Your decision tomorrow should be about Nigeria; her progress and recovery. Vote for the candidate that can deliver a Nigeria that works for everyone. Please, go out and vote. I BELIEVE IN A NIGERIA THAT WORKS FOR ALL.
@SirJarus That house will prompt them to create a new Building Code.
Most Japanese houses are built to withstand severe earthquakes measuring magnitude 7 or higher on the seismic scale, per the 1981 Standard (Shintaishin) Building Code.
Elon Musk’s point about China is worth thinking about not because “China is peaceful,” but because China’s historical experience is fundamentally different from the Western imperial model we often use to interpret it.
For much of its long history, China’s biggest wars were fought within China, not across oceans to build overseas colonies.
Think about the scale of its history, the Three Kingdoms, the An Lushan Rebellion, the Mongol conquest, the Ming–Qing transition, the Taiping Rebellion, and countless periods of fragmentation and reunification.
Some of these conflicts produced demographic catastrophes on a scale that is difficult to comprehend today. Elon frequently cited “70%” figure is debatable and shouldn’t be treated as a precise historical statistic. But the broader pattern is real, some of China’s bloodiest chapters were civil wars, rebellions and struggles over the reunification of the Chinese heartland.
That matters because history shapes strategic culture.
China is a continental civilisation with thousands of years of written history, repeatedly experiencing fragmentation, famine, invasion, reconstruction and reunification. Its strategic instinct has often been about maintaining internal cohesion, securing its borders and building economic strength.
This doesn’t mean China has never expanded, fought neighbours or exercised imperial power, it absolutely has.
And history is not destiny… But I think the mistake is assuming that China’s rise automatically follows the same trajectory as 19th-century European imperialism, overseas colonies, resource extraction and permanent expeditionary warfare.
Look at what China has poured enormous resources into over the past few decades: high-speed rail, ports, manufacturing, cities, energy infrastructure, technology and industrial capacity.
That tells us something, the question isn’t whether China is “good” or “bad”, the more useful question is what kind of superpower is China becoming?
If we want to compete with China, collaborate with China, invest in China or simply understand China, we need to stop projecting our own historical experience onto it.
You cannot understand a civilization with 5,000 years of history by viewing it through a 200-year-old Western lens.
The floods in the Himalayas, which have left more than 1,000 dead and more than 4,000 missing, began as an unpredictable glacial avalanche. Glacial avalanches have always been a hazard wherever glaciers sit on steep mountain slopes. But as Earth’s climate warms, they will become more common.
Find out why the Himalayas are one of the most disaster-prone places on Earth: https://t.co/FQLSwcKAb8
How did a man who pioneered free education and television still fail to win the presidency in a country where those achievements should have given him enormous political capital? That's where the Nigerian story gets fascinating.