Consistent and persistent is the answer
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”
— Karen Blixen
It’s hard not to get discouraged and frustrated.
Quite frankly, I don’t even know where to begin. Understandably social media is a moist sinkhole of horror, although its murmurs have begun seeping through into mainstream media where some knowledge is becoming common knowledge, finally. Whether its purpose is to nudge the hypnotized masses and normalize escalating levels of absurdity, honestly I’ll never really know, but some change is afoot.
However from my personal experience most people are still playing pretend.
If you’re lucky you may get the odd trusting co-worker, or a local grocery clerk, who’ll whisper “they’re not telling the truth” about an obvious public lie that people are too terrified to talk about. Terrorism, fear that freezes the mind and soul itself, was always domestic and never abroad. Too many are financially compromised, free expression chilled, because HR ensures your behaviour is well managed even outside of work.
How many are ensnared by the devil’s dollar bill?
As usual, if I openly voice my honest opinion I’m ignored or laughed off as eccentric, because without special authority the credulous and subservient would never dare rattle their chains. Since so many are set in their worldview, there’s not much to discuss except for mundane topics that are tiresome or irrelevant at best.
What does one do when it feels like there’s nothing that can be done?
Everyone has a different opinion of what to prioritize, which is probably the correct answer because individual circumstances is where real action begins. Tragically, I lack the skills to become a cult leader like our esteemed Queen of Canada and there’s no tight clique I fit into, thus my perspective tends to differ from the vast social majority. Many online dissident discussions often exhume the thought terminating cliche “what are you going to do about it anyway?”
After all, resistance is futile when facing the collective.
But that cliche offers me no value. I can still make my own decisions and I’m not a debt slave with tight reigns wrapped around my neck. And although there’s no way to completely avoid risk, hope is never totally lost, but its cost is hard work.
How I manage my perceived risks is uncommon.
As technical person my risk tolerance is low, since I hyper-focus on failure modes, where the biggest issue I see right now is that nothing makes sense. As trivial as that sounds, if nothing makes sense then anything can fail, so nothing is off the table in terms of failure modes. Unfortunately the preparedness mindset often manifests as paranoia when water, power, food or energy could be compromised. Distrust and insecurity are part of the proactive management package, which most people can’t handle, but that trait is necessary for functioning systems to stay in operation. Strangely I see that trait quickly vanishing from the workforce, chilled by financial compromise, threats or in the case of Boeing, assassination.
Without first hand knowledge of the efforts required to keep water, power, food and energy in operation, our standard of living is taken for granted as if it were magic. Have you tried to manually sanitize or pump water? Have you ever tried to generate power mechanically? How many hours have you spent trying to grow your own food, and how much did you get? Do you have the resources to supply your own heat and locomotion? Or can anyone locally answer these questions? These uncomfortable statements force people to sacrifice their values to “belong to society.” The problem being, when any necessity is held hostage you must negotiate with terrorists, which may even be your government.
How is Calgary, the largest city in the province of Alberta, faring with their water? What’s the point of “belonging to society” if its leaders fail to do their job?
Hell, what’s the point of a country if its leaders are controlled by foreign influence?
The fundamental purpose of propaganda is to change what you believe.
In an emotional dance of perception, a cognitive belief interacts with experienced reality to influence behaviour, since what you do can be controlled by what you think and instrumented by how you feel. More people than you would care to imagine are stuck in this hypnotic trance. The most notable squabbling, character attacks and ad hominem rhetoric, are nothing more than closed loop stimuli where a good word followed by a bad word reaffirms a cognitive belief. Without the comforting emotional structure provided by systems of false beliefs, frail minds would shatter like glass.
These are breeding conditions for cults, which lure in the intellectually weak and emotionally crippled. Mainstream media followers are nothing but cult members, willing to drink jugs of koolaid and sacrifice the young for their personal salvation.
The spiral of silence must end, else we’ll be sucked into the orifice of the Black Sun.
And personally speaking, I believe actions speak louder than words.
A common idiom is to be like water. Be gentle, flow effortlessly and be wary of the raging floods. And since we’re mostly water, physically, that analogy is rather fitting.
Through effortless action, water’s momentum manifests as a powerful force capable of carving out mountains and etching deep canyons, immovable objects that succumb to water’s indiscriminate rage. Water is a basic necessity, and without active water management plans our civilizations quickly crumbles and erodes.
Harnessing water means controlling its flow.
Our belief systems, values and mechanisms used to resolve conflict are the mental equivalent of that flow. Propaganda and behavioural sinks disrupt natural and productive human behaviours by redirecting its potential towards nefarious and political endeavours. We must relearn to direct where our energy flows.
Be like water.
Be consistent and persistent.
I've been busy.
Like, really busy.
So far I've planted over 300 row feet of potatoes, which is actually a lie because I got an extra 3 gallons of seed potatoes from the community gardens that needed to be planted, so I honestly have no idea how many potatoes I planted... This also includes over 40 squash plants, 100 onion sets and 50 row feet of tomatoes.
My goal this year is to over-produce easy-to-store staples.
During winter we went through about 100 lbs of potatoes in 3 months for a family of 4. So our yearly potato usage is about 400 lbs. If one plant produces 2.5 lbs on the low end then we’d need about 160 plants. 1 potato plant on the high side takes up 1.5 feet, which is 240 row feet for 400 lbs. Assuming a 20% failure rate this places the yearly need to around 300 row feet. What I've planted should do the trick, and more, but we won't know for sure until I harvest, cure and actually use the yield.
The reason I planted even more is it gives me the option to store the extra or donate it to a local charity, and you can’t donate what you don’t have! Plus I’m curious to see what I can produce out of the first year.
Here's a quick photo of our gardens so far, which are a work in progress and takes years to stabilize. Our climate is annoyingly intense. The days are hot, the nights are cold and we sometimes get violent wind storms. Coming up with proper gardening practices and shelter will take time.
I'm using similar logic for squash, trying to produce as much as possible. Surplus squash and pumpkins serve another important purpose because I can feed it to our new laying flock in the winter, who may enjoy a cooked treat or its seeds. Our flock contains 12 chicks from 3 different breeds: Rhode Island Red, Lavender Orpington and Jersey Giant. They're starting to get feathers and developing unique chicken personalities. When they get a little bigger, they can join our grandma chicken and begin a chicken campaign to conquer all the bugs.
Speaking of bugs our property is loaded with ticks, probably from the crazy amount of snow which made the area a little too wet and swampy. One local resident was left in a bit of a pickle, requiring a shave and some de-ticking.
Fortunately, I hired an elite crack team to deal with the root cause.
After tracking down some embryos online, from a reputable dealer of course, my creatures will gestate within a few weeks and pupate into bestial form several months later, discarding their primordial shells...
Who is this elite crack team of experts? Guinea hens.
Guinea fowl are supposedly chatty guard birds who squawk and attack unwanted predators, and thankfully other people. They’re also great for tick and insect control. Our property is cursed by Beelzebub, the lord of the flies, and also the tyrannical tick principalities. With the guineas on site, they can kindly return them back to hell.
Oh, but I’m even busier than that.
I purchased 35 service berries, 5 apple trees, 5 blueberries and 100 strawberry crowns that I planted this last weekend. Every year I plan to add more plants to stage successions and back fill any deer-related accidents. The goal is to have a supply of fresh / frozen fruit, jams, pie filling, juices and more. Getting stuck with a surplus is a good problem to have, especially considering how expensive everything is.
Not to mention there's a few trees that need to be cut down and chipped up, I'm swamped with work. But despite setbacks, the only way to make our goals come true is to be consistent, persistent and to put in the hard work.
Every day is a new challenge and every week a new milestone.
Not only that I started teaching, which comes with its own unique challenges and pressures. While I do enjoy Substack, it's had to take a bit of a backseat to deal with plants, ticks, birds and 32-bit microcontrollers.
When I tell people what I’m doing there’s a bit of shock on their face.
Actions speak louder than words, and I know where my energy must flow.
Why would I invest so much effort into self-sufficiency? Just for fun? Why would I move away 2000km+? Just for something to do? The implication underlying these actions gets more head turns than if I flat out explained my motivation. Obviously, I think something is seriously wrong, and I’m doing something about it in the best way I can as an individual. No one cares about my motivation anyway, they want rumours and gossip.
But I can’t change people’s minds.
What the future holds is anyone’s guess, although I don’t intend to wait around and find out the hard way. Regardless of the scenario, having control over your basic needs is a good idea. The naysayers would disagree because of the volume of work involved. The underlying implication is uncomfortable too, because imagining unavailable necessities is too terrifying for most to handle.
Although tiring, I enjoy the work and I’m far from done because there is no “done.” Consistent and persistent effort is a lifestyle change. And I’d rather change how I live my life now than have my hand forced later.
I hope my family likes potatoes…
You would be surprised at the influence you and our movement are having. I live in the hot plains of North Texas but am improving our small farm day by day in a fashion very similar to yours. Some people seem envious of our little place and wish they too could escape the big city but most are oblivious to the changing world and think we have lost our minds. I don't think too much about their reaction anymore.
Very nice, Theodore. I probably skipped some of the vegetarian parts.