It’s Probably Nothing

Claws of the Panda It's Probably Nothing 39 Comments

Outlook India;

China blasted a dam over a river in Anhui province on Sunday to discharge the surging flood waters as torrential rains and floods wreaked havoc in the country, killing over 100 people.
 
The dam on the Chuhe river, a tributary of the mighty Yangtze River, was destroyed with explosives to ease the flood control pressure in the river basin, state-run CCTV reported.
 
Water levels on many rivers, including the Yangtze, have been unusually high this year because of torrential rains.

39 Replies to “It’s Probably Nothing”

  2. Damn global warming droughts….

    Is there a ‘Like a bridge under troubled water’ remark in there somewhere?

    1. Global warming causes all EXTREME weather … hot, cold, wet, dry … it’s ALL because of your sinful insistence on heating and cooling your home! And for buying vegetables flown-in from Mexico! Sinner!! Sinners!! /sarc. /stupidity

      1. I love when they had the ICGW meeting in Copenhagen and they ran out of limos and had to import them from Sweden. I mean, Copenhagen isn’t even all that big, with an urban area of 112 sq. mi. It’s probably not even a 5 mile ride from the hotel to the conference. I understand most of them flew into Copenhagen on chartered flights.
        That’s why prima facie it is so hard to take those people seriously. When they do stuff like that, you kind of think they can’t really think there is actually a problem. And there hasn’t been, for the over half a century they’ve been talking about it.
        And, tangentially, the antipope worries about global warming and closed borders rather than the fact that Catholics are getting slaughtered by Muslims in Africa. And Xi Jinping, with whom the antipope has an obsequious relationship, has just decreed that all pictures of Jesus in private homes have to be taken down.

  3. This worries me. You have a well armed nation with an excess of men and now a disaster where they will be left with trouble feeding their own people. Perfect combination to initiate a war of desperation. On the other hand it is also a perfect combination for a revolution. So perhaps China will finally throw off the evil panda. In any case, it is certainly interesting times.

  4. Impressive pictures.

    For whatever kind of “scientific” nature / reasons the ruling communist party claims to have in governing China, there is a deep rooted historical believe in China that disasters (like … wuhan flu, earthquakes, floodings) do signal a change of dynasty – if there is any truth in it, destiny is talking forcefully to the Chinese people.

    1. However … since Xi is Dear Leader for LIFE. He might have to suffer a tragic, accidental, death … eh comrades?

      1. Maybe someone in China will hire the Clinton Arkancide team. Maybe, the team has been offered. Interesting times indeed.

  5. Epic disasters and communism. Some things they just can’t lie their way out of.

    1. “Epic disasters and communism.”

      But you repeated yourself.

      “Communism, Socialism, cataclysm isn’t it all the same?”
      Winston Churchill

  7. In any event, the Far-Left will insist that it will be the West that must suffer. China’s self inflicted disaster will be spun as our fault for not yielding to the Socialist Climate Gods.

    1. Amazing how the ‘Climate Morality Police’ continually give China a pass on their horrendous CO2 sins. But then, maybe not so amazing when you consider all of the left’s sacred ideologies are only bullshit platitudes designed to manipulate other’s actions.

      I like to point out to all the leftards I know that Climate Change seems to disappear as a major threat to humanity anytime any other story that proves to be more politically advantageous to them comes along. Obviously, from all of our leftist betters’ rantings, policemen and a virulent flu strain are now the greatest threats to mankind.

  8. and here I thought that we were “ALL” going to die from global warming, or the whuwho flu, Fick am I stupid.

    1. WE ONLY HAVE ELEVEN YEARS LEFT!!! DEAR GOD!!! DO SOMETHING!! FOR THE CHILDREN!!! sarc

  9. China has to create an enemy on almost every internal crisis. The problem is that they need to identify that enemy outside of their borders. The, absolute, biggest threat to the ruling Communist party is not the US. It is the masses over which they rule. If you go back to 2012, there was four fold increase in mass protesting by the citizens of mainland China. Most of it was related to land grabs on farmers and Tibetan autonomy. The Communist Party’s response was to create a crime called “picking quarrels and causing trouble.” I kid you not. That is their invented official criminal code wording (after translation). It carries, at least, a four year jail sentence. The problem is that rioting/protests in China continued to occur. It wasn’t a sufficient deterrent.

