Death by Shopping

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I have some more thoughts on yesterday’s death at a Wal-Mart on the other site. Also I found an interesting site about crowd disasters and crowd dynamics. There are many, many examples of people being crushed to death in crowds, usually because too many people are trying to squeeze through too small a space. I learned it’s more common for people to be crushed to death against fences or walls than to be trampled. Sometimes when people are trying to go both ways through a small space they make a “human mincer” and crush each other.

And the moral is, dense crowds should always be regarded as potentially dangerous.

BTW — the racist comment I didn’t link to on the other site is here.

4 thoughts on “Death by Shopping”

  1. This is a letter worth signing…

    Having just finished watching a geat documentary called “King Corn” on the corn industry in the USA and the effect on diets, cattle raising, diabetes, obesity and everything else our corn-based diet has given us, I was looking around the net for ways to solve the problem.

    Then I found this petition from the Organic Consumers Association and I realized that this would be a good start:

    Dear President-Elect Obama,

    Congratulations on being elected as the next President of the United States. We as organic consumers, gardeners, farmers and activists are especially hopeful about the prospects of creating a sustainable and healthy food and farming system that can improve public health, conserve energy and the environment, revitalize the economy, and help reduce dangerous greenhouse gas pollution.

    We respectfully request that you take the following steps to create a healthy, sustainable, just, and organic future:

    1. Plant a working “Organic Victory Garden” on the South Lawn of the White House, to symbolize your commitment to locally-based, solar-based organic agriculture, with surplus food going to local food shelves.

    2. Hire a well-known organic chef, such as Nora Pouillon or Alice Waters, to prepare healthy organic meals for the White House and staff, including vegetables and herbs from the White House Organic Victory Garden.

    3. Increase food stamp benefits so low-income Americans can afford high quality organic foods. One way to do this would be to double the value of food stamp debit cards for fresh food purchased from farmers markets.

    4. Restore consumers’ right to know by publicly supporting mandatory labeling of Genetically Engineered foods, with regulations similar to those now in place in Europe, Japan, and other nations.

    5. Expand incentives for small and mid-sized organic farms and for farmers and ranchers who wish to make the transition to organic. The organic sector currently represents at least three percent of our current food purchases, therefore it deserves at least three percent of USDA program funds and incentives.

    …CONTINUED AT Under The LobsterScope

  2. (Comment deleted because commenter didn’t turn off his bleeping CAPS LOCK. Reliapundit: The caps lock is on your keyboard over on the left, probably just below the tab. If you turn off caps lock, you can try to comment again. This is just proper net etiquette, so please learn it. — Maha)

  3. Who the bleep is that imbecile? “Promoting universal human rights”… “I marched with Dr. MLK Jr.”… “Black people are generally ruder than white people”?

    Because the imbecile didn’t say it was genetic, the comment isn’t racist? Um… there’s no such rule, fool.

    Man, that is some funky, kool-aid acid test thinking. It would be funny if it weren’t so hateful.

  4. There is no better example than this WalMart worker of where were we’ve gone wrong as civilisation. North Americans are wed to a gluttonous business model of consumption that is not sustainable and is killing our planet not to mention Walmart maintenance workers. The question is: What the hell are we going to do about it? I for one am going to donate to charity this Christmas and stay out of the stores. In the earlier comment about king corn, corn is also responsible for the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (due to fertilizer run-off from mid west fields) which is is expected to be become worse because of our …get this…addiction to ethanol. Righties blame the negative environmental effects of corn ethanol and skyrocketing food prices on the greenies and Al Gore. The ethanol lobbyists have successfully created and perpetuated the meme that the greenies are responsible for people starving because they where the original pushers of ethanol as green when in actual fact it was pushed by BIG AGbusiness to make a small number of big investors rich …and reduce reliance on foreign energy. Corn ethanol is the perfect scam which worsens global warming. Farmers are planting fence row to fence row to cash in on the bonanza and in turn driving many bird species to extinction due to habitat losses. The perps get a shit-load of government incentives all the while covering themselves in green wash …as in ethanol is good for the environment…while the greenies and Al Gore get all the blame for any bad stuff that happens..like I said…perfect scam.

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