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Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud
SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here (1) and here (2), showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government-issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever."
Uh oh, some poor sysadmin at Baidu is in need of "re-education".
China has already taken their official stance. They just don't care about the rules and don't care what other people think about it.
The IOC are making themselves look pretty scummy by association at the moment. They seem complicit in various pieces of fraud and dodgy dealings, and perfectly willing to help cover everything up.
But then I've never held them in that high a regard anyway. They're a business and they make the world's governments beg like puppydogs to be allowed to hold their games.
Frankly I find the whole thing to be something of a joke, and an incredible waste of money.
Why is there a minimum age to begin with? I think if a 14 year old can compete at the level of those a few years older, she should be allowed to. Is the age requirement only in gymnastics? Wasn't Michael Phelps 15 in his first Olympics in 2000?
Easy, it depends on how many millions the chicoms pour into their private bank accounts. The IOC is the biggest joke in all of sports.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
is this seen as a scandal the world over, or just in America? No doubt many in China will believe that the gov on this and ignore the evidence (even if the girls and their parents come forward and admit it as well). But Do many in EU, South America, Africa, Asia Minor, Japan, South Korea, oceana, etc see this as a pretty wicked scandel of both Chinese gov AND IOC?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nobody from the IOC is going to say a word about this before they've left China. It would be rather foolhardy to do otherwise.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The IOC is going to lose a LOT of credibility over this (as if they have much left to begin with) if they don't do something about it soon.
I wouldn't even mind if they didn't award the gold to the American women. Let them keep the silver, but it needs to be stripped from the Chinese. This is only proof of one of them being underage, but from what I've been reading, it's starting to seem pretty certain that at least 3 of them are underage.
And if China was willing to cheat this blatantly in this event, it makes you wonder what might have been going on behind closed doors with the rest of their athletes.
Sigh. I blame the Chinese government for this.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
She's 16 in Chinese years, which is 14 is US years.
Who didn't assume the Chinese would "cheat to win" at least a few times in this Olympics? They want to dazzle the world and win as many medals as possible. One has to assume they'll resort to unsavory tactics as long as plausible deniability exists.
On another Olympics note, does anyone else think there have been an unusually high number of errors in the technical events this year? Perhaps I just wasn't watching that closely in previous years, but I thought there have been an inordinate number of falls (off balance beams), poor landings and other substantial technical failures by the competitors. We've had outstanding performances by the likes of Phelps and Bolt, but otherwise there's been a lot of sucking by these elite athletes.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
So much for don't be evil...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Where the movie "Wag the dog" made a fake war to get the attention away from alleged sexual behavior of the president. "Wag the dog II" will be about the alleged sexual behavior of the president to get the attention away from war.
My, how times have changed.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I say carbon date 'em!
Hand in your geek creds please. Carbon dating only works on dead things, and will only give you the time that has passed since the thing in question died.
Unless you're suggesting that some of the athletes were, in fact, undead.
This gossip and tabloid type scandal is perfect for more distraction of the public. Even if nothing happens now, in China- The US news will be plastered.
What war in Iraq?
Dude, the war in Iraq isn't going anywhere.
Neither is the war in Georgia/Ossetia.
And the Olympics are over in a few days.
Everyone with a tv or radio knows that Condi Rice is skipping the closing ceremonies because of emergency NATO meetings about Russian & because Musharraf just resigned.
Part of the reasons the IOC chose China was to shine a spotlight on their censorious, opaque and human-rights-violating ways. The idea being that, if the Chinese government gets enough egg on their face, they might decide anything is better than being humiliated/embarrassed in front of the world. At most, that high wattage bulb is going to be shining for another week.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Most of the girls on the Chinese team don't look like they've finished puberty - childish faces, no hips, scrawny. Even for Chinese, these athletes would be extreme cases if they were even close to their 'official' age. Cheng Fei is the only one that does. I can't wait to see what they look like in 3 or 4 years.. I guarantee they will all be taller, heavier, and curvier.
