The Mind Sports Olympiad Goes Live

The Mind Sports Olympiad was held in August this year. If you missed it, you can catch up with it on YouTube.

The 2018 Mind Sports was held at JW3 in North London. This was the fifth year in a row it has been held in what now looks like its permanent home. New games are a regular feature of MSO, but this year there was a new feature: livestreaming on YouTube, the video hub of the world.

When I arrived on the Tuesday, in the morning, the livestream was just being set up. Paco Garcia de la Banda was present; the 2010 Pentamind champion and a regular gamester, he told me to my surprise he was not playing but was commentating.

The office has been run by chess organiser Tony Corfe since the inception of MSO in 1997; he looked in this year, but the admin work was carried out by Ben Ross and Carmel Black. Also lending a hand were Etan Ilfeld (the inventor of diving chess), Josef Kollar, and others.

Five livestreams were uploaded by MSO, the first on August 19. The award ceremony was uploaded as a regular video two days after the event had closed. Livestreams were also uploaded by the event sponsor, Bondora. Another sponsor was five times Pentamind winner Demis Hassabis.

The Pentamind is of course the big meta-event, and was won this year by Ankush Khandelwal who turned up on crutches and obviously in pain after an horrific accident on the football field. Runner up was Andres Kuusk. The two men were actually joint winners in 2013, with Andres winning outright in 2011, 2014 and 2016. Ankush is a veteran who has been playing MSO since he was a schoolboy; Andres is a relative newcomer, but like Paco he has not simply been playing games, he has been training the next generation.

Turnout was up this year, including many young players, and now with the added publicity of the YouTube livestream plus sound sponsorship, the future of MSO seems secure.

You can also find MSO on its dedicated website msoworld.com; the results website boardability.com (a couple of years behind); and on Facebook.

The 2018 Pentamind winners.

[The above article was first published on Medium, October 26, 2018.]

The UK Parole Board Has Lost Its Collective Mind

If you thought Friday The Thirteenth was an American film franchise, think again. Seven years before the release of the first film so named, Britain had its own Friday The Thirteenth. On Friday, April 13, 1973, David McGreavy was babysitting for Clive Ralph, the man who had taken him in after his own parents threw him out. Clive and his wife Elsie had not only an eight month old baby girl but another two year old daughter and a four year old son.

Elsie was working a shift at a local public house; the Ralphs were saving for a home of their own; McGreavy had babysat for them before, and there was of course not the slightest indication of the horror that was to come. McGreavy had been drinking, and, annoyed that the baby would not stop crying, he battered her skull in, cut the throat of her sister, and strangled their brother. Then, as if that were not enough, he mutilated all three bodies with a pickaxe handle, and finally impaled them on the railings outside the house.

Proud mother Elsie Ralph (later Urry) with the only extant photograph of her young family.

McGreavy stood trial at Worcester Crown Court on July 30, but as he pleaded guilty there was no trial as such, only a sentencing hearing. Capital punishment had been abolished in England, in practice if not in theory, only seven years earlier, so the judge, Mr Justice Ashworth, gave him the mandatory life sentence with a tariff of twenty years. If the latter sounds unduly lenient, it is doubtful if he believed McGreavy would ever be released. Incidentally, nine years earlier, the same judge had presided over the trial of Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen, the last men to be hanged in Britain. They were executed simultaneously at different prisons.

Mr Justice Ashworth died in 1975; McGreavy was seriously assaulted in prison the same year, but by 1995 he had been transferred to an open prison. Broadly speaking there are two types of prisoners who are sent to open prisons: low risk, non-violent offenders, and longer term prisoners, including murderers. With the abolition of capital punishment, those murderers who are considered safe to be released are sensibly walked back into society gradually, including open prison, day release, and perhaps a half-way house. But surely the authorities could not be considering releasing a man who had butchered three human beings, babies, under such circumstances, or indeed any circumstances? Guess again! In 2006, McGreavy was allowed out of prison unescorted. Clearly someone at the Home Office or elsewhere in the civil service was outraged, and tipped off a tabloid newspaper. After McGreavy was photographed walking the streets of Merseyside, the balloon went up. He is now believed to be back in a closed prison, certainly he was after 2006, but incredibly the Parole Board is again considering his release.

