anyone heard anything about this?

5/12/2008 11:27:24 PM

like 18 hours ago an earthquake happened

5/12/2008 11:28:04 PM

I think the Earth opened up and the Devil tried to take as many people as he could down into Hell for them being wicked communists or something.

5/12/2008 11:28:33 PM

5/12/2008 11:31:25 PM

personally i hope the US is responsible for the hurricane hitting myanmar, the tsunami in 2004, and the earthquake in china...thats what the US needs to develop...weapons that can cause hurricanes to destablize countries we dont like or that do not succumb to us..or like winter storms etc..we could shoot a nuke to the bottom of the ocean and cause more tsunamis etc

[Edited on May 12, 2008 at 11:32 PM. Reason : .]

5/12/2008 11:31:40 PM

I think the world might be coming to an end you guys. I mean, a 7.9 is a huge earthquake. That other earthquake just hit Illinois a couple weeks ago. Myanmar got anally raped by that cyclone. Gas is about to hit $4.00 a gallon. We're fucked.

5/12/2008 11:37:00 PM

Totally.















Lemme get a hit off that, brah.














I'm actually curious to compare or contrast the Chinese government's response to its disaster to Myanmar's, or our own during Hurricane Katrina.

5/13/2008 12:12:45 AM

well our own was definitely not as handled as poorly thats for sure


tops i think there were about 3500 people that died from katrina

5/13/2008 1:06:23 AM

Yeah, but we also don't have 1.7 billion people living here. I'd imagine that when you have so many people living so close to each other, they die quicker when something bad happens.

5/13/2008 1:11:58 AM

^ That's generally why when "shit goes down" in Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent, it's usually a many-hundreds-of-thousands-dead affair.

High population density + Poor ass living standard (shelter quality, geographic mobility) = Epic devastation during natural disasters

5/13/2008 1:22:23 AM

honestly in the wake of this myanmar thing i give the bush administration a 10/10 on how they handled katrina

5/13/2008 1:40:40 AM

I will choose to disagree with you there.

5/13/2008 3:12:46 AM

For the Chinese quake, I believe the epicenter hit a rather "rural" part of China with the worst hit city a mere 600,000 individuals. Given that the death toll is at 12,000 people and rising, it looks like this is going to be a really nasty mess.

The Chinese government tends to move very quickly on these sorts of disasters. For a nation that has historically viewed natural disasters as a harbinger of government collapse and revolution, a poor performance could easily lead to very bad things for the CCP. The biggest problem may occur if after the earthquake, it turns out that many of the buildings that collapsed were not built to code thanks to bribes and other corruption.

For the record, the United States has already given, and the Chinese accepted, $500,000 in initial earthquake relief aid.

5/13/2008 2:16:33 PM

$500,000

lol

5/13/2008 2:20:45 PM

Aww, they emptied the pennies from the Washington ashtray. That's sweet.

5/13/2008 2:29:07 PM

I bet they handle it better than Katrina.

When FEMA screwed up Katrina some people probably lost their jobs (or maybe not I have no idea)

In China, you get sent to prison or beheaded for making the government look incompetent.

5/13/2008 3:08:11 PM

They also have state run media to keep them from looking too bad.

5/13/2008 3:23:18 PM

Quote :

"a rather "rural" part of China with the worst hit city a mere 600,000 individuals."

so it hit an area like North Carolina near Charlotte?

5/13/2008 3:29:20 PM

Some of the comments here show just how ethnocentric Americans are...

I have not read a THING about the earthquake response being insufficient, corrupt, or anything like that. You all seem to really want it to be, but the fact is, the very nature of the event and the area where it happened in pretty well determined the extent of the damage - but there is no indication that this will not be responsibly handled or that the death toll will climb any further than what it should.

Nature pretty well just screwed them a new asshole.

5/13/2008 5:39:05 PM

Quote :

"For a nation that has historically viewed natural disasters as a harbinger of government collapse and revolution, a poor performance could easily lead to very bad things for the CCP. The biggest problem may occur if after the earthquake, it turns out that many of the buildings that collapsed were not built to code thanks to bribes and other corruption."

This is what China's enemies would like to see, and they're already beating you to the punch.

Quote :

"We have seen so many collapsed schools but very few other severely damaged government buildings. To what would you attribute this difference?"

http://shisaku.blogspot.com/2008/05/totalitarianism-aint-what-it-used-to-be.html

5/13/2008 5:41:40 PM

China is still behind in the race with Burma

5/16/2008 12:00:16 AM

No matter where you are, there's someone out there worse off than you.

...unless you're in Sudan.

5/16/2008 9:59:20 AM

I'm happy to see that the Chinese government has handled this crisis quite well. Unlike previous disasters, they've been very transparent with their efforts, even willing to accept foreign assistance from nations like Japan and Taiwan to help in rescue efforts. This is a big step from the past where China has tried to cover up these sorts of events and hide them. The organization of the Chinese effort has also been impressive, although this is more an expectation of a government of the size and scale of the PRC.

It's been particularly interesting though when compared with the cyclone in Burma, comparing the responses between the two governments.

5/16/2008 1:02:55 PM

I was listening to an international reporter today on XM (he was with a british news group but no BBC). Apparently the builders of one of the schools that collapsed may be executed because it was not built according to legally required standards and as a result hundreds died.

5/16/2008 2:07:33 PM

^ well... if he had falsified information... a similar case could happen here, the only difference is that we hope that our system is developed enough to not allow something not built to code collapse and kill a hundred people.

5/16/2008 2:13:01 PM

^ That's true, these things can happen anywhere. However, China does have a larger problem with this than most industrialized nations. The Chinese public recognizes it as a major problem, and the PRC government acknowledges this and has been trying to do something about it in recent years (hence the significant numbers of extremely public executions of corrupt officials). The issue is so bad that it threatens to throttle the current rate of growth in China and cap their progress.

I'm not trying to tear China down, I'm a big admirer of how much they've done over the last several decades. However, to deny they have problems out of a sense of ethnic pride or nationalism is no different than seeing Americans get all bent out of shape when foreigners even comment upon domestic American issues.

[Edited on May 16, 2008 at 2:40 PM. Reason : .]

5/16/2008 2:39:22 PM

Quote :

"I was listening to an international reporter today on XM (he was with a british news group but no BBC). Apparently the builders of one of the schools that collapsed may be executed because it was not built according to legally required standards and as a result hundreds died."

awesome, send a message

5/16/2008 10:22:29 PM