Sarah sez

One in a series that takes a look at some of the zany and madcap things said by the former governor of Alaska.



It would appear that Ms. Palin is a big fan of those top-down pragmatists over in China. Those top-down pragmatists that have a very interesting concept of being "pro-choice". Here's Palin over in China just yesterday:

What we ended up doing is setting up a system whereby we did cut by $1.2 trillion upfront, the deficit over the next 10 years. And we set up a group of senators that have to come up with another $1.2 to $1.7 trillion in savings or automatically there will be cuts that go into effect in January to get those savings. So the savings will be accomplished. But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I’m not second-guessing -- of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.

So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that's much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that.

(emphasis, ours)




Of course, that wasn't Palin but rather our very own Vice President, Joey "Choo-choo" Biden.

It speaks volumes of the statist mindset that they're idea of entitlement reform isn't to make any needed structural changes to the entitlement program itself but rather ensuring a sustainable worker:pensioner ratio (Biden even got that one wrong. How is limiting the number of future workers paying into the system in any way sustainable?) through forced abortions.

An eight-months pregnant woman was dragged from her home and forced to have an abortion because she had broken China’s one-child-per-family law.

Twelve government officials entered Xiao Aiying’s house where they hit and kicked her in the stomach, before taking her kicking and screaming to hospital.

There, the 36-year-old was restrained as doctors injected her with a drug to kill the unborn baby.

Her husband Luo Yanquan, a construction worker, yesterday described the moment officials burst into his family home.

‘They held her hands behind her back and pushed her head against the wall and kicked her in the stomach,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if they were trying to give her a miscarriage.

‘Our ten-year-old daughter has been excited about having a little brother or sister but I don’t know how I can explain to her what has happened.’

He recalled how a month before the child was due to be born officials told the couple they weren’t allowed to have another baby because they already have a daughter.

His wife (pictured), who was filmed in hospital with large bruises on her arms and her dead child still inside her, said: ‘I have had this baby, feeling it moving around and around my belly. Can you imagine how I feel now.’

Her harrowing experience in Siming, near the city of Xiamen, south-west China, on October 10, comes a month after the government in Beijing said there would be no relaxation in strict family planning laws.

Forced abortions just a tad unsavory for your delicate sensibilities? How about, then, a pre-emptive strike via forced sterilizations?

Authorities in southern China must not violate human rights in carrying out their reported plans to sterilize thousands of people this month in a drive to meet family planning targets, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

According to Chinese media reports, officials in Puning City, Guangdong Province aim to sterilize 9,559 people, some against their will, by 26 April.

The authorities started the campaign to sterilize people who already have at least one child on 7 April.

Four days later, the authorities said they had already met 50 per cent of their target. A local doctor told the media his team was scheduled to work from 8am until 4am the following day.

"Forced sterilizations carried out by officials amount to torture and the haste of the procedures raises questions about their safety and possible health impacts," said Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director.

Question for Amnesty International: Is there a way in which to perform sterilizations that is not a violation of one's human rights?

And here's what we wrote last fall with respect to the Chi-comms and their biggest cheerleader in the American press (linked above):

Are we somehow implying that Thomas Friedman, with his odd obsession regarding China's economic planning, condones this? Certainly not. However, when your column, time after time, extols, on the whole, the virtues of this command-and-control authoritarian state, you're going to have to answer for certain things.

You may say that it is only with respect to China's economic direction does Friedman's affection lie. China's One Child Policy was put into place, in large part, because of economics and the fact that China was worried that families (and the country, for that matter) could not afford more than one child per couple.

Crappy economic policy spills over and creates brutal, thuggish and murderous human policy.

What better example is there of the importance to rein in the influence and power of government? If the government can direct economic activity, what gives you the reason to think that they will not see that as justification for directing other parts of society. Please see: ObamaCare.

Sorry, Tom. When it comes to being a Chi-comm apologist, if you're in for a dime, you're in for a dollar.

Perhaps, some day soon, we will find ourselves in a position where China is not buying so much of our debt and we will better be in another position where we won't feel so compelled to ass-kiss them and their morally bankrupt system of governance.


