Olympics or Freak Show?

One week before the 2016 Summer Olympics even begin, everyone paying attention seems to be girding themselves for a disaster. Despite promises from officials that Rio de Janeiro would undergo dramatic environmental cleanup ahead of the Games, waterways where some athletes will be performing are still teeming with pollution — prompting one local doctor to tell the New York Times that “foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap.” Some of the facilities are unfinished, forcingat least one of the nation’s athletes out of the village in search of last-minute alternative housing.

And then there are the security concerns: Last week, Brazilian police announced they’d arrested the tenth suspect in a terror-cell plot, but in the midst of worries about lone-wolf attacks, the government only just contracted a relatively unknown firm to hire and train more than 6,000 security screeners for the event — a delay one U.S. expert told The Wall Street Journal was “staggering.” The panic over the country’s crime problem is bad enough that a Brazilian soccer star took to Instagramearlier this year to issue a dire warning: “I advise everyone with plans to visit Brazil for the Olympics in Rio — to stay home. You’ll be putting your life at risk here. This is without even speaking about the state of public hospitals and all the Brazilian political mess. Only God can change the situation in our Brazil.” 

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/the-disaster-olympics.html

Dysfunctional culture, with no idea of what liberty is or what it can do to empower the masses, is on display.

Olympics? Yawn

It hasn't been about idealism for a long, long time.  It's about faux nationalism, entertainment and money.  If only it were honest about the making money using faux nationalism and entertainment, it would all be more sufferable.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/doping-and-an-olympic-crisis-of-idealism

Watching a Train Crash?

Mr. Picciani has also tried to minimize concerns over the mosquito-borne Zika virus, declaring that all the proper preventive measures are in place. That hasn’t stopped athletes like Jason Day, the world’s No. 1 ranked golfer, from announcing that they’re skipping the Olympics because of Zika. In an open letter last month, 150 prominent doctors, bioethicists and scientists from around the world asked for the Olympics to be moved or postponed because of the Zika epidemic.

In Brazil, these concerns are generally greeted with scorn. First, August is the middle of winter here, so the weather will be drier and cooler, meaning fewer mosquitoes. Second — and more important — the virus seems like a relatively minor problem: According to one calculation, in Rio a woman is more than 10 times more likely to be raped than catch Zika. (Men are more likely to be shot to death.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/brazils-olympic-catastrophe.html?_r=1