This morning I noticed a link at Instapundit linking the Appalachian floods and the Mandate of Heaven. Of course! Experts agree that Yellow River floods have frequently marked the end of a dynasty in China because the flood showed that the emperor who ruled Tianxia (天下; "all under heaven") had lost the Mandate of Heaven.  The experts at Google Search AI agree:

Yellow River floods have contributed to the end of multiple dynasties in China, including the Yuan, Northern Song, and Western Han dynasties.

That’s because, when things start to go wrong, humans realize that God is not mocked by corrupt incompetent rulers. Secular westerners prefer to talk instead about the verdict of history.

How many Yellow River floods were there, overall? About 22 in the last 1,000 years. The last flood mentioned was the 1958 flood. Do you think that flood was a divine judgment on Mao Zedong and his catastrophic Great Leap Forward that began in 1958 and ended in famine?

Let’s go closer to home. Wiki lists 25 Mississippi River floods for the last 500 years. What happened before that? Experts agree that the First Nation records for the previous 20,000 years were destroyed by a robber band of white settler-colonialists in 1619. But I wonder. Could it be that the First Nations lost the Mandate of Heaven in one of the Mississippi River floods in the middle of the last millennium that is now lost to history? More research is needed.

The question is: why does a flood imperil the regime? It’s obvious. Most people believe that the government cares about them. But in the real world, government bureaucracies merely bureaucrat. FEMA’s Strategic Plan has “Goal 1 -- Install Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management.” A Keystone Kops flood response tells us that the government doesn’t care about people like you and me.

Every government bureaucracy aligns with the regime Narrative. But, beneath the surface, the bureaucrats always have their own agenda. Thus, Chinese emperors found it necessary to develop a parallel bureaucracy -- dominated by eunuchs -- to keep tabs on the Mandarin bureaucrats. I assume this is the model on which our beloved Intelligence Community -- founded by cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover -- is based.

Some years ago, I watched the 76-episode Chinese TV series “Empresses in the Palace.” If you’ve ever been to the Forbidden City in Beijing you’ll love this series, because it assembles empresses and guards and eunuchs and gorgeous clothes and banners together to bring the Forbidden City to life. Of course, the “empresses” include everyone from the girlboss Empress-in-chief down to the humblest Concubine 2nd Class. While all the empresses are clearly from the highest class, the emperor himself is a rather rough and ready Manchu, descendant “of a sedentary farming people” from NE China. Experts agree that the movie is definitely not a satire on the empire of Emperor Willie Brown of California, born back east in the sedentary farming town of Mineola, TX.

But where are the experts on the rising cabal of PayPal veterans Peter Thiel and Elon Musk -- and their frontman JD Vance from the sedentary farming people of rural Ohio? Don’t they realize that they are scheming in the background to humiliate the current ruling class with false accusations of a failed Hurricane Helene response, where the liberal town of Asheville, NC, is hardest hit?

How will it all pan out?  Our educated women friends naturally prefer the girl-talk word salad of Kamala Harris: it’s so relatable, in comparison to the crude macho act of Trump. But when the rain starts to fall and the roads start to wash away and the power goes out then a more primitive instinct takes over. You and I know that women expect to be protected: from robbers and raiders and rapists. And they have instinctively expected this protection all down the ages. But the instinct only kicks in when danger threatens and the decent drapery of ordinary life is stripped away. The rest of the time our women friends revert to the culture of manners that they use to dominate their domestic -- and now corporate -- world.

The question in this election season is whether men get to elect a man who acts like a hero, and whether liberal women feel threatened enough by Biden-Harris failures to stay home on November 5.

If there is one thing we've learned in the last month or so it is that Kamala Harris can pose nicely at her desk in Air Force Two or sit seriously at the head of the table in a government conference room and pose for the cameras. But what she hasn’t shown is any interest in the real work of a political leader: making tough decisions after a flood.

Will that make a difference on November 5, 2024?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

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