Google Lives!

Today's post will have to be short, but there is good reason. Overnight, as many of you who use Gmail might know, Google sent out a mass message to every user of their services. It seems a big group of engineers and other employees have made the google campus into a bit of a fortress, and since they added all those solar panels and other renewable energy sources, they have been able to keep blogger and other services up and running. I have managed to contact them back, and have been learning some very interesting news, most of which I will have to share later. But for the record, that is why I am posting so early and so short. I don't want to waste a lot of time, just in case we get cut off from them.

Updates: since my post yesterday and the subsequent announcement to our group of the decisions reached by the committee, several people in the compound have expressed their unhappiness at, most particularly, the idea that we would whip someone as punishment. I will say that this idea was a bone of heavy contention even among the committee, but let me assure you, once more.

We do not want to use this option, if at all possible. But it IS an option. I have said before that we live in a harder, more brutal world. While we strive to be as civilized as possible, when one of us steps across that line, endangering the group or selfishly harming a person (thus reducing our capacity to defend ourselves), strict and severe punishment needs to be available. Because none of us want to die, or for the community to die--so we set a harsh deterrent. This is universal; it applies to me just as much as any other person. It applies to my own mother. But if we act with reasonable restraint and continue to do as we have done to defend and protect each other, I see no real issue.

Moving on: we have established contact with a few smaller groups, thanks to the team at google. These survivors have no internet access, but the google crew have managed to take control of several of the telecom systems abandoned around the country, and have been able to track the movement of cell phones near us. They handed us the numbers, we called them. A few seem promising, and relatively close to us; one group is in Cynthiana, another in Winchester. One is in Ohio. We are actively trying to gauge numbers and see if any of them want to pull up stakes and come here. I'm still a bit wary of bringing in strangers, but to really start over, to have some chance to rebuild against the constant threat of herds of zombies coming against us, we need to be united. Many scattered groups are much weaker than one large group standing as one.

More to come tomorrow, I am trying to coordinate too much at once. Hopefully, this is just the first step.