GREAT NOW IT IS THE ELITE WHO ARE FEVERISHLY �PREPPING� FOR THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIETY.
Once upon a time, �prepping� was something that was considered to be on �the lunatic
fringe� of society.
But in 2017, wealthy elitists are actually the most hardcore preppers of all.
This is particularly true in places such as Silicon Valley, where a whole host of young
tech moguls are putting a tremendous amount of time, effort and money into preparing for
apocalyptic scenarios.
So while interest in prepping among the general population has fallen extremely low right
now, the election of Donald Trump has given liberal wealthy elitists even more urgency
to prepare for what they believe is a very uncertain future.
In the January 30th, 2017 edition of the New Yorker, reporter Evan Osnos has done an extraordinary
job of profiling these wealthy elitists that are �getting ready for the crackup of civilization�.
One of the people that he interviewed was Steve Huffman, the young co-founder and CEO
of Reddit� Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large
blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia,
he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate�s Web site as a prank.
He is less focussed on a specific threat�a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty
bomb�than he is on the aftermath, �the temporary collapse of our government and structures,�
as he puts it.
�I own a couple of motorcycles.
I have a bunch of guns and ammo.
Food.
I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.�
According to the article, Huffman estimates that �fifty-plus percent� of his elite
friends in Silicon Valley have some form of �apocalypse insurance�.
Needless to say, that number would be far higher than for the general population as
a whole.
Another tech mogul that was interviewed by Osnos for the story was former Facebook product
manager Antonio Garc�a Mart�nez� Last spring, as the Presidential campaign
exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio Garc�a Mart�nez, a forty-year-old
former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on
an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands
of rounds of ammunition.
�When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,� he told me.
The author of �Chaos Monkeys,� an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, Garc�a Mart�nez
wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated.
�All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,�
he said.
�No, you�re going to need to form a local militia.
You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.� Once he started telling
peers in the Bay Area about his �little island project,� they came �out of the
woodwork� to describe their own preparations, he said.
�I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works
understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.�
As you can see, a lot of these liberal elitists are actually secretly stashing away lots of
guns and ammunition.
So don�t believe everything that you read about them being �anti-gun�.
Other big names in Silicon Valley have decided that having a property on the other side of
the planet is the best form of �apocalypse insurance�.
The following comes from a story about Paypal founder Peter Thiel in the New York Times�
Mr. Thiel�s admiration for New Zealand is longstanding.
�Utopia,� he once called it.
He has an investment firm in the country that has put millions into local start-ups.
He also owns lavish properties there, which his Silicon Valley friends hope to fly to
in the event of a worldwide pandemic.
And of course Thiel is far from alone.
So many wealthy individuals are buying up property in New Zealand these days that it
is actually becoming a significant political issue over there.
In fact, it is being reported that foreigners purchased an astounding 3500 square kilometers
during the first ten months of 2016� Statistics showed foreigners had bought over
3500 square kilometers of New Zealand in the first ten months of 2016, which is over four
times as much as they did in the same period in 2010.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told The New Yorker that New Zealand had become the
hot topic among Silicon Valley leaders lately.
�Saying you�re �buying a house in New Zealand� is kind of a wink, wink, say no
more.
Once you�ve done the Masonic handshake, they�ll be, like, �Oh, you know, I have
a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they�re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like
they would be interesting to live in.� Hoffman estimated that over half of the Silicon
Valley insiders were into preparedness � especially since anti-elite sentiment has risen around
the globe in recent years.
It was intensified by events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, he added.
So are these wealthy elitists ahead of the curve, or are they just being paranoid?
Only time will tell, but they didn�t become exceedingly wealthy in the first place by
being stupid.
As I discussed yesterday on The Most Important News, there are certainly reasons to be optimistic
now that Donald Trump has become president, but there are also lots of reasons to be prepping
harder than ever.
We should be hopeful for the future and working for a better tomorrow, but we also need to
understand that we live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable.
And most of us think that it is just common sense to purchase insurance for our homes,
our cars, our health, our lives and so many other things, and yet most of the population
is completely unprepared for a major catastrophic event.
It is a good thing to have balance in life.
My wife and I are very proud preppers, and there won�t ever be a time when we aren�t
prepping.
But we also live our lives without any fear.
We know that the world is going to get crazier and crazier, but we do not believe that it
is a time to dig a hole and try to hide from the world.
Rather, now is a time to rise up and become the people that we were created to be.
This year my wife and I are going to be taking on some new adventures, and these new adventures
are going to give us a bigger voice than ever before.
Someone once told me that life is like a coin.
You can spend it any way that you want, but you can only spend it once.
We don�t want to spend our lives paying bills and killing time.
Instead, we want to do all that we can to make a difference and to change the world.
So unlike these wealthy elitists, let us not be in fear of what is coming.
There is no other time in history that I would have rather lived than right here and right
now, and I can�t wait to see what comes next.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét