"Now you'll tell me that Lorne Greene is not a Mexican"

Much like Recon was out of the game until last week's episode of Gen. Kill, so too is Crass, until next Tuesday any way. Until then, stay tuned for more of X's updates from Beijing.

Selectively Inbred Human Opposes Selective Breeding Of Plants

Sir, Step Away From The Counter And Get Down On The Ground Now!

While L.A. bans fast food in South Central, Mississippi goes whole hog and considers banning fat people from restaurants:

Mississippi, the fattest state in the Union, introduced a bill last Friday that would ban some restaurants from serving anyone with a BMI over 30.

Meanwhile Olympic fatass Michael Phelps confesses to his 12,000 calorie a day diet:

Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase "Breakfast of Champions" by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise.
He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

At lunch, Phelps gobbles up a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread - capping off the meal by chugging about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

For dinner, Phelps really loads up on the carbs - what he needs to give him plenty of energy for his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week regimen - with a pound of pasta and an entire pizza.
He washes all that down with another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

WTF? Chinese Use Son of Hitler's Architect To Design Olympics

Albert Speer Jr., Like Father Like Son in Olympic Design?

op-ed by Nina Khrushcheva in the Guardian entitled, "Olympic Hubris." In it, she makes connections between Albert Speer's designs for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the hiring of his son, Albert Speer Jr., to design the master plan for the Beijing Olympics.

Totalitarian regimes -- the Nazis, the Soviets in 1980, and now the Chinese -- desire to host the Olympics as a way to signal to the world their superiority. China believes that it has found its own model to develop and modernise, and its rulers regard the games in the same way as the Nazis and Leonid Brezhnev did, as a means of "selling" their model to a global audience.

Obviously, the Chinese were naive to choose an architect whose name carried such dark historical connotations. The name of Speer itself probably did not matter to the officials who chose him. They sought to stage an Olympics that made manifest their image of themselves, and Speer Jr, looking back to his father's mastery of the architecture of power, delivered the goods.

The opening ceremonies did have a creepy vibe at times. When it wasn't a ridiculous vibe.

National Socialist Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics each survived nine years after hosting Olympic Games. Here's to the 2017 demise of Communist China.

The author of the op-ed, Nina Khrushcheva, is Nikita Khrushchev's grandaughter. The author of this blogpost, Comrade X, is possibly related to Ghengis Khan along with an estimated 1/3 of the Earth's population.

Oh Herro!

Spain's Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country's best-selling newspaper. Spaniards are considered the most racist of all the different types of Mexicans.

Election 2000 Flashback

MLB World Series Program: "What do you think of domed stadiums?"

"Gore: 'The design and construction of domed stadiums - in Seattle (the Kingdome was the first free-standing current dome ever built), Houston (the Astrodome was the first stadium to use astroturf) and Minnesota (the Metrodome is the only stadium in the USA whose roof is suspended without beams or rods - it's supported by air pressure), for example - have been feats of architectural and engineering excellence. But the real measure of any stadium, domed or otherwise, is how much fun you have inside.'

"Bush: 'I like to go to baseball games outside.'"

As to the significance of all this, leave it (as usual) to the foreigners:

"It's an astonishing document, isn't it?" (Tim) Blair wrote. "Baseball has provided the character analysis all those debates merely hinted at. Gore = egocentric blowhard. Bush = Gump-like savant."

Putin Rates The Euros: "They're Pussies!"

Richard Dolan: "Having taken the Europeans' measure in Kosovo/Bosnia in the '90s and Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan more recently, he knows that the European end of "strong transatlantic unity" is all talk, no action. Nor, given the Europeans' dependence on Russian oil and gas, need Putin worry about economic sanctions or pressure, which in all events the Europeans would not invoke. "