Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Top overseas consultant to the Beijing Olympics - revealed!

Some feel that he may only have been brought in recently, perhaps as a replacement for Mr Spielberg; but I think he must have been working behind the scenes for some time now.


Consider these recent news stories about the preparations for this year's Olympic Games:

Jane Macartney of The Times tips us off that Beijing is beginning a massive pre-Olympic clean-up of the city's large population of stray cats, which may result in as many as 200,000 animals being put down. Offers from animal rights groups and shelters to provide alternative solutions, or to at least assist with the humane disposal of the condemned kitties have, of course, been spurned. (Likely result: A plague of rats! Do you think Dr E is just messing with Beijing, plotting to visit a string of Biblical calamities upon the city to punish it for its Olympic hubris??)

And then the Financial Times has this story on the lunatic escalation of Olympic Beijing's demands for additional water supplies from the provinces. Much of north central China is a horrendous dustbowl already, and if the capital's depradations continue on this scale (300 million cubic metres of water being demanded just to flush out the city's sewage-clogged public waterways?!), then large areas of the country could be plunged into catastrophic drought. An Qiyuan, a party official from hard-hit Shaanxi province, has had the temerity to speak out about this on the eve of the present National People's Congress session. I doubt he'll ever be heard from again.

It is, of course, somewhat old news (The Wall Street Journal was
on the case a couple of months ago) that Beijing has been trying to cloak its disastrous Air Pollution Index figures by taking some of the most smog-dense downtown measuring stations out of the city average, but The Peking Duck blog last week published a letter recently circulated to members of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China by an American environmental consultant offering detailed documentation of this petty subterfuge - a particularly embarassing revelation in view of the fact that one Du Shaozhong, an official of the Beijing Environmental Protection Agency, had recently issued a flat-out denial that this had been done. Ha!

And I think I have mentioned on here before (though I forget where) that the city's approach to clearing up the drug 'problem' is to periodically arrest (and/or beat the crap out of) every gentleman of colour caught on the streets of the Sanlitun bar district. There have been rumours (I haven't seen this written up anywhere yet, but give it time...) that the authorities here would like to rescind all visas issued to Africans (it does seem to be Africans that monopolize the drug dealing here, but this is hardly an appropriate response to that fact) and not grant any more - at least for the rest of this year. I suppose they might just possibly be willing to consider making a few exceptions for people who could prove that they were bona fide Olympic competitors. Then again..... it could be a useful way for China to improve its medal haul in the long-distance running events.

In fact, it seems increasingly as though the Beijing Visa Office is determined to hound as many of us laowai as possible - of whatever skin colour - out of the country before August, by making it next-to-impossible for us to renew our visas (more on this at a later date). What larks!

And of course, the classic 'evil villain' stratagem of manipulating the weather - well, Beijing's been doing that for years! Not content with raping the water supplies of the provinces to the west, the capital also 'steals' water from places further east, like Tianjin (and, er, Korea?), by manically shooting down every single cloud that hoves into view with barrages of rockets and artillery shells loaded with cloud-seeding silver iodide crystals. And annual quotas of 'blue sky' days are regularly met by the simple expedient of closing down all the factories for a couple of hundred kilometres upwind every once in a while. Only in a totalitarian country could you act on this scale - and keep on getting away with it. Dr Evil must be having the time of his life!


Measures like these not only score impressively on the EVIL-ness scale, but are also gob-smackingly misguided, unnecessary, self-harming, downright STUPID..... and an all-around PR disaster. And we're only a couple of months into the Olympic year: there will, I'm afraid, be much, much more of this sort of thing to come.

It is perhaps a little unfortunate that racist 'security' measures against blacks and Muslims, or looming environmental catastrophe, drought, and famine will probably raise fewer eyebrows in the West than the current gatticide. Oh, well - so long as people start taking notice, for whatever reason. If we can start with saving a few moggies, maybe we can then get the Beijing authorities to start behaving more sensibly on some of these other things.

EVIL must be stopped. Where's Austin Powers when you need him?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

The undoubted 2008 Beijing fuck-up will have only one saving grace, which is that it will act as a yardstick by which the undoubtedly even greater London 2012 fuck-up can be slightly more kindly judged.

