Специально для тупого вруна zzzzz с сайте ВП, там ДВЕ ЗАГЛАВНЫЕ статьи: SOCHI, Russia — COLUMN | The grim and the gorgeous coexist side by side at the Sochi Olympics. Anyone who thinks that what’s happening here is comparable to the excesses of other sports events in other places simply hasn’t seen or felt these Winter Games firsthand. The $51 billion colossus is an act of destructive grandiosity that threatens to make us all queasily complicit in crime yet simultaneously awed and intimidated.

The most expensive Olympics in history are partly a Potemkin village, an elaborate facade built to impress foreign passersby and to enhance the image of a small, odd, chill-faced man who likes to pose menacingly shirtless in order to seem much taller than he actually is. It’s also a heist: Somewhere along the line, according to Vladimir Putin’s critics, as much $30 billion disappeared, and it didn’t go into the hotels, where the carpets look like scraps from an old office, unless it went into the surveillance that gives new meaning to the phrase bedbugs. Mainly it seems to have gone into creating scale, breathtaking but needlessly immense structures with columns that loom hundreds of feet high, dwarfing individuals into specks. And that’s exactly the point, isn’t it, to make the ordinary citizen quail with helplessness at the power of the “new” Russian state.

It’s the most troubling, complicated Olympics of our time, full of suppression, apprehension, active borderland insurgencies, gay scapegoating, Internet hacking. And farce, which peaked before the Opening Ceremonies when IOC President and arch-enabler Thomas Bach said there were no problems here, only “a couple of hiccups.”