Month: May 2021

Anthony Gonzalez’s career in the NFL was brief and mostly uneventful. Drafted out of Ohio State University in 2007 by the Indianapolis Colts, Gonzalez had two decent seasons and even scored a touchdown in a playoff game. After that, however, he suffered a knee injury and only started one more game before he was cut in 2012.

He wasn’t your average football player, however. He studied philosophy in Columbus and got a Masters Degree in business administration from Stanford after his football-playing days were over.

In 2018, he ran for an won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving Ohio’s 16th congressional district. A Cuban-American by heritage, Gonzalez become one of just a handful of minority Republicans serving in Congress. He voted to impeach Donald Trump in his second trial, stemming from the January 6 insurrection.

The chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party, Jane Timken, had been hand-picked by Trump. And she was a Trumper through and through. But she felt compelled to provide some lukewarm cover for Gonzalez’s decision. Now she’s seeking the Republican nomination to run for retiring Rob Portman’s seat in the U.S. Senate, and her decision to stand with Gonzalez is causing her problems.

During Jane Timken’s tenure as Ohio’s GOP chair, Donald Trump won the one-time bellwether state by a whopping 8 percentage points. She put 150,000 miles on her car driving to the state’s 88 counties as a surrogate for the president. And she raised a total of $5 million for his two campaigns.

But that sterling record of MAGA support might not be enough to guarantee the former president’s support in her bid for the GOP Senate nomination. Timken’s sin? In her capacity as state party chair, she failed to immediately condemn home-state Republican congressman, Anthony Gonzalez, for voting to impeach Trump in response to the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

To be clear, Timken didn’t stand with Gonzalez for long. While she initially said that Gonzalez had a “rational reason why he voted that way. I think he’s an effective legislator, and he’s a very good person,” she soon changed her tune. In February, after announcing her candidacy for the Senate, she said that Gonzalez should resign.

“It is clear Congressman Gonzalez’s wrongful decision to vote with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to impeach President Trump has undermined his ability to effectively represent the people of the 16th district,” Timken’s statement said. “Gonzalez should immediately resign so the Republican Party can unify behind new, conservative leadership for the 16th district.

“President Trump is the leader of our Party, and we must have conservative leaders committed to the team if we are going to keep Ohio red and win back majorities in the U.S. House and Senate in 2022,” Timken’s statement said, adding that Gonzalez by stepping down would put his constituents and the Republican Party first.”

This was quite a turnabout, but it didn’t erase her original sin. In fact, it made no one happy. No matter who you ask, she was egregiously wrong at least once–either when she defended Gonzalez or when she turned on him.

Now her Republican competitors for the nomination are making sure that neither the primary electorate nor the former disgraced president forget that she defended Gonzalez, and it could easily cost her the chance to serve in the Senate.

Timken’s foes and two dozen conservative activists penned an open letter this weekend to the state Republican Party that called on primary voters to reject her candidacy.

“Timken is everything that President Trump stood against: politicians who say one thing and do another,” read the letter, a hard copy of which was also sent to Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Timken defended Anthony Gonzalez’s vote to impeach President Trump, then called for his resignation the moment it became politically toxic for her to stand with Gonzalez.”

As far as I know, there are no candidates who take a contrary view and are willing to defend Gonzalez, so the contest will come down to whether or not Timken’s sin is too big for the voters to stomach. To defend against this possibility, she will try to be the most pro-Trump sounding candidate in the race.

And, while Democrat Sherrod Brown serves in the other Ohio Senate seat, the winner of the Republican primary will have basic advantages that should make them the favorite to win the November election. The Buckeye State voted for Trump twice, and it had trended to the right over the last couple of decades.

The Ohio GOP should value a Cuban-American with a philosophy degree from Ohio State and a master’s degree from Stanford, but they consider Gonzalez a pariah. This is driven by what the voters are telling them rather than any objective problem with Gonzalez’s position, which is that the president of the United States should not send a mob to attack the U.S. Congress in order to remain in power after losing his reelection bid.

The GOP is not healing. It’s in a death spiral, and they’re going to pull us all down with them.

My son has adopted the kangaroo as a kind of personal mascot. For Christmas, he received a stuffed kangaroo and two kangaroo t-shirts. It’s become a bit of a family joke, as I also received kangaroo underwear. I thought wearing them might bring him luck in his soccer tournament yesterday but he team was slaughtered in three straight matches.

When I got home, I noticed the New York Times had published a feature by Damien Cave on the ethics of killing kangaroos. I love the writing in this piece. Here’s a sample:

Just after 4 a.m., he pulled into the parking lot of Warroo Game Meats, a processor in Surat co-owned by a family with Aboriginal roots and a Chinese investor — Australia old and new. Mr. White had 21 kangaroos hanging on his truck, each of them killed with a single shot to the head, each of them tagged with his name and the location for biosecurity tracking.

Mr. White might sound like a monster, but things are complicated. There are more kangaroos in Australia than people, and the population goes through natural booms and busts.

Periods of plenty lead to booms in population for the four kangaroo species that are legally harvested — between 2001 and 2011, their numbers ranged from 23 million to 57 million, according to government surveys.

From an American perspective, they’re a lot like deer–a car accident waiting to happen. During times of drought, emaciated roos crowd the roadways seeking dew-fed grasses.  They’re also an important source of food, and one that has little impact on climate change compared to cattle. This is not a scenario where the animal is being hunted to extinction, and professional cullers are preferable to pissed-off farmers who want to protect their grazing lands.

Seeing the animals starving and hit by cars — or worse, seeing farmers massacre them to preserve feed for cows and sheep, a culling that happens outside the formal kangaroo industry, and often illegally — has made most of [the worn of] Surat believe that commercial shooters are helping kangaroos by minimizing the suffering of the outback’s boom-and-bust cycles.

“The people far away, they don’t see that,” said Megan Nielsen, 29, a farmer with three children who sometimes keep kangaroos as pets. “If you have a shooter, you know they’re doing it the right way.”

Driving through a local farmer’s hilly paddock, Mr. White said he had seen firsthand the greater agony caused by farmers and the less scrupulous killers they often hire, leaving gut-shot kangaroos to die in the fields.

Of most interest to Americans is the way the urban/rural divide mirrors our own experiences.

In the end, the argument over Australia’s kangaroo industry has always been only partly about cruelty and only partly about animals. It is most viscerally about whose values rule.

To Mr. Pacelle, Australia’s professional hunters are justifying harm to wildlife to get paid. To Professor Wilson, animal rights activists are engaging in “imperialism” that forces their sensitivities onto others.

I think, ideally in these situations, neither side should fully prevail. Kangaroos are an important food and materials resource, and their population should be intelligently managed. The industry should be regulated, and part of the regulation should involve the ethical treatment of the animal. In practice, what this means is that both sides should continue to fight because we don’t want to see either side come out on top.

Yet, it’s possible to fight while being better informed and more attuned to the legitimate concerns and sensibilities of the other side. The point should never be about making human communities suffer, but rather about how to go about things in an intelligent, sustainable and merciful manner.

Democratic Rep. Salud Carbajal of California Democrat has introduced the Kangaroo Protection Act, a bill that would ban leather and meat imports from Australia. A lot depends on details, but supporting or opposing this Act isn’t as simple as loving kangaroos and wanting to see them protected. I’m suspicious of absolutist solutions. Regulating the kangaroo population is Australia’s job, not the job of the U.S. Congress, and if the goal is to influence Australia, an out-right ban on imports might not be the best negotiating trick.

On the other hand, the threat of a ban might be quite effective. As I said above, it’s complicated. The important thing is that there’s a dialogue rather than just two sides fighting across a cultural chasm.

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a 2003 Toyota for the upcoming “planes, trains and automobiles” show at the gallery where I sometimes show some of my pieces. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent car lot visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Over this I added my outline in blue paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Last year, my wife bought me some yoga lessons, which was a thoughtful but overly optimistic idea. I dutifully went to five or six classes before admitting to her that I have no interest in doing yoga. I enjoyed some of it, particularly learning the poses, but it’s not something that fits my personality. I’m not the kind of person to go to the gym either, unless it’s to take a swim. I think it comes down to the fact that I live inside my head, and my body is simply an inconvenience that occasionally reminds me that I’m mortal. I don’t look at myself in mirrors either. It’s not that I don’t like what I see but that I simply don’t care.

Nonetheless, I can attest that yoga stretches can do some miraculous things for flexibility and stress relief. I absolutely felt better both physically and mentally after those yoga classes. It never occurred to me once that I might be doing something controversial, let alone sacrilegious.

That’s why I find it hard to believe that I share a country with Alabamans.

