FOUR THINGS TO CONSIDER before you try to join the Amish.

AT THE WAPO, whittling down the corrections backlog.

COULD FOOD SHORTAGES bring down civilization?

MICHAEL S. MALONE: Who Will Be Tech’s Next Winners And Losers?

GERARD VAN DER LEUN: How quickly can Swine Flu make you sick? About 90 minutes of CNN should do it.

JANET NAPOLITANO’S mea culpa.

Now if she can just apologize to the Canadians.

A FLU PANDEMIC SURVIVAL LIST. Probably still too early to panic yet, though.

UPDATE: Or maybe not . . . .

IN THE MAIL: Aaron Klein’s The Late Great State of Israel: How Enemies Within and Without Threaten the Jewish Nation’s Survival.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: “U.S. public health officials did not know about a growing outbreak of swine flu in Mexico until nearly a week after that country started invoking protective measures, and didn’t learn that the deaths were caused by a rare strain of the influenza until after Canadian officials did. . . . U.S. public health officials are still largely in the dark about what’s happening in Mexico two weeks after the outbreak was recognized.”

UPDATE: “Where’s Gerald Ford when we need him?”

Plus, a reader emails: “Drudge is doing a bang-up job of keeping US informed of what is going on. MUCH better than our duly appointed public officials.”

ITALIAN CRUISE SHIP fights off pirates.

MURTHA UPDATE: New York Times: House Heavyweight Feels Threat to Power. “In the weeks since the news that prosecutors had raided the offices of the PMA Group — a lobbying firm founded by a former Murtha associate that became a gateway to his office and his biggest source of campaign money — about two dozen rank-and-file Democrats have risked his wrath by calling for a House ethics investigation of the matter. One Democrat has even foresworn seeking earmarks for the military contractors in his district because of ethical concerns about the process. . . . Now Mr. Murtha lost another fight to block a new rule requiring competitive bidding on earmarked contracts. Furthermore, one of his usual lieutenants — Representative Peter J. Visclosky, Democrat of Indiana and member of the defense subcommittee who is chairman of the energy and water panel — unexpectedly switched sides to back the new restrictions, perhaps because he too is under new scrutiny for his ties to the PMA Group. . . . Even among donors, mainly defense interests, Mr. Murtha’s standing appears to be slumping.”

UPDATE: Obama’s revenge?

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Obama’s Grave Pakistan Problem.

FLU UPDATE: Experts to advise WHO on pandemic alert phase. “International experts will convene on Tuesday to advise the World Health Organisation (WHO) whether to raise the current pandemic alert level due to the new flu virus in Mexico and the United States, a WHO spokesman said.”

UPDATE: Asia on Alert Over Swine Flu Threat.

ANOTHER UPDATE: CDC confirms swine flu in New York. “Mayor Bloomberg announced in a news conference Sunday morning that the Centers for Disease Control confirmed cases of swine flu in a Queens school.”

BEA ARTHUR HAS DIED. Lots of video at the link.

DON LUSKIN: TARP Looking More Criminal by the Minute.

PJTV: Fourth of July Tea Party plans progress.

COMPUTER PROGRAM to take on Jeopardy.

FROM FABIUS MAXIMUS, some weekend reading recommendations.

JOANNE JACOBS: Textbooks Push The Softer Side of Islam. And wishing it will make it so!

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S Costanza Strategy. Hey, it worked for George.

WEIGHT TRAINING lowers your blood pressure.

A TEA PARTY PROTEST IN WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK: Hundreds turned out, though the focus was local.

UPDATE: Here’s a blog report with video and pics from the West Tennessee Tea Party in Jackson, Tennessee.

THIS IS TROUBLING: Mexico’s Calderon Declares Emergency Amid Swine Flu Outbreak. And this is also troubling: “The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported.” Luckily, though, I expect that if President Obama were going to catch this, he would have gotten sick by now so I guess he’s in the clear.

UPDATE: The World Health Organization is worried: “Experts at WHO and elsewhere believe that the world is now closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century’s three pandemics occurred.”

