Foul conditions aboard stranded Carnival cruise ship Triumph: Passengers describe ‘sewage running down the walls’ and people acting like ‘savages’

OK, this sounds like a really bad vacation. But that’s what it is… a vacation that went bad. After an engine room fire that took out most of the electrical generation capability, the cruise ship Triumph was left adrift in the Gulf of Mexico with seriously reduced air conditioning, food prep and toilet-flushing capability. And in four days, new reports are coming out describing at least some of the people onboard as “savages.”

Now, here you have a bunch of people who are *not* starving (food prep may be hampered, but the ship obviously was fully stocked with a whole lot of food for the cruise). The passengers know that this is a temporary situation, and when it’s over they’ll be back to a fully-functional civilization. Yet there are reports of people fighting over food.

Consider for a moment that, instead of an engine room fire on a cruise ship, the problem was an EMP burst over CONUS or Europe or east Asia, taking down the power grid for tens or hundreds of millions of people. Yellowstone goes *foom.* A major plague breaks out. The economy collapses. The food trucks stop rolling into cities for a week or three air conditioning is out; the lights go off and stay off; the dead rising from the grave; cats and dogs living together; mass hysteria.

Similarly: just a few days ago we witnessed the spectacle of the LAPD completely losing their minds over “rogue ex-cop” and enthusiastic Obama supporter Chris Dornan. When some LAPD saw a truck of a different model from Dormans, with a different license plate, painted a different color, with two hispanic women rather than one hugenormous black guy, they decided that it was clearly time to act… and opened fire on the truck, shooting it dozens of times. This demonstrated that not only will those whose  very reason for being is to maintain civilization sometimes resort of complete barbarism… they might be pretty incompetent at it, as they didn’t even kill the two women in the truck.

My point: the best of us are about five seconds from completely flipping out. And when you pack humans in tight, as on a cruise ship, a housing project or a major city, you’re just asking for trouble of nightmarish proportions.