A few short years ago, the media would have been transfixed over a quake that took just a few thousand lives.

Day by day, each new toll would have been at the top of the new -- with a new count almost hourly. Sixty dead. Four hundred. A thousand.

Remember when that was a big disaster?

Then there were the hurricanes and massive wildfires and the Asian tsunami: in 2004 a huge wave caused by an earthquake drowned or swept away a stunning 225,000.

Now, we hardly wince with there are 128,000 thousand dead from a cyclone (as in Myanmar, which was once Burma), and 80,000 from an earthquake in China a week later. Peculiar it has been how seemingly unrelated disasters -- quakes and storms or fires or flood -- sometimes hit the same area.

The incredible augmentation of chastisements (winter in China last season stranded tens of millions, while the U.S. saw a tremendous outbreak of violent, topsy-turvy weather, as did Europe, with Africa reeling from drought) is part of a trend since around 1990.

We may be in a record tornado year. The storms are one after another. Two weeks ago it was Missouri, then the southeast, and just last weekend headlines trumpeted the storms in Oklahoma followed the next day by yet worse in Minnesota (and Iowa).

A special concern: quakes. The earth has been rattled -- and faraway quakes seem related. Is it the time of the great rumbling?

During the entire decade of the 1970s, the U.S. Geological Survey recorded a total of 44 earthquakes it classified as "significant." The following decade, from January 1980 to December 1989, the U.S.G.S. recorded 47 significant earthquakes. That is for the entire decade.

From 1990 through the end of 1999, they recorded 57 significant earthquakes and from 2000 thru to the recent earthquake in Sichuan, China,  the U.S.G.S. recorded an astonishing 109 earthquakes of at least magnitude 7.0 (and 13 earthquakes measuring between 8.0 and 9.9 on the Richter Scale).

China and then Colombia and then China again, and before that, rumblings in the American Midwest (as well as California) as quakes have followed others that have been thousands of miles away.

Scientists used to insist that such were unrelated but are beginning to conclude what many have long said: that tremors often go hand in hand, "telegraphing" from one fault to another. Our conclusion takes it a step further: They are linked spiritually as well as geophysically. There are forces at work that go beyond those known to the seismologist.

And let us remember that the greatest recorded quakes in the contiguous 48 U.S. states were not in California but along the New Madrid fault in Missouri.

At least two of them were magnitude-8.0 or higher -- substantially more powerful than the 1906 quake (of magnitude-7.9) in San Francisco.

Those quakes -- in 1811 and 1812 -- were so potent that they caused the Mississippi in some spots to temporarily flow backwards. (The tremors also rang church bells in places as distant as Boston.) Watch the Midwest. Watch too the Carolinas. Watch for the quake in a place the general public does not usually envision. There are faults from New York down to the Carolinas.

What do we see now?

An augmentation. As we often have pointed out, events are heightening. This is in direct accord with the more sober prophecies.

An aid agency called Oxfam International reckons a quadrupling of various disasters in the past two decades (from 120 a year in the 1980s to 500 a year now).

One Asian news website says that what it defines as truly huge natural disasters ("from geological reasons such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis") increased from a yearly average to one in the 1950s to two by the 2000s. Meanwhile, calamities related to weather jumped from two annual ones to seven over the same period.

Are there strange harbingers? In Asia, they say frogs swarmed before the tremors; frogs recently also have swarmed in California.

We don't usually consider the economy as part of "chastisement" but it is exactly such that can reduce us to what prophecy has said: peasant lifestyles. This is purification, and it is good. No fear here -- not with God. Remarkable it has been to hear economists recently speak about their concern over future fighting and civil disruptions over gasoline -- just as predictions from the mystical realm have warned for years. Prophecy and reality are dovetailing.

Meditate on how life would change if gas becomes $6 a gallon.

That will begin to transform the landscape around you. Some claim it could go to $8 or even $12 a gallon within years. It is already almost $8 in France, while Caribbean islands like Antigua have seen $12.95.

There will be ups and downs (oil is traded like stocks), but we can plan on various shortages and at least some price hikes in the years to come. Some are already forsaking modern amenities for a more peasant lifestyle (see this account and then reread the 1990 prophecy). Just the other day, the European Parliament called on the E.U. to set up "food stocks" to avert future crises.

In a non-binding resolution, deputies said that current cereal stocks would last only thirty days and questioned whether European food stocks "are at the right level, especially in view of possible crises."

"It seems to me that that there are two things in play here," notes a viewer. "The first is a movement to force people to detach. (A playing out of the interior call to simplify our lives in recent years.) The disasters seem to be targeting and highlighting the things we are most attached to in a disordered way.

"The second is to show that the 'government' does not have all the answers. We have been treating our governments like they are our Gods in recent years. They are the first place we turn when there is a problem, and they are being shown over the whole world as being unwise at best, and maliciously uncaring at worst."

"This thought was spurred by an article, 'Can Animals Predict Quakes?'  It contained this quote: 'Mianzhu residents feared the toads were a sign of an approaching natural disaster, but a local forestry bureau official said it was normal.' 

"They consulted, and relied on, the word of their local bureaucracy -- which overruled their natural, God-given instincts."

But as far what will happen specifically:

Beware those who claim to have an exact blueprint for the future.

As the addendum to the 1990 prophecy intoned, in 2004, "The event to come will surprise everyone who has offered a prognostication."

Stay tuned.....

[see also: Now tornadoes destroy in Minnesota, This is dark, and Distant quake can set off others]

[resources: Sent To Earth, The Final Hour, and Tower of Light]