Occupy gets ugly and YouTube weighs in

Today the news from Oakland was bad. The Occupy movement seems to be hitting a critical mass of police intolerance.

This story from PBS news covers the developments pretty well. The Newshour reports that the Oakland Police department denied using flashbangs to disperse the crowd. Notice, they don't deny hitting Scott Olsen, a Marine Corps veteran with a tear gas canister.

This video pretty convincingly shows the police tossing the flashbang right into the crowd that has gather to help Scott:

I noticed something pretty interesting about the YouTube video. The number of views didn't seem to be going up, but somehow the number of "likes" were. I took this screen shot at 4:36 this afternoon, and as you can see YouTube says it only has 308 views but somehow 1,658 people have "liked" this video: (you can click on the screen shot to see the full size)

This is either some kind of bug or YouTube is not telling us the truth about how many times this video has been watched.

I took this screen shot 8:09 and the video still only has 308 but now has almost 3,000 likes:

Draw your own conclusions.

Does anyone have another explanation for what is happening here? Does the video still say it only has 308 views when you watch it?

The Northwest in the wake of the Japan quake or how megaquakes caused me to prepare for the Apocalypse.

The tragedy in Japan is heart breaking. If Japan, a country that prides itself on its earthquake preparedness suffered so much, what would happen here in the Northwest?

In the Northwest we are at similar risk for major quakes and many of us remember the 6.8 Nisqually quake in 2001.

Like Japan, we are at risk for what scientists call megathrust earthquakes, a phenomenon that occurs along subduction zones like our Juan De Fuca plate that is sliding underneath the North American plate. A megathrust quake caused the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. These events happen every several hundred years and scientists think the last one occurred in 1700 in the Northwest which means we are due.

What makes these quakes different is their intensity and duration. A 9.0 megathrust quake along the Cascadia subduction zone would likely cause massive tremors that would last for 3 to 5 minutes. The japan quake lasted about 6 minutes.

In response to this possibility I have created a disaster kit that goes beyond what the government suggests you have in case of emergency.

The only question now is whether to keep it in the car or in the apartment.

What do you think? Anything I forgot?