    China is now spending in excess of $125 Billion per year on riot gear and those who wear it. Last year they added 360k new riot police to the ranks.

    What I’m getting at is that the current ruling party is on a cliff ledge. They can never have the focus of their citizens on the internal corruption and mismanagement of the Little Red Book club. So, they are forced to make outlandish accusations towards the West in an effort to deflect the animosity that would be aimed squarely at them should true facts enlighten the masses (such as on the example of flooding above).

    Buckle up, because I’m almost sure you won’t recognize China in a decade. You might now recognize it five years from now.

    1. I’ve long thought that China could fall apart at any time. One reason is that the country is comprised of a number of different peoples and the Party has frequently run roughshod over them in its consolidation of power. That’s led to ethnic friction, such as the Tibetans resenting the influx of Han into their territory.

      My impression is that China is a civil war waiting to happen and it might not take much to set it off.

      1. I don’t think a civil war is in the cards. Instead, consider what happened in Romania. Revolution, I think, is more likely. And, as with most revolutions…they start small in a single area, and the next thing you know the leader and his wife are being executed. China has a bunch of flash points all over the mainland (Wuhan among them). Any one of them could resonate with a vast majority…and then the Ruling class is in big trouble. But, I think they are playing with fire down in Hong Kong.

        1. “..consider what happened in Romania. Revolution..”
          Visited a small ‘Revolution Museum’ in Timișoara……..one recalcitrant Priest, couple dozen supporters, and a week or so later…..

        2. Are we seeing the same thing that you describe in the USA right now? I fervently hope not, but your outline definitely sounds similar. This antifa,BLM and other groups are receiving funding from Nike,the Ford Foundation and several other well known organizations. I am sure that there is significant funding from off shore entities as well as Soros and other anarchists.

      2. I believe you are right, BA, which is why I am becoming increasingly concerned about China’s apparent attempts to create ‘outside’ enemies to direct it’s people’s discontent towards.

        Few things have the potential to pull a nation together faster than a fake righteous war against a fake evil empire that the citizenry are trained to believe are the ones responsible for their very real problems.

        1. China’s belligerence has been obvious for several years. It’s claims to and occupation of territories belonging to nearby SE Asian countries is an example. So far, it’s made enemies of Viet Nam (hardly surprising as the Vietnamese and Chinese hated each other for centuries), the Philippines, Japan, and Indonesia.

          Gordon Chang, who’s often a guest on The John Batchelor Show has often talked about this. Xi sees himself as a modern-day emperor, albeit a communist one, and he insists on making China great again because that country has traditionally itself as the one and only master of the world, modern politics and diplomacy being irrelevant.

      3. The different peoples in China are mostly regional and not ethnic.
        91.5% of Chinese are ethnic Han. Even in so-called Autonomous Regions, the identified native ethnics have been overwhelmed by Han migration into them, such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. I look for any civil war to happen inside Han China itself.
        Yes, China is so big that, historically, it took a strong central government to exert its authority. Whenever that central government falters, at the end of a dynasty, China split into a dozen or more self-proclaimed kingdoms. Especially complicit are the provinces in the South and Southwest. When the military governors were strong, it was they who rebelled, such as at the end of the Tang dynasty. When they were weak, they could not put down the rebelling peasant bandits, such as at the end of the Ming dynasty.
        The potential is there, no doubt. There are regional differences, and the Hong Kong demonstrations were powered by it. I would love to see the whole Pearl River region rise up.
        But Hong Kong also showed how futile a popular revolt is. The question is, if China devolves into civil war, who are the rebels? This is the 21st century, and the Chicom has command of far advanced weapons and communication. Modern weapons are so powerful, you cannot be successful without some faction of the army. And Tiananmen Square in 1989 showed the Chicom are not reluctant to use tanks against their own people, even some of their own children. And power in China is intricately distributed among the party, army, and local officials. Nothing can happen in secret. For the past half century, there had been palace intrigues, with changes made at the highest level. But there had not been anything with even a whiff of potential civil war.

    2. I love history and history always repeats itself. The communist USSR lasted about 80 years (1917 to 1997) and communist China is now approaching 80 years (1940 – 2020). And this is in countries (Russia, China) which are used to despotic dynasties.
      I think that Covid0-19 or whatever you want to call it, is dramatically changing the social landscape in the western world as well.
      Public education and travel are 2 areas which are going to be very different within 5 years.

