Medal score: China 82, USA 62. I gotta believe the USA will pick up ground when we get to track and field, but it doesn't really matter. The Olympians are having lots of sex, so everything will be alright.
The article says officials are handing out 100,000 condoms to the athletes. The athletes will go through them (they went through 130,000 in Athens). I did a little math. There are 10,500 athletes. Presumably half of them are male, meaning there are 5,250 users. Each user would have to use 19.047 condoms (pity the man who uses only a .047 one). If the Olympics last 17 days, that means each person is having sex a little more than once a day. When you consider that there are at least a few abstainers--religious, married, ugly--the number of encounters among the active escalates.
It gives a whole new meaning to the five rings, but I suspect the reality is that there's a lot of odd souvenir collecting going on ("See this, I got it at Beijing, and I'm not pointing to my gonorrhea").
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Dalrymple on Solzhenitsyn. Pretty good stuff. My favorite paragraph:
[T]he Russian satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich satirized Solzhenitsyn's Russian nationalism by depicting someone resembling him having his employees flogged in Vermont. This satirical scene, in fact, made a profound criticism of Solzhenitsyn's political thought. Voinovich was alluding to the fact that, were it not for the horrors of Bolshevism, the pre-revolutionary Russian political tradition would be regarded as so brutal that no sensitive person of good will could be a Russian nationalist. As it was, the Bolsheviks regularly killed in a few minutes more people than the Romanovs managed in a century, giving pre-revolutionary Russian history the retrospective luster of decency, wisdom, and compassion that it did not in the least deserve. For Voinovich–and the distinguished historian of Russia Richard Pipes–Leninism had its roots in the Russian tradition as well as the Marxist one. This meant that Solzhenitsyn, while absolutely right in his uncompromising attitude to Marxist-Leninism and all its works, belonged in the category of Dostoevsky: a brilliant seer who would nevertheless have made a very bad guide.
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Patrick Buchanan breaks down the case against Obama and abortion. He "goes further than any U.S. senator has dared go in defending what John Paul II called the 'culture of death.' . . . In 2007, Barack pledged that, in his first act as president, he will sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every federal, state or local regulation or restriction on abortion. The National Organization for Women says it would abolish all restrictions on government funding of abortion."
And, of course, we know Catholics will vote for him. I can only shake my head.
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