Archive for the ‘Information’ Category
March 8th, 2007 | 
Author: [ Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes ]
I found this jewel of an article reposted on Timebomb2000.com, and felt it covered all the bases of survival in hard times (disaster, ecomonic downturn, civil strife, etc.) that I just had to make sure it was seen by a wider audience. Many of the items here could by applied and used in worse case scenarios, including pandemic bird flu, which seems to have the biggest echo on the governments “Fear Radar”.
Rich
From the old Greenspun board
Fair use
http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0011LtHow to Survive Really Hard Times
greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread
Moderator: ed@yourdon.com——————————————————————————–
How to Survive Really Hard Times
In the old days, folks were accustomed to periodically having to live through hard times. They knew how to survive the hard times with the least amount of wear and tear on their families. Nowadays, most folks don’t know what hard times really are. Even those folks who think they have it hard right now can usually still depend on some type of government handout or charity assistance, and therefore they don’t truly know what hard times really are.My definition of hard times is when things ain’t what they use to be and they don’t look like they will return to normal anytime soon. This frequently happens in times of war, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Which are also usually accompanied by power failures that last for days, weeks, or months.
Following are some suggestions for surviving these types of hard times.
Shelter:
Let’s start by assuming you now live in some type of dwelling and your dwelling is not in the immediate path of a flood, hurricane, marching troops, etc.
First, stay inside unless you must absolutely go outdoors. In the old days, folks had enough sense to come in out of the rain. During hard times, you don’t need to get wet, cold, or frost bitten. That just makes matters worse.
Posted in 
[ Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes ]
Received this from a friend today…and feel it’s something I need to share…
Rich
You probably missed it in the rush of news last week, but there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, any American.
So an Australian dentist wrote an editorial the following day to let everyone know what an American is so they would know when they found one. (Good one, mate!!!!)
An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek. An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, Arab, Pakistani or Afghan.
An American may also be a Comanche, Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.
An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses.
An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.
An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world. The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence , which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.
An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need, never asking a thing in return.
When Afghanistan was over-run by the Soviet army 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country!
As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan. Americans welcome the best of everything…the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best services. But they also welcome the least. The national symbol of America, The Statue of Liberty, welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America.
Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11, 2001 earning a better life for their families. It’s been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 different countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.
So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and other blood-thirsty tyrants in the world. But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.
[ Reading time: < 1 minute ]
…as Yoda would say.
I’ve received a nice letter from a national preparedness organization. Telling me to stop doing something I’ve been doing for 4 years. I’ll tell more later. I’ve responded to them with a nice letter (yes, a NICE letter…after all it came from their legal department) asking for clarification on a few issues.
I’ll bring you up to date sometime after the weekend, since NO ONE in DC works on Superbowl Weekend.
Go Cowboys!!!..er..uh..I mean, Go Steelers!!
[ Reading time: 16 - 26 minutes ]
Survivalist Reading Material.
Fiction
Aftermath Charles Sheffield Very Good
AFTER DOOMSDAY Poul Anderson
Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand Hard to grasp
Alas Babylon Pat Frank Truly a superb classic
Amerikan sunset Jennifer Ladewig Drivel
A Wrinkle in the skin John Christopher A character essay
NIGHT OF THE CRABS Guy Smith
The Comet Robert Charles Very Good
Damnation Alley Roger Zelazny Better than the movie
Deathlands James Axler
Deluge: A Romance and Dawn (Science Fiction/2 Volumes in 1) Fowler Wright
The Drought JG Ballard thought provoking
The Drowned World JG Ballard interesting
Down to a Sunless Sea (either version) David Graham- Truly great another classic
Earth Abides George R Stewart 2nd only to Alas Babylon
Earth Winter Richard Moran
Eternity Road Jack Mc Devitt Interesting future shock
Empire of Ice Richard Moran
Famine Graham Masterson
Heavy Weather Bruce Sterling
Ice! Arnold Federbush depressing
Icefire Judith & Garfield Reeth Stevens entertaining
The Last Ranger Craig Sargeant
