It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like …

MUZAFFARABAD: Death toll in the disastrous earthquake that had struck Azad Kashmir, Frontier province and Punjab is likely to go beyond 40,000 marks, while the much needed relief works in some of the devastated areas could not yet been taken up.

The nightmare and the huge tragedy that visited these ruined and ravaged vast areas of hills and dales and the plane lands with no exceptions and with equal severity could hardly be described as words fail to depict the real scene of that doomsday …

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Rich and poor nations have taken the hit over a period so twisted in nature’s assaults that one month, rich is helping poor and the next, poor is helping rich as best it can, and then the poor gets slammed once again.

The United States, giver of tsunami aid in December, accepted hurricane aid from some of those same countries in September. Now it is giving to South Asia a second time, in response to the weekend earthquakes. India is sending tents, food, blankets and medicine to its foe, Pakistan, geology briefly shoving aside geopolitics.

More than 176,000 people died in the earthquake and tsunami of December; an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 in the quake Saturday; perhaps 1,000 or more in Guatemalan landslides last week; more than 1,200 in Katrina. Asian beaches, mountainous Kashmir villages and American urban streets and casinos all were overwhelmed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

H/T Drudge

The city of Lisbon, capital of Portugal, was flourishing in a sustained economic boom based on the development of diamond and gold mines in Brazil when a massive earthquake struck on the morning of Nov. 1, 1755.

It was All Saints Day, and the churches were packed with worshippers when the first of two shocks hit. At least 30,000 lives were lost. The 18th century rationalist philosopher and skeptic Francois Marie Arouet — better known as Voltaire — used the disaster to attack the concept of a kindly, beneficial God watching over a world where everything worked out for the best in his satirical novel “Candide.”

The Book of Revelation predicts a dramatic earthquake will shake the earth before the Second Coming of Christ. Accordingly, Christian fundamentalist groups have always been prone to see earthquakes as signs of divine judgment or of the imminence of the return of Jesus.

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