I will endeavour to label another 50 trees or so by the end of March with metal tags, as I have the first 50.
Every one of you who has sponsored a tree has had their prayers said for both themselves or the person sponsored for and the saint it is dedicated to as well.
I think I will also endeavour to say the prayers at least once a year for each sponsor and Saint in any case, as it is good practice.
A special thank you to Kamil K. who has regularly sponsored one or more trees every month.
Of the 7 tins available, 5 have already gone. And some have already reached the buyers and they have been kind enough to give me a brief review. Here they are:
One of the customers, who is actually a pretty famous guy in his own right, and an awesome dude, sent me this initially:
Oil arrived! Absolutely delicious. We each had a tasty spoonful and look forward to some great cooking!
When I asked if I could use that line from his email as a review, he promptly decided to write up a longer one. I didn’t even ask, as I say, the man is seriously cool.
Slightly fuller review:
Absolutely delicious, and in a less affected way than the high-end olive oils we see in places like Whole Foods and Erewhon. As lovely as the typical high-shelf olive oils are, they also gain much of their aroma and piquancy from additives trying to recapture the natural richness stripped by filtering. One of our longstanding favorites has been Frescobaldi Laudemio, a lovely offering from Tuscany that is nonetheless filtered and blended from many sources. Compare this with the Ca’ Filo Extra Virgin Olive Oil, which is single-source and entirely unfiltered, and you have a completely different experience in kind. It’s sipping good, with a perfect spicey finish and lingering lovely aftertaste. Looking forward to months of enhanced cooking. And side sips.
The first guy to actually immediately buy a tin, also wrote a very nice email that he said I can use as a review, where he wrote:
I received the olive oil tin on Saturday as expected. I am a pleased customer – I’ll be buying again when the next batch is available or a regular process is stood up.
I’m obviously not an olive oil expert. That said, 1) your pricing was a bargain – compared to the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club in the US, they charge $92-3 per liter and send 1.5 liters of olive oil a quarter; and 2) I enjoyed your olive oil much better than the recently pressed ones from them. Granted the batch I have right now is from Chile – it tastes smoother vs. the peppery taste I recall from yours, but I suspect the same will be true for the Italian batch.
Thank you,
In a follow up email when I asked if I could use his email as a review, he added the following:
The maximum phenols are why I will use this as a daily preventative shot instead of for cooking or salads, exception being if I bake some bread to eat it with. I definitely enjoy the peppery taste.
And he is quite right. This Olive Oil is actually a health booster. The wife and kids have been ill with a weird “flu” again and as soon as I ensured they were taking their olive oil, lemon and honey (we also have natural honey from proper bees here on our property) hotshots, they started to improve.
Even if you don’t use it for cooking, the Blueprint guy (Brian Johnson) recommends taking at least three tablespoons a day of it. I haven’t spent 2 million USD a year for several years to figure it out, but I can tell you that my direct experience of drinking the oil daily and not doing so is almost miraculous. the point pain I had for moths in my elbows vanished in two days, and only came back if I stopped taking the oil. After several weeks of being more or less regular with the drinking at least a sip of oil a day or putting a bunch of it on salad, even if I stopped for a couple of weeks the joint pain only came back if I again overused my arms for various farm works. And if I did, a couple of oil shots and I would be fine again after a day or two.
The anti-inflammatory properties of this oil are truly something to be experienced before you can appreciate it; and since pretty much every illness begins with inflammation, it’s a general health tonic.
Anyway, given that Trump wants to impose 25% tariffs on anything from Europe, the next batch, if it can even get there, will likely be in the $85-95 per litre range, so if you want one of the remaining 2 tins, you had best order them now.
Young men (and women) think that when they come across a “Bible Zealot” or “hardcore Christian” which is what most would assume I am (they would be wrong because I am not a Bible alone moron and what passes for both “hardcore” and “christian” today is laughable) that talks about “hedonism”, we are imagining young people are on some orgiastic drunken revelry on the daily.
Allow me to correct that misguided view.
First of all I am GenX not a boomer so I neither resent nor hallucinate the situation of millennials and zoomers. In fact I mostly pity them, at least when they are not completely pathetic, in which case I am mostly frustrated by their lack of animus.
More importantly, I understand better than most that hedonism today is not really the orgies of the collapsing Roman empire. It is more a wasting of time while waiting and hoping against hope for “something better” to come along.
When you are raised with no understanding whatsoever of what Catholicism actually was and has always been and continues to be in those small number of families who still hold to it, you cannot help but go wrong in life.
The only sense of “the right way” I had in my upbringing was a code of honour that can best be defined —as John C. Wright did— as being that of the noble heathen. That is a man who keeps his word and does as his personal honour commands. It is a far cry from Catholicism and possibly the best level of civilisation that sort of way can aspire to is that of feudal Japan.
Possibly Imperial China too, but my understanding of Japanese codes of honour is superior (and closer) than the Chinese version of it. The Roman Empire too fas founded on it on arguably surpassed both Japanese and Chinese achievements, but in any case, no one can deny that all of those systems were far more brutal, uncharitable, and lacking in mercy and kindness when compared to Catholicism.
The point here is that absent the framework of what a good life actually is, meaning the proof of it, the reality of it you can see and verify for yourself, how is any young person to decide on how to best approach life?
If you DO know, things become a LOT simpler. But if you do not know, what a good life really means, you’re almost certain to get lost in all sorts of distractions.
I never saved really. I did buy some property (land) at age 26 after writing the first edition of the Face on Mars, and some 25 years later it helped me to sell it and put a deposit on a house in Italy. But as I had no intention to make any children (until I was 40 and gradually I had realised a lot of life’s “givens” were contemptible lies spread by boomers) I spent most of my time indulging those interests that caught my attention. And unbelievable as it may sound, the main one was a search for true love. Which resulted in much heartache and a lot of women. After a while it got so I sort of stopped believing in it but carried on enjoying the women. The rest of my time was filled with doing what I liked or interested me. Reading, martial arts, studying the human mind, ancient things and places, writing, visiting places I wanted to see… but always also that search for that one woman.
And eventually I found her.
But it was a very long, tortuous and far more painful and difficult road than it needed to be.
Had I been taught, and more importantly, shown, that family is the main point of life. Had my own family I was born into been less of a shitshow, how many years of distraction would I have saved. How much more could I have done and thus be leaving my children?
I don’t regret my life at all, because every part of it brought me to where I am now, married to the right woman finally and with enough children too. And if I had not taken this particular road I would not be with her or have the children I do, and as was very cleverly shown in a delightful film called About Time, that reality is inconceivable to me.
But the point is that if you are say in your twenties, or even thirties, (and yes, even 40s or 50s, I am living proof of this: It’s never too late) and you realise deeply that the main purpose of life is actually to create a family that is as happy and prosperous as you can make it, then, regardless of your actual situation, your priorities, your actions and your activities will be radically different than if you think having the latest iphone, knowing the latest political gossip, or cheering for this or that sports team, or traveling to see X place for the instagram cred, or getting another notch on your belt, matters at all.
And the kind of actions and activities that you will focus on will be such that, yes, perhaps you might have less “fun” (or time wasted on things that ultimately don’t matter, depending on your perspective) but you might also have a more concrete base from which to start that family.
Had I aimed to built something for the future starting in my early 20s, I would probably be able to live off rental income even with six kids by now. It’s also true that for my particular character that was never really going to be a likely road, so there is that to counter, I have always been too curious, and probably, as a good friend pointed out, too capable, to ever worry about the future, and indeed I am not especially worried about it now either, but it certainly is a lot harder than it could be.
Having a much harder life is not necessarily a bad thing. It makes you more capable in many ways (assuming you survive and overcome). But there is certainly something to be said for not having to work into your 80s. Probably anyway. Then again, I have Jean Parisot de Valette as a somewhat inspirational figure; and he was swinging his two-handed sword on the walls of one of the castles of Malta, wounded in a leg and not wearing his full armour at age 71, so… if you have that kind of character, what I can guarantee is that your life might indeed be very hard, but not boring. The issue however is not you, but your children, and while for some the idea of swinging a sword at muslim invaders’s heads in our seventies might be appealing (and for some of us possibly inevitable!) the fact is that if you’re instead leaving your children a few well-stocked and well-defended castles, and yet have also instructed them in the proper running of a city-state, you’d be far better off.
My children on the other hand will have to learn on the job, as it were, and perhaps that is as fate or God ordained. After all, we do have an 800 year known history of doing things this way; and while my branch of the family is indeed the silver one (that is filled with curious explorers and war-like adventurers, of minor noble rank) and not the gold branch that had the much higher nobility titles and actual castles to their name, it is also true that our side of the family has some truly extraordinary people in it; several of whom have been talked about in history books or left monuments with their name on it for a time.
But… if I had somehow a crystal ball at age 20 that told me I would have six children all under the age of 14 at age 55, aside the utter shock, I probably would have worked like a possessed man (as I tend to do most things) towards securing far more land and property and wealth than I have done. And even without the crystal ball, if I had simply thought creating a family was the main aim in life, I would have done so too.
Instead, the boomer poison of “the world is horrible, why would you want to bring more innocents into it?” Infected me well into my early 30s at the very least. And that is a lie that is directly related to someone not having any belief of any real substance in a Loving God.
Generic Zen-Agnosticism tinged with Shintoism is not exactly ideal for the consideration of family creation. And there hasn’t been as much need for wandering samurai, thankfully.
It took until the end of my 30s to realise that having children was the right way to live. And I am not unintelligent, which is demonstrated by the fact that I had come to this conclusion even though I was still essentially agnostic, and very much aware of how the levers of power on this planet work, which is not a position a person as objectively rational as I am is likely to come to without having a belief in God.
In fact I had come to this conclusion based only on the possibly irrational belief that my capabilities were enough to protect a child of mine even under such dystopic conditions as we have on this planet. Whether you think that is arrogance or confidence is debatable, but I am basically certain it would have been true if I limited myself to one or two children.
Adding the knowledge of a Loving God has removed a HUGE amount of the concern about having more children. And no, it does not mean miracles fall unceasing from the sky, the practicalities of feeding six children instead of two, as well as clothing them, educating them and so on are real, but you tend to find a way as you reorganise your priorities. And yes, maybe they will not all have the latest iphone and brand name clothing, but guess what: that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It makes them more imaginative and capable if they need to work for things, and if you are a decent parent you will also be able to help them get over a truly noxious aspect of modern life: caring excessively what other people think.
It’s a little different for girls than boys, but generally speaking, it is always best to err on the side of NOT caring what other people think than vice versa.
The emotional scars left by being overly concerned about other people’s opinions can be a truly devastating thing, particularly for girls, but boys too. Luckily my three youngest children already exhibit many traits that make me pretty secure in the view that this will not be an issue for them. If anything, the main worry might be to keep them from being arrested or chased out of towns for being possibly too cavalier about social rules in general!
All the people I knew at school that were from wealthy families, as a very frequent general trend, almost invariably tend to become what I would consider less accomplished human beings that even some of the absolute social rejects that everyone assumed would amount to nothing.
As a rule they tend to hold on to their wealth but be rather vacuous creatures with little to offer in terms of interesting personalities or life stories.
These apparent digressions, are not meandering, meaningless recollections and reflections of my life, they are intended to show you, and hopefully help you, see different aspects of life from different perspectives so that you might realise several things:
The nihilistic depressive narrative of the boomers is a lie.
The aimless apathy of the millennials or zoomers who are afflicted by it is weak, pathetic and unseemily for anyone with an ounce of self-respect.
The “hard” road may often be the better road, and even if not, at least you will have more cool stories and have seen a side of life the cocooned and perfumed princes of the planet will never know.
