Clear and chilly this early Tuesday on California’s north coast — the half-moon hangs gently to the south, easing westward over the Pacific.
There’s a holiday this week, but it’s all bullshit.

Bonkers and shakers: We had a 4.3 magnitude earthquake about 2:20 this morning about 27 miles west of the tiny coastal town of Ferndale, about 20 miles south of where I’m sitting right now. I was awake, but didn’t feel a thing — mainly because my handy USGS map reports it was nearly seven miles deep.

(Illustration found here).

The USGS site is Bookmarked and I check it at least twice a day — if you live in the zone, zone in on the living, and this is California, earthquake country.
Duh!
Interestingly, near-about the same time, there were other big shakers worldwide — a 4.9, 140 miles northwest of Tobelo, Indonesia, a 3.0, 95 miles northwest of Old Iliamna, Alaska, and a couple since, a 4.6 magnitude 52 miles south of Amukta Island, Alaska, and a 2.8 about 32 miles north of Nikiski, Alaska.
The earth never sleeps.

Even if dormant, we hope. Earlier this month, it was reported evidence has been found of 20 ancient supervolcanoes near the US Utah-Nevada border, and at one time created some chaotic shit.
Via Sci-News:

Supervolcanoes are giant volcanoes that blast out more than 1,000 cubic km of volcanic material when they erupt.
They are different from the more familiar straddle volcanoes because they aren’t as obvious to the naked eye and affect enormous areas.
“Supervolcanoes as we’ve seen are some of Earth’s largest volcanic edifices, and yet they don’t stand as high cones. At the heart of a supervolcano instead, is a large collapse.
“Those collapses in supervolcanoes occur with the eruption and form enormous holes in the ground in plateaus, known as calderas,” said Dr Eric Christiansen of Brigham Young University, who is a co-author of two papers published in the journal Geosphere.
The newly discovered supervolcanoes aren’t active today, but 30 million years ago more than 5,500 cubic km of magma erupted during a one-week period near a place called Wah Wah Springs.
“In southern Utah, deposits from this single eruption are 4 km thick.
“Imagine the devastation — it would have been catastrophic to anything living within hundreds of miles,” Dr Christiansen said.

And just last week, it was announced there’s a humongous magma reservoir lurking beneath a dormant supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park, and it’s way-bigger than anyone figured — and it can blow… when?
From National Geographic:

“We found it to be about two-and-a-half times larger than we thought,” said analysis team scientist James Farrell of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
“That’s not to say it’s getting any bigger. It’s just that our ability to see it is getting better.”
…
The supervolcano underneath the national park last erupted on a massive scale some 640,000 years ago, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
It is a potential supervolcano, capable of spewing more than 240 cubic miles (1,000 cubic kilometers) of magma across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, with global climate effects.
“We believe it will erupt again someday, but we have no idea when,” Farrell said.

And the USGS added this about the Yellowstone possible-gusher: The senior author of the publication is postdoctoral fellow Fred Massin. He and his University of Utah colleagues carefully examined more than 33,000 earthquakes between 1984 and 2010. They found that over 15,000 were “repeating,” meaning that they came from the same location with similar motions from the same seismic sources, and thus produced nearly identical shaking characteristics recorded at distant seismometers.
No matter how you rock your roll, one day soon.

And of shakers, this year’s biggest ball-buster shaker was human — Eddie Snowden, who gave himself a clap on the back for his work, via an interview released last night at the Washington Post.
Some snips:

Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia.
But he consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said.
“I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated.
“Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said.
“That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”
…
In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the ­classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.
“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said.
“That is an oath to the Constitution.
“That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”
People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.
“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said.
“I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

The Post also added this: At the Aspen Security Forum in July, a four-star military officer known for his even keel seethed through one meeting alongside a reporter he knew to be in contact with Snowden. Before walking away, he turned and pointed a finger.
“We didn’t have another 9/11,” he said angrily, because intelligence enabled warfighters to find the enemy first.
“Until you’ve got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to bury your people, you don’t have a clue.”

Of course, it’s already been disclosed there’s no evidence at all the NSA hardware hasn’t stopped one single terrorist attack, plans or “events, as the NSA so calls them.
Even President Obama can’t muster up the evidence — as evident at his press conference on Friday, via also the Washington Post:

National Security Agency defenders, including President Obama, continue to cite the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 when defending the program that scoops up domestic call records in bulk.
But asked specifically, on Friday, if he could identify a time when that program stopped a similar attack, President Obama couldn’t.
That’s because the program hasn’t prevented a second 9/11.
At the end of the year news conference, Reuters’s Mark Felsenthal asked:

“As you review how to rein in the National Security Agency, a federal judge says that, for example, the government has failed to cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata actually stopped an imminent attack.
Are you able to identify any specific examples when it did so? Are you convinced that the collection of that data is useful to national security to continue as it is?”

But President Obama never answered the question about a specific examples.
Instead he spoke more broadly and tied the program, again, back to 9/11.

“What I’ve said in the past continues to be the case, which is that the NSA, in executing this program, believed, based on experiences from 9/11, that it was important for us to be able to track, if there was a phone number of a known terrorist outside of the United States calling into the United States, where that call might have gone and that having that data in one place and retained for a certain period of time allowed them to be confident in pursuing various investigations of terrorist threats.”

The president’s reliance on a 9/11 narrative is expected.
The terrorist attack was a defining moment for a generation and now serves as a tragic reminder of a time when the U.S. government failed to protect its citizens.
It’s understandable that any president would want to be seen as vigilant in preventing another such attack.
But the reason the president can’t cite a specific time the phone meta-data program stopped a similar tragedy is because it hasn’t.

And that should be a 7.9 on the Richter Scale of human bullshit — but nooooo…