• Tag Archives earthquake

  • A Little Late Night Darkness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                     Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    Well.  5.8 earthquake on the EAST coast.  Hurricane Irene bearing down on a direct line with the eastern seaboard.  Astronomers have seen a black hole swallowing a star.

    Coincidence?

    Rapture Index 183
     Net Change    -1

    A fire and brimstone preacher of the old guard would doubtless see these events as apocalyptic messages sent in God’s Old Testament form.  Doubt it.

    Nature continues violent, ruthless and heartless, a force beyond our imagining, a force our understanding cannot diminish and a power our technology cannot dominate.

    We came out of the darkness and will return to the darkness.  These are the messages in these events.  Read them and weep.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • Snow in LA. Earthquake in Indiana. Ice Here. End Times?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                                         Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Headlines you never expected to see:

    Wind gusts topping 90 mph topple trees in L.A. area, blocking roads; snow closes I-15

    Magnitude 3.8 Earthquake Rattles Indiana

    Whoa.  Earthquake.  Indiana?  What the…   Here’s an example of today’s news coverage.  My old buddy Ed Schmidt made a joke on his facebook page about an earthquake.  Just to be sure I checked google.  Sure enough:

    “Officials from the U.S. Geological Survey said an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.2 has been registered in Indiana, just north of Indianapolis near the small (hmmm. where are their fact checkers?) town of Kokomo (46,000+).

    (USGS earthquake epicenter map)

    No damages or injuries were reported as a result of the quake that hit at 6:55 a.m. central time, officials said.

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    Some people in the Chicago area said they felt shaking from the earthquake, though it’s unclear if a 4.2 magnitude quake in Central Indiana could be felt as far west as Cook County…

    The earthquake’s epicenter was about three miles beneath a farm field a short distance south of Pingree Grove, near Route 20 and Switzer Road in western Kane County.

    That quake was caused by a previously unknown fault line that has not generated any shocks since geologists started keeping track 150 years ago.

    In Indiana, Howard County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Rogers says the department was bombarded by phone calls after the quake from people wondering what had happened. He says some people reported hearing a loud boom.

    Indiana University geologist Michael Hamburger told Indianapolis television station WTHR the quake was felt across Central Indiana and into western Ohio. He said the temblor occurred in an area “that’s seismically very quiet.”

    The Indianapolis Star is reporting the quake was felt as far west as New Castle, Indiana, and that items shook off the shelf in Martinsville, located in northeast Indiana.”

    Meanwhile, here there be ice.  Out, out damned ice.  Be gone.  Snow we can deal with, but ice?  Four-wheel drive’s no good, just slipping and sliding out of control.  Skidding into the New Year may be some people’s idea of a good time, but not mine.

    Kate and I had plans to go to the Spectacle shop today and spend year end money left over in our pre-tax medical account.  Will have to wait till tomorrow.  When we go, I plan to get some up to date reading glasses and a new pair of driving glasses with the graduated lens.  Gonna stick with round lenses, not sure why but I’ve come to identify myself with them.  My correction is sort of odd in that I can read without glasses since I have offsetting problems, but now when my eyes get tired or I read a lot of small type, blurring occurs.  In the past, when that happened, I could put on my reading glasses to sharpen things up, but now they’re just enough off that they make things worse.  An aging body is such fun.

    We have a grand-dog in surgery today.  Solly, Jon and Jen’s youngest dog, has some kind of digestive tract problem.  He doesn’t eat and has become thinner and thinner.  Hope he comes out of that ok.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on the news Memories News of the Strange Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Haiti

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                 Waning Moon of Long Nights (New Moon tomorrow)

    The day before the journey.  Not a big journey as things go, but a trip.  Ruthie and Gabe, Jon and Jen.  Family.  As we grow older, family tends to take more and more of our focus.  Why?  Because the work world fades away, home and its memories remain.  This is, I imagine, much as it always has been.  I recall a theory from evolutionary biology that says grandparents were a reason for population increases and longevity increases.  We were around for child care.

    The usual before trip minutiae:  a stuck garage door, cardboard recycling, packing, picking up a connector to make a keyboard usable on the net book.  This and that.

    The death toll in Haiti adds catastrophe to the already multiple problems of a failed state, a failed state within our sphere of influence.  See the Monroe Doctrine.  I’ve not followed Haiti closely so I don’t know the history, how things have become the way they are, but I do know that we have a moral responsibility as a neighbor.

    Acts of God.  Bah, humbug.  These are acts of nature, just like the great Lisbon earthquake in the 18th century.  That one caused a great deal of consternation in various Christian communities.

    “The 1755 Lisbon earthquake (see engraving) created a crisis of faith in Europe and beyond. The catastrophe occurred on a holy day and destroyed many of the city’s magnificent sanctuaries. The destruction caused many to renounce religion; others interpreted the event as a sign of God’s displeasure, thus a sign of His omnipotence. Enlightened souls who considered the world innately good took a jolt. Voltaire contemplated the implications. Immanuel Kant devoted several tracts to Lisbon and its consequences.”

    To read acts of the natural world as anything but what they are is folly.  In Haiti’s case a strike-slip fault–the San Andreas is such a fault–stored up energy since, oddly, about the same time as the Lisbon event, and yesterday a tectonic shift sprung free.  A great analogy in the newspaper compared a strike-slip fault to a person moving a heavy piano.  They push and push and push, nothing happens.  Then, suddenly, the piano moves.  In this instance however the piano then falls on you.

    It is peculiar that we blame God for acts of nature but won’t take responsibility for our own acts against nature, like climate change.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion World History 📎and tagged

  • Theodicy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                      Waning Moon of Long Nights

    Explanations of theodicy run aground on Haiti, just as they do on the Holocaust, Rawandi, Sudan.  When a nation as poor and crippled as Haiti gets hit with a major earthquake, how does one reconcile that with a loving and just God?  No intellectual fancy footwork can answer that question.

    I’m reading a book sent to Kate by Jon, Children of Dust.  It’s a memoir of a young Punjabi who makes several circuits through various perspectives on Islam from conservative to fundamentalist to ethnic and, I understand, eventually out.  This is the second memoir I’ve read recently, the other being Escape, about the FLDS.

    With this one I have doubts about the accuracy of it.  Memoirs are tricky at best, memory changes as we remember, in fact it changes before it becomes solid memory.  Eye witness accounts are, according to some criminologists, the most unreliable testimony.

    There is, of course, the need all of us to be the heroes in our own story,  the need to smooth out the most raggedy parts of our performance as a human being.  There is a desire to be accepted that goes beyond this tendency to encourage putting the very best light on what we do.  In addition, the most memorable moments are emotionally  highly charged and therefore subject to distortion in the moment, much less over time.

    And each of these can loop back on themselves to create another level of distortion.  That is, I admit my tendency to smooth out the raggedy parts so I show you raggedy parts.  In fact, I may make them grimmer than they were in order to convince you I’m honest, which I’m not.  Anyhow, the labyrinth here is difficult at best.

    Children of Dust is worth a read, perhaps less as a memoir than as an impression of the complex lives Muslims live in contemporary world culture.  It succeeds brilliantly in doing that.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Literature Writing 📎and tagged