Archive for the ‘Poll’ Category

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:

Regarding book reviews, do you prefer I review fiction or non-fiction books?

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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.

    Another Poll

    If I were to do written reviews of things here on the blog, (not paid for by anyone, just for fun)

    Would you prefer I do written reviews on:

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      What Next?

      There are three paths I can go down with respect to the next book I write.

      NAZI MOON (linked) is now available at least in the US and CANADA and should be available soon in other countries too.

      Do you Prefer I next write:

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      I have been asked to do the relationship book by friends and men in general for years; at least 20 of them. I resisted the impulse* for at least a couple of decades, primarily because, as one of my alter egos/nicknames —given to me by friends in Italy over 20 years ago— said in one of the graphic novels he appears in: “Any man that says he has understood all there is to know about women, is either a liar or insane.” And it’s close enough to the truth in some ways. Nevertheless, I feel that after two divorces, a lot of women in between, and finally a proper Catholic marriage, not to mention 4 children I fathered, I have probably made —and persevered!— and (one hopes), learnt enough that it is probably acceptable to pass on a few pointers to younger men; at least on those issues I feel I have now got enough experience to retroactively note when I did the right thing (regardless of outcome), and when I did the wrong thing (again, regardless of outcome). I mention this, because as I say, there have been a lot of people asking me for this for a long time.

      With regard to my non-fiction, each book I have written so far, is really mostly a compilation of my theories and conclusions formed with many years of experience.

      The Face on Mars was the result of a lifelong interest in Astronomy from very early childhood. I understood what a light-year was at age four, thanks to an uncle who was, and remains, a total geek to this day. He also sent me a telescope in my early teens, with which I observed the mountains of the moon, and how the moon itself moved. I also saw Haley’s comet with it, from our home in Africa at the time. And to this day the concepts I put forth in that book were then, and for the most part continue to remain today, unique. Some have badly plagiarised aspects of it (hello Graham Hancock) but the overall main issue had not been understood by anyone I am aware of before I saw it. And most remain totally ignorant of it, despite the predictions and theories I made back in 1995, playing out as correct in the intervening time. The update in 2014 also added a new dimension to the reality of my ideas, which is partly expanded on a lot more in my fiction work.

      Systema was similarly, a book I wrote after I had personally spend decades in the martial arts world. And I wanted to demystify a LOT of the nonsense that goes with many martial art “concepts” and their related egos, and which —in particular— seemed to have a vortex of “mystic ninjas” concerning the Russian system. Which is an impression many martial artists might have if they have not experience of it firsthand. By merely watching YouTube videos or hearing “fantastic” stories of almost magical ability, they are most likely going to assume it is some woo-woo nonsensical “martial art”. That thought is disabused within minutes of confronting any of the top exponents of it. Unfortunately, as always, along with the really good practitioners, there were also a lot of “mystic ninjas” and some of the practitioners did nothing to demystify the situation, so I did it. I have been doing martial arts since I was a very small child, thanks to my dad, so I had pretty extensive knowledge of it before I put hand-to-keyboard after almost four decades of it.

      Reclaiming the Catholic Church was in some ways the “odd man out” because I had a road to Damascus Event in 2013 and the book came out in 2020, that is, only 7 years later. However, I had been reading different books on all the main religions, mysticism, “spiritual” and even New Age stuff, again, since my teens, and literally infiltrating various cults as a hobby, in order to see if anyone had anything that was demonstrably true, real, or worthwhile. I had settled on a basic Zen-Agnosticism, with a clear understanding there must be an intelligence behind creation (the math, astronomy, biology and physics, as well as logic, pretty much confirms it many, many, many times over) but no sense of a God as such that was specifically interested in us mere mortals, much less me specifically. That changed in a radical, unexpected and utterly surprising way, that while “subjective” in the sense that I cannot prove it to anyone else, was absolutely objective and very much so for me. The other part that helped was that because the Catholic Church has ALL of its rules and dogmas written down, it was fairly easy to follow the thread of its history and see the astonishing truth it is founded on. As it was, to see that the current inhabitants of the Vatican are, without putting too fine a point on it, flat out Satanists.

