Ah, the Chess players lament upon losing a won game…This writer has lost his share of so-called “won” games. Truth be told, I have lost more than my share of “won” games, because
After half a century playing Chess there is one particular tournament game that stands out in my memory. The game was with National Master Paul Linxwiler, of the Great State of Tennessee. I bungled the opening and butchered the middle game to the point it was only a matter of time before Paul landed the blow causing me to resign. Fortunately, that blow was not forthcoming. Move after move I had to sit there seeing all these winning moves that were not being made. This went on for many moves and much time. It was TORTURE! I refused to allow the thought that the man would continue to play second and/or third rate moves, but that is just what he did, until finally offering a draw. I broke my hand bringing it from underneath the table to take his proffered hand, metaphorically speaking, of course… When we went over the game I pointed out each and every better move he had not played as Paul sat there shaking his head, mortified at what he was seeing…
had one of those “won” games in the third round of the 2021 US Masters. I was watching the action at FollowChess.com, where you get it straight, without analysis or some thermometer type thingamajig bouncing up and down when a move is made. After seeing bad move after bad move being played I will admit to having gone to ChessBomb.com to check out the, shall we say, ‘colorful’ moves being made by Ms. Yu. It was difficult to believe what was being seen, as Jennifer continued playing weak moves, with a generous supply of what GM Yasser Seiriwan would call “Howlers,” thrown into the mix to keep one amazed. No pleasure was taken seeing her torturous moves being played as I reflected on the Linxwiler game… After playing over the game I understood why Jennifer withdrew from the tournament:
IM Josiah Stearman 2413 (USA) vs WGM Jennifer Yu 2247 (USA) U.S. Masters 2021 round 03 D19 Queen’s Gambit Declined Slav, Dutch variation
d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Nc3 dxc4 5. a4 Bf5 6. e3 e6 7. Bxc4 Bb4 8. O-O Nbd7 9. Qe2 O-O 10. e4 Bg4 (Although Deep Fritz 13 likes this move, Komodo plays 10…Bg6, as have 1165 humans, compared to the 116 who preferred 10…Bg4) 11. e5? (The ChessBaseDataBase contains only 19 games in which this move has been played; it has only scored 45%. 11 Rd1 has been played 119 times, and is the choice of Stockfish, Komodo, and Houdini while scoring 55% of the time, therefore the question mark) 11…Nd5 12. Nxd5 (Houdini @depth 25 plays 12 h3, as does Stockfish 14 @depth 20. SF 270919 @depth 23 plays 12 Bd2) 12…cxd5 (SF plays12…exd5) 13. Bd3 (Komodo and Fritz play the game move, but SF 11 @depth 23 plays 13 Bb5, a TN) 13…Bh5 (According to the CBDB this move has been played 445 times, which could be a mistake as 365Chess shows only 5 games. SF 13 @depth 37 and SF 221121 @depth 38 both prefer 13…f6. For those of you new to the game, the reason for the move of the f-pawn is to confront the white outpost on e5, which is in your territory and must be dealt with sooner or later, so why not now? Then again, Deep Fritz would play 13…Rc8. The vacillating move made in the game is weak. Allowing your opponent a free move when one begins the game down a move is not to be recommended) 14. Qe3 Be7 15. a5 Nb8 16. Bd2 a6 (Komodo @depth 38 plays this move but SF 240321 @depth 56 plays 16…Nc6) 17. h3 is a TN. (SF & Komodo agree 17 Ne1 is best)
d4 e6 2. Nf3 f5 3. g3 (3 c4 was the choice in 1501 games at the ChessBaseDataBase, resulting in a 54% outcome for white. The 1239 games in which 3 g3 was played is the second most often played move, but the result has been better at 56% for white. Stockfish 14 @depth 49 and SF 220521 @depth 51 will play 3 Bf4, which has seen action in only 173 games. I kid you not…Even more astounding is that the result has been an incredible 62%!) 3…Nf6 4. Bg2 (SF and Komodo play 4 c4) 4…d5 5. O-O (SF goes with 5 c4) 5…Bd6 6. c4 c6 7. b3 (SF says Ne5) 7…Qe7 8. Ne5 (In almost one half of the games played [844] 8 Bb2 has been the move played even though it has only scored 51%. Go figure… One Komodo program prefers 8 Nc3 [45 games; 57%], while another prefers 8 Qc2 [67 games; 57%]. Then there is Houdini…who would play 8 Ne5, as has been played in 253 games while scoring a fantastic 60% against the highest rated opposition!) 8…O-O (Komodo castles but SF prefers 8…Nbd7) 9. Bb2 (Fritz plays the game move but Komodo plays 9 Bf4) 9…Bd7 (SF 14 plays 9…b6. Deep Fritz plays 9…Nbd7) 10. Nd2 Be8 (Komodo and Deep Fritz 13 play this but SF 8 plays 10…Rd8) 11. Ndf3 (The most often played move and the choice of Komodo, but SF 14 plays 11 Nd3) 11…Bh5 (SF 12 @depth 38 plays 11…Bg6) 12. Nd3 (SF 8 plays the game move but SF 13 @depth 35 plays 12 Ne1 a NEW MOVE, and a TN if and when it is played over the board against a human opponent…) 12…Nbd7 13. Nfe5 g5 (Fritz likes 13…Bc7; SF 8 plays 13…Ba3, both of which will be a TN if and when…)
13…g5 was a surprising choice by Mr. Aaron and certainly must say something about the kind of player who would fire the g-pawn salvo at his esteemed Grandmaster opponent. A player does not make such a move in an attempt to draw. Things got interesting quickly after GM Shabba pushing his e-pawn only one square in lieu of two on move twenty. Then after 20…gxf4 Shabba should probably taken the pawn with his knight with 21 Nxf4. It was at this moment Deepak could have taken control of the game by playing 21…Nh5, but played the retrograde and limp-writsted 21…Ne8 giving the advantage to Shabba. Only a couple of moves later Shabba played a limp-wristed move himself when easing the Bishop back to f1. Deepak answered by taking the pawn on f4, which was the reddest move possible according to the Bomb; big advantage to Shabba. After the exchanges on f4 on move 24 the GM had a won game. With all the action taking place on the king side Shabba, for some reason, decided to move his Bishop to a3, tossing away his advantage. For the next several moves there was punching and counter punching with the game staying about even, Steven, until the GM played 32 h3, again a BRIGHT RED move, the kind of move GM Yasser Seriwan would call a “howler” and it was time to turn out the lights because the party was over…
(This has been the most often played move with 1074 games in the CBDB, and it is the move favored by Fritz, but SF 14 @depth 47 plays the second most often move chosen by humans in 811 games, 5 d3. Then there is SF 141220 @depth 61 preference for 3 Nc3, the third in number of game with 312) 5…e5 6. O-O (Although SF 12 & 13, going deep into the 50s, would castle, as have 263 players in the CBDB, SF 14 @depth 43 shows 6 Nc3, a move having been played in only 7 previous games!) 6…Be7 7. Nc3 d6 8. Nd5 (Nd1 SF) 8…Be6 9. Ng5 (SF 12 @depth 44 plays the game move, but @depth 50 plays 9 c4, a TN. The same program going one fathom deeper decides upon 9 Nh4, another Theoretical Novelty) 9… Bxd5 10. exd5 Nb4? (10…Nd4 is a superior move because it threatens the Queen. This move is so weak that at the top level of the Royal Game white now has a winning advantage) 11. c3 (11 d4 could, and probably should be played immediately) 11…Na6 12. d4 Nd7?
White to make move 13
The last move made by black was a horrendous, game losing move. Black has yet to complete development and he just moved an already developed piece for the second time and did not improve the position of the piece. Granted, the Knight is attacked twice, but White now has a game ending shot.
13. h4? (Can you find the move the young GM missed?) 13…O-O 14. dxe5 Nxe5 15. Qc2 Bxg5 16. hxg5 c4 17. Be4 g6 18. f4
Black to move
18…Nd7? (He moved the dancing and prancing knight again!)