More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Felipe Solis story is questionable. AP says he died “a week later,” not the next day. And reader Michael Waters emails that Mexican press reports say the cause of death was a heart attack. So stay tuned.

MORE: Drudge is going pedal-to-the-metal on this one, but I think it’s a little early for panic just yet.

STILL MORE: Not everyone agrees with me: Swine flu spreads panic in Mexico City.

The Mexican capital was a fearful place on Saturday, as residents donned surgical masks, avoided shaking hands or simply stayed home amid a swine flu outbreak that has killed at least 20 people and perhaps as many as 81 across Mexico.

Mexico City has become the epicenter of the sickness, which is suspected to have infected 1,324 people nationwide by Saturday night. Mexican President Felipe Calderón issued a decree allowing the federal health department to enter homes and forcibly quarantine people, and the authorities ordered all schools closed until May 6 in the capital and neighboring Mexico State.

Is this an overreaction, or an underreaction? At this point, it’s impossible to say. The most likely outcome is that this will just be a flu outbreak. But we’ll see.

MORE STILL: Reader Chuck Pelto writes:

I don’t think he’s in ‘panic’. Otherwise, we’d be seeing NOTHING, as he had fled to the proverbial hills.

Instead, he’s providing useful information. More useful than I’m getting from other sources. Indeed, it’s as in my days as a young officer in the 82d. The neighbor across the carports from me in the duplex, on-post, married officers’ housing was with the division intelligence battalion. Over beers he intimated that he got better information from the wire services than he did through official channels. I saw the initial reports on Drudge and forwarded the links to my local public health department. They were pleased to get the ‘heads-up’, as I get the impression that their ‘official channels’ were still sort of ‘asleep’.

Late, yesterday, they were working and sent out a one-over-their-world press release alerting everyone to ‘get ready for trouble’. That’s 60 hours AFTER Drudge started carrying this information.

Whether people ‘panic’ over it is THEIR problem. Not Drudge’s. Nor mine.

Good point.

Plus, reader Michael Greene sends this Swine Flu google map.

FINALLY: Reader Santiago Valenzuela writes:

It seems to me to be much ado about nothing. True, swine flu is a little more deadly than the flu that goes around, but it doesn’t have me worried like the avian flu did before. For the avian flu I actually started stocking up long-term food (though rice, beans and jerkey for months on end never seemed like a good life, it at least meant I wouldn’t have to depend on infrastructure that seems remarkably fragile in these instances) and I ordered antivirals from Russia (sadly, it went bad a year or so ago and I disposed of it properly.) Had a whole little plan worked out.

To be honest, though, this one doesn’t seem nearly as bad as the avian flu, lethality-wise. So I’m not worried about it in particular.

It has reminded me to restock on antivirals, but for a different reason. I think far too many people are simply unprepared for any sort of emergency – even a short term one. I had some antibiotics and antivirals and stores of food on hand not just for pandemics, but because I think it was a generally useful inventory to have. For any number of emergencies – either social or personal (losing a job, riots, pandemic, whatever) I was prepared to batten down the hatches and ride it out alright.

Now I’m married (just a few weeks ago!) but my wife is very amenable to my survivalist tendencies. So its back to stocking up for me. The investment is tiny (I think antivirals and enough food and water to last a human a month ran just a couple hundred bucks!) and the payoff in terms of peace of mind, if nothing else, is tremendously valuable.

Just a thought. All this pandemic worry would be a lot less sensational if the majority of the population was prepared for simple emergencies like this.

Well, as I think I mentioned, my brother got a letter from the State of Ohio a while back advising him and all residents to have a months worth of food and necessaries stored against an avial flu outbreak. Ready.gov has similar recommendations. I think it’s too early to panic on this, but it’s never too early to make sensible preparations, most of which will protect you against the disaster no one expects as well as the one everyone is worried about at any given moment.

On the other hand, you want your gloomy predictions, here’s one. Can’t vouch for its accuracy, and in fact I think it’s unlikely to be borne out. Hope I’m right, of course. . . .

Plus, reason to take a breath and relax. And a roundup from Jules Crittenden.

SOME LESSONS LEARNED, and advice for next time, from a PJTV citizen journalist.