Lucifer’s Hammer Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Becoming a classic -also in audio book (Lucifer\’s Hammer Part 1 Of 2) and (Lucifer\’s Hammer Part 2 Of 2)
Long voyage back Luke Rhineheart In the top ten of all time
The long loud silence Wilson Tucker
The Last ship William Brinkley
Malevil Robert Merle
Moonfall Jack Mc Devitt
The New Madrid Run Micheal Reisig
Out of the Ashes ( Ashes series) William W Johnstone
Plague 99 Jean Ure
Patriots James Wesley Rawles
The Rift Walter J Williams
Shiva Descending Gregory Benford
Some will not die Algis Budrys
The Stand Stephen King
The Third Pandemic Pierre Ouellette
This is the way the world ends James Morrow
The Year of the Quiet Sun Wilson Tucker Suprisingly Good
When the City Stopped When the City stopped Joan Phipson
The Wild Shore Kim Stanley Robinson Deep stuff
48 James Herbert
8.4 Peter Hernon good read
Factual and reference
The survivalists Patrick Rivers 0-413-31650-5
Earth Shock Basil Booth & Frank Fitch 0-7221-1778 7
The nuclear survival handbook: Living through and after a nuclear attack Barry Popkess
Tappan on survival Mel Tappan 0-916172-04-x
Survival Guns Mel Tappan
The Survival Retreat Ragnar Benson 0-87364-275-9
The Modern Survival Retreat Ragnar Benson 0-87364-980-x
Apocalypse Tomorrow Duncan Long 0-87947-089-5
When Technology Fails Mathew Stein 1-57416-047-8
The Coming Global Superstorm Bell and Strieber 0-7434-0888-8
Life after doomsday Bruce D Clayton 0-87364-175-2
Surviving Doomsday C Bruce Sibley 07219-0780-6
Outdoor Survival guide Hugh Mc Manners 0-7513-0644-4
[ Reading time: 5 - 8 minutes ]
Source from eWEEK
WordPress 1.5.2 Is Good Fit for Business
By Jim Rapoza
September 19, 2005
BOTTOM LINE:
CONTENT AUTHORING
ROLES AND WORKFLOW
DEVELOPER OPTIONS
PLATFORM SUPPORT
WordPress is free to use and licensed under the standard GNU GPL. The WordPress site has plenty of good documentation and support forums, but there is no information provided about possible commercial-level support.
Bring up the term “corporate blogging” in a group of technology workers, and there’s bound to be a few snickers as images are conjured of lame and infrequent executive-level blogs or marketing campaigns disguised as blogs.
But blogging can be used in ways that serve traditional business needs. In fact, the best blogging applications can handle many of the tasks performed with portal, content management, and collaboration and discussion systems.
Blogging has its roots in open-source software, and one of the most widely used platforms for blogging is WordPress (www.wordpress.org). In eWEEK Labs’ tests of the most recent release, 1.5.2, we were impressed with WordPress’ good administrative capabilities, extensive customization options and easy-to-use end-user posting interfaces.
WordPress lets administrators control who can view, respond to and create content, and it now includes options for building standard Web pages within the WordPress environment. All these features make the platform suitable for internal company portals.
WordPress is based on the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database. WordPress, which is free and licensed under the GNU GPL (General Public License), is simple to install on Linux, Unix and Windows platforms.
The WordPress site boasts that installation of the application takes only 5 minutes, but we think that applies to those installing it on a hosted server. Still, it was easy to get up and running on our SuSE Linux-based test server.
WordPress’ management is very good—we found that pretty much anything can be done from this interface, even basic layout customizations. The initial management screen, almost portallike in its design, is a useful dashboard that shows a list of recent posts and comments, as well as anything requiring the user’s immediate attention.
As a high-level administrator, we could define basic settings for the site, such as name and address structure and whether files (and what type of files) could be uploaded by users. A wide variety of options let us control who could respond to posts and what level of moderation was required. We could also set up a list of blacklisted terms to avoid comment spam.
WordPress supports trackback and pingback, both of which make it possible for blogs to notify one another when linked. Trackback and pingback are standard blog features, but they have some useful applications in a corporate setting—for example, allowing users to know what their colleagues are doing and when their work is being used in another project.
One somewhat-confusing aspect of WordPress is how users and blog authors are managed. Rather than using assignable rights and roles as a portal would, users in WordPress are ranked from Level 0 (almost no rights) to Level 10 (full administrative rights). By default, WordPress has only one Level 10 user.
Levels are well-documented online, and we were able to use them with ease after a little experimentation. Still, the level system seems to have been designed with standard blogs in mind, where users gain the trust of the blog owner over time. In a corporate setting, a more well-defined rights assignment system would work better.
All users access the same management interface as the administrator, although menu options are limited as the user’s level decreases. To post to the blog, a user chooses the Write option, which presents a simple but effective form-based interface for writing a post. Content in the posts is in HTML, but well-implemented buttons will automatically generate code for such commonly used items as links, images and rich-text formatting.