Matthew Puckett is a National Master from the Great State of Alabama, where he is currently the highest rated player. Mr. Puckett is strong enough to have bested a Grandmaster, Sam Palatnik. The battle, featuring a Leningrad Dutch, was contested at the Atlanta Chess & Game Center. Not many, if any, GMs lost at the House of Pain.
Alexander Shabalov is enshrined in the US Chess Hall of Fame.
Matthew Puckett 2138 (USA) vs GM Alexander Shabalov 2496 (USA) U.S. Masters 2021 round 01 D30 Queen’s gambit declined
White to make eighth moveWhite to make twelfth move White to make sixteenth move
d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. g3 Bb4+ 5. Bd2 a5 6. Qc2 O-O 7. Bg2 c5 8. dxc5? (Players are taught it is usually better to capture toward the center. Although a small mistake, it would have been much better to play 8. cxd5)
8…d4 9. Bxb4 axb4 10. Nbd2 Nc6 11. O-O e5 12. Rfd1? (12 Ng5 must be played as it is the only move not causing disadvantage) 12… Qe7 13. Nb3 h6 14. Ne1 Bg4 15. Qd2 Rfd8 16. Nd3? (The game, for all intents and purposes is over after this egregious mistake. When deciding upon a move a player will ask himself before making the move, “With which move will my opponent reply?” In this case the answer is obvious, which means that after the expected 16…e4, Matthew planned to play 17 Nxb4, because what kind of player would move the Knight to d3 if he were intending on retreating immediately? Yet that is the move Mr. Puckett should have played, but by then he had completely lost his objectivity and carried on with his ill-fated plan…) 16…e4 17. Nxb4 Nxb4 18. Qxb4 d3 19. f3 dxe2 20. Rxd8+ Rxd8 21. fxg4 Rd1+ 22. Kf2 e1=Q+ 23. Qxe1 Nxg4+ 24. Kg1 Rxe1+ 25. Rxe1 f5 26. Bf1 Ne5 27. Be2 Qg5 28. Kf2 f4 0-1 https://www.chessbomb.com/arena/2021-us-masters/01-Puckett_Matthew-Shabalov_Alexander
The movie Casablanca premiered in New York City 79 years ago today, in 1942. The film starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, with notable support by Claude Rains and Paul Henreid. It’s the story of a cynical American expat, Rick Blaine, who runs a bar in Morocco’s largest city during World War II. He’s unexpectedly reunited with his former love, Ilsa, who is now married to a leader of the French Resistance. By the end of the movie, Rick finds he still has a selfless heart under his bitter exterior. The movie was originally intended for release in January 1943, and that is when it came out in the rest of the country, but the producers moved up the New York premiere to take advantage of the free publicity surrounding the landing of Allied forces in North Africa.
The film was based on an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. A story analyst called it “sophisticated hokum,” but recommended it to Warner Bros. anyway. Unlike most movies, Casablanca was filmed in story order rather than out of sequence, because the screenplay was only half done by the time filming began. Ingrid Bergman wrote in her autobiography, My Story (1980): “We were shooting off the cuff. Every day they were handing out dialogue and we were trying to make some sense of it. Every morning we would say, ‘Well, who are we? What are we doing here?’ And [director] Michael Curtiz would say, ‘We’re not quite sure, but let’s get through this scene today and we’ll let you know tomorrow.’” She didn’t know which man her character ended up with until the final scene was filmed.
The movie was filmed almost entirely indoors, because a Japanese submarine had been spotted off the coast of California and everyone was worried that Japan might attack the mainland. The production crew also had to cope with war rationing and shortages of things like rubber and aluminum. They couldn’t use nylon or silk in the costumes, so Ingrid Bergman wore cotton.