For the first time in nearly three decades, Alabama will allow yoga to be taught in its public schools, but the ancient practice will be missing some of its hallmarks: Teachers will be barred from saying the traditional salutation “namaste” and using Sanskrit names for poses.

Chanting is forbidden. And the sound of “om,” one of the most popular mantras associated with the practice, which combines breathing exercises and stretches, is a no-no.

The changes follow the signing of a bill on Thursday by Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, overriding a 1993 ban on yoga instruction in public schools by the state’s Board of Education. Some conservative groups had called for the prohibition to be preserved, contending that the practice of yoga is inseparable from Hinduism and Buddhism and amounted to a religious activity.

The original ban is mind-blowing, but the new “relaxed” standard is equally dumb.

The bill gained final approval by a vote of 75 to 14 in the House on Monday after previously passing in the State Senate. It included a number of amendments in the final language that [State Representative Jeremy] Gray said reflected efforts by Republicans to play to their religious conservative base.

The amendments require parents to sign a permission slip for students to practice yoga. They also bar school personnel from using “hypnosis, the induction of a dissociative mental state, guided imagery, meditation or any aspect of Eastern philosophy.”

In my mind, the permission slip ought to cover any concerns people might have about their children doing yoga in school. If you don’t want someone saying “Namaste” to your child or introducing “any aspect” of Eastern philosophy to their preciously indoctrinated minds, then don’t sign that slip.

I do give the Alabama legislature credit for revisiting the old law and making some changes. That’s a sign of progress. But, man, those folks have a long way to go before they reach a place with even a semblance of sanity.

I’m struck, looking over Vice-President Kamala Harris’s remarks on Wednesday as she prepared to meet with influential Guatemalans, at how simple it is to articulate a problem if you’re not an irredeemable asshole like Mitt Romney.

And so, today, we have leaders from — from this background who have fought and have spent their entire careers fighting for justice in Guatemala.  At this table are attorneys who have prosecuted drug traffickers and organized crime.  At this table are judges who have advocated for an independent judiciary and the rule of law; leaders who have taken on corruption, who have taken on violence, and have worked to commit themselves to what must happen in terms of ensuring that there will be justice as it relates to all people in Guatemala.

Some of these leaders have been forced to leave the country because of this work.  And we are here because I want to hear your stories unfiltered, unedited, and directly.

As Harris went on to explain, corruption in the Guatemalan government and judicial system is central to the surge of migrants at the U.S. southern border. It undermines the country’s ability to attract foreign investment and therefore does real damage to economic opportunity, but it also makes it impossible to effectively combat crime, meaning that ordinary citizens are fleeing the country not just for jobs but for their own safety. Therefore, lessening corruption and improving the judicial system are prerequisites to making meaningful progress, and this must be a first step because American politicians aren’t eager to spend money in Guatemala if they think it’s just going to help entrench corrupt bastards in power.

Romney, however, grilled Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a hearing on the Southern border last week, arguing that there’s no reason to consider foreign aid to the Northern Triangle because we can’t give money to every country in the world. He said this, by the way, in the midst of excoriating the administration over the fact that Central Americans are arriving at our border in droves.

This complete lack of seriousness is what I expect from Romney, and it’s what keeps him firmly in the fold of a party that no longer needs or wants him. It’s true that simply throwing money at the problem will not work, but that’s precisely Harris’s point. On the other hand, if we want to stop the surge of migrants, we have to address the root causes, and if we are going to do anything about those root causes, it won’t be by sending money to Angola or Switzerland. It’s not a legitimate argument that Romney makes–that we can’t invest some resources in the Northern Triangle unless we’re also investing in every other country on Earth.

It’s also not serious to think we can stop the illegal entry with walls and gadgets alone.

Harris’s argument is unassailable. We can’t help Guatemala simply by giving them money. If we’re going to make a big investment, the first thing that investment should go toward is improving the judicial system. If that’s not possible, then nothing else is really possible either.

Romney fancies himself a statesman, but he’s showboating instead, pretending to be stupid to score points with a Republican base that would rather see him hanged than follow his lead.

The migrant problem is complicated and vexing, but it’s made more so by Romney’s refusal to help and his decision to score cheap and worthless political points rather than doing something constructive.

Hey everyone! I am running late. It has been one of those weeks. Nothing bad. I’ve just been very busy. It happens. Hopefully the rest of y’all are doing okay.

Here’s a little easy listening for you. It’s very much a product of its time.

