Refusing to award the Olympics to countries that don't have excellent human-rights records is political. But it's a better way of doing politics than the way the IOC has chosen.

So I guess we'd then have to retroactively remove the Olympics from Athens, Sydney, Atlanta, Barcelona, Seoul, L.A., Moscow ..... stop me when I get to the name of a city that is in a country with an "excellent human-rights record".

I'm old enough to have clear memories of all of those games. I'm old enough to remember the political palaver that went on in advance of all of them. And I'm old enough to remember that when the athletes started walking in all of that nonsense disappeared, even if only for a moment.

I was lucky enough to be in the stadium in Sydney -- in Australia, with its appalling record of Aboriginal human rights -- when the Korean teams walked in (as they do) together; when the tiny East Timor team enjoyed its very first games.

We clapped our hands red. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Midnight Oil wore their "Sorry" suits, and a murmuring became a national dialogue.

So here's my prediction: there'll be lots of chatter, ranging from the excellent (Parag Khanna, today, in the Guardian) to the idiotic (Ted Kerasote, yesterday, on Salon), but the games will go ahead, and they'll be pretty good, and for a brief moment we'll forget about all the stupid politics and marvel at what could be, rather than what is.

Is the strongest memory of 1936 Hitler, or Jesse Owens?

I'm as cynical about the triumphalism of the Olympics as the next guy, but there is absolutely no doubt that it succeeds in having us see the "other guys" as just human beings, and makes us squirm about our own failings of humanity.

And that goes double for the host country.

The reason card-playing movies never work (with the one notable exception actually not being about the card-playing) is that they are based on a visual lie, and everyone in the audience knows it.

All show the time spend bellied up to the gaming table to be fun, exhilarating, glamorous. When in fact playing cards for money (as distinct to playing for "fun") is a long horrible grind, where the name of the game is to get in as many "hands" per hour to make your minuscule statistical advantage (obtained through "counting") "pay off".

Of course that's stupefyingly boring, and therefore practically unfilmable, and thus the bright lights, laughs-and-excitement fake version that is put to film never ever rings "true" -- and so card-playing movies never ever feel right, and never ever work.

Given a perfect opportunity to show this truth, and focus "21" on the real meat of the story -- the back room tensions and interactions with casinos who clearly don't like to lose -- the director went (again, predictably) with the "grinding is fun!" visuals, and so right at its heart "21" contains the untruth that, in the end, makes it feel unreal and therefore fail as a film.

Zacharek nails why the screening I saw of this was -- in the quiet moments -- filled with the unmistakable sounds of "restless audience".

You _want_ to care, you want to feel like you're watching something _important_ but somehow it's just not there.

And sitting in the dark with 300+ others feeling the same way is really, really awful.

1% of the population with 20% of the wealth?!

Sounds like a job for Taxation Man!

Or does it?

The problem with those numbers is that while they make good headlines, they're almost irrelevant in the larger debate.

Imagine if you effectively taxed that richest one percent, and took away half their money. So far so good! You've freed up 10% of the nation's wealth. Then, when you try to redistribute that wealth, you discover than an extra 10% really doesn't keep very many of the other 99% out of trouble.

For someone earning $5.00 an hour, $5.50 is not a "get out of wage-slave jail free" card. $9.00 might be, but you don't get there by confiscating 50% (or even 100%) of the income of the nation's richest. The maths just doesn't add up. But let me just make it clear that I'm not advocating voodoo economics, either.

The "real killas" in economy terms, and certainly in income redistribution terms, are the middle classes. Policies that enable them to rack up huge household debt (which Andrew mentions), to believe that their long-term financial interests are served by highly leveraged purchase of 2nd and 3rd properties, to easily lose health insurance and thus slam straight to the bottom of the asset tree --- those are the problems.

Not the richest 1%. That's just the go-nowhere politics of envy.

Convincing the middle classes to invest wisely and vote for safety nets, though, is really, really tough. Getting them to vote in their own interests is tough enough -- getting them to act in their own interests may well be the very definition of a Sisyphean task.

"Taxes are not there to "Play Robin Hood" they are there to pay the bills and improve what your country has."

Exactly. I'm agreeing with you.

But that old Robin Hood line kinda tells me you didn't exactly _read_ what I'd written. What's up with that?

Apparently, Tom Kean now works here:

http://www.quadventures.com/a2_team.php

There are phone numbers and addresses on the website.

If I were chasing this down, I'd try the obvious email address, with the obvious variations.

Here's a DHL DC-8:

http://tinyurl.com/54o29k

Which if I read the story correctly, is Patrick's "Monster".

Great writing, great column. Up there with the best parts of your book, Patrick!