"Just clarifying, I made this tweet at 5am while playing speed chess, eating mozz sticks.... I didn't mean 'WW3' literally I was being semi-comedically glib."

Everybody's a comedian.

Just clarifying, I made this tweet at 5am while playing speed chess, eating mozz sticks & listening to live updates on the scale of the damage & breadth of countries already getting attacked. I didn't mean "WW3" literally I was being semi-comedically glibhttps://t.co/YhE9AKWFcg pic.twitter.com/4hGYR8h8Ol

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 28, 2026

If you "don't know of a 280 character way of describing whatever this is," there is always the option of saying nothing. I can't copy the tweets of the sayers of nothing, and they can't go viral, but thanks to everyone who's quietly contemplating the situation and hoping for the best.  

Screenshot, in case Benz has the sense to delete it:

"Tesla is the only company with all the ingredients for making intelligent humanoid robots at scale."

"My prediction is that Optimus will be the biggest product of all time by far. It will be 10 times bigger than the next biggest product ever made."

ELON MUSK: "Tesla is the only company with all the ingredients for making intelligent humanoid robots at scale.

My prediction is that Optimus will be the biggest product of all time by far. It will be 10 times bigger than the next biggest product ever made." pic.twitter.com/Aqa6SsnsQW

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) April 2, 2025

Musk moves quickly into successes and failures. Yes, we could pause to cry a tear over Brad Schimel — upon whom once rested "the entire destiny of humanity" — but look here: Musk has got the biggest product ever made.

And:

pic.twitter.com/ZoideOC1RU

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2025

All right now. Who would mope about Wisconsin?!

There’s no success like failure....

AND: Embracing the notion that there's no success like failure, Musk now tweets: "I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain."

"As recently as 2015 Nigel Short, then vice-president of the world chess federation Fide, claimed that 'men are hardwired to be better chess players than women'..."

"... adding: 'You have to gracefully accept that.' The English grandmaster went on to explain it was clear men and women’s brains are different because he helps his wife get the car out of the garage and she has more emotional intelligence than him.... Debbie Hayton, a trans woman who writes frequently for conservative outlets, wrote in UnHerd: 'It’s possible that evolution has left men with an innate advantage in chess.' Hayton backed that up with a quote from a (female) Harvard biologist about males having a large advantage over females in spatial ability. But... [a] 2020 study in Nature Scientific Reports... found no difference between male and female spatial abilities. Any differences previously found, a lot of research suggests, may be down to testing methodologies...."

Writes Arwa Mahdawi in "Excluding trans women in women’s chess makes you a pawn of the patriarchy/The world’s top chess federation is banning trans women from competing until a review is made – and the defenses are sexist assumptions and shaky science" (The Guardian).

ADDED: In the comments, after posting about sexual dimorphism, I wrote "I'd hypothesize that chess, a game invented and developed by men, reflects male strengths and predilections. Why wouldn't it?" I took that question to ChatGPT and didn't get a straight answer, but when I demanded a straight answer,  I got one. 

Why is there women's chess in the first place? My female mind fails to comprehend.

I'm trying to read "World chess body bars trans women from competing in women’s events/The International Chess Federation’s new guidelines also strip transgender men of previously won women’s titles" (NBC News).

This isn't like swimming and tennis and the like. There's no physical component... just an insulting implication that women are mentally inferior (at least in some chess-specific way).

From the article:

There is no recent research that proves men have significantly different IQs or are smarter than women, and older studies — one from 2005 and another from 2006 — that do make that claim have been debunked....

I found this — not addressing the trans issue — in a Chess.com forum from 2008. Somebody says:

"Teachers nationwide are flummoxed by students’ newfound chess obsession/The fad, fueled by social media stars, has left teachers divided between displeasure and delight."

That's the headline at WaPo.

Why on earth would there be displeasure?

Some teachers have mixed feelings about the clandestine playing of chess in their classes....

Why wouldn't all teachers have unmixed negative feelings about the unauthorized playing of chess in class? 

Justine Wewers, a high school geography teacher... wishes her students would stop clicking to Chess.com on their Chromebooks and iPhones mid-lesson, as roughly one-third of her 150 ninth-graders... try to do each day...

"Chess Investigation Finds That U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times."

"An internal report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal alleges a previously unknown pattern of likely widespread cheating by Hans Moke Niemann, the player whose September victory over Magnus Carlsen has rocked the chess world."

The Wall Street Journal reports. 

Death comes for Max von Sydow.

