Some observations from 10,500 feet

I've spent an inordinate amount of time watching the Katrina Show this week - time I should have spent riding my motorcycle on my favorite Rocky Mountain roads here in the Colorado high country.
My hosts and their other guests don't share my fascination with what's happening on the Gulf Coast, most likely because they aren't in the news-gathering business.
I think the coverage has been pretty good, although there have been a lot of stupid and inane things said by the folks at CNN and FOX and the major networks, but that's mostly a consequence of having to maintain a running commentary with limited information.
I'm not particularly surprised at the anarchy in New Orleans and elsewhere. All of the intelligent and productive people got out of town when the evacuation orders came down and it became obvious that it was too dangerous to stay. So what we were left with were the uneducated poor and a hard core of dirtbags who may have remained in anticipation of a looting opportunity. And, of course, those desperately unfortunate people who were stuck in hospitals.
So when the flooding started, we had a situation where government agencies had to divert critical resources to snatching people from rooftops - people who should have gotten the hell out of town in the first place - rather than put all of their efforts into stemming the rising waters.
The fact that armed looters and other dirtbags are now shooting at rescue helicopters concerns me because they will have to be dealt with harshly - possibly by sending in battle-hardened Iraq vets who are not novices to urban warfare. TV images of looters getting wasted will not play well in other urban black communities because most of the looters are black. I'm sure this is a troubling fact to TV news producers who are trying to be politically correct and are searching the camera footage in vain for images of white looters. There are, unfortunately, plenty of blacks around the country who are eager to sieze on such images as evidence of organized racisim and stirr up riots similar to those that followed the Rodney King incident as well as the Watts and Patterson, N.J., riots of the mid-1960s.
There are plenty of people in this country who think class warfare would be a good thing and New Orleans could be the catalyst.
On the subject of gas prices and availability, I see the prospect of a return to the dreaded national 55 mph speed limit as a fuel conservation measure. Just when my home state finally bumped the speed limit on rural interstate highways to 70 mph - the point where it stood before the fuel crisis of the 1970s.