In short, the old adage is still mostly true: wounds heal, and chicks dig scars
All that said… it is only a foolish or imprudent man that does not plan (somewhat loosely, to allow for life’s inevitable detours) for the future. Especially when he envisions a numerous family in it.
Plan accordingly young man, and realise that hedonism might just be your indulgence in fancy clothes and package holidays, without a single Roman orgy in sight.
It’s quite miserable being outside in the wet cold, with a sore throat, chopping the wood I need to do every morning so as to have enough of it to keep the wood stove heating all the radiators in the house, so we all stay warm.
But the little voice on the side, that comes out every morning to watch me, of her own free will, with her blonde hair and blue eyes that says:
“You missed!” Gleefully with every axe strike that doesn’t immediately produce a new chunk of wood, makes it exhilarating instead.
And today, when I broke off a partially chopped piece by hand, I even got:
“Daddy! Your job, you did it!”
And having the 5, 4 and 2 year old just decide to get dressed up and go play together in the forest is also something that counters the sensation of dreadful dystopia that most of the world is engulfed by, especially in the cities.
Which is why I suggest you get married, get rural, (not necessarily in that order, as city girls don’t adapt well to the harsh reality of farm life), make a load of children and connect with like minded people in real life first and foremost, but online too. And always beware the fake “homesteaders” that have 4 hours a day to make videos of how they live “off grid”.
Anyone actually living off grid doesn’t have the time to do that.
This is a story that I am sure most people will assume is made up, but I swear it happened exactly as written here, and I do have the wife as witness.
We are in the kitchen, she’s cooking and the little turtle, who is 2 going on 20 is hanging about. I was telling my wife that when I was busy building the pull-up bar for the kids alongside my own, and asked her to get the yellow level for me, which she had done also the previous day, as she came out with it she said:
“Daddy, do you also need the pencil?”
I was sure my wife had asked her, so I checked but the look on her face told me even before she confirmed it that she clearly had not.
The fact that a child who has just turned 2 figured all that out on her own is quite impressive. But as we are talking about her she starts to tell us about her “baby” that is in the bedroom (her doll she got for Christmas) and then, this happens:
LT: There is a baby in there (taps her mother’s bump)
Me: Yes there is. What should we call him?
LT: Bad baby?
Me: (making a disapproving face) no-o not bad baby… what name should we give him?
LT: Darth
I am not making that up. And all conversation ended due to laughter.
The Little Turtle (2) Does look like a little angel, with her blue eyes and blonde curls, but her enthusiasm for me is what properly gets me every time.
In the morning, the ritual is to take out some of the large slices of tree I stored earlier in the year, and then, axe in hand, cut it down to sizes that can fit in the wood burning stove that also heats ll the radiators in the house.
Without fail, she will ask to get dressed, shoes, coat and sometimes little gloves on, so she can stand at the top of the short stairs above where I chop the wood to watch me. She wants to help put the cut pieces in the basket but she’s a little short and the bits can be heavy anyway, and I want her to stay at the top of the stairs because sometimes a chunk of wood will fly out to the side.
Even so, she will sit out there with me, saying a few funny things or commenting on the work.
“Daddy, you’re bashing it!”
Her favourite one is when an axe strike doesn’t immediately produce a new chunk of wood.
You can hear the glee in her voice: “Daddy, you MISSED!”
She will sometimes be sitting at the table getting ready to eat and just sing to herself: “daddy, daddy, daddy…”
And last night, she was in the bed with us sound asleep and all of a sudden she shouts: “Daddy! And… And…” (she does this when fully awake too) “I felled in the SNOW!”
She had in fact fallen in the snow a few days earlier and of course, being as this is an EVENT in her life she repeats it to everyone who will listen.
I started to say “Ok darling…” but my wife shushed me… I look, and… the little turtle is sound asleep.
Dreaming of talking to daddy even when she’s passed out.
There really is nothing to compare to the love of your children. My wife keeps telling me she doesn’t want any of them to grow up, because she loves how they are at these ages. I understand, but I am probably more excited to see how they develop and what kind of people they become.
When a darker mood takes me I fleetingly think about people who intentionally hurt, rape or do even worse things to children. And at those times, I am more certain than anything, that such people need to be wiped out from the face of the Earth, along with anyone and everyone that would cover for them, hide them, or help them.
There simply are no consequences on Earth that would stop me from reducing such people to slurry if they ever came near one of my children. And I cannot fathom for the life of me, how any father (or mother for that matter) could in any way not feel exactly the same as I do on this.
The more you live in touch with nature, hard as it may be compared to the soft lifestyles we have all been accustomed to, the ore obvious it becomes, that some “people” just like some noxious, poisonous critters (except even those have more of a right to life on Earth) simply need killing. And I really don’t give a shit how politically incorrect this might sound. Certain crimes absolutely need the death penalty, and we need to reinstate it globally ASAP.
This Christmas I was rather remiss with messaging people and wishing them a Happy Christmas and New Year. Mostly because I focused on doing the things that needed doing for my family to have a relaxed time over the holidays.
On Christmas day we basically didn’t even get out of out PJs and just watched the kids go nuts with their presents, which thanks to my wife was a literal mountain of odds and ends. She also got me some nice tops and colognes.
She wanted to go crazy with Christmas dinner but I finally managed to break through the usual female delusion that whatever they imagine is reality —the five small crazy people running around the house helped of course— they tend to break through most self-inflicted delusions of blissful parenting, and she finally realised no one cared for a specific Christmas dinner as she envisioned it, and everyone was happier just chilling out and eating random stuff and pigging out on panettone and biscuits. Including her since she did not have to stress herself out making an elaborate dinner.
The point of all this is that with our phones mostly ignored and just normal, in real life stuff going on, it was really quite awesome.
