Magnitude 8.0 Earthquake Hits Off Coast Of Chile
[This is just breaking - Updates will be put below as they become available]
Seismic Monitor
Massive 8.0 Quake Off Chile Coast Sparks Tsunami
Quake upgraded to 8.2:
Powerful Earthquake Strikes Off The Coast Of Chile
Some pictures are beginning to emerge:
[This is just breaking - Updates will be put below as they become available]
A major earthquake of magnitude 8.0 struck off the coast of Chile on Tuesday, near the mining area of Iquique, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
It said the quake was very shallow, only 10 kilometres below the seabed, which would have made it feel stronger. It was centred 86 kilometres northwest of Iquique.
A tsunami warning for the Pacific coast of South America has been issued.
Seismic Monitor
Massive 8.0 Quake Off Chile Coast Sparks Tsunami
A major earthquake of magnitude 8.0 struck off the coast of Chile on Tuesday, triggering a tsunami that hit the northern part of the country and a tsunami warning for all of South and Central America's Pacific coast.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was very shallow, only 6.2 miles (10 km) below the seabed, and struck at 6:46 p.m. local time (0046 am BST) 62 miles (99 km) northwest of the mining port of Iquique, near the Peruvian border.
The Chilean navy said the first tsunami wave had hit the coast within 45 minutes of the quake.
"An earthquake of this size has the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that can strike coastlines near the epicentre within minutes and more distant coastlines within hours," the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.
Iquique is a key copper exporting port, close to the country's main copper mines. Mining companies Codelco and BHP Billiton said that had not yet received reports of damage to mines.
The warning said that aside from Chile, the coasts of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua were also at risk. A tsunami of up to 6.3 feet (1.92 metres) could strike the town of Pisagua, Chile, within 44 minutes of the quake, it said.
Quake upgraded to 8.2:
Powerful Earthquake Strikes Off The Coast Of Chile
Some pictures are beginning to emerge:
Large Earthquake Strikes Off Coast Of Chile, Tsunami Warnings
[Fortunately, at this point there appears to be no major damage or loss of life]
[Fortunately, at this point there appears to be no major damage or loss of life]
I'm getting a late start today (or an early start for tomorrow) so this site will be constantly updated throughout the evening.
First up is a very interesting story. It may mean nothing, but it seems unusual, especially in light of the recent earthquakes in the region. Take a look at the video:
A number of bloggers are posting videos that show bison and other animals allegedly leaving Yellowstone National Park, prompting theories that as earthquakes ramp up the seismic activity will set off the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Two of the main bloggers behind the discussion stress that there’s no way to know when the supervolcano will go off but note that the 4.8 magnitude earthquake that hit on March 30 seemed to set off a reaction from the animals, who are moving for a reason.
“Whether I believe this, or whether I don’t believe the story or not, I don’t know. I can tell you this story I saw this morning about the buffaloes running the street … whether or not it’s because of any activity in Yellowstone or not, I don’t know,” said blogger Jay Lee, who posted a story on his site tatoott1009.com.
“But I’ll tell you this, whatever the case may be, that their running away from Yellowstone is an alert of some sort.”
This map from the U.S. Geological Service shows the range of the volcanic ash that was deposited after the biggest of the Yellowstone National Park eruptions around 2.1 million years ago. "These eruptions left behind huge volcanic depressions called “calderas” and spread volcanic ash over large parts of North America," it said. "If another large caldera-forming eruption were to occur at Yellowstone, its effects would be worldwide. Thick ash deposits would bury vast areas of the United States, and injection of huge volumes of volcanic gases into the atmosphere could drastically affect global climate. Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption in the near future. In fact, the probability of any such event occurring at Yellowstone within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low."
Tom Lupshu, who describes himself as a “noted Ohio survivalist and search-and-rescue expert,” said on YouTube that nearly one quarter of the northern elk herd at Yellowstone National Park are missing, according to the annual winter count.
“Biologists aren’t sure if there’s been a stunning decline in the herd or if other factors have skewed the tally,” he said. “Current Helium releases at 1000 times above normal. Complete media blackout. Herds of bison running for their lives on the public roadways and they were not being chased or rounded up, the bison were running down the mountain slopes onto roadways running right past a filming crew. They detect something vast and deadly. The Yellowstone Supervolcano is the only thing there that would fit the bill.”
Lupshu said in a later video that scientists say they can’t predict when the Supervolcano will erupt.
“But one thing is for sure. The more the Earthquakes in the region, the more are the chances of the volcano being activated from its dormant state. Last time an earthquake struck in 1980. But the force of nature has acted up once again.”
The supervolcano refers to the huge magma chamber beneath the park, which is in Wyoming.
The Daily Bell: The Quest For World Peace
[This article is interesting because it traces the origins of this "globalism" movement to the WWI era - which is the period that many of us believe marked the beginning of the last generation - as the initial birth pains, as given by Jesus in the Olivet Discourse all spikes in previously unprecedented numbers]
For almost a century, since the end of the First World War in 1918, mankind has been in search of international order and global peace through the political method of international organization. However, instead of peace among men, the last one hundred years has seen almost unending wars, great and small. Maybe it is because men have looked for peace from government rather than from a rebirth of the philosophy of individualism and classical liberalism.
In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the League of Nations was seen as the great hope for world peace and security. Its failure in the years between the two world wars (1919-1939) was taken as proof that a better and stronger organization was needed if yet a third world war was to be prevented.
Out of the ashes of World War II emerged the United Nations. Once again were heard the heralds proclaiming that world peace and security were in man's reach. And, once more, mankind's hopes were dashed during the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In the post-Cold War era since 1991, the world has been in search of global peace once again. It has taken the form of United Nations or NATO political and military interventions in various parts of the world. And, sometimes, it has been in the form of unilateral military actions by the United States and others countries when they have declared it to be in their "national interests."
