The Beijing Olympics

Remember when the Olympic games were about the athletes and the sports? I've been coming across some pretty weird articles and thought I'd share.

The Beijing Olympics in August are about the Chinese gov't's

• human rights abuses---this site is worth a visit just for the display of professionalism
  


• controlling the weather---

  Its cloud-seeding weapons include 6,781 artillery guns and 4,110 rocket launchers, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The China Meteorological Administration says 4,231 flights for cloud-seeding were conducted from 1995 to 2003.
  
  The Chinese scientists say it worked — increasing rainfall during those years by 210 billion cubic meters, enough to meet the annual needs of 400 million people. China has a population of about 1.3 billion.

  (more excerpts below)
  


• Beijing pollution,
  


• genocide in Darfur (Spielberg actually had an effect!).
  
  But the biggest crowds in Beijing might turn out to be for an unexpected kind of game - the digital kind.

  Regarding the Olympics deal, I ask him the inevitable question: Isn't video gaming rather non-athletic?
  
  But he unreels a rapid-fire series of comebacks:
  
  * "This involves hand/eye coordination in the extreme. The best guys train eight hours a day."
  * "You burn more calories playing 20 minutes of boxing on the Wii than in a 20-minute jog."
  * "Do you get more obese playing video games or watching football on TV?"

  
  More on their weather control program...
  

  But the history of Chinese science projects has its quirky examples, too — like the one that promises to produce softball-size tomatoes or giant gourds by shooting seeds or seedlings into space and then sowing them back on earth.
  
  Fifty years ago, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong made extravagant claims about new agricultural techniques that could lift China out of starvation. His plans to beat nature were based mostly on ideology and pseudo-science and caused widespread famine.

  
  ...............................
  

  On the very day Chinese weather modification experts were boasting at a news conference about controlling rain during the Olympics, the country’s midsection was being pummeled by the worst snow storm in 50 years, which Chinese meteorologists failed to predict.