I’ll tell you a story about self-confidence.

When I was 20 and in driving school, I thought it would help to boost my confidence by giving myself suggestions such as “I’m going to do great”, “I’m going to succeed” and so on, before the driving test. As you can imagine, I messed up the test and failed.

This was quite a shock to me, in a sense that I really took the time to think about what happened and learn the lessons. The next time I took the test, I focused on doing every particular thing right, and nothing else. As a result, I passed the test and got my driving license.

This coloured my thinking about self-confidence, and, now that I think of it, about ego, to this day. Basically, if you want to do anything properly, there is no place for you in the process. Thoughts about success or failure are mere ego-musings and are irrelevant. What matters is to see what the situation requires and do it to the best of your abilities. Everything else contributes to failure.

The only self-confidence that matters is a result of having done many difficult and possibly dangerous things over the course of your life; you succeeded at some, failed at others, and you have a healthy attitude towards things – basically, you’re going to try very hard and be completely focused on it, but you know that either success or failure are not really up to you, at the end of it. To be very proud of your successes leaves you vulnerable to feeling humiliated by your failures, and I see little use for either.

I was thinking about the extent to which past trauma and frustrations condition my actions, and whether that is something that should be remedied, or accepted.

You see, people usually assume that conditioning by trauma is a bad thing, but if you know anything about how neural networks are trained, you would know that trauma is an excellent way to condition a neural network to avoid a certain path. For instance, fall from great height is deadly. In order to avoid death, it would be a good idea to condition oneself to avoid situations that can lead to fall from height. In case of humans, it’s an instinct, hard-wired in our brains from the beginning, as something that is always necessary. Don’t fuck around at heights. Don’t eat foods you never ate before if you’re lost in the woods. Be afraid of the dark. Basically, try to survive long enough that your conscious mind can guide you, but before that, rely on instinct. Also, if you barely survived something, it creates a strong trauma-imprint in order for you to avoid things that might bring you close to such a near-miss in the future. You can see where I’m going there – fear and trauma can be a very good way not to get poisoned, raped, robbed or killed. It’s much safer for you to be afraid of snakes and spiders, than to handle them. The worst thing that can happen to you if you fear them is fear. The worst thing that can happen if you don’t fear them is death. From the evolution standpoint, fear is preferable, and trauma is a way to store personal experience in actionable, useful form – if you hit your toe on a rock once and broke it, trauma-caused imprint will make you careful about it in the future. If you got raped in a corn field once because you weren’t afraid to walk alone in the dark through desolate places, trauma will change your dangerous behaviour in a hurry.

The problem is neither fear nor trauma – rather, the problem are all those “positive thinking” nonsense books from America, authored in the 1990s or earlier, where fear, stress or trauma are seen as a philosophical substitute for evil in a worldview that tries very hard to avoid evil as a concept. They thought that, if you removed all trauma-imprints, you will psychologically return to the innocence of childhood which they for some reason see as perfection. I don’t share that opinion, because you know what the difference is between a child and an idiot? A child is younger; that’s all. I don’t wish to be an idiot again, because I worked quite hard to learn what I have, and if I have scars from trauma, they all contain a lesson – if you do this, you might get wrecked again.

Sure, sometimes trauma generalises things too much, to the point where very specific bad experience can “poison the well” in a very broad way that isn’t really helpful – for instance, you get scared of heights even when it’s pointless and not at all useful. Such things need to be worked on, of course, but if I have traumatic experiences caused by a computer that ran a shitty Win98 OS with too little RAM, and repeatedly froze and crashed when I tried to edit a 300DPI TIFF image for the cover of my first book, and as a result I couldn’t finish the edit in time and I ended up submitting the version that’s not properly sized and text ended up being too close to the margins, and so on? What if those traumatic experiences cause me to over-specify my computers in order to avoid situations of this kind, where the computer runs perfectly fine 99% of the time, but when I need to do some graphics work, it turns out to be unfit and causes me to fail at important tasks? What’s the worst thing that can happen if I listen to my experience and buy over-specced equipment whenever I can? I can waste some money, and that’s it. For 99% of the time, I will have a computer that’s vastly over-specified for the task at hand, but at that instance when I need to prepare a meter-sized high-res photographic print, I will be able to do it without a problem. Also, with cars – I have trauma caused by cars with insufficiently powerful engines, because my first car had 54HP and overtaking was always scary and dangerous. I also have issues with bad tyres. As a result, I avoid cars that are underpowered or in some other way unsafe, and I try to always have excellent tyres. Again, what exactly is the problem with trauma here? It causes me to spend more money on really important things that prevent dangerous situations? How terrible. 🙂 I also have trauma caused by food poisoning that makes me wary of things that caused food poisoning before – that jar of pickled olives with only a few remaining ones that’s been sitting in the fridge, or that opened cup of sour cream that’s been in the fridge for a week, especially in the summer, and stuff that tastes a bit “off” – what’s the worst that can happen if I “succumb to my fears”? I throw away suspicious foods and not get sick? That’s terrible, I must immediately return to childhood where I had no such fears and would eat any kind of toxic garbage including leaked batteries and dog shit. What an ideal state of spiritual perfection that was. 🙂

In short, we’ve all been told all kinds of stupid bullshit, and we need to un-learn it all, especially the stuff that came from America, because that’s simply a motherlode of nonsense.

Yesterday I added another page to the main menu of the blog, Status. It contains hourly radiation measurements from my dosimeter, and my current assessments of dangers.

You might ask “why”, and “why now”. I’m actually not sure – I basically solved the technical problem of “how”, and then just did it. I don’t know how much sense it makes. The current geopolitical situation is the worst I ever saw, and I was here in the 1980s, in the time of the Pershing-missile crisis in Europe, when Andropov was so spooked he had a general with the nuclear codes with him at all times in his hospital room. I also monitor the spiritual condition of the global astral field and it shows all signs of extreme energy depletion. Also, there are strong indicators of complete societal breakdown in the West, the petrodollar system has been de facto broken, and the fiat currency system is in the process of collapse. Each of those by itself is not good and suggests a crisis, but together they form a very strong multi-variant convergence that I don’t think we’ve seen at any time in history. Also, I can’t tell whether this current multivariant convergent collapse pattern is merely a symptom, in the sense that people on a very wide scale have a premonition that this world is doomed, and this causes their behaviour. For instance, if we were to be hit by some fatal natural disaster in the near future, and people could subconsciously sense this, it might cause them to act weirdly. It’s hard to tell what is the cause and what is the effect, and this is why I’m monitoring all kinds of possible disasters; also, because I hate being ignorant and so I pass my time hypothesising. I feel something’s up, but that’s about it.

As for the radiation monitor, the reason why I have it is twofold – first, I don’t trust any government at this point to provide us with timely and accurate data about anything. They lie so much I can’t even assume that they lie and extrapolate anything useful from this fact. Also, I know a thing or two about nuclear weapons, enough so that I am aware that serious shit could be going on and nobody outside of the immediately affected area would know about it, with the possible exception of very colorful sunsets. Combine the two, and, obviously, there could be several nuclear explosions in Europe, and I would not be able to personally verify it, and the governments would lie. A dosimeter would let me know if fallout cloud had reached me, and from this I could tell that some serious shit hit the fan somewhere. Also, I could use it to check if the food I’m buying is contaminated, or if some area is particularly “hot”. In the first days, however, I am aware that not many people have their own radiation monitor, and when shit starts going on, I expect to have other priorities, so setting this up now looks like a good idea, because transcribing measurements manually or tweaking software during an acute crisis is not something I would realistically do. Having something that does it by default might help. Also, it can prove a negative – for instance, if the governments say there was a nuclear war, and my dosimeter consistently shows baseline, it would mean they want us to think there’s a nuclear war so that they can assume emergency powers. As a middle ground, they can understate or overstate the danger, and I have the ability to check for myself. For instance, if they say everything’s fine and I can see that everything is hot as fuck, I can avoid the danger. Also, if they say everything is hot and I see that it is fine, I can move around safely and notify others. In any case, it allows me to perform my own measurements and share them with others, so that they can have a datapoint independent of the lying governments and media. Whether that will help or not, I don’t know, but it’s something I can do, and I prefer doing something to remaining passive and waiting to get fucked.

I watched video about a prepping community that refurbishes former US Army ammo bunkers in South Dakota:

The first thing that crossed my mind was that this looked like exactly the kind of place the army would select for a Minuteman ICBM silo site, and in a few minutes of searching, here’s what I found:

Yes, there indeed is a huge ICBM field right across from that abandoned ammo depot. So, yeah, good job placing your “survival” bunkers right on the “X”, in the middle of a first-strike zone of death that’s going to be turned into a glass parking lot in case of a nuclear war.

Edit: this missile field seems to have been retired, but to quote Wikipedia, “Some 450 of the newer Minuteman III missiles are still on active duty at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, Minot AFB, North Dakota, and F. E. Warren AFB, Wyoming.” This is all basically “next door”, so my observation stands.

This made me continue this line of thinking: how to identify bad ideas when you’re trying to prepare for a disaster, and what makes sense.

There are several fundamental principles I try to adhere to:

1. Prepare the way you normally live. This means you don’t buy “survival foods”, you buy the kind of foods you would normally eat, just keep an increased suply at home instead of doing the “just-in-time” thing. This also means you don’t have a separate “survival location” where you would bug out to in case of a disaster, because the likelihood of you being able to leave your primary residence in case of an acute emergency is exceedingly low, and your probability of success drops exponentially with the remoteness of your survival site. This means that your primary location must be equipped to serve as an emergency shelter, and if it’s not, you should move to a place that’s inherently safer. Essentially, don’t buy a shelter in the middle of nowhere if you don’t intend to actually live there, because chances are you won’t be able to get there in time; if there’s a nuclear war looming, do you really want to be on a long road trip, exposed? If there’s an emergency, understand that the authorities might restrict your movement, that there might be panic and chaos, and being out there in such a scenario actually increases your probability of robbery, injury or death.
2. Use your imagination a bit and imagine several modes of disaster. Examples are nuclear war, civil/conventional war, riots, earthquake, volcano, flood, tsunami, plague and extreme weather (tornadoes, hurricanes etc.). Use common sense to model probabilities: are you in a flood zone, does your location have extreme weather, is there a history of seismicity or volcanism, is your country trying to piss off a nuclear superpower, what’s the population density and what happens in case of riots or a plague and so on. If your primary or hypothetical secondary location puts you right on the “X”, you have a problem. You need to approach this from a risk-reduction realistic perspective. Basically, don’t build a nuclear shelter in a first-strike zone of death, near the ICBM field.
3. What’s your realistic endgame? You’re in the shelter, there’s a disaster you’re riding out, but what do you actually plan to achieve? Let’s say it’s a big disaster. Do you keep relatives and neighbours out in some “every man for himself” pattern, or do you try to build a wider community “for later”, because your probability of survival as an individual with lots of supplies, but alienating everybody else, works for as long as you don’t vitally need something you don’t have. However, if you’re spreading out your supplies across a wider group, they are not going to last long. It would be a very good idea to be surrounded by people who are all on the same page, and they all try to maintain some level of disaster preparedness, and who can then pool resources.
4. If whatever you’re doing fails, what then?
5. Never rely on mercenaries (or hired staff of any kind) in emergencies. They will either abandon you at the first sign of real trouble, or they will actually rob and murder you. This is a lesson people historically learned the hard way. Always ask the question “why would that person not just outright rob/kill/rape/murder me”, and if the answer is “because of the law”, you’re fucked. Also, never trust atheists with anything; if a person is not profoundly religious, they are inherently dangerous in a situation where there’s no state to enforce laws.
6. A source is always preferable to a limited supply. This means having a source of water you can filter and use instead of having a water tank; having a power source (a hydroelectric, solar or wind generator) rather than relying on batteries or a limited tank of diesel for the generator; being able to grow food rather than relying on limited supplies. Living in some remote area with limited supplies inevitably creates a scenario where the supplies run out, and then what? Always plan ahead and avoid obvious dead ends.

Russia has reliable data that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are storing Western weapons at nuclear power plants – SVR

The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation reported that there is reliable information about the deployment of three Ukrainian nuclear power plants in the territories. In addition, they said that these “warehouses” house missiles for HIMARS and foreign air defense systems.

If detonation of warehouses and destruction of nuclear power plants occur at Ukrainian nuclear power plants, it is planned to blame Moscow – Foreign Intelligence Service

The Foreign Intelligence Service reported that only in the last week of last year, several railway wagons of the “deadly cargo” were delivered to the Rivne NPP. In the event that a large-scale detonation occurs at Ukrainian nuclear power plants, Kyiv plans to put the blame on Moscow.

“The calculation is based on the fact that the Russian Armed Forces, realizing the danger of a nuclear catastrophe, will not strike at the territories of nuclear power plants. If a large-scale detonation of warehouses and the destruction of a nuclear power plant happen due to the fault of another “stray” Ukrainian air defense missile, then the blame for the tragedy can always be attributed to Moscow,” the Foreign Intelligence Service noted.

source1, source2: Telegram

This is just wonderful. Basically, the Ukrops are keeping the NATO weapons stockpiles in the nuclear power plants, because they figured out that they are the only thing the Russians weren’t calibrating, so it’s safe. So now of course the Russians are frustrated because they have to choose between not achieving military goals, and risking several Chernobyls at once if they do.