Well, no sooner than Defense Secretary Mattis made allusions to "other kinds" of military options for North Korea, and then talked briefly about "kinetic weapons" in response to a reporter's question about them, than Mr. L.G.R found this article which states that North Korea experienced a 3.5 earthquake near its nuclear facilities:

Earthquake strikes North Korea near nuclear test zone, but no radiation reported

What's noteworthy here is that the article itself at least mentions the possibility of artificial, man-made earthquakes, caused by nuclear detonations, though in this case, it quickly dismisses them:

An official from the agency, speaking to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity citing office rules, said an analysis of seismic waves and the lack of sound waves clearly showed that the quake wasn’t caused by an artificial explosion. Nuclear proliferation watchdog CTBTO said the quake was unlikely to have been man-made.

Rather, the experts are saying this may well be an aftershock from a previous test, which is highly possible, since no radiation is associated with this event, ruling out another nuclear test:

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said he had spoken to Zerbo. “While the data analysis is preliminary, the early indications strongly suggest that the smaller events today (which are in a seismically inactive area) are likely further geologic disturbances created by the Sept. 3 nuclear test explosion,” he said. “In other words, not another nuclear test but related to the high-yield Sept. 3 nuclear weapon test explosion.”

What disturbs me, however, is the high octane speculative possibility that this may not be a conventional aftershock and that it may indeed be an artificially caused quake.

In this respect, it does fit a template for such things. We'll call it the "Disguised Act of God" template, and one may obtain the general outlines of such a template by considering three examples:

Years ago, when the earthquake rocked Haiti, and was followed shortly thereafter by an earthquake near Paral, Chile, I speculated with Mr. Richard Hoagland that those quakes may have been salvos in some sort of covert war between extra-territorial factions vying for hegemony. My suspicions were caused by two curious "facts" that were not getting much play either in the corporate controlled media, nor in what we are now calling "alternative media" or the free and independent media. Those two facts were (1) the curious absence of any earthquake reportage or shocks in Haiti's neighboring Dominican Republic (after all, they both share the same island of Hispanola); and (2) there were immediate stories of possible tsunamis in the Pacific due to the very strong Paral earthquake in Chile, which, as events turned out, were not needed: the expected tsunami in Hawaii never materialized as water rose - if my memory serves me correctly - about three feet, and did so rather slowly at that. As I pointed out at the time, if one has some non-nuclear technology of some sort than can cause earthquakes, then similarly that technology might possibly be capable of damping shocks - or tsunamis - from earthquakes in regions one does not want to affect, like the Dominican Republic, or the Pacific. Adding to my speculations at that time, I pointed out that Haiti (again, at that time) was a major hub for moving money covertly in the international money racket. One need only think of the allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation's Haiti "relief" in this respect. But why the Paral region of Chile? As I also pointed out, that region of Chile was once home to the notorious post-war Nazi compound, Cologna Dignidad, and the area was populated by "veterans" and their descendants. So my speculation was that someone had fired an "earthquake salvo" so to speak, at Haiti, hub of international financial shenanigans, and that someone else had fired back.

Then came the Fukushma tsunami and earthquake, which several people in Japan and elsewhere (including me), found suspicious. As I put it at that time, the Japanese had a new government, which immediately began to send feelers to China, and which also began to make noises about demanding the closure of the large American airbase in the Okinawa prefecture. This was followed by a stern warning from then US defense secretary Robert Gates, who made what can only be called a threat to Japan that such demands would have dire consequences if persisted in. Then came the Fukushima disaster, and with it, speculations that Japan had been conducting a secret nuclear armaments program, and speculations from some in Japan that the whole thing had been a deliberate attack on the country in the guise of an "act of God." Most of those speculations entertained the idea that the event had been caused by placing a nuclear weapon on a sensitive region of the ocean basin, and detonating it.

Finally, there was the Indonesian tsunami, and here I must rely upon the observations of former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts' observations. She records being mystified at the sudden volume of trade in Indonesian sovereign securities about a week prior to that event. The trades made, at the time she was watching them, no sense whatsoever. There was no standard economic or financial reason for what she was seeing. Then came the tsunami, and voila! the reason was provided: someone knew about the event, and that implied not only insider trading but a technology to do it and a willingness to use it, perhaps for no other reason than such financial gain.

In each of these cases, there are three elements which form my "Disguised Act of God" template: (1) a (geo-)political and/or financial-economic context in which (2) the use of such technologies and weapons (3) occurs in close temporal proximation to the (geo-) political and/or financial-economic context.

A moment's consideration of this template reveals its glaring weakness, namely, there is no one known mechanism or technology whose signatures are known and which can be used to corroborate such an interpretation. At best, the "Disguised Act of God" template can only suggest that certain events might be speculatively interpreted to be such. This is not to say that various mechanisms haven't been proposed, from HAARP to creating "beat frequencies" in the planet itself that interfere upon a certain region and cause quakes. The latter is at least theoretically possible, but would require perhaps nuclear detonations of its own at various points carefully coordinated to establish that beat frequency at the target area, or other means of doing so, and those, conceivably, would require enormous energies of their own. Additionally, the problem with this "beat frequency" approach is that it is likely to trigger smaller quakes in other non-target regions unless, again, one has some sort of damping technology.

What we're left with in our high octane speculation is exactly that: high octane speculation. But one thing can be said, and that is that the event at least fits the template, and if so, then someone might be sending messages to someone else. And that, of course, assumes that the intended recipient of the message is capable of reading it. And that too, remains up for grabs. But the message itself? Well, isn't it interesting that the story is reported in the Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose company has been alleged to be in a "database deal" with the CIA, and whose newspaper has long been associated with that agency...

See you on the flip side...