China | Ain't Complicated

Better Than Being There

If it looks too good to be true … – 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics

It turns out that amazing line of fireworks footprints marching from Tiananmen Square to the Bird’s Nest stadium during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was computer-generated and inserted into television coverage to look like the real thing.

It was fake.

It didn’t go down like that.

Of course, this is a case of good news-bad news.

I was in Tiananmen Square on Friday evening, reporting and writing a column on the tens of thousands of jubilant Chinese citizens who gravitated there to celebrate. Those people saw two tiny flarelike blasts pop in the sky, followed by a lot of nothing, and they were probably baffled by the widespread reports of the lit-up sky, exploding footprints and brilliant fireworks. And today, I’m thinking those people are relieved to learn they’re not losing their marbles.

That’s the good news.

Russia vs Georgia

And it’s not at the Olympics:

Russia seizes South Ossetia

Russian troops backed by tanks and fighter jets seized control of South Ossetia on Sunday as fears grew of a wider conflict with Georgia over the separatist region.

Georgia said it had withdrawn most of its troops from South Ossetia in the face of a build-up in Russian firepower and that it had lost control of the near-destroyed regional capital, Tskhinvali.

[…]

“We’re being driven away. The place was in flames and we couldn’t stay,” Pavlik, an elderly man travelling by foot, told AFP as he fled from the conflict zone.

[…]

Russia backs the separatist government in South Ossetia and sent in tanks and troops on Friday in response to pro-Western Georgia’s military offensive to take back the province which broke away in the early 1990s after a separatist war.

[…]

“We have left practically all of South Ossetia as an expression of goodwill and our willingness to stop military confrontation,” Georgian National Security Council Secretary Alexander Lomaia told AFP.

[…]

The movement of Russia’s naval fleet from their base in Ukraine to positions near Georgia also threatened to destabilise the region.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry threatened to prevent the warships from returning to their base in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol.

[…]

Georgia’s army of less than 25,000 men is confronting a Russian force which can count on more than one million troops and has dominance of both skies and sea.

On the diplomatic front, a meeting of the UN Security Council on Saturday failed to agree on a call for an immediate ceasefire.

Russia on the move. Imagine that.

Georgia may be an ally of the US. But the US is rather occupied elsewhere these days.

Next thing you know, we’ll hear Iran moved against Israel. And China against Taiwan. And North Korea against the South. And Iran against the US.

Or something.

Wars and rumors of wars, you know.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

So face it.

Well, anyway. What shall we Christians in America do?

Olympics: Something Big Coming Down?

I thought of that earlier this morning when I first saw this story.

Item Number One:

Attackers with home-made bombs and knives killed 16 police in a restive western region of China on Monday, state media said, in just the sort of violence Beijing had hoped to avoid four days before the Olympics.

The attack, which occurred about 4,000 km 2,500 miles from the capital in the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, was a reminder of internal tensions in China, especially in its ethnically mixed and largely Muslim west.

Police said they had information separatists from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement had been planning attacks in the run-up to the Games.

I wonder if this is the forerunner to a Big Event masterminded by Big Terror.

Item Number Two is more benign in nature:

American swimming phenomenon Michael Phelps slipped into town to begin an Olympic adventure that could end with him breaking Mark Spitzs record of seven golds in a single Olympics.

[…]

Phelps won six gold and two bronze medals at the 2004 Athens Olympics and will get a $1 million bonus from sponsor Speedo if he can equal compatriot Spitzs haul from the 1972 Munich Games.

I remember Spitz.

Note to Phelps: Stay off the dope.

To Yahoo! (Or Not)

Yahoo! charged with helping Beijing suppress human rights – Asia News

The International Organisation for human rights has called web giant Yahoo! to court in the United States, guilty of having provided the Chinese government with information to trace and arrest journalists and dissidents.

The group — which has a long history of working to promote human rights world wide — has also asked a court in San Francisco to charge Yahoo! With complicity with Beijing in the abuse of civil rights and in acts of torture committed against arrested dissidents.

[…]

The web giant responded to the charges stating that it was obliged to work in agreement with the laws of each single state in which the system is used, but admitted that collaboration with the Chinese government had led to arrests and arbitrary detentions.

Law-abiding Yahoo! — good for them.

Microsoft and Google get “honorable” mentions in the article as well.

I use all three of them. Extensively.

Should I divest myself of them?

(I don’t approve of some ways my taxes are used either.)

(Nor do I approve of some of the stuff Yoder Store, Sharis, Safeway, WalMart, and Pizza Hut sell.)