(NB: Links to gruesome photos, video, and politics below)
The Majesty and Tragedy of Vancouver’s Winter Games is a sharp conterpoint this week to the parlous financial state Greece finds itself in at the moment.
While Vancouver groans under the weight of broken promises and bad engineering, the Greek government, which had been flush with confidence from being awarded the 2004 Summer Games, proceeded to put itself on a spending path that could not but end this week in a heap at the door of the IMF seeking a massive bailout.
The Modern Olympics has turned from a quirky revival of the ancient Greek ideal of athletic excellence into a ruinous carnival of theft and death. To destroy lives, and whole economies so uncaringly is not a worthwhile price for such a bastardized, commercialized, nationalist spectacle.
It it time, as small numbers of athletes already have, to cut the ties between the Olympics and government. No more national teams, just individual competition. The best in the world, period. The memory of Nodar Kumaritashvili deserves no less.
NOTE: NBC scrubbed the internet (not totally) of the very graphic crash video. They tried to hide the evidence, but failed, again, in the face of the lightning-fast diffusion of information across the internet. Another argument, as if we needed one, against corporatization and copyright.
Akio Toyoda – Austrian?
What an Austrian Looks Like?
The chairman and grandson of the founder of Toyota Motor Company, the largest automaker by sales in the world, had a press conference today in Tokyo to talk about the company’s recent quality woes. Speaking about how Toyota, a company known far and wide for quality first, could have such visible and damaging quality problems, Toyoda had this explanation;
“Up to now, we had been saying that the rapid expansion was in response to customer needs — that it was inevitable. The basic rule of the Toyota Production System is to only build as many cars as there is demand for, and we ourselves broke that rule.” Toyoda said some of the sales during the rapid expansion over the last decade may have been driven artificially by sales financing, and was not based on “real demand”.
(hat tip to the truth about cars, no thanks to NPR which as of 0830 did not have the quote on its website)