Firefighters

The artist formerly known as Frau Lobster clued me in to this firefighter expo thing. And to Old Shawnee Days, for that matter.





Excellent.

They had a ton of fire trucks parked at the Adequate Mall, and a police chopper and whatnot. They had bucket races for the firefighters, and a sort of tug-of-war where they competed to push a barrel on a rope with a stream of water from a hose.





The only problem with that even was the firefighters found it too tempting when they were losing to just turn the hose on their opponents.



The state troopers were very proud of their helicopter, including its supposed zero cost to taxpayers.



They explained this was because of drug interdiction seizures. They didn't bust a drug runner using a $2.4 million chopper, they just confiscated that much in cars and cash and whatnot off dope runners.






Which tells me a couple of things. One, that there is more dope being run than could ever be interdicted. This is the futility of a war on drugs, because it's really a war on ourselves. It also tells me that we've really gone way too far in giving away our civil rights for an illusion of security. Nobody is not getting stoned because of this 'war,' but people are having their property seized without due process, and if you let the state get away with this, it's not far off that they'll seize your property on other pretexts.






Sorry to rant, but when a guy can lose his commercial fishing vessel because an employee was caught with a personal stash, we have totally fucked the dog as a society.

The trucks were cool, though. And we got to ride one.



We also so a cool Red Cross vehicle. A big diesel Excursion that's full of radio gear, with a huge tower. It's got like 14 radios, three cell phones, a satellite phone, and so on. It's what lets you get to the outside world when a natural disaster wipes out all means of transmission somewhere.









It's got a 45 gallon tank of diesel and the biggest alternator I've ever seen on a car.