  10. The Mighty Red Dragon, deliberately keep their people ignorant, and uniformed (of anything deemed problematic) unarmed, slightly hungry, and under strict authoritarian control. Any nation that ignores human rights, runs concentration, er sorry, re-education holiday camps, or welds shut the doors of their apartments to keep them contained and starves them death, during the whonewwhuhanflu, is capable of just about anything to keep the state protected from the ire of it’s people. I would hope they would revolt, but i doubt we will see it. A million man army can control a hell of a lot of unarmed people, and they are conditioned to work for the state, not the people.

  11. We remember Thucydides as a historian thanks to his documentation of the Peloponnesian War, but we often forget that he was also a philosopher. And like all great philosophers, he has many things to teach us, even if his teaching is inappropriately applied. Thousands of years after the war was fought between Sparta and Athens, observers argued that it showed that an authoritarian government would defeat a democracy. This was widely said in the early stages of World War II and repeated throughout the Cold War. In truth, what Thucydides said about democracies and oppressive regimes was far more sophisticated and complex than a simplistic slogan invoked by defeatists.

    https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-truth-about-the-us-china-thucydides-trap/

    1. Did you read it? The Thucydides-Trap assertion here rests on a mistaken, and pretty naive assumption.

      The Trap-assertion basically says that one side (China) feels its legitimate aspirations are being thwarted by a jealous rival, while the other (the U.S.) is losing its global hegemony and wants to keep it, even if it must block China to do so. This is oversimplistic, and not very representative of the facts on the ground. Simply put, China is behaving like an acquisitive bully that sees itself as having a millennia-old divine right to take what it wants and dominate the world; and the U.S. is the de facto “world’s policeman” and the only great power that can make China respect it, and (hopefully) slow down or give-up its hegemonic aspirations.

      Evidence? China was an unquestionable emerging power that pursued a policy of “friend to all”, and was effective at lulling potential rivals to sleep. The U.S. opened detente under Nixon, and happily offshored most of its manufacturing (including crucial industries like pharmaceuticals) to China; too much of the first-world did the same. Then China started developing muscles and throwing them around; Tibet, and constant threats against Taiwan, and the Nine-Dash-Line, and the Belt-and-Road Initiative that neighbours, initially grateful for the new markets, are steadily coming to view as economic imperialism – “Send us your raw materials, and we will drive your industries out of business and sell you all the manufactured goods you want at a hefty mark-up!”

      And they showed their hand too early, and it was menacingly curled into a fist: the Hague unequivocally ruled that China’s “historic claims” to the South China Sea are bogus and China has no rights to the area at all; and China said “Yeah well we don’t care about your verdict, we’re doing it anyway!” and sent out the dredgers, committed horrible eco-destruction on several South China Sea coral atolls, made them into islands, plumped runways and missile batteries on them, and claimed Exclusive Economic Zones around all of them, sending-out warships to drive-away other nations which have documented claims on those waters. And the Chinese fishing boats go where they will, and vacuum-up every other nations’ fish, escorted by those same warships.

      A Chinese tanker was recently arrested four miles away from a Malaysian island (i.e., well inside the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit – a very different thing from an ‘Exclusive Economic Zone’), and when the captain was questioned about what he was doing there, he replied that he’d been sent to refuel the Chinese fishing boats that were illegally fishing in Malaysian waters.

      The result? – China is now viewed with deep distrust in Southeast Asia, and all the other nations there (except North Korea) are queuing-up to improve their relations with the U.S. Surprised? And the U.S., at first genuinely welcoming China into the world order, is preparing against China because only too obviously, to take over the world (as Xi has said they will), China must knock the U.S. down several pegs (as Xi has said they will). So that’s not an emerging/declining power situation at all – it’s an open threat, and not just to the U.S.

      It’s an open threat to the whole world; and only Canada seems oblivious.

