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i cant help but wonder about these people. the entire hurricane lasted about 3 hours. the flooding hasnt ended yet. but these people have no idea that their entire life will grind to a halt for the next several years. from what ive been watching on foxnews and cnn; these people seem to think a snap of the fingers is going to end this, and they can walk right back to what they had. in reality, they might never get back what they had. its not a sense of just loosing a home. these people are now unemployed. with dependents. there is no housing. not temporary, not permanent. there isnt supplies to build any either. there isnt even land to put it all back on to. everything now is still underwater. it cant just get put back the way it was.

as a sociologist, i guess what disturbs me the most are the images i see of looting, gangs, and group mentality exhibiting dangerious tendancies. there is no food. no water. no medicine. the dead are lying around them. there is no hope. and there is lawlessness. its a bad situation that could go off like a bomb. people are openly calling for the military to interviene on the ground. the attorney general is on tv making statements about how this will not happen. its a strange predicament. never thought id hear the words, "please bring in the army to march in my town"

what clearly is to blame is the ill prepared state of response. the federal emergency management organization has been throwing money arond since 9/11 for states and cities to produce working large scale disaster prep and plans. it looks like nothing was planned here. for a week they knew they were getting a hurricane. for 3 days they exact knowledge it was going to be a category 3 or more, and coming straight at them. and look what happens. there is no order. no plan. texas has more planning, in 24 hours, to deal with the problem, than either states of MS or LA. preparedness should have said;

forced evacuation of all population, block by block, with in 40 miles of the city. staging of emergency personel 150 miles out, days in advance. staging of transported goods and resources, including food water and clothing, 150 miles out in the advance days. in the final day or so, the army corps of engineers and city works should have been fortifying the fuck out of that burm around the town. 40 foot might have made a difference. much more so than 14. and if that meant bulldozing buildings for materials, so be it. then wait out that storm. come back in after 4 hours, and expect lawlessness, and death. restore order. restore health conditions. then restore the people to the area. simple. simple enough to have saved lives.

how would i handle it? being someone in that hurricane with my house coming down around me? i wouldnt roam the streets and start looting. pragmatically speaking. job 1, has to be creating shelter. people are walking around, crying, looting. but still have no place to go. the first thing id do, is build something. anything. get the sun and rain off myself. get some kind of temporary shelter up. id still have to survive. that means sanitizing whats around me. drag out the dead, and start burning the bodies. purifying water. then setting up to connect to the outside world. clear out a football sized area for every 300 people, to accomodate air drops. the name of the game is order. its having a plan. its knowing how to survive. right now, these people are living on borrowed time. 7-11's are going to run out of grape soda to steal, and four days later they have no temporary shelters, no signals out to where they are. and no sense of what to do. just thousands of throngs of people, rampaging like animals on a sinking ship.

its a tragedy. it could have been avoided. but it wasnt. instead, we have a refugee situation very similar to Bosnia, or Congo, or Cambodia. there is no hospitable place for these people to go. they have nothing. yet, only in america do we seem to demand help in 30 minutes; when it took months before the same level of assistance could begin in foreign countries for similar predicaments. and yet, most shocking. for all the money we raised for a tsunami. for all the aid we air lifted to eurpoe. for all the villages we created in africa. there isnt one country showing up to help america. who is there to help when the World's Helper, needs a hand?

well... the gasoline speech. everyone has asked me for my opinion. so. angrily. and without any sense of direction or desire to make it coherent. i think outloud to those that listen:

first. im not an economist. nor an accountant. i dont know the pricing strategies, or the specific costs associated, and nor do i know what market principles guide something to be this volitle of a price point in such a short time. but. here is what i do know.

for this week, 22 aug 2005. gas is now at approximately 2.52 per gallon in my area. last year at this time, we paid about 1.83. the year before that, it was about 1.78. if you look at our trendings of the price per gallon, over that time; we see the same basic patterns. gasoline prices generally start to fall till they bottom out in december, then rise till mid spring, then spike over the summer... the only problem is, we didnt really valley out this winter. no. we didnt. the price, for whatever reason, in sep to dec 2004 actually ROSE. then fell to its pre-rise level, before increasing in value again. now, we arent seeing an valley to this years fall slow down either, instead its gone off like a bomb.

were paying 73 cents or so more than last year... about a 140% increase. so. if we were cans of soda, selling at the standard 60 cents per can last year, we are 84 cents now. if we are a gallon of milk last year, we are over 3 dollars this year. so what. well. that 2 liter of soda you get, even at gas station prices is only 1.79... well its just under half the price you pay per gallon of gas. so why do we bitch?

gas went up 18 cents this last week. understandable. a 20% increase in a product over night is pretty uncommon. ha. imagine if that one ounce of gold you have... pure gold mind you, melted and congealed from all the jewlery you own, surged 20% in value this week... at about 450 bucks an ounce, you made a cool 85 dollars. so. gas too. is a valued commodity. anything that can rise that fast, has to be valued preciously. bullshit? i dont think so. look at the gasoline consumption lately. see something wrong? its up. we are actually consuming between 5 adn 15 million barrels of gasoline MORE, than our normal trend. or.. with about 300 million barrels.. its about a 105% of consumption, maybe 110%. so in a perfect world, maybe we could just be even and say, if we rise the demand for a product, the rate increase would match. this is wrong, i know it. but what if. wed be paying a dime more now, rather than 70 cents more. so keep in mind, that the rate of consumption will effect the price. it has to. so now lets figure that we should actually be paying 1.90 per gallon, since we are indeed, demanding more of it. think. what happens to the price of that one bottle of booze you want, when you arent old enough to buy it? its not 20 bucks.. its 25 dollars now. you pay someone else a premium, because you want it. the supply is nil. the price goes up. and either you buy, or you dont. so. the question i want america to answer is... why are we outstripping our growth on gasoline consumption?

