Image Source: www.indefence.is

The day after both Landsbanki  – Icelands national bank and Kaupthing – icelands largest private bank was taken over by theIcelandic Financial Supervisory Authority the UK government froze all the assets of icelands largest bank in the UK.

The HM treasury also listed Landsbanki as a financial regime alongside the Taliban, Sudan, liberia and Zimbabwe. The UK government invoked 2001 terrorist legislation to freeze Landsbanki assets in the UK. One part has been taken over by ING and the other by administrators.  Assets totalling over €4 billion have now been sold off.

HM Treasury Snub Landsbanki

Icelanders shocked at hearing their bank assets were frozen using anti-terror legislation started up a campaign site to show to the world they are not terrorists. The BBC has also run a story.

click here for the campaign site

Not Looking Good For Planet Earth

New scientist has an intersting article about the over-consumption of the planets resources. It basically highlights that the last 50 years has seen an unprecedented change that is reaching a singularity pointing towards a total worldwide collapse of resources within what looks like the next 20 years.

Data for increasing consumption goes hand in hand with temperature rises, species extinction,  and ozone depletion. It’s a simple fact that we’re using up resources faster than the planet can sustain.

Read the original article and it’s references for more information, and the full sized graph.

Lets be honest, while generator power is all well and good it’s hardly a silent, cheap long term power source. There’s the constant throb of the Generator, the maintenance, the fuel supply, and of course in a disaster situation anyone near by will know that you have a generator that’s calling out to be stolen.

Here’s where solar power comes in, it’s totally silent, and it’s practically maintenance free but the problem with general usage solar power is the panels aren’t usually up to the task of powering much more than the odd light bulb, and you need a constant supply of bright weather.

One of the problems with typical solar / battery systems is that they’re incredibly heavy, or need lots of floor space (like the powercube) or they’re dog-ugly like the Harvester. There’s a new product on the market that changes all that. Called the The Solar Stik™ Breeze. The Concept for the Solar Stik was born out of a need for marine based power on boats that had no room for large scale solar arrays, it was then a natural progression to adapt the Solar Stik to land based use, and more recently add wind power to the configuration so that power generation can continue through the night.
Once the system is set up, power drawn from wind / sun is fed into a battery bank. The entire system is designed to be portable and easily transported. Additionally, multiple units can be connected together if needed for particularly demanding sites. The panels come with a 25 year warranty. Unlike you average generator which typically comes with a 1-3 year warranty. Here’s the YouTube promo..

At around $8,000 the starting price for the Stik is slightly more expensive than other solar devices in this bracket, however they don’t feature the newer technology found within these panels that provide improved power generation.

Visit the product site here for further information.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912

This video has one of the best explanations of the banking loan system out there. It’s high production values, and description of how the FED creates money for the US government is second to none. If you haven’t seen this video, watch the first 15 minutes. The website for this video is at http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ where there is also an earlier production.

A not so pocket-sized calendar

The Mayan civilization rose to power in Southern Mexico over the course of 2000 years, aside from the mass human sacrifices to their gods they were highly advanced, with written language extensive use of mathematics, astronomy and agriculture. The entire civilisation suffered a decline after 900 AD. It’s still not yet known what caused this decline but theories such as overpopulation, and 100 year droughts may go someway towards answering that.

Ritual sacrifices weren

The Mayan Pyramid Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. Serves as an incredibly accurate calender, it was built around 1050 and has 365 steps. Their calender was adopted by other civilisations, the Aztec and the Toltec. The Mayan calender is even more accurate than the Gregorian calender.

The Maya method of reckoning time involved counting forward from a hypothetical fixed point and expressing the date in time periods based on the number 20 and counted in intervals of 1, 20, 360, 7200, and 144,000 days. The Mayans used 3 different dating systems at the same time. the Long Count, the Divine Calender, and the Civil Calender. The Long Count represents the number of days since the start of the Mayan Era.

To summarise they  believed the Long Count for their era started in 3114BC ( their idea of the creation of the world). There’s a little bit of debate on the exact day, but the majority of sites seem to settle on the 11th or 13th of  August as the exact date. The Long count resets every 5,126 years. December 21st 2012 or December 23rd 2012 is seen as the end of that Era.
There are many that say that the date surrounding the end of the era will mean the end of the world, or a complete rebirth of that era. Surprisingly there are many more predictions that predict the end of the world or a ‘reset of the planet’ in 2012 which we’ll cover

It’s interesting to note that so far the earliest human writing found (in Pakistan in 1999) so far dates back to around 3300-3200 BC which predates the start of the current Mayan era. As a footnote the
Tărtăria tablets are supposed to date back to 5500 BC.

Further reading.

http://2012wiki.com/

http://2012news.com/

http://www.mayan-calendar.com/topic_longcount.php

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-mayan.html

http://www.edgarcayce.org/2012.asp

We’re going to be doing more in-depth shelter guides in future, but this is just a quick overview of basic choices out there. If you live in the land of the free, there are plenty of contractors happy to offer advice and take your money for digging a large hole, reinforcing it with concrete, and kitting it out with filtration units and a self contained toilet, most of these are in kit form, then we get into serious money. Here’s a quick overview…

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