While that is probably true, most adult women in China look young compared to what we Westerners are used to. (I lived there for a few years, and I always thought that many of my adult coworkers looked like they were 16 or 17) They are just, in general, shorter, thinner, and less curvey than their western counterparts. So it's hard to judge.
That doesn't mean that Google modified the cache, it just means that the cached version has been modified.
Recall that Microsoft Office applications do not always remove deleted data, and Google's search engine operates on the raw data in a file (which means that Google will return search results that seem less than obvious if you just look at a rendered copy of the file... something search engine spammers find handy). That means if someone in China deleted that row from the spreadsheet, it would still show up in Google's search.
Even though you have tons of sports in the Olympics, each sport is different, especially in culture.
In order to groom a good gymnast you have to start very young and you have to practice constantly, training for much of her life. You must be physically strong, flexible, have incredible coordination and balance, have low weight and low body fat and be relatively fearless. The types of things female gymnasts are asked to do are best performed by teenage girls who have made a life long career out of gymnastics. The problem is that once you realize this, you press gymnasts to train harder and harder, faster and faster. You get into situations were girls train too much, ignore schooling, get injuries because they push too hard, begin to suffer from bolemia and anorexia, etc. To top it off, you typically only get 1 shot at olympic gold, if at all, because in 4 years your "washed up" because the next girl who comes along is the new star and at 20 you can't do the same things you can at 16. At that young age, all you want to do is get your moment in the spotlight, make your coach and your parents happy, and get your pony. You aren't thinking about your long term future, and most gymnasts don't have a future in gymnastics outside of their teen years. If you look at this culture, women's gymnastics no longer looks like such a pretty sport.
At least in men's gymnastics, they can attend at least two olympics, because their events are based more on strength and men can continue to get stronger past their teen years
Just to paint a little more broad picture, look at swimming this year. There's a 40 year old woman swimming for the american team this year. Phelps has been in two and could be in three olympics. Swimmers train hard, but in general they can get better as they get older, as Phelps did, but gymnasts peak early. When have you seen a woman gymnast in more than 1 olympics? When have you seen a 24 year old female gymnast, much less a 40 year old one?
The point of the rule is a stop gap to prevent downward pressure on the average age of a gymnast, and allow them to grow up at least a little bit in the hopes they can make better decisions for themselves, and so that coaches and countries don't start pushing 12 year olds as gymnasts. A 14 year old is a little more fearless than a 16 year old... in a very bad way. One bad decision could cause severe injury, and pushing a girl that young will have lasting effects on her life, mostly bad. I would not put it past communist regimes like China to have a state run program where they don't care about their girls and create a program which churns out 12-14 year old world class gymnasts who in turn are discarded with severe emotional and physical problems later in life.
So in short, it's their to protect the girls from themselves and everyone else who would push them too hard to early. Personally, I'd want the limit higher, because calling those gymnasts "women" is downright upsetting to me, and they still start incredibly young for a fleeting chance at a bit of stardom.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
No. Everyone with a TV or radio knows that Phelps won 8 medals, when the next season of Stuck-On-An-Island-With-A-Film-Crew starts, and how the evil gas companies are making gazillions of dollars at our expense.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
People in many western countries have an expectation that governments and businesses behave in a mostly honorable manner.
Sorry dude but I stopped taking you seriously after that first sentence.
Speaking narrowly to the issue of rule-making and rule-enforcement in general, and ignoring he question of the truth of the specific allegations in this specific case:
Any rule not applied fairly is a risk to equal competition. Just because you don't know whether a rule introduces a bias on the outcome does not mean that it doesn't.
For example, let's suppose some country (any country) did have an athlete participating in an event contrary to some rule. It doesn't matter if it's age or drugs or taste in music. If some number of countries select from their entire population and others select from only the people in the approved group, then whether or not any given country was able to show its most competitive face is purely a question of whether the excluded group contains the most competitive person.
