鮑比·菲舍爾

Since there is a lot of crap about Bobby Fisher on the internet, it is better to read a reliable article by The Independent.

Independent.co.uk
"Bobby Fischer: The greatest chess player of them all?
Bobby Fischer, who died yesterday, was not just a genius but a troubled icon whose struggles epitomised the spirit of the Cold War era.
By Andy McSmithSaturday, 19 January 2008
He was arguably the best chess player the world has ever seen, yet he was an abject failure in life, a self-hating Jew, who betrayed the country in which he grew up, and threw his talent away. His death is hardly an occasion for great mourning: he was so obviously unhappy on this earth that he may be better off out of it. But oh, the waste of a brilliant mind!
In the Cold War, the capitalist and Communist systems of America and Russia fought one another by proxy. They competed in space, or meddled in the affairs of small countries such as Afghanistan.
In 1972, the US government was crippled by the Watergate scandal; it had failed in its efforts to be rid of Castro and defeat was looking inevitable in Vietnam.
Then a chess player from Brooklyn, New York, fired by a loathing of communists, emerged to take on the Soviets in a field where they had been supreme for decades. The USSR took its chess very seriously. Potential champions were selected young and trained by grandmasters. They were expected not just to excel in the game, but to be model Soviet citizens, ambassadors for their country. At home, they were admired like rock stars. Abroad, they were carefully, protectively watched by the KGB.
Out of 88 chess grandmasters in the world, 33 were from the Soviet Union, and another large batch were from the satellite communist states of eastern Europe. Every world chess champion since 1937 had been a Soviet citizen.
Against this vast phalanx of chess champions, all the US had to offer was this strange loner who had dropped out of school in his teens. He was so unpredictable that the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, rang him several times to plead with him not to drop out of the contest.
Bobby Fischer was a deeply troubled man. His communist mother, Regina, was certainly part of the problem. She was a strong woman with strong opinions. It emerged years later that the FBI was watching her, believing she could be a spy. Their file on her was 900 pages. His supposed father was Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, who married Regina in Moscow in 1933, but left her and her two children before Bobby was old enough to have any memory of him.
The now declassified FBI files suggest that Bobby was actually conceived in Washington in 1942, when Regina was visiting a close friend, a Hungarian born physicist named Paul Felix Nemenyi. He paid Regina child support until his death.
Little Bobby found out about chess from a book when he was six, and soon became absorbed in it to the exclusion of all other childish interests. This led his mother to take him to a psychiatrist, who told her not to worry.
So instead she took him to play chess against a master, Max Pavey, who was giving a simultaneous exhibition. Bobby survived 15 minutes on the board against Pavey, which so impressed the chairman of the Brooklyn Chess Club that he invited the boy to join and learn the game from adults. At about 1954, when he was 11, Fischer "just got good". By the age of 14, he was the US national chamion. In 1958, he became the first player in the history of the game to achieve grandmaster status as young as 15.
Bobby's unique style of play was likened to the behaviour of a wild predator. It was impossible to predict which opening he would use or what he would do next. As he approached the final round of the 1972 world chess championship, Boris Spassky, the reigning champion, should have seen what was coming. Fischer charged through the opening rounds, winning six games out of six. Even in the semi-final, against the former world champion, Tigran Petrosian, he won by five games to one. The KGB analysed Fischer's behaviour and concluded that he was a psychopath. Spassky was apparently confident of victory.
On 11 July 1972, in a sports hall in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, the final played to a packed auditorium. Spassky took his place at the chessboard. But opposite him, there was an empty chair. Fischer had not turned up. Spassky, playing white, moved his queen's pawn forward two squares. No response. The arbitrator pronounced that Spassky was now ahead in the contest, by one game to nil.
It looked like a petulant blunder by the challenger, who had become more fussy and prone to complain about the conditions under which he was forced to play chess which each passing year. He had repeatedly accused the Russians of cheating, and lying. Now he had thrown a match.
In retrospect, it looks much more like a clever ploy in a psychological war against Spassky and the Soviet apparatus. From then on, Spassky never knew what Fischer would do next, but he hung on gamely as the American repeatedly beat him. By game 11, Fischer was winning 6.5 to 3.5 in the best of 24 games final. At game 21, Spassky surrendered. For the loser, it was a humiliation that landed him in trouble with his government, which was already wondering if he was some sort of secret dissident, but he was able to live comfortably in Russia after the collapse of Communism. For the victor, the outcome was unmitigated disaster. Having reached the pinnacle of his ambition, at the age of 29, Fischer seemed to lose his faltering grip on reality. He refused to continue playing, and lost the world title by default in 1975 to yet another Soviet player, Anatoly Karpov.
