{"id":197,"date":"2008-08-08T20:44:08","date_gmt":"2008-08-09T02:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/?p=197"},"modified":"2026-08-31T18:39:02","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T00:39:02","slug":"2008-olympic-opening-ceremony-or-communism-isnt-that-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/2008-olympic-opening-ceremony-or-communism-isnt-that-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony, or &#8220;Communism Isn&#8217;t That Bad&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8221;m\u00a0sitting here inadvertentlywatching the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in China. It&#8217;s been very educational. I&#8217;ve learned a lot of things I didn&#8217;t know. Here are some examples, along with some thougths I had during the show:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Taiwan, although they have athletes there, weren&#8217;t given the dignity of actually being called Taiwan, or even allowed to carry their own flag.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Palestine&#8221; is apparently a country. Their athletes garb included the terrorist-sympathizing &#8220;keffiyeh&#8221; made famous by Yasser Arafat. Nice sentiment there.<\/li>\n<li>Hong Kong is a country? I thought it was part of China?<\/li>\n<li>They had the world&#8217;s largest LED (or was that LCD?) display in the middle of their stadium, almost 500 feet long. Pretty impressive. I wonder if it&#8217;s powered by a counterfeit version of Windows?<\/li>\n<li>It was nice to see that President Bush was the row captain on his row (i.e. he sat on the end). Russian&#8217;s Putin was in the middle of the same row. Hopefully he stayed seated when the Chinese National Anthem played.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of the Chinese National Anthem, Americans could learn a thing or two about how an anthem is sung. It seems that when we have &#8220;celebrities&#8221; singing the Anthem here, they treat it as an opportunity to show off their vocal chops. It&#8217;s not uncommon to hear the National Anthem butchered here. While the Chinese anthem sounded like some kind of death march, they at least were all on the same page.<\/li>\n<li>It was nice to see the Iraqi athletes get a rousing ovation when they walked in. Too bad the Olympic bureaucrats didn&#8217;t get their head out of their butts in time for all the Iraqi athletes to make it.<\/li>\n<li>I have to hand it to NBC for actually mentioning some of the controversial aspects of China hosting the games. They mentioned Tienanmen<strong> <\/strong>Square at the beginning and were seemingly outraged that China had stripped the visa from someone who&#8217;d planned to publicize the Darfur situation.<\/li>\n<li>The little boy who survived the earthquake, who walked in with Yao Ming&#8230; Did you notice that his Chinese flag was upside down? Wonder if it was made in China?<\/li>\n<li>I can&#8217;t believe they&#8217;re getting rid of baseball. Must be because it&#8217;s an American game.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of stupidity on the part of the IOC, when they started letting professional athletes compete, that pretty much ruined it for me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Overall, the ceremony seemed to be China&#8217;s plea to the rest of the world to be accepted as an equal&#8230;. this despite the fact that citizens in that country aren&#8217;t all equal.\u00a0 The fact is, China should never have been given this opportunity to host the Olympics until they show more progress towards human rights. I doubt I&#8217;ll be watching much more of the games; I wasted too much time watching the opening ceremonies as it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8221;m\u00a0sitting here inadvertentlywatching the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in China. It&#8217;s been very educational. I&#8217;ve learned a lot of things I didn&#8217;t know. Here are some examples, along with some thougths I had during the show: Taiwan, although &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/2008-olympic-opening-ceremony-or-communism-isnt-that-bad\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-society","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}