Let's suppose the games are closed to anyone who likes hip hop music, for example. Why might it matter if some hypothetical Foozania were to field a swimmer who secretly likes hip hop music when the other countries voluntarily held back? Absent Michael Phelps (we all know from US airtime allotments that there are not really any other swimmers of note in the US), who would be voluntarily withheld because of his professed like of hip hop, the Foozanian swimmer's scores might seem very good. By your reasoning, which seems to amount to absence of competition, he deserves his medal fair and square, right? But if the absence of competition can be caused by uneven application of rules, that's where the problem comes.
But beyond this, there is also a human rights question: Are there sports in which people are pressured at a younger and younger age to get into the sport, before they are ready to make a free choice? Are there sports in which the toll the sport takes on the athlete is damaging before a certain age? These are complex questions of ethics that it seems fair for the Olympic committee to at least consider, so you can understand why there might be such rules. And once there are such rules, my examples above hopefully show why they must be applied fairly in order for the Olympics to mean anything at all.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
A couple of elderly women (70+) are being reducated for wanting to protest their eviction and their sin was timing their application during the Olympics. That and the incident where their poster golden boy broke down from too much training and his coach said the extreme pressure from the regime was to blame convinces me there is a god up there and he was looking after me for I was not born in China.
Yes, I am being melodramatic and I think it's apt.
This is old news. There were already some discussions regarding this on various Chinese forums. People have dug up webpages showing reports of her age as 14, all coming from the same source, namingly the "6-city competition". Insiders said it's actually the local gymnastics team which He belongs to that forged her age as 14, in order to get the highly skilled olympian into this event,which has a underage group meant for young gymnastists under 15. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how this new discovery of hidden spreadsheets is going to fit in the story.
Where's the hacking part come in? Give him credit for his search and chinese language skills but hacking?
In that case, would cutting their head off and counting the rings work? ;)
Part of the reasons the IOC chose China was to shine a spotlight on their censorious, opaque and human-rights-violating ways.
Actually, it's much more likely that the IOC chose China because of the rather large bribes which were presented to their selection committee.
That IS how they operate after all. Free dinners, big parties, free alcohol, and free jewelry for their wives or cars for the husbands so they can honestly say "No, I didn't get anything".
I know what you're thinking, and yes, the jewelry should be worth more than the cars if you want to be the winner...
But maybe I'm just being cynical.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
No, but you would get a cease and desist from the IOC if there were 5 rings.
People in many western countries HAD an expectation that governments and businesses behave in a mostly honorable manner. Then they grew up. Mostly with the help of the behavior of the government and businesses. I won't bother with a list here, since someone on the opposite political side of me (responding with the usual "my team's better, rahrahrah" bullshit) will just reply with a list of "my guys" WHICH WILL JUST ADD TO THE PROOF OF MY GODDAM POINT.
Say what you want about the Chinese, though. No really, go ahead — the Chinese people don't get to. And therein lies the only real difference between us and them. For now.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Or, more accurately, his Administration is tyrannical. It's no Genghis Khan, or Caligula, or even Napolean, but between describing the administration as benevolent and thinking first and foremost of the people or as authoritarian and largely out for the ends of a few the latter clearly wins out.
The guy may not be entirely unredeemable, but it is not inappropriate to (constantly!) remind everyone living under his Administration that he ain't no nice guy.
[Ego]out
"Authoritarian" tyranny. China is not ruled by capitalist trends, though they use that as leverage. It is ruled by a strong, centralized political apparatus.
[Ego]out
"People in many western countries have an expectation that governments and businesses behave in a mostly honorable manner."
Sorry, I have no such expectation. I expect government will behave in accordance with the will of the corporations who got the politicians elected and who pay them good money. I expect that *every* politician is corrupt until proven innocent
The US for instance is currently ruled by representatives of Big Oil and private military corporations that are sucking trillions out of the hands of the US taxpayers. With that kind of money available its no wonder there is corruption abounding. When the Iraq war winds up, you can expect another one to follow because the companies making all that money at the moment will not be likely to stand for a peace. Its too good a racket
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
We have introduced age limits because it is bad for the physical and mental development of younger athletes to compete at such a high level.
It looks like China broke the rules, and the gold needs to be stripped from the effected athletes.