Fischer then went into hiding, apart from one impulsive television appearance and the occasional game. He had already renounced his Jewish heritage by joining a sect called the Worldwide Church of God, based in Pasadena, to which he donated a large chunk of his winnings. In 1978, he sued a magazine that had criticised the church, but then accused the church of reneging on a promise to finance the lawsuit.
In May 1981, he was wandering around Pasadena, shabbily dressed and with a flowing beard, when a policeman spotted him and thought that he might be a bank robber. He was arrested after refusing to answer the lawman's questions. A year later, he described the experience in a diatribe which he published under the title, "I was tortured in the Pasadena jailhouse".
Even in his teens, Fischer's rift with his mother seemed to turn him into an anti-Semite. In 1962, he was quoted as saying: "There are too many Jews in chess. They don't seem to dress so nicely. That's what I don't like." In 1984, he sent an open letter to the Encyclopaedia Judaica demanding that his entry be removed.
In 1992 he emerged from retirement to play a rematch with Spassky in Serbia. He won by 10 games to five, with 15 draws, but the game put him in conflict with the US government for defying its sanctions against Serbia. That, and his anti-Semitic tirades, provoked the Worldwide Church of God into publicly disowning him.
The incident simply stoked Fischer's hatred of his home country. He continued raging against the Jews, became a Holocaust- denier, and after 11 September 2001, he went on radio in the Philippines to say: "This is all wonderful news. It's time to finish off the US once and for all."
He was arrested in Japan in 2004, and faced the possibility of being sent back to the US to stand trial for sanctions busting, but found sanctuary in Iceland. Its people had not forgotten the man who made them the centre of world attention in the summer of 1972. He died in a Reykjavik hospital.
The grumblings of a grandmaster
* ON CHESS: "Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent's mind."
* ON WINNING: "I like the moment when I break a man's ego."
* ON WINNING: "There are tough players and nice guys. I'm a tough player."
* ON FRIENDSHIP: "I don't keep any close friends. I don't keep any secrets. I don't need friends. I just tell everybody everything, that's all."
* ON HIS RIVALS: "Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi – these guys are really the lowest dogs around."
* ON JEWS: "America is totally under control of the Jews, you know. I mean, look what they're doing in Yugoslavia."
* ON WOMEN: "They're stupid compared to men. They shouldn't play chess."
* ON THE MEDIA: "Is it against the law to kill a reporter?"
* ON THE TERROR ATTACKS OF 11 SEPTEMBER 2001: "This is all wonderful news. It is time to finish off the US once and for all."
A flawed man, a flawless player
By Jon Speelman, Grandmaster and chess writer
Bobby Fischer was one of the greatest chess players of all time and an inspiration for generations of young players following his world championship victory against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik 1972.
After the end of the Second World War and the death of reigning champion Alexander Alekhine in 1946, a period of Soviet hegemony ensued with few serious Western challengers until the Dane Bent Larsen started to give them a run for their money.
In his prime, Fischer was a force of nature with an unsurpassed will to win, especially with the black pieces. He took opening preparation to a level undreamt of by his predecessors but surpassed by Gary Kasparov and in more recent times by the symbiotic analysis which is now possible with the help of computers.
A ferocious attacking player, Fischer scored many of his early successes as white against the Sicilian Defence, often tearing his opponents to pieces. But his overriding characteristic was not violence but clarity of thought: he had a preternatural ability to cut his way through complex positions, finding blindingly clear solutions to apparently baffling problems.
Unfortunately, this clarity of thought didn't fully extend beyond the chess board. A Cold War icon after the defeat of Spassky, Fischer's life started to unravel after the failure three years later to arrange a title defence against Anatoly Karpov. Stripped of his title, he continued to maintain that he was world champion and it was his "rematch" against Spassky in defiance of the UN that led ultimately to his ruin: though he was able to play some magnificent chess on the island of Sveti Stefan, even after a lay-off of 20 years.
The argument as to the "greatest of all time" will always continue and always be subjective. Players tend to go for those they know personally and I would plump for Kasparov. However, Fischer is certainly one of the chasing group and his very best games are a glorious legacy of a flawed but fantastic life."

