Thursday, September 08, 2005

So who were the five people shot dead anyways?

Nobody seems to know for sure if they were contractors or looters but one thing for sure, the story very quietly changed while nobody was looking.

Here's what Spero News has to say and here's what Nicholas Stix has to say.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Katrina Disinformation

I seems like there is a lot of bogus information on the wire these days about what's up in Louisiana. For a couple of hours I saw an AP piece about how the 7 looters that were shot and killed were actually construction contractors, somehow that story got magically erased. How about those stories about rape and murder of kids? Why is it that the Guardian says it's bunk?

Despite all that crap, I just can't believe that the US gov't let hundreds of thousands of people rot without food or water for four freaking days. It doesn't take a logistical genius to figure out how to move that stuff out there when you've had four full days of warning . That's an eight day response to total carnage, pathetic. Would the same thing happen if it was NYC, DC or Chicago? Probably not, jump to your own conclusions why that is.

Whoever is in charge of FEMA should be criminally charged because this is probably the most catastrophic and avoidable failure of it's kind that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

If it was up to me, there'd be loaded planes, boats and choppers on the ground ready to go well before the storms hit. Didn't anybody learn anything from the last hundred years of major disasters?

How I spent my labor day weekend part 1. Lets see, I did a little motocross and crashed a whole bunch until my radiator broke and then I spent 2 days boating and surfing my brains out. Couldn't have asked for more. Posted by Picasa

There's some crazy static on that there trampoline. Posted by Picasa

This was pretty much what I did all weekend Posted by Picasa

Ballast in back. Posted by Picasa

Ballast in front Posted by Picasa

What happens when you take nine people, a thousand pounds of ballast, and a couple of monkeys hanging off a tower and stick them in a Nautique? Posted by Picasa

You end up with a wake four feet high Posted by Picasa

Monster ass wake Posted by Picasa

Monday ballast Posted by Picasa

Chucky D, the Budweiser poster boy. Posted by Picasa

Here's my deep water video camera rig. It's still a little leaky but nearly ready for her maiden voyage. I'm calling it the diving duck. Posted by Picasa

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Pressure Cooker

It's quite unbelievable to see how bad things are in the southern states. Besides the total mayhem that the storm brought about, there seems to be anarchy settling in with mass lootings, arson and all out chaos. There are stories floating around the wire about police looting and helping looters, hospitals being bunkered because of looter riots and people shooting at rescue helicopters. WTF?? In Montreal, about six years ago (maybe 7), the city got shut down by a week long ice storm that covered us in 8 inches of ice. Power was out everywhere and everything was shut down. Instead of looting, we had a massive outreach of compassion where everybody seemed to help everybody else out. I had electricity through it all and had half a dozen people living in my tiny apartment and then we moved into my office when the power went out. So why is it that things are so different down south? I would guess that the biggest reason is that poverty is so pervasive there that losing everything doesn't mean all that much if you don't have much to start with. The one time that I did spend in the bayou, I saw things that were impossible here. There were people living in shanty towns set up in ditches and underpasses. There were families frying food out of the back of their cars with kids playing barefoot in the muck. It's too cold for that here and for the most part, the homeless people here are mostly kids, alcoholics and out patients, not functioning families.

It's easy for us here to say how great we were to each other during our disasters as none of us grew up in a steel hut under an overpass. Here, we're too rich and fortunate for looting and arson, we only do that after hockey games.