My eldest daughter taught the 4 and 5 year old to play the card game go fish. The littlest one (she’s just turned 2) got a baby Yoda stuffed toy that she absolutely loves, because she has been addicted to watching the Mandalorian. She literally likes it more than anyone else except maybe the little viking, but even he does not follow the plot as much as she does.
I even managed to read a couple of pages of one of the books that has been on my bedside for the last six months.
But above all, this time has driven home deeply how artificial most of our lives have become.
We are not meant to spend 8-13 hours a day sitting at a desk shuffling electrons from one spreadsheet and email to another poor bastard in some other office doing the same. And even if you are earning millions, which most people in that situation are absolutely not, you can’t enjoy it really. So you may have the nice house and the big cars, and the two week holiday in Bora-Bora, but IF you have children, they are being raised by strangers and you see them less than those strangers do. They are spending hours and hours and hours a day being indoctrinated in ways you don’t even realise are control mechanisms. Like for example, if one kid keeps bugging you and shoving you, and you punch them right in the mouth, that now means you’re a bad kid. Which of course is complete bullshit. And when they are small what do they really learn? What do they really need? They need to be able to rear, write and do math well.
All the rest they can learn faster and deeper at home and without any of the nonsense. You can certainly interest any kid in the Roman empire, or the real history of Christianity, or the (real) reasons for WWI and WWII along with the politically acceptable version to skate by the zombies that still outnumber us.
All while showing them also how to drive a tractor, recognise different plants and animals, teaching them how to track and hunt, cook, keep house, use a spreadsheet to keep track of things, figure out how to survey a piece of land, deal with things like bills and figuring out stuff they never teach you in school. Especially things related to alternative energy sources and so on, as well as classical physics and chemistry. Certainly everything taught at elementary school can be better done at home by any reasonably educated parent that is working as a farmer at home, all while playing/working at the daily things that you need to do on any farm.
And is farm life hard? It sure is.
It’s certainly not for anyone wanting an easy life without physical effort, and it certainly isn’t the idyllic and easy life that pretend-homesteaders on YouTube would have you believe. Especially the ones who in reality have other income which is actually what they really live on.
Even the ones that are not flat out lying about how they live, what they grow and where their food come from, can, inadvertently and unintentionally, give a false impression to people who simply have no concept of how life works when you are really trying to live off the land as your main source of income.
Despite all this, if you plan a little ahead, it is without a doubt a more satisfying way to live than most.
The main issues are to reduce any recurring costs, which means things like land taxes (in the USA at least), electricity and water bills, any recurring services like phones or internet costs, petrol, gas, diesel, and of course the basics of food.
After that, even if you did have enough space and know-how to raise animals, say some chickens and a couple of pigs for butchering and say a few goats too, the maintenance to keep them fed, alive, and protected from predators is not nothing.
And the food you might grow is dependent on the weather and many other factors that are often out of your control.
The ideal situation is you having the property with no debt, some regular income that hopefully is from passive income, and enough savings to tide you over while you learn how to make yourself more self-sufficient. Even then, emergencies or sudden injuries or illness can wipe out your safety margin quite instantly.
These are all realities you need to face and some of them that you didn’t consider will hit you too. And keep in mind that in my professional opinion, being a farmer is at least as dangerous as being a full time martial arts student or instructor in terms of potential injuries, and more dangerous than being a professional bodyguard.
Despite all this, if you manage to make yourself self-sufficient and essentially able to survive even in the event of the proverbial zombie apocalypse, you will be part of a new kind of “elite”, that is, people who no longer need to rely on the conventional dictates of those who run this world through fiat money, bureaucracy, blackmail and force.
The plan is to become immune from the pressure of fiat money first (hopefully you are immune from blackmail as long as you’re not a child rapist on film like many so-called hollywood “stars”), then organise to take over the local bureaucracy so you become immune from rules that you can avoid or countermand officially (or the other way around, whichever you can do first) which is why settling in small hamlets out if the way and populated by like-minded people is step one.
Eventually, if you are successful, force too will be brought to bear on your community, so plan ahead and remember that a smaller but determined force with skin in the game almost always can resist a larger force that is mandated by people and reasons that are completely disconnected from the people on the ground supposed to execute them.
So, yes, real life is “harder” than living online and being a wage slave. But really… is it?
Only you can answer that question, and ultimately it answers the question as to wether you are the type that prefers a gilded cage over your own freedom.
And just like on the dojo floor, all your words and social media posts mean absolutely nothing when compared to the physical reality of your actions. Or lack thereof.
As usual, the point is always the same: Know Yourself.
And if you are a wage-slave type, just admit it and stop lying to yourself.
And if you are not, nothing they do will be able to keep you down anyway, so my posts will hopefully just save you time and effort in terms of what to prepare for and what to avoid.
Vox put up a good post on Putin’s Presidential Q&A. It’s worth reading because it is useful to drive points that should be obvious by now home.
Nothing that is in Vox’s post is news to me, nor has it been for a long time, in fact, far linger than I have known Vox. But his post certainly helped to bring into sharp focus for me something that I have been in essence writing about in one way or another for decades, and it is this: the big picture of things really is quite simple.
There are events from my life that stuck out and are remembered sharply even fifty years later. Many are related to shocking or unusual events but a few are rooted in the very reality we inhabit on this planet. Specifically, I recall how since the age of four to about seven, I tried repeatedly to make sense of the concept of money, and how as a child I simply could not make sense of it at all.
The whole thing seemed absurd and fake to me, and although I eventually did what everyone else does, except I did it at about age seven: give up and assume it must be too complicated for me to grasp. But the truth is precisely the opposite.
The whole concept of fiat money is absurd. It is literally invented out of thin air (and sustained by literally nothing) by a bunch of predatory, and largely also child raping perverts, to enslave humanity. And yes, I know that sounds “unhinged” —especially if you working finance yourself, right? And yet… anyone who takes the time to look into it knows I am simply stating an undeniable fact.
