Sometimes, however, I want to see more.

More plants, more bushes, more flowers, more trees, more birdbaths.

So I’ve been looking at companies that do Omaha landscaping, and I’ve liked what I’ve seen for the most part. Some of these guys are really professional, doing job after job well, on time and on budget.

I’d like to see some stone used, especially around the trees we put in our backyard last year. A nice stone circle around each tree would be great, especially when the trees fill out and spread out.

The only thing I’m worried about is our current sprinkler system. Fortunately, this company handles Omaha sprinkler systems as well, so I guess we’re covered there.

I suppose we’re just waiting to hear back from them at this point, so our fingers are crossed and we’re hoping for the best.

Share on Facebook

There is a significant portion of the youth living in the North Omaha community that is beyond hope of anything better in life than what you see on the news on a nightly basis. Shooting, robberies, thefts, beatings, killings, car chases.

What’s worse, everyone reading this who is familiar with the situation in North Omaha would probably agree. We don’t expect anything better, because we see what’s going on. Nobody with any real choice in the matter would live in those areas with those kids. Why live somewhere where bullets are flying? Why live somewhere where if you have something nice, the odds are that someone else will just try to take it?

As a little mental exercise, let’s make a parallel statement, such as: “Elkhorn’s youth are destined to fail” or “Millard’s youth are destined to fail” or even “South Omaha’s youth are destined to fail.” Do any of those statements resonate with the ring of truth? Do those statements make someone nod in agreement?

Nope. It’s North Omaha.

Some people would like to blame Omaha Public Schools for North Omaha’s problems. After all, 52 schools in the Omaha Public School system have been labeled as low achieving schools. Those darn teachers and administrators are doing it all wrong! They’re not teaching our kids! They’re not leading them by the hand towards success! No child should be left behind! Let’s shuffle around the principals and see if that solves the problem!

Level the worst high school in OPS. Take the best high school in Millard and rip it out of the ground. Shake out all the students while keeping the entire staff down to the janitor. Keep all the books, all the programs, all the equipment and drop the whole thing right in the middle of North Omaha. All the advantages that the Millard students get are now the same advantages enjoyed by Omaha Public School students.

Wait a year and test again. Compare the data for the two years and I’ll bet that you won’t see a single change in test scores or graduation rates. You will still have at least half the student population in the school dropping out or being transferred to the “alternative” high school. You’ll have another sizable portion of the students biding their time until graduation. And then you’ll have your last 20-25% or so who will succeed.

The problem with North Omaha youth isn’t the schools. The problem isn’t the teachers, the principals, the programs, the buildings or the parking.

The problem with North Omaha youth can be boiled down to one thing: the community’s acceptance of thug culture.

What can a teacher do when her thug students just don’t want to learn?

Teacher:

D’Angelo, I’d like to give you a grade for this assignment, but you didn’t finish it. If you finish it, I can give you a grade. Can you finish it, please?

Student in North O:

Fuck no. It’s a stupid assignment. I ain’t gonna do it.

At this point, what tools does a teacher have? Does the teacher go to the parents? What if the parents don’t care?

Teacher:

Mrs. Love, I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a few weeks now, because we need to talk about D’Angelo’s progress in class. He isn’t completing his assignments and because of that, I’m unable to give him the grades necessary for him to pass. Is there something we can do to help motivate him?

Mrs. Love:

I can’t help you. He doesn’t listen to me. He’s the school’s problem.

The kids in North Omaha are destined to fail until the parents and community in North Omaha decide otherwise. It should be a very simple concept, but too many people want to confuse the issue and throw racial politics into the mix.

This is not an impossible problem. There are solutions. It all depends on how badly the community wants things to change. Right now, it doesn’t. It may never get to that point.

If they’d like some ideas to get them started, however, here are some possible ideas for change:

Uniforms – Make everyone dress the same
Get em young – It’s far too late to try to fix high school students
Dorms – Give the students a place of their own to live and eat
Sexually segregated schools – The fewer distractions the better
Vocational Programs – College isn’t the best choice for everyone. An electrician or carpenter who has been working for 5 years makes more than a teacher, degreed journalist, or public service worker.
Filter out the bad kids and concentrate on the good ones – Take the real troublemakers and kick them out. School should be for those who want to learn.