Casablanca received great reviews, but at the time most people just seemed to think it was going to be one of many boilerplate movies intended to raise American morale during World War II. The New York Times wrote, “Yes, indeed, the Warners here have a picture which makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “a drama that lifts you right out of your seat” and added, “Certainly a more accomplished cast of players cannot be imagined.” Variety wrote, “Casablanca will take the [box offices] of America just as swiftly as the AEF took North Africa.” Another reviewer said, “It certainly won’t make Vichy happy — but that’s just another point for it.” It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won three of them: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Not every critic since the movie’s release has considered it a masterpiece, however. Pauline Kael said, “It’s far from a great film, but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism, and you’re never really pressed to take its melodramatic twists and turns seriously.” (https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-november-26-2021/)
MYSTERY WIRE — The Pentagon dropped a UFO surprise late Tuesday night. A new office will be created to track and assess unidentified aerial phenomena spotted over military ranges, according to a memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks.
The office was given an unwieldy name, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, with an unpronounceable acronym AOIMSG. The memo from Hicks specified that the new office has the job to “detect, identify, and attribute” unidentified objects and to assess any possible threat to aviation safety and/or national security.
For decades, the Department of Defense has ridiculed and dismissed UFO incidents and reports. It has thwarted attempts by Congress and the public to access information and files related to military encounters with UFOs, including those seen over sensitive military facilities and assets, including nuclear weapons storage areas and missile bases.
born in Amsterdam in 1632. Spinoza was the descendent of Portuguese Jews who immigrated to the Netherlands seeking religious tolerance. Young Spinoza studied Hebrew, the Old Testament, the Talmud, and Cabala’s traditions of mysticism and miracle. Fluent in five languages, Spinoza wrote in Latin, which he learned from Christian teachers who introduced the young scholar to mathematics and philosophy.
By age 24, Spinoza had developed his own ideas. He asserted that everything in the universe was made from the same divine substance, possessing infinite characteristics. He defined God and the laws of nature as one and the same, a part of this infinite substance. All of this was too far-flung from the dominant vision of an almighty, singular godhead for Spinoza’s religious contemporaries to tolerate, and Spinoza was excommunicated.
This did not deter him from his intellectual pursuits. He said, “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” He left Amsterdam and supported himself grinding lenses while writing books of philosophy. He lived in solitude and studied the work of Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, and Huygens. Spinoza published three books while he was alive, though more of his writings were published later by friends. The only book that named him as an author was Principles of the Philosophy of René Descartes (1663). He withheld much of his work because he feared retribution from a group of theologians who had publicly accused him of atheism.
For more than a century after his death, Spinoza’s work was widely considered heretical and atheistic. But toward the end of the 18th century, his ideas underwent a revival. Thinkers called him “holy” and “a man intoxicated with the divine,” and he influenced philosophers such as Goethe, Herder, Lessing, and Novalis. According to the philosopher Hegel, “to be a philosopher, one must first become a Spinozist.”
Spinoza said, “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
“Baby, we should record an OnlyFans video back here.”
NOVEMBER 22–While seated in the rear of a Florida Highway Patrol cruiser, Summer Watkins had a brilliant idea. “Baby, we should record an OnlyFans video back here,” the 24-year-old yelled to her male companion, who would soon join her in the squad car.
Watkins and Yordan Noa, 24, were seated in the police vehicle after Noa’s BMW was pulled over early Thursday since he was driving with a suspended license. Cops planned to transport the duo to nearby Shell station in Naples where they could “make arrangements to get home,” according to an arrest report.
When Noa joined her in the patrol car, Watkins asked a cop, “What if I suck his dick back here?” The officer replied that she could not do that. Watkins, however, persisted: “Can I suck his dick back here?” The officer responded, “No.”
When the cop closed the vehicle’s rear door and walked away for a few minutes, Watkins and Noa–neither of whom was handcuffed–engaged in sexual activity that was recorded by the “prisoner compartment camera.”
After Noa exposed his penis, Watkins began performing oral sex on him. Watkins, cops noted, “can be heard saying ‘fuck Five-O’ while giving oral sex.”
Noa, cops say, used his phone to memorialize Watkins pleasuring him. “Can ya’ll hear me? She’s sucking dick in the back of a State Trooper right now,” Noa exclaimed while recording. When Noa later used FaceTime to talk with a friend, Watkins interjected, “I just sucked his dick in the back of a police car.”
