How To Homestead Without Land or Animals
When we first moved to our current home, I had no idea that I wanted to be a homesteader.None at all. I didn’t know the first thing about gardening, chickens, ducks, rabbits, or even how to can food. I had some things to learn along the way, and I have made many, many mistakes. Well, “opportunities to learn more” is what we call them. There were days it was easier, and days it was much harder. You can easily learn how to have the mind of a homesteader, too. It just takes a few steps and you are on your way to becoming more self sufficient. And you don’t even need to own land, or have any animals. You don’t need to move to a tiny cabin far away from anyone or anything “modern”, either. Anyone can do these!
Step 1~ Learn to Cook From Scratch
Although many people already do this, it was the first thing I really needed to learn how to do. I bought so much boxed, processed and prepared foods it was insane. We “nuked” almost everything, and when I made spaghetti, it became code in our family for “we are going out to eat” since I was lousy at boiling water for pasta. Learning to cook from scratch has saved our family so much money, too. A bag of flour, some salt, yeast, and sugar was much cheaper and better for us than store bought bread. Of course, as you get comfortable with that, you can move on to more traditional prepared foods like sourdough, kombucha, homemade sauerkraut and such. But, for now, if you are buying that blue box of mac and cheese, try making it yourself from scratch instead. You’ll have a much better flavor, trust me.Step 2~ Declutter and get rid of things you don’t need
This was the hardest thing for me to do at first. I mean, who doesn’t need to have 12 of the exact same item? For us, it was a process, and still is. We are paring down cookware to only those things I love and use daily, like my cast iron. I said goodbye to the 12 different types of tupperware bowls without lids and instead learned to wash a stainless steel bowl out when I was done. Movies that were on DVD went on to a raspberry Pi computer to take up less space. Clothes were pared down to what we truly loved, wore, and what fit. We accomplish that each year, by turning the hangers backward in January and June. Whatever is still backwards gets donated. (Well, except the winter coats in June, but you get the idea.)The best part is that I no longer have to take hours to clean my house. There is less stuff to make a mess, and less stuff to clean up! Win-win! You can start by boxing up appliances and kitchen wares you think you don’t use. Write the date on the box, put the box out of the way, but don’t give anything away yet. After 6 months, donate the entire box, without opening it. You aren’t using it, or maybe you already replaced it with something better.
Step 3~ Try a no spend month at least once a year.
This may or may not be easy for you, depending on what you have in food storage. We typically do this either in January or February, as the roads are often snow and ice covered and going to the store is a pain. This gives us the opportunity to make sure our canned foods are rotated, our food storage is still full of foods we eat, and it helps the creative juices flow in the kitchen. This also means no buying clothing, appliances, or anything. (emergency situations may change that). Our rules mean nothing new is brought into the house at all that 30 days. Nothing. Zilch, zip, nada. I don’t even like to bring in anything to review in that time period as well.
div id="tbn-e71321de-dc6f-426c-a99f-88af598c461b"
Step 4~ Grow your own food
This will make you feel like a homesteader right off the bat. Once you pick your own lettuce or tomato, it’s almost impossible to go back to store bought. There is something soothing about digging in dirt, seeing that plant grow and enjoying the harvest. Of course, if you do it “right”, the entire neighborhood will get tomatoes. Or zucchini.
Step 5~ Learn how to preserve that food
My first canning “episode” was not pretty. I knew nothing about how to really do it. I bought 1/2 bushel of apples to make my own applesauce. I had some quart jars, fresh from the store and a large aluminum pot. That’s it. So, I cut up the apples, removing the cores, filled that large pot, covered with water, and boiled the apples. Sounds about right, ya know? Well, the issue was that pot was ALL I had to can in as well. So, after the apples were cooked, I put them in the blender to blend, then filled the jars. I then had to wash the pot, fill it with water and then boil it to put the jars in. Instead of a rack on the bottom, I had an old dishtowel to protect the jars. For better or worse, that 1/2 bushel took me nearly 12 hours to sauce and can and for my efforts I got about 8 quarts.I’ve learned so much since then, but that first time was the most memorable. It took me from “canning virgin” to “canning novice”, on my way to “canning expert”. I would recommend that first timers actually make sure to have the proper equipment, such as jars, lids, and a real canner. And read the book that comes with the canner. It does have a lot of good information. The rest comes with experience and just trying. If at all possible, try and can with someone else the first time to get a feel for the process. Or, just jump in with both feet and learn as you go…worked for me!
And, don’t forget that you can also learn to dehydrate and freeze your garden harvest!