There are a number of petitions on Change Dot Org that have been set up hopefully to stop this. The one at this link

https://www.change.org/p/uk-parliament-triple-child-killer-david-mcgreavy-should-never-be-released-from-prison

has attracted the most support, but to date far fewer than the petition to keep the Black Cab Rapist behind bars. But for considerable public pressure, John Worboys would have been released after serving only ten years, but earlier this year, the High Court quashed the Parole Board’s decision, and Worboys will now remain behind bars for the foreseeable future.

David McGreavy — Friday The Thirteenth for real.

If you think the David McGreavy case was an anomaly and Worboys pulled the wool over the Parole Board’s eyes, think again. Two years ago, Colin Pitchfork was recommended for parole, and has even been allowed out of prison on day release. If the name is not familiar to you, Pitchfork was the first murderer to be brought to book by DNA profiling. In November 1983, he raped and strangled the underage teenager Lynda Mann. In July 1986, another teen was given the same treatment. His other crimes include allowing a none-too-bright teenager to take the rap for the second murder. Pitchfork was convicted in 1988.

Then there is the case of Jane Andrews. She attracted considerable media attention on account of having once worked for a member of the Royal Family. In September 2000, she battered and stabbed her lover to death while he was asleep. In trying to avoid or minimise her responsibility for the crime, she lied persistently, but was convicted the following year. By 2009, when she was already being groomed for release, she absconded from an open prison. In spite of this, she was paroled in 2015, but was recalled to prison this year after harassing a former lover.

To lock up a man or a woman for one year or even one month, is a terrible thing, and to do so for decades on end is unthinkable, but what is the alternative? Clearly the Parole Board believes that at some point even the most depraved of killers should be unleashed on society.

There is though yet another reason the Pitchforks and McGreavys of this world should not be released, that is the sheer cost, because such men will always be the targets for vigilante attacks, not from the families of their victims but from the type of people who think justice should be done properly, or from those simply out to make a name for themselves. Although they are also at risk in prison, it is easier to prevent this sort of thing there by keeping them separated from other inmates.

Should McGreavy in particular be released, he would need to be given a new identity. When rapist and would-be murderer Larry Singleton was paroled after only eight years, the locals were so outraged that he was forced to live in a trailer in the grounds of San Quentin Prison until his parole ended. After that, he moved back to his native Florida where seven years later he stabbed a woman to death.

Rather than face the cost of supplying McGreavy and people like him with new identities then monitoring them closely just in case, the Ministry Of Justice would do much better to spend this scarce money on the rehabilitation of ordinary prisoners, most of whom are selfish or weak rather than simply evil. In the United States, the Trump Administration is doing this. A man who is released from prison with no family ties, no home and scant worldly possessions is already half-way to serving a life sentence on the installment plan, and that’s before we begin talking about drug problems, literacy, work skills, etc.

If the Parole Board does not recognise this simple truth, it should be abolished and replaced with a new institution, or staffed with people who do. Another factor that should be considered is Legal Aid. Pitchfork was granted Legal Aid to challenge his tariff. At a time when the Legal Aid budget is being cut to the bone, double child killers should be sent to the back of a very long queue. Not every reprobate deserves a second chance.

[The above was originally published on Medium, December 6, 2018.]

Diaspora Dudes Are Not Dindus, Colin

Hey Colin, forget about da hood for a moment, the braindead black commentators who parrot their drivel about white supremacy, and the talking heads of all races who give their vacuous pronouncements uncritical support. Take a look at some of the fellas and their lovely ladies who are making it in Japan, Singapore, and similar exotic places.

Do you notice anything different about them, Colin? Like they’re intelligent, literate, highly educated, and not unduly obsessed with playing the race card?

Why don’t you see any of these types in da hood, Colin? Is it because this race thing isn’t really a race thing at all? Surely you’ve read Thomas Sowell; he’s read you, after all, and if you haven’t read any of his books, you must at least have seen him on YouTube discoursing on the old days when it was safe for white folks to walk around Harlem at night. And you are pals with Jesse Lee Peterson, aren’t you, Colin? Does he think this is purely a race thing?

Open your eyes, Colin, and see the bigger picture, especially when law and order issues are raised, but one word of warning, Colin, don’t you go making the blue kids angry, because if you do, you’ll realise just what wonderful people the fellas and their lovely ladies really are.

DUCHAMP VERSUS EINSTEIN — Science Versus Art

If you haven’t heard of Albert Einstein, go to the back of the class. If you haven’t heard of Marcel Duchamp, he was an Einstein contemporary who went out of his way to create works of art that, how shall we say, stood out? In 1919, he painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa – not the real one, thankfully, and if you thought Tracey Emin’s Unmade Bed was bizarre, then clearly you haven’t heard of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. Best not to mention his Urinal.

When he wasn’t creating bizarre works of art, Duchamp was playing chess, and he was rather good at it. Playing at a very high level, he usually lost more games than he won, but in 1932 he beat Eugene Znosko-Borovsky into second place at the Paris Championship. Znosko-Borovsky had won the same tournament two years earlier, and once beat Capablanca, so Duchamp was a class act. He also played a mean game of correspondence chess.

Albert Einstein on the other hand was a club player, and although an enthusiast, not a particularly strong one. So, had they met, there is little or no doubt who would have been victorious, all things being equal. But what if all things were not equal? What for example if a time traveller arranged a match for the two men in some weird continuum with a change in the rules?

That is the subject of Duchamp Versus Einstein, a short but snappy work that smacks of authenticity because one of its authors is a science fiction writer and the other is a chess player of Duchamp’s calibre, not to mention a mathematician. This is not the first time Messrs Hinz and Ilfeld have worked together. but it is their first major collaboration.

Christopher Hinz was born in 1951 and has a career in comics and science fiction dating back to the 1980s. Etan Ilfeld is a generation younger, an American ex-patriate who came to the UK to play in the Mind Sports Olympiad and ended up running it. He is also the owner of Watkins Books, based in London’s West End. The London book launch of Duchamp Versus Einstein was held last night at the nearby Goldsboro Books, where if you have £1300 to spare you can pick up a first edition of the second Harry Potter novel. Christopher Hinz couldn’t cross the Atlantic but sent a message; the New York book launch was held last month, and featured readings by both authors.

You can check out Duchamp Versus Einstein at Angry Robot Books, and while you’re at it, take a gander at Watkins.

Feminism Breeds Angry Morons

The headline in today’s Guardian on-line reads E Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump is a victory for sexual assault survivors – indeed.

If you are not up to scratch with this farce, in June this year, the eccentric journalist and author accused Donald Trump of raping her. And this rape happened...? late 1995 or early 1996 in the lingerie department of Bergdorf Goodman, a New York department store comparable with London’s Harrods.

Carroll is not simply eccentric, she is a fruitcake, and at 75 quite likely half-senile. If she is half-senile, the talking heads and hacks who endorsed her are the full monty. Anderson Cooper was given the task of interviewing her for his network, and the interview went very well until she told him most people think of rape as “sexy”, at which point Cooper realised he’d been had, but some people never realise, or don’t want to realise, out of ideology, sheer stupidity, or both. One of these in this instance was the odious Jessica Valenti who felt compelled to pen Our Rapist President. Noting that Trump has been accused of all manner of sexual improprieties by so many women, she considers all of them plus any further allegations credible and true. One is tempted to ask if she also believes in the Clinton Death List. After all, Hillary Clinton has been accused by numerous people of serial murder. Heck, she has even been accused of rape, not assisting a rape, but actual rape. In this age of social and at times not-so-social media, it is difficult to find any famous, powerful or wealthy individual who has not been accused of some dastardly crime.

A while back, Stefan Molyneax produced an excellent recording in which he debunked every single claim made against Trump by numerous women. This was before the E. Jean Carroll episode, but that was also debunked when it was revealed that Carroll had plagiarised this phantom rape from a 2012 episode of an American crime drama. Leaving that aside, the Bergdorg Goodman claim was ludicrous. In the first instance there would have been CCTV in the store, even in 1995. In the second instance, it is highly unlikely that the lingerie department would have been unstaffed; a shoplifter might have got away with it, but a rapist? In the third instance, we will have to wait and see if Trump can account for his movements every relevant day of that period. For a billionaire, this is a real possibilty.

Carroll claims to have corroboration for this nonsense; she told people at the time. Yeah, sure she did. Doubtless O.J. Simpson could have supplied an alibi two decades and more on from that notorious double murder had he been convicted.

Today, it was reported that Carroll has taken a leaf out of Gloria Allred’s book and is to sue Trump for defamation, hence the aforementioned Guardian headline. Said story was written by Moira Donegan, who describes herself as an angry feminist. Aren’t they all angry?

Donegan begins her rant with “The columnist’s defamation case defies the history of a legal system being used to silence women”.

Were women ever silent? Helen Keller, maybe.

“Trump did what he usually does: he went after her character. He denied the rape and also made assertions that were easily disproven, including that he had never met Carroll.”

And she isn’t going after his character? Trump did indeed claim he had never met Carroll when in fact he had. What he should have said was he had no recollection of ever meeting her, which is undoubtedly true. She was one of several hundred people he met at an event he had probably forgotten. In 1987!

Moira Donegan really is thick as pigshit, just like Jessica Valenti, but here it is in plain English. A rape is not like a grope, an unwanted caress, an unwelcome touch, it is a felony, a crime that is so serious it needs to be reported at once or at least reasonably promptly. It is also a crime that leaves physical evidence, and perhaps even witnesses. A rape committed in a private dwelling may generate witnesses, as would the scream resulting from one committed in a department store.

In short, a stranger rape is not she said/he said, it is a crime that leaves physical evidence. If reported at the time. A rape reported 3 months or 24 years after it allegedly occurred is indeed she said/he said. And why would a woman lie? If Moira Donegan doesn’t know this, E Jean Carroll certainly does, away with the fairies or not.

Time To Stop The Russophobia

The publication of the redacted Mueller Report has or should have put the ludicrous Trump/Russia collusion hoax to bed for good. Leaving aside the fact that Donald Trump’s enemies — the Democratic Party, the liberal establishment and almost the entire mainstream media – have now moved on to obstruction of justice, the anti-Russian hate has not gone away, nor will it. In February this year, an op-ed published in the New York Times explained the reason for this hate. According to Franz J. Sedelmeyer: “Corruption is in Russia’s DNA, as it is in Mr. Putin’s.”

Clearly Mr Sedelmeyer has a beef with the Russian Federation’s charismatic leader, and with Mother Russia herself, but substitute black, Jewish, Islamic, or even Chinese for Russia in that sentence, and it takes on an entirely different meaning.

Trump and Putin — conspirators or patriots doing the best for their respective nations?

Racism, so-called, has been and remains one of the most controversial issues of our age, meaning usually white racism. Of course, Russian is not a race, but neither is Islam, so let’s settle for xenophobia. Fear/loathing of strangers, of “the other” is universally condemned, but when the other is Russian, that’s different.

Older readers will doubtless remember the Soviet Union, the Cold War, perhaps even the Cuban missile crisis. There was much fear-mongering in those troubled times, but even then people did not generally speak of Russians as evil; we all knew and understood it was the Soviet system — communism, socialism, call it what you will — that was the real problem, not Russian DNA.

When Trump ran for President he made it clear he wanted America to have good relations with Russia, and indeed with China. The principal reason for this is not difficult to understand; the biggest political problem the world faces today is not the arms race or evil empires but international terrorism, specifically at this moment Islamist terrorism. Russia can be an ally in that fight. Indeed, it has been. In March 2011, Russian intelligence warned the US authorities about the Tsarnaev brothers. This warning was ignored; the result was the terrible Boston Marathon bombing.

Even away from terrorism there has been cooperation between American and Russian law enforcement. A decade earlier, the Blue Orchid paedophile ring that was operating from Russia was shut down by a joint operation between American and Russian agencies. This led inter alia to the arrest of American paedophile Glenn Martikian who was tricked into returning home by an American undercover agent. On March 27, 2001, the headline in the Houston Chronicle read U.S., Russia unite against kiddie porn.

Away from terrorism and crime there has been and is ongoing cooperation between American and Russian agencies in the form of the International Space Station. All this begs the question, why should any American politician or mainstream media outlet whip up hatred against Russia?

Did Russia or some agency of the Russian Government interfere with the American elections? That depends how you define interfere. Here is comedian Lee Camp explaining what he considers to be the full extent of the interference mainstream media talking heads and leading Democrats would have you believe influenced voters to put Donald Trump in the White House rather than Hillary Clinton. Before you play the video be warned that Mr Camp is not averse to using the odd swear word.

So has the Russian Government been totally blameless, has it done nothing pernicious in the West? In November 2006, Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London; he died a horrible death by polonium poisoning. Last year, another Russian national and his daughter were targeted similarly in the UK, this time by a nerve agent. It is generally acknowledged that whoever was behind these attacks had access to toxins that only government agents have. It seems almost certain therefore that someone in Russia authorised both the successful assassination and the failed attempt, but it does not follow that the order came from the top. And it certainly does not follow that Russian DNA is responsible.

Whoever carried out these attacks, be it a rogue operation or otherwise, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, indeed a prime suspect in the Litvinenko assassination has been named, although the Russian Government has refused to extradite him. There is though no reason for the latest incident, the Skripal case, to be allowed to poison US/Russia, UK/Russia or anything/Russia relations generally. And before anyone becomes too virtuous, let us not forget that on occasion our own governments have carried out what amount to extra-judicial executions, ie murders.

It is clear that there are people in Washington and elsewhere who are intent on demonising not only Vladimir Putin but Russia and the Russian people themselves. The United States may be the world’s dominant super-power, but an outright war with Russia would leave us all losers, even without the use of nuclear weapons. We have to stop this madness whatever the cost, and if our governments won’t act, we must. In the UK, the Stop The War Coalition has been in the forefront of this movement. There are similar groups elsewhere, including Australia.

[The above article was first published on Medium, April 20, 2019.]

DAVE CHAPPELLE — A True Hero Of Comedy

Tommy Cooper was one of the greatest comedians who ever lived. He had several recognisable features: one was that he could make an audience laugh literally at the drop of a hat. Another was that he never told a blue joke.

Dave Chappelle performing.

There are still a few comedians like that around; Dave Chappelle is half-way there, but unlike Cooper, no one could ever call him a family entertainer. Over the past few years, comedy with the sort of edge Chappelle produces has taken a beating from the intolerant left. They haven’t yet been able to control every aspect of our economic lives, but controlling speech is a good start. As a black man, Chappelle can use one racial epithet no white comedian dare, but cussing for the sake of it has never been funny outside of a school playground. This is where Chappelle excels; he knows when and where to drop the bombs, and when and where to play it cool.

Unsurprisingly, his new Netflix special was trashed by the critics and applauded by the public in equal measure. As of September 8, Sticks & Stones had been reviewed 379 times at the Internet Movie Database, 282 of those reviews were 10/10, not unprecedented but mightily impressive.

The hostile reaction of the critics is easy to understand. Being black may give Chappelle him a certain immunity, but in the fantasy world of intersectionality his masculity puts him lower down the food chain of oppression than the women of all races and anyone whose sexual proclivities would be unwelcome in a mosque. It is these people who are now largely in control of the Western media. Like Chappelle cares.

After the conviction of Bill Cosby, he joked about him being a serial rapist, which is understandable, because the witch-hunt initiated by Gloria Allred took in a lot of people, including a jury. In Sticks & Stones though, he shows he hasn’t been taken in by all the mud that has been thrown at Michael Jackson, including the lie-ridden pseudo-documentary Leaving Neverland that was released a decade after the entertainer’s death. And his send up of hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett is right on the money.

Like all good comedians in this day and age, Chappelle writes all his own material, and in the global village that is a Herculean task. Before the Internet if not before television, a joke could be told over and over again with the same effect. Not anymore.

Where does Chappelle go from here? Hopefully on to bigger and greater things. That’s if he doesn’t get MeToo-ed.

[The above review was published originally on Medium, September 8, 2019.]