposes and people, and shotguns or rifles are very difficult to come buy, very highly regulated and so on. The geography of pretty much the entire UK is also not exactly conducive to anyone being able to go Rambo-style and survive as some kind of desperado fugitive from the law (not that anyone is advocating anyone does this, by the way). In short, if you live in the UK and the SHTF really badly, you had best hope you are in a rural area, surrounded by like-minded people, who maybe also have the odd shotgun or two and who are willing to band together against say hordes of marauding bandits that might decide to attack a farmhouse or so.
The alternate reality, that the government armed forces decide to requisition your property/wife/life, is pretty grim, and there is not likely going to be any viable resistance to such an event, regardless of how legal/illegal/just/unjust it might be. The amount of deadly force the UK government can bring against its own citizens and the geography and digitisation of that nation are such that, as the Borg would put it, “resistance is futile”. Your best bet in such an environment is to stick to permitted weaponry like pellet guns or maybe crossbows if you are in an area that would permit you to use them for hunting purposes in order to supplement your diet in an emergency. So you see that a gun review about the merits of the colt 1911 for self-defence purposes would have zero value for a person in such a position.
If on the other hand, you’re Hillbilly Joe and your cousin Billy-Bob-Jean the third is actually the redneck that took out that F35 the US air-force “lost” with a shoulder fired .50 calibre Barrett, well… your situation in a SHTF situation would be completely different, but the review of the Colt 1911 might be just as meaningless to you, as you might be dealing with raiders that come at you from over a click away with heir own .50 cals.
So that explains the why I would need the legal constraints.
2. Geographical constraints. If you life in flatland desert where you can see someone approaching from 10km away, it makes a difference when compared to a guy living in the Amazonian underbrush with visibility limited to a few metres. So your current or at least intended geographical situation needs to be understood. Again, I don’t care to know your position on Earth, but a simple descriptor of the situation is helpful. Is it mostly flat-land with low-rolling hills, like most of the UK, mountain terrain with deep snow-drifts and inaccessible areas, mediterranean forest, sparse beach on the ocean-front on a smallish island nation, or what?
At a minimum then those two things need to be provided for me to give a bespoke reply to anyone interested in it.
If you also have a specific weapon you are either thinking of or want my take on in general, then that alone can suffice. In this case my assumption will be that you already have identified the other two aspects and just want my opinion on the specific weapon you are interested in.
All that said, keep in mind the old adage that opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one, and most times they are full of shit.
My opinions are valid and valuable in general terms and I am not prone to exaggerating or hyping my “theoretical” knowledge above my actual practical knowledge, but most of all my opinions re valuable to me first and foremost because of my personal experience in life with various weapons and concepts. My history with guns is fairly well-known and I did work for a number of years in armed close protection, and grew up in a very experienced family of hunters and have hunted since I was a child. I worked various undercover jobs, alongside police, military and private people, and have trained both armed and unarmed police in close quarter combat as well as private clients. I have worked for people that are known world-wide in this respect and have no need to breach my NDAs and so on to “prove” how cool or tough or clever I am. I’m just saying that my opinions are based on a lot of experience that most normal people do not have and as such are probably worthwhile. But if you’re some special ops guy with a bunch of kills to your name and you think my preferred weapons etc suck, then by all means ignore my advice and follow your own. People are different and have different skills, different mentalities and different body sizes. What works for me might be awful for a guy that is 5’6″ and 140lbs.
Now that I got all those corollaries out of the way, feel free to post a comment or ping me an email on any guns you want a review on. I will basically only do gun reviews on specific guns or concepts related to them when asked, so you can make it as personal to you as you want.
That’s all for now.
No related posts.
By G | 4 January 2024 | Posted in Books, Guns, Poll, Social Commentary, Writing