7.2 Earthquake Strikes Mexicali

Yesterday at 3:40 we had a 7.2 earthquake centered just southwest of Mexicali just across the border in the Imperial Valley. Actually the damage doesn’t seem that great considering it’s the biggest earthquake to hit this area since the Landers earthquake in June of 1992 at a 7.3, which was larger than I remember. They showed lots of scenes of water sloshing in swimming pools however when I was back in the apartment there was a lot more sloshing action in the pool with both the Landers and the Northridge earthquakes in 1994. Lucy Jones was the Cal Tech spokeswoman getting a lot of air time and there is stuff even I, who has lived here a long time, didn’t know. This was a 7.2 quake upgrated from a 6.9. It is a strike slip fault action meaning you have sideways rather than vertical ground movement. They showed cracks in the roads however – with Northridge I think you had cracks of several feet rather than several inches. There seemed to be little building destruction but mostly just cracks and obvious structural damage. She said that the slide action was northward and probably crossed the border, which is why we felt it so strongly to the north. The quake was also felt as far away as Las Vegas and Phoenix. San Diego felt it more strongly than we did. She said there was a five percent chance of a bigger quake but these odds tick down minute by minute. She said the Landers quake was rich in “triggered earthquakes” in the five point range. You had trouble escaping coverage last evening as it was on all the major stations even pre empting the Network news. Of course most of us felt it here though James and Paul said they didn’t. It was apparently felt more strongly on the second floor than the first, where a lot of people were at that Kerioke gathering. Will said that the chandeliers in the upper room were swinging wildly and objects were sliding around in his room. Of course at the time I was right here at the computer and felt the earthquake as a broad swaying motion such as you might experience from a wind blown high rise. I haven’t called Mom yet but I imagine the quake was just a little stronger down south where she lives.

I had KOLA on before seven. “Sixty Minutes” had this rediculas notion of patenting the human genome. There are a substantial portion of human genes, maybe a quarter of them, that have been “patented”. This idea got started when a court in 1980 allowed some microbe used to clean up oil spills to be patented. Now women suffering from breast and ovarian cancers can’t get the treatment they need because it will cost them a lot of money because only out outfit holds the patent on all genetic testing. We will pray that a wiser court overturns the foolish 1980 decision. However is Justice Stevens resigns this year, Obama will have to be on his toes to make sure and get a liberal that this Senate with all its intransigent Republicans will approve.

President Bush is still President as far as the people in Uganda are concerned. I knew those people were backward but come on! They are all grateful to president Bush for distributing some anti AIDS pills people take by the handful to cure AIDS and bring people back from the brink of death. Their slogan in Uganda is AFC, which doesn’t stand for automatic frequency control. It stands for abstenance, fidelity, and condoms ad a back-up plan. But there are so many Christians in Uganda I sure didn’t know about that now there is a sweeping campaign that isn’t working to try and get Uganda’s young people to walk the straight and narrow moral path. OK. But what if your spouse gets infected?

And there is some new smokeless tobacco product that college students here are using when they can’t smoke. A lot of times they will combine the product with cigarette smoking. Anti smoking laws have become so oppressive that smokers need some sort of “fix” to get them through the day, that doesn’t involve tobacco spitting. Nicotine addiction in itself doesn’t cause all of the lung cancer and COPD that cigarettes do.

The dirty little secret about this economy is even if we do get some real recovery action going, as Thom Hartman and others say, it will be just another economic “bubble” that will burst in the near future and we will be right back where we were in September of 2008 only worse. Nobody is talking about real banking reform or any sort of restoration of the financial regulations we had in this country up through the late 1990’s. Glass-Stiegel is not going to be reinstated. I think Obama must be hoping that if there is another major economic bust it will be on January 21^st of 2017 after he’s left office.