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What happens in Bush’s America when you try to express your freedom of speech? If you’re the Vice-President, nothing. If you’re a mere American citizen who’s managed to survive Hurricane Katrina (no thanks to Mr. Cheney or his ‘boss’), you’ll be hunted down by MP’s with M-16s, and handcuffed, while being told that in actuality, you’d broken no laws:

“I am no fan of Mr. Cheney because of several reasons,” Marble wrote. “For those who don’t know, Mr. Cheney is infamous for telling Senator [Pat] Leahy ‘go fu** yourself’ on the Senate floor. Also, I am not happy about the fact that thousands have died due to the slow action of FEMA, not to even mention the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, i.e. Iraq.”

…

As he stood about 10 feet away from Cheney and his friend and some camera operators from CNN and other media filmed the scene, Marble suddenly yelled, “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go fuck yourself, you asshole!”

Hey, at least Marble was polite. After all, he referred to Cheney as “Mr. Cheney.”

“I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr. Cheney’s infamous words back at him,” Marble wrote. “At that moment, I noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back to my former house.”

His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marble’s house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble’s home, two military police waving M-16’s showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit Marble’s description who had cursed at Cheney.

“I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so they put me in handcuffs and ‘detained’ me for about 20 minutes or so,” Marble wrote. “My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go.”

Alvaro R. Morales Villa has posted his Five Days with Katrina, nearly 200 photos he took before, during, and after the hurricane:

On Sunday August 28 I woke up at 5 in the morning to go to my morning job at the Chateu Sonesta Hotel. The night before, we had been warned that Hurricane Katrina was preying her eyes upon us. In the history of New Orleans, there has NEVER been a direct hit by a hurricane. In everyone’s mind, this hurricane would follow the same path that hundreds of past storms had done before. However, because of the size of the storm and ferocity which it tore through South Florida, the citizens of the The Big Easy prepared themselves as best they could… this is my tale of the events…

Too bad I won’t be getting one.

al Qaeda is happy, because the hurricane is God’s wrath against ‘oppressor’ America:

The al Qaeda group in Iraq on Sunday hailed the hurricane deaths in “oppressor” America as the “wrath of God”, according to an Internet statement.

And the American Taliban, Columbia Christians for Life subchapter, is happy because the hurricane is God’s wrath against America for allowing abortions:

the antiabortion group Columbia Christians for Life claimed that Katrina is God’s punishment for America’s tolerance of abortion rights…“God is not mocked. We reap what we sow … The city of New Orleans has sown innocent bloodshed and violence in the womb for years and years and has now reaped bloodshed and violence on her streets. May the people in the city of New Orleans be broken by God’s Holy Law, receive, by God’s grace, his gift of faith … and receive his great salvation through Christ alone, repenting of their sins, and receiving Jesus Christ (Yahshua Messiah) as their Lord and Savior. Hallelu-Yah ! Then, may New Orleans be delivered from her many sins!”

As probably anyone who reads my musings could tell, I’m an athiest. I don’t believe in God. But I find it fascinating that so many people take any given event, and will interpret it as proof that God is on their side; perhaps its God punishing the wicked. I’ve noticed a lot of other supposedly loving Christian groups publicly celebrating the death in New Orleans as God’s punishment for the sinful homosexual parties there.

Of course, the vast majority of the people hurt by Katrina were practically impoverished before the hurricane. They weren’t the people who fly from all over the country to party in Mardi Gras. Many of them are good ‘god-fearing’ folks. But apparently all-knowing, all-powerful, and merciful God will blast their lives to smithereens to punish them for sins of other people. If that’s the God that people worship, then even if I believed in its existence, I certainly wouldn’t worship something like that.

Anyone familiar with motorcycles already knows that they get pretty good fuel economy, on the order of 35-50 mpg. I’ve been keeping an eye out for diesel motorcycles, since the fuel economy for such would be quite a bit higher. There have been various diesel motorbikes around for some time, though sadly there haven’t been any commercially available ones (that I’ve found) in the US.

Well, the military has recently been trying to phase out their gasoline motorcycles, in favor of ones that can run on diesel or kerosene. Enter the M1030M1, a military diesel motorbike. I’ve read about it for some time, and it looks quite nice.

Well, Hayes Diversified Technologies developed it, and they’re using that design to provide a civilian model, the D650A1 “Bulldog”. With a six gallon tank and 102mpg (@55 mph), you’re looking at a six hundred mile range. Add in the fact that its made to run on diesel or biodiesel, and you have a pretty potentially impressive machine. There’s a spec sheet here [pdf]. “Production is scheduled for March of 2006.”

That the Bush administration diverted funds from the rebuilding of the New Orleans levees to Iraq is by now well-known. What you might not have heard is that the people cleaning up the mess are really pissed about it. A tipster informs us that down in New Orleans, they have a name for the flood waters that have invaded the city: Lake George.