There is something about remixes that has fascinated me really since remixes became a thing. Yeah – that’s a long time. Sometimes they’re minor refinements to the original (as is the case here). Others serve strictly to function on the dance floor. And yet others end up being art in their own right.

Here’s a remix of some early Steve Reich pieces by Tranquility Bass (who passed away far too soon), Megamix. And a megamix it is.

The bar is open and the jukebox is working. If you wish to sit in silence and contemplate the universe, that’s fine. If you want to talk, do that too.

Peace and love.

I met Daily Kos user RenaRF in real life somewhere back in the mists of time, probably at the original Netroots Nations conference in Las Vegas in 2006. She struck me as a partisan Democrat, but also a practical level-headed professional. It’s striking to see her tone fifteen years later.

I’m tired of being reasonable, especially when the other side — which is an existential threat to democracy — is anything but.  I have spent whatever balance I had to put faith in norms and processes after the deadly, criminal debacle that was/is the Trump *administration.

She’s done with seeking consensus or aspiring to bipartisan solutions. For her, the threat to democracy we’re facing is exactly analogous to the threat the Weimar Republic faced in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. If we don’t wake up, democracy will be lost.

Looking back on the rise of Hitler — just a simple timeline — is super instructive in terms of framing the risks we now face.  Hitler attempted a coup in 1923, and served prison time over it. Hitler clung to the big lie, put his head down, and soldiered on.  All around him, the political “power structure” kept thinking that they could find a way through this without abandoning #TheWayThingsAreDone.

Her solution isn’t particularly radical however. All she’s asking is that the Democrats create a January 6 commission, and if they have to change the Senate rules to overcome a Republican filibuster, so be it. This is necessary because the GOP (or GQP, as she calls it) has already shown its true colors, and the intentions are not benign.

Stop trying to negotiate with these soul-less, power-grabbing, corrupt, criminal, lying sacks of rat turds.  ”THEY SENT PEOPLE TO KILL YOU.” And frankly, they’d do it again — WILL do it again — if they believe they can succeed.  Comity, bipartisanship, all of that are the old rules.  We keep trying to play a game by those old rules and never acknowledge that the GQP poured gasoline on them, lit a match, and then dropped a nuclear bomb on them just for good measure.  We are playing a game that doesn’t exist any longer, and they are playing an entirely different game.

She recommends playing hardball with any Democratic senator who won’t go along with changing the rules to overcome the filibuster. They should be stripped of their committee assignments even at the risk that they flip parties.

This isn’t going to happen, and I think RenaRF is so strident precisely because she knows it isn’t going to happen. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he will put the commission to a vote on the Senate floor, but that’s not actually true. What he’ll do is make a motion to have a vote, and the motion will fail because it takes a supermajority of 60 senators to overcome the objection on even one member. There will not be 10 Republican senators willing to join the 50 Democratic ones, and therefore there will not be a vote on creating a commission.

Schumer will accept this without stripping any Democrats of their committee assignments. The House of Representatives will have to go it alone.

There’s talk that the vote in the House could win the support of 20 to 50 Republicans. The lower number is a lot more believable than the higher one, but without the Senate’s support the bill will go nowhere. In that case, I expect Speaker Nancy Pelosi to create the commission anyway. But that will require a new bill.

Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson aptly describes why congressional Republicans are unwilling to countenance a January 6 commission: “They see the majority in their grasp, and just as they did in the states this year, they’ll strike quickly, mercilessly, and without a moment of hesitation of a scintilla of shame to make the next election the last.”

He, like RenaRF, sees the 2022 midterms as potentially the last free and fair elections that will be held in our Republic. I suppose that depends on whether or not the Democrats can win the 2024 presidential election in the face of unprecedented suppression designed to disproportionally disenfranchise their voters. If not, then Rena and Rick are probably right. The Republicans will consolidate their gains and use the Justice Department and the Courts to legitimize their permanent seizure of power.

Truthfully, this might happen even with a bipartisan January 6 commission. People like RenaRF are a bellwether. When they sound an alarm this loudly, we really ought to listen. The Republicans are a mortal threat to our system of government, but just as a big a threat is complacency.

On May 12, my friend Noz, a Jewish-American, wrote a good explainer of what caused the latest blow-up in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and why the coverage we’re seeing in America is misleading.

 1. About 10 days ago, an Israeli court ordered several Palestinian families to be expelled from their homes in Jerusalem. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem later admitted that the city brought the eviction case as part of a broader strategy of installing “layers of jews” throughout East Jerusalem to make sure that Jerusalem is “a Jewish capital for the Jewish people.”

2. Palestinians protested the evictions as ethnic cleansing.

3. The Israeli government escalated the hostilities by cracking down on protesters, including assaulting worshippers trying to pray and forcibly clearing the al-Aksa Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan, injuring 178 people.

4. Hamas retaliated for the assault against the mosque by launching a barrage of missiles into Israel, which caused property damage, but no injuries.

5. Israel retaliated with an assault against Gaza which killed 20 people, including 9 children.

I’m sure it will only get worse from here.

Meanwhile, the American media paid very little attention to the evictions, the protests, the IDF’s assault of worshippers at al-Aksa, really anything until #4. When Hamas started firing missiles, it was suddenly a top story. Because the story started there, it looked like Hamas just started attacking for no reason.

Some of the details here are a little inaccurate. For example, the New York Times reports that it was the police, not the army, that raided the al-Aska Mosque, and they didn’t do it to crack down on protestors but rather to assure the call to prayer wouldn’t drown out the Israeli president’s speech.

“Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets. It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.”

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians has been going on so long and has involved so many outrages that it’s a fool’s game to talk about who started any particular blow-up as though that will help us decide which side is in the right. In any case, both sides are fully capable of squandering any high ground they might initially have by targeting innocents in response.

As Noz, says, “I think Hamas’ attack was pretty counterproductive and was little more than a desperate attempt for the group to remain relevant.”

Still, wherever you stand on Israel or Netanyahu, it’s pretty hard to justify what Israel did to instigate this latest bout of violence. The core of the problem is an effort to take over East Jerusalem, which is a dubious goal and unsupported by the international community. But even leaving aside the land grab, violating the sanctity of the al-Asqa mosque and cutting its sound system during Ramadan so the Israeli president can give a speech is a senseless provocation.

I agree with Noz that it’s a shame that Hamas hijacked the legitimate protest against this.

Lost in all of this are the ordinary Palestinians who continue to protest and who are getting unfairly lumped in with Hamas in the eyes of most Americans. In our media Hamas is an easy villain. The story is only worth telling if we have a good villain.

From Netanyahu’s perspective, he’s grateful for the rockets precisely because almost no one supports indiscriminately launching rockets at civilian populations. It’s a conversation ender.

Despite this, Democrats in Congress are increasingly impatient with this pattern of behavior on Israel’s part and they’re beginning to assert themselves, even voicing strong criticism of the Biden administration’s weak response.

Not much will come of this in the short run. An effort to postpone or cancel arms sales to Israel will certainly fail. But this movement on the left away from Israel is only beginning. It will get stronger.

When it comes to Israel’s self-defense, the bipartisan support they enjoy on Capitol Hill is nearly as important as their nuclear deterrent. It ought to be more of a concern for Israelis that Netanyahu is losing that support.

Israel’s most powerful supporter in Congress is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Schumer is calling for a cease-fire. It would be prudent for Netanyahu to listen.

I’m not sure exactly how it will play out, but I now expect that the Supreme Court will severely restrict access to legal abortion during its next term. That’s the conclusion I draw from their decision to hear a case on a Mississippi law that bans most abortions after fifteen weeks, including in cases of rape and incest.

The law was struck down in November 2018 by a federal district judge, and that ruling was upheld in December 2019 by very conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The Roberts Court could have just left things there, but they did not. That indicates that they intend to change the status quo.

The report from CNN suggests that the Court will go after the “viability” issue in some way. This makes sense, because it’s the issue that forced the 5th Circuit’s hand in ruling the law unconstitutional.

“In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability,” a panel of judges on the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals previously held.

“States may regulate abortion procedures prior to viability so long as they do not impose an undue burden on the woman’s right, but they may not ban abortions,” the appeals court wrote, concluding that “the law at issue is a ban.”

It seems like a logical time, too. There will never be a popular time to gut Roe v. Wade, but there are times of greater and lesser political peril for the conservative movement. Choosing a midterm year when a Democrat is in the White House and the Democrats control Congress is about they best they can do to mitigate any potential fallout. Generally, the first midterm for a new president is bad for his party, mainly because the opposition is more engaged. This is doubly true when the president’s party is defending majorities in Congress. The Republicans enter the 2022 election cycle with innate advantages that can cushion any blow they receive for severely restricting women’s reproductive rights, and that’s probably why the Roberts Court is scheduling things this way. I definitely don’t see them taking up the case only to reaffirm a woman’s right to choose.