Share on Facebook

With Omaha’s Mayor Suttle attempting to re-write the contracts signed in years gone by that detail medical care for retired city workers, the focus on making everyone pay their fair share has come to the fore. On broadcast news station message boards, Facebook and other social media, there has been a considerable call for people to “pay their fair share.”

I’m all in favor of being fair. Fair is good.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the powers that be have skipped over a large segment of Omaha’s population when they looked for ways to level out our sinking budgets – our county inmates.

What happens now is that an experienced inmate comes into the jail and immediately fills out a kite to see a dentist, for free. Then the inmate usually fills out a kite saying their shoulder is hurting from when they were arrested in order to get a free 30-day prescription for Motrin. If the inmate has any phantom aches or pains, they write a kite to get on sick call to talk to a doctor, for free.

Right now, Douglas County does not charge incarcerated inmates for medical care in any way, shape or form. Inmates, including the ones who shoot your neighbors, kill your dogs, molest your children and run over people crossing the street, get all medical care provided to them absolutely free while they’re in the Douglas County jail.

But how can someone without a job reasonably be expected to pay a co-pay to see a doctor,” you ask? “That’s inhumane,” you scream!

Well, before we call the ACLU in to Douglas County to head off conversation on this topic, let’s look at how other jails run things. Do other jails and prisons charge for health care? Yes, absolutely. There are many, many more jails and prisons that charge a co-pay when an inmate sees a doctor than those jails and prisons that do not. Take a look at Polk County, Nebraska as an example. This is from their inmate handbook:

Polk County Health Care Fees
A co-pay fee will be charged to inmates who sign up for sick call and are seen by a physician or physician’s assistant, or receive a prescribed medication. Federal inmates will be billed for co-pays after 30 days in custody. Medical care is provided to all inmates regardless of finances.
The co-pay fee schedule is as follows:

Sick call – $5.00
Physician, Physician’s assistant, Psychiatrist visit -$10.00
Dental Visit -$10.00
Prescription Medications -$5.00
Mental Health Visit – $5.00

Note: Due to the rising cost in the medical field, the co-pay fees may change. If this change occurs, a notice will be placed in the housing units.

It is a federal rule that inmates incarcerated in United States jails must have access to health care despite their finances. That means an inmate without the money on his or her inmate account to cover a co-pay or a prescription bill will never be charged. If Douglas County started charging their inmates co-pays and prescription fees, indigent inmates in Douglas County would continue to receive their medical treatment and drug prescriptions absolutely free.

The only people that this would affect are the inmates who have money on their inmate accounts. And there are a lot of inmates with money on their accounts.

With that money, they’d be forced to make a series of decisions:

Do I want to go see the dentist, or do I want to buy 4 candy bars and a bag of chips?
Do I want to pay $5 for that 30-day Motrin prescription or do I want to buy some Tylenol off commissary?
Do I want to go see the doctor for a sprained ankle I twisted while playing basketball in my shower shoes, or would I rather save that money for something else?

In addition to teaching inmates to make good financial decisions, charging inmates co-pays would dramatically reduce the amount of frivolous kite-writing to the Douglas County medical department for every ache and pain. All those kites have to be answered and returned. That’s a lot of man-hours wasted every day.

Now, instituting a program to charge inmates for medical visits and prescription drugs may not be the answer to the area’s budget problems – but it might be a step in the right direction. It’s something that should at least be on the table for discussion.

Now, so you don’t think I’m selling you sunshine and roses, there are some facilities who have reported problems with co-pay systems for inmates. For example:

The Pinellas County Jail will no longer charge an $8 co-payment to inmates seeking medical care, forfeiting an estimated $50,000 in annual revenue from a policy that jail officials said created more problems than profit.

The jail used co-pays to help offset millions of dollars in medical bills and discourage requests for unnecessary treatments or bogus ailments. Most medical insurance does the same thing.

In 1995, when the co-pays began, jail officials told the Times that the charges had cut demand for care in half, an early sign that they were clearing waiting rooms of all but those with real medical need.

But in the years since, said Pinellas County Sheriff Jim Coats, the co-pays have bred hostility among inmates and bogged down staff with paperwork, making the tens of thousands in lost cash “not even worth it.”

