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Showing posts with label Irene. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irene. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Bloomberg Stated Looters To Be Sent To Internment Camps & Nuclear Explosion In Tunnels Caused Quakes In Colorado & Virginia.

"In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg chose not to evacuate the criminals in Rikers Island, according to Mother Jones. The mayor has also warned that any looters caught during or in the wake of the storm will be placed in internment camps. This raises questions about the role of law enforcement and order during a natural disaster. It also raises questions about the psychology of looting and rioting which occur after most natural disasters."
http://news.yahoo.com/crime-wake-hurricane-irene-151209892.html

An internment camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, enemy aliens, people with mental illness, members of specific ethnic or religious groups, civilian inhabitants of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, usually during a war. The term is used for facilities where the inmates were selected by some generalized criteria, rather than detained as individuals after due process of law fairly applied by a judiciary.

Internment is the imprisonment or confinement[1] of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives the meaning as: "The action of 'interning'; confinement within the limits of a country or place." Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction between internment, which is being confined usually for preventive or political reasons, and imprisonment, which is being closely confined as a punishment for crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment


Internment / Resettlement Specialist (31E)

  • Enlisted
  • Officer
  • Active Duty
  • Army Reserve
Internment/Resettlement (I/R) Specialists in the Army are primarily responsible for day-to-day operations in a military confinement/correctional facility or detention/internment facility. I/R Specialists provide rehabilitative, health, welfare, and security to U.S. military prisoners within a confinement or correctional facility; conduct inspections; prepare written reports; and coordinate activities of prisoners/internees and staff personnel.

Some of your duties as an Internment/Resettlement Specialist may include:
  • Assist with the supervision and management of confinement and detention operations
  • Provide external security to confinement/corrections facilities or detention/internment facilities
  • Provide counseling and guidance to individual prisoners within a rehabilitative program
  • Prepare or review reports and records of prisoners/internees and programs
http://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/browse-career-and-job-categories/legal-and-law-enforcement/internment-resettlement-specialist.html



 





"It's not just us nutters saying it now: Mayor Bloomberg publicly stated that looters in the wake of tropical storm Irene will be detained in INTERNMENT CAMPS. Yes, that was the term he used!

Besides that excuse for a drill, aka 'Irene', the government (?) has been up to some bizarre tricks including setting off a nuke to blow up their own underground military tunnels, which caused the quake in Virginia last week."

Death toll from Hurricane Irene rises to 18: officials

Agence France-Presse August 28, 2011

‘Never Again,’ Again 

published in 2008

Hurricane Gustav gave the state of Louisiana a test for which it had three years to prepare. There were thousands of poor, sick, disabled and elderly people who could not get out on their own. They needed to be rescued with dispatch, and sheltered in safety and dignity. 

One simple test. The state flunked.

Three years to the week after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, Louisiana executed a fundamentally unfair evacuation plan and did it badly. It relied on dividing the population into separate streams: People with their own cars were directed to shelters run by parishes, churches and the Red Cross. People with medical problems not requiring hospitalization were taken to special shelters. Sex offenders had a shelter to themselves. 

All those without a car or a ride were taken on state buses to four state-run warehouses. It was in these shelters, including two abandoned stores, a Wal-Mart and a Sam’s Club, that thousands of working-poor New Orleanians got a sickening reminder of Katrina.

Evacuees said they had had no idea where they were going; bus drivers would not tell them. When they arrived, there were not enough portable toilets, and no showers. For five days there was no way to bathe, except with bottled water in filthy outdoor toilets. Privacy in the vast open space — 1,000 people to a warehouse, shoulder-to-shoulder on cots — was nonexistent. The mood among evacuees was grim, surrounded as they were by police officers and the National Guard, with no visitors or reporters allowed.
“We didn’t want to evacuate into a prison,” Lethia Brooks told the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, an organization that accompanied the evacuees, inspected the shelters and collected hundreds of stories into a report sharply critical of the state’s response. 

Gustav ended up being no Katrina, and the week of suffering was not as severe as the deathly mayhem of three years ago. But residents had every right to expect far better treatment than they received. After a week of indignities in crowded, unsanitary shelters, many returned home with their fragile finances in turmoil. They had been forced to buy extra basics while out of their homes, and September rent was due.

The secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Social Services, which was responsible for the shelters, resigned after this scandal and one involving problems with food stamp distribution. 

Now, many poor residents are vowing “never again,” as in, “Never again will we get on the bus to be warehoused. We’ll ride out the next storm.” In New Orleans, disaster is never far away, and government incompetence cannot be allowed to undermine a swift, sure evacuation. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration should move quickly on a better plan that does not expose the poor to differential, substandard treatment. 


August 20, 2011
Obama Issues Secret Order For Military Raids On Civilians
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
 
A frightening report prepared by Russia’s foreign military intelligence directorate (GRU) circulating in the Kremlin today states that the United States has moved even closer to becoming an all-out police state after President Obama issued a secret order yesterday allowing US military forces to begin conducting raids against American civilians.

According to this GRU report, an American law called the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits US Army and Air Force personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States. The US Navy and Marine Corps are prohibited by a Department of Defense directive, not by the Act itself from going against their own citizens and the Coast Guard, under the Department of Homeland Security, is exempt from the this law.

Obama’s secret order yesterday, however, overturned this law meant to protect American civilians from military oppression and allowed heavily armed troops belonging to the US Air Force's Office of Special Investigations to raid a military surplus and gun store in Las Vegas Nevada named Citadel Gun & Safe.

This privately owned civilian company describes itself as: “Citadel Gun and Safe for 7 years has provided law enforcement & soldiers quality firearm accessories and security products.  We have the largest selection of ammunition and security products, safes, optics, preparedness supplies, and firearm accessories in the state. It is a unique store with something for everyone in every price range.”

Witnesses to this raid, as noted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper, stated that heavily armed US Air Force Troops broke down doors while storming into Citadel Gun & Safe shouting “search warrant” and were assisted by local police forces and FBI “observers.” When local reporters attempted to query a Nellis Air Force Base spokesman about this unprecedented raid they were told to ask their questions to the office's headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.

Important to note, this GRU report says, is that the assertion by these US Air Force troops that they had a “search warrant” is highly suspect because there is no judicial record of any American judge ever issuing such a document to military forces to act against civilians.

The true reason for Obama signing this secret order to allow US military forces to begin raiding American civilians, this GRU report asserts, is his regimes crackdown against any establishments that sell any type of survival-type supplies as they deem them to be one of the greatest threats to their being able to hold onto power.

Just this past week the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a new declaration (see below) titled Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities Related to Military Surplus Stores wherein they warned that any American citizen buying survival-type supplies, especially if they pay with cash, are now to be reported to authorities as potential terrorists.

So fearful has Obama become of these “potential” terrorists that this past week during a national television interview he warned that the biggest threat to the United States was what he termed as “lone wolves” and that his intelligence officials have begun to characterize in videos released to police departments as “white middle class Americans.”

To the fear Obama has against his own people, this GRU report says, is the growing knowledge among the ordinary classes in the United States that their government has ceased to serve them and is, instead, a tyrannical system that protects the 400 oligarchs who control more of the wealth of that nation than 150 million of their fellow Americans.

In a nation that now has as many of their citizens in prison that live in public housing, and where Obama has prosecuted more government whistleblowers for trying to tell American people the truth than all of the other US Presidents in history combined, and where more of its soldiers have died by suicide than in their wars, this GRU report warns that the US military is now planning for London style riots to hit their country too.

To how feared the growing American police state has become we can further note from the comments made this past week by Paul Deller of the London Metropolitan Police Federation who said, “In Britain we police by consent… America polices by force and we do not want to do that in this country.”

As history has always shown, a population that allows its self to be governed by an elite class at the expense of everyone else can not help but to fail. And as warned about by Karl Marx (1818-1883), “At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself.” 

August 24, 2011
Russia Reports Nuclear Explosions Hit Vast US Military Tunnel Network
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

A frightening foreign military intelligence directorate (GRU) report circulating in the Kremlin today states that over the past nearly 36 hours the vast intercontinental military tunnel complex constructed by the United States Air force over the past nearly 45 years was hit with two powerful nuclear explosions at its main terminuses in Colorado and Virginia used nearly exclusively by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 

According to this report, this unprecedented nuclear attack began on the evening of 22 August when one of the main air pressure relief tunnels for this CIA tunnel, located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa Florida, was forced open allowing millions of cubic feet of air to rush suddenly into the atmosphere. The unique sound of this event was captured by video [1st video left] during a baseball game being played at Tropicana Field near MacDill, though US officials blamed the “mystery noise” on a faulty sound system.

