Crossing the line of war

 You don't need a million poets and prophets with their pens if you have one idiot who delivers us into a radiant crescendo.

RIP?

2023 math

 

 2023 = (2+0+2+3) * (2²+0²+2²+3²)²

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%282%2B0%2B2%2B3%29+*+%282%C2%B2%2B0%C2%B2%2B2%C2%B2%2B3%C2%B2%29%C2%B2 

 

A neat little equation, forwarded to me by Alain Brobecker via the Chess Problems & Studies server on Discord.

Volksverhetzung durch ZDF-Kanäle

 

Diese beiden Bilder von vom ZDF betriebenen Youtube-Kanälen, am 27. August 2022 abgerufen, sehen zunächst harmlos aus. Doch einen Tag vorher, am 26. August 2022, hat das ZDF über den Begriff "Indianer" das hier verlauten lassen:

Da das ZDF also den Begriff Indianer für rassistisch hält, gibt es zu, dass seine Youtube-Kanäle zu Hass und Gewalt gegen andere Völker aufstacheln. Im Strafrecht nennt sich das "Volksverhetzung".

Oder krasser ausgedrückt: Der Rundfunkbeitrag wird verwendet, um wie in der NS-Zeit volksverhetzende Propaganda durch staatlich betriebene Propagandamedien zu betreiben. Vielen Dank aber auch!

Ravensburger's racist agenda

 Currently Ravensburger sadly has taken up a racist agenda by which it wants no more books by Karl May published (especially the novels with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand that criticized the genocide against Native Americans). They cite "cultural appropriation" as the reason, which means essentially that they don't want foreign influences in their works but rather a German only culture.

Nearly 70 years after the nazi dictatorship, the dreams of pure Aryan art and the banning of "Entartete Kunst" should not exist in Germany anymore, but Ravensburger lets them live high again!

As they are shitting on the grave of Lothar Schmid with this, who was leading the Karl May Verlag (Karl May Press) for around half a decade - who also criticized Ravensburger sharply for this nazistic action -, as well as going against all good taste, I hereby openly criticize them for this.

Research paper on selfmates and reflexmates

A Note on the Computational Complexity of Selfmate and Reflexmate Chess Problems by Zhujun Zhang was just published two days on arxiv.org

 

 A selfmate is a Chess problem in which White, moving first, needs to force Black to checkmate within a specified number of moves. The reflexmate is a derivative of the selfmate in which White compels Black to checkmate with the added condition that if either player can checkmate, they must do that (when this condition applies only to Black, it is a semi-reflexmate). We slightly modify the reduction of EXPTIME-hardness of Chess and apply the reduction to these Chess problems. It is proved that selfmate, reflexmate, and semi-reflexmate are all EXPTIME-complete.

Enyonam Sewa Fumey - future FIDE President?

 As I read on ChessBase, Enyonam Sewa Fumey from Togo wants to become the new FIDE President, the successor of Arkady Dvorkovich.

In the current times, it would feel wrong to have either an Ukrainian or a Russian as FIDE President. It is not about there being any corruption, but about it possibly looking to the outside that there might be any corruption, even if there isn't any - I believe Mr. Dvorkovich is not corrupt, I believe he does a good job, but in the current times of war his country of origin could be an issue.

So it will be an interesting upcoming election. Mr. Fumey has good chances in my opinion. I didn't know Mr. Fumey at all before. But to the outside world, the non-chessplayers, it will make a better appearance to have someone from Togo than to have someone from an active war country.

I really don't have any opinion here on who is the better candidate, but to keep good optics, it would currently be Mr. Fumey. An African - to my knowledge a continent that didn't have a FIDE President yet.

We had four Europeans - two Dutchmen, one Swede, one from Iceland -, then three Asians - one Filipino and two Russians - as Presidents. As such, an African would be a welcome choice. So far Africa is one of many underrepresented continents. From the information I read, Fumey seems like a great enthusiast. A man who in his chess-political career also improved his own skills, gaining among other accolades the title of an International Arbiter.

One thing seems certain: Whoever wins the election this year will further advance chess to the best of his abilities.

If we can end the horrible war, chess can have a bright future again. If we can't, then likely chess is the least of our issues...

The Russian people are not the culprits!

 I am very saddened about the current direction the world as a whole moves towards.

I believe - want to believe - that if they could most Russians would end the war immediately, without the west destroying their lives as it does by excluding them from SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc.; and without further sanctions such as the IOC excluding their athletes while celebrating the extermination of Uyghurs in China.

What we achieve is to make sure the Russians - and Belarussians - will hate us for the foreseeable future because we treat them horribly. This is no basis for peace, it is only a basis for further escalation.

Putin says he reacted to the threat by biolabs in Ukraine. Biolabs that were funded by companies tied to the Bidens. The same Hunter Biden that funded the Gain-Of-Function research in Wuhan. If that is true, then Russia had every right to fear the use of bioweapons. This does not excuse the response that equals massive war crimes in Ukraine. This does not excuse attacking Ukrainian civilians. But it shows that this is not another one-sided affair. If we want to hold Putin responsible, we also must hold the Bidens responsible, we must hold Zelensky and Xi responsible for funding the research of bioweapons in Wuhan, and of biolabs in Ukraine that might or might not have also been used for bioweapons, which Russia might be unable to tell from the outside.

But we must not hold the innocent population responsible. While we do not outright kill them, we treat them not like humans, we destroy their lives by excluding them from receiving any kind of payments from abroad. We exclude them from sports events. All the while China, which is at least as much of a threat to the free world as Putin, gets its military presence in the South Chinese Sea up, it can prepare unhindered to invade Taiwan (aka the real China), it can support Russia's war against the Ukrainian people without having to fear any repercussions from the corrupt west, from the corrupt United Nations, from the nearly dead United States, from anyone.

The Ukrainian people have lost this war, they had no chance as they were just pawns in the games of politicians which since 2014, if not earlier, were ready to be sacrificed. More and more aggression towards Russia was sparked in rhetorics, but nothing was done to protect Ukraine from an attack.

The "Star Wars" program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, is useless against modern Russian MIRVs. The west has no chance to survive a nuclear war. Putin might be crazy enough to start one, and some western politicians would want this. Instead of doing anything useful, western leaders virtue signal by sending weapons to Ukraine, punishing the innocent Russian population, competely ignoring the Chinese influence on Russia and that they have the greatest own interest in this war, in this partial genocide.

Our politicians have completely failed us, and they have completely failed the Ukrainian people!