3 Personal Disneylands Being Planned By Total Lunatics
Building an isolated personal utopia is an endeavor typically reserved for Dr. Doom. However, it turns out there are several private cities currently in development that were seemingly designed for the sheer purpose of inflating one or more egos, to be built with the brick and mortar of unbridled lunacy.
The Citadel Project
The goal of the Citadel Project is to build a giant walled compound in rural Idaho where every citizen is required to carry a gun, because Escape from New York apparently didn't do enough to demonstrate the catastrophic folly of this line of thinking.
We're assuming the Farmers Market is just a gun store with organic tomatoes.
The proposal for the Citadel reads like a vacation pamphlet written by the Unabomber. It brags about the Citadel's picturesque public gardens, rivers, and lakes, while simultaneously displaying a map that makes the whole community look like Shawshank and declaring that their primary source of income will be a gun factory.
Each house comes with an AR-15 and a safe room, with the option of adding an emergency micro-suite, because if you're going to be a fucking lunatic you might as well go all the way. Every citizen (or in their words, every Patriot) is required to keep at least 1,000 rounds of ammo for their AR-15, on hand, at all times, and each household needs to maintain a year's worth of supplies and a "Tactical Go Bag" in case of Red Dawn. This is not preparing for war so much as actively hoping for it.
Don't worry. Just to be safe, they have an application form with 12 whole questions.
To cap it all off, they require absolutely no background checks whatsoever to come live in their fortress of 7,000 gun-worshipping families. Although we imagine they might reevaluate their screening process if they get an application with the name "Muhammad" on it.
The Seasteading Institute
The Seasteading Institute is every libertarian's wet dream (pun utterly intended). The goal is to help build giant floating cities for the ultra-rich (called "Seasteads") and presumably some very desperate poor people to pack their royal garbage into cubes and feed them to sharks.
Hopefully the real ones will be a little less "Ernst Blofeld" hideous.
According to the founders of the institute, Seasteads would "enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems," which is another way of saying "get all our billionaire friends together in a consequence-free environment."
... well, no, this one isn't any better. It looks like a Sky Giant fell on a pool filter.
The most commonly proposed Seasteads would have no welfare, no minimum wage, loose building codes, and minimal weapon restrictions and will terrify anyone who's ever played BioShock.
Independence, USA
Independence is a hybrid community/theme park proposed by Glenn Beck, focused on bringing America back to its glorious roots, because when you think of mature and rationally developed ideas, Glenn Beck's jiggling face immediately springs to mind.
Glenn presents his idea solemnly and punctuates it with fiercely poetic metaphors (an approach that's somewhat undercut by the fact that he's dressed like a socially frustrated circus clown). His $2 billion city would be a hive of jingoism dedicated to preserving a vision of America that we're not even sure ever existed and Glenn himself has never been able to sufficiently articulate. Beck's own website emphatically compares Independence to Disneyland, which seems to suggest that Glenn is under the impression Colonial America was settled by humanoid animals and that the first transcontinental railroad was Big Thunder Mountain.
"And once our constitution is ratified we'll take a trip down Splash Mountain just like Washington and Jefferson before us!"
People would be invited to live or vacation in Independence, USA, or even send their children to a "deprogramming" summer camp to wipe away all that ridiculous bullshit they teach in schools with the cold hard truth of Glenn Beck's curriculum, which would be something like forcing your kids to spend three months trying to decipher the Zodiac killer's letters.
You can read more from Mark, including his plan to build a city at the centre of the Earth, at his website.