This GRU report, however, points out that Russian engineers are well acquainted with this unique sound as they work feverishly to prepare an additional 5,000 bomb shelters ordered by Prime Minister Putin this past spring to be completed by the end of 2012.

Russian engineers were, also, able to duplicate this unique sound this past March when they were called into the Ukraine to vent a number of deep underground tunnels from poison gas that had killed three people near Kiev and which was, likewise, captured by video.

Within a few hours of the venting of this vast tunnel complex, this report continues, a nuclear device was detonated at its western terminus located near Trinidad Colorado with the second blast occurring nearly 12 hours later at the eastern terminus near  Culpeper Virginia, and both causing powerful earthquakes felt by tens of millions of Americans.

Unbeknownst to the vast majority of the American people is that the vast military tunnel network constructed since the early 1960’s under their country has cost an estimated $40 trillion and with the exception of this attack shows no sign of abating.         

The only known photo of one of the massive US Air Force boring machines used to construct this vast tunnel complex was taken by Little Skull Mountain in Nevada in December 1982 [see bottom photo] and is similar in design to those used to construct the Chunnel between England and France.

Maps of these tunnels, and the underground bases associated with them, have been compiled over the years by many independent researchers along with lists of their probable locations. 

The specific tunnel attacked by these nuclear devices, this GRU report says, was being used by the CIA during their moving of their headquarters and all of their assets out of their Langley Virginia location to their new base located in Denver Colorado that was begun in 2005 for reasons still not fully explained.

The GRU speculates that the timing of this attack in hitting the western terminus first, then the eastern one, was more than likely meant to “trap and destroy” whatever the CIA was currently moving through this tunnel from Langley to Denver. 

Most interesting to note is that this attack comes nearly a decade to the day after the 11 September 2011 internal war between the CIA and the US military establishment that rained destruction upon America, and then the world, but whose final battle has yet to be fought, or won, by either side. 

To what the final outcome of this titanic struggle will be it is not in our knowing, other than to note that when two powerful forces like these collide, and as they have done so many times in the past, the ultimate losers end up being the American people whose delight in total ignorance as to what is happening around them continues to astound the whole world. 

August 24, 2011 EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com. 

[Ed. Note: Western governments and their intelligence services actively campaign against the information found in these reports so as not to alarm their citizens about the many catastrophic Earth changes and events to come, a stance that the Sisters of Sorcha Faal strongly disagrees with in believing that it is every human beings right to know the truth.  Due to our missions conflicts with that of those governments, the responses of their ‘agents’ against us has been a longstanding misinformation/misdirection campaign designed to discredit and which is addressed in the report “Who Is Sorcha Faal?.] 
 

Seismic evidence reveals underground nuclear detonation south of Washington DC.


Seismology charts are now revealing that the 5.8 magnitude tremor that rattled the entire East Coast including Washington DC was not a natural earthquake but an earthquake that resulted from an underground  nuclear detonation.  The image above is a seismograph from Washington and Lee University, (similar one found on www2.tricities.com website) about 85 miles southwest of the earthquake’s epicenter in Mineral.  The green lines indicates the tremor that was felt in Washington DC which caused damaged to the Washington Memorial and the Washington National Cathedral.  The black lines is a transparent overlay of a seismograph from a pdf file from Virginia Division Mineral Resources on Earthquakes.  That file describes a typical natural occurring earthquake as:

“When a fault ruptures, energy is released in the form of seismic waves. The first waves to reach the earth’s surface are primary or “P” waves (Figure 2). P waves are compressional waves that travel at a speed of about four miles per second near the surface – faster as depth increases. The next waves to reach the earth’s surface are secondary or “S” waves. S waves are shear waves that move at a speed of about 1.5 miles per second. P and S waves are body waves that travel through the earth much like sonar waves travel through water. Surface waves, which are slower than S waves, travel along the surface of the earth much like waves at the surface of the ocean. S waves and surface waves cause the most destruction at the earth’s surface.”