It's staggering to imagine just what an epically colossal buffoon is Joe Biden.

Thomas Friedman likes this

Reap the benefits of being a "world leader" in wind turbine and lithium-ion battery production, reap also the benefits of a top-down command-and-control energy infrastructure.

Since the Communists came to power, November 15 has been circled in red on many Beijing calendars. It's not Mao Zedong's birthday. November 15 is the day when city officials dutifully flick the switch to turn on the capital's centrally-controlled heating system, supplying warmth to most of Beijing's 22 million residents.

In one of the last vestiges of collective living, Beijing's coal plants pump heat to city apartments on a strict schedule, from November 15 to March 15, every year. Since the 1950s, the schedule has rarely changed, even if temperatures plummet before the appointed day.

After enduring record heat-waves this summer, with the mercury soaring to its highest mark in 60 years, and thick pollution in the fall (which the government blamed on "fog"), Beijingers are now suffering through the early onset of bitter cold. China's state-run media reported October 18 as the city's coldest autumn day since 1986, with temperatures peaking at 48 degrees and then dropping to 44.

Many residents of the capital city are counting down the days to November 15 hunched over their computer keyboards, commiserating about the frigid weather and lack of government-provided relief.

The image of China's growing, increasingly tech-savvy and some would say restive population, hunkering over an internet-connected computer is certainly metaphorical.

And in other totally related news:

An eight-months pregnant woman was dragged from her home and forced to have an abortion because she had broken China’s one-child-per-family law.

Twelve government officials entered Xiao Aiying’s house where they hit and kicked her in the stomach, before taking her kicking and screaming to hospital
.
There, the 36-year-old was restrained as doctors injected her with a drug to kill the unborn baby.

Her husband Luo Yanquan, a construction worker, yesterday described the moment officials burst into his family home.

‘They held her hands behind her back and pushed her head against the wall and kicked her in the stomach,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if they were trying to give her a miscarriage.

‘Our ten-year-old daughter has been excited about having a little brother or sister but I don’t know how I can explain to her what has happened.’

He recalled how a month before the child was due to be born officials told the couple they weren’t allowed to have another baby because they already have a daughter.

His wife (pictured), who was filmed in hospital with large bruises on her arms and her dead child still inside her, said: ‘I have had this baby, feeling it moving around and around my belly. Can you imagine how I feel now.’

Her harrowing experience in Siming, near the city of Xiamen, south-west China, on October 10, comes a month after the government in Beijing said there would be no relaxation in strict family planning laws.

Most Chinese families are allowed only one child to reduce the 1.3 billion-plus population and cut unsustainable demand on resources.

The policy leads to an estimated 13 million abortions every year, with many of those ordered by local authorities. Infanticide is also widespread in many rural areas.
Those who violate the one child law can be fined up to £25,000.

As well as a home invasion and a beating.

The Yanquan's apparently lacked both the money and political connections to prevent this from happening.

Are we somehow implying that Thomas Friedman, with his odd obsession regarding China's economic planning, condones this? Certainly not. However, when your column, time after time, extols, on the whole, the virtues of this command-and-control authoritarian state, you're going to have to answer for certain things.

You may say that it is only with respect to China's economic direction does Friedman's affection lie. China's One Child Policy was put into place, in large part, because of economics and the fact that China was worried that families (and the country, for that matter) could not afford more than one child per couple.

Crappy economic policy spills over and creates brutal, thuggish and murderous human policy.

What better example is there of the importance to rein in the influence and power of government? If the government can direct economic activity, what gives you the reason to think that they will not see that as justification for directing other parts of society. Please see: ObamaCare.

Sorry, Tom. When it comes to being a Chi-comm apologist, if you're in for a dime, you're in for a dollar.


This story is revolting and heart-breaking. Please pray for the Yanquan's as their going public with this will not be viewed favorably by China's own ruling class.

And stacked next to all those films about George Washington...

Headline:

Chinese film on 1960 labor camps cheered in Venice

A powerful Chinese film on the plight of political prisoners condemned to forced labor camps in the late 1950s wooed critics in Venice on Monday, with some tipping it as a strong contender for the festival's top prize.

"The Ditch" tells the little-known story of some 3,000 people deported for "re-education" to labor camps on the edge of the Gobi desert, in western China, and struggling to survive extreme climate and acute food shortages.

Billed as right-wing enemies by the government for even mildly criticizing the Communist party or simply because of their background, many died of starvation, disease and exhaustion in the ditches that served as dormitories.

For a set of people that become giddy over the prospects of a "docu-drama" on Che' Guevara, we're at a loss to determine in what context this "cheering" was er, executed.

Go with what you know

The Chi-comms take a page out of The Great Leap Forward playbook for their comprehensive macro-economic industrial base strategy:

Chinese steel mills and mobile phone factories are being idled and thousands of homes in one area are doing without electricity as local governments order power cuts to meet energy-saving targets set by Beijing.

Rolling blackouts and enforced power cuts are affecting key industrial areas. The prosperous eastern city of Taizhou turned off street lights and ordered hotels and shopping malls to cut power use. In Anping County southwest of Beijing, an area known as China's wire-manufacturing capital, thousands of factories and homes have endured daylong blackouts over the past two weeks.

"We can't meet deadlines for some orders and will have to pay penalties," said Han Hongmai, general manager of Anping's Jintai Metal Wire Co. "At home we can't use the toilet" on blackout days due to lack of power for water pumps, he said.

The reason for these shut-downs is mandatory energy efficiency goals dictated by the central government that are not being met.

Some industrious plants/factories still wishing to fulfill production goals while their power is cut, resort to firing up older on-site diesel generators which, of course, is not what you would consider environmentally friendly.

And dig this:

"You could say local governments are trying to blackmail the central government: If you order me to do something I can't deliver, I will pass on the pressure to ordinary people," said Yang Ailun, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace China.

An autocratic central government dictating terms of business to semi-nationalized industries who simply promise to pass along the pain to their costumers...? Over here we call that ObamaCare.

Reading the article, one gets the impression that the Chinese economy is one where an action or series of top-down decrees causes a spastic reaction that is responded to in turn by yet more top-down decrees by the Chi-comms. From our vantage point the Chinese economy is one massive back and forth flail.

Thomas Friedman likes this.

The never-ending apology tour makes a stop in China (UPDATED)

(please scroll down for update)

So, what happens when a free representative republic like America attempts to sit down and discuss "human rights" with a top-down authoritarian, communist regime like that which exists in China?

If you are a member of the Obama administration, you start making ridiculous implied moral equivalencies between Arizona'a illegal immigration law and China's one child/forced abortion policy.

Read more at Left Coast Rebel, here.


P.S. We imagine Arizonans aren't taking kindly to the ugly red-headed step-child treatment they are getting from officials of their own country. In fact, we don't ever recall anyone ever getting called out in this manner. This has been an administration of firsts, however.


(UPDATE #1): KT was kind enough to link to this post and his intro got us to pondering even more.

Just what in the hell were we thinking in the first place engaging in human rights "dialog" with the Chi-comms? In order to dialog with someone, do you not need some commanality? Do you not need some sort of mutually-agreed upon baseline from which you can begin discussion? Where in god's name does that baseline exist between us and the Chi-comms. It doesn't. That's fact.

But since we did decide to enter into dialog we're forced to simultaneously pander in the most shameless manner to the Chi-comms while hanging the citizens of a state of our Union out to dry.

It's bad enough that the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department and who has criticized the law admitted that he hadn't even read the law (ditto: Napolitano), it has now been revealed that the Justice Department has not even seen fit to rescind a Bush-era memo that acknowleges the states' powers to enforce federal law.

In the legal battle over Arizona's new immigration law, an ironic subtext has emerged: whether a Bush-era legal opinion complicates a potential Obama administration lawsuit against Arizona.

The document, written in 2002 by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that state police officers have "inherent power" to arrest undocumented immigrants for violating federal law. It was issued by Jay S. Bybee, who also helped write controversial memos from the same era that sanctioned harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects.

The author of the Arizona law -- which has drawn strong opposition from top Obama administration officials -- has cited the authority granted in the 2002 memo as a basis for the legislation. The Obama administration has not withdrawn the memo, and some backers of the Arizona law said Monday that because it remains in place, a Justice Department lawsuit against Arizona would be awkward at best.

(italics, ours)

You think?

The Justice Department is currently working feverishly to bring suit against a law that is current Justice Department policy. The geniuses at Team-O never saw fit to rummage through the files of the despised Bush administration to see if there might be some inconvenient directives or memos that might gum up their politicization of the illegal immigration debate. Unbelievable.

So, if you are scoring at home, we have:

1. Shameless pandering to historic human rights abusers who in terms of both quality and quantity in human rights abuses probably lead the planet.

2. Throwing the citizens of Arizona under the bus.

3. The nation's top cop and director of Homeland Security freely admit they haven't read the law which they apparently oppose.

4. Justice Department is currently charting a course which directly countermands their own policy.

You know what all this represents? Amateur hour. Amateur hour, plain and simple.



Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to open mic night at the Copa Americana. Please give it up for Team Obama - they'll be here for, eh, 2-1/2 more years.

Because nothing says sexy like Communism

So what do you do when you think your propaganda piece marking the 60th anniversary of Communism in China may fall flat with the young hep cats in your country? You bring out the stars.

There has never been a movie quite like Jiangguo Daye. The blockbuster features nearly 200 of China's top movie stars, including action heroes Jackie Chan and Jet Li plus a host of directors, comedy stars and even journalists. There is Zhang Ziyi of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Stephen Chow of Kung Fu Hustle, and Hong Kong heartthrob Andy Lau. Imagine a Hollywood film featuring the entire celebrity audience at the Oscars and you get the idea.

But The Founding of a Republic – the title in English – is not just an A-list extravaganza. It is a stirring propaganda epic, a tale of how 60 years ago, when Chairman Mao's scruffy band of revolutionary warriors overcame Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Kuomintang in the civil war to establish the world's most enduring Communist revolution.

Actually, we believe the vast majority of Hollywood is stung by not being requested to participate in this grand undertaking.

We don't know the ideological slant of The Independent (U.K.) to which this article is linked but one can make some general assumptions when "stirring propaganda epic" is used without a hint of irony.

Color us disappointed, though, that actors like Jet Li and Jackie Chan who made their fortunes in the West and have enjoyed the liberties and freedoms of this country would return to China to participate in this bit of Chi-comm self-gratification.

P.S. No word on whether Michael Bay is available to direct The Great Leap Forward: a glorious ode to the people's famine and pig iron.

The Friday evening dump

(one in a weekly series intended to shine some light on unsavory news being jettisoned from the White House and Capitol Hill right before the weekend)


Quickies-style because there was quite a bit of dumpage.


Whoa… time out a minute. They’re not getting out of it this easily. What Joe Wilson’s outburst may have lacked in comportment appears, none the less, to have moved the needle with respect to ensuring illegals are not covered under Obamacare. We imagine illegal immigrant activists in their fight for justice and the fair treatment of illegals are relieved by this turn of events. Stay tuned.

Cave. Abandoning six party talks to go one-on-one with the Norks. So this is what we agreed to in order to free the two journalists from North Korea?

Our Chi-comm creditors will be very pleased to know that we are squeezing them on tires.

The outfit that advocates for the poor and uh, workers, is out of the census game so says the census bureau.



Enjoy the rest of your college football Saturday.

Progressive in reverse

But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow

- "Revolution" The Beatles

In a move I am sure will win no friends for the President, Max Baucus is proposing fines of $3800 per family for a failure to buy health insurance. How outrageous and unconstitutional! To be fined just because you are alive and don't want a product? If this fine passes and isn't overturned, I might lose faith in our checks and balances.

That from B-Daddy on a simply brilliant idea that is essentially a tax on the air you breath because there is no way around it. With the Democrats’ and the President’s signature legislative initiative is teetering on the brink of collapse, they need to do everything they can to garner public support and this… this is what they come up? This is their big idea?

