As the Avian Influenza/H5N1A/The Bird Flu slowly creeps around the world, scientists and politicians alike worry their pretty little heads off. They’re concerned that this “modern day plague” could lead to millions of deaths worldwide in the next few years.

Preppers, doomers, survivalists, and millionaires alike are stocking up again, just like for Y2k. Prepackaged food, water, water filters, defensive weaponry, gas masks, medical supplies, and LOTS of meds like Tamiflu and herbal remedies are being yanked off shelves, while online suppliers keep running out (or scamming folks out of hard earned money by not delivering product.

Some of you may have stocked up and filled your bunker by now.

Guess what? Inquiring minds want to know. The media is knocking on MY door again, just like Y2k, and looking for preppers in THEIR neck O-the-woods.

Wanna help your fellow man? Want to dispense your ideologies and thought provoking preparedness protocals to the masses? Want to create a sensation and save the world?

Consider contacting Michelle below, in California. Her newspaper iin Stockon, about halfway between San Franscisco and Yosemite National Park (good place to be…they’ll have a head start when the Flu hits ‘Frisco’, and be hiding out in the caves and cliffs of Yosemite before sundown!)

Give her a shout, if you can help her out…

Richard,

I am a reporter writing a story for The (Stockton, Calif.) Record about pandemic flu preparedness. I am looking for a source in San Joaquin County, California – someone who is ready to be self-sufficient when the next pandemic hits. Do you know of anyone?

As with all media-types, I am working against a deadline. If you could respond at your earliest convenience, I would be most appreciative.

Thank you.

Michelle Machado
Business Reporter, The Record
(209) 943-8547 — phone
(209) 943-8504 — fax
mmachado@recordnet.com — e-mail

Source

Sept. 11 Panel Chief Warns of Nuclear Threat to U.S.
Reuters Mar 28, 2006
WASHINGTON - The United States has not adequately protected itself against the nightmare scenario of a nuclear attack by terrorists, the head of the panel that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said on Tuesday.

Former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean told a Senate panel that neither the Bush administration nor Congress has done all it can to protect American lives and the U.S. economy: “The size of the problem still totally dwarfs the policy response.”

Another expert, Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, outlined numerous security gaps in global trade and shipping. Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander, said the country is living on “borrowed time” for avoiding a so-called dirty bomb that could contaminate a financial district or residential neighborhood and wreak havoc on the economy.

They were among the witnesses before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations one day after the release of a government report that said that four years after the attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, federal undercover investigators were able to enter the United States with enough radioactive material for two dirty bombs.

Radiation monitors did detect the radioactive materials in investigators’ cars crossing the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian borders in December 2005, but border patrol officials did not realize the shipping documents and permits were forged, the Government Accountability Office said in that report.

The commission disbanded in 2004 after conducting a comprehensive probe of the attacks. But its 10 members have remained active in promoting better national defense.

A dirty bomb could kill people in the blast’s immediate vicinity and spew radioactive material, making an area unusable. It could cause immense economic disruption, as other ports and transport routes could be shut down temporarily, just as air traffic was halted after the 2001 attacks.

“We’re not acting like a nation at war,” said Flynn, adding that security plans have not drawn on all the available technology nor the incentives in the private sector for closing security gaps.

Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, noted that a nuclear bomb would be far more devastating than a dirty bomb. A small amount of plutonium — smaller than a water glass that Levin displayed — could wipe out a city and kill millions.

Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, said the lack of nuclear screening at seaports is a “massive blind spot.”

Kean acknowledged that a nuclear attack is less likely than other actions, like the train and subway bombings in Madrid and London. “But a nuclear event is possible, and it would have profound and incalculable consequences.”

“Why isn’t the president talking more often about securing nuclear materials?” he asked. “Why isn’t the Congress focused? … Why aren’t the airwaves filled with commentary if everyone agrees that the crossroads of terrorism and nuclear weapons is the most serious threat to our security?”

I’m finishing up an Associates of Applied Science degree in Web Design in a few weeks, and I’m working on my “big project” for this semester…conversion of SurvivalRing.org to a database driven website, from static html pages. It’s going to be a biggie, but I’m at the point of total understanding of how and what to do.

Very happy to be at this point, too. This is the reason I came back to college as a non-traditional student…to learn the skills to enhance a project that has taken over my life, and make it the cutting edge resource that I know it can be.

At the same time I’ve been working on this degree, and the A.A.S in Electronic Media that I earned last year, I’ve also been playing with a lot of other web technology.

Using Dreamweaver and Flash, I’ve done some pretty cool things, and I’m very comfortable with what these tools can do. I’ve come to enjoy a handful of tools that make web development much faster and easier. For example, I have a full blown web server running on my laptop right now, using Wampserver. This package is free, includes mysql, php, apache, and phpmyadmin. Perl, Zend Optimizer, and Webalizer are also available as downloads for this wonderful tool. I’m using this system to work on many projects right now, before taking them to my online hosting account. Development time has been greatly increased.

