tsunamis, God and conspiracies

I'm kinda glad I'm home to see Canadian news coverage of the tragedy in South Asia although I'm reading a lot about it online too. Someone pointed me to a forum where people are talking about Jet Li being missing and now found. My first reaction was that it is sick to see people so concerned about one person simply because he is a celebrity when there are close to 30,000 other people who are dead. No they're not celebrities. We don't know their names and I'm certain they don't do kung fu. Most of them were poor locals, many children, who were fisherman or who served the tourism industry in some small capacity. Their lives count too. I saw one American news report that cut in only shots of white tourists in shelters and completely left out any images of the local people. That is just selfish, ethnocentric and disgusting.

On that forum where people were talking about Jet Li, a number of arguments also erupted. One guy asked everyone to send good thoughts. He was blasted by some Christian who said they need prayers, not good thoughts. That person was lambasted by someone who noted that God allowed this to happen on Jesus' birthday and then went on a rant about how there is no Christian God. Interesting how that discussion evolved. I have to agree with the person who said that you can pray, send thoughts, whatever makes you feel good, but what people really need to do is send money. There's at least some sort of guarantee you'll be making a difference.

One other person on the forum submitted this link to an article on a Russian web site. It suggests that these natural disasters might actually be the work of humans. i.e. geophysical experiments by the US military in inducing natural disasters. Here's a snippet from the article. I find it a little hard to believe, OK really hard to believe, but ya never know:

It is well known that the USA and the USSR concluded an agreement at the
end of the 1970s. Pursuant to the agreement, scientific developments in the
field of geophysics for military purposes were banned. All the works in the
field became secret too. However, the works continued anyway, despite the signed
document. It was simply conducted under the disguise of the scientific research
or the development of the double-purpose technology. The point and the purpose
of those developments were rather vague and even mysterious. A lot of
specialists and scientists believe that a special American program HAARP is one
of those developments... It is an open secret that the USA (probably, not the
USA alone) has already constructed high-frequency transmitter facilities. Those
devices can heat the earth environment up to the state of plasma by means of
pumping ions. This makes it possible to control the environment, which might
show considerable influence on the atmospheric phenomena. The owners of this
weapon are able to program floods, twisters and storms, even earthquakes in any
region of the planet.