So which country has had the most dominant Olympic performance ever?  Was it the United States in 1984 where the games were boycotted by heavy weights East Germany and the USSR?  Or was it the 1980 Moscow Olympics where the USSR and East Germany won the lion's share of the medals thanks in part to the absence of Team USA?   Arguably, the most dominant nation ever was Great Britain, way back in the London Olympics of 1908.

Unlike the 1980 and '84 Olympic games, the contest in 1908 wasn't boycotted.  The British managed to secure over half of all Gold Medals awarded and just under 50% of the total Silver Medal count.  British athletes won 45.2% of all medals conferred in the games.  Contrast this performance with the success of the Soviet Union in 1980.  While the Soviet performance was impressive, they garnered only 39% of the Gold Medals and 33.8% of the total Silver Medal count.  The USSR won 30.9% of all medals awarded.  At the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, Team USA captured 36.7% of Gold Medals, 27.8% of Silver and 25.2% of the total medal count.

The British have participated at all games in the modern Olympics, but haven't come close to approaching their performance in the Fourth Olympiad held in London in 1908.  London will again host the Olympics in 2012, 104 years after the British essentially monopolized the Olympic medal count in their capital ciy, a performance that has yet to be surpassed by any other nation.

Normal mothers--those that don't aspire to be a guest on the Jerry Springer Show--don't tell their ugly daughters that they're ugly.  In China, they wouldn't have to: the government has a program to do it for them.   They take a young, talented girl and train her to sing.  They tell her that she's going to perform in front of over a billion people as the face of China during the Opening Ceremony of the XXIX Beijing Olympic Games.  Then, at the last minute, they let her know she's too ugly to be the face of China and that she is going to be substituted for the real face of China, but at least her voice will be heard.  Apparently, the real face of China can't sing.

It surprises me that people in the West are surprised at the plight of the child performer.  It's China after all; have the media not being paying attention to what goes on there?  That little girl is a living metaphor of the Chinese system--the Mao Dynasty as it were.  The individual is sacrificed for the common good--as determined by the benevolent government.  This is the country that controls the Internet, decides what its people can see.  Apparently, it's decided to control TV content for the rest of the world.

The media announced we were in a recession months ago; the stock market has turned anemic; we've been led to believe that the banking industry is near collapse, is it a good time to buy?  Are we at a bottom?  It's always hard to tell; in fact, the only way to know for sure that we've hit a market bottom is from the comfortable vantage point of a few years in the future.  However, there is one hopeful sign: Nightline--the late night news behemoth on ABC--has run a story on the increase in the number of survivalists.  Convinced that things will get so bad that modern civilization will collapse, a small minority of people hurriedly train and prepare for the worst.  I see this movement as a good sign for investors--long term investors; the growing number of pessimists is a sign that we're getting closer to a turnaround.  What if they're right and the financial system collapses?  Well, it doesn't matter, does it?  What if they're wrong?  I guess that since they weren't around 60 million years ago when the big meteorite hit, they've always been wrong about earth-shattering catastrophes; I'd bet on things getting better.  It's time to build a portfolio, not a bunker.