why? if you want cheap gas. stop buying it. stop using it. the price will plummet. if we, as americans used 85% of the expected volume... the price would dip. it has to. because some refinery is pushing out at 99% capacity, and those lines have a constant flow coming in the pipes. its like produce in that respect then... how much do you pay for bananas? its a sin to pay more than 30 cents per pound.. why? they rot in 3 days. if you wont pay 30 cents for bananas today, tomorrow, they have to be 20 cents. or less. its product that has to go. now sure. you can sit on it. you can keep those bananas on the shelf till its a pile of black pudding. but it wont sell. same with gasoline. gasonline has a shelf life. gasoline goes stale. the only way to back the quantity off, is to slow production a facility, and slow the replunishment from it to stations. thin it out. if you stopped driving, all at once. that gasoline in the lines, now being pumped at 99% capacity is worthless. and dont tell me it wont get noticed. lets fucking say, that each gas station in the US sells oh.. 100 gallons a day. thats it. fewer than 10 cars fuel up. ok? 163,000 gas stations in this country, that collect federal excise tax. say you boycot it on friday. 100 x 163,000 = 16,300,000. you use that much a day. 16.3 million, gallons. at 2.52 per gallon, someone just lost in the neighborhood of 40 million dollars. now. im way off. gas stations in my region take a tanker truck about 2 times per week. thats just shy of 9,000 gallons a pop. if there are 50 gas stations in davenport, id be missing most. so. 50 x 18,000 = 900,000. nearly a million gallons of gasoline per week. at 2.52 per gallon, thats 2.3 million a week were paying out. imagine if you stopped it for a day. but... heres the kicker... all this joyriding you do, at 110% of the gasoline consumption, thats at a clip of 800 grand a week someone is making off your fat ass. just in davenport. just purely speculating with low-ball guesses. now can you see why the gas game is so volitile?

not that im pulling up green party roots here people. but. the reason the price of gasoline is what it is, is because of your nature to consume. plain and simple. its not some man in a grand red cape and crown setting prices on a black board. its you. the lacksidazical goon that goes to QwikTrip for a soda. then later for smokes. then drives across town to see a movie. then home. then to work. then to eat. then drives around in his big SUV for an hour, running the airconditioner and massive stereo for the neighbors to hear. you, the person that drives around without any clue that each trip consumes gasoline. each gallon of gasoline is made from about 2 gallons of crude oil. the process takes a shit load of heat, pressure, chemicals and precision, and is so dangerous, we like to do it in foreign countries that dont mean much in the real estate books. plus we have to dig it up. before that, we have to wait around for a t-rex to fall down and god damn die, and decompose with a bunch of plant matter, praying that a specific geothermal process encloses it all at a specific temperature, to produce oil. so its a bit more involved than that "gotta get some smokes" craze, that you bitch about to Ahmed and Sanji at the gasmart, feeling they are targeting your white ass because we brought a war to their shithole in the world.

if you just ended the oustanding increase on gasoline and crude oil based products, the prices wouldnt rise. look at it another way. if. if a future fuel source could be developed and marketed tomorrow, it would never sell for what the price of gasoline does now. consider if we just widened the exploration for current fuel. consider if we just decided the standard 40% fuel efficiency of the gasoline combustion engine was not enough to be sold. imagine if we paid for gasoline what people in other countries pay for milk. just imagine alot of other factors that would also change the price you pay per gallon. but none of them would matter nearly as much as consumption. dependancy on oil is what the green folks call the problem. but really, its the level of consumption. and sure. its youre right to buy any old monster truck out there, pushing out countless drives across town at 3 gallons per mile consumption. but. its the oil cartels right to charge you as damn much as theyd like, now that youve found yourself squarely married to the prospect of living and dying by your gasoline. its our bed. weve made it up. sometimes its not so comfortable to lay in it so long. however. it will swing back again in our favor.

after the gas prices of the 1970s of adjusted 3 dollars per gallon, we spent nearly 30 years paying less than half that for the same product. but it took a generation off guard, and it adjusted their outlook. its about time something grabbed us by the crotch that wasnt as sweet as britney spears. its a national conversation that could easily be a critical motivating factor for our generation. as it stands, we are sat hunched on the threshold of development. true development. we demand and then we consume. cheap as possible. easy as pie. thats what should be our motto. and now, we found out, cheap has its limits. at this point, there isnt a walmart we can run to, to buy Made In China gas on a shelf at 30% of normal price. we cant simply sell a product like that so under valued to make it acceptable, or it would kill the very industry we desire to see serve us. we dont have a new flavor of the month.. we cant abandon gasoline like we do Michael Jackson cd's. we are now stuck digging deeper to pay the piper, because we loom on the edge of morality in the international market. we stand at a line that says, PUT UP || SHUT UP. to eat the grumblings of our misgivings to take the cheap handouts and steamroll forward, or, to quietly look around and wisen up that Americans have gotten a good deal for a long time. do we, as a generation of Americans really want cheap gas, our way, right now... or are we willing to accept the responsibility for what that entails? sometimes that might mean going to war for it. sometimes that might mean you cant make 15 trips around town to do errannds. it might mean you cant all have a car when you go to college. but right now that means, paying more at the pump.

am i really that wrong this time?

s.