The sexual encounter was discovered an hour later when a patrolman reviewed video footage of the couple in the police vehicle. At that point, “It was discovered that the defendant had performed oral sex on” Noa, reported Trooper J.D. Perez-Morales.
Since Watkins had already been dropped off, the cop returned to the gas station and arrested her for lewd and lascivious behavior and breach of peace, both misdemeanors. She later bonded out of jail and is scheduled for arraignment on December 16.
Noa, who was arrested after cops found marijuana and a controlled substance in his car, was also charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, breach of peace, and exposure of sexual organs. Free on bond, he is scheduled to be arraigned on December 13. https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/sex/tryst-in-fhp-car-902561
The filmmaker, whose new documentary ‘JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass’ examines additional evidence about John F. Kennedy’s death, says Biden is acting just like his predecessor Trump with a delay in releasing records.
By Oliver Stone November 22, 2021 9:18am
‘JFK Revisited’ Camelot Productions
On the matter of openness about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, there is not much difference between former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden.
In 1991, there was a huge controversy over JFK, a film I directed and co-wrote. One reason for this was at the end of the film, I alerted the public that the files of the last inquiry into Kennedy’s murder — the House Select Committee on Assassinations — were sealed until the year 2029. This created an outcry, and congressional hearings and legislation followed. Under the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), a five-person citizens panel appointed by the president to oversee the release of classified records on the JFK case, was formed.
From 1994 to 1998, the ARRB declassified about 60,000 documents and 2 million total pages of records. But the four-year mandate was not adequate to fulfill their mission to release everything, and there was no congressional oversight to ensure the completion of the ARRB’s mandate of full disclosure.
The 1992 legislation decreed that everything would be declassified by Oct. 26, 2017. On that day, President Trump was visited by the CIA and FBI. He was the only person allowed by law to further delay the process. He did so, twice. First, a six-month delay on the grounds the agencies had “insufficient time” to finish the job required by the JFK Records Act. In April of 2018, he granted a three-year delay.
President Trump also added a layer of bureaucracy to the law which is not there: The National Archives was never foreseen as an arbiter of what should be withheld or released. Yet, agencies apparently continue to make postponement requests to the archivist, even after President Trump’s arbitrary three-year “extension.”
The JFK Records Act also stated that if any record was still being withheld in 2017, the president had to state, in writing, the reasons why. That did not happen.
Most people thought that Biden would break with Trump and declassify everything immediately on the due date of Oct. 26. He didn’t. He has now given the CIA and FBI until Dec. 15, 2022, to comply with the law. Between Trump and Biden, the total delay will be more than five years. In other words, the public will have waited 59 years since Kennedy’s assassination for the declassification of the last of the JFK records.
One last point should be made about Biden’s decision: Back in 1992, he was part of a unanimous Senate which passed the JFK Records Collection Act. Now, he agrees with his predecessor that nearly three decades was not enough time to fulfill the act’s mandate.
Oliver Stone is a director, screenwriter, producer and best-selling author. He won his first Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Midnight Express (1978) and won his second and third as best director for Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), respectively. Other notable projects include JFK (1991), W. (2008), Savages (2012) and Snowden (2016). https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/oliver-stone-biden-trump-jfk-assassination-records-column-1235045794/
This Is Where Oliver Stone Got His Loony JFK Conspiracies From
The origin story for the CIA-killed-Kennedy myth is twistier than a magic bullet
President John Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline and Texas Governor Johhn Connally minutes before he was assassinated, on November 22nd, 1963. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Oliver Stone once made brilliant movies like Platoon, which won Oscars for best picture and best director. These days, he’s a tinfoil-hatted fabricator. His new documentary — JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, premiering on Showtime on, you guessed it, Nov. 22 — is rooted in a big lie. It comes 30 years after the premiere of JFK, a film unrivaled in the annals of American cinematic propaganda. Both are based on the undying delusion that President Kennedy was murdered by the Deep State: The Central Intelligence Agency, backed by the military-industrial complex.
