America's Earthquake.

The United States has been providing the bulk of the intelligence that was behind Britain, France and Qatar's grand plan to sweep into Tripoli, kill Muammer Qaddafi and cause the Libyan government to collapse. On Monday (23/8/11) and Tuesday (24/8/11) what that plan started to unravel people began asking if America had purposefully supplied Britain, France and Qatar with false information in order to make them fail of whether the Americans had also been fooled by Qaddafi's ruse.

Also on Tuesday American prosecutors dropped rape and other charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn and he was allowed to return to France. Now it's well established that Strauss-Kahn is a serial sex offender who committed the rape he was accused of yet has been allowed to get away with it because he's friends with the American President so the announcement itself was hardly a surprise. What was interesting though was the way it was presented. The maid who Strauss-Kahn raped was something of an amalgamation of several of the carers who have been causing my grandmother problems. Struass-Kahn could also be several people including myself or my father. So the presentation of the announcement could either look like the Americans getting tough on Britain over the way they've been behaving or America joining forces with Britain to increase the pressure on me ahead of the traditional Tuesday night pub dinner. Personally I'm going with the latter.

About two hours after the Strauss-Kahn announcement was made in New York a 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck the town of Mineral in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As the reasonably powerful 'quake struck at a shallow depth it caused moderate damage to buildings across a wide area including the Washington National (protestant) Cathedral and the Washington Monument. Across Washington and New York it forced a Pentagon briefing on Libya to be cancelled and forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate from their buildings. This was an experience that must have felt much like the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 and came just over two weeks before the tenth anniversary of those attacks.

Obviously this is going to keep the scientists fascinated for months to come and I've still haven't fully got my head around it. However it seems to me like a subtle little hint to America that the operation against Libya has run it's course and should be allowed to come to it's natural conclusion. After all it seems that America is going to have to work very hard and give away a lot to get the United Nation's to mis-appropriate Libyan government assets or get the NATO mission extended.