I’ve also been hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails, and found a similar package for creating an environment on the laptop for learning Ruby. It’s called Instant Rails, and creates a running server environment for Ruby. I haven’t done anything with Ruby yet, but it looks like an immensely likable package. Once I’ve played with it a bit, I’ll share some fun stuff I do with it.

I’m sure I’ve stated it before, but I’ll say it again. I’m not getting these degrees and skills to just be hireable by other companies. I’m putting enormous amounts of time into creating cutting edge web tools, infrastructure, and state of the art programming, to enable much easier, greatly enhanced, and much faster serving of the same science and fact based survival and preparedness information I’ve been doing for almost ten years now.

Sure, I’ll love a good paying, benefit enhanced, and long term job to make my life easier, supporting my wife and I, in some comfort and ease (compared to the path we’ve had for the past 20 years of hard work due to no college degrees).

The Entreprenuerial bug has bitten, and I’ve got a business plan, along with marketing and publicity plans, to make my little SurvivalRing website THE survival and preparedness site for the ages…or at least enough to help folks worldwide, while making a real living from it. Time will tell…but I know enough now that I can make it happen.

Time to head back to the editing screen to do some more code hacking…Enjoy the sites!

Buck Sargent put a great article online today, about Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, the son of the bitter Cindy Sheehan. He also has an awesome, very touching video available as well, called Once Upon A Time in Mosul.

Take a moment. Read the article. View the video. You WILL be touched beyond belief.

As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I have a large portion of my family that has served in the US Military here and overseas. I am proud of all of them. Fortunately, I haven’t lost any of them to combat. Unfortunately, many of my friends, neighbors, and associates have lost people in their lives to combat conditions.

Buck’s article should bring a tear to your eye…even more so with the video.

Rich

I’ve gone flying before many times…but not like this…so damn cool!

The Bubba Boy who ripped off this professor’s laptop has found himself in the worst of all worlds…no where to go, no where to hide, no way to back out of this nightmare. Pay close attention to just exactly what Professor did to find and isolate the culprit (thanks to break.com for sharing).

I’ve been working on SurvivalRing for nearly ten years now. It all started with my original Blast Shelter website on my old AOL account. After Y2k, and especially after 9/11, folks would contact me about once a year, from somewhere in America, asking me questions about what to do with “fallout shelter” and “civil defense” items they had found in old municipal basements, in attics of rural ambulance barns, or at auctions or flea markets.

I would always ask if they might send a list of just the DOCUMENTS, which is what I personally try to preserve by digitizing every one I can get my hands on, but would rarely see anything from these callers. Most just wanted an easy cash return on semi-collectible memorabilia.

Well, someone hit a motherload of this kind of stuff this week. Read on for the entertainment value of this news story.

Posted on Tue, Mar. 21, 2006

Cold War-era supplies found in New York

MARCUS FRANKLIN
Associated Press

NEW YORK - In 17 years of working on the city’s bridges, Joe Vaccaro has made some unusual finds: a 100-year-old copy of a newspaper, sepia-toned photographs.

But none matched the discovery he and his co-workers made last week in the structural foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge.

There, in the musty dark, the workers found a Cold War-era cache of provisions to have been used in the wake of a nuclear attack: some 350,000 packaged crackers, paper blankets, metal drums for water and medical supplies.

“I’ve never found anything as significant as this,” Vaccaro, a carpentry supervisor, said Tuesday while standing in the attic-like room amid the stockpile.

The artifacts recalled a fearful period in U.S. history a half-century ago, when the country and the Soviet Union were sworn enemies and air-raid sirens and shelters were common.

“This is a treasure of modern history,” said Vaccaro’s boss, Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall.

Weinshall said she has contacted the Civil Defense Museum and the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene about taking the items, which include syringes and Dextran, an intravenous drug.

The Office of Civil Defense, a unit of the Pentagon that coordinated domestic preparedness in the early 1960’s, probably put the supplies there, Weinshall said.

It’s also possible a city agency was responsible for the stash, first reported Tuesday by The New York Times.

Weinshall said right now there’s no way to tell whether the supplies were intended to be used at the bridge in case of an attack or if the bridge was only a storage space.

“Until we get to the bottom - when it was put here, who put it here - we won’t know fully,” she said.

Some of the items were stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.

Fallout shelters were common around the country in the 1950s, but such finds are rare, said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University.

“Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago,” he said. “It’s kind of unusual to find one fully intact - one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense.”

The 17.5-gallon metal drums, presumably once filled with water, were labeled, “Reuse as a commode.” The Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers were sealed in dozens of metal canisters. One of the canisters, however, had broken open.

Weinshall tasted a cracker.

“It tasted,” she said, “like cardboard.”