Honor the King

Pragmatism Populism Prism

It's hard to argue with the core argument of progressives regarding the current Senate health care bill, that by mandating individuals to buy health care but not creating a public option, or at least a national exchange, to keep insurance companies honest, the bill is delivering millions into the coffers of Aetna, Cigna and Mass Mutual without getting anything in return. (Although Nate Silver argues that the public option was a progressive pipe dream, even in a 60-seat Senate.)

How does one start off with the great populist political issue of our generation and end up with a corporatist, capitalist gift that sends insurance company stock soaring? To think people actually called Obama a socialist...

I am still holding back complete judgment. There is a good chance that the cost containment measures in the bill will do what lefties expected of the public option. It will bend the deficit curve. It will end corrupt insurance industry practices such as denial of pre-existing conditions, etc. It will cover 31 million more Americans. It's a giant, gargantuan step in the right direction.

At the end of the day, this may be the best our clunky, corrupt Congress could achieve, and as such, an argument for pragmatic incrementalism. Get what you can now, fight for more later. Once the economy recovers, once we pass an energy reform bill, once Obama wins a second term, we can go back and create a public option later. That's the argument.

Hardly a heady campaign slogan, hardly the fierce urgency of now...and there lies the difference between politics and government. Change is a bitch.

Using Space and the V'ant Kruijs

Yesterday, I played the black pieces in an easy win against a lower-ranked player. It was a bit one-sided, but the game involved an interesting series of moves that are worth examining.

My opponent opened (unintentionally) with the V'ant Kruijs opening, an irregular opening that is not recommended (it blocks the dark bishop, low statistical odds, etc.), and moreover, unfortunately for him, I had just seen the best statistical defense to the V'ant Kruijs played by Indian GM Vishy Anand a few days ago.

Black's defense is very elegant, I love how the board looks for black at 6. ...Be7.

The most pivotal moves of this game came at the end of the opening, in moves 11-14. It begins with white making a small error at 11. Qd3, when he advances his queen with no apparent end in mind. This is a common amateur error, moving pieces without intention. I do it all the time. It almost always hurts you.

Watch how his queen gets trapped in that alley when I respond with 11. ...Qa5, pinning the knight to the white king, and forcing him to move 12. Bd2 to free his King from the pin, further walling his queen in. She is now surrounded by her own pieces. When I move 12. ...c4, she has no safe square to escape to.

One of the hardest things to learn as an amateur player is how to play in space, and use it against your opponent. As a low-ranked amateur myself, I am just starting to figure this out. The book teaches that if you gain an advantage in material, you should "trade down", i.e., look for every chance to exchange pieces with your opponent and reduce the number of pieces on the board (while maintaining your numerical advantage), thereby hastening the endgame.

The "trade down" rule does NOT apply when you have a spatial advantage. Click on move 12 below, compare white and black - notice how cramped white's pieces are compared to mine. His rooks, dark bishop, knight and queen are trapped and have nowhere to go. In this situation, trading down actually helps your opponent by clearing space for him to move. The better option in this situation is to increase the pressure without exchanging your pieces.

That is what I did with 12. ...c4. At this point, white is in trouble. There is no safe square for his queen to escape to, and the only pieces she can capture are pawns. In this situation, when your back is against the wall, there is often a way to turn the tables. My opponent almost found it.

He moves 13. Nxd5, opening up a discovered attack from his bishop on my queen, and attacking my knight and bishop. (Slightly better would have been Ne4 - threatens by queen and knight, and from here, his knight is not under threat like it is at d5). I responded with 13. ...Qxd5, moving my queen to safety, capturing his knight, and pinning the pawn on g2.

He moves 14. Qxc4, which offers an exchange, but remember that trading down when you have a spatial advantage is not advisable. His move also ignores the pin on the g2 pawn and h1 rook. A better move for white would have been to leave his queen where she was, but keep the pressure on my queen with Bf3. This would have put me on the defensive and given him the space to mount an offensive.

Those four moves really decided the game. Once I penetrated the second rank with my queen and bishop, it was only a matter of time.

Note: Another point of interest. The endgame begins at 23. ...Qxe3+, when I capture his bishop and check the king. A move back, my opponent made the blunder of moving his queen off the third rank to pointlessly threaten my rooks - this was a stupid mistake. If he had not done that, my move would not have been possible.