What is missing from the seismograph for the Washington DC area 5.8 magnitude earthquake are the primary or “P” waves.  All earthquakes that are the direct result of fault rupture have these primary or “P” waves.  Nuclear detonations do not.  Underground nuclear detonations are very violent and immediate with no forewarnings whatsoever. An underground detonation would account for the missing “P” seismic waves for the Washington DC 5.8 magnitude earthquake.  If you’ve ever witnessed a controlled demolition of a building you would no doubt describe the earth tremors as millions of people are now describing what it felt like on August 23, 2011 all along the East coast.
Air Force tunnel boring machine links deep underground military bases across U.S. 

I was pointed to this overlooked piece of evidence by someone who claimed to be with the United States Air Force.  The story submission appeared to be sent by mistake as nothing was visible in the body of the submission.  Instead of sending it to the trash I thought I would apply an old intelligence trick I was taught back in 1989.  I right clicked my mouse on the body of the submission and selected all, then copy.  I then opened up the notepad and selected paste from the menu.   You would expect nothing to be pasted as there was nothing in the body of the submission but, just as I thought, a paragraph was pasted into the notepad.  What was revealed was 1 paragraph whereby who ever sent it stated he was a member of the United States Air Force.  He stated that the Virginia 5.8 magnitude earth “wasn’t a natural earthquake and not a HAARP earthquake”.  He told me to find a seismograph of the Washington DC area earthquake and compare it to a past earthquake.  Then he stated that I should Google DUMB or Deep Underground Military Bases.  He ended by stating “the ABC warnings are real”.  I tried to trace the IP of the submission but they don’t exists.
Based on the discrepancy between a natural earthquake and an underground nuclear detonation (used seismographs from the North Korea underground nuclear detonation and past U.S. underground nuclear tests), it would appear that yes there was an earthquake but an earthquake created as a result of an underground nuclear detonation.  It would also appear that the United States Air Force has intercepted a nuclear bomb that was being transported via the deep underground tunnel systems that links secret deep underground military bases across the United States, to Washington DC.  It would appear that some people in the United States Air Force are taking action to prevent another false flag attack on US soil.  It is good to know that there are still people in the United States military who are upholding their oath to defend the United States from all its enemies, both foreign and domestic.
http://presscore.ca/2011/?p=4009
 

Monday, August 29, 2011

The Effects of Irene. Was Irene Hyped? Was God To Blame For The Earthquake & Irene?


Hurricane Irene couldn't keep New York's financial district down. Wall Street's best-known market was not only running, but trading up on Monday morning.
Some traders who normally take trains to work in lower Manhattan drove instead on Monday to be sure they got to their posts on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a unit of NYSE Euronext. Some said they were without power, but they made it in anyone because markets don't stop.
"We are all here and everything is up and running," said Kenneth Polcari, a managing director with ICAP Equities, who lives in Mount Kisko, N.Y. "Life goes on."

Hurricane Irene Is Over; Power Still Out For Many


What’s left of Hurricane Irene — which technically no longer qualifies as a named storm — has now moved on to Eastern Canada. Residents of the eastern United States are waking up this morning to messes of various kinds.
While New York City was largely spared — though Staten Island and Queens were whacked fairly hard — surrounding states, especiallyConnecticut, and New Jersey, got a good thumping. As many as 700,000 people in Connecticut and 600,000 in New Jersey are without power in the wake Irene, and many will go without for as long as a week.
Power outages in others states, in no particular order: Vermont is reporting another 50,000 residents without power, and at one point or another, every single road in that state, except for Interstates 89 and 91, were closed from flooding.
Another 700,000 are without power in Massachusetts; 160,000 are without power New Hampshire; power is out for 171,000 in Maine; and power is out for 284,000 in Rhode Island.
Power outages were still being addressed this morning in MarylandVirginia and North Carolina; another 20,000 or so are without power in the District of ColumbiaDelaware has 39,000 without power, and a tornado touched down there; Pennsylvania, including the Phildelphia area, has about 400,000 without power. The total number of homes and businesses without power up and down the East Coast was in the neighborhood of six million.
An estimate of the cost of damage to insurers, conducted by Kinetic Analysis, a firm that predicts storm damage, is about $3 billion, down from an earlier estimate of $14 billion. The death toll so far is 25.

States begin the process of getting back to normal after Irene

Stripped of hurricane rank, Irene spent the last of its fury Sunday, leaving treacherous flooding and millions without power -- but an unfazed New York and relief that it was nothing like the nightmare authorities feared.

Quechee Covered Bridge in Lebanon, N.H.
Emergency crews keep people at a safe distance from the Quechee Covered Bridge in Lebanon, N.H., as it flooded with water from the Ottauquechee River Sunday. A weakened but dangerous Tropical Storm Irene dumped up to half a foot of rain in places, flooded roads, knocked down trees and left more than 165,000 New Hampshire homes and businesses on the dark before blowing out of the state. (Polina Yamshchikov / AP Photo / August 28, 2011)
The storm that had been Hurricane Irene crossed into Canada overnight but wasn't yet through with the U.S., where flood waters threatened Vermont towns and big city commuters had to make do with slowly reawakening transit systems.

The storm left millions without power across much of the Eastern Seaboard, killed at least two dozen and forced airlines to cancel about 9,000 flights. It never became the big-city nightmare forecasters and public officials had warned about, but it caused the worst flooding in a century in Vermont.

Many of the worst effects arose from rains that fell inland, not the highly anticipated storm surge along the coasts. Residents of Pennsylvania and New Jersey nervously watched waters rise as hours' worth of rain funneled into rivers and creeks. Normally narrow ribbons of water turned into raging torrents in Vermont and upstate New York late Sunday, tumbling with tree limbs, cars and parts of bridges.

"This is not over," President Barack Obama said from the Rose Garden.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-naw-irene-aftermath-20110829,0,1894943.story

Hurricane Irene and the Routine of Emergency Response

Posted: 8/29/11 08:56 AM ET
As Hurricane Irene made its way up the east coast of the United States, we saw an impressive set of emergency measures taken by local, state and federal agencies. Increasingly sophisticated emergency response has become a fundamental and expected function of government in the developed world. We see this in the United States and we need to see enhanced capacity on a worldwide basis. There are three reasons for the need for more routinized and sophisticated emergency capacity. The first is that there are more people on the planet and here in the United States. We are approaching 7 billion people worldwide, and some projections call for world population to peak at 10 billion by the end of the century. The number of people in the pathway of exposure to danger grows daily. The second reason is that for the first time in world history most of the world's population lives in cities. Urban people depend on others to provide the basics of life: food, water and shelter. Some of the systems that deliver these necessities are fragile, and when disasters hit, it is difficult to avoid their impact. The third reason is that people like me love the ocean and have the means to live nearby.
In fact, while waiting out Irene in my apartment in New York City's Morningside Heights, my thoughts, fears and hopes centered on a narrow sand bar on the south shore of Long Island, where I have spent summers for nearly a quarter century. It's a place called Long Beach, New York. Long Beach has been a popular resort since early in the 20th century, and has survived many storms. Although I am not an environmental scientist, I work with them every day at Columbia University's Earth Institute. They have made me aware of the risks of owning property near the ocean, but it is a risk I knowingly take.

How a hurricane becomes a political opportunity

Tropical Storm Irene New York City is Still Standing 8-28-11
For the vast majority of Americans who could give a seagull's tail feather about Tropical Storm/Hurricane Irene, good luck trying to find something else interesting on television over the weekend.
The storm story had everything America's East Coast-centric media loves, especially on a slow-news August weekend: UnpredictaNew Jersey Gov Chris Christie and Lt Gov Kim Guadagno talk with storm evacuees Irenebility, the possibility of death and destruction and an East Coast location.
Which makes it by definition important.
Like it or not, Americans living thousands of miles away were going to see network reporters leaning into driving winds and rains like people who didn't know enough to come in out of the rain. CNN International even went full time with the U.S. East Coast storm although it had a ready-made Asian typhoon blasting through the Philippines and Taiwan too.

Local Red Cross accepting donations for Hurricane Irene relief efforts

Published: Monday, August 29, 2011, 10:30 AM
BAY CITY — As people up and down the East Coast return home after fleeing Hurricane Irene, the Great Lakes Bay Chapter of the American Red Cross is mustering its troops for a massive relief effort. 