“The administrative reviewing and tracking of all that cost us more than we make,” said Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Bob Gualtieri. “The bang wasn’t worth the buck.”

After further review of the information available, I have yet to see this example as anything other than an isolated case. And who knows? Maybe there were extenuating factors involved in the Pinellas County system’s failure to make it work. Maybe someone was in love with paperwork for paperwork’s sake. Maybe someone couldn’t figure out a good way to automate or computerize the process and eliminate the wasted time and frustration involved when the people involved in running a system don’t like the system. Who knows?

What we do know is that there are thousands of jails and prisons nationwide that do have a copay system in place, one that works.

So why don’t we?

Share on Facebook

As a common example – while you’re on a trip to Bermuda, dead people begin to rise from the grave, biting living people and turning them into dead people. You’re on a plane back from your trip and the pilot starts to shriek over the intercom. He’s been bitten by the co-pilot and is rapidly dying. Your plane starts to turn, loses altitude quickly, and you plummet into the ocean next to a small deserted island. You make your way to the island, but you didn’t even get a chance to grab your carry-on luggage. You start getting hungry, so what do you do?

You’re going to need shelter, and you’re going to need a fire, but you’re also going to need to start looking for sources of nutrition. Animals you can kill and cook are your best nutritional bet in a survival-type situation, but you can also suppliment your diet with available plant life.

The biggest problem with plant life is that it rarely comes out of the ground labelled. While scientists are working on this issue with great alacrity, until they figure out the solution, your challenge remains: when you’re surrounded with unfamiliar plants, how can you tell what you can eat and what you can’t?

When you find yourself in this situation, you want to follow a few general guidelines:

Avoid mushrooms and other fungi. While mushrooms can be tasty and nutritious, they can also be unpleasant and deadly. Even the most experienced mushroom hunters can sometimes have difficulty telling a deadly variety from an edible one. This means that, for you, the possible nutritional benefit you may gain is heavily outweighed by the risk you take in trying unfamiliar fungus.

Cook it if you can. Boiling is good. While boiling won’t destroy all poisons, it will destroy some of them. And some poison gone is better than no poison gone. Also, boiling will remove some of the tannins that make food like acorns taste absolutely horrible.

If it smells like almonds, don’t eat it. Cyanide smells like almonds. Cyanide is bad for you.

Avoid white or yellow berries, as well as plants with beans, seeds, or milky white sap. Castor bean seeds, for example, contain the deadly toxin ricin. Eating just a few castor bean seeds can be fatal. Purple or black berries are worth a try. Red fruit is iffy. While some red berries are good to eat, many others like yew berries, holly berries and, woody nightshade berries are not.

Be sure to watch baby closely for the next few hours

Find something that is relatively abundant. It makes no sense to waste time testing the edibility on a plant that could turn out to be both poisonous and scarce.

If you have children (or better yet, a baby) test the plant on the youngest child first. Babies and toddlers are very sensitive to hazardous plants. Also, if you die from the plant, you’ll turn into a zombie and the baby will be your first meal. If the baby dies from the plant, you can probably take on a zombie baby and come out on top.

Once you’ve selected a plant that passes the above tests, here are the steps to the Universal Edibility Test:

• Pick out one part of the plant to test — for example, just the leaves and not the roots. Or just the stem, not the roots or leaves. Or just the berries. One part of the plant may be poisonous while the other part of the plant is not.
• Make sure you haven’t eaten anything for the last six to eight hours. This will help make sure that nothing else you’ve eaten will influence the test and give time for anything you ate earlier time to act up.
• While you’re waiting, hold the plant against your wrist or inside elbow for 15 minutes to see if it irritates your skin.
• Touch a small amount to your lips for three minutes.
• Touch it to your tongue for 15 minutes.
• Chew it but don’t swallow for 15 minutes.
• Swallow. If you don’t get sick after eight hours, try a quarter cup of the plant and repeat the above test steps.

If you’re still breathing after eating a quarter cup of the plant, you’re probably safe eating it in larger quantities. Probably.

Share on Facebook

As I’m sure you’ve seen on all the major media outlets, the Tea Partiers have been going on and on ad nauseum about “protecting their constitutional freedoms,” “fighting unconstitutional government programs” and “resisting a government that oversteps its authority.”

They’re really just a bunch of negative bigots!