The great Swedish actor was 90. From the NYT obituary:

Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on April 10, 1929, in Lund, in southern Sweden.... He was said to have adopted the name Max from the star performer in a flea circus he saw while serving in the Swedish Quartermaster Corps....

For all his connection to the land of his birth and of Bergman, Sweden became distant to Mr. von Sydow.... "I have nowhere really to call home... I feel I have lost my Swedish roots. It’s funny because I’ve been working in so many places that now I feel at home in many locations. But Sweden is the only place I feel less and less at home."

Did he really name himself after a flea?! From a 2012 interview (in The Guardian):

Is it true he named himself after a flea? "Ha ha ha!" booms Von Sydow, his laugh filling the room. "Yes! Ha ha ha! During my military service, I performed a sketch in which I played a flea called Max. So when critics kept misspelling my name, I decided to change it and thought, 'Ah! Max!'"

Ah, so it was not an actual flea "in a flea circus he saw," as the New York Times put it. He himself was in a show playing a character that happened to be a flea.

A flea circus is a show on a tiny stage that has real fleas performing (or tiny imitation fleas):

The first records of flea performances were from watchmakers who were demonstrating their metalworking skills. In 1578, Mark Scaliot produced a lock and chain that were attached to a flea. The first recorded flea circus dates back to the early 1820s, when an Italian impresario called Louis Bertolotto advertised an “extraordinary exhibition of industrious fleas” on Regent Street, London. Some flea circuses persisted in very small venues in the United States as late as the 1960s....

Here's Charlie Chaplin with his flea circus in one of my all-time favorite movies — "Limelight" (which I'll put up as a meditation on death alongside "The Seventh Seal," so please make that your double feature):

At the Sit-Next-to-the-Queen Café...

... you can be your usual charming self.

(Photo source: Andrew Dunn.)

I have found it: the most pleasant news story of the day.

"A medieval chess piece that was missing for almost 200 years had been unknowingly kept in a drawer by an Edinburgh family.... The Lewis Chessmen are among the biggest draws at the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.... 'They brought it in for assessment... That happens every day. [Sotheby's] doors are open for free valuations. We get called down to the counter and have no idea what we are going to see. More often than not, it's not worth very much. I said, 'Oh my goodness, it's one of the Lewis Chessmen.'...  The newly-discovered piece is a warder, a man with helmet, shield and sword and the equivalent of a rook on a modern chess board, which 'has immense character and power'" (BBC).

"I will live my life very carefully from now on, to thank everyone."

Said Ekapol Chanthawong, the assistant coach who was rescued, along with the 12 soccer-playing boys, from the cave in Thailand, quoted in "Thai soccer players and coach speak publicly for first time since their rescue from flooded cave" (WaPo).

Also:

The Thai navy SEALs who stayed with the lost team until the rescue said Wednesday that they worked to keep the boys’ spirits up and ensure they were in good health. Wearing hats and sunglasses — Thai SEALs are not identified due to the nature of their work — they said they gave the boys high-protein rations and played chess with them to pass the time.

The SEALs used food as motivation, reminding the boys of all the treats that awaited them when they returned home....

“They were like my brothers, like my family,” Ekapol said of the SEALs. “We ate together, and we slept together.”

"Under the present circumstances, the only way for me to protect my rights is not to go to Iran... There is no place for an enforceable religious dress code in sports."

Said Soumya Swaminathan, a 29-year-old chess champion —  5th in India — who has withdrawn from a chess competition that will end in Iran, which is requiring females to wear a headscarf.

That's the first time I ever looked at the word "headscarf" and thought of the alternate meaning of eating a head. To "scarf" is "To pig out or 'down' food really fast and hastily."

By the way, is chess a "sport"? Here's "Ten Reasons why Chess is a Sport." The 10 reasons (detailed at the link): 1. Competitive. 2. Well established. 3. Physical fitness ("Peak mental condition requires being in good physical condition" (though the inclusion of disabled persons is counted as a reason under #7)) 4. Behaviour code. 5. Olympic Recognition ("Chess has been recognised as a sport by the International Olympic Committee since 2000.") 6. European Recognition. 7. Global game. 8. Mental component ("All sports have a mental component.") 9. National accolade. 10. Player ranking system.

"In a few days I am going to lose two World Champion titles - one by one. Just because I decided not to go to Saudi Arabia."

"Not to play by someone's rules, not to wear abaya, not to be accompanied getting outside, and altogether not to feel myself a secondary creature. Exactly one year ago I won these two titles and was about the happiest person in the chess world but this time I feel really bad. I am ready to stand for my principles and skip the event, where in five days I was expected to earn more than I do in a dozen of events combined. All that is annoying, but the most upsetting thing is that almost nobody really cares. That is a really bitter feeling, still not the one to change my opinion and my principles. The same goes for my sister Mariya - and I am really happy that we share this point of view. And yes, for those few who care - we'll be back!"

Said Anna Muzychuk, writing on Facebook.

"Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Why? Because tennis is so damned lonely."

"Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players—and yet boxers have their corner men and managers.”

Wrote Andre Agassi, quoted in "Nick Kyrgios, the Reluctant Rising Star of Tennis/He has been called the most talented player since Roger Federer. But does he even want to win?" by Louisa Thomas, who adds: "And, during a match, unlike boxers, tennis players can’t talk to or touch even their opponents, let alone a coach." (New Yorker)

I'd heard that article in podcast form on my walk today. Searching the website to get to the text, I used the terms tennis and boxers and happened upon this article from last year about David Foster Wallace, who wrote about tennis (which he'd played with some success at the junior level):

It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too. The perfect game for Wallace.

Things not believed: "I'm looking forward to voting Democrat again."

That "Democrat" is a tell. Someone actually looking forward to voting for Democrats would say "voting Democratic." But I don't trust the transcription in the Washington Examiner, because it also identifies the speaker of this line as "the acclaimed philosopher."

Camille Paglia is a philosopher?

Here's a 2005 article by Camille Paglia: "Ten great female philosophers: The thinking woman's women/Radio 4's 'Greatest Philosopher' poll yielded an all-male Top 20. But is philosophy really a female-free zone? On the contrary, insists Camille Paglia - and here are 10 to prove the point." In the note identifying the author, she's listed as a "Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia." If she had any claim to being considered a philosopher, I think we'd have seen it there. She said:

I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole - and there are obvious exceptions - are more drawn to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated....

Paglia loves to personalize things, so you can bet she'd have said but not me! if she could.

A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard.

Obviously, Paglia does not meet her own definition of philosopher. She likes to talk about ideas in connection with art — high and low art of all kinds. 

Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers....

But: 

The term philosopher is passé, anyhow, and should be abandoned. The thinker of modern times should be partly abstract and partly practical. Karl Marx, the winner of the Radio 4 poll yesterday, was indeed a truly major thinker.

A "major thinker" — which is what Paglia probably thinks she is — but not a "philosopher," because:

He was not a captive of abstraction and always kept his eye on society and its evolution...

Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre.

Who wants to be a philosopher anyway? Nobody good, certainly not Paglia:

This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity.... Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.

Man, I know the feeling! I had to stop at this point and listen to "Life During Wartime":



Why stay in college? Why go to night school?/Gonna be different this time/Can't write a letter, can't send no postcard/I ain't got time for that now... We got computer, we're tapping phone lines/I know that ain't allowed... Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?....

Anyway, back to the I-don't-trust-it Washington Examiner article I've been trying to read as the sun comes up here in Madison, Wisconsin, where nobody I know is manipulating terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard, and I am thrown back to 1979, when I was trying to be a law student and The Talking Heads were distracting me with word of impending chaos and the futility of further education. I was writing in notebooks — what good are notebooks? — and nobody I knew got computer.

But speaking of chess, have you ever seen this picture?



That's "A Jew and a Muslim playing chess in 13th century al-Andalus." I found that in the Wikipedia article "Al-Andalus," which I clicked through to from "Alcázar," which I'd looked up because it was the hardest answer in the Friday NYT crossword.

Change 2 letters in chess, and you get the opposite of chess: Chaos! And chaos is what made me want to blog that Washington Examiner fragment about whatever it was Camille Paglia may have said. The key line for me wasn't Paglia's spurious expressing of hope to vote Democrat, but her assertion about what's going on with the attacks on Trump:

"Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos... They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything... I am appalled at the behavior of the media... It's the collapse of journalism....  I feel that the media has so utterly lost its credibility that I think people are going to vote against the media again."

I wanted to quote that because I agree with it. A partisan plot to cripple the American President, to make it as difficult as possible to accomplish anything? "Chaos" is a fun-loving term compared to "treason," but we don't say "treason" anymore, do we?

In the 1790s, opposition political parties were new and not fully accepted. Government leaders often considered their opponents to be some sort of traitors. Historian Ron Chernow reports that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and President George Washington "regarded much of the criticism fired at their administration as disloyal, even treasonous, in nature." When an undeclared Quasi-War broke out with France in 1797–98, "Hamilton increasingly mistook dissent for treason and engaged in hyperbole." Furthermore, the Jeffersonian opposition party behaved the same way. After 1801, with a peaceful transition in the political party in power, the rhetoric of "treason" against political opponents diminished.

Oh, but these days, part of the chaos-making is calling treason on Trump.

"If one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes."

Wrote Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo.

Quoted at Brain Pickings, which expands to something said by "the great Polish-born British mathematician, biologist, writer, and historian of science Jacob Bronowski":

Evolution is built up by the perpetuation of errors. It runs counter to the second law of thermodynamics by promoting the error to the new norm so that the second law now works on the error, and then a new error is built up. That is also central to all inductive acts and all acts of imagination. We ask ourselves, “Why does one chess player play better than another?” The answer is not that the one who plays better makes fewer mistakes, because in a fundamental way the one who plays better makes more mistakes, by which I mean more imaginative mistakes. He sees more ridiculous alternatives… The mark of the great player is exactly that he thinks of something which by all known norms of the game is an error. His choice does not conform to the way in which, if you want to put it most brutally, a machine would play the game....

The 20-year-old chess grandmaster dies 2 days before the 90-year old grandmaster.

The 90-year-old, who died on Monday, was Mark Taimanov — "a virtuoso pianist and former Soviet chess champion whose lopsided loss to Bobby Fischer in 1971 in the quarterfinals of a major chess tournament cost him his government salary."

The match, in 10 games, was to be decided by whoever got to 5.5 points first, with wins counting as one point and draws as a half point. Mr. Fischer beat Mr. Taimanov 6-0, without even yielding a draw.

It was an unheard-of result, and to the Soviet authorities, the only explanation had to be a nefarious one, so they blamed Mr. Taimanov. They barred him from traveling abroad, censured him and cut off his government salary, which all elite chess players received.

“This dramatic match changed my life into hell,” Mr. Taimanov said in an interview... in 2002.

The 20-year-old was another Russian, Yuri Yeliseyev. He loved not only chess but parkour, and he died of a 12-story fall after attempting to transit from a window to a balcony.

A neighbour told the Life channel that Yeliseyev had been seen performing the stunt over the summer. A social media account photo showed him hanging by his hands from a ledge high above the ground....

The national chess team coach, Sergei Yanovsky, told state news agency R-Sport that Yeliseyev was one of the most talented young grandmasters in Russia and praised his “colourful individuality." "His uniqueness and search for his own path was very evident in all his decisions; he rejected any existing blueprints... Even as a boy he always wanted to show off his fearlessness and climb up on something, but not to this extreme level”....

Let's talk about this illustration of Trump that Rolling Stone used for "R.I.P., GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party."

Here's the article, by Matt Taibbi, which has the subtitle "Donald Trump crushed 16 GOP opponents in one of the most appalling, vicious campaigns in history. His next victim? The entire Republican Party." I don't really feel I need to read that. I clicked over there because I saw the illustration, in cropped form, over at Facebook, and I wondered what the hell it was supposed to be. You have to scroll down for the illustration, which is very nicely drawn by Victor Juhasz. Rolling Stone just plopped some video at the top of the page, but I've got to say that I love where the freeze frame just happens to be on my browser:



Speaking of DEATH!!! Hell, man. The party of Reagan is like a big, gooey sandwich, sliced down the middle by Donald Trump and sadistically eased apart by his famously tiny hands so that the gloppy cheese that is the establishment stretches with agonizing stringiness and the delectable ham remains securely ensconced within the thick slabs of the well-toasted bread of the people.

Now, step away from the sandwich — you've had enough, Miss Piggy — and feast your eyes on the fine Juhasz drawing of Trump as the Grim Reaper. The reference is to the chess game with death in the Ingmar Bergman movie "The Seventh Seal":



From the above-linked Wikipedia summary of the Bergman movie:

Disillusioned knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his nihilistic squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) return after fighting in the Crusades and find Sweden being ravaged by the plague. On the beach immediately after their arrival, the knight encounters Death (Bengt Ekerot), personified as a pale, black-cowled figure resembling a monk. The knight, in the middle of a chess game he has been playing alone, challenges Death to a chess match, believing that he can forestall his demise as long as the game continues. Death agrees, and they start a new game.

So the GOP invited Trump to play the game.

The knight and squire enter a church...  The knight goes to the confessional where he is joined by Death in the robe of a priest.... Upon revealing the chess strategy that will save his life, the knight discovers that the priest is Death, who promises to remember the tactics....

Trump learned how the GOP was playing the game.

After hearing Death state "No one escapes me" the knight knocks the chess pieces over, distracting Death while the family slips away. 

#NeverTrump!!!

Death places the pieces back on the board, then wins the game on the next move. 

Indiana!

He announces that when they meet again, the knight's time—and that of all those traveling with him—will be up....

Convention time. Here's the GOP on its way to Cleveland...



They go further away, away from the sunrise, in their stately dance to the dark country beyond the horizon while the rain gently washes their faces and cleanses the tears from their cheeks....

"Saudi Arabia’s top cleric has declared the playing of chess 'forbidden'... a waste of time and money that creates hatred between players."

Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al-Sheikh called it “the work of Satan.”

“It makes the rich man poor, and makes the poor man rich,” he said. “It causes hostility and wastes time where it should not be spent.”

What's wrong with making the rich man poor, and the poor man rich?

What's the history of chess? Where is it from? Probably originally from China, and then from India to Persia. After the Muslim conquest of Persia in 651, it spread through the Arab world.

From "The Immortal Game: A History of Chess" by David Shenk:

From the very first exposure to the game, there had been a serious and recurring question as to whether chess was allowable under Islamic law. The Koran—the sacred text of revelations received by Muhammad—did not mention chess by name, but did explicitly outlaw the use of both “images” and “lots.”... [M]any first- and second-generation Muslims considered the game altogether tainted and plainly illegal. Others regarded chess as having no purpose other than recreation....

Fighting for reelection, Obama spent $58 million — $38 million on TV ads alone.

According to this L.A. Times article, which is illustrated, for some reason, with a photograph of Sheldon Adelson — a Romney donor — gesturing at some lit-up models of what are presumably models of casinos. (He's identified as a "casino mogul.")

A "mogul," which originally referred to "the successive heads of the Muslim dynasty founded by Zahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483–1530), which ruled an empire covering a large part of South Asia from the 16th to the 19th centuries," now denotes "An important, influential, or dominant person; an autocrat," according to the OED, which gives the early example "I am the Sultan of this place: Mr. Limberham is the Mogol of the next Mansion" — a line spoken by a character named Brainsick, in the play "Limberham (or The Kind Keeper)," by John Dryden.

The photo of Adelson in the L.A. Times makes him seem capable of moving skyscrapers like big chess pieces. What a manipulative fellow! He gave $10 million in June to a Romney super PAC called Restore Our Future. ("Restore" means to bring back. Back to the future.) Restore Our Future raised $20.6 million in June. Meanwhile, Obama's super PAC, Priorities USA Action took in only $6 million.

Romney's campaign raised much more money than did Obama — $106 million to $70 million (in June). So Obama is lagging in the fundraising and also spending much more.

Heading into July, Romney and his party allies were left with nearly $170 million on hand, while Obama and the Democrats had $147 million.

That's not that huge of a difference, but Obama is such a big spender. And what did he get for all that spending? I think the idea was to frame Romney as an evil capitalist, and it hasn't worked out that well. 1. Despite the heavy attack on Romney, Obama hasn't moved up in the polls, and 2. The attack on capitalism went too far and touched off an effective counterattack. Not only has Obama depleted his funds, he's depleted his argument against Romney.

The Obama campaign’s attempt to portray Mitt Romney as the villainous Bane from “The Dark Knight Rises” appears to be a big flop. And the problem for Obama is, he really doesn’t have a Plan B.

 ADDED: The Obama campaign spent more than $2.6 on polling alone, just in June. What are they finding out? Why isn't that information giving them more useful ideas about how to win? Reminds me of the stimulus program, dumping huge amounts of money on things that done even pan out.

"I like to play chess. I moved to a small town and nobody played chess there..."

"... but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simple game, but it’s played at a higher level."

Quoted here. Worth contemplating. Seems like a metaphor for all kinds of things.

I like to write scholarly dissertations. I moved to the internet and nobody wrote scholarly dissertations there, but one blogger fisked one of my paragraphs. I always thought blogging was kind of a simple game, but I started a blog to defend myself. And that blogger shredded my first nine or ten posts. That’s sort of like living on the internet. It’s a simple game, but it’s played at a higher level.