The Stupid...it shakes out of her head....

.....like plates falling off a shelf in an earthquake.

Ann Althouse has an annoying schtick of complaining about liberal Madison. Today it is this observation on the approximate two dozen 911 calls made by county residents after feeling the eathquake that rumbled through our neck of the woods....

I can't imagine calling the police over that, but somehow 2 dozen of my neighbors did. What's their motivation? How do their minds work? Maybe when you live in a liberal outpost in the bleak Midwest, and the war goes on and the news media ask a candidate why he doesn't wear a flag pin, you get needy and you turn to government to find meaning when anything seems amiss.

Yeah only the DFH of  Madison would  call 911 searching for the greater meaning.....err wait:

From Indianapolis:

IMPD says they received 180 calls into their 911 dispatch call center between 5:30 and 6:30 am, a large number for that time of the morning.

From Clarksville TN:

Jones said the 911 log indicates 24 calls this morning making inquiries "about the shaking."

From Louisville:

Just after the temblor, city officials say the 911 dispatch center was overwhelmed with calls from people asking for information

From Chicago:

Chicago Fire Department Chief Joe Roccasalva said the tremors caused a "huge spike in calls" to the city's 911 center,

From  Warren County Ohio:

Frank Young, director of the Warren County Department of Emergency Services, said the 911 center received several calls from residents wondering if there had been an earthquake,

And the rest

The stupid....It burns and it's getting oooold Ann.  I wonder if we give her the medal and combat pay she so pathetically seeks for living in our fair city would she STFU?

Nah......

Comments

[Sue]

I don't get it. Madison is the last progressive beacon in a once-progressive state. It's not like she has nowhere to go. If she hates it so much, she can move to almost any other spot in WI, like Washington County, where I live. She'll feel so much at home here. Except... now that I think of it, whenever the tornado siren goes off in my town, all the needy conservatives (there really aren't any liberals, so it must be them) call the police and the radio station because they a) need to verify that there is, indeed, a tornado bearing down on us and the City is not actually testing the sirens at 3:00 a.m., and b) don't know what to do.

[Robert Earle]

(mostly not the point, but...)

A 5.2 earthquake 300 miles (?) away was felt in Madison?!? Wow.

Must be that the midwest topography (farmland topsoil) transmits the waves more efficienly that mountain range does. (I thought it was the exact opposite!)

Because I've been living in southern California for 25 years, and have been here for many 'moderate' earthquakes. For example, I live maybe a little closer to the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake (the one that hit just as a World Series game was about to start, and San Francisco had lots of damage). That was a 6.9 quake (that is, maybe 75 times as powerful) and is was only felt in Los Angeles by the people at the tops of the high-rise buildings downtown (where the height of the building re-amplifies the wave.) At ground level, I did not feel a thing that day.

Again...wow. I am surprised.

[justathought]

I wonder if we give her the medal and combat pay she so pathetically seeks for living in our fair city would she STFU?

Maybe just a nice coffee-table book...

[Michael]

An article I saw suggested what you said, Robert--the topography, plus a theory about what causes midwest earthquakes (apparently a tectonic plate that's been fully subducted)--combined with surface geology makes the waves travel further than, say those along the various California faults.

Madison, for all its progressive charms, by the way, has plenty of conservative in it, too, at least in my experience (I lived there for a decade). I remember my first landlord taking a pretty extreme anti-American Indian position during a big spearfishing controversy (he was trying to explain things to me, the outsider)...a subsequent landlord shamelessly cheated me: he took my security deposit to "replace" window screens that never actually existed...but since I didn't note "no screens" on my check-in, I had little recourse. Nice, eh?

The same landlord was flagged by the local weekly newspaper for discriminatory renting practices--they investigated following numerous complaints.

Actually, Ann, like most wingnuts, has a perpetual chip on her shoulder, hollering about "the libruls" without realizing that she's really projecting her own inadequacies on an epic scale...beginning with a lack of understanding of the very nature of civil society. That's bad enough, but considering she's a law professor, it's truly a damning indictment...

[hoppy]

This is so encouraging! I think maybe we will win the presidency after all. Look at the density of progressives in all of those diverse communities. Of course, it is obvious that only a liberal would dial 911, so we are IN, baby!!

[flory]

So if Tory is strong enough to knock Cally halfway across the airlock with one backhanded slap, wouldn't Galen and Sam be frackin terminators? And wouldn't that have been a clue a loooong time ago that maybe they weren't completely normal?

[flory]

Crap. Wrong thread.

[serge]

Perhaps Ms Law Professor had been hitting the box wine a little too hard that day.

[joejoejoe]

I called 911 a few weeks ago because of a bad kitchen fire. Who knew that made me a liberal?

[Interrobang]

Um... Pardon me for being dense (and liberal), but if you can't call the emergency phone number for what you think might be an actual emergency, what are you supposed to do?

So, Michael, do you think bad landlords and wingnuts are directly proportional? My hometown has zillions of wingnuts in it (the property-owning class, generally), and more bad landlords than you can shake the Orwellianly-named "Tenant Protection Act" at.

[Silver Owl]

LOL! Althouse while sipping on her wine box just knew that anyone and everyone who dialed 911 was a liberal. The difference being a drunk and a citizen that wants to know. One whines about others seeking information and the other actually finds out what is going on.

[Michael]

Interroband--
I guess it's more like "not all wingnuts are bad landlords, but I'd bet most bad landlords certainly are wingnuts."

To be fair, though, at least Madison had some degree of tenants' rights, unlike here in Loosiana.

And, changing the topic completely: I'm checking out your streetcar posts, which are really good. Thanks. Here in Baton Rouge I can still see streetcar track in a couple of places, although, of course, the cars themselves were phased out years ago (and these days, of course, one of the biggest local issues is horrible traffic. Go figure).