Already four times over 'budget' (well what a surprise) and mired in controversy, I imagine that the good folk of Paris are heaving a huge sigh of relief that they didn't get saddled with the 2012 version of this pointless, recurring white elephant.

The latest good news is that the 'eco friendly' London 2012 Olympics - to which ALL transport by personal car is to be banned - apparently signed a contract with the International Olympic Committee to provide 2,000 chauffeured cars for the exclusive use of 'high ups' of various participating nations. One of the clauses of this breath-taking piece of hypocrisy (recently 'leaked' - God bless all whistle-blowers) was that this contract provision was to be kept secret! So it's not as though the bastards writing-in this condition did so in a state of happy ignorance.

My prediction would be that the 2012 Olympics will be the only Olympics of modern times that have to be cancelled; radically modified by having some events held elsewhere or will otherwise be the biggest gangfuck since the previous one... (see original post).

It strikes me that the best way to tell the Chinese that we heartily disapprove of just about EVERYTHING they do (Darfur, Tibet, Taiwan, Tienanmen Square, oppression, ecological desecration yadda yadda) would be to stay away in 2008. Oh, and don't give me any cant about the 'poor little athletes' and 'keeping politics out of sport'...these muscle-bound morons can waste their own time and energy running around in little circles in a rather less mind-bendingly EXPENSIVE and DISRUPTIVE way to the rest of us, surely?

Personally - if I am spared - I intend to spend the whole of the relevant weeks of sporting hell in 2008 and 2012 holed up in some tropical jungle or backwater of southern Bulgaria far from television, newspapers or radio... If your visa gets bounced Froog you are welcome to join me, but for someone of such an unsporting nature yourself you always did display a depressingly great interest in the antics of flanneled fools and muddied oafs!

Froog said...

I'm not unsporty, just uncoordinated.

I took quite an interest in the Olympics when I was a child. I grew out of it.

Back in the days when it was just their upper-class twits competing against our upper-class twits (and training by racing around the quad!), it had a certain charm. But now it's a case of "our performance-enhancing drugs are more undetectable than your performance-enhancing drugs", what is the fucking point, really?

No, the events themselves are a complete bore and an appalling waste of resources.

Interestingly enough (is this a case where the propaganda machine forgot to put out a clear enough message, or is some dissent being 'officially' encouraged by certain factions of the government??) I do hear more and more Chinese people saying this.

The events are a bore, but what goes on around it - the spin-doctoring, the terraforming - is horribly fascinating. I think I'll stay here just for that. I haven't applied for any tickets, and feel no strong urge to go to any of the events, but - if I can find somewhere affordable to stay and I don't get deported - I think I will stick around as an on-the-fringes observer.

Anonymous said...

The whole Olympics palaver is indeed a fascinating sociological phenomenon... a hideously expensive version of the 'bigger fool' principal (has Montreal actually paid off its Olympic debts yet?) I don't give a toss about the impending Chinese fiasco but the London one might conceivably hit me in my own pocket...if I am not in tax exile by then. Mind you, on current showing by our delightful Chancellor of the Exchequer (it was budget day yesterday) there won't be anything left in anyone's pockets here to rob :-(

The renovations on the first of our Ottoman-style houses in Bulgaria will be finished by June (God willing...if the hand-made terracotta floor tiles I am having shipped in from India don't go missing en route). It will have a pool; a restaurant and bar within staggering distance; beer at about 40 pence for a litre bottle and the Bulgarian totty is truly, utterly, mind-bendingly stonking :-) Sure I can't tempt you to make an Olympic escape????

Froog said...

Thanks for the offer, Mothman, but the beer is still cheaper here. Although I suppose it might not be in August.

The British Cowboy said...

There is only one replacement for Mr Spielberg, and that is Senor Spielbergo, his Mexican non-union alternative.

argonox said...

Love it.

Anonymous said...

Me too :-)

Harvster said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Froog said...

Harv,

You are welcome to make jeering calls (whether in earnest or in jest) for my deportation, but please do not go alluding to my real name on here..... even with asterisks.

The censors have been going apeshit over the past couple of weeks, and - if they don't already know who I am - I really don't want to be giving them any clues at all.