Loved the link. Loved the historical account from ancient times. Didn't agree with the title. I think the protests against China and its police-state Olympics are good. I've been writing jokes about it for years, the best being that China is a police state so we can expect some new Olympic events. One of them is synchronized thinking. Ba-doom. The only part of the protests that made me sad is when we called them out for human rights violations after our own hideous record during the Bush years. Where's the street protests about that? Maybe one day when this is all over, we should hold the Olympics where Guantanamo used to be. I really want to look back on these times....a long way back. I hate knowing that if the Olympics were held in America right now, a Chinese comedy writer could write a joke about a new Olympic event here: Waterboarding.

Everything is fine a dandy..our FÜHRER is not going to miss the Olympics. Human rights...Bush has no concept of the term.

... boys! boys! boys, you've got to get out of and NOT 'be in the house' more -- Get Global; it's a God-like, Mt. Olympus, worldly FEELING ... a certain je ne sais qua, I don't know, sophisticated? cosmopolitan? savoir faire?

Is the CIA behind the China-bashing Olympics protests?, by Larry Chin, Global Research, April 11, 2008.

Around the world, Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games has become the target of unprecedented, well-orchestrated and extremely hostile mass protests.
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The legions of pro-Tibet activists also seem largely unaware of the historical fact that the “holy land of compassion” has been a CIA pawn since the end of World War II. The infamous Tolstoi Mission sent CIA operatives into Tibet, with plans to establish it as a US military base, from which the US could control the entire Asian region. This activity flourished under the US-supported, opium-banked Nationalist Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek.
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Denunciations of Beijing’s brutal crackdowns do not take into account the covert operations and outside infiltrations that triggered the crackdowns in the first place.
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China is the target of long-term US military and political aggression. A full-blown superpower conflict is underway. China is being simultaneously used as the labor engine for the world’s capitalist economy, while being geostrategically and militarily encircled. China is also in the process of being financially seized and gutted by the World Trade Organization. Every move made by the Beijing government, particularly for its own stakes in oil and gas, have been violently contested by the Western powers. China’s attempted rise to the world stage, out of decades of isolation, is headed off by rapacious US-led machinations.
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It is tragically ironic that the predominantly Western/developed market-based “Save Tibet” and “Save Darfur” activists and anti-China protesters have done relatively little, if anything to “save themselves.”

I imagine it is hard to see up close, in The Family, (Bill, what exactly was it your Dad did there that domesticated you and your brother's childhood in Saudi Arabia?) But maybe if you look outside your door, there's a care to see a gallon of gasoline now costs all the tea in China.

[WARNING: Anecdotal digression: My once-business partner (in staging rock concert lightshows) and longtime friend (since Woodstock), grew up in Malta (think: 'Knights of __' and Mdina pre-Hellenic/Olympic glass), and in Geneva, Switzerland, (and lost one eye's sight to a ski pole tip, in reckless schussing at St. Moritz ... or was it Innsbruck -- how very! Continental), and took standard form school in London. We were hanging out together quite recently, and in the ordinary course of conversation -- what we'd been doing, what's new, how's it going -- at presentation of my written material covering the travels and bio of (maroon velvet-jacketed, drawing room-mansioned, pipe-smoking - very Continental) Allen Dulles during the OSS -to- CIA years, my twin-separated-by-birth suddenly smacks his forehead, and says, "oh, so that's what Dad was doing with the binoculars on his daily widow's-walk, that year we lived in Berne (continental spelling);" and then for a long moment his good eye's gaze seemed to go through me at some distant, far distant, point along a close timeline in his mind where memories hang drying in a sunny hilltop breeze of a summer's day ....]

Meanwhile, back in reality and somewhere over the mysterious Orient's Himalayas, is seen Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China, by F. William Engdahl, Global Research, April 10, 2008.

Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing’s by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at this sensitive time in their relations and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. It’s part of an escalating strategy of destabilization of China which has been initiated by the Bush Administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar region, bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China’s oil companies are developing potentially huge oil reserves. It includes counter moves across mineral-rich Africa. And it includes strenuous efforts to turn India into a major new US forward base on the Asian sub-continent to be deployed against China, though evidence to date suggests the Indian government is being very cautious not to upset Chinese relations. The current Tibet operation apparently got the green light in October last year when George Bush agreed to meet the Dalai Lama for the first time publicly in Washington.
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Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet contains some of the world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world's lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet's forests are the largest timber reserve at China's disposal; as of 1980, an estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled and taken by China. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the region.

On the Tibet Autonomous Region’s border along the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam Basin, known as a "treasure basin." The Basin has 57 different types of mineral resources with proven reserves including petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and gold. These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China.

And situated as it is, on the “roof of the world,” Tibet is perhaps the world’s most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven of Asia's greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people. He who controls Tibet’s water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever over all Asia.
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The events in Tibet since March 10 have been played in Western media with little regard to accuracy or independent cross-checking. Most of the pictures blown up in European and US newspapers and TV have not even been of Chinese military oppression of Tibetan lamas or monks. They have been shown to be in most cases either Reuters or AFP pictures of Han Chinese being beaten by Tibetan monks in paramilitary organizations. In some instances German TV stations ran video pictures of beatings that were not even from Tibet but rather by Nepalese police in Kathmandu.

And ... so ... what is this "synchronized thinking," Darfur, Africa, Asian sub-continent, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Xinjiang Uygur, Qaidam (petroleum) Basin, Kathmandu, Reuters, German TV, Dalai Lama, Tibet, 'Mt. Olympus,' et cetera, that you speak of?