Actually, I don't know if there's necessarily a difference of scale. It might be, but it's not really necessary.
See, I don't know much about China, but at least in the USSR the age of mass deportations and millions of people in Gulag ended with Stalin. Then it evolved in something cheaper, more subtle and more efficient: the idea that anything you say _might_ be recorded somewhere and _might_ be used against you. Not even necessarily by a visit of the secret police. Sure, it _could_ be the secret police too, but maybe it'll be something else. Maybe you'll never fly out of the USSR ever again, because you can't be trusted to come back. Maybe you'll never get a job past a certain level. Maybe it'll bite you in the arse in some other way. Or maybe noone wrote that in your dossier after all. But you don't know.
And you don't know who's spying and reporting on you. Maybe comrade Piotr is really rabidly against the government and you could start building a resistance together. But maybe he's an agent provocateur.
They actually had very few political prisoners past a point. The people held themselves in line admirably, given that Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually had less political prisoners than the USA has in gitmo. The actual gulag was more kept as a reminder of what _could_ happen if you really cross the line too far, than as something to be used immediately and lots. Sorta like how the nukes are more for threat value, than actually used in wars.
And I find that the USA had been taking an eerily similar direction during the Bush years. The whole surveillance mania, and the repeated leaks about what else they monitor and try to connect (including laughable stuff like data-mining the grocery purchases for people who buy arab food), it's like they actually _wanted_ people to get the idea that someone's watching and they better behave. Even some of the few terrorism trials, it's like they chose the most laughable and/or most suspiciously looking like entrapment. It almost begs thinking that the moral is, beware of who's asking you dubious stuff, he might be an agent provocateur.
Now I'm not saying it's some deliberate conspiracy to leak them. Probably more like not caring what gets leaked. Give enough minions orders to spy left and right, and you can pretty much count on it that some of them will botch it or run to the press. Which can actually be good if that's the message you actually want to give to your population: watch it, we've got our eyes on all y'all.
Look at the other details about the USSR in that list. Flight restrictions for people they don't like? Check. Done in the USA too. Your pool of available jobs might depend on how much of an politically loyal you make yourself seen as? Check. The Bushies politicized half the government departments. Etc.
Gitmo and torture kept as the ultimate stick, where you probably won't land, but you _might_ if you're really undesirable? Check. Same role as the Gulag had post-Stalin.
Not saying that the USA is a perfect equivalent to the USSR dictatorship... yet. But it looks to me like they've been working real hard to push it in that direction. If given more time, I don't doubt that it would have got a lot worse eventually.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Shame on China for cheating. Athletes have been busted individually cheating in the games (doping, for example). But to see systematic cheating abetted by a government, and to see that cheating result in diminished achievement for deserving athletes of any nation (but to be honest, it stings more to see my countrywomen denied) is a tough thing to bear.
Nastia Liukin is a triple gold medalist and Shawn Johnson is a double gold medalist as far as I'm concerned.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Nice argument but a rule is a rule. If you are going to commit fraud in order to get your way, and possibly create an uneven playing field while doing so, then you should suffer the penalty, period. There's nothing meaningless about this argument. Having kids compete at an Olympic level before they've even had a chance to properly form emotionally is certainly not a good thing. If you want to participate you participate under the same rules as everyone else and the message that needs to be made clear is that committing fraud to do so is not going to be tolerated. Has nothing to do with beliefs or western "mores". If they want it changed they can make a proposal and have it approved or not, end of story.
I'll give you the whole Thoreau Civil Disobedience thing. I'm pretty much 100% on board there. thats fine for important social and governmental issues. Here is where we diverge. Gymnastics is a sport. Sports have rules. Those rules are for everyone. Don't like the rules, don't play. Do you think the rules of baseball are dumb? Go play cricket. Lots of sports periodically change or tweak the rules. It's not new. If you are caught cheating, then pay the fine, and play by the rules. Otherwise, you might as well go play Calvinball.
