Humans are a wonderful lot, a paradoxically wonderful one. Scanning the headlines of CNN today, there are reports of the stampeding in Baghdad, the difficulty New Orleans is having evacuating the city, and the death penalty one drunk driver in Thailand is receiving for having killed four people.

So in Baghdad, a thousand people (or so) were killed because rumors of an insurgent suicide bomber ripped through a pilgrimage site, the people ran out and on top of each other onto a bridge where the bridge siding collapsed and more people were thrown into the water, some of which I'm sure died by drowning. I'd always assumed stampeding had to do with larger things crushing smaller things, not equal things stepping on equal things and killing them. Intuitively, that makes sense. How one person can muster the gumption to actually step on another repeatedly (I'm assuming each person probably had to step on more than just ONE person to have a thousand people die) is really beyond me. Sure, you can say it's in an effort to save your own skin, and that just illustrates my point: people tend to shed the bonds of law, order and dignity as soon as is convenient, when an excuse (yes, I'll call it an excuse, not necessarily implying a bad thing, just an explanatory "reason") allows.

Moving on now, to how the mayor is having trouble evacuating New Orleans and how some 50 or 60 thousand people still have to be moved out. Interestingly enough, the evacuation process is being slowed because of looting. Looting must come off as the most primeval example of illustrating that one is above the law when certain conditions arise making it impossible for the law to be enforced. You loot because you want. You loot because you can't get caught. You loot because the infinite hunger of personal wants arises at the time most opportune for it to be fulfilled at the least personal cost. I loved reading about this. I'm not going to sit on a moral high horse about looting and all the things that aren't "good" about it, I'm just going to say that I agree with Thomas Hobbes, that law is the only mechanism keeping the beastly human nature in check. To what lengths we go to correct our own defect is interesting too...

In Thailand a 23 year old drunk driver who killed four people on a drunken spree is being sentenced to death. I am one for the death penalty. I don't believe keeping scum on the earth alive and paying for its subsistence when it has committed a heinous atrocity against its own is an effective form of "rehabilitation." To an extent, I don't consider rehabilitation for large crimes possible, large being defined as crimes like murder, rape, slavery, torture, etc. A Thai anti-drunk driving association is claiming, however, that the death penalty is appropriate as a punishment for drunk driving and that this should set a rather juicy legal precedent for other judges to draw upon when sentencing. I completely agree that in this case, the driver should get the death penalty. You did a stupid stupid thing, friend, and people were killed. I am all about avenging blood with blood and I don't think society should pay for his subsistence after killing one person and then three others while trying to evade detection. I don't think, however, this case should be setting too much legal precedent. I think it was my philosophy class which declared that humans definitely place a premium (of punishment) on a successful crime and a much lesser one on an unsuccessful crime. The sentencing difference between murder and attempted murder is significant, though the mens rea involved in the two instances could be identical. I would also argue the guilty *act* is no different either. Then why the difference in sentencing? Who knows, but in terms of legal consistency, IF Thailand differentiates between successful and non-successful acts, it must acknowledge this to be an 'exceptional' circumstance of drunk driving. If this 23 year old Thai man had just cajoled drunkenly down the street in his car harmlessly whizzing down empty streets clearly drunk, would he have received the same sentence? Should he? Likely not. What Thailand's penalty for drunk driving (without vehicular homicide) is, I don't know, but considering that it has the highest rate of vehicle death in the world, I'd guess it isn't nearly a large enough deterrent.

Buried in all this is the fact that no matter what humans attempt to do to "right the wrongs" through law, the wrongs are still there, waiting for their chances. Delicious. Loot on, New Orleans, loot on.