      1. { – For those unsure of the difference:

        1) an Exclusive Economic Zone (abbreviated EEZ) is usually 200 nautical miles from the nearest land, unless it conflicts with another country’s EEZ in which case it’s evenly divided between the two. EEZ’s typically govern fisheries and mineral rights, including oil – and many (Japan did it with Okinotorishima) countries have been tempted to just start dropping rocks on the ocean bottom until they break the surface, then call it an island and declare territorial waters and EEZ’s around them. So the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (abbreviated as UNCLOS) specifically declares that an EEZ may not be instituted on an island that has been built-up above the high-tide line.

        2) Territorial Waters are typically 12 nautical miles from nearest land, although different nations have different ways of working-out lines between two points of land. The distance is very historical – 12 nautical miles is considered to be the maximum range of British 9.2″ (233.7 mm) coastal artillery. Territorial waters have always been defined as the waters that a country can command with its cannon; in the old days of black powder and muzzle-loading cannon, they were 3 nautical miles. Because it’s always been accepted that a country may claim any territorial waters it wants – but if it can’t actually enforce its will on them, anybody can do whatever he wants out there and there’s nothing the country can do about it.

        History is endlessly fascinating – }

      2. Yes, but Sleepy Joe or his Demoncrap replacement will undo all the ill will to China that the bad Orange Man did. If the polls are correct, look for a major offensive by China against territory it claims on Inauguration Day 2021. The only thing a Sleepy Joe administration will do is say, “Come on Man!” and nothing else. Like Jimmah Catah in 1979 with Iran.

    2. I am not going to address your linked article, as it had been well commented on elsewhere in this thread.
      I want to comment on the Peloponnesian war as reported by Thucydides. If he had a bias, surely it would be on Athens’ side, since he actually took part in that war. Actually his lesson learned was relatively straight forward.
      Yes, Athens thought of itself as much more enlightened, and it considered Sparta almost barbaric. But in fact, Athens was only a democracy for privileged citizens who had franchise. Estimates of percentage of free citizens are as low as 10 or 20%. There is no doubt citizens of Sparta were subjected to harsher state control. On the other hand, almost all the slaves were captured in war, and owned by the state rather than individually.
      But the real lesson was in the different ways Athens and Sparta treated their allies.
      In that treatment of relationship between city and allies, Sparta was definitely the more enlightened. Sparta did not demand conformance of allies to her own standards. In fact, Spartan allies were free to conduct their local control in any way they want. In contrast, Athenians was so impressed by their own enlightenment, they demanded that every ally conducted itself in exactly the same way. I am reminded of how Jimmah Carter treated our faithful ally Aga Khan of Persia. Carter was complicit in overthrowing the latter, and wound up with a much more repressive country who is our sworn enemy. Or the present day far left who are so convinced of their own enlightenment that they forbid anyone to believe anything except that enlightened orthodoxy.
      That was how Athens lost the war. They started to lose allies. And those allies who remained with them deserted the cause as soon as things went South.
      Thucydides narrated all of that rather clearly and straightforward. And that is his real lesson for us.

  12. Might be a good time for Alberta and Saskatchewan farmers to consider implementing a “CO2/covid surcharge” for any food leaving Buffalo.

    Best wishes to China.

  13. So China has a population that is teetering on overthrowing communism and Canada has a population teetering on embracing it?

    We look back in history and lol how they burned witches or dealt with Black Plague and we have intellectuals who think we have it all together.

    200 years from now humanity will laugh and shake their heads at us.

    That Chinese dam is probably built the same way my 50cc kids quad was 10 years ago. Copied but not understood by the builder

  14. Lives lost is just an inconvenience…saving face is what really matters. Sometimes I think they’re just hardwired that way.
    They blew up a dyke on the Northern part of the Yellow river in 1938 to halt the Japanese advancing on Wuhan hoping that flooding the area would slow them down if not stop them completely. It didn’t, the Japanese simply went around the flooded parts and captured Wuhan anyway. A tactic that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.
    The result? A million Chinese lives lost, so no biggie. Of course not wanting a disaster go to waste the Chinese propagandized the hell out of it by blaming the Japanese. The rest is history.

  15. A couple of time now I’ve heard that if the 3 gorges goes, we might lose a significant portion of the pharmaceutical production of the planet.

    I’m cheering for the damn dam to hold. And for them to be moving the factories to higher ground.

    1. The factories will reappear as if by magic—in North America, where they should have been the whole time.

      The rest of us are praying God to unleash the water dragon.

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