Step 6~ Get out of debt
This one is the toughest. We have floated back and forth on this to be honest. First, paying off all your debts frees you in so many ways. You suddenly have cash you never realized you had, and not having payments going out each month is less stressful. However, our emergency fund has always been eaten up within seconds of building it, and the crisis usually called for more money. Like replacing our well, or the washing machine. Or the oven. Or when my daughter broke her wrist. Or when the van died and needed to be replaced.The first step is to NOT be okay with debt. You have got to realize that paying for things with a credit card is only keeping you a slave to that card. Work on spending less than you make, saving the rest, and doing that often. We like to use GoodBudget to help us with that. You can put it on a computer, phone, or tablet, up to 5 items and it really has worked for us.
But, it’ll only work if you really want it to. It’s easy to make excuses of “oh, we need this or that” trust me, I KNOW. Being out of debt really is freeing and worth the effort.
Having the mind of a homesteader is really about self sufficiency.
That doesn’t mean you always do without, but that you make every effort to do with what you have first. It’s not a race, and each of us can go at our own pace, and do what is important to us personally. These 6 steps can help anyone achieve their dream of being more self sufficient, however, and anyone can do them. So, what are you waiting for?http://thehomesteadinghippy.com/how-to-homestead-without-land-or-animals/
Ecological Panic: The New Rationale For Globalist Cultism
Wednesday, 16 December 2015 04:51 Brandon Smith
Faith in an ideology based on a desire for power over others and the need to feel personally superior without any legitimate accomplishment is perhaps the most dangerous state of being an individual or society can adopt. I would refer to such a mindset as “zealotry,” an integral element of cultism and an extreme result of the elitist side of faith.
Zealotry and cultism are not limited to the realm of the religious. Zealotry is a clever devil hiding in the woodwork of any political or academic construct, and this includes the scientific community when it strays away from empirical logic and honest data into a world of pseudoscience and social engineering. I cannot think of a better example of zealotry feeding scientific cultism than the highly propagandized climate change/global warming movement.
Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is quickly becoming the overarching rationale for almost every policy toward global centralization, as well as a scapegoat for nearly every major crisis from mass shootings and the rise of ISIS to geopolitical shifts in economic structures. Global warming has been projected as a magical force deviously underlying everything. It is presented by climate scientists and activists as an all-encompassing behemoth of cause and effect, yet nearly all of this frantic pontificating is supported by faith, rather than hard data.
The issue is one of transparency. Without transparency of experimental data, climate scientists and think tank operatives become immune to examination. That is to say, if climate scientists and organizations, many of which are funded by public tax dollars, are not required to reveal the raw data behind their claims on global warming, then their claims are no longer a matter of “fact” or scientific process. Rather, the assertions of climate scientists now become edicts from on high, messages from high priests with a private line to the god of science — a god that no one is allowed to question. Their words become gospel: carbon footprints in the sand.
Climate research institutions like the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have refused for decades to release the raw data behind their experiments, which they say prove the existence of man-made global warming. For many years the CRU refused to release any data that was not first processed to reflect its own desired outcomes and still refuses to release emails that might prove that climate scientists had rigged data in their warming models.
Professor Phil Jones of the CRU in charge of maintaining data sets famously told an Australian climate scientist in 2004:
“Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
When opposition became more intense in reaction to the CRU’s secretive data, the organization had this to say:
“We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”
Whenever the data issue becomes mainstream and pressure builds, climate scientists simply "lose" the original raw data, and once again we are asked to take them at their word.
Now think about that for a moment. Only in the past few years have climate scientists been pushed to give up raw data to the public, as well as to other unaffiliated scientists, for review. They have enjoyed almost complete immunity from scrutiny since the global warming farce began while acting as the CORE drivers of political and economic policy models by international organizations like the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Future laws and taxes that could affect the entire globe are being written and established on the word of a handful of unaccountable scientists who see their claims as sacrosanct and above investigation.
Despite the assertions of some global warming enthusiasts, little has changed since the release of the hacked “climategate” data and emails or public pressure on climate research institutions. These organizations continue to dismiss data requests made through the Freedom Of Information Act.
Recently, the NOAA released studies which it conveniently claims refutes satellite data proving that there has actually been NO global warming for at least 19 years. When asked by lawmakers to release research papers pertaining to the experiments that supposedly back the assertions of the NOAA, the NOAA refused.