Do you believe that the CIA killed JFK? Millions of Americans suspect so. Let me ask you, then: Why do they believe it?
The tale can be traced to a Russian disinformation operation. It came from the same arsenal of political warfare that convinced half the world that the U.S. Army created AIDS. The one that monkey-wrenched the 2016 election for Donald Trump. The one now flooding the internet with deadly lies about the coronavirus and vaccines. The goals of these campaigns were one and the same: to divide Americans, to pour salt in our self-inflicted wounds, and ultimately to convince you that there is no truth. That crackpot fantasies are cold hard realities. That “conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts,” as Stone proclaims in JFK Revisited.
Disinformation works best when it contains a kernel of truth. And, in truth, the Kennedy assassination is the black hole of American history. It has sucked better minds than Stone’s down into darkness. It has taught generations of Americans to be highly skeptical of the Official Government Version of events. It made the grassy knoll our town commons.
But what you believe about it boils down to this: Either Lee Harvey Oswald, trained by the United States Marines as a sharpshooter before he defected to the Soviet Union, got off a million-to-one shot in Dallas. He acted alone. Or he was an instrument of a conspiracy so immense that it staggers the mind.
As the new documentary opens, Stone paces down Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where President Kennedy was killed, the same place where QAnon crazies gathered recently to await the miraculous resurrection of JFK Jr. and the divine reinauguration of Trump. The director promises his audience that he is about to solve the murder mystery, to “piece together what really happened that day and discover the reasons why.”
Brace yourself: he doesn’t.
The dark beast of JFK Revisited is Allen Dulles, a founding father of the CIA and its director from February 1953 to November 1961. I know a fair amount about Dulles; my history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, lays a multitude of sins at his feet. Dulles often grievously misled Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. He oversaw CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala which ushered in dictatorships. His top officers tried to kill Fidel Castro, enlisting the Mafia. He blithely convinced JFK to carry out the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, which was his downfall as Director of Central Intelligence.
Stone pegs Dulles as a presiding genius of the plot against the president. To begin building this case, he tells us that Dulles and the CIA backed a failed military coup aimed at assassinating President Charles de Gaulle of France. That’s another lie spun by Moscow.
Like the cold-war CIA, the KGB paid editors and reporters around the world to print stories that could advance the Kremlin’s international agendas. In the late 1950’s, it created a directorate to undermine America. Department D — D as in dezinformatsiya — aimed to bend and shape public opinion, and above all to defame the United States. The Department of Disinformation was the world’s first industrial factory of fake news.
A KGB-scripted story about the CIA’s plot to kill De Gaulle first appeared in a daily newspaper, Paese Sera, published in Rome and backed by the Italian Communist Party, a few days after the Bay of Pigs. It was republished in Moscow by the Soviet party organ, Pravda; then in France, and finally across the globe. That was, and is, the M.O. of Russian disinformation operations: start a fire, fan the flames, and blow the smoke around the world.
Six years later, Paese Sera planted the seed that flowered into JFK. And therein lies a tale. (One first told in 2001 by the historian Max Holland in The Wilson Quarterly, a now-defunct political science journal.)
On March 1, 1967, the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, arrested Clay Shaw, the director of the city’s International Trade Mart and a somewhat-closeted gay man, and charged him with a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The D.A. told reporters that what happened in Dallas had been “a homosexual thrill-killing.” Three days later, Paese Sera named Shaw as a conduit for CIA funds for espionage and dirty tricks in Rome. The story, crafted by the KGB, ricocheted around the world, landing in New York on the front page of a New Left weekly, the National Guardian, on March 18.
Garrison seized upon it. He fed the falsehood to a friendly newspaper reporter in New Orleans and it landed on page one. He told the world that Shaw was a longtime CIA operative. (He wasn’t, though he had been a casual part-time contact on questions of commerce, one among some 150,000 Americans who volunteered information to the cold-war CIA.) The prosecutor then doubled down. He proclaimed that the CIA had plotted to kill Kennedy and then covered up the conspiracy, that Oswald had been under its control, that the agency was “infinitely more powerful than the Gestapo,” and that it had masterminded a coup d’etat in America in the name of anticommunism.
