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The Samizdata Blog named after the Soviet dissident press called Samizdat (self-published) has started us off with a string of items about the Three Gorges Dam in China. Beyond the dam problems though, the post shows some remarkable thought about the relative problems and strengths of democracy and the eventual weaknesses of an autocratic regime like China’s. To do that reference is made to Victor Davis Hanson’s sophisticated thinking about the Western way of war.
Here is a report about progress, so to speak, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China.
This dam, just as was earlier prophesied, is causing lots of environmental problems, as in real environmental problems, as in: people are finding themselves living in buildings that are collapsing, beside roads that are cracking up, on land that is sliding into the water. We are not talking imaginary rises in sea level here, but real damage to real human habitats. Earthquakes are now happening.
That Telegraph piece links to this Times report, which explains things thus:
“As the water rises, it penetrates fissures and seeps into soil. Then it loosens the slopes that ascend at steep angles on either side of the river. Eventually, rocks, soil and stone give way. The landslides undermine the geology of the area. That, in turn, sets off earth tremors. It may be the world’s biggest case of rising damp.”
The Times report also includes this choice little paragraph, concerning some crumbling building that was hurriedly vacated by government officials and allocated instead to mere people:
‘”What kind of dogshit government moves itself out and moves us into somewhere like this?” one of them complained.’ …
Here’s the piece from Telegraph, UK.
In China, cracks are appearing – in the neighbourhood of the massive Three Gorges Dam, the country’s great prestige project, and also in the Great Internet Firewall of China, enabling the ominous news to leak out. Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.
Recent media reports tell of a series of landslips, minor earthquakes and cracks appearing in roads and buildings along the central section of the Yangtse, between the dam and the city of Chongqing. Almost 10,000 “dangerous sites” have been identified, but many of the people living near them cannot be relocated for lack of money. Two years ago thousands of children died in Sichuan Province because their schools were not resistant to the earthquake which hit the area; in the town of Badong near Chongqing children are attending school in buildings which have been recognised as far more vulnerable. What else can they do? The local authorities can’t afford a new one.
Like many such megaprojects, the Three Gorges was always driven as much by politics as by economics. …
More of this from the London Times.
The Three Gorges dam was so vast and sweeping a vision that nothing could stand in its way. Not the old cities of the Yangtze valley, storehouses of human toil and treasure for more than a thousand years. Not the lush, low-lying farmlands, nor the villages, nor even the pagodas and temples that graced the riverbanks. The cries of dissenting scientists and the lamentations of more than a million Chinese people forced to leave their ancestral lands counted for nothing.
When the waters rose to 570ft last year, drowning all these things, it marked a triumph for the engineers at the top of the Chinese Communist party. But in the past six months a sinister trail of events has unfolded from the dam all the way up the 410-mile reservoir to the metropolis of Chongqing. It began with strange, small-scale earthquakes recorded by official monitoring stations and reported by the Chinese media. Mysterious cracks split roads and sundered schoolhouses and apartments in newly built towns and villages on the bluffs looking down on the river.
The local government now says that 300,000 people will have to move out in addition to the 1.4m evicted to make way for the dam. More than 50,000 residents have already been relocated owing to seismic problems that were not foreseen when the dam was built, according to the state news agency, Xinhua. …
It gets better, because of a Jonah Goldberg Corner post that was in Pickings September 10, 2009 when Tom Friedman, one of the NY Times’ useful idiots was displaying his enthusiasm for the Chinese way of getting things done.
… So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman’s intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are “drawbacks” to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these “drawbacks” pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.
I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it’s the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn’t picky in this regard). …
Mark Steyn ponders the two-dimensional president.
…Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment”, too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on Earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job – that it’s really too small for him, and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.
And so the Gulf spill was an irritation, but he dutifully went through the motions of flying in to be photographed looking presidentially concerned. As he wearily explained to Matt Lauer, “I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking…” Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he’s not a good enough actor to fake it.
…Obama’s postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It’s true that he hadn’t seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn’t seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he’s passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. …
George Will looks at the government encroachment on the economy and how that’s working out.
…Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May. The 41,000 jobs created were dwarfed by the 411,000 temporary and low-wage government jobs needed to administer the census. …
…May’s 41,000 jobs were one-fifth of the April number and substantially fewer than half the number needed to keep pace with the normal growth of the labor force. This is evidence against the theory that a growing government can be counted on to produce prosperity because a government dollar spent has a reliable multiplier effect as it ripples through the economy from which the government took the dollar.
Today’s evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government’s control of economic life. The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is. …
Michael Barone reviews Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln’s battle with unions.
…Union leaders desperately need Congress to pass their card check bill, which would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. Card check would allow union thugs, er, organizers to collect signatures on cards of a majority of employees and then, presto, the union would be recognized as bargaining agent, and dues money would come pouring in.
It isn’t now, at least at the rate union leaders would like. Last January the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that union membership in 2009 was at an all-time low since the 1930s. Only 12 percent of wage and salary workers were union members, and the number of union members dropped 771,000 between 2008 and 2009.
And, for the first time in history, more union members (7.9 million) work in the public sector than the private sector (7.4 million). Only 7.2 percent of private sector workers are union members, a huge drop from the peak figure of 28 percent in the mid-1950s. …
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders discusses California’s pension problems.
…Last week, the Libertarian-leaning Reason Foundation released a report that found that California’s unfunded pension liability “translates to roughly $36,000 for each California household.” Author Adam B. Summers called the current system “unsustainable and unaffordable.”
…Schwarzenegger tried to fix the problem. In 2005, he proposed ending state employees’ generous defined-benefit pensions by setting up 401(k)-style plans for new state hires. He collected 400,000 signatures for a special-election ballot measure toward that end.
Did a grateful public rally behind Schwarzenegger? Short answer: No. …