Eventually, apologists for the climate cartel are forced to admit that the raw data is not available to the public. Climate scientists seem to be the only scientists in the world who get away with presenting theories and conclusions without being required to back what they say with hard data. Instead of admitting this is an absurd standard, apologists often defend the act of scientific secrecy, claiming that "average people" are not smart enough to interpret the data even if it was made available to us. We the "profane" public are too unclean to examine the holy books of climate scientists; we are expected to simply bow down to them and globalist entities like the UN as mediators between us and the gods.
Again, there is no available raw data that proves that overt global warming or “climate change” is even occurring, let alone that it is caused by human beings or carbon dioxide. There is far more hard evidence suggesting that changes in climate are determined by the SUN; you know, that massive ball of heat and radiation at the center of our solar system the size of 1.3 million Earths. This was outlined expertly in a Channel Four documentary on the global warming hoax.
Until climate scientists are willing to present their findings including all raw data in a legitimate and transparent manner for independent review, NOTHING they have to say on global warming is relevant. Period. They are not high priests. They are not infallible. They are not even particularly honest. Every chart you see in the mainstream showing warming corresponding to human carbon dioxide production is based on hearsay from these pseudoscientists, not hard evidence. Thus, all current and future laws and regulations based on said hearsay are ultimately erroneous and dangerous.
Unfortunately, corruption within climate research is not where the problem stops. There are people within the halls of power that see the climate change ideology as the perfect vehicle to promote a new kind of social order — an order in which collectivism and centralized governance are “scientifically” indispensable.
The Club of Rome, a globalist think tank with close ties to the climate change agenda stated on page 75 of its publication “The First Global Revolution” in 1990:
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself…"
The passage appears under the subhead “The Common Enemy Of Humanity Is Man.”
There is a particular genius in the strategy of essentially uniting humanity against itself. We have heard arguments from politicians in the mainstream about the infinite threats caused by global warming. We have heard many political leaders from across the world demand centralization under the oversight of the U.N. to stop said threats. From Barack Obama to Vladimir Putin, there is considerable geopolitical consensus that the idea of climate change is real (yes, Putin in his last speech at the U.N. demanded action on climate change and more power to the U.N., proving once again that he is not anti-globalist).
Secretary of State John Kerry, among others, has even suggested that ISIS was caused by climate change. This political rhetoric is meant for the masses who consume 15 minutes or less of news per day from the worst possible mainstream sources.
There are, however, more clever snake-oil salesmen writing what I would call “refined propaganda.” These are the think tank analysts who turn lies into highly reasonable sounding treatise built on complex but always circular logical fallacies. If you want to know how future history texts will be written if the globalists get everything they want, simply read the papers and books of the think tank agents today.
Years ago, I wrote about one of these elitist analysts in “The Linchpin Lie: How Global Collapse Will Be Sold To The Masses.” The article focused on a member of Rand Corporation named John Casti and his propaganda mechanism called the “Linchpin Theory.” Casti presented the false idea that “overcomplexity” was the primary cause of global crisis’ leading to minor incidents cascading like dominoes into worldwide catastrophes. Casti’s solution is, of course, simplification (Translation: globalization and centralization under a streamlined one-world system). This argument conveniently gives a free pass to the organized criminality of international elites — as if these men and their engineered disasters do not exist or never mattered, and all the fiscal pain and endless war we suffer is merely a product of random chaos.
I have come across another think tank elitist peddling a similar propaganda mechanism called “Ecological Panic.” Timothy Snyder is a member of the Council On Foreign Relations and the writer of “Black Earth: The Holocaust As History And Warning.” I highly suggest readers listen to this interview with Snyder on Reuters to get a sense of what I mean by “propaganda.”
Snyder conjures a vast array of disinformation in that interview alone, but I was particularly intrigued with the idea of “ecological panic,” which, I believe, is the next phase (or a more carefully defined phase) in the climate change agenda. Here is a summary:
Snyder presents the foundational theory that crises — more specifically, “holocausts” — are a product of resource scarcity and unrealistic ideas of proper living standards. He blames these unrealistic standards on his own conceptions of free market systems, which supposedly encourage societies to demand more access to resources than what is practical (keep in mind that the elites want to be the people who have the power to determine what is practical and what is not). Snyder offers up the notion that Hitler himself, in a way that is not exactly made clear, was a promoter of a brand of free market greed, which lured unsuspecting Germans into the mentality of war and genocide for profit.So, if you were wondering where the root source was for the argument that climate change skeptics are the same as “holocaust deniers,” this kind of thinking is it.
At every turn, Snyder and the Reuters interviewers attempt to link Hitler’s philosophies and actions back to current principles that are original pillars of Western culture. Snyder suggests that Hitler’s social Darwinism is related to the free-market mentality of competition, which he seems to think means competition at any cost. He argues that the German ideal of high living standards was derived from ranking themselves against American standards. The interview leapfrogs into a comparison between the German obsession with high living standards at the onset of fascism and the American conception of high livings standards today.
