- Daily Kos performs crazed self-immolation of credibility.
- Strategic oil reserves opened; economists fear major gas crisis.
- Some good news in light of lootings and price gouging and general displacement: Millions have been contributed in relief.
- Interesting info about Bush: “Bush cut short his working vacation in Texas by two days — even though aides have long contended that his duties are uninterrupted when he spends time at his ranch in nearby Crawford, which has White House-level communications capability.”
- Death toll in Miss. remains unknown.
- More info on Miss.: “A 30-foot (10-meter) storm surge in Mississippi wiped away 90 percent of the buildings along the coast at Biloxi and Gulfport.”
- Current estimate of people trapped in New Orleans: 80,000.
- More: Dozens of carjackings overnight, with people firing at rescue helicopters.
- The name of the oil company that will be receiving the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is unknown. Anybody have a good guess?
- In the Glenn Reynolds universe, you shoot first and ask questions later. Apparently, Reynolds doesn’t understand that a major disaster often causes people to resort to crazy behavior, both authorities and looters.
© 2005, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.
Edward
Finally someone (as in the Washington Post) decided to take Jim Kunstler’s book Long Emergency seriously:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083001655.html
$3 a gallon gas prices will do that, no?
I’m not sure of the logic behind your last bullet point regarding Reynolds. Am I missing something? It didn’t appear he was advocating indiscriminate shooting of looters. Did he in another post? (I don’t read him regualrly so maybe I missed it.)
Are you suggesting that a major disaster excuses ‘crazy behavior’ like acquiring a some DVDs or trying to loot a children’s hospital?
I’m not advocating that random looters be gunned down willy nilly – who could begrudge someone bread and water? – but martial law generally implies the use of lethal force (if necessary) to maintain social order. And when certain folks are attacking hospitals, firing on fireman and rescue personel etc etc I’d say some use of lethal force is warranted.
Um yeah, that was long. Like your blog though.
Dan: A fair argument. All I was saying was that people resort to crazy behavior in the face of a disaster and that indiscriminately shooting them struck me as a rather authoritarian notion that fails to take human nature into account.