Who else but a negative bigot would think that the healthcare bill, which will give millions of poor people access to free healthcare, is a bad thing?

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves. – William Pitt (1783)

Who else but a negative bigot would be opposed to the only fair institution – the United States Government – regulating the automobile and healthcare industries? Hell, why would they be opposed to the government regulating every industry?

The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife. – Thomas Jefferson (1821)

The majority vote of the people gives the moral right and the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce gives them the legal right to do it! You can’t trust the corporations, they’re only in it for the money!

On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already? – Thomas Jefferson (1782)

Who else but a negative bigot would be opposed to introducing a fair cap-and-trade system that could only possibly lead to reduced carbon emissions and to mankind finally saving the planet?

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. – Thomas Jefferson (1824)

Who else but a negative bigot wouldn’t want to give their fair share so that people who are less lucky and less fortunate can share in the wealth? Those less-fortunate people have children, and by denying those people their fair share of the wealth of this country, you’re denying their children the opportunity to better themselves!

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. – Thomas Jefferson (1816)

What makes these “patriotic,” racist, corporate slaves think that they’re any wiser than Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank? By what right do they have to go against the will of the majority? Democrats won the last election, and to the winners go the spoils, after all.

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government. – Patrick Henry

We’ve been making huge strides since Obama was elected! We’ve ensured that government will have the power to really push equality and justice for everyone! Everyone who needs to be taken care of, will, and if you’re not on board, you’re just a greedy, racist bigot.

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. – George Washington

And why do the tea-partiers think they’re so special? What makes these tea-bagging fascists think that they have all the right answers?

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. – Samuel Adams

People trust government to fix the roads, defend the country, provide legal justice and run our schools. We all trust the government to do those things, so why do the tea-baggers close their eyes, plug their ears and scream, “No, no, no” when the idea of the government stepping in and fixing problems comes up?

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson

All this talk of rebellion and “fighting back” against the government is bullcrap. Nobody will do anything. The army has the guns and missles and tanks. They’ll maintain order if the Tea Partiers ever get out of line and make sure the trains run on time.

What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. – Thomas Jefferson (1787)

There aren’t more than a handful of corporate ass-kissers in the tea-bagging party. Vote Democrat or Republican in November 2010, don’t waste your vote on the Tea Party!

Share on Facebook

If countless businesses and government agencies feel the need to plan out mitigating the harm done to them by forseeable disasters, why aren’t you doing the same? When is the last time you conducted a threat assessment, on yourself? It’s a pretty good idea that just about everyone sits down at some point and does this so as to give everyone a more realistic idea of where we need to be at regarding disaster preparedness planning.

Here’s how you can go about it:

You should start by listing any and every threat you can think of. A threat is anything – natural or unnatural – that can substantially change your lifestyle. Common threats include: job loss, hurricanes, street crime, fire, winter storms, socio-economic collapse, illness/injury/death of the family breadwinner, earthquakes, home invasion, pandemic flu, chemical/biological/radiological/nuclear disaster and zombie apocolypse.

Think the threats out for yourself and don’t pay attention to the news while you do it. If every television news channel and newspaper in your area is reporting on the horrible economy but you are debt free, own your own home, have plenty of savings, are self employed in a stable industry, and can pretty much take care of yourself financially, then unlike most of the population, financial calamity probably won’t be at the top of your list. Likewise, if you’re mentally, inventorily and physically prepared for a horde of zombies staggering through your neighborhood, you could put that threat a little lower on the list.

Next look at each risk and make three categories: least likely to happen, most likely to happen, and everything in between. Here in Omaha, we just don’t have much in the way of hurricanes. So despite the fact that hurricanes seriously make life suck, it isn’t a risk for me and my family. So hurricanes get put into the ‘least likely to happen’ list. Zombie attacks, however, can happen anytime – so this will go on the ‘most likely to happen’ list.

Take your ‘most likely to happen’ list and logically prioritize them. Don’t let the media or emotions take over when putting this list together. The news of the day can often impact our thinking and cause us to give more priority to categories that really are less likely to happen then the regular boring stuff like job loss.