Just what in the Sam Hill is going on around here? Perhaps our girl, Camille, no conservative she, has some insight

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?… I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the nostalgic past.

In just a moment, one will be able to start connecting the dots to see how it is that the ideology of “Keep your politics off my body” went from that to levying a punitive fine on people who do not sign up for healthcare.

And one can see how the “party of choice” only means that when it comes to terminating pregnancies.

But nothing sums up this transformation better than Thomas Friedman spinning off the democracy coil and pining for a more top-down Chi-comm management structure. The mainstreaming of the fringe continues in a column we were always waiting for Krugman to write.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Do you know what else the Chinese leaders understand? A complete intolerance and crushing of dissent, that’s what. And remember when dissent was patriotic?

What is truly remarkable about this column is that Friedman’s agenda is unquestionably the right course of action so it is obvious that it be acted upon without delay or question. What do you mean, you beg to differ?

What would Friedman say, though, if it wasn’t the Democrats who controlled the executive and legislative branches? We guarantee you he would be howling about the heavy-handed nature of the party in power and how their efforts to partially privatize social security, for example, and introduce market-based reforms to healthcare was… autocratic in nature.

It’s simply unbelievable but believe, we must. And mind you, this isn’t some kook Kos diarist. This is the fair-headed lad of liberal establishment speaking here.

So, this is the end-state of Paglia’s perception of liberal ideology and Friedman’s reality of the same? Adopting the ultimate statist model with an atrocious human rights and environmental track record and where huge swaths of the countryside still exist in grinding poverty?

What was it about The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution that Friedman missed? What is it about the management apparatus that caused those two massive human tragedies and which still resides intact to be misunderstood by Friedman?

There can be only one conclusion: Cloaked in the guise of doing the right thing for society, absolute power is its own justification.

The apologists for the Soviet Union that we saw during the Cold War have re-emerged and have upped the ante using universal healthcare and environmentalism as leverage for an autocratic style of governance.

We thank Friedman and others for dropping any pretenses and making this all clear as day.

Olympic Update: Widening Fissures

The bile that had subsided somewhat over the first week of the Olympics has risen again as the Guardian has footage here of Chinese police man-handling Free Tibet protestors and reporters that were merely covering the protest… something that the IOC claimed reporters would freely be allowed to do.

Quote from the IOC: “The IOC does disapprove of any attempts to hinder a journalist who is going about or doing his job seemingly within the rules and regulation,” IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies tells reporters, according to AFP. “We do not want to see it happening again.” (italics ours)

Rules of engagement for the press has such a nice totalitarian feel to it, yes?

Captain Ed thinks the Olympic movement may never recover from the habitual caving of the IOC to the Chi-comms. We won’t go that far because, hell, if it doesn’t make it to the T.V., then it just didn’t happen.

NBC, your call.

Beijing '08 Olympics Update

(One in an occasional series provided during the run-up to the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing, China. Archived posts in this series can be accessed by entering “Olympics” in the blog search box above).

Its official….. What was once bubbling under the surface on human rights groups websites is now out in the open and is being spoken as a viable course of action. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been the highest profile figure to date to make public mention of a “boycott” of the Beijing Games.

There have been two major boycotts of the Games: in 1980 the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Games in protest of the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan the previous year and in ’84, the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern Bloc returned the favor by sitting out the L.A. Games. Ironically, the rest of the world responded with the largest collective shrug in recorded history as those Games turned out to be the Olympics that saved the Olympics after successively, the financial disaster of the ’76 Montreal Games and those ’80 Moscow Games that nobody watched.

In what was probably the only major decision Carter made that we agreed with, Carter’s decision to have the U.S. sit out the Games was the right thing to do. As the leader of the free world it would have been unthinkable, in our minds, to send our athletes over to Moscow to play happy-face with our Cold War adversary in the wake of their naked act of aggression.

But athletes shouldn’t be made pawns in a political game? Please. When NBC and the newspapers stop running countries’ medal counts we’ll stop believing that the Olympic Games have always been, in large part, a contest of what country’s socio-political system produces the best 4x100 relay team.

