Get Busy Livin, or Get Busy Dyin': The Secret Sauce - how you can attain and enhance your independance

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Monday, February 27, 2012

The Secret Sauce - how you can attain and enhance your independance

As many of our readers know we are very "high" on earthbag homes as a DIY home construction methodology. But this is only a component in a well designed life path strategy designed to provide long-term sustainability and survival in times of economic distress and upheaval.

Our model for sustainability is (this is a very concise thumbnail sketch)....

1. Get debt free.
2. Buy rural off-grid property, in a strategic location - abundant water and sun, capable of defense, allies nearby.....etc...
3. develop and stockpile your own energy sources (solar, wind, coal, wood, propane)
4. build your own earthbag home (....for as little as $2 to $5 per square foot)
5. develop your own comfort-level of sustainability: Greenhouses, farming, animals
6. enhance and develop your security

Obviously this approach may be hard for some to take. But your home can be whatever you want or feel comfortable with provided you calculate and account for your long-term needs.

A properly motivated person can, with minor levels of training, a piece of land, and maybe $10,000 in cash - can design and build a nice, comfortable, clean earthbag home. This is a powerful tool for anyone who wishes to live a sovereign life.

Imagine buying a few acres of land, building your own home, developing your own solar, wind and other off-grid energy sources. You would then be living a lifestyle, which while different than most - would be highly sustainable and easily maintained. Imagine if you had no debt, and lived in a home that is paid for and wholly owned by you. You could do quite well on much less income and live a more satisfying complete lifestyle. Additionally, if you had a large garden and greenhouse, along with some chickens, cows, rabbits and other animals, you wouldn't have to worry about losing a job, or other economic uncertainty because you could sustain yourself or your family for months with little or no income. We have estimate that living in this scenario you could easily survive and even thrive with income of only a few hundred dollars per month. Do you think that might provide peace of mind for you?

Of course other great design modes are abundant, and include: Rammed earth, strawbale, concrete, and even shipping container construction.

If you're not familiar with earthbag construction take a minute to read this little introduction.

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You don't often see a home for sale advertised as "dirt cheap." You certainly won't find many contractors who brag about a dirt cheap building method. A dirt cheap price for a home might just signify a money pit, a disaster in the making. An exception to that rule, however, might be building with actual dirt.

Home Design Image Gallery

http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/projects/verticalwalls.htm

Earthbag homes are exactly what they sound like -- bags filled with earthen materials stacked to make a house. They often look like big beehives when they're completed, but it's possible for them to take other forms as well. Sandbags have long been used to create military bunkers and flood walls, but their role in building homes is fairly new.

In the 1970s, Iranian architect Nader Khalili was working in the countrysides of Iran, teaching villagers how to make their adobe homes solid by a process that was like firing clay in a kiln. When he came to the United States, however, he realized that adobe homes weren't always practical or economical but that elements of the earth could still be used to create a stable home that anyone could afford.

Khalili, who established the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture in Hesperia, Calif., identified sand as a resource that was available to everyone. He began stacking sandbags like bricks, using barbed wire as a kind of mortar. Eventually, Khalili developed superadobe, which is a building method that uses mile-long fabric tubes that can be pumped full of soil and laid in coils to create a structure. Khalili saw these superadobe earthen structures as a way to provide temporary housing in the case of natural emergencies, low-cost housing for the poor and even lunar housing, with astronauts taking the tubes to the moon and using materials there as fill. He presented this idea to NASA and built a prototype lunar colony in Hesperia.

Other great examples are here:

http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/projects/robinshouse.htm

http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/projects/pisco.htm

http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/projects/kennedyhouse.htm

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Our Mission

I am not bound to please thee with my answers.
William Shakespeare

We have been following this path (active prepping) since the early 1990's. In our case this includes military training, weapons training, hunting, fishing, tracking, advanced martial arts training in open hand CQB and hand weapons, orienteering, outdoors skills, and other less obvious but important skills. Your training and skills should, as much as possible, always be seen as tools that need to be improved. You never know everything and you can always forget what you know.

This site is dedicated not just to survival, but to the people who choose to live, with dignity as sovereign beings. We see too many people who focus entirely too much energy in pleasing themselves with shallow pursuits. Sacrificing their own freedom, and independence.

I believe we can all be sovereign citizens - by living life for ourselves; and not for the sake of others, or a group, or a collective state. Too many people spend too much of their time, money and lives concerned with what others think of them, and trying to gain the esteem of strangers. This is dangerous and not only effects how they spend the bulk of their money and their life's productivity, but even how they vote and how they view governance.

This "lifepath" I just described, which I call "living life for others", (Ayn Rand called it, "second hand living"), impacts the choices many people make about the cars they drive, the houses they own, even the clothes they wear. In its most essential form, it is an unthinking compulsion, or need to impress other people. The cold fact is other people, especially strangers - do not think about, or care at all, what you drive, what you wear, or what sort of house you live in; and even if they did, is it not somewhat insane to live life this way.

This false life path of "living to impress others" or "maintaining appearances" is a central ingredient of collectivist governance, and religious power schemes. It is how organizations like governments and religions control people. This primary tool of control has been used by countless entities: organized religion; and later by governments....i.e., leninism, marxism, socialism, facism whatever you may call it. They and all other collectivist forms of control use a few simple but effective mechanisms to control people; the desire to "belong", and....altruism.

Like Spock in Star Trek - the proponents of collectivism believe "the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few, or the one".

But this is a false and dangerous lie....for who determines what "need" is, and how exactly is the "many" determined?

By this vague but noble sounding principle two people....maybe your neighbors.....should be allowed to get together and "vote" to steal your belongings; your food, maybe your house, maybe your children......or even your life.

Why NOT - don't their needs outweigh yours?

The right answer, of course - is NO. America was, historically, the only form of government EVER founded on the principle that an INDIVIDUAL'S needs are paramount; and that together we all make up a society of individuals and that a proper governments central responsibility is to protect the INDIVIDUAL rights of its citizens.

Collectivism is a corrupt ideology by which people are legally allowed to steal the property, and productivity of an individual, any individual. They are justified by a vague undefined notion of the "needs" of some group or collective. Which can never be satisfied because "NEED" is always great according to someone.

Modern collectivism also has another benefit to its followers - it's phony altruism provides a twisted path to easy nobility. This un-earned nobility is often driven by the need to impress others with your apparent "compassion".

The answer to this is simple - Live life for yourself. Make choices for yourself - based on the way YOU want to live, and the person YOU want to be.

Do not concern yourselves with what others do, and how they choose to live. Learn to be at peace with your choices, and find yourself and true contentment.
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