Actually we have the age limit because a 12 year old girl has a size to strength ratio that is superior to that of a 16 year old girl. If you saw those Chinese girls you'd know what I am talking about. Compare the bodies of Shawn Johnson or Alicia Sacramone to He Kexin or Yang Yilin. There is no comparison.
2. Amongst other reasons, the age requirement is there because children under the age of 16 don't face the same pressures a 16 year old kid faces. This was thoroughly explained by the coach of the U.S. team. When you're 14, in the opinion of the rule makers, you are much more aware that you are competing in a global arena representing your country. When you're younger you see it as a game and you don't have nearly as much pressure.
3. Add this to the way the Chinese treat the U.S. gymnasts, by making them wait for a long time after they are called. It was done by the 'arena authorities' and not the IOC. They give no explanation why. They only do it to the U.S. gymnasts in the final round.
Add all these together and you get a insatiable lust for winning at any cost, not just a willingness to break "bad rules". China will do whatever it takes to win. Rules only apply to the weak [non communist].
http://www.kansascity.com/495/story/747330.html
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/olympics/2008/writers/selena_roberts/08/13/china.gymnasts/?bcnn=yes
Speaking as someone with no knowledge of the gymnastics, it seems to me that the sport is just broken and this is a symptom of the problem.
Why is it that when women start developing (gasp!), they are hugely disadvantaged in the world of competitive gymnastics? It seems *that* is the fundamental problem, and it doesn't appear to be a problem that's too difficult to solve. To have a women's sport where the best competitors are the farthest thing from actual women seems silly.
Yes, I understand that with the current gymnastic events it is an advantage to be smaller, lighter, not as curvy, etc. But while we cannot control the woman's figure, of course we can control the sport and its events. Why not choose or create events that aren't hindered by a woman's curves or emphasize artistic moves that prefer a adult's center of mass, rather than a child's, etc.?
If the olympic events naturally favor younger girls, then expect more and more younger girls to compete and succeed. To put a restriction which are contrary to nature the sport itself - you are guaranteed they will be protested and circumvented.
http://www.talknerdy.org
This isn't about law. This is about the Olympics. At the Olympics, the IOC has the final word on who gets a gold medal, and who doesn't. The 'laws' which are alleged to have been violated are the rules of the IOC, not the rules of Chinese law. What could be done about it is to disqualify the Chinese gymnast, and take away any gold medals which were awarded to her. That would be pretty extreme, and as you say, I doubt that will be done, because China would, as you say, just deny any evidence that she is too young, and brush it off as a clerical error which has been 'corrected'.
Amen. +5 insightful (where the fuck are my mod points??)
The thing to debate - in this particular instance - is not the relative 'goodness' or 'badness' of the 16 year old rule, although I do agree with it on a personal level. The fact is that the IOC has the rule, China knew they had the rule going in, they broke the rule, they need to get slapped upside the head.
The girls did a great job and all, but you don't argue the merits of a traffic law while you're driving down the interstate - you go in front of a lawmaker/makers and debate it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Let me just say, right out of the box, I appreciate that you started off with an ad hominem attack. It really supports your position, and lends credence to your rationale.
You are, however, absolutely correct; the same could be said about steroids. We absolutely have a choice to support the use of steroids and the lie to cover it up, or frown on the use of steroids but actively work to not cover it up. Bodies are ruined by steroids, as are lives, and we have a choice to partake in it or not. Everyone else has that same choice.
Where you start to put words in my mouth is the part about snapping off baby heads. (A minor aside; contrary to popular opinion, babies do not have milky insides.) We absolutely should strenuously object, and even take action against - perhaps even boycotting such multicultural events as the Olympics - people who are engaged in harmful activities against other people. This includes athletes who like the taste of baby meat for the 1% edge it gives them, and authoritarian regimes that raise athletes from birth for a specific event. What we should not do is ignore those actions, or the frameworks that allow for them, and instead focus on rules violation.
It is simply unacceptable that the anger here is at the fact that "China broke the rules!" and not at "China is ignoring human rights!" It's entirely wrongheaded, and why those underlying issues are never addressed.
