This Post Would Get Me Arrested in China.

Fortunately I don't live in China, or in the occupied nation of Tibet, or I'd be in jail like Tsering Dondrub just for pasting this image of the Tibetan flag here on my blog.

Top Ten Reasons the USA Won’t Boycott the Beijing Summer Olympics

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

10. We don’t want to imperil our lifeline of cheap electronics, lead-enhanced toys, slightly-poisoned dog food, and piles of other plastic useless crap that keeps our McMansions and Wal-Marts from looking empty.
9. What? And give up our quadrennial chance to maniacally chant “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” with our families for two weeks while eating Doritos and staring at prerecorded and edited ping-pong, badminton, and beach volleyball tournaments on the new widescreen HDTV that we bought for the occasion?
8. Has the Dalai Lama's country ever contributed cheap labor, diamonds, or oil to the US economy?
7. This year, American scientists have finally found a way to stay one step ahead in the performance-enhancing-chemical and undetectable-blood-doping wars.
6. A vague fear about Chinese hackers being talented enough to bring down eBay … or Dick Cheney’s pacemaker.
5. We only pick fights with countries that don’t have an air force.
4. It’s our only chance to see Modern Pentathlon on television (even if it’s only in a five-minute montage of the courageous American Pentathlete who placed 45th).
3. There is no Tibetan voting block in Miami, or New Jersey, or anywhere else in the USA.
2. We want to see hour-long Up-Close-and-Personal stories about dyslexic orphans who have fought their way to the top of the international equestrian dressage ranks after being adopted by sympathetic American billionaires.
1. George W. Bush’s balls are only half the size of Jimmy Carter’s.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

but seriously, in addition to the current violence against Tibetans, the 11th Panchen Lama will turn 19 on April 25th. He's been a political prisoner of the Chinese since he was six. But "Hey, it's all about the athletes, and having fun!" Let's not spoil it with any talk of politics. That would be like spoiling this weekend's White House Easter Egg Roll® with talk of innocent minors who were thrown without charges into cells at Guantanamo.

Click here or on the interlocked Olympic handcuffs to check out Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières) at rsf.org.

And here's a blog I just found dedicated to an Olympic Boycott: Boycott2008Games.blogspot.com

The Chief Manufacturers of America's Useless Crap Are Shooting Tibetans in Lhasa Today

And the Chinese government has the audacity to blame the Dalai Lama for the governmental violence. What should we do about this?

• Are we going to stop buying the millions of products that say Made in China?
• Are we going to boycott the Olympic Games in Beijing? Will we show we have as much backbone as Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1980?
• How about adding this flag to the uniforms of our Olympic athletes? Can't we, as a nation, be at least as brave as Björk?

Just Asking,
True Blue Liberal

Can you find a better way to spend 65 dollars? ... a two-day course of enlightenment for less than the price of an SUV's tank of gasoline

I hate to brag, but here's the visual proof that my Sunday and Monday made up for the fact that I couldn't make it to Washington DC on Saturday.
What can you say about a football stadium, "The Birthplace of College Football" at Rutgers, being sold out and silent as the Dalai Lama talked informally and with great humor and seriousness about war, peace, compassion, attachment, and reconciliation to 36,000 new friends? It was a Sunday morning I'll never forget.
And Monday night? I expect that in a year or two ECM will release a record by Keith Jarrett called "Keith Jarrett Solo at Carnegie Hall" or, more likely, "The New York Concert" (to fit neatly with the solo improvisational concerts that made Köln, Vienna, and Paris famous) and you'll wish you were there in the sold-out hall too for his only US solo concert in the past decade, from the first note through the five encores. I've been to a lot of concerts since I first saw the Allman Brothers and Johnny Winter at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1971, and this one ... one man alone at an unamplified piano in Carnegie Hall for two and a half hours ... beat them all. Or maybe it was just that seeing the Dalai Lama the day before had opened my mind to fully accept this music on this night.
(Sorry if this post seems insufficiently engagé, but Bush and Cheney and Brownie and the rest of our gang in DC just seem so small and insignificant after brushes with spiritual and artistic greatness over the past two days. Some atrocity will get TBL back on the case of these petty greedy thin-skinned "men" soon, but right now I'm listening to Radiance, so excuse me if I don't give a shit.)