In the modern world the average person is highly dependent on a huge number of organizations to support him or her. This means they live a precarious lifestyle that can easily be turned upside down by external events. There are many things that you can do to take control of you life so you can better weather unfavourable events. Modern survivalism is about taking action to make your lifestyle more robust so it can better weather disasters be it personal, local, or worldwide. By shoring up the resilience of my lifestyle I feel more empowered to live the kind of life I want to live rather than that I feel like I have to.
Actions I have taken along these lines include removing all short term debt, have a 5 year plan to pay off our modest house, been gardening for 3 years ,starting a business and increased the amount of stored food I have available.
The term “Modern survivalism” was coined by Jack Spirko at the survival podcast I am a listener.
————————————————————————————————–
RELATED BLOG POSTS BELOW
————————————————————————————————–
I have been of the opinion for about 3 years that the troubles with the financial economy are terminal and none of the bailout nonsense is going to do anything apart from make it worse. I expect people in the UK and US to see there savings and investments being wiped out (after devaluation and collapse of the euro). Currently Australia is looking pretty good compared to elswhere however if (when) the banks fail I would expect that to cause either a bailout (therefore currency devaluation) or bank faliure here too.
A friend of mine from my finance club sent me the video below – its dynamite. When the BBC interviewed this bond trader they got what they didn’t expect!
Also on the subject of the ecionomy theres a new video by juice media out
If you want to know more about things finanical then you can find alot of stuff on The real Truth about money
Shadow stats is also a great place to dig into economic data if your interested
The crash course video course is also an excellent film that explains the basics of all things economic
Having local copies of useful stuff on the internet is handy when your not online. The internet is also constantly changing which means that just because something useful is on there now doesn’t mean it always be as useful in the future. For this reason I like local copies of some key items 1. How to download the wikipedia I used okiwiki2. How to Download all your google docs You can now download all your google docs in one go easily. Click Actions -> Download -> All items 3. How to download maps onto your iphone I use offmaps but its a bit annoying. I also tryto zoom around on my iphone in the maps application to put the maps in cache (although is teduios)
Australia has been devastated this last few months. The flooding has been on a massive scale affecting most of the east side of the country in one way or another. QLD has been most badly affected but NSW and VIC have also taken a pounding close to home Castlemaine has been affected. We spent last Sunday preserving fruits to donate to the guys that had their homes flooded in Castlemaine. Part of the growing ambundance project. Below is a video showing the the water. It is incredible after all the drought all the resiviors around castlemaine are now full. However the flooding has caused significant flooding and personal disasters.
I went to my bank to get some money to by my new car the other day. I needed $4000. They told me that officially I needed to give 24 hours notice for cash withdrawl over $2,000 however they had enough today so they could give me my $4000. Now my bank is probably a bit smaller than ANZ but I found this quite startling. It got me wondering about how much money banks have in reserve.
A note about Reserve banking . Banks don't need $100
dollars to lend you $100.The US has a requirement that
the banks have to at least own equity worth 10% of the
total loans outstanding. So if Citibank only actually
owned $10 then the sum of all the loans they could
make could not exceed $100.
So I did a little investigation and what I found (with a quick look on wikipedia) concearned me somewhat. I knew that the US had a 10% requirement I didn’t know though that the UK and Australia does not require any reserve requirement whatsoever. So they can make money loaning money they don’t have. I wish I could do that. A tabe showing the reserve requirements by country can be found here wikipedia.
Politicians (both labour and opposition) have been talking about immigration policies that would see the Australian population to almost double from 22 to 36million by 2050. Australia currently has the fastest growing population in the world.
The Australian citizens have never been asked about this.
Yesterday I watched a video from Dick Smith that basically debunked most of the widely used reasons for a “Large Australia”. He is campaigning to have the politicians actually consult the the people about the population strategy and come up with a sensible plan.
Intro Video
Long Video
“Dick Smith is one of Australia’s most recognised individuals. After a successful business career in retailing and publishing, Dick has become well known as a restless adventurer, making many pioneering and record breaking flights by helicopter, aeroplane and balloon.” More info and complete text on Dick Smiths full website here.
World Growth
Dick also broaches the subject of world population growth and the predicted increase in population from 6.7 to just over 9 billion by 2050. World food production over the last 9 years has remained flat and is looking likely to decrease as more soil becomes infertile. Concern about food availability in the future is one of the drivers that got me interested in permaculture. To see more about me and permaculture go to my permaculture page.
I have just got back from the cathedral ranges National Park. We bought a new canvas tent. The tent was good and easy to put up although the bag has ripped allready hmm.
We were close to the town of Taggerty which had an exhibition and a sausage sizzle on the fire from the previous year which included small books written by the survivors. We went to the town of Alexandra (Which has a statue of Princess Alexandra of Denmark shipped from the UK).
We also went to Marysville – a town that was burnt down in one of the 400 fires that raged during the the Black Saturday bush fires. We both found it quite sombre but also positive as the town is starting to be rebuilt. (Details here )
NSW, Victoria Lord Howe Island and NZ were on Tsunami alert yesterday! I watched the unfolding events using tweetdeck – it was fascinating!
“The weather bureau says east coast beaches may experience abnormal wave conditions today after a tsunami warning was cancelled overnight.
A 7.8-magnitude earthquake off the coast of New Zealand last night prompted the Bureau of Meteorology to issue a tsunami warning for parts of the east coast.” FULL ARTICLE HERE
I was in bed last night and the earth moved. The windows rattled and my bed shook. I got out of bed to make sure something wasn’t causing the house to shake. I then went back to bed and heard on the radio that there had been an earthquake!
”
UPDATE 5.45pm: RESIDENTS as far north as Bendigo and Seymour felt an earthquake hitting 4.6 on the Richter Scale that rocked Victoria last night.
Millions of Victorians felt the quake just after 9pm, with many waking to cracked walls and broken windows this morning. There was no major damage or injuries reported.” source
Comments on this entry are closed.