But the quest for world peace through either political internationalism or unilateralism is a false path to the goal of ending global conflicts.
During the twentieth century, when peace was pursued through international organizations such as the League of Nations and the UN, the world suffered from wars, civil wars, and mass murders on a scale that practically exceeds the capacity of the human mind to comprehend.
Wars and domestic political murder by governments around the world may have resulted in the deaths of more than 300 million people during the last one hundred years.
Less Government Equaled Global Order
In stark contrast, during the one hundred years between 1815 and 1914, when no global political organizations for world peace existed, wars were few in number, relatively short in duration, and, compared with the twentieth century, fairly limited in their destructive effects on human life and property.
(The American Civil War of the 1860s, with more than 600,000 deaths was one striking exception to this pattern.)
Collectivism Meant Less Freedom and More Conflict
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, another idea began to challenge and finally superseded the classical-liberal ideal. That idea was political and economic collectivism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it took various forms: Marxian socialism,fascism, Nazism, welfare statism, social democracy, neo-mercantilism, protectionism and imperialism.
It was the new idea of collectivism that set the world on the course that led to the First World War. Leading up to the war were the drive for monopolized markets; domestic regulation of trade and commerce; militarization of international relationships; the ascendancy of "great-power" politics to which individual interests were to be subservient; individual obedience to the interests of the state; and welfare statism, with its nationalization of income and redistribution of wealth.
The First World War dramatically reinforced these tendencies in a way that permanently brought an end to the classical-liberal era. It also ended the particular conditions that were conducive to international peace.
In the collectivist era of the twentieth century, everything became an affair of state because nothing was outside of political consideration. Trade and commerce were no longer matters of private individuals searching for mutually advantageous gains from trade; instead they became issues of national prosperity, national employment, national industrial development, and national standards of living.
Ownership and control of resources and raw materials in various parts of the world became matters of "national security," as they had been under the older mercantilism, before classical liberalism had freed and privatized the economic and international affairs of life.
Every aspect of life, every human relationship, every form of commerce, enterprise and exchange was politicized once again. Once more they were made affairs of state, rather than matters of private agreement and competition for improvement of the human condition.
What motivated the shift from classical liberalism to the collectivist era?
The Danger of Special Interests and Social Engineers
Two forces came into play in the twentieth century. First was the power of special interests and the second was the appeal of the social engineer.
The principle of the equality of individual rights for all before the law was replaced with the idea of group privileges and entitlements for some at the expense of others at home and abroad. Rather than the "umpire" enforcing the "rules of the game" of respected individual rights for all, the government became an engine for redistributions, regulations and controls to benefit pitting groups within nations against each other for political favors, as well as conflicts between nations wishing to plunder each other.
Adam Smith's conception of a system of natural liberty under which every man was free to peacefully follow his own interests, with the cumulative results of men's interactions generating a spontaneous order of human relationships, was replaced with the hubris of the government planner who considered himself wise and knowledgeable enough to reorder society according to his higher vision of the proper, fair and just relationships that should prevail among men.
The fetish of the social engineer did not pass away with Nazism in World War II or with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. It is the essence of the welfare state and has been the implicit agenda behind America's and other country's military interventions around the world both during and since the end of the Cold War.
Whether such foreign intervention is undertaken unilaterally by the United States or jointly by several nations under an aegis such as NATO's or even in the name of the entire world with authorization from the UN, the attempt to bring peace and order in the present era will invariably fail to achieve all that is hoped from it.
The fundamental reason for this continuing failure is that such peace and order can be established on a permanent basis only in a world in which classical-liberal ideas once more predominate.
Freedom Makes for World Peace, Not Social Engineers
But an understanding of a free society and ultimately its establishment cannot be socially engineered, centrally planned, or coercively imposed. It must grow within each individual.
When a sufficient number of people within a society come to share that common vision of a free civil and market society based on a respect for individual rights, with government simply the protector of those "rules of the game," then the institutional changes will develop to transform that society into a community of free men.
This is made more difficult when the leading nation espousing a restructuring of the world has itself lost any real understanding of the meaning of freedom. How can America teach other countries and remold them into models of freedom when America itself has lost an understanding of what freedom means?
Can freedom mean government-supplied health care, government standardization of education across the nation, politically motivated favors and privileges for special-interest groups, government surveillance of and intrusion into the private affairs of ordinary citizens, regulation of industry and commerce, arrests and indefinite imprisonment without charges and growing tax burdens to pay for the costs of domestic and foreign interventionist policies?
How can freedom be taught and planned for others when in these and many other areas neither Americans nor Europeans have any real and clear understanding of what freedom means and requires in everyday daily life?
And can how foreign political and military intervention be free of both justifiable and false suspicions concerning the motives of the interventionists on the part of those being "liberated" when the intervening governments involve themselves in various domestic and international affairs precisely to use their power to benefit some at the expense of others?
Only a real and successful rebirth of the classical-liberal ideas of individual freedom, private property, impartial rule of law, freedom of trade at home and abroad and strictly limited government can bring about a world of peace.
Only when these ideas are once again believed in, direct men's choices and are established will the world reduce and eliminate the primary reasons that governments go to war with each other or that men fight civil wars against each other within their own countries.
Only then will the preconditions be present for the type of world community of peaceful nations that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical liberal friends of freedom envisaged and partly brought into existence in that earlier epoch of human history.
No Peace in the World Without Freedom in Practice
Until then wars and civil wars will continue to break out and wreak havoc upon the world. And even the might of the most powerful nations in the world cannot prevent them from happening or eliminate their causes.