      BELIEVE! Instead, published a year before RTCC, was a much smaller work, putting out my new, or updated, basic outline philosophy. For those who have read both books, you will notice that BELIEVE! is not even a fifth of the size of RTCC, at just under 100 pages, and is a lot more open with respect to overall views and concepts. RTCC was the follow up that basically said, “OK, so that’s sort of where I am with respect to religion as a whole (BELIEVE!) now let’s take a look at this one path that I state is the best one I can see so far, and in this book, (RTCC), I went full autist, covering every aspect of Sedevacantism (i.e. the actual, current, only Catholicism left) and demonstrating it in a manner that no one has so far even attempted to refute, much less succeeded. The result is that RTCC is the foundation on which BELIVE! is really sitting on, which is probably why even if a much smaller and less detailed book, BELIEVE! has resulted in now over 100 people converting to Sedevacantist Catholicism (aka simply: Catholicism).

      The reason I point all this out, is because in these last two non-fiction books, it becomes obvious that even my overall looser and more generic ideas, as expressed in BELIEVE!, for example, clearly have had a lot of genuinely positive effects on people who read them. And we know it was this that sparked the results, because BELIEVE! came first, and yet, even without all the details (presented in RTCC), it had a serious impact on people’s lives.

      I see a LOT of confusion, struggles and heartache among young men today concerning intimate relationships and finding the right woman.

      I literally get questions, emails, or messages on the topic to a frequency that is starting to become hard to keep up with. And as anyone that reads my blog knows, I have a rather low opinions of PUAs, and would very much hate to be mistaken for one. That said, I know for a demonstrable fact that my advice benefits these younger men, because they are getting married, having babies, and resolving issues they had for many years of their lives. I have literally had everything from friends, neighbours and even strangers, asking for advice, on an ad hoc basis, to hypnosis sessions with people that were under clinical care as supposedly paranoid schizophrenics under medication that went on to stop the medication (yes with doctor approval and full knowledge of my sessions with them) and go on to have a productive life with a functioning relationship, when prior they were 29 year old virgins. And I have been doing this for at least 15 years, with positive results.

      So, perhaps, there is some utility in putting together some of the baseline concepts concerning male-female interactions and so on.

      The other options (SF saga continuation) or YA SF books are, respectively, more a divertimento for myself and, a less fun, but I think helpful addition to the current dearth of adventure stories for boys mostly. I am not aware of anything like the Hardy Boys and so on coming along anytime recently, which is why Castalia House is doing well printing old classics. I would not enjoy writing such books as much as my own adult Science Fiction, but it would not be too difficult to do and they should be able to be produced fairly quickly. Although, I am not likely to be acclaimed as a children’s author anytime soon, or even long after I am dust, so the effort might not be worth it.

      Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter, so please feel free to leave comments after you vote, thanks. 

      * Vox, on this post, referring to someone else, Taleb, in this case, said something that holds true for most of us. Personally I have always genuinely tried to resist the temptation, and often people have been quite “deflated” when trying to make me their “guru”, when, after being asked something I know little or nothing about or at least I don’t feel qualified to take a stand on, I simply say “I have no idea”. Some were quite insistent nevertheless and I always consciously dissuaded that, as I explained in some detail in my book Systema: The Russian Martial System.

        Next Livestream on…?

        You can pick up to 3 answers, but I will not be able to know which is your preferred one.

        all polls are anonymous, I have no way of figuring out who answered what even if I wanted to, which I don’t.

        Which of the following would you prefer to have a livestream on?

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          Testing polling function

          So I have finally added a polling function, which I hope will make my blog a little more useful to my readers, as I will use it to try and figure out what y’all want to read more or less of.

          Here is the first one. Results will be shown once you vote.

          Assuming WWIII becomes partially nuclear and wipes out the largest city near you:

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