This guy is ready for zombies - but not so much for floods

For example, if you are the family breadwinner and you have a spouse and three kids at home like I do, at the top of your list of disasters would be the possibility of your long term illness, disability or death. Especially death, because that’s really long-term. Unless you die during a zombie attack, in which case your death will be alarmingly short-term.

Regardless of the above, without you and your income around, job loss would be a real, live disaster for your family. And unfortunately, such a scenario is a little more likely to happen than something like a zombie uprising or nuclear warfare. So, looking at the spectre of the loss of the primary breadwinner’s income-generating ability, your ten steps for dealing with that particular disaster could include: getting life insurance, writing or updating your will, looking into short or long-term disability insurance and getting an emergency fund in place as soon as possible.

With a tiny bit of work on your part, your disaster preparedness tasks should now be laid out fairly clearly. If you have five ‘most likely to happen’ disasters with ten steps each to complete in order to be better prepared for if those disasters actually happen, then you now have 50 tasks to take care of. Some of these tasks will take a few minutes. Others will be on-going activities.

Does this mean you shouldn’t prepare for things such as social collapse or bugging out for an indeterminate amount of time? No. You should always develop your skills, think through every “what if” scenario you could think of, practice camping out in the woods, grow a garden for the exercise and health benefits, etc, however the majority of your time, attention, and money should go towards preparing for the disasters that are most likely to happen to you.

So what about the rest of the threats you listed, those that were least likely and less likely to happen? Well, fortunately, disaster planning in general will help mitigate a wide range of disasters, not just the things you plan for. For example, an earthquake may be high on your list and a flood may be very low on your list, but the steps you take to prepare for the earthquake (getting a bug-out-bag ready, checking your insurance, planning to bug out if necessary, gathering clean up supplies, etc) will work for both situations.

Share on Facebook

Malls are filled with women and children, who are the type of target that those interested in terrorism love to go after. Most malls have prominent signs on the doors announcing that concealed weapons are prohibited from being carried into the mall. While this will absolutely stop law-abiding citizens from bringing their sidearm into the mall with them, this means that terrorists or other criminal-types will find just about everybody in the mall to be completely defenseless.

Recently, we have had a mall shooting here in Omaha, Nebraska that brought home the fact that extreme situations can happen at any time, anywhere. My wife had shopped at the Westroads mall that day, leaving the parking about 20 minutes before Mr. Hawkins entered Von Maur with his weapon and killed several people with it. I hate to consider wht would have happened it she had encountered the gunman up close and personally. My wife is not the action-hero type and wouldn’t ever consider carrying a concealed weapon – her only chance would have been to run as fast as she could.

I fully expect more of these types of situations in the future as our society continues to degenerate. In the spirit of sharing, I’ve put together a list of tips and strategies that you can hopefully use if you ever find yourself in a situation where a terrorist or group of terrorists have taken over a shopping mall that you happen to be at.

Officer Responding To A Mall Shooting

People’s natural stress response is one of the three “F’s” – Fight, Flight or Freeze. Do not freeze. Get moving. You need to get out of the “kill zone” as quickly as possible. If you’re shopping by yourself, spread out and get away from other people! Getting into a dogpile with other shoppers just makes for a large, neatly packaged target for the shooter or shooters to aim at.

Stay quiet. Do not scream or yell. Sound attracts attention. Use hand signals to communicate with other people.

After about 10 seconds of shooting, you will have a window of opportunity to escape while the shooters are reloading. Use this time to exit the “kill zone” as quickly as possible. While the shooters were firing, you should have been able to determine roughly where the shooters are located. Move from cover to cover to escape the “kill zone” while staying as low as possible. If you absolutely have to cross an open area, wait for a lull in the firing.

You may have a greater opportunity to escape if you go into a store since all stores in a mall are required to have a fire exit in the back. The nearest doors and other obvious escape routes may have been chained closed. Fire escape doors may have been chained closed by the terrorists to keep people in and the police out.

Once in a store, head towards the back and find the exit to the hallway which runs behind the stores. Be sure to move pallets or other items in front of the rear door to the store you just exited to create other quick obstacles to hamper any pursuit.

If you can’t leave through the fire escape, go back into the store. Use the store phone to call 911, if you haven’t already used your cell phone to do so. If possible, use a store computer to print out maps of the mall from the mall’s website. Take cover in the store until you have a plan of escape. Search for anything that can be used as a weapon or tool. Look for scissors, box cutters, metal bars taken from display shelves or anything else with an edge or some heft to it.