This was always going to happen once the Republicans got Amy Coney Barrett on the bench. If nothing changes between now and next year with respect to the composition of the Court, the day will finally come for anti-choice movement. They may not get everything they want, but they’ll get a victory and it will be a disaster for American women.

As a teenager, and before I decided to get a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, I was intrigued by the character of Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek program. He had a human mother, but the appearance of his father, a humanoid from the planet Vulcan. He was raised on Vulcan where he experienced discrimination and taunting as a “half-breed,” and this led him to reject his human side almost entirely. Vulcans prized logic and disdained emotional reasoning, and Spock attempted to follow this example. Occasionally, his human side would emerge nonetheless, usually to his great shame.

The program explored the advantages and disadvantages of logical versus emotional reasoning through Spock’s internal conflict and also by contrasting him with the highly emotional (and fully human) Captain Kirk. I had reason to recollect my fondness for this theme in Star Trek while reading Sam Copeland’s article 10 Positions Chess Engines Just Don’t Understand‎.

My favorite example from Copeland’s piece involves a 3-minute blitz game between American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and a highly developed chess computer named Rybka. There are many notable things about this game, but for the layman the most spectacular is that Hikaru managed to make 224 (good) moves in under 180 seconds. I thought only computers could calculate that fast.

To understand the game at all, you need to know that chess is a lot like baseball in one respect. It’s a nearly perfect game with a numbingly wide array of possibilities, but it does contain a flaw or two that require special rules to address.

In baseball, this would be the infield fly rule which exists to eliminate the incentive to deliberately drop a pop-up in the infield when there are runners on first and second base and less than two outs. In that scenario, the base runners cannot run because they’ll be doubled off after the catch. Therefore, the infielder can let the ball drop and get two outs instead of just one by quickly throwing to third base to force out the runner on second, and the third baseman can then throw to second base to force out the runner on first. This is better than getting just one out by catching the batter’s pop-up. To avoid this, the infield fly rule says the batter is out and play is dead as soon as the ball goes up in the air.

In chess, there can be locked positions where meaningful movement is no longer possible and there is no way to force an end to the game. The players will usually agree to a draw when this happens, but that’s voluntary. There needs to be a rule that forces a conclusion, and that’s called the 50-rule move.

The fifty-move rule in chess states that a player can claim a draw if no capture has been made and no pawn has been moved in the last fifty moves (for this purpose a “move” consists of a player completing a turn followed by the opponent completing a turn). The purpose of this rule is to prevent a player with no chance of winning from obstinately continuing to play indefinitely or seeking to win by tiring the opponent.

You might guess from that definition that the rule is almost always invoked after pawns become locked and can no longer advance or capture. It’s also possible that a pawn could capture but it would be a terrible move that would turn a surefire draw into certain defeat. It’s this latter situation that Hikaru created to defeat the computer.

But here’s the fascinating part. Hikaru relied on the greed of the computer. He intentionally sacrificed pieces to give the computer a big material advantage. Thinking it was winning by a large margin, the computer wanted to avoid a draw at all costs, and therefore decided to make a bad move rather than allow Hikaru to invoke the 50-move rule and claim a draw.

Hikaru knew he couldn’t defeat the computer by outsmarting it with better positional play, but he could use the computer’s emotional reasoning against it. Understanding the goal, he prepared and executed a plan that would give the computer the choice between accepting a draw and going for the win, and he made sure going for the win would be the wrong decision.

The plan would not have worked if the computer were not mesmerized by its material advantage, so Hikaru had to add that to his design, too. That’s no easy trick, because he had to find a way to win despite having fewer powerful pieces on the board.

This is an inversion of the Star Trek model, where humans are constantly making stupid mistakes that could be avoided by rigorous logic. In this case, it’s the computer that abandons logic in its lust for a victory that will not be forthcoming. It’s like Hikaru found the computer’s suppressed human half. I can almost imagine the Rybka computer’s Spock-like embarrassed shame.

Maybe this is the best Star Trek analogy for this chess match, but the show also had examples where Kirk’s succeeded, where Spock would have failed, by using human intuition and psychology that defied logical reasoning.

Hikaru certainly identified a “psychological” weakness in the computer. Still, I believe this weakness was a human remnant. Much like Spock couldn’t fully shake off the influence of his human mother, Rykba couldn’t fully shake off the influence of its human programmers.

Here’s the game, which was played in 2008.