myopiclunacy.com

This is the danger of allowing capitalism into your corrupt country. The real story always gets out. You can only hide and intimidate for so long before people from pissed-off bloggers to The Times reporters start getting the story out:

China’s iron Olympic grip starts to slip

The mystery of the half-filled stands at many events at the 2008 Olympic Games has been solved, according to Chinese internet users, who say it is the result of a policy to prevent the gathering of large and possibly uncontrollable crowds.

They claim ticket sales to the public were secretly restricted. Blocks of tickets went to government departments, Communist party officials or state-owned companies, which have quietly obeyed orders not to hand them out. “People are so angry because they slept all night outside ticket booths and got nothing and now they see this,” said one blogger, Jian Yu.

Official explanations eroded swiftly because internet insurgents have rapidly identified cracks in the perfect facade constructed for the Olympics.

In the nine days since Chinese leaders presided over a grandiose - and, it turns out, partly faked - opening ceremony, one fact after another has eluded the censors and fuelled public indignation at the costs and the charade. Protected, they hope, by online anonymity, some of China’s 1.3 billion people are daring to wonder where it will all end.
At some football matches in the northern city of Shenyang, only a third of the seats were taken. Even some gymnastics finals, usually one of the biggest attractions on the programme, were not sold out.

Nobody seems to have explained it to the International Olympic Committee, which is baffled by the empty seats, or to the sponsors, who are disappointed.

The IOC should have no reason to have something explained. They knew what they were getting into when they awarded China the games. The fact that there are shennangans going on should come as no surprise. It’s like giving Michael Jackson a baby to watch or asking George Bush to speak clearly. The sponsors should have also done their due diligence before agreeing to sponsor an event in China. Um - hello - it’s China! Buyer beware.

Lower-ranking Chinese officials hastily bused in paid “volunteers” to populate the stands in Beijing, appreciating the embarrassment caused by leaving them half-empty, but public relations remain a matter of indifference to most guardians of public order.

Security has been heavy-handed from the start. As the film director Zhang Yimou’s extravaganza kicked off with a boom, I watched on a giant screen in a park, one of the few venues where ordinary Chinese people were allowed to gather.

They cheered as the fireworks exploded, few looking up to find that there were, in fact, none to be seen because the sequence was produced by software, not gunpowder.

They cooed at nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, hardly caring that her lyrics were obviously mimed, and as she sang they went into a patriotic delirium when goose-stepping soldiers raised the national flag. Yet even these loyal citizens could not be trusted. We were surrounded by dozens of police who locked the gates to keep us in and others out.

Chao Chanqing, an exiled journalist widely read on web-sites accessible in China, has accused Zhang, the director, of playing the same role as Leni Riefenstahl, who filmed an epic documentary for Hitler at the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

The director scorns the comparison but he admitted that a Chinese leader ordered him to make changes to the ceremony. “I had no chance to reject his opinion,” he told the Nanfang Weekend newspaper. Analysts said he was referring to vice-president Xi Jinping, heir apparent to the top job.

Government officials swept thousands of migrant workers out of Beijing – the very people who built the stadium, at least 10 of them paying with their lives. Police arrested hundreds of provincial petitioners who sought justice in the capital and sent at least 58 to labour camps for “reeducation”.

The sick were told that routine surgery was cancelled in every hospital and officials shut some psychiatric patients inside their wards.

It’s just China being China, yo.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Newsweek rocks:

Hadith and The New Face of Islam

A critique of radicalism is building within the heart of the Muslim world.

Rahat Dar / EPA-Corbis
Fresh Air: Worshipers in Pakistan, where support for Muslim radicals has plummeted

By Christopher Dickey and Owen Matthews | NEWSWEEK
Jun 9, 2008 Issue

Back in the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden had a problem, and it was Islam. He wanted to say the Qur’an gave his followers license to kill innocents—and themselves—in the cause of “jihad.” That was how he could justify his global campaign of terror. But that’s not what the Muslim holy book says, and that’s not the way it was interpreted by any of the great scholars and preachers of the faith.

So bin Laden set about spinning the revelations contained in the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the Hadith, which provide much of the context for actual religious practice in the Muslim world. The Saudi millionaire wrote a diatribe that he called a declaration of war and then a fatwa, or religious edict, cherry-picking quotations from Islamic Scripture and calling on dubious scholars to back him up. The tracts were political propaganda, not theology, but for his purpose they worked very well. The apocalyptic notion of holy war he promoted—and the reality of it that he demonstrated on 9/11—became the dominant vision of Islam for those with little understanding of the faith, whether in the West or, indeed, the Muslim world. Even many religious scholars were intimidated.

Now that’s starting to change. Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, “Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda’s vision of the future.” At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden’s nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

Intellectually and theologically, a lot of the most ambitious work is being done by a group of scholars based in Ankara, Turkey, who expect to publish new editions of the Hadith before the end of the year. They have collected all 170,000 known narrations of the Prophet’s sayings. These are supposed to record Muhammad’s words and deeds as a guide to daily life and a key to some of the mysteries of the Qur’an. But many of those anecdotes came out of a specific historical context, and those who told the stories or, much later, recorded them, were not always reliable. Sometimes they confused “universal values of Islam with geographical, cultural and religious values of their time and place,” says Mehmet Gormez, a theology professor at the University of Ankara who’s working on the project. “Every Hadith narration has … a context. We want to give every narration a home again.” …

I love it when smart people research things and talk about it in a constructive manner.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Not that those with critical thinking skills and some understanding of the African American experience couldn’t already figure this out, but it’s amazing how controversial people sound when you conveniently leave out the context in which they make statements … especially when those statements are paraphrased and especially when you have an agenda to push. You know - like Sean Hannity’s Neo Nazi sympathizer agenda (allegedly):

YouTube - FOX Lies!! Barack Obama Pastor Wright


God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God


Xmas 2007, Part 1


Xmas 2007, Part 2


Xmas 2007, Part 3


Xmas 2007, Part 4

Popularity: 8% [?]

If there were any welling hope about whether pro sports was ready for tolerance in the lockerroom, let that be dashed yet again. It seems there’s some sort of code among the players - a don’t ask don’t tell unless you call me out policy - that caused Brandon Lloyd to speculate about the sexual orientation of legendary Cowboy QB and FOX color commentator Troy Aikman - rumors that have existed before:

Redskins much maligned receiver Brandon Lloyd was on The Junkies (which happens to be our least favorite sports radio program ever) here in D.C. this morning, and may have crossed the line. The first half of the interview is mostly about the game yesterday, and the team’s inability to catch the football. Then, seemingly bitter about Aikman calling him out on air, B-Lloyd suggests that Troy might be gay

I guess cowboys and indians will never get along.

Popularity: 6% [?]