If a terrorist group has actually taken control of the mall itself, a good escape route could possibly be the freight elevator near the food court which leads down to the loading dock area. This is usually a large area that is difficult to contain and will probably be where a SWAT team enters.

Local police will be the first to arrive. Depending on your city, they could arrive in force within two to 15 minutes. A SWAT team will take much longer to arrive. In the Omaha Westroads shooting, the first police units arrived within 6 minutes of the first 911 call.

A serious terrorist attack will likely plan on dealing with a police presence. There may be improvised explosive devices (IED’s) placed at main entrances to keep standard police units from entering. Keep an eye out for any boxes or packages placed at entrances and exits and give them wide berth.

After about 10 minutes, it’s reasonable to assume that an organized terrorist group determined to cause maximum destruction will be going from store to store in a “cleaning up” phase, having killed all the easy targets in their immediate vicinity. You will need to prepare yourself for this eventuality, and your best chance for survival is if you have a few people on your side.

You will need a shield. Locate anything that can be used as a container – a briefcase, a suitcase, a box or a large bag. Fill this container with phone books, leather items or anything else with some weight and thickness behind it. Phone books in a suitcase would be optimal.

When a terrorist enters the store, everyone available absolutely has to get involved. The group needs to work as a team to ambush the shooter. One person takes the shield and rushes the shooter in order to “pancake” him, while another team member uses a bar to swing low at him and another uses a metal bar to swing high at him. When the shooter is down, the fourth person bashes his head with whatever object will do the job.

To ambush the shooter, the team gets into “ambush” position and waits until he is in the middle of the strike zone before springing on him. Ambush position is basically surrounding the person so there is no one target for him to aim at and no escape when the group converges on him.

Once the shooter has been taken out, take his weapons, magazines, any body armor and any information he is carrying. Distribute these items to the individuals in your group and head towards your escape route.

If the shooter is carrying a radio, tape down the “transmit” button to create a “hot mic” situation that could possible prevent the terrorists from communicating.

When the decision is made to head towards your escape route, the group needs to move like a small military unit. Move single file, about a foot from the wall, with one person with a firearm covering 9 to 3 o’clock up and down in the front and one person covering 3 to 9 o’clock up and down in the back. The people in the middle of the line should help scan for shooters. Don’t walk too close to the wall as bullets often ricochet and travel down walls.

When you get close to the area that police may have already taken control of, put all of your weapons on the floor. If a SWAT team sees people with weapons they will, in all likelihood, shoot – not knowing if the people trying to escape were the terrorists or not. Keep your hands visible and in the air. Do not make any sudden moves or run towards the SWAT team. Follow all instructions given by the SWAT team. You and your group will probably be treated as terrorists until it can be ascertained that you’re not involved the victims.

Above all, remember that in a terrorist shooting situation, the goal of the terrorists is to kill. They will do so until they are stopped. They will be in a state of mind that defies reason. Do not attempt to communicate or reason with the shooters.

While most people will never be caught in such a situation, and those that do may find a mall shooting scenario unfolding differently, just having this type of basic information is a very good way to become more prepared. Usually after an active shooter situation all you get are sound bites on the news, not facts and explanation on how to best survive such an event.

Since training and muscle memory and all of the other vital skills necessary to survive such a situation require more than just reading an article or watching a movie, you may want to consider other ways to train to respond to such an event. Try playing paintball. While it’s not the same as getting shot at, you will become more adept at a number of useful skills such as reading your environment, identifying “enemies” who are hiding from you, traveling silently, etcetera. You may also consider taking a firearms course or two, and participating in practical shooting leagues and events which will increase your firearms skills dramatically.

Share on Facebook

When you’re putting together survival packs for your family, don’t forget to address possible differences in temperature that may happen during the season when the actual disaster occurs. Blizzards knock down power lines and cut off communications regularly, not to mention the fact that near-complete shutdown of transportation in some parts of the country happens on a regular basis.

Be sure that you add at least a few cold-weather supplies to your equipment list – so when the worst occurs, you won’t be caught in a “Wish-I-Had-That” moment.

This is snow. Cold stuff.