Lots of options are available from this main interface, including choosing categories and whether to allow comments to the post. We especially liked WordPress’ ability to support private and password-enabled posts, both of which can be attractive in corporate environments.
While WordPress includes an Upload option, useful for uploading images to use in a post, it doesn’t have a facility for managing images that have already been uploaded. However, multiple WordPress plug-ins can be found online that provide this capability.
It is also possible to configure WordPress to accept posts sent to a specific e-mail address. While we would be hesitant to use this in a public system, it could prove useful in corporate settings where some users resist learning even a simple Web-based interface.
The look and layout of the site in WordPress is based on themes—essentially collections of style sheets and PHP template files. It was easy during tests to create our own themes or to customize the many themes available online. In addition, while any serious editing should be done from a dedicated authoring application, we liked that we could edit themes directly from the Web-based management interface.
All template and theme changes in WordPress happen automatically, meaning we didn’t have to restart anything to enable them. We also could have as many themes as we wanted, and we could move the entire site among them with a single mouse click.
In addition to the image plug-ins mentioned above, numerous WordPress plug-ins are available online that provide additional management and configuration options, as well as advertising management capabilities and features that fight comment spam.
Can comment spam be stopped? Click here to read more.
Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.
Evaluation Shortlist
Hosted blogging platforms A wide variety of ISPs and major Internet companies offer some form of hosted blogging, often for free or included with another service. The best known of the hosted services is Google’s venerable Blogger (www.blogger.com)
PHP-Nuke and Plone Two of the best-known open-source portal platforms, PHPNuke.org’s PHP-Nuke and the Plone Foundation’s Plone both provide blogging capabilities as well as robust collaboration and content management features (phpnuke.org, plone.org)
SixApart Ltd.’s Movable Type One of the longest-standing blogging platforms, Movable Type is now a commercial product and is available in both installed and hosted options (www.sixapart.com)
Labs Director Jim Rapoza can be reached at jim_rapoza@ziffdavis.com.
[ Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes ]
Will the US REALLY have enought flu vaccine? Depends on who you talk to, but things seem to be more positive this time around…
Rich
WASHINGTON PREDICTS ADEQUATE SUPPLY OF FLU VACCINE
By GARDINER HARRIS
NYT Express
10/24/2005
WASHINGTON — Top federal health officials acknowledged Monday that there were some spot shortages of flu vaccine this year but said overall supplies should be adequate.
Some doctors and public health clinics have complained that they have limited supplies of flu vaccines this year. But Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt and other top health officials said this situation should change in the coming weeks.
Eight states have reported some flu cases, a normal level at this point; flu season usually peaks in January and February, and people have many weeks to get vaccinated, officials noted.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said flu vaccine supplies were tight because the country is in a “transition” period. As more people decide to get vaccinated against the flu every year, vaccine supplies will become more abundant and reliable, he said. This change will also help the nation if a pandemic were ever to strike, he said.
In the wake of a supply crunch last year, federal health officials had instructed doctors to vaccinate through Sunday only the elderly, the very young, the sick and health care providers. On Monday, however, vaccines were made available to all.
Federal officials said that somewhere from 70 million to 88 million doses of flu vaccines should be available this year, much of it in the coming weeks.
Leavitt also took care to distinguish between fears of a bird flu that could cause millions of deaths worldwide and the annual effects of the seasonal flu.
He said the administration was revising its long-awaited plan for dealing with an outbreak of a rare pandemic flu that could kill millions. But he pointed out that the seasonal flu is also dangerous.
“It kills an average of 36,000 Americans a year, leads 200,000 Americans to be hospitalized and causes countless lost school and work days,” he said. “Much of this can be prevented by simply getting a flu shot.”
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Since 1999, I’ve had spurts of time where I’ll go months without having a media person contact me asking to help them find “Survivalists”. I guess this is better than the FBI and other alphabet agencies asking for the same thing.
The lady below is looking for folks into prepping and practicing a lifestyle of being ready. If you’re interested in helping her out, send her an email below. She writes for StyleWeekly.com
Hi Richard,
I’m a magazine writer in Richmond, VA, and I came across your Web site today. I found your site to be quite comprehensive and I wanted to ask you if you’re acquainted with any folks or organizations in Virginia, particularly Central Virginia, who are interested in survival and emergency preparedness. If so, could you tell me how to get in touch with them?
Many thanks,
Melissa Sinclair
Melissa.Sinclair@styleweekly.com
