High tide

It's not high tide, is it? No, it's a fucking tidal wave come to carry off your house, your resort, and your youngest daughters. It also carried off boats, Hindus bathing as part of a ritual, fishermen, tourists in bermuda shorts, sunbathers, government bureaucrats with canteens full of whiskey along with their bureaucracies. I think it's pretty obvious I'm talking about that earthquake yesterday, the strongest in 40 years. That's pretty significant.

It's not really the human tragedy I want to focus on, even if as of right now it stands at 23,000 dead. (The numbers keep getting revised upward every few hours, and I don't expect they'll top out anytime soon.) Human population growth will replace those people in a few hours at most. (If you're a reincarnation believer, it will dump the majority of them in squalid third-world countries.) The real problem is this is just the kind of thing that shakes people's faith in God. The argument from natural disasters is pretty solid. As a counterargument, I would not be surprised if the American government made an earthquake machine, which would collapse at least the earthquake aspect of natual disasters to human agency, for which free will can account for pretty readily. This paragraph has been too heavily influenced by bad action movies, in particular one involving Steven Segal on a train.

Consider: "the earthquake was so powerful that it slightly disrupted the Earth's rotation. In essence, it is messing with time. The cumulative effects of a minor hiccup in rotation might not be visible until thousands of years in the future. Who knows? This could mean that dawn is at 9 p.m. for Torontonians 20,000 years from now. If we live that long."