Death toll in China could reach 50,000

That's almost 0.0003782574586696988% of their population!

Quick, everyone run to walmart and buy something. That's the fastest wat to send the commie some cash.

I do, however, wonder if they didn't bring this upon themselves. No, it isn't an act of god, but it may be an act of engineering. Bear with me:

First, go here to get an idea of where Sichuan is located.

Now, peep this:


See the Indo-Australian and Eurasian plates? When they rub up on each other (subduction) one of them (or both) has an orgasm, and an earthquake occurs in China. Depending on the strength, duration, and number of orgasms, a number is generated on a Richter scale, which displays Gaia's orgiastic tremors.

Great. Now that you're all twitterpated, consider this:
The Chin are building the three gorges dam,

which is going to harness the Yangtse river, and add about 100 gazillion trillion gallons of water to the terrain. Someone may want to tell them, water has mass. Stack enough mass up in any single location, and you are bound to have some effect on them there plates, right?

I'm not saying the weight of all that water somehow "tipped" the Eurasian plate, but it may have had a localized effect, causing the edge of the plate to subduct, even a tiny bit, and causing an earthquake.

I'm no geologist, but the possibility seems plausible to me that the Chinese created this disaster themselves. Of course, the REAL cause is that since all the tourists are flooding into China for the Peiping Olympic games, it is President Bush's fault because he didn't boycott the games. If the tourists weren't there, we could speed much needed relief into those poor, poor Chinese peasants--I mean comrades who share in the bounty of communist utopia.

Or, we could look at this as 50,000 fewer evil primates who are adding carbon to the atmosphere with their unregulated cooking fires, damaging the earth with their terraced steppe-farming, and oppressing the water buffalo. In honor of their sacrifice on the altar of environmental self-righteousness, I am going to go burn a quart of diesel in the back yard--and if I can find one, maybe an old tire.

Now, the loss of 50,000 people is a tragedy. I am not making light of that. But before anyone starts spouting off about foreign aid for China, let's remember, there are still 1,321,801888 of them left (give or take.) They have more than enough manpower, resources, and treasure to help themselves.

--Chuck