When you keep in mind that the human body is always releasing moisture, even in very cold conditions, you’ll quickly come to realize that the number one rule for comfort and safety in the outdoors in cold weather is staying dry. Staying dry goes hand in hand with staying warm. Without staying dry, you’ll never stay warm – and you’ll be putting your life in serious jeopardy.

Layering your clothing is the key to staying dry. Base layers, the clothing closest to your skin, must be made of a fabric that wicks moisture away from your skin and moves it into the upper layers of your clothing to be evaporated away. When all your layers move moisture away from your skin so that it can be harmlessly evaporated into the air, you’ll stay dry and, thus, warm.

Keeping a good supply of clothes that are designed

Choose Clothing Fabrics Wisely

Some fabrics are better at retaining warmth while wet. Wool, for example, is a natural insulator that will retain body heat even when it gets wet. It is also quite good at moving your body’s moisture outward for evaporation. Cotton, on the other hand, will just absorb water, hold it next to your skin and lead to you getting chilled to the bone.

Merino wool and other wool products made today are not itchy, by the way. So if you’ve been shying away from wool because of past problems with itchiness, give it another try.

Products by SmartWool have been found to be excellent clothing for extreme survival purposes. They have socks, shirts and all sorts of moisture-killing products that are warm and most of all, comfortable to wear. Getting as little as a few pairs of SmartWool socks can make the difference between a comfortable and an uncomfortable experience in a survival situation. Check their available products out at Amazon here, or at your local retailer that carries their product line.

Wearing clothing made from wool or synthetics that are designed for active purposes, such as hunting or hiking clothing, and storing it all in the event of a disaster is a very good idea. Be sure it fits and then put it away.

A big part of surviving any disaster can be related to the temperature at the time of the event. The regular problems someone has with dealing with an emergency can quickly become compounded when cold weather has to be taken into account.

If you live in an area that has cold weather on a regular basis, you absolutely must factor possible low temperatures in when it comes to putting together your survival kits. Selecting items for your survival kit that can help make cold weather bearable should be something you concentrate on.

Due to their amazingly efficient, NASA-developed technology that uses thin metallic-polyester fabric to reflect body heat, putting a space blanket or two into each survival kit you assemble is one of the wisest things you can do.

The material that space blankets are made of is both waterproof and windproof. That fact, combined with their light weight and ability to compact into a very small size, makes them a very useful tool for those interested in coping with cold weather.

The biggest problem with space blankets is their biggest advantage – adaptability. Space blankets can be used to line sleeping bags, cut up to make articles of clothing or to use as liners for other containers. Because they’re so useful, they get used – they get cut up and altered to fit the particular need at the time.

Due to this fact, a combination space blanket/poncho would make an excellent selection as a second blanket for a survival kit.

This particular space blanket to the right has been modified to address the issues that come with altering a regular space blanket in order to wear it. The corners have had reinforced grommet holes put in, which helps with the durability and length of usefulness. In addition, inside hand pockets allow for an easy way for the wearer to keep the poncho closed, even if they happen to be wearing gloves.

A few moments spent in selecting the right cold weather gear can make the difference between life and death. With the low price and high availability of space blankets, it would be foolish not to invest in a few.

Share on Facebook

I want to be completely honest. I do not have a 17 inch computer monitor at the moment.

I did, though.

I’ve been through a lot of computers in my time and back when CRT computer monitors were all the rage, I had a nice little ViewSonic 17 incher paired up with my blazingly fast Dell – with it’s huge 4 gigabyte hard drive. I was a living, breathing computer gaming god and it felt good.

Some people think time has passed 17 inch computer monitors by. Some people think that the only computer monitors worth having are at least 19 inches and preferably 24 inches or larger. Those people are wrong.

17 inch computer monitors are vastly more affordable than larger monitors. You can, in fact, pick up two or three smaller monitors for the same price that you’d pay for one, single, slightly-larger monitor.

Wall of Monitors

The vast majority of computer video cards now come with dual inputs suitable for working with two monitors.

Here’s a few easy steps you can follow if you’re sitting there wondering how to set up two 17 inch computer monitors on your own home PC.

1) Connect your second monitor.

You may have to restart your computer so that it detects the new monitor.

2) After you connect your second monitor, you will want to adjust your display settings.

