Not only is London overspending for this coming summer's Olympics—the Guardian now estimates that the initial budget of £2.37 billion may be ten times that—but also the city will be turned into a locked-down police state! Sort of permanently, in fact. Neat! During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city [...]

In the year leading up to the Olympics, I was working as a speed typist for the Ministry of Propaganda and I had agreed to spend the first night of Chinese New Year at the apartment of my roomate's aunt. She lived in the far North of the city and the cab that took us up there skirted the stadiums that were still being built. You could smell the construction — an awful, coppery whiff — and see the things hulking there, but that was as close as you got. Shoddy plywood fenced the park, with guard huts at various intervals illuminated to show stern-faced bao an grumbling inside.