Fiat money has no bearing on logic, reason, justice or fairness of any kind. It is an entirely vicious, evil, and predatory controlling mechanism that we have all somehow been fooled, cajoled, ultimately forces into accepting as “the way things are”, as if it was as normal as needing to drink water and breathe air to live. But it is a complete fiction and absolutely not required to exist at all for anything we have now and indeed more and better things to exist too.
Even without getting into other esoteric concepts for which a blog post is not the place, if we just shifted to a gold standard again, it would be a major improvement.
Which is why anyone who tried it in living memory ends up having their entire country “liberated” by USA carpet bombing, colour revolutions and the death of the guy proposing it as a vicious dictator.
We could even improve on the gold standard too, with my fractionating value of gold concept, which could be related to a generic global population index adjusted yearly. This means the value of gold would fluctuate yearly on the basis of the overall global population. More people and each fraction of gold becomes more valuable. Leas people and it drops in value.
The idea being that the total amount of gold on the planet is eventually finite, and you could say that each human being could on average use say 10 million dollars of value over a lifetime, and if we assume a total of 8 billion people, that would mean the total value of the gold on Earth needs to be 10,000,000 x 8,000,000,000 = 80 quadrillion dollars. The total amount of gold currently mined and excavated on Earth is approximately 200,000 tons, so each gram of gold should have a value of 400,000 dollars. Sounds like a lot? Not really. Many people use up a lot more than 10 million dollars in their lives. And you can always fractionate the gold. So you have various gold deposits (some “banks” that is really a central fort knox type place with extreme security but also total transparency – think live cameras and open book accounting online globally) that stores people’s or even governments gold, and issues digital currency that is measured in micrograms (one microgram would be worth 40 cents in this example).
At any time a person can go to one of the “banks” (really just holding secure places that have no other function) and retrieve whatever weight of gold they are able to (say a minimum of a gram for ease of things). More importantly, anyone has the right to verify each “bank” really has exactly the amount of gold they are issuing digital currency for on each customer’s behalf.
Such a system would also have to instantly do away with usury, which is the favourite weapon of the parasites feeding on the rest of the human race currently.
Anyway…
You see how my thought about money as a four to seven year old was in fact correct, and how with another 20 years or so of life experience, one could easily describe a system that is simple to understand, fair, and would absolutely work.
Yes, I came up with this system by age 26. I never published it officially as I figured doing so at the time in any meaningfully public way might be unhealthy. After all, I am from the generation that saw what happened to the guy who posted the original essay titled Assassination Politics.
And that’s the thing. If you are just able to ignore the lies and reason things out for yourself, all the big political and economic “issues” are childishly simple to understand and correct.
They might be extremely difficult to put in practice, but not because of any intrinsic difficulty beyond the fact that the current pedovores in charge would absolutely murder you and whole nations to prevent so much as the ideas, never mind the implementations of these things.
The other thing that struck me as a seven year old was the concept of indeed free trade and specifically import/export of goods. I still recall out elementary school teacher explaining how export goods were the top quality that we would send out and we would keep the second grade stuff. That didn’t make any sense to me either. Surely if you have an excess of something that other people need you keep the best stuff for YOUR people and send out the next best thing. After all… if the other guys don’t have enough of it they can hardly complain can they?
And by the time I was old enough to know what GDP stood for, I knew that the entire system of economics and accounting was basically the purview of conmen and idiots and idiot-conmen. I briefly took an economics class for university and dropped it after a scant month when it became equally obvious that all accounting is, is a way to mask fraud, theft, lies and deceit. Sure, some people that work in that field are actually honest, I know, I worked in a closely related aspect of it for decades and still do, but the various practices of accounting, while mostly potentially harmless in and of themselves, become intrinsically easy to be made deceptive by someone adept at navigating the system. And it’s not even an injustice in many cases, because more often than not, all a good accountant is trying to do, is fend off the throughly predatory class of vermin that composes government, who live off the work of honest citizens while giving a return for it that would see them executed for fraud, criminal negligence, misappropriation of funds, nepotism and flat out theft in any just society.
See, things really are NOT that complicated. And even the more truly nuanced and deeper aspects of economics can still be thought of carefully and deeply and equitable, fair, honest, and just solutions found.
But that is not what the people who own and run things like the Bank for International Settlement and the Federal Reserve and the various “national” Central Banks, and the IMF want.
Of course not.
They want the chaos, and the barriers to understanding, real, simple, knowledge first of all, then the barriers to entry into their domain of course and above all, the barriers to doing anything at all that might change the status quo where they have infinite supply of that which they create out if thin air, but determines if your child will eat or starve, have access to good medicine based in science or poisons based in the lies they teach their “cattle” (you and yours and me and mine), that is: fiat money.
It’s all a giant, massive lie, spun in a delusion, covered by sophistry, fraudulent math, predatory “legislation”, and deeper down, blackmail, violence, war, and deception at every turn.
So what can you do about it? You can start by regaining as much of your own personal sovereignty as you can, with the aim of becoming able to be independent of fiat money too, ultimately. And this is what I have been writing about in various ways for the last four years at least, but has been a trend for much of my life. Until 2020 though, this was limited to trying to be left alone as I got in with my little life in my corner of the world. That was a mistake many of us made, and it is no linger sustainable.
It’s time to organise and create a new way of life.
You will find the beginning of this in the sticky post at the top labelled The Important Stuff. Click on that read more up there or the link here, and work your way through. At the bottom you also have links to various series that will help you put things in context.
Good luck cowboy. Hope to see you on my side of the fight one day.
This pinned post aims to give both new and old visitors the quick links to the main parts of this site that are most important, and gets updated with any new stuff fairly regularly so it’s a good idea to check it now and then.
The People have spoken. I will also add a brief (say under 9,000 words!) explanation as to why.
Perhaps my binging of the series Mad Men has inclined me to explain myself more than usual concerning a topic I hardly ever mention but that is actually quite important to me: Aesthetics.
And since you all have short attention spans I put a heading below in underlined bold you can skip to.