Finally, since you seemed to not be able to catch my original meaning; I do not find that lying about rule breaking is right action. To the contrary, it's not acceptable. There is a value system, though, wherein it is, and the point in that value system wherein I diverge from having any further iota of agreement is where the decision to lie about the rulebreaking occurs.
To spell it out; I don't agree with having kids in these events - but other people, parents, children, athletes and cultures are going to disagree with this. It's a whole big issue that I'm not addressing. I do agree with breaking rules you find unjust. I don't agree with lying about it - and at that point, when you lie about it, you lose your right to claim a morally viable underlying framework.
One final point, because I feel that your straw man argument regarding the Russians can be turned to something worthwhile saying; if you are actively sabotaging other people - well, clearly you are capable of doing that, but it doesn't lend legitimacy to the victory. Therein lies the problem with China; because we're arguing about the lie, we're lending legitimacy to the way they go about the important things by putting pressure on the minor point; the rule breaking that is, at best, only debatable. If Russia were to grease a pommel horse, well, it would be clear and no one (ok, realistically, few) would count the victory legitimate. When we fail to act ethically we lend legitimacy to others acting unethically.
[Ego]out
Well, its almost impossible to count the ways that statement is false. For one thing, the concept of honorable can be very different in different places. It reminds me of the Catholic Church's reaction to priest pedophilia scandals. Canon law enjoins the hierarchy against doing anything that would bring the Church into disrepute, so of course that meant they had to cover it up. In case you didn't notice, that was sarcastic. It takes a special kind of blindness to interpret what would otherwise be a useful rule in such a damaging way.
Same thing here. The Chinese authorities used various kinds of trickery in the opening ceremonies. One you might not have heard of is the children representing 55 ethnic minority groups were all Han (Chinese) children dressed up in ethnic costumes. The constant theme of all these various stories is this: they treat keeping up appearances as a critical matter of national prestige, almost national security.
Now, let's move off the culturally relative topic of honor onto firmer ground of administration. The problem with any system in which the bureaucracies are allowed to manage appearances is that the people in those bureaucracies lose their capacity to recognize irony. Bureaucracies are good at handling complexity, but terrible at subtlety. Too many people taking their cues from other people just like them. Too much groupthink. Any reasonably clever individual would have foreseen that the torch relay business was asking for trouble, and that acting surprised and offended about the inevitable protests would play into the hands of the protesters. If you're a tough guy, when somebody kicks you in the groin, you're supposed to ... raise one eyebrow, or laugh it off or something like that. You don't dance around holding your crotch in one hand and pointing an accusing finger with another and shout "unfair!" That tells everyone the protestors hit you in a weak spot, so if you aren't prepared to take it with a grin, you don't offer them the opportunity.
Any reasonably clever individual could figure out that trying to look even better than you could possibly be during the opening ceremonies would end up with people questioning even the bona fide amazing things you do.
Anybody with enough brains to be a top level government planner could figure out that hanging so much national pride and prestige on something like this, and doing it so transparently, is as good as hanging a sign on your national back saying "Kick me!" But you take all those excellent brains, and you embed them in a bureaucracy nobody's allowed to question, that is hermetically sealed from independent thought and touchy about criticism, and those individually excellent brains end up trudging along together, stuck in the groove of groupthink.
The Olympics might have been everything China dreamed for them to be, if the government had grasped one fundamental and ironic fact: you gain national prestige in something like this by doing really well while acting as if it wasn't important at all. The jingoistic, quasi-religious, neopagan ceremony of the Olympics is a trap. The more you act like this is supposed to be proof of national superiority or virility or something, the less you are measured by what you achieve. People start watching for how far you fall short of what you pretend to be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I was thinking more of articles like this one: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24468-2005Feb14.html I read a great article on the subject a few weeks ago, that detailed how much of the several trillion dollars have been sunk into Iraq have been scammed by big military contractors, but alas I can't find it again. If I recall correctly it was estimated at around 20% of those trillions - so billions of dollars. I could easily be wrong though as I don't have the article to hand and one tends to inflate values in memory. Heres another article as well: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050930/news_lz1e30cray.html And another: http://www.propublica.org/scandal/military-contractor-abuse/ Companies like Haliburton and Blackwater (and dozens more) are making money hand over fist, screwing the US public out of those dollars, and they have a strong lobby support and friends in government (who will no doubt retire as members of the BOD for these companies by way of thanks). Its a *huge* scam, and the US public are the victims in this. That's why you are at war in Iraq currently. Its also why i expect that if you pull out of Iraq, you will end up somewhere else, because the money has to keep rolling into the hands of these companies. You may think your Medicare system and other social programs are eating up tons of cash, and undoubtedly they are - but at least they improve the lives of American citizens. Contracts to Haliburton and other similar companies merely line the pockets of their corporate owners. The money currently being doled out in plastic wrapped bundles of $100k each could be spent to decrease the cost of the medical system, create jobs for those who are unemployed, start new companies that produce useful services for US citizens at home etc, rather than being spent on wasteful contract services (like paying a company 15m a month to guard flights for a month where no such flights landed etc).
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
That's what it comes down to for me as well. I don't have a strong position on 14-year-olds doing gymnastics.
But what China is doing here - and I don't doubt it for a moment - is behaving dishonorably, pure and simple.
It's like they planted some clear plastic flippers in their swimmer's lane so he could put them on and out-pace his competition. Or giving their boxer a set of brass knuckles. It's cheating and it's pathetic. It says that they knew they were going to lose a fair competition, so they had to win by deception.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
"If you want to find the recipients of the largess of our bloated federal budget start and end with the entitlement programs.""
There's only one problem with this, but it's huge. The use of the term "entitlement programs" is a little misleading. A better term may be "conscience leading" or "moral corrections". Many with the philosophies that you spew seem not to understand that we all, in this country especially, do not start or end on equal footing when quality of life, or the means to gain it is concerned. These "entitlement" programs are merely the moral outcome of this.
The military-industrial complex has the opposite effect. Remember, while "entitlement programs" do require much of our resources, and rightfully so IMO, the amount we spend on far more frivolous things (yes, I said frivolous) that merely end up making the rich and powerful entities richer and more powerful, would be much more wisely spent on many other things. For example, and we'll just use the Iraq war spending and just my state (Illinois) for an example. We could have furnished 48 million homes with renewable energy alternatives. Again, this is just with the money spent for ILLINOIS. The numbers are just astounding. 48,000 more teachers, just in Illinois, just with Illinois' portion of the money spent in Iraq. 14 million more people with health care, just in this state, etc...
So, while you may have a point, I think it's misleading. Redirecting what we spend on these things would have had a MUCH more profound effect on the quality of this country and it's moral standing in the world, which by proxy, makes us safer, happier and richer. The problem is that those that hold the vast majority of power/money in the country will do anything they can to keep the status quo. The current policies in this country promote it (you can start with the Reagan admin). I just think some of us would rather have that changed, than to stop "entitlement programs".
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
>>It looks like China broke the rules, and the gold needs to be stripped from the effected athletes.
China was also cheating in TKD, with their judges refusing to score good players that would face Chinese athletes next:
http://olympics.thestar.com/2008/article/481950
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/taekwondo/story/2008/08/19/f-olympics-taekwondo-gonda.html
http://www.tsn.ca/olympics/story/?id=246955&lid=headline&lpos=secStory_main
http://www.sportsnet.ca/olympics/2008/08/20/olympic_taekwondo_gonda/
Whoever is arguing that kids are not allowed into the Olympics because of this ridiculous notion of 'destruction of their bodies' is clearly not informed about the age, at which the gymnasts start their training and when they are allowed to compete in various local, regional, national and international (like world) events. How many medals must a gymnast have before they are even allowed to the Olympics in gymnastics? More often than not, these 'kids' already are world champions.
I and many of my colleagues at work (who are mostly Chinese) agree that the Chinese girls are definitely between 12 and 14 years of age, not anywhere near 16.
You can't handle the truth.