It's Like Chess

The World Chess Championship reaches a crucial game tomorrow. Champion Vladimir Kramnik is presently level with Veselin Topalov.A 12th game draw will send the match to tie-break. Kramnik is white.

Kramnik drinks a lot of water and likes to stretch his long legs. At first each player had private restrooms. Topalov was getting beaten and his manager accused Kramnik of too many pit-stops implying that he was cheating in the bog - eg receiving messages, using a computer - as the bogs were the only unsurveyed environment.

FIDE, the ruling body, then changed the arrangement to a common bog/restroom/signals centre. VK protested, didn't turn up for game 5, forfeited, appealed, lost the appeal, theatened to sue, blah blah.

Since then Topalov's manager has drawn attention to a high correlation between VK's moves and Fritz the Computer's preferences. Baldly stated this has no significance other than gamesmanship.

Pretty much everyone thinks Kramnik is in the right.

The history of World Chess Championships is Pythonesque to a fault and it's splendid that the traditional mix of genius and puerility is being carried on by a new generation. Naturally the Prime Minister of Bulgaria is involved, but where is Borat of Kazakhstan ? Unless....

Борат Сагдиев ................. Vladimir Kramnik


More details on www.kramnik.com and www.susanpolgar.blogspot.com.

Speaking of comedy, if there are any chess-playing readers in Moab, Utah who'd like a few skittles games next week, I'll be there with my manager and his manager.

Expletive Deleted

While you are throwing out your toothpaste from hand baggage for your next flight to and from the UK, you may care to reflect on this :


Anila Baig, a columnist on The Sun newspaper, reported that at Leeds-Bradford airport no member of security had asked her to remove her niqab to check her identity against her passport picture.

A Flatter Tax

There's less buzz about flat tax these days, so let me make a modest proposal:

What is called "flat tax" is really "less progressive tax." Ignoring the fiddly bits like thresholds, if I earn 100k and you earn 50k, I pay twice as much tax as you, for no good reason except that you have a vote worth as much as mine (more if your vote is thought more biddable).

"Flat tax" should mean we pay the same tax. That would be a glorious revolution.

The only enforcement need be a public list of those who've paid the tax, a strong sanction if you think about it.

For a lively essay on what I call "flat slope tax" see The Economist.

Chavez/Rangel/Pelosi/donkeys/grace

Chavez comes to NYC, calls Bush 'the Devil'.
Rep.Rangel (D) says 'You do not come into my country, my congressional district, and you do not condemn my president. If there is any criticism of President Bush, it should be restricted to Americans..'
Rep. Pelosi (D) says 'Hugo Chavez abused the privilege that he had, speaking at the United Nations'.

Sanctimonious piffle! Chavez owes no allegiance to Bush or the US. Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter ...these guys may have an obligation to refrain from belittling their President when speaking abroad. Some hope. You know the thing I like about Bush, despite Miers, despite immigration. The man has grace.

Postcard from Hungary

In Budapest a couple of nights ago I was playing chess with a friend from Houston, sitting outside a tex-mex, when a few thousand rioters sauntered by our table. Hungarian rioting is rather genteel :



Almost nothing happened. Budapest was calm. We were by the tv station and parliament, the epicentre of "Budapest burns".
The next day it was calm. It was a peaceful democratic demo with a teeny bit of action staged for photo-ops.
It brought home to me how much of the "News" is phony and amplified.

We also played chess in outdoor hot baths and moseyed around the banks of the Danube and a Totalitarian Sculpture Theme Park:


The Totalitarian theme has potential for an OzymandiasWorld, with smashed, colossal, mossed over. stone limbs and heads; theme experiences to include show-trials and queueing for bogroll and soap.

Harry Reid Fisks Winston Churchill

Oh, I wish I'd written this.

Economics

I'm asked by a friend who trades inflation for a bank what I think. So....

"Sell in September and go away.
I dunno. UK housing is just unaffordable. We'll have to emigrate to Poland. That's not a joke, it makes a lot of sense to base an office in E.Europe, eg the Baltic States. In Poland you can get cheap Ukrainian plumbers.

US housing is more efficient than in space restricted, bureaucratic UK, so I expect the price signals to work earlier (as they are) with consequently smoother markets and less knock-on to consumer confidence in general. The UK is hard to predict because just as English is the global 'lingua franca', so London has become world city and new capital immigration (eg from India and China) can propel UK asset prices further than history would suggest.

Commodities have peaked, absent much greater tension in the middle east or somewhere unexpected.

Inflation in general has stayed low despite the commodity boom, despite mid-east war, despite China and India. Reason is China and India (abundant cheap, skilled human assets) plus tech advance plus floating currencies to permit tensions in purchasing power parity and expectations to disssipate rapidly rather than by currency earthquakes.

So :

Commodities down
US housing down 25% ish, but no hard landing for economy.
UK housing is a big fat wobbling bubble which will probably both inflate and deflate bigtime with an eventual big fat splatty pop.
E. Europe pretty good.
France will improve for sure.
Germany still stuck. Talent gets out, but they're not really hungry.
China - no idea.
India will boom. Tremendous talent, finally, finally starting to liberalise.
Inflation overall not a bigtime problem.
Sterling steady - really it's a better reserve currency than Euro.
Dollar strong. Say it again - strong dollar. More hawkish fed, purchasing power parity, lower oil prices. President Romney will be more of a deficit hawk.

Politics in the UK is rancid. Cameron's an utter scumbag and Labour/the vast public sector/the BBC will try to capture Gordon Brown away from markets and the US. That might lead to 1970's type national gangrene for a while".

TV

On live British TV I watch soccer highlights and that's it. Maybe I became saturated with The Simpsons when Haloween seemed to come round every month. I should take another look. After all Homer is, well, Homeric
.
I watch a few US shows on DVD, often with a glass of whisky at 2 am seeing that 'alcohol is the cause of and solution to all of life's problems' - H.Simpson. Maybe it's a golden age for American comedy. By Series 2 the US version of The Office became richer and funnier than the original with delicious supporting roles and it's just poignant in places. I re-watched some of The Larry Sanders Show. It's like comedy heaven to me, up there with Fawlty Towers. But Arrested Development may be up there too. The LSS and AD have Jeffrey Tambor in common. Also in common is the brevity of these shows - all around 24 minutes or less. 'Brevity is the soul of wit' and the lack of it undoes many shows and movies. Desperate Housewives and The Sopranos are just too long, too padded. Curb Your Enthusiasm is very decent, but too linear on Larry David. The other characters are stifled, tho they have real potential. Also it's 5 minutes too long. Am I the only person who doesn't get "24"? My highly intelligent male American in-laws love it. I re-sample for 10 minutes and give up; the characters and plotting seem so lame. And where did "Duckman" go ?

I must plug CSPAN Book TV, an amazing free resource on the web. The Afterwords and In Depth Archives are rich,rich,rich..VD Hanson, Tammy Bruce, Newt Gingrich, Bernard Lewis, Charles Murray, C Hitchens and on and on. Long, uninterrrupted conversations with intelligent, articulate, alert minds. There are plenty of liberals too plus writers of the standing of Updike and Wolfe. An unexpected gem is the interview with Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin on his book "Shooter" about sniping in Iraq.

Fake But True

Some conservatives attack Bill Clinton and gang for attacking an ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11"

I prefer an absolutist line on docudramas - "real people, real words."
Once you start down the "fake but true" road you go on thru Rathergate to the Ministry of Truth. That liberals lie is just another reason not to do it.

But..

"The attack on a group of Western tourists in Jordan on Monday should be condemned by all standards as an act of terrorism, but..."
Done that. Heard it before. Writes itself. Don't buy it.

But.Me.No.Buts.

Airport madness

On Sunday we may travel to the northern tip of Denmark, one of the most tranquil spots I know because:
1. The beaches are superb and fairly empty.
2. The land is surrounded by sea on nearly all sides, so the light bounces up and down to create a special palette which was exploited by the "Skagen school" of painters.


The uncluttered landscape is mirrored by Danish design. We're partial to the glassware.
3. I like the Danes. They earned honour in WW2, saving almost all their Jews, and they have been pro-US against the EU pattern. I have done a lot of shipping business with Danes and they are great at performing their side of the letter and spirit of contracts.
4. They were traduced by most of the MSM over the Mohammed cartoons, so this is a good year to visit.

The bad part is Stansted Airport. This weekend a strike of check-in staff and baggage-handlers is scheduled - evil in a normal year. It's a Bank Holiday weekend and the kind of person who'd piss on a family vacation like that deserves nightmares to the crack of doom. Oh the humanity! Think of the children! Let these cockroaches get another job if they can't do this one without back-stabbing the rest of us. Backstabbing cockroaches, pah! This year the strike comes on top of the security farce, so 'treasonous' is too mild. No wonder one becomes a sulphurous old fart with age - it's the rational response to the calibrated sadism all around. Hell is other people, heaven is:



So, folks, for a great family vacation, rent a house in Jutland and fly by private jet.

As an air travel oriented coda, here's a transplanted comment to Mick Stockinger's post on Uncorrelated.com "Mutiny in the War on Terror" provoked by the Movable Type damnspamfilter (more calibrated sadism; what's the bad word ? 'race' ? 'flipflop' ?) -

"I applaud the passenger mutiny. Nobody cares what race they are - it's risk assessment. Nearly a quarter of young British male Muslims tell pollsters that 7/7 was justified.
Mick, it may be hard to get just how 'sensitive' the UK establishment has been to Muslims in ways which are beyond satire. It's been tried and failed. Repeat slowly after me "tried..and..failed."

The dhimmi mood music all around just increases their sense of victimhood. But they are not the victims. We are, and it's time that that culture paid a price and take ownership of the problem. If they can not or will not, then the West must do what it needs to do for self-preservation.

Assume the following:
1. You and your family are on a plane waiting to take off.
2. It's hot. You're wearing shorts and flip-flops.
3. There is no passenger profiling.
4. 24 Muslims, mostly young males, have just been arrested for plotting to blow up passenger planes.
5. There are 2 young male Muslims on the plane. They appear too heavily dressed. They glance frequently at their watches. They speak to each other in Arabic or Urdu rather than English.

Ok, Mick, I want to know, honestly, would you leave your children on that plane for the sake of the wider principles you wrote about ? Not me, mush, and I don't feel bad about it. I didn't create the problem. Muslims did; that's Muslims as a group and Islam as a culture. It's way past time for them to fix the problem or have it fixed around them. "