I have to agree. In the immortal words of BTO you ain't seen nothing yet

Aye, one of these days a REAL rain is going to come.

I agree too. Big houses (all houses, really) are sitting ducks, incredibly vulnerable. Only the police and the momentum of the social order keep them sitting pretty.

Many houses can be ignited with nothing more than a cigarette lighter. This could be done in the middle of the night, while you sleep.

Such events could happen on a mass scale, very easily. The threshold is drawing closer.

Gasoline at $6/gallon, perhaps, and fast-rising unemployment.

The new Greater Depression will be very different from the old one, because people have changed for the worse, there are far more of them, and the resource base has been depleted. So we can expect mass vandalism and chaos, indeed.

My thoughts exactly!!! When I hear people talking about everyone will come more together due to hardship like they did in the Great Depression to get through it. I'm thinking to myself "do these people not see the radical changes in cultures from today and almost 80 years ago?" Society and peoples mindsets are totaly different today from back then.

4 words

Upside down

insurance fraud

Presumed the majority of the US citizens is apolitical.
You really think of riots in a nation which does know far less demonstrations, rotten egg attacks, sit-ins etc than Europe?

Every attack on the democratic rights passed without much reaction of the big mass.

Some people think the end justifies the means, but I disagree. Eco-terrorists do the cause more harm than good!

Look at the bright side. $6 a gallon and the arson mob can not afford to buy enough fuel to lit that mansion in that fancy suburb on the other site of town ...

Could this explain some of the fires in California ?

I noticed the story is in German in the Der Spiegel. Is there an english version?

Our communities are vulnerable because we have no real history of this kind of thing. A few wing nuts with Molotov cocktails do not a revolution make. Should this kind of thing get serious, your neighborhood watch would become serious. They sell night vision at Wal-Mart.

Check this one out:

"Eco terrorists" burn McMansions.

Excuse me, but if you're an "eco-terrorist" group and you want to get away with arson, do you spraypaint your name all over the place???

Qui bono?

ELF certainly doesn't "bono."

While I don't think folks should be going around burning houses, I also don't think they are 'terrorists". So, if you just burn down a house for kicks, you're an arsonist, you know with rights and stuff. You burn it down for a reason, then you're a terrorist. The likes of which now have little rights in this country if the government so classifies you, and they don't even have to have much in the way of evidence or anything.

So who do we start calling terrorists next?

A slippery slope there. Got Guantanamo?

Olaf

P.S. Don't discount the insurance fraud thing.

Yes, those damn eco-people did it! Now we can brand them as terrorists and put them in camps. Of course we are humane, and we will put them in eco-camps which are made of redwood trees recently cut down. The never ending bullshit of the media, it just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

Umm, forget 'civility' "tresapassers will shot on sight" and rightly so...

UPDATE: UMM...

go live in Pakistan loser...loser...

Not in Woodinville... at least not yet. The wave hasn't hit there yet.

If the fires had hit just about anywhere else in the USA the builders would be suspects.