So, where do we stand with respect to boycotting these Games? We’re leaning towards going and not boycotting the Games. Article here from the U-T lays out a good case for sending our athletes precisely because of the awareness and thus pressure that can be exerted on the Chi-comms particularly in the wake of this recent crackdown in Tibet. If we don’t go, then we aren’t watching and if we aren’t watching then the Tibetans, Buddhists, Christians, Falun-gongers and all the other dissidents and good ol’ fashioned agitators are denied their world-wide stage.

And how will NBC will cover these “Human Rights Olympics”? Will they seize this opportunity to expose what has been going on over there for years or will they play the servile guests and just mouth the Chi-comm party line? Were not certain but we will just say this: thank g#d, the Cuddly One is a religiously-neutral Buddhist instead of a Roman Catholic or Southern Baptist.

Beijing '08 Olympics Update

(One in an occasional series provided during the run-up to the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing, China. Archived posts in this series can be accessed by entering “Olympics” in the blog search box above).

As kids growing up in SoCal in the 70s, smog alerts were a common occurrence, particularly in September and October when some smog alerts actually kept us inside during recess. Once school let out, though, we’d run home and get our homework done so we could run around outside again to make up for all the pollutants that those kill-joys at public school deprived our lungs.

Anyway, it appears the athletes competing at the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing will be contending with similar problems as according to article here, the host city, on a typical day has airborne pollution that is 5 times above the World Health Organization’s standard of safety.

The effects of this pollution has already been experienced by athletes who have competed there in Olympic test events such as Colby Pearce a cyclist who developed bronchitis as a result: “When you are coughing up black mucus, you have to stop for a second and say: 'OK, I get it. This is a really, really bad problem we're looking at.” He got it, alright.

So while the Chi-comms might find it in their hearts to resist persecuting dissidents, Christians and Falun Gongers for the 2-3 weeks we’re all there, this pollution business will literally be a much more visible issue that won’t so easily be swept under the carpet.

Beijing '08 Olympics Update

(One in an occasional series provided during the run-up to the ’08 Summer Games in Beijing, China. Archived posts in this series can be accessed by entering “Olympics” in the search box above).

You all have to read this article from Yahoo! Sports. In a word: hilarious. As China preps for the Olympics they’re whipping everybody into shape by holding cheering practices, urging decorum and trying their darndest to stamp-out all those English mis-translations on business signs and billboards.

And giving due credit, we were led to this article by 100% Injury Rate via Deadspin. Yes, That Deadspin… Father, it was them….it was they who stripped us of our blog-reading virginity.

The Cheering Program is sponsored by something called the “Beijing Civilized Workers Cheering Squad”. Just what is it about Communism that compels the addition of unnecessary adjectives to slogans and titles?

This cheering program is like the Texas A&M yell practice on Friday evenings….. but instead of a campus of 15,000 it’s one wound-up, eager-to-please, ain’t-nuthin’-gonna-stop-us nation of 1,000,000,000 (1 bil) people prodded by their Chi-Com overseers to make the entire country look somewhat less dreary and oppressed than it really is.

And this from the article: "Shouting obscenities at opposing players is common in Chinese soccer, which has been plagued with match-fixing scandals and on-field fighting. Beijing's top club team, Guo'an, plays at the Feng Tai stadium, which is draped with huge signs urging good behavior." Just how this differentiates Chinese soccer from soccer anywhere else on the planet was not explained.

By this article’s account, China’s efforts to make us really think they’re part of the gang is a bit off-putting. Its creepily analogous to how middle-aged moms and dads read books in an attempt to “relate” to their kids. Its as if China went out and bought “Getting Hip Y’All to the West” and “Using Awkward State-Approved Language to Connect with Your Inner Def Homie-Boy” and “Will they Accept Me?: the story of a young Socialist and her experiences at the Glorious (coed) People’s Olympic Athlete Village (of coeds)”.

As we’ve said all along, we cannot wait for these games. Add the unintentional comedy factor to the list of reasons why.