祭

A link to a matsuri festival in 2007

北京的污染

Time magazine has recently displayed an unusual level of vulgarity by proclaiming the death of French culture and electing Putinium as its man of the year. If it has some relevance to French culture, it is more reminiscent of the Revolutionaries of the Terror who had pioneered the way for the diverse totalitarian regimes that have been plaguing the 20th century and the current one.

The New York Times, on the other hand, has published a lucid article about the pollution in the Olympic city of Beijing. And if you are so satisfied with your technocratic globalized planet, read the last issue of National Geographic on the costs of recycling PCs, monitors, cell phones and Apple trash.

"December 29, 2007Beijing’s Olympic Quest: Turn Smoggy Sky Blue By JIM YARDLEYBEIJING — Every day, monitoring stations across thecity measure air pollution to determine if the skiesabove this national capital can officially bedesignated blue. It is not an act of whimsy: withBeijing preparing to play host to the 2008 OlympicGames, the official Blue Sky ratings are the city’sown measuring stick for how well it is cleaning up itspolluted air.Thursday did not bring good news. The gray, acridskies rated an eye-reddening 421 on a scale of 500,with 500 being the worst. Friday rated 500. Both daysfar exceeded pollution levels deemed safe by the WorldHealth Organization. In Beijing, officials warnedresidents to stay indoors until Saturday, butresidents here are accustomed to breathing foul air.One man flew a kite in Tiananmen Square.For Beijing officials, Thursday was especiallydepressing because the city was hoping to celebrate anenvironmental victory. In recent years, Beijing hassteadily increased its Blue Sky days. The city needsone more, defined as scoring below 101, to reach itsgoal of 245 Blue Sky days this year. These improvingratings are how Beijing hopes to reassure the worldthat Olympic athletes will not be gasping for breathnext August.“We’re definitely hoping for the best,” said Jon Kolb,a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, “butpreparing for the worst.”For the world’s Olympians, Beijing’s air is aperformance issue. The concern is that respiratoryproblems could impede athletic performance and preventrecords from being broken. For the city’s estimated 12million residents, pollution is an inescapable healthand quality-of-life issue. Skepticism about thevalidity of the Blue Sky ratings is common. Moreover,the concern is whether the city can clean itself uplong after the Games are over. Beijing has long ranked as one of the world’s mostpolluted cities. To win the Games, Beijing promised a“Green Olympics” and undertook environmentalinitiatives now considered models for the rest of thecountry. But greening Beijing has not meant slowing itdown. Officials also have encouraged an astonishingurbanization boom that has made environmental gainsseem modest, if not illusory. Beijing is like an athlete trying to get into shape bywalking on a treadmill yet eating double cheeseburgersat the same time. Polluting factories have been movedor closed. But auto emissions are rising as the cityadds up to 1,200 new cars and trucks every day. Dirty,coal-burning furnaces have been replaced, lowering thecity’s sulfur dioxide emissions. But fine-particlepollution has been exacerbated by a staggeringcitywide construction binge that shows no signs ofletting up.China’s unsolved riddle is how to reconcile fasteconomic growth with environmental protection. ButBeijing’s Olympic deadline means the city needs animmediate answer. The ruling Communist Party envisionsthe Games as a public relations showcase and isleaving no detail untended. Scientists arecross-breeding chrysanthemums to ensure that flowersbloom in August.Now Beijing is also going to try to manipulate airquality. For months, scientists have treated the citylike a laboratory, testing wind patterns andatmospheric structure, while pinpointing local andregional pollution sources. Olympics contingency planshave been approved for Beijing and surroundingprovinces. Details are not public, but officials havediscussed shutting down factories and restrictingtraffic during the Games. “We are determined to ensure that the air conditionsmeet the necessary standards in August 2008,” Liu Qi,president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for theGames, told the International Olympic Committee’sexecutive board this month.Beijing residents overwhelmingly support the Games andtake for granted that officials will do what isnecessary to ensure clean air. Last August, the cityremoved a million cars from roads during a four-daytest intended to gauge pollution and traffic. Butpeople also know that any emergency measures have alimited shelf life.“Yes, I heard about it,” said an engineer at onefactory that may temporarily be shut down. He refusedto identify himself because he was criticizinggovernment policy. “It is like you invite some gueststo your home, and hide all your children underneaththe bed to make the house look nicer. If all thepolluting factories are shut down for the Olympics,there will be a major pollution outbreak afterwardwhen all the factories restart, right?”Beijing officials say the Olympics will have a lastingand positive environmental legