I was thinking about disaster preparedness – prepping, in short – considering I’ve noticed a strong increase in the instinctual-level warning signal, probably broadcast through the global astral field. It communicates immediate and urgent need to stock up on supplies and prepare for a disaster, because when it begins it will be too late, the supplies will become inaccessible. I’ve heard of many instances where people, always the older ones, prepared for the war by stocking up on food and other supplies in their basements, before the 1990s war in Yugoslavia. Obviously, people can sense that shit is about to hit the fan, but only the older ones, who already have had personal experience with war, actually act upon it.

The instinct itself is very similar to that of a squirrel who feels a strong urge to collect acorns and nuts and store them in a hole in a tree where it will hibernate. It’s a very basic, animal urge directly connected to survival. For something like a limited war, this instinct is extremely useful. Stocking up on non-perishable supplies will not get you through the crisis entirely, but will give you a very comfortable margin of time which allows you to avoid desperate options later, and the ability to plot a course of action which doesn’t include extreme risk is what will actually help you survive. For instance, you don’t have to try and rob someone’s food cache, or to go out and risk sniper and mortar fire in order to attempt something. The priorities are clean water, medications (for people with chronic conditions), food, fuel and weapons. Essentially, water is the biggest issue. If you don’t have access to pure drinking water, death from water-borne pathogens is the bigger threat than sniper fire. However, the problem can be solved if you stock up on bleach; two drops per liter of water, stir and leave for 30 minutes to kill the pathogens and you have drinkable water. As for food, stock up on carbs and fats; protein is easy. You can hunt for protein (which includes collecting the earthworms and eating the pets), but carbs and fats are freakishly hard to get from nature, outside of modern agriculture. Stock up on whatever you would otherwise eat, just have a bigger quantity in store and rotate the supplies so that they are always fresh enough. If you think it’s silly, think about Aleppo, Syria. Imagine being trapped there after the war had started. Your options are basically eat whatever you have in your apartment, or go out under sniper fire and try to get something to eat, in a situation where nobody really has much, whatever they have is guarded with guns, and distribution of humanitarian aid is an excellent opportunity for mortar fire by the enemy. Fuel is a big problem, especially in cold weather. Without fuel, you can’t prepare food, or get warm. It increases the chance of people getting sick and dying because of nonexistent health care in those conditions. Also, the cheapest non-perishable foods, like flour, beans and barley, will require cooking. Also, if the electricity runs out, the perishable foods in the refrigerator will need to be eaten quickly. Having your own solar power generator, strong enough to power the fridge and the oven is a great asset, but almost nobody has access to that, so it’s not really worth mentioning. The problem with having supplies is that people who don’t have supplies will be tempted to take yours, especially if they have a gun and you don’t. So, having a gun with plentiful munitions is an absolute life-saver in those situations. In a civil-war situation, people can be divided into active and passive elements of a situation depending on whether they are armed or not. Translate “passive” as “victim”. Also, people who can rely on other people and have plentiful social contacts with the neighbors are more likely to be able to trade for whatever they need. Expect “grid” to fail – gas, water, electricity, phone, Internet. Those who use gas in bottles for cooking will fare much better than those who use gas supplies from the grid, for instance. The more “off grid” your installation is, the less modern and convenient it is in the normal circumstances, the more resilient it is in the case of outages and infrastructural collapse. You can get gas in bottles from somewhere, but if you’re connected to the city’s supply, you will probably need to rework/replace your kitchen stove in order to be able to cook food. Also, if your central heating system uses gas or electricity from the grid, expect it to stop working. For this kind of outages, think Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar, Aleppo or Donetsk. We’re not talking nuclear war or a Chicxulub-level asteroid strike, we’re talking things like a civil war, where a city is expected to be split into segments based on the communities, with riots, armed gangs and all sorts of shit taking place, which makes it very dangerous to go out. Even in case of a natural disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, there might be infrastructural collapse, widespread looting and violence, and you want to have some level of isolation from that until it blows itself out and order is restored. The worst possible scenario of this kind is the siege of Leningrad in WW2. I know more about it than I would like. Millions died. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a picnic compared to what happened there. In early 1942 some 100000 people died every month, mostly from starvation. Not fun. I interpret all the atrocities committed by the Soviets in Germany, later, as a reaction to that. You see, shit like that actually happens, it’s not some far-fetched conspiracy theory. At almost every single moment there’s a place in the world where you have a natural disaster or a civil war or a siege. Being able to endure for two weeks without exposing yourself to danger or starving is very useful.

In such circumstances, probably the best thing you can do is wait out the first period of randomness and chaotic bloodshed, and when you figure out what’s going on, make an assessment on whether to get the fuck out or to wait it out. Each option has strengths and weaknesses. However, there are possible scenarios in which getting out isn’t an option, because there’s nowhere for you to go. There are people who have romantic notions of taking a backpack with supplies and going into the woods to “live off the land”. Be absolutely certain that if you do that, you will die. Every shelter you make, every fire you light, is a beacon attracting all kinds of criminals to your camping site, and be assured that there will be criminals in the woods. They will rob you of your resources, and if you resist, they will kill you with impunity, and possibly even eat you. Your home, in most circumstances, will be much more easy to defend from attack. If you don’t already live off the land now, don’t even think about attempting it later. It stopped being possible for humans to live off the land in great numbers in late Pleistocene, and it forced them to invent agriculture, not because it’s fun but because it was the alternative to starvation. I walk through the forests all the time, and it’s true there’s wildlife there – boars and deer, for the most part. I’ve seen pig tracks, and I’ve seen deer occasionally. However, to attempt to survive by hunting the woods for pigs and deer, let’s say that this couldn’t even feed a small village, even if they hunted the animals to extinction. There’s simply too many people for this to work. In order to calculate the number of people who would die in case of a great disaster that would restrict food production, just have in mind that throughout history, human population was as big as the food supply allowed. So, if food production drops to pre-industrial levels, human population will drop to a pre-industrial level. Numerically, this means a sustainable population of around one billion people, which means six billions would die. This, of course, is an optimistic assessment, because the ensuing chaos and conflict would mean that those who are sentenced to death from starvation will commonly resort to banditry of all sorts, and the expectation that one billion people will be able to grow food on pre-industrial level while surrounded by hungry mobs of crazed people is naive. Some isolated, inaccessible areas might continue to function normally, but for the most part, in the rest of the world literally everybody would die before there would be any kind of peace again, because the most realistic and effective survival tactics in those times would not be agriculture, but armed robbery. However, this will not be the universal outcome. In some parts of the world, people are very disciplined and would be much more effective in surviving great hardships. In America, however, I would expect the worst kinds of nightmare.

So, to summarize. Being prepared for a limited disaster scenario is a good idea. Those things happen with such frequency, it’s very likely for a person to experience at least one such scenario during his or her lifetime. Some experience several. However, trying to survive a civilization-ending cataclysm such as a nuclear war or an asteroid strike is naive and pointless. Even if there were survivors, the factors leading to survival would probably be too random to be able to prepare. Most likely, the low-tech, off-the-grid, already living off the land, secluded closely-knit communities separated from the rest of the world by some natural barrier that is very difficult to overcome without modern technology, would have the greatest probability of survival. In urban communities, I’m afraid that there can be no long term survival. I personally know how much food I have to buy for my family every week, and it’s very easy for me to extrapolate the probability of our survival if the urban food supply were to be disrupted. Also, we are completely dependent on the grid – gas, water, electricity, everything. In those circumstances, survival is an illusion.

So, preparedness. By all means, be prepared for low-level extraordinary events, such as an earthquake, a flood or a civil war. Pay your bills, wash your dishes, have some excess of non-perishable food stored, have a bottle of bleach for disinfecting water, have battery lamps and power packs for charging your phone when there’s no electricity for five days. But above all, be prepared to leave this world, because all humans must die. Be prepared for war, but above all, be prepared to meet God. If you are, everything is easy.

I have a long-term issue with compassion.

Every time some manipulative asshole wants to emotionally blackmail me into doing something that’s useless, harmful, evil or which I don’t care for, they appeal to my compassion.

“Don’t you have a heart? Allow the Islamic refugees in.”

“Don’t you like animals?”

“Would you rather have a doughnut or save a child?”

“You have things and I don’t. It’s not fair!”

“Rich people should pay their fair share in society.”

It’s not that I oppose helping people. In fact, I strongly support it. However, there seem to be several forms of helping people, and I have a hugely different emotional feedback to both. The first kind is when you help someone who’s having a problem. You help solve the problem, and things are better. You feel good about it. The second kind is when you’re emotionally manipulated, or, should I say heartfucked, into giving your resources to someone who is the problem, who just squanders it away, and you get to feel like you’ve been pissed on.

The problem is, the word “compassion” is used for both, indiscriminately.

I recently helped a financially not well off kid by donating my old computer; a Q8200 quad core thing with 4 GB RAM and a 15” LCD monitor, so don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a piece of junk, it’s more powerful than the one my wife uses for browsing the web. She asked me, why are you doing this, you already know how that’s going to end? I answered that I’m testing a hypothesis. So, I installed the whole system with every kind of educational thing I could think of – Ubuntu Lucid, Netbeans IDE with support for Java, C++ and PHP, Python IDLE, and all the command-line programming languages, and I made sure my son told him what he had there, and I told his father that it’s an educational system he can use to learn how to code.

The first thing the kid did was to try some Linux games, got bored with them, and then installed Windows 10 so that he can play all games. He got a graphics card from someone and now has a gaming PC. He never even touched anything educational. Yes, he has barely passing grades in school, and yes, since he’s poor the people will tend to attribute his poor results in school to his situation at home.

But no, that’s not how it works, because there’s another kid who’s friends with my son, whose parents are also financially not well off, and who also struggles with money. He’s one of the smartest kids in the whole school, has top grades in everything, and he, my son and one other kid spend their time after school arguing about politics and economy. Yes, they’re 12, and they argue about political and economic systems.

So, essentially, whom should I feel compassion for? Whom should I try to help? The kid who will convert all resources into fuel for perpetuating his situation, or the kid who apparently doesn’t need much help because he’s doing great despite his apparent circumstances?

So, how do you help people? It’s very simple. Just do your job well, do the things you feel good about, and let the free market sort things out. Don’t try to help the poor people. Buy whatever you like having and using, and someone will have to manufacture more of that. They will have to open factories and create jobs, and poor people will then have jobs, and if they are motivated enough, they will use that as a stepping-stone towards a better job, and higher qualifications. Buy the shoes that were manufactured in a sweat shop in Thailand, where the workers are supposedly “exploited”, because you see, that’s communist propaganda. They are not exploited, they are given a great opportunity to get out of abject misery they lived in before, trying to catch rats on rice fields as a source of protein, or taking part in the sex industry. Making shoes for you for 2 dollars a day is a way out for them. It’s what makes the local economy going, and then other functionality will arise from that, the same way it did in Japan, Korea and China. They all started on a similar level of poverty, and look at them now. So, help people by buying stuff from the factories that “exploit” them. That’s the best thing you could possibly do. Don’t donate to humanitarian aid; instead, buy stuff that’s produced by “exploiting” the poor in some African shithole. If people there are exploited by someone, that means they are worth more alive than dead, and they are worth more healthy than sick. This means someone will be motivated to make the area secure from violence, and to implement health care. It also means there will be need for some literate locals in administration, so schools will be opened. Basically, when you create an economic need for someone by exploiting them, you included that person into the global economy, and when someone is useful, when he creates profit for someone, someone influential will care if this profit is compromised by some machete-wielding gang. Paramilitary security contractors with guns will go there and take care of the problem.

Capitalism. That’s essentially how you solve the issue of poverty. You can’t solve it altogether, because there will always be those who are part of the problem and who can’t be part of any kind of solution, and they will have to live in abject misery and die as a warning to others, but allowing that is absolutely necessary, and if you try to prevent it out of “compassion”, you will destroy the entire social structure and produce universal misery, as was always the case when any kind of communism was attempted.

If you want to make a train move, you pull. Bill Gates did more good to the world when he created Microsoft, than with all his “humanitarian” efforts, which will all prove to be counterproductive, because trying to help the poor is essentially paying people to be poor. You need to pay them to be useful. You don’t get a good economy by improving healthcare, you get healthcare by improving the economy. You need to create an economic incentive for healthcare, and for that, people who live there must be worth more alive than dead, they must be worth more healthy than sick. And honestly, if they’re not worth more alive than dead, if they don’t contribute anything of value to the world, so that someone would be motivated to protect them, just let them die.

Another lever used by the manipulative in order to pressure the emotional is the assumption that all people are equal, and that you should identify with everybody’s situation because it could be you. Well, no, it couldn’t, you see. I just described those kids who go to the same school, have similar financial difficulties, but hugely different outcomes, because all people are not equal. Some are just just better. That’s what free market and capitalism are for, to show who’s better without being judgmental. It allows the least useful ones to die, and it directs the flow of resources to those who are the most useful. And don’t tell me that capitalism will eventually make everyone but the few on top poor. That’s bullshit. Capitalism “wants” everybody to be able to afford a car and an iPhone and a 1000 EUR gaming PC, and a house and a lawn mower and a fridge and a microwave, and a vacation in some fancy expensive place. You know why that is? Because when people can afford things, they spend money, and that makes the entire machine of capitalism going. If only the top few have money, nobody can buy the products manufactured in their factories. The factories will then go bankrupt, the stock market will collapse and you will get the great depression of the 1930s. So, it’s in the best interest of the manufacturers to pay people well, because those people will then be able to afford the products on the marketplace, and increase the consumer base. Increased consumer base means more consumption, ergo more profit for the shareholders. Everybody wins, except that kid who decided it’s not fun to learn how to code and plays games instead. He will have to lose, and guess what, fuck him and fuck everybody who’s sorry for him.

Me, I’ll rather have a doughnut than “save a child”, because by buying a doughnut I’m keeping the woman who sells them employed. She will then have money to support her children, so, basically, by being “selfish” I’m actually helping someone’s children. By buying an expensive computer I’m keeping the factory workers employed, I’m keeping the workers in retail sales employed, and all their children will have healthcare and education and food. And I will earn the money for buying those things by doing the best I can at the top of my qualification level, because then people will find me useful and give me money to keep me doing whatever I’m doing, instead of not caring whether I’m dead or alive.

So yes, be compassionate to the world by being incredibly good at your job and earning huge amounts of money, and then spend it on good stuff, stuff that will make you feel great. That’s how you make world a better place. And when someone asks you if you’d rather have another cup of coffee or help a child, go have the best cup of coffee you can get, because that’s how you really help a child. Donating to UNICEF just propagates misery in the world. It feeds the UN bureaucracy, it feeds the warlords who sell the humanitarian aid on the black market, and incentivizes poverty because that’s what attracts money into the system.

Compassion, that’s how the manipulative sucker the resources out of the gullible. Satan’s favorite emotion, because it can use good people as an instrument for increasing the amount of evil in the world. It drives the feedback loop of misery and suffering.