Attack of Self-Consciousness

So while I bleat about the failings of the neo-capitalist world, as usual I ignore the fact that I am pretty darn lucky to be living in an afluent country with some decent freedoms, and little-to-no plate tectonics.

Last week a very small and remote part of Australia got whacked by a Richter 8.1 quake. The penguins on Macquarie Island might have felt it, but no-one else did. Some dead sperm whales washed up in Tassie again; might be coincidence, might be those fucking Yanks and their God-given-condescending right to pound the crap out of the Southern Ocean with 210dB sonar blasts. Anyway, hopefully some seismologist somewhere is busily investigating the little 8.1 on our side of the Asian/Indian Plate interface and it's relationship to the killer that struck SE Asia yesterday.

Hopefully the said seismologist will be able to sucessfully lobby some of the local governments, and perhaps some of the more affluent ones to fund an Indian Ocean Seismic alert system.

In the meantime, do what you can:

Oxfam.

Care Australia.

Red Cross.

Unicef.