Art, Chess, Potpourri and other nonsense.
Lady in Red!
“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.” ― George Carlin (1937 – 2008). I miss George Carlin! I would love to know what he thinks of how the government is handling the pandemic! Carlin had a knack for cutting thru the bullshit and getting us laugh at our stupidities and prejudices.
Schools are not what they used to be
Sunday Bloody Sunday!
On Sunday December 6 of this year at the FIDE General Assembly (online) Nigel Short received a warm message from Iran’s spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei. It was sort of humiliating, and FIDE has tried to play it down. But the Short/Pein proposal to have Iran banned because of the current practice of Iranian athletes/chess players boycotting Israel was unceremoniously thrown into the garbage at the very last moment and replaced with another proposal (by the Kremlin) that insures that Iran will never be banned for boycotting Israel in the future.
The terms ”targeted punishments” and ”proportionate restrictive measures” are political double-speak for a mere slap on the wrist. Furthermore, in the future any discussion of Iran boycotting Israel is exclusively the domain of the FIDE Council, and therefore subject to non-disclosure agreements that Dvorkovich imposed when he first took over the FIDE presidency in 2018.
A lesson in big-boy politics. I fully support Short’s efforts, but a Russian controlled FIDE could never go against the strategic interests of the Kremlin. As I had pointed out several times here on this blog. We will just have to wait until Nigel Short becomes FIDE president before anything will be done about political boycotts.
