China has apparently blocked access to nytimes.com, now that the Olympics are over and the government doesn't even have to pretend to be mildly less restrictive anymore.

After 17 years of false starts and whispery rumors, no one was shocked when Chinese Democracy, Guns N' Roses' (well, Axl Rose's at least) newest and much-delayed album, was finally released last week. Except for the, well, Chinese! As if they were living under some sort of all-the-way-around-the-world rock or something, this is apparently the first the Communist-y supernation has heard of the album. And they are not happy about it. The album's title is "venomously attacking China," according to national Chinese newspaper the Global Times. The album is laden with commentary on the Chinese government, referencing the banned spiritual practice of Falun Gong and featuring the 1989-y lyric: "if your Great Wall rocks blame yourself." (If you're Great Wall's a rockin', you're probably doin' the knockin'! Of boots! Chinese boots!) But, c'mon, we've known the title of this thing for years, and the Chinese are just now getting mad about it? They could have been raging about this since, like, before the internet even existed! Where were the pamphlets about how the album is a Western tool meant to "grasp and control the world using democracy as a pawn"? I mean, it's true! And it's also about rockin' out! Their reaction, though resoundingly nationalistic and scary, is probably kind of what Axl and his newish bandmates were hoping for here stateside. Instead all they got was a deliciously side-winding review by Chuck Klosterman, and sad opening day debuts at Best Buy. So, I guess it just goes to show that the world has changed a lot since last we Used Our Illusion, but China hasn't noticed. Because, you know, they've been focusing on slightly bigger things. China State Media Blast New Guns N' Roses Album [AP]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Microsoft a patent, first applied for in 2004, on technology to censor profanity — or any keywords off a list — from an audio stream in real time. This technology could be applied not just to online video like YouTube but also for cell-phone audio and internet chat. Think China will be the first buyer? @#$% yeah. [Ars Technica]

Don't be a sucker. Those complicated, long-winded explanations of the worldwide financial crisis are just a lot of big city hokum. Fortunately, your good buddies Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris are here to set the record straight: It's a dark, shadowy conspiracy between the fat cats on Wall Street, the elitists in Washington, and the nefarious Red Chinese who are secretly stealing our oil off the Florida coast! Huffpo's Rachel Sklar learned the awful truth from Huckabee's new talk show on Fox last night. Huckabee's got a "friend" who tells him this whole mess is the result of "financial terrorism": "Just today, a friend of mine in the financial markets indicated that he's been doing a careful analysis of the last 12 days, and there seems to be a manipulation of the marketplace - at the last half-hour of each day, there is an extraordinary rush of computerized trading going on. He believes that there may, in fact, be evidence of economic terrorism that is fueling a lot of what's going on. Now it's a fascinating idea, that if somebody could break down the world economy, it would have a greater impact that any bomb ever set off. It seems to be there is plausible argument for it." But, Norris sagely points out, don't forget the Chinese! "Oh yeah, I think - oh definitely, Mike. The thing is, China has one and a half trillion dollars* of our debt. Now, what did we give China for collateral for that one and a half trillion dollars? So the thing is, you know, with our government - what did - what secret deal did they get, give China, said, 'Well, you know, ah, we won't tell the people but you can drill 50 miles off the Florida shore, and do a slant drilling into our oil in Florida,' you know - so a lot of things are going on underhandedly that we the people don't know, and that's why it's so important, Mike, that we the people get the power back. We need a voter revolution in our country." (audience applause) Also? When Congress took off for the Jewish Holidays, they were really Christmas shopping, and Barack Obama is big on infanticide. Read it here.

Jimmy Wales, cofounder of the world's most comprehensive history of C-Pop, recently sat for propaganda pictures with China's top censor Cai Mingzhao. The pair also spoke a little bit, but not about "the fact that a few politically sensitive pages are blocked," according to an interview Wales gave to Rebecca MacKinnon, an advisory board member at Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation. "Since I wasn't sure of the exact details, and just due to the way the conversation went (more high level than about specific details), I didn't raise this question," Wales said. "But, I am not cool with any censorship of Wikipedia." Maybe he'll tell Mingzhao the next time they meet for pictures.