The Red Cross reported that more than 27,000 people spent Saturday night in shelters as the storm came ashore from North Carolina to New England. Thousands of Red Cross disaster workers have been dispatched to the area, along with more than 200 emergency response vehicles and tens of thousands of prepackaged meals. 

Ken Vavra, interim executive director at the Great Lakes Bay Chapter of the Red Cross, said that they are accepting donations intended to help with the relief effort. 

"We are definitely prepared to help," he said. "We will make sure any donations intended for the relief effort get there."

Money isn't the only donation that Red Cross officials are hoping for. The storm also forced Red Cross to cancel more than 50 blood drives that were scheduled along the East Coast, resulting in a shortage of nearly 1,400 units of blood at a time when blood supplies are vital.

To find a blood drive or for more information on how to donate, call the Great Lakes Bay Chapter of the American Red Cross at 989-892-1541.

Hurricane Irene: Was Media Coverage Overhyped? (VIDEO, POLL)

Hurricane Irene Media
The Huffington Post      First Posted: 8/29/11 08:48 AM ET Updated: 8/29/11 09:37 AM ET


With Hurricane Irene in the rearview mirror, the media is playing its favorite game: examining its own coverage.
Seemingly the entire press gave the weekend over to Irene. On television, there was no escaping the coverage, as networks pulled in their top talent and blanketed the East Coast with correspondents.
But Irene was weaker than expected in many places along the East Coast — especially in New York City, where so much of the national media is located. As the predicted dire effects of the storm failed to materialize, many critics and reporters quickly pounced, saying that the media (and cable news in particular) had overhyped Irene and caused millions needless fear.
The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz led the way on Sunday with a harshly critical column about cable news coverage.
"Cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon," he wrote. "...The tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings."
The Daily Telegraph's US correspondent Toby Harnden echoed that sentiment, writing that some of the coverage of Irene was "beyond parody."
This argument was quickly praised by many media watchers. It also received substantial pushback, especially from the cable news reporters who found themselves targets of criticism.
"Not overblown to the families of the people who died, or those who suffered damage in the billions," CNN's Soledad O'Brien tweeted to Kurtz on Sunday.
On Fox News, Shepard Smith read out a comment calling the storm a "tempest in a teacup."
"It's not, sir," he frostily responded. Later, Smith tweeted, "Even though it was a weaker storm remember all of those who will be affected by the flooding.
Some outside media watchers also scoffed at the argument. "The more stories I hear, the more flood images I see, the more I think people saying this was nothing are out to lunch," Reuters' Anthony DeRosa tweeted.
On Monday, the "Today" show devoted a long segment to the question. Not surprisingly, the panel the show assembled defended the coverage from the weekend. Al Roker responded to criticism that over-zealous coverage could breed complacency in people, since they might take more serious future warnings with a grain of salt.

Michele Bachmann Blames God for the Earthquake, Hurricane Irene

Michele Bachmann would stop hurricanes by appointing God as her budget chief.
Michele Bachmann would stop hurricanes by appointing God as her budget chief.Photo: Richard Ellis/Getty Images








Every time a natural disaster strikes, televangelist clown Pat Robertson is there to remind us that God is angry and the End Times are nigh. The recent earthquake and hurricane were no exception:
“It seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power. It has been the symbol of our great nation. We look at the symbol and we say ‘this is one nation under God.’ Now there’s a crack in it … Is that a sign from the Lord? … You judge. It seems to me symbolic,” Robertson said.
He cited Matthew’s Gospel, which mentions an “upheaval in the earth” as a sign of the End of Days. The earthquake is just a “birth pang” of the world to come, Robertson explained ...
Robertson prayed to God to send Hurricane Irene out to sea at the end of his Thursday broadcast. But if it hits us, it’s probably just another one of those “birth pangs.”
Of course, most people don't take Robertson seriously. Hurricanes and earthquakes have occurred regularly all over the world since before humankind existed. There was a time when they seemed to be the product of God's wrath, but geology and meteorology long ago provided much more plausible explanations. Nevertheless, there are still a few wacky cranks like Robertson to say things like this:
"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."
Whoops! That wasn't Pat Robertson ridiculously claiming that God created a (very minor) earthquake and a (relatively unexceptional) hurricane because he was upset about the government's finances. It was Michele Bachmann. She's running for president.