Olympics
February 7, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
I was happy to read, via NRO’s Jack Butler, that the ratings for Friday’s opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics were down 43 percent from 2018. Butler cites an article in Axios which notes that ratings for the opening ceremonies in Tokyo last summer were also down, but by only 6 percent. Thus, Axios’ explanation for the mass tuning out of the China ceremonies — that “broadcast and cable TV
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February 4, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
This column in the Washington Post by Barry Svrluga is full of deserved contempt for China and the fact that the Winter Olympic Games are being held there. He writes: According to Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups, the Chinese government has arbitrarily detained, tortured and forced into labor more than a million Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic population largely in Xinjiang, in the country’s northwest. Beijing has suffocated free
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January 21, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
The upcoming Winter Olympic games aren’t just the genocide Olympics. They are also the totalitarian Olympics. James Hohmann reports: China is requiring anyone attending the Winter Olympics to download an app on their cellphone that will allow the surveillance state to track their movements. Ostensibly to help with coronavirus contact tracing, the software also includes glaring encryption flaws that make it easier for authorities to snoop on athletes in attendance
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August 20, 2016 — Steven Hayward
If there was an Olympic medal for political mendacity, the Clintons would upstage Usain Bolts for the fastest wind-aided dissimulation. Forget the triple jump. And in Ryan Lochte we’ve either found a successor to Brian Williams at NBC News, or President Hillary’s perfect press spokesman. And finally, the part of this job I hate the most. . .
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August 16, 2016 — Steven Hayward
I haven’t been taking in much of the Rio Olympics. Actually I’ve found the Olympics much less interesting ever since the Cold War ended, since the principal drama of the Olympics back in those days was the heavy ideological subtext, which yielded the parlor game of anticipating the preposterous scores of the East German judges, and guessing which East German women athletes were really men, which only meant those progressive
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August 10, 2016 — Steven Hayward
I’m not getting in a lot of viewing of the Rio Olympics—actually, none at all—but I gather the Rio folks wanted to be “green” in the conventional environmental way. But it looks like maybe they’ve taken it a bit too far: the swimming pools are turning green from algae: As reported in the Daily Mail, the Olympic organizers “don’t know what happened,” but suspect that strong ultra-violet radiation of the
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August 8, 2016 — John Hinderaker
One of my favorite posts is one I wrote during the 2004 Olympics on beach volleyball. I noted that the Yahoo News slide show on Olympic beach volleyball included a remarkable 194 photos, three of which I reproduced. This was my comment on one of them: I’ve long been aware of volleyball, but I had no idea what a cerebral sport it is. The girl in this photo isn’t just
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January 23, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Sen. Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democrat, spoke for many of us when he characterized the administration as parroting Iran’s talking points on nuclear negotiations. But it isn’t just in the realm of nuclear talks that Obama acquiesces to Iranian positions. Charles Krauthammer points out that the administration is also acquiescing to Iranian domination of Syria, having told the New York Times that it
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