The Poll remains open so it may accumulate more votes over time, but I am also quite sure that most of the critics have spoken already.
I also received some texts and emails and one of the most balanced was an email that explained how the eye naturally tracks from top left to bottom right for Westerners, and that while, yes, the fruitfly attention span is a real thing, and people probably don’t even notice the sidebars and links there, this site has a unique look that is not really found anywhere else; and that —for anyone with a little discernment— makes it stand out from the endless deserts of slick, clean, pristine, and sterile sites that all resemble each other.
And he has a point. I don’t know about you, but I can barely stomach seeing another substack layout.
He was probably too polite to point out what my most constructive critic spells out, which is that he thinks the blog looks like a Warhammer 40K site and that there is so much content it looks like a reddit sub with 50,000 posts.
While I resent the Reddit comparison, I understand this site is not one-dimensional, and that can be “overwhelming” for some, after all, I cover everything from Ancient Technology to the Zombie Apocalypse, and everything in between, with serious posts about astronomy, Mars, The Catholic Church, Martial Arts, Christianity, Hypnosis, Science Fiction deeply steeped in Nazi “Conspiracy theories” that are rooted in factual events, random thoughts on the farming life, occasional humorous anecdotes about my not quite feral, but certainly savage children, and many, many, other topics, as the categories list (now fixed after the hack attack) on the right clearly shows.
So, yeah, I guess the average overstimulated, non-existent attention-span, partially woke, partially boomerzeigest infected, possibly apathetic GenXer, depressed Millennial, or stoned GenZ reader may find the site too much “effort” to peruse, investigate, navigate, and explore.
I get it.
But you see, as I wrote back in 2009 when I created this site’s look, from scratch, out of my own ideas and head, and despite it offering both Hypnosis Services (which are actually being requested more lately, with good results in general) as well as a link to my E-store for digital versions of books I wrote (most of which are also on Amazon), and some watercolours I do when time permits, the primary thing this site is about is not what you might think.
It is not politics, hypnosis, science, science fiction, writing, or really any of the categories listed on the right; but rather, it is about an overall, encompassing category I mentioned right at the very origin of this site:
Exploration.
As I wrote in 2009 (the site launched in early 2010 but I had written up the various pieces a few months earlier):
The world we inhabit, and the universe we find ourselves in, is an absolutely incredible and fascinating thing. In truth, almost everything I do stems from my ever-growing curiosity about many, many things.
This site means to attract a very unique type of reader.
The ideal daily visitor is a person that is still curious about life and the world we live in. Increasingly frustrated or angered by the increasing enstupidation and zombification of humanity all around us, but not crippled by it. Not a nihilist or a person lacking in hope and ability as a result of the grind they put us all under. I want the rebels that prefer to live out in the wastelands with single action revolvers, filtered water catchment tanks, solar panels, and water turbines, far away from the drug-addled inhabitants of the Brave New World Cities where you will be provided for, own nothing, and be drugged, lied to and brainwashed into “happiness”.
Such people will NEVER agree with everything I think, opine on or write. There will be things I say that will piss them off, or they will disagree with, BUT and this is key, they are the type of person that CAN be persuaded by facts. And as such, even the things I write that may piss them off may later, one day, when presented in a way that suits them more, be digested, metabolised and assimilated. They may, in fact, change their mind. And sometimes they may change mine.
Everyone likes to think they are that type of person, who can change his mind based on solid facts, but I estimate that at minimum over 85% of people are simply not. And if I had to guesstimate the actual number of people that can turn their long-held beliefs on a dime when presented with irrefutable evidence, I would say that at the most optimistic and generous, it is under 2%.
So, I know. I am my own worst enemy from a financial, economic, or fame perspective. And while I care absolutely not at all for fame, I could certainly appreciate being able to make a living just from my writing and sharing of concepts, stories, and ideas I have discovered in my rather eventful life. That would be truly awesome.
But not at the cost of my integrity.
I ENJOY writing this blog. And while it lay mostly dormant for years at a time, because my life was too full, chaotic and dynamic for me to give this much thought, since 3 years ago, I have begun an attempt to create a stable family home. It’s not a coincidence given I have also fathered three children in the last 5 years.
And while I have no more time (in fact, probably less), no less chaos, and certainly a LOT more worries and a LOT less money than I did before, continuing to write here actually gives me some of the spiritual fuel that inspires me and keeps me going.
Yes, the Satanists in charge may nuke the site tomorrow from orbit, or I may get droned or microwaved into a “heart attack” for it, or whatever.
C’est la vie.
But in the meantime I’ll carry on as I see fit.
And in doing so, the people that will most likely be attracted to this site are the types who WILL look at the links on the sidebars.
The types of people who DO read full length books and enjoy them, even if they too are harassed, squashed into cubicles, robbed of their time and sanity and souls every day.
They are the people who remain curious, defiant, who are able to change their mind based on facts, enjoy a story or a laugh with a man they agree on some things with and disagree on others, without either one ever losing respect for each other.
They are the type who, perhaps, also understand my sense of taste.
The Aesthetics of this most Excellent and Tonic Verbarium of Ideas
In my opinion, the last natural, real, honest, scientists, were best exemplified in the late 1800s. It was a time when equipment and machinery was crafted with care and skill, but also with a pleasing aesthetic.
Scientific observation was meticulously undertaken with patient recording of results and while the scientific method was held to tightly, the imagination of men was unfettered. We could envision sky-ships and then we built them.
Cognac and good cigars were served in the well-furnished libraries of men who could theorise on the laws of gravity as easily as discuss the possibility of remote areas of the world that might house supposedly extinct species. Men who would travel to far-away lands to explore ancient and mysterious ruins to discover the real origins of mankind. Men who did not fear an intellectual conversation, nor a brawl when the occasion called for it. Men who could argue honestly in search of truth, not the mere satisfaction of ego.
Such is the design of this site.
