and, one may even point out that there's a full moon and the solstice happening at the same time, which is just producing that much more stress....

remember: gravity destroys everything in the end.

resistance is futile.

"The more destructive earthquakes of magnitude 5.0–6.0 appear to be significantly impacted by solar activity. The phase of the seismic frequency enhancement is concentrated on or near the winter solstice,"

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11589-013-0023-2

you have to remember that the earth never knows where the turn is - it thinks it's moving in a straight line. well, relative to the curvature in space, of course. i know i shouldn't anthropomorphize celestial bodies, especially not on christmas, but the point is that the rotation isn't graceful, or planned out like you would imagine if you were running a race track - the earth is passed out at the wheel. it's nothing like the perfect circle you see in these newtonian diagrams, it's an elongated oval.

so, it's more like that all of the momentum of the earth is pushing directly forward, as though the earth is falling away from the sun (even as it is being propelled forward by it), until it gets to the point where it nearly escapes, and then gets thrown back the other way, like a boomerang.

a boomerang. imagine a boomerang returning back whence it came. that's the earth at the solstice...

so, it's not hard to imagine how these fractures in the crust may end up dealing with stress from that, especially near the equator.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-astronomical-tidal-forces-trigger-earthquakes/

that tsunami in bangladesh happened around christmas too, didn't it?

there are going to be conspiracy theories. i just want to get in before them...

it is not completely outside of the realm of possibility that some evil coalition of republicans in the pentagon is getting off on beating down the heathens at the solstice; earthquake technology would be about the same thing as volcano technology, it is not hard to imagine how it might function and it would need to be tested. i neither offer any proof of this, nor do i think it particularly likely, but it cannot be ruled out a priori - this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, that ought to be explored.

i more just want to point out that there's actually a naturalistic explanation, surrounding the solstice, as the gravitational forces on the earth are experiencing a kind of whiplash around this date. yearly. hey, it's not that different than the milankovitch theory. and, while tidal drag is not the mainstream consensus as the mechanism of tectonic activity, people tend not to realize that we actually don't have a good mechanistic theory at all (what we know about subduction is mostly observational, not causal - we don't have anything close to a predictive model on tectonic activity), and that tidal drag was actually the mechanism initially proposed by alfred wegener. i have to have this argument once in a while with these neckbeards that think they're debunking astrology; tidal drag is actually an existing research question, and it does have some promising potential.

the idea would be that the reason this happened in about the same place at about the same time of year is that the earth went through about the same fluctuations in the gravitational field, leading to about the same fracture in the crust.

and, i think it's important to recognize on christmas just how dangerously in motion we really are, being flung around this star, wobbling, in constant threat of being pulled apart and flung out into the galaxy....

you could do a calculation and try and determine how likely it is that it's a coincidence; i won't bother.  i might say something about how the universe doesn't give a fuck about your ratios - as evidenced by the inevitable contradiction, and then use that to undermine the model. but, perhaps the more cogent observation is that it isn't a coincidence at all - that there's physics here to unravel.

fuck your god.

but happy solstice.

yeah.

the problem is you told them to stop printing money, donald.

i don't own any stocks. but, if you want to reverse this, a return to quantitative easing is required.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/trump-fed-only-problem-our-economy-has-2018-12-1027831518

it's the time of the year to enjoy some of the classics.

so, i forgot that most bourgeois and government things are closed this week.

i don't have any problems with acknowledging the solstice, but aren't we all a little too old for christmas? isn't the society too old for christmas? the culture? aren't we beyond this? can't we all grow up a little?

we have this weird holiday in canada called "boxing day", so i won't be able to make any calls until thursday. but, i'm planning on kind of pivoting on thursday morning, too.

i've been sleeping for the better part of the last week; outside of a grocery run on saturday morning, i've barely been awake since wednesday, except to eat. i kind of want to get back to rebuilding, but i'm still having a hard time staying awake.

i want to be clear on the point about my father's estate. i was offered the role of executor, but turned it down, as i expected to be on long term disability. in ontario, the government either seizes assets or throws you off disability, and on a certain level i actually agree - if you can effectively execute an estate, you're not very disabled. i don't know exactly what the will says. but, the agreement we came to was not designed to exclude me, but rather to get around the government in a way that would ensure i wasn't excluded, because he couldn't leave me money directly.

my father didn't like my politics, but he's one of the few people that understood them, because he had so much exposure, and such an opportunity to do so - and you can imagine that a moderately conservative parent would have these kinds of arguments about finances and employment with their anarchist child, so long as the level of discourse can remain respectful, and it usually did. he wanted me to embrace a normal life of capitalist excess, and found it frustrating that i refused to, but i think i got through to him well enough that he understood that i wanted a way out of all of that, rather than the thing itself...

and, i would still rather get a disability check than go after my step-mother or sister regarding mismanagement or broken promises. i don't want my dead father's money. i want a guaranteed income. but, i have to adjust to what the state is doing, whether i like it or not.

he didn't have millions of dollars to leave me; i'm sure he would have, if he did. what he could do is what he did - he sat me down with my stepmother and had her agree to wire me "gifts" on a regular basis. it's a henson trust in theory, without the actual trust. and, maybe i was naive to believe her, and maybe he was naive to suggest it, but there wasn't another reasonable option - i was not able to work, and am still not able to work, and could consequently not accept the magnitude of funds on offer without losing access to required long term benefits.

as mentioned: i don't expect anything has been probated, yet. i'll find out near the end of the week.

see, the american media calls these people "political prisoners", but the truth is that they're mostly fundamentalist jihadist extremists that would shoot you on the street for belonging to the wrong cult, or eating the wrong thing, or having sex with the wrong person.

to be clear: this is a sensationalist report that may very well essentially be bullshit designed to influence donald trump. as journalism, it's pretty lacking. it's not unbelievable, though.

but, had the outcome been the other way, there'd be just as many - probably many more - dead secularists executed in poorly run jails for breaking sharia law, and some of these people would be the executioners.

it's the nature of this kind of a war - a lot of people are going to die. you need to look at it like this: at the end day, there's little comparison in terms of death counts, when you compare the secular and religious regimes. if what the post is saying is even true, this is a brutal means to an end, but the end is worth striving for.

you can't stamp out religion with force. but, sometimes, there's little option but to try....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/syria-bodies/