Ostensibly, the hint is that high living standards lead to totalitarianism and holocausts.
The final thrust of the discussion revolves around the key idea that state conquests for resources along with global warming are today’s “linchpins” for further war, mass immigrations and genocide. Snyder directly relates Hitlerian genocidal philosophy with resource conquest and Hitler’s refusal to take science into account as a warning or a solution. Snyder links this to “ecological panic,” the claim that a lack of resource management and practicality lead to amoral thought processes and genocide. He suggests that global warming is a new catalyst for ecological panic and that the U.S. and much of the world are diving headlong into the same pattern as Nazi Germany out of greed for resources and a refusal to acknowledge the “wisdom” of climate science.
Snyder constructs a narrative of moral relativism in which people cannot be saved by enlightenment or moral compass because, according to him (and I am paraphrasing), resource crisis removes all morality from the situation and automatically turns people into monsters. This is yet another elitist attempt to discount inborn conscience as a factor and elevate collectivist control of environment to mold society.
For someone who claims that understanding history requires “undoing the things we think we know implanted in our minds by nationalist history,” Snyder injects a rather ridiculous abstract regurgitation of mainstream history with vast voids of space in his information.
First off, as shown above, Snyder’s primary thesis falls apart if the ideology of man-made global warming is a lie, a lie generated by false data provided by climate scientists who keep the raw and real data to themselves like some kind of occult knowledge.
Second, true free markets did not exist in Germany during the Great Depression or World War II; and they certainly do not exist in America today. I’m getting a little tired of socialists and globalists constantly blaming “free markets” for the problems they created.
Third, Snyder, like Casti from Rand Corporation, completely skips over the historical record when it comes to the influences of internationalists in the creation of disasters or totalitarian governments like the Third Reich. I highly suggest anyone interested in the REAL history of the Nazi Party read the well-documented works of Antony Sutton, including “Wall Street And The Rise Of Hitler.”
While consistently attempting to connect Hitler’s fancies and genocidal tendencies to his admiration for American history, Snyder utterly ignores the fact that Hitler’s ideas on genocide were directly affected by the philosophy of eugenics, a philosophy which was launched by global elitists like the Rockefellers in the U.S. in the early 1900s — the same elites who later funded the Nazi infrastructure. Resource entitlement and "ecological panic" had little or nothing to do with Hitler’s eugenics background.
It is documented fact that the success of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is due to the openly admitted support by covert government agencies, including U.S. agencies, tied to internationalist interests — NOT due to global warming, which is perhaps the most insane connect-the-dot theory I have ever heard.
What we have here from this CFR mouthpiece is a carefully crafted rationalization for globalism. Look at it this way: If ecological panic is the primary trigger of collapse, war and industrialized death, the elites escape all blame. They are the ones, after all, trying to “save us” from ourselves by introducing carbon emissions controls, not to mention the idea of population controls.
Global warming becomes a catch-all bogeyman, a Frankenstein monstrosity created by humanity and plaguing humanity. Those who deny the existence of global warming or who question the legitimacy of its high priests (climate scientists) are not exercising their right to skepticism; they are contributing to inevitable genocide. Therefore, climate denial would have to be punished by governments, as climate scientists have been publicly suggesting.
Climate change and Snyder’s world of ecological panic would naturally facilitate the development of population controls and institutionalized eugenics. I have no idea if Snyder is aware of the irony that his ideology is actually more closely related to Hitler’s ideology than free markets ever will be. Being that he is a member of the CFR, I suspect he is aware indeed.
If you want to know why internationalists and collectivists have been force-feeding the climate change agenda to the world despite considerable opposition and well-publicized incidences of exposed fraud on the part of climate scientists, consider the prize at the end of the game. If climate change and ecological panic become ingrained “truths” within our social framework, literally any horror can be justified.
Under ecological panic, human beings must apply social Darwinism in order to survive. Amoral rationalizations must prevail. Pseudoscientists and the establishment become the purveyors of life and death, prosperity and poverty. It will be the elitist class, given license by the power of blind faith rather than hard data, that will determine every aspect of existence from resource allocation, to production, to labor, to relationships and birth, to child rearing, to an individual’s very life span and access to healthcare. Globalism, if allowed to continue in the name of climate defense, will become the most pervasive and powerful cult in history.
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/2764-ecological-panic-the-new-rationale-for-globalist-cultism