The slightly baroque look of the wallpaper reminiscent of hand-crafted wood-panelling, the various links and addendums to the site analogous to hidden doors in the library, or a secret panel in the desk, behind which was to be found even more astonishing information and locations.
It was a time where a man could be a real scientist, an explorer, a polymath, hold his own in discussions with the most esteemed experts of various royal societies, but not shy away from a bare knuckle fight or a duel with rapiers at dawn.
It was a better time, when men (and women) of good breeding, or at least quick wit, were naturally more observant, could make something of themselves through their own efforts, and were free to explore thoughts, ideas, lands and cultures with no one bothering them too much beyond possibly trying to kill them for time to time; but usually for economic or personal reasons, which are at least understandable, unlike much of the wokeness of the present day.
So that, is the look I was going for.
And I would say it has stood the test of time.
It is not a design that has “aged out”.
It was intentionally started as something you might expect to find well over one hundred years ago, in a slightly cyberpunkish, Space 1899, Jules Verne and HG Wells novel, sort of way.
The intent here, is that while the tone can range from rough and brusque to rarefied and abstract, the point is freedom to think. Freedom to explore.
And in fact, in writing out this explanation for you, gentle readers and kind supporters of my work (and yes, you too, those who hate-read here in fury, and even you, Dean, 30-year veteran of the NSA/CIA/FBI/Spook outfit that is designated as my personal agent), I am reminded of that original intent as well as the ways I may have strayed from it here and there, as every man will.
At times my tone has been cruder than I prefer, but then, it is a very raw and evil world we inhabit, and I, nor my target audience, is a prude. The odd curse or graphic sentence here and there is not anything I will lose sleep over, but perhaps, I can find a better way to temper my expressions.
I do not know yet if this site will ever reach a large enough readership that it might result in continued patronage of the things I offer and mention here, I hope it does, and soon. But regardless if it ever does or not, I will continue to write here in this spirit; and the changes that might come to this site (other than what Dean and his friends might have in store for us all) will probably be limited to a consolidation, of various concepts or topics. Perhaps an addition of a forum for people to discuss various ideas.
And there is certainly scope for people to contribute.
The SOE side of things has never taken off because the readership I have is small, and we are all increasingly struggling to survive, but the structure for it is all identified and it would be awesome if other natural scientists from around the world took it upon themselves to do experiments, report them back here and get them to be added to the Adventure Science Library, which I have not had a chance to work on and update in years.
Similarly, you might want to actually physically join me in Italy or at least contribute to the efforts of The Kurganate. One man already has bought property near me, another lives here already, and more would come here tomorrow if they had the funds to do so. Some are working towards it.
Or you might just support my efforts by reading my books, or subscribing with a membership to my YouTube channel.
Or… you could simply use the share button at the bottom of each blog post (you need to actually click on the blog post individually for the button to appear at the end of a post, but we are working on it showing even if you are just on the main page) and send whatever post interests you to a friend.
In Conclusion
I know this site is not for everyone.
It was never meant to be.
It was always meant to be for that discerning, objective, rational, curious, adventurous yet scientific type of person. Maybe they all died out in the late 1800s, or maybe I really am from Mars, and was transported here as a very small baby, in a perverse reversal of John Carter’s situation. But whatever the case may be, and as much harder as becoming a Warlord of Terra is, I plan to continue on as a, possibly Martian, erudite polymath, with a large vocabulary, a small to inexistent capacity for suffering fools, and a partiality for rapiers, blades and firearms, exploring ancient ruins, and hunting for cryptids.
The Meaning of Hedonism
Young men (and women) think that when they come across a “Bible Zealot” or “hardcore Christian” which is what most would assume I am (they would be wrong because I am not a Bible alone moron and what passes for both “hardcore” and “christian” today is laughable) that talks about “hedonism”, we are imagining young people are on some orgiastic drunken revelry on the daily.
Allow me to correct that misguided view.
First of all I am GenX not a boomer so I neither resent nor hallucinate the situation of millennials and zoomers. In fact I mostly pity them, at least when they are not completely pathetic, in which case I am mostly frustrated by their lack of animus.
More importantly, I understand better than most that hedonism today is not really the orgies of the collapsing Roman empire. It is more a wasting of time while waiting and hoping against hope for “something better” to come along.
When you are raised with no understanding whatsoever of what Catholicism actually was and has always been and continues to be in those small number of families who still hold to it, you cannot help but go wrong in life.
The only sense of “the right way” I had in my upbringing was a code of honour that can best be defined —as John C. Wright did— as being that of the noble heathen. That is a man who keeps his word and does as his personal honour commands. It is a far cry from Catholicism and possibly the best level of civilisation that sort of way can aspire to is that of feudal Japan.
Possibly Imperial China too, but my understanding of Japanese codes of honour is superior (and closer) than the Chinese version of it. The Roman Empire too fas founded on it on arguably surpassed both Japanese and Chinese achievements, but in any case, no one can deny that all of those systems were far more brutal, uncharitable, and lacking in mercy and kindness when compared to Catholicism.
The point here is that absent the framework of what a good life actually is, meaning the proof of it, the reality of it you can see and verify for yourself, how is any young person to decide on how to best approach life?
If you DO know, things become a LOT simpler. But if you do not know, what a good life really means, you’re almost certain to get lost in all sorts of distractions.
I never saved really. I did buy some property (land) at age 26 after writing the first edition of the Face on Mars, and some 25 years later it helped me to sell it and put a deposit on a house in Italy. But as I had no intention to make any children (until I was 40 and gradually I had realised a lot of life’s “givens” were contemptible lies spread by boomers) I spent most of my time indulging those interests that caught my attention. And unbelievable as it may sound, the main one was a search for true love. Which resulted in much heartache and a lot of women. After a while it got so I sort of stopped believing in it but carried on enjoying the women. The rest of my time was filled with doing what I liked or interested me. Reading, martial arts, studying the human mind, ancient things and places, writing, visiting places I wanted to see… but always also that search for that one woman.
And eventually I found her.
But it was a very long, tortuous and far more painful and difficult road than it needed to be.
Had I been taught, and more importantly, shown, that family is the main point of life. Had my own family I was born into been less of a shitshow, how many years of distraction would I have saved. How much more could I have done and thus be leaving my children?
I don’t regret my life at all, because every part of it brought me to where I am now, married to the right woman finally and with enough children too. And if I had not taken this particular road I would not be with her or have the children I do, and as was very cleverly shown in a delightful film called About Time, that reality is inconceivable to me.
But the point is that if you are say in your twenties, or even thirties, (and yes, even 40s or 50s, I am living proof of this: It’s never too late) and you realise deeply that the main purpose of life is actually to create a family that is as happy and prosperous as you can make it, then, regardless of your actual situation, your priorities, your actions and your activities will be radically different than if you think having the latest iphone, knowing the latest political gossip, or cheering for this or that sports team, or traveling to see X place for the instagram cred, or getting another notch on your belt, matters at all.
And the kind of actions and activities that you will focus on will be such that, yes, perhaps you might have less “fun” (or time wasted on things that ultimately don’t matter, depending on your perspective) but you might also have a more concrete base from which to start that family.
Had I aimed to built something for the future starting in my early 20s, I would probably be able to live off rental income even with six kids by now. It’s also true that for my particular character that was never really going to be a likely road, so there is that to counter, I have always been too curious, and probably, as a good friend pointed out, too capable, to ever worry about the future, and indeed I am not especially worried about it now either, but it certainly is a lot harder than it could be.
Having a much harder life is not necessarily a bad thing. It makes you more capable in many ways (assuming you survive and overcome). But there is certainly something to be said for not having to work into your 80s. Probably anyway. Then again, I have Jean Parisot de Valette as a somewhat inspirational figure; and he was swinging his two-handed sword on the walls of one of the castles of Malta, wounded in a leg and not wearing his full armour at age 71, so… if you have that kind of character, what I can guarantee is that your life might indeed be very hard, but not boring. The issue however is not you, but your children, and while for some the idea of swinging a sword at muslim invaders’s heads in our seventies might be appealing (and for some of us possibly inevitable!) the fact is that if you’re instead leaving your children a few well-stocked and well-defended castles, and yet have also instructed them in the proper running of a city-state, you’d be far better off.
My children on the other hand will have to learn on the job, as it were, and perhaps that is as fate or God ordained. After all, we do have an 800 year known history of doing things this way; and while my branch of the family is indeed the silver one (that is filled with curious explorers and war-like adventurers, of minor noble rank) and not the gold branch that had the much higher nobility titles and actual castles to their name, it is also true that our side of the family has some truly extraordinary people in it; several of whom have been talked about in history books or left monuments with their name on it for a time.
But… if I had somehow a crystal ball at age 20 that told me I would have six children all under the age of 14 at age 55, aside the utter shock, I probably would have worked like a possessed man (as I tend to do most things) towards securing far more land and property and wealth than I have done. And even without the crystal ball, if I had simply thought creating a family was the main aim in life, I would have done so too.
Instead, the boomer poison of “the world is horrible, why would you want to bring more innocents into it?” Infected me well into my early 30s at the very least. And that is a lie that is directly related to someone not having any belief of any real substance in a Loving God.
Generic Zen-Agnosticism tinged with Shintoism is not exactly ideal for the consideration of family creation. And there hasn’t been as much need for wandering samurai, thankfully.
It took until the end of my 30s to realise that having children was the right way to live. And I am not unintelligent, which is demonstrated by the fact that I had come to this conclusion even though I was still essentially agnostic, and very much aware of how the levers of power on this planet work, which is not a position a person as objectively rational as I am is likely to come to without having a belief in God.
In fact I had come to this conclusion based only on the possibly irrational belief that my capabilities were enough to protect a child of mine even under such dystopic conditions as we have on this planet. Whether you think that is arrogance or confidence is debatable, but I am basically certain it would have been true if I limited myself to one or two children.
Adding the knowledge of a Loving God has removed a HUGE amount of the concern about having more children. And no, it does not mean miracles fall unceasing from the sky, the practicalities of feeding six children instead of two, as well as clothing them, educating them and so on are real, but you tend to find a way as you reorganise your priorities. And yes, maybe they will not all have the latest iphone and brand name clothing, but guess what: that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It makes them more imaginative and capable if they need to work for things, and if you are a decent parent you will also be able to help them get over a truly noxious aspect of modern life: caring excessively what other people think.
It’s a little different for girls than boys, but generally speaking, it is always best to err on the side of NOT caring what other people think than vice versa.
The emotional scars left by being overly concerned about other people’s opinions can be a truly devastating thing, particularly for girls, but boys too. Luckily my three youngest children already exhibit many traits that make me pretty secure in the view that this will not be an issue for them. If anything, the main worry might be to keep them from being arrested or chased out of towns for being possibly too cavalier about social rules in general!
All the people I knew at school that were from wealthy families, as a very frequent general trend, almost invariably tend to become what I would consider less accomplished human beings that even some of the absolute social rejects that everyone assumed would amount to nothing.
As a rule they tend to hold on to their wealth but be rather vacuous creatures with little to offer in terms of interesting personalities or life stories.
These apparent digressions, are not meandering, meaningless recollections and reflections of my life, they are intended to show you, and hopefully help you, see different aspects of life from different perspectives so that you might realise several things:
All that said… it is only a foolish or imprudent man that does not plan (somewhat loosely, to allow for life’s inevitable detours) for the future. Especially when he envisions a numerous family in it.
Plan accordingly young man, and realise that hedonism might just be your indulgence in fancy clothes and package holidays, without a single Roman orgy in sight.
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By G | 10 January 2025 | Posted in Farming Life, Increasing Happiness, Relationships, Social Commentary