If It's Just Your Heart Talking, I Don't Mind

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Even though it tips the scales at about 11 pages, take a few minutes this weekend to read Naomi Klein's piece in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. George Orwell's nightmare vision of the future might just be taking shape in modern-day China.

"China's All-Seeing Eye" by Naomi Klein of Rolling Stone.

How's It Going to Be When You Don't Know Me?

Congratulations to Ms. Cris Carpenter for correctly naming "How's it Going to Be?" by Third Eye Blind as the Monday Song of the Day. In honor of Cris, I will do my best to keep the content of this post out of the dreaded category of "lame".

I've written recently about the public relations battle that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Organizing Committee is currently waging, but today the hits just kept on coming.

Six workers have died building venues for the 2008 Beijing Olympics over the last five years, an acknowledgment Monday that came after a series of clarifications by a Chinese official. Ding Zhenkuan, deputy chief of Beijing's Municipal Bureau of Work Safety, initially told reporters no deaths had taken place at the 91,000-seat National Stadium, known as the "Bird's Nest" and the site for the opening and closing ceremonies.

He later said two died there and then added there were six worker deaths in total at all sites, without elaborating on the other four deaths.

"China Acknowledges Six Have Died Building Beijing Venues" courtesy of the Associated Press.

I Can't Be Holding On to What You Got, When All You Got is Hurt

Forget yesterday's post about Beijing hosting the first "Green Olympics". NY Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof presents what he believes may be a more apt title for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad.
The Beijing Olympics this summer were supposed to be China’s coming-out party, celebrating the end of nearly two centuries of weakness, poverty and humiliation. Instead, China’s leaders are tarnishing their own Olympiad by abetting genocide in Darfur and in effect undermining the U.N. military deployment there. The result is a growing international campaign to brand these “The Genocide Olympics.”

I Wanted to Tell You But You Never Listened

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee is fond of promoting the fact that they are trying to put on the first-ever "Green Olympics", but I don't think they intended that moniker to describe the color of phlegm* that Olympians will be expelling from their lungs during events.

To protect the athletes, Mr. Wilber is encouraging them to train elsewhere and arrive in Beijing at the last possible moment. He is also testing possible Olympians to see if they qualify for an International Olympic Committee exemption to use an asthma inhaler. And, in what may be a controversial recommendation, Mr. Wilber is urging all the athletes to wear specially designed masks over their noses and mouths from the minute they step foot in Beijing until they begin competing. --"U.S. Olympians Devise Solution to Smog: Mask" by Juliet Macur

Chinese Air Quality: It's fannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnntastic!!!

*At least that's what Patty V. and Heidi Hipp told me.