The Chinese milk contamination crisis is bringing back the wet nurse…which gives me an excuse to link to this.

A Chinese worker at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China is "definitely not fired," a factory spokesperson told the newspaper Xiandai Kuaibao. The smiling young lady's photos were found on a newly unboxed iPhone by a British buyer who posted them to MacRumors.

Hard to believe our nation's star athletes have time to go to the gym and practice jumpshots or whatever, what with all their marketing strategy meetings and reality shows and plotting to invade China like the second coming of opium. Sports stars and their sponsors have known for years that China is the market of the future-"If only 1% of Chinese buy our sneakers, that's $300 million more in revenue blah blah..." just like every other business in the world. But the Olympics have whet athletes' appetites even more. They want to rule China. The question is, why is China letting them do it?

The number eight is considered lucky in China, and so everyone assumed that's why the Beijing Olympics opened on August 8, aka 08/08/08. This little chestnut gave the media a mildly exotic (but easy to understand!) piece of Chinese culture to talk about in their inevitable stories on the Olympic host country, and also something interesting to say about the opening ceremonies before they happened. But NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol explodes the myth of 8-8-08 in the Times today, saying superstition is "not really why the Olympics started then." The real reason? Money. (Duh.)

Someone is lying at Nike. The only question is who. The mystery surrounds how the shoe company approached the thuggish Chinese dictatorship over online rumors about an athlete it sponsors. No one disputes that Nike, which recently claimed its shoes have "become an icon of self-expression and a symbol of Democratic style," ran to the repressive regime in a snit. Someone claiming to be close to Nike had issued an anonymous Web post claiming the company forced Liu Xiang, pictured, to exit the games because he was unlikely to win. This echoed tampering allegations Nike also faced in Brazil. Does Nike want the poster hunted down and thrown in jail? Hunted down and unmasked, so he can be sued? Or simply handled by the Chinese government in whatever manner it feels appropriate? No one has any idea, because Nike keeps changing its story — and digging itself into a deeper hole.

The whining by journalists about China's Internet restrictions at the Olympics in Beijing rings hollow: It belies how interested they are in actually reporting anything that might run afoul of the China's Communist censors. How convenient to blame packet sniffers and blocked network ports, instead of actually wearing out shoe leather tracking down protesters. Oh, but how much easier to refresh Amnesty International's website from the air-conditioned comfort of the Olympic Village. Actually showing up at a protest will get you detained without a trial, as muckraking videoblogger Brian Conley and friends have discovered. It's hard to meet deadlines from jail, so best to stick to hard-hitting reports about cheerleaders. A bonus: People actually enjoy watching that stuff.News Corp. has long treated the government in China with a velvet touch, and NBC's parent General Electric, with its huge infrastructure arm, has billions of reasons not to risk their investment in the games with any actual balanced reporting from China. In fact, American corporations like Nike are figuring out that having a state willing to bully and muzzle the press can have its upside. But before you go spinning media conglomerate conspiracy theories — there's a secret memo from Rupert Murdoch himself telling editors to take it easy on China! — remember that it ultimately boils down to individuals making reporting decisions based simply on trying to keep their jobs. Conley is no stranger to courting the ire of local officials — he and colleague Jeff Rae, who has also been detained, once regaled me over dinner in New York with a story about almost ending up behind bars while covering unrest in Guatemala and southern Mexico a few years ago. And the Iraqi citizens reporting for his site Alive in Baghdad don't just court jail, but death. So Conley and Rae couldn't have possibly been too surprised when, while following fellow foreigners specifically to record their protests, they got caught up in the dragnet. His company, Small World News, runs on a shoestring budget, and frankly the interest generated by his detention provides the kind of publicity neither he nor Students for a Free Tibet could otherwise afford — but only outside of China. As an entrepreneur trying to build a business, the jail time may ultimately help Conley out. But will it actually change China's policies? As anyone at Google or Yahoo can tell you, complicity with China has proven much more profitable than principles.