On Feb. 6, 1969, Garrison put Clay Shaw on trial. His witnesses were a parade of perjurers from the seamier quarters of New Orleans. He presented no evidence tying the CIA to his case. But in his summation, he asked the jurors to strike a righteous blow against the Deep State’s “murder of the truth.” They took 54 minutes to acquit.
Garrison’s tragicomedy had two lasting effects on the United States. The first was immediate: After he announced his charges, the number of Americans who believed that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy skyrocketed. A majority still believe it. The second took 20 years.
Garrison spent a decade turning his case into a book called On The Trail Of The Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy. The co-conspirators in this opus included the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police department, the Warren Commission, the Secret Service, anti-Castro Cubans, the United States Army, and the Navy pathologists who autopsied JFK. Fifteen publishers rejected it until it was picked up by William Schaap and Ellen Ray at Sheridan Square Press in 1988. (The couple had worked with Phillip Agee, a CIA defector, publishing Covert Action Information Bulletin, a magazine devoted to exposing the Agency’s operations and officers. Agee received a strong assist from Russian intelligence, according to KGB records. No evidence whatsoever links Schaap and Ray, now both deceased, to the Russians.)
On The Trail Of The Assassins would prove to be a hit with the public. Shortly before its publication, as Schaap later recounted, “at a film festival in Havana, we ran into Oliver Stone. And Ellen said to him, ‘Have I got a property for you!’ Because we knew he was an assassination freak, we gave him an advance copy of the book…. Of course, Oliver Stone won’t admit to any of this!”
JFK and its new sequel are, with artistic embellishments, cinematic transcriptions of Jim Garrison’s delusions. The original movie convinced millions more Americans that the version of history wrought by Stone and Garrison was true. National surveys taken after JFK was released showed that three-quarters of those polled believed the CIA had murdered the President. And that, along with the end of the cold war, provoked Congress to begin declassifying millions of records relating to the assassination — a task that remains incomplete nearly three decades later. Both Trump and President Biden have delayed disclosures required under law, though a new set of documents is set to be unwrapped before Christmas.
I’ve spent half my life reporting, writing, and reading about the CIA and American intelligence. I remember the Kennedy assassination; I’ve studied the evidence. And I can’t tell you that there wasn’t a conspiracy. Maybe it was the Russians. Could have been the Cubans. Might have been the Mafia. Maybe there’s a mind-blowing bombshell in the still-classified archives of the government. But I seriously doubt it.
I can tell you for a fact that our democracy is suffocating under an avalanche of disinformation. Trump won the 2020 election! Covid vaccines are seeded with microchips! Democrats are blood-sucking pedophile communists! 9/11 was an inside job! Our body politic is being poisoned by lies. They stalk the land like brain-eating zombies. And we can’t seem to kill them.
During research for the previous post a strange game of brevity was found that required no board to play out the game but a board was needed to make sure you could believe what you saw, or at least what you thought you visualized:
This is the notation for the game between: Ahmad, Abdul Khaliq (2217) vs Fedorov, Alexei (2555) Event: 4th Mersin Open 2019 Site: Mersin TUR Date: 11/16/2019 Round: 1.7 Score: 0-1 ECO: B30 Sicilian defence https://www.365chess.com/game.php?back=1&gid=4230737&m=16
is a FIDE Master from Iraq who was born in 1963, the year POTUS John Fitzgerald Kennedy was ASSASSINATED, and his current rating is 2222. (https://ratings.fide.com/profile/4800443)
is a 2541 rated Grandmaster from Belarus, who was born in 1972, the year Bobby Fischer defeated World Chess Champion Boris Spassky to become Champ.
For one who usually has too many words at this moment I still do not know what to say about the above game…I decided to do more research and, Lo & Behold! Like a BOLT from the BLUE it was, I tell you…The Most Amazin’ Chess Game of All Time! I have been replaying games for over half a century and I have never, ever seen another game quite like it, and sincerely hope I never, ever again see anything like it on the Chess board.
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Armchair Warrior 