Just another day: Is there anybody out there?

Yeah, you can bet that when a major quake smacks the earth, I'll be posting another "Just another day."  Just consider me that quaint, long-haired maniac walking the streets of the blogospherre toting my big sign and crying "The end is near!" except that my hair is really short and I don't have very much of it anymore.  With that, away we go.

• Right in the middle of someone's Chile.  8.8 on Herr Richter's scale.  That's a whopper.  So much so that the folks across the Pacific in Japan (!) are concerned about a tsunami. 
• Not to be outdone.  Japan had their own rocker earlier in the week.  They tagged 7.0 which is itself a doozy but nothing compared to 8.8.  Consider, too, that Japan's construction is a lot more high tech compared with most of Chile's construction.  Japan fared pretty well, overall.  Chile's going to be a mess.  Is the earth burping more than normal?
• Blizzard after blizzard after blizzard.  Few on the east coast are singing, "Let it Snow."  It's been snowing there since December.  We should have had the Winter Olympics in D.C.
• Drudge.  None of these events are new.  It seems every week some "natural" phenomena grab the headlines.  Drudge linked an article to MSNBC asking the question, "Is Nature Out of Control?"  Last year we had tornadoes as abundant "dudes" in a snowboard half-pipe interview.  This winter it's winter capturing everyone's attention.  Then Haiti, Japan, and Chile in the span of a month.  While the article deals with earthquakes (here), all of nature has been heaving. 
  
  What gives?  Roland Emmerich might want us to believe it's because of "2012" or perhaps some bizarre cyclical upheaval that gives rise to "The Day After Tomorrow."  Jesus had other ideas.  He said,
  

  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.

  Nations have been hammering nations for a couple centuries, but the whole deal with the troubled earth seems awfully recent. Some writer at MSNBC seems to think so, too.
• Money, money.  The head of the International Monetary Fund has joined a growing choir calling for a global currency (here).  With the shrinking of international distances, economies seem to be more and more intertwined, like it or not.  Should we move to a global currency, it's a very small step toward nations asking for an international government with oversight over global interactions.  A very small step.  All of this on the heels of the euro's disintegration (here) and America's lethal national debt.
• Animals.  God forgive them.  A dog bites a man, it's put down.  If it does it once, it's likely to do it again.  So will someone please explain to me why an orca that's been involved in three human deaths would be allowed to swim leisurely in its pool (here)?  The supreme idiocy of "animals are people, too" fleshed out for all to see.  One man kills three, he'll be facing lethal injection.  Shamu does it?  He gets an extra-large bucket of herring.  What gives?

Last one, turn the lights out.