But notice how, despite my large advantage at the beginning of the endgame, I have to sacrifice both my rooks to finish him off. This is in part because of his two rooks guarding the back rank, and in part because my king was trapped behind his pawn wall, so I needed to keep his king in perpetual check to avoid checkmate myself. I like this endgame a lot. It was very efficient, which is unlike me.

Don't Panic.

This game pretty well illustrates the perils of bringing your queen out too quickly to chase after the elusive butterfly of an early checkmate. Not to mention the lesson of not panicking early.

My opponent got a little excited when he saw the possibility of a combination checkmate in four moves and moved 3. Qf3 (hoping for 4. Qf7#). He sacrificed center control and early development to chase after that f7 pawn, and while he did so, I calmly gained center control (4. ...Be7) and castled my king (5. ...O-O).

When the exchange at f7 was over, I was down a rook and a pawn (6 points) to his knight and bishop (6 points). An even exchange of material, but it left me with devastating center control and him with an exposed queen, no development, and an unprotected king.

Witness how center control allowed me to walk in his front door, figuratively speaking, with 11. ...Qxe5 and then with 14. ...Qxd3+.

My pivotal move was 13. ...Ng4!, threatening his white queen with my black knight. Yielding to the temptation of capturing my knight with his pawn would have resulted in a disastrous line for White:

14. fxNg4...Qxg2+

15. Ke1...Bh4+

16. Kd1...Bxg4+

17. Qe2...QxQ#.

(Update: A reader just made a great point - at move 15 in the hypothetical line above, moving the King out of check to e1 wouldn't be white's best move. White would be very slightly better off blocking the check with his own queen and offering a queen sacrifice. Great point, and in this case, the line would be:

15. Qf2...Bxg4+ I decline the exchange and check with my bishop

If 16. Ke1...QxRh1+ I capture the rook on the back rank and check

If 16. Kd2...QxQ+ I take his queen and check. Still disastrous.)

He had no choice but to withdraw his queen (although he should have moved it to d2) and give up further control of the center, allowing 14. ...Qxd3+ and the ensuing checkmate.

A classic lesson, it seems to me, of playing your game and not letting your opponent's attempts to disrupt your opening throw you off.

Sita Sings the Blues

In honor of Vijaydashami, I am presenting "Sita Sings the Blues" by Nina Paley.

This animated movie is a beautiful work of art and of creative storytelling. It is a worthy inclusion in the archives of the many diverse artistic interpretations of the Ramayana that have existed throughout history. Learn more at http://www.sitasingstheblues.com.

This film is being distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, which means anyone can copy, share and screen it. Please therefore consider supporting the worldwide distribution of this film by donating even a small amount here.

Enjoy!

Part 1 of 10:



Part 2 of 10:



Part 3 of 10:



Part 4 of 10:



Part 5 of 10:



Part 6 of 10:



Part 7 of 10:



Part 8 of 10:



Part 9 of 10:



Part 10 of 10:



HAPPY VIJAYADASHAMI TO ALL!

Patience is a Virtue

This is a really interesting game if you're a fan of positioning and tactics, as opposed to the games that feature quick sacrifices and lots of exchanges.

I am trying to focus on playing for position rather than just trying to capture and kill. My opponent was a bit cautious early, choosing to surrender position rather than exchange pieces. Then he made a gigantic blunder, lost his queen in move 13, and never recovered.

When you get lucky and win your opponent's queen very early, there is a big temptation to assert your advantage in material by going on a killing spree. That can be dangerous against a seasoned player.

It took until move 35 for me to checkmate him because this was a closed game, with a pawn jungle smack in the middle of the board that hurt the mobility of both sides. It required some foresight and tricky maneuvering.

Note: This game also featured the rarely used "en passant" move (move 15), the only time a pawn is allowed to capture sideways. I had actually never captured en passant before, so that was kind of cool. More on the obscure en passant rule here.

The Perils of an Uncastled King

Another game with me playing the black pieces. This one illustrates the importance of white controlling the center and castling early. He didn't do so, and allowed me to exploit the wide open center with multiple attacks on his exposed king.

Pros and grandmasters don't need to castle, they know how to protect exposed kings. Otherwise, castle your king. If not, stuff like this happens:

Strong Start, Gimpy Finish

Check out this game, with me playing the black pieces. I started strong and defended the center, but took too long to close out my opponent.

The awesome knight fork (of the white king, queen and rook, plus double check) in Move# 19 should never have happened. I had a check mate there (19. ...Qh5#) and missed it. I then went on to miss 4 - count'em - 4 more chances to checkmate (20. ...Qg4#, 21. ...Ng2#, 22. ...g5# and 23. ...h6#) before finally closing the deal with 26. ...Rxg6#.

Pathetic. Lesson as always: there's always a better move if you're patient enough to search for it.

RIP Michael Jackson

What a sad, weird day yesterday was.

I was at Best Buy around 6 pmwhen the guy next to me, while fingering his Blackberry, nudged his wife and murmured, “Says here Michael Jackson had a heart attack.” I glanced over, and there it was: “Jacko Suffers Cardiac Arrest, Rushed to UCLA Med Center.”

I was taken aback, but didn’t think any more about it. I think I figured he’s a relatively young guy, he’s physically fit, a dancer. Either the news is wrong, or he’ll be fine. Half an hour later, I came home to my wife checking a text from her brother: “Turn on the news. Michael is dead.”

The television immediately went on and stayed on until 1 in the morning. We watched without believing what we were seeing. They kept saying “unconfirmed reports of death”, so I fully expected them to say they had it wrong, that Michael was alive and recovering.

Then Jermaine Jackson came on the screen, and Michael’s body was wheeled out on a gurney, covered in a white sheet, immobile. Yet, it wasn’t until this morning that the reality of his death began to sink in.

I remember as a kid in boarding school listening furtively to Off the Wall and Thriller on my Sony Walkman after lights out, hoping the teachers wouldn't find out, sharing the headphones with my best friend, rocking out to Beat It and Billie Jean without fully understanding the words because the quality of the tapes was so bad. I remember for years thinking Michael was asking in Smooth Criminal: “Annie, are you walking, are you walking, Annie?”, and wondering why it mattered whether Annie was walking or not.

Then in 1991, an aunt got me Dangerous as a Christmas present, both the album, on audiotape, and the entire music video, on videotape. (Had CDs and DVDs not been invented yet? Yikes.) I watched and listened to them so many times I wore them out completely. Black or White was a groundbreaking track for the early 1990’s, at time when race relations in the US were incredibly frayed. The music video itself featured ground breaking technology and special effects. It was amazing to see so many cameos of famous people working with Michael on that album, like Michael Jordan, Eddie Murphy, Iman, David Bowie, Naomi Campbell and many others. Then there was the huge Superbowl halftime performance, and Heal the World. It seemed as if here was a man who understood the obligations of fame, a transcendent artist, entertainer and philanthropist, a unique icon worthy of admiration, the kind of guy who could sing Man in the Mirror and mean it.

Then the allegations of child sexual abuse came out, and he married Lisa Marie Presley, and dangled his baby from a balcony, and had one or ten too many plastic surgeries. I remember seeing him on TV in 2000, at some Kennedy Center gala, and being startled by how mask-like his face had become, almost like a skull. His nose was barely there, his chin looked as if it had literally been sanded down. He turned into a punch line for late-night comics, and everyone forgot about the musical genius behind Wacko Jacko.

Now he is dead. At some level, we all saw this coming. He was only 50, but his body, ravaged by so many surgeries, accidents and medications for chronic illnesses, was probably 15 or 20 years older. He may have been addicted to painkillers. As stunning as yesterday’s news was, it wasn’t surprising. I couldn’t imagine an 80-year-old Michael Jackson, wrinkled and stooped, going around on an ivory walking stick. Could you?

Someone on TV yesterday said it well: he spent his childhood living like an adult, then spent his adulthood trying to capture some unreal, idealized vision of childhood: with Neverland Ranch, Bubbles the Chimp, those odd relationships with kids. There was such a thin line there between genius and insanity.

Michael Jackson has occupied our collective consciousness for so long, his death truly feels like the end of an era. If you are around my age, it’s hard not to feel like a huge part of your childhood died with him. It seems like he struggled his whole life – with an autocratic father, with the demands of fame and fortune, with a world he didn’t understand, with troubling allegations and legal problems, with health issues and financial woes. And through all that, he remained a musical genius, a dancer of otherworldly ability, and a human being of incredible compassion and a world-size heart.

Michael, thanks for all the memories. I hope you have finally found peace.

American Jihad

Robert Draper of GQ (GQ of all places) reports in an incredible article about the extent to which Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon filled its presidential briefings with prejudicial, slanted imagery (Iraqi kids kissing troops, raucous, friendly crowds) and painted the picture of a Christian crusade against Islam. They even included Biblical quotes with each report.

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

We were fighting a holy war.

Click here for the full article, and here for a slideshow of images. It's fairly chilling.