In the New Display Detected dialog box that comes up when you plugged in your new monitor, click the Display Settings link, to adjust your display settings.If you dont see this dialog box, click the Start button, and then click “Control Panel.” Click “Appearance and Personalization,” and then, under Personalization, click “Adjust screen resolution.”

In the Display Settings dialog box, click the monitor icon labeled 2, and then select the “Extend the desktop onto this monitor” check box.

3) If you need to, you can easily drag the monitor icons so that they are arranged in the same way as the monitors on your desk.

To check which is monitor 1 and monitor 2, just click the “Identify Monitors” button to verify which monitor is 1 and which monitor is 2.

4) Click “Apply” to let Windows activate your new monitor

5) Click “OK.”

Seriously, that’s it. Very simple.

Smaller monitors can often give you a huge bump up in quality in exchange for screen real estate, like this ViewSonic 17 inch computer monitor, for example. Check out the review on Amazon:

This is a great quality little monitor. I was worried whether it would be big enough at 17 inches, but it’s actually the perfect size. ViewSonic makes great stuff – my other home monitor is a 17-inch CRT that’s about 8 years old, and the picture is like brand-new. I use ViewSonic 19-inch and 15-inch LCDs for editing in my studio, and they are superb. So I trust the ViewSonic name. I needed a new monitor to fit into a small space downstairs, and this was perfect. Detail is good, color is good, though I expected a little more contrast. That seems to be getting better as it gets more use. I’m really happy with the purchase. A freind of mine got an off-brand for a little less money, but the picture and clarity aren’t nearly as good. I say go for the quality, as this will be something you live with for years.

Or even this Acer with this glowing review:

I purchased this for my 78 year old mother to replace her old, CRT monitor. I purchased it 1.) for the low, low price 2.) on the basis of two positive customer reviews. Exceeding all possible expectations, the monitor arrived in her home within two business days — free freight. She hooked it up by herself and is babblingly ecstatic with the results. (“I don’t even have to use my glasses to read it!!”)

What I really want resembles the above image. Eight or 10 little 17 inch computer monitors hooked up on a monitor tree, each one easily switchable from independent view to one synchronized image with a click of a mouse.

Share on Facebook

Liberty, the ability for the individual to act as he or she sees fit, without outside coercion, has been dead for a century or more, so why do we keep playing lip service to it?

Let’s look at the recent health care debate for a minute. I won’t take long.

You have one very large group of people who feel everyone deserves to be taken care of when they are sick. You have another very large group of people who feel that they’re not entirely comfortable with the idea of working hard to pay to take care of someone else.

The first group has the best interests of everyone at heart. They want everyone to be taken care of when they are sick, or injured, or in pain. They don’t want to pass people on the street, dying of appendicitis because they cannot pay a doctor to fix the problem. They don’t want people to lose their homes because they paid a doctor to fix a problem and now can’t afford to pay the doctor.

The second group doesn’t want any of that either. However, they also don’t feel that they should have money taken out of their pockets to pay to fix the situation. The second group respects liberty and hates coercion. They feel that perhaps some of the people who are in bad situations are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of bad choices that they made. They realize that some people who are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of circumstances beyond their own control.

Sometimes people from both groups help those less-fortunate people with money, time or other resources, but not enough to completely alleviate the problem.

So the first group has decided that everyone is now going to chip in and work for a portion of the year in order to try to fix the problem of some people not being able to afford to go to a doctor. This, over the objections of the second group, who is just as numerous as the first.

So who is right? Who is moral in this situation?

The answer to that question lies in what is more important to the people involved in the argument. Is either liberty or security more important?

The only honest way to phrase that argument is to put it in the starkest terms – are we willing to all be slaves so that some of us will have an easier time of it?

The most important aspect of liberty is the presence and enforcement of property rights. You have the right to earn what you can as best as you can. You have the right to do nothing if you choose. You do not have the right to take someone else’s property, or time, because once someone is having their property (or time) unwillingly confiscated for someone else’s good, that person is a slave for the portion of time that it took to earn/build that property.

If you infringe on property rights you have decided that in order to preserve the life and liberty of X, you will violate the life and liberty of Y. And once you go down that road, it means you don’t really care about life or liberty – you just favor X over Y for some reason.

Share on Facebook