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What the heck is going on…

heads up: this is a pretty old post, it may be outdated.

"The men in blue perplexed everyone," she said. "Nobody actually seemed to know who they were officially or what their title was. They were kind of very robotic, very full on."

Top Cops Protect Olympic Flame - TIME

My last post encouraged me to do a little bit more searching into the Olympic torch journey. Apparently, these Chinese men in blue are the official security detail from China. They're the ones who decided to put out the Torch in France and have been very rough with … everybody. Be they protestors, torch bearers, or the Chairman of the Olympic Committee (really, read the article).

Several thoughts occur to me:

  • If the Chinese are this serious about security, then the chances of a terrorist succeeding in Beijing are very small, go China.
  • The fact that these high ranking security guards only understand basics of other languages and were chosen based on how "tall, handsome, mighty, in exceptional physical condition similar to that of professional athletes" they are means that the Chinese are just going to run this Olympics their way – forget everyone else.
  • That's not necessarily a bad thing. It might help us westerners better understand the Chinese way of doing things.
  • …or it will just piss us westerners off and cause all kinds of incidents

(oh, yea, and I really do like this slideshow from Time that I keep pulling pictures from.)