Missile launch: President Obama calls for UN to take action after North Korea fires off its missile.
Five children found dead: Bodies discovered in Pierce County mobile home, father apparently killed his children and then himself.
Talking sense: Restrictions to be loosened on Americans traveling to Cuba.
Big catch: Somali pirates seize German cargo ship.
Explosion in Pakistan: At least 20 people are dead after a suicide bombing outside a Shia mosque.
Shell game: Man sues Shell for alleged human rights abuses in Nigeria.
No more dancing: Choreographer who appeared on “So You Think You Can Dance” has been arrested for allegedly raping four women.
Violent humans attack pit bulls: Pit bull found strangled and tied to tree in Thurston County, another was “dragged and dumped” at a Goodwill.
Murder in Seattle: Man beaten near Pike Place Market last week dies from his injuries.
Still erupting: Mount Redoubt sends an ash plume 50,000 feet into the air.
Comics and murder: Green River killings to become a graphic novel.
I have a few of questions for that gun nut who was ranting in the comments the other day about how great guns were:
1. Where were all the gun-totin’ nuts who are supposedly “protecting us all” when the guy in Graham tragically shot his five kids, and why didn’t they stop him?
2. Where were all the gun-totin’ nuts when the crazy in Philadelphia laid in wait with a fuckin’ assault rifle and killed three cops? Why didn’t all the gun-totin’ masses supposedly protecting us stop him?
3. Where were all the gun-totin’ nuts when the guy in NY killed 13 people at a school, and why didn’t the gun nuts stop him?
Bonus question: During the past three days when these nutjobs with guns killed twenty people, how many crimes did the gun-totin’ nuts claim they prevented? Please provide proof.
I blame left-wing crazies in the media for encouraging this latest spate of man-on-pitbull violence.
@1, the “gun nut”/”anti-union nut”/”anti-obama nut”, etc. is all the same troll that’s been haunting Slog since at least the primaries last year
Re Mt. Redoubt: as a former geologist I should point out that eruptions like Redoubt & St. Helens & Pinatubo in the Phillipines were NOTHING (like, 1/10,000th – 1/1000th) compared to the eruptions millions of years ago that layed down the volcanic rocks we see here in the PNW. Krakatoa in Indonesia (188?) was REALLY huge compared to the eruptions we’ve seen in the last 30 yrs, but still only about 1/100th of the older eruptions. And we’ll get another one of those, sometime.
Societal chaos caused by economic upheaval? Meh. Try surviving in total darkness all the time because the sun is blocked out, for 5, or 10, or 50 years. That is, if you weren’t incinerated by a 1000 degree cloud of glowing ash, or crushed by a car-sized rock ejected from a volcano first. I’ll put money on that kind of scenario as “the end of mankind.” It’s the sort of thing where NO kind of technology short of evacuating the planet will save us.
Nature is a bitch.
Chris@4:
…much less the 4x increase in earthquakes and uplift rates that have been going on at Yellowstone. Parts of the park are now rising 2-3″ per year! This is bad news for humans.
@5: I’m not a geologist, but I’d assume that apart from hot spots like Yellowstone, any kind of ramp-up of geological activity will take place on, you know, geological time.
It’s a reminder that we won’t be around for ever, but I doubt we’re in for global volcanic catastrophe any time this millennium. Climate change is the much more immediate problem.
I met Ken Wiwa a few times, and the whole story of Ken Saro-Wiwa is a fucking travesty. What’s truly horrific is that when your dad was slaughtered by an oil company and you’re living in Toronto, Canada, you live with the reminder of his killer on every street corner.
“The flames of Shell are flames of Hell,
We bask below their light,
Nought for us to serve the blight,
Of cursed neglect and cursed Shell.”
@ Lee,
I doubt we’re in for global volcanic catastrophe any time this millennium, too. But I do think we’re in for several craptastic global volcanic catastrophe movies this summer.
So our new strategy is to whine to the UN?
@6: it’s not an “either or.” One can act decisively on global warming while keeping a nervous eye on Yellowstone Caldera uplifting. And of course, there’s nothing one can do about the second, except maybe adjust travel and living arrangements accordingly.
By the way- did Mt. St. Helen’s act on a “geologic time?” Or did it massively erupt just two months after the first signs of activity?
@4:
Here’s the real scenario to worry about, because it has a non-trivial chance of happening in our lifetimes:
12:10pm- Cascadia Subduction Earthquake. A portion of the North American tectonic plate, bulged up by the Juan de Fuca plate caught sliding eastward underneath is, snaps flat as it has done every 300-400 years for millenia. From the BC border to northern CA, land drops a half foot over the course of 5-7 minutes. This produces accelerations on the order of 1/4 to 1/2 gee, but the shaking just goes on and on and on.
Approximately one quarter of the bridges in the effected area fail. Metal skyscrapers (and the Needle) sway and lose windows, but stay upright. Brick structures collapse into rubble. All of them. Tens of thousand, perhaps hundreds of thousands, die immediately.
Distributed power loss is total, as falling trees decimate the grid.
12:20pm: the subduction-spawned tsunami (a la the “Dec 26” 2006 Andaman Islands quake) breaks at 30-60′ all along the effected coast. Fortunately the coasts are sparsely populated, but still tens of thousands more die, particularly in Eureka, Crescent City, Coos Bay, Astoria, and Aberdeen.
12:35pm: the remnants of the tsunami, having been partially dissipated by the islands and the right turn at Whidby Island, hit Seattle. The surge is 10-15′. Almost no one is killed, because there has been time to evactuate uphill, but the port and ferry facilities are destroyed, and King Co airport is flooded. Billions of dollars in damage.
1:30pm: the real shit hits the fan. The half foot of downward motion of the North American plate causes an increase in the pressure of the molten magma underneath. The magma comes out the only place it can: the Cascade volcanoes.
(If this seems far fetched, remember that the Andaman Island volcanoes started erupting as a result of the 2006 earthquake.)
Rainier erupts from a vent near Gibraltar Rock. Ejecta and pyroclastic flow kill everyone at Sunrise and Paradise. The blast travels high into the atmosphere, shutting down all air travel and beginning a gray rain of ash that will last days, and will destroy many homes.
Ejecta heats the glaciers, and they start sloughing their ways down the river valleys around Rainier. The ice mixes with soil to make a cement like mud. All communication near the mountain is lost, but the Pierce County Lahar Warning System seismometers detect the low frequency vibrations of the advancing mud. But without power, no warnings go out, and the first sign of impending disaster is the sound of buildings and trees collapsing upriver. The mud moves at about 30 miles per hour.
Carbonado gets a fifty foot wall of mud. At Orting it’s thirty feet.
Glacier Peak has a similar result. Only there’s no lahar warning system, and the residents of Darrington are simply swept away.
2:30pm – the lahars are halfway to the ocean. Emergency management folks understand the danger, and are frantically trying to evacuate the lowlands. There is panic in Mt Vernon and Sedro-Woolley. It’s much, much worse in Tacoma, where most of the rivers off the mountain meet before entering Commecement Bay. People don’t understand which areas are in iminent danger (the lowlands) and relatively safe (any place more than 50′ above the valleys.)
(Don’t believe it? You don’t even need an earthquake or volcanic eruption to get a lahar- though that helps- and the USGS thinks a lahar through Commencement Bay is the equivilent to a “hundred year flood” risk.)
3:30pm – the lahars reach Skagit and Commencement Bays. It’s only 10-15 feet tall is this point, but all bridges, all power structures, all buildings, and all people in their path are destroyed. Tens of thousands more die, and tens of billions of dollars more damage is done.
4:00pm- Tens of thousands in the Puget Sound area are dead, with perhaps another one hundred thousand injured and in need of immediate assistance. Emergency services are completely and utterly overwhelmed. Travel is effectively impossible due to destroyed bridges and downed trees and buildings. Devestation extends hundreds of miles north and south, and no help will be coming from those directions. The passes are closed because of the ash and the bridges. Nothing can get in by air, because of the ash, or by boat, because of the destroyed port facilities, or by truck because of the destroyed bridges.
The three million Puget Sound residents are on their own, perhaps for weeks, with only as much food and supplies as they have in their kitchens, or can buy/barter/loot from the local grocery store.
It seems unlikely that even a Cascadia quake would trigger a large eruption from Rainier on the same day. Although there is some speculation on how the Chile megathrust quake of 1960 may have tectonically forced the recent eruptions at Chaiten volcano. It’s rhyolitic, the magma type responsible for the most violent eruptions on Earth, and hasn’t been active in 9000 years. If she really goes, global climate won’t respond kindly.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The odds of North Korea dropping a nuke on Seattle are actually significantly higher.
@8 1997 beat you to it. That was the year of Dante’s Peak and Volcano.
11 Actually that scenario is ‘What happens the day after Washington legalizes Gay Marriage’.
@11: Where is that scenario from?
I increase the reward to $10,000 for info on the pitbull killer…NOT just b/c it’s a pit bull, but b/c this kind of violence towards animals is an indicator of MAJOR MENTAL ILLNESS or perhaps an indicator of an angry dog fighter who could not get his dogs to fight.
Either way it makes me BEYOND SICK.