Monsters From The Id

Monsters From The Id
Tom Davey's Blog

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Friday, November 29, 2002

The Kissinger Commission

The lead editorial in the New York Times today states in polite language what many of us are thinking rather more vehemently about the Administration's astonishing selection of Henry Kissinger to lead the commission investigating the government's failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. The Times's case against Kissinger goes like this:

It is "improbable" to expect Kissinger to report unflinchingly on government conduct given his extensive personal and business ties to the same establishment he is investigating.

"There can be no place for the kind of political calculation and court flattery that Kissinger practiced so assiduously" while running foreign policy during the Nixon Administration.

"Nor is there any tolerance for the kind of cynicism that Mr. Kissinger applied to the prosecution of the Vietnam War."

In truth, the second and third points smack of ad hominem attacks. Nonetheless, the Administration could surely have found a less unsavory person to lead this important body. Jimmy Carter is available I bet. In the end, the Times manages to connect the dots:

Indeed, it is tempting to wonder if the choice of Mr. Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it long opposed.

10:14:18 PM

King Takes Self

In the annals of celebrity bios, few could be more icky than Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame, Rene Chun's portrait in the December Atlantic Online of the greatest chess player who ever lived. Did you not know that Bill Clinton is a "secret Jew," and that the Holocaust was a "money-making invention?" Apparently you've not been paying attention to Fischer's broadcast radio rants from his self-imposed exile in the Philippines. It's like watching Tiger Woods play a perfect round of golf while he informs the TV cameras that pod people from Venus control the United Nations.

However deranged Fisher might be about subjects outside chess, he still thinks clearly enough about the game itself. I had never before heard of "Fischer Random Chess," but it seems a hopeful way to restore a future to chess now that the calculating brawn of computers has shown the limits of what once seemed like the game's infinite universe of variation. FRC is:

. . . a tweaked version of shuffle chess, in which both players' back-row pieces are arranged according to the same random shuffle before play begins. Although not revolutionary, the premise of FRC is compelling: with 960 different starting positions, opening theory becomes obsolete, and the strongest player -- not necessarily the player who has memorized more strategies or has the most expensive chess-analysis software -- is assured victory.

8:28:16 PM