The Olympic Games have long promoted more than the amateur athletic spirit. Sponsors this year sell pharmaceuticals, laptop computers and luxury watches, among other things, mostly to consumers outside of China. But there's something particularly sad about the way the games have been co-opted to push sugary treats inside the host country. Mars Inc., for example, used street sports events and other Olympic gimmicks to help grow sales of Snickers bars 75 percent in China this year, the Wall Street Journal reports for today's paper. Then there's Coke, which spread its tooth-eroding product into China's impoverished, soda-deprived rural provinces by attaching itself to the Olympic torch relay. That and some other local uses of Coke's $400 million in global Olympic advertising helped erode Pepsi's lead in China, the Journal reported on its front page Tuesday. Both Mars and Coke seem oblivious to the moral issues raised by their campaigns amid heightened scrutiny, in the U.S. at least, of obesity-linked products. If they're not more careful, American sugar purveyors may find themselves shackled in the fashion of cigarette makers. After the jump, a look at a scene from Mad Men, in which tobacco executives begin to grapple with the regulatory noose begin to close around their own advertising in the early 1960s.

You think NBC is making a good return on its investment for these Olympics? You don't even know what a good return is. NBC had to bid for these Olympic rights in an auction, and they ended up paying more than $1.5 billion for the most recent summer and winter games. But how much did CCTV, the national broadcast network in China, pay for the money-minting opportunity to carry the games in its home country? (Hint: there's nobody for them to bid against):

China has cut off access to the iTunes store after it was revealed that some Olympic athletes have downloaded a pro-Tibet album featuring, among others, tea-swilling bald Lothario Moby. Dear power structure: Please stop affirming Moby's self-importance. [Idolator]

When will the far East stop its racist stereotyping of the white man? Athletes from across the world define the Chinese by the slanty-ness of their eyes. But China is just as bad. They harbor the ludicrous notion that whites look alike! Listen carefully, China: BBC pundit Steve Parry is a tall, white, goofy former swimmer. But Michael Phelps is a tall, white, goofy current swimmer. Being mistaken for someone else is just one more thing white men in China are forced to endure, like weird foreign food and a lack of readily available American flag bumper stickers. Watch the clip of Parry being mobbed by enthusiastic Michael Phelps fans below:

A hipster artist has just become the first American detained by Chinese authorities for something he did at the Beijing Olympics. (Is this seriously the first? We would be very happy to be wrong about everything about this.) Tennessee native James Powderly (no relation to Dash Snow) ("heh") was last seen leaving New York-where his graffiti-influenced experimental art collective had a Moma show earlier this year-in this Flickr photo. (More recognizable photo of him after the jump.) Powderly, who is known for using lasers to project his graffiti tag onto buildings, was apparently detained early this morning Beijing time while attempting to debut a work of protest art, news that comes (really!) via a Twitter message somehow received by Students For a Free Tibet. It is not Powderly's first brush with Red Chinese authorities:

When The Economist marked the opening of the Beijing Olympics by putting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the cover, we took it as a big hint to waste no time naming the Solzhenitsyn of China already. Of course, it was not a hint directed at us, but at Slate, which usually scoops everyone on the whole "pithy takes on weighty geopolitical topics" angle. The thing is, no one has found one yet! Perhaps because the Chinese are a godless people and therefore less likely to accord epic religious and literary symbolism to perpendicular lines drawn in their dirt? Because it's not for total for lack of trying. The New Republic blog has been featuring a Chinese "Dissident of the Day" during most days of the games, but they all seem to have been imprisoned — thanks, Yahoo! — before their publishing careers could really take off. Slate, for its part, had Anne Applebaum write a piece on a non-incarcerated candidate for the title, a Communist Party official named Yang Jisheng who wrote a book called Tombstone about the 36 million Chinese who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward. But Tombstone, like pretty much any account of post-1949 Chinese history that is in any way true, is banned in China.No one has bothered translating it into English. And even if it could get published both places, it would probably seem a little dated. (One of the reasons Solzhenityn's seminal One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich became such a hit in the U.S. is that it was published in Russia first, back in 1962, back when people were still starving to death from the Great Leap Forward.) Of course, it would be nice to think that Solzhenitsyn was so influential, and his depictions of the dehumanization of Soviet labor camps so universally applicable, that Solzhenitsyn himself would be the "Solzhenitsyn of China." But when he died it turned out the official state-controlled Chinese literary association had no comment, explaining that they didn't have any Russian literary experts on hand. Then someone unearthed a Chinese Russian literature expert named Liu Wenfei who has basically never spoken to the Western press. "For Chinese intellectuals," he said, Solzhenitsyn was "a master of literature." And "for others who suffered in the 1960s and 1970s, he was a thinker with a deep sense of justice and morality who pitilessly attacked the crimes of the Soviet dictatorship." Which is a pretty clever way of admitting that pretty much all Chinese intellectuals "suffered in the 1960s and 1970s" without having to point out that so many continue to suffer. Ma Jian, whose novelized account of the pro-democracy movement that ended in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre came out this year, is also, needless to say, banned. (Most Chinese still don't know about the massacre itself.) Same goes, of course, for the Chinese guy to possess both the distinctions of "years in labor camps" and "Nobel Prize in Literature," Gao Xingjian. Even if it weren't, Gao is probably too highbrow to achieve the influence and audience of a Solzhenitsyn. Or maybe it is not a question of "brow," but a question of "literature" entirely once any society has reached a level of technological advancement beyond that of Pyongyang — which is to say: Not that Solzhenitsyn really thought of himself as all that influential in the end. Obit: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [Economist]

The Olympics: yay, a thing I don't need to add a contextual sentence lest you haven't been watching! Of course you're watching! At this point not having watched the Olympics is like not having heard of September 11. DMX himself knows about it! And NBC just got its best Saturday ratings in 18 years, restoring every last eight hundred forty seven million dollars they fronted for the thing along with the whole notion of American mass media. How did NBC do it? New Yorker television columnist Nancy Franklin has an answer: by appealing to the "lowest common denominator"! (Which is funny, because we thought appealing to the lowest common denominator didn't actually work on the Nielsens anymore unless you multiplied the Nielsen rating by some mysterious inflated self-importance multiplier reflective of the proportion of viewers employed in the New York media.) Franklin kvetches that 2008's "not painfully handcuffed but handcuffed nonetheless" Olympics coverage has been the shlockiest yet in an anachronistically curmudgeonly review that sounds… very New Yorker circa 1990!

Here was the Spanish Olympic basketball team, minding its own business by posing for a full-page newspaper ad in the "Slanty-eyed Chinaman" pose, which, as all Spanish basketball players know, is funny and endearing. Then the scurrilous English-speaking media goes and writes a news story about it, twisting it into some sort of "racist" gesture. Despite the fact that Spanish athletes have many Chinamen friends! Spanish nationalist outrage has risen up at the foreign misinterpretations of this widely practiced gesture of eye-based friendship among Spanish athletic teams. So it's only fitting that the (English) reporter who broke the story has now had to write a groveling piece defending his decision to cover this Spanish leisure activity:

When a Hong Kong paper said earlier this week that it had gotten its hands on a 21-point memo from the Chinese government's propaganda unit telling the national media how it must cover the Olympics, the head of the Beijing Olympic committee scoffed, "There is no such 21-point document. Chinese media, according to the Chinese constitution, are free to report on the games." But then the Sydney Morning Herald got the same document, and published it in full. Witness the worldwide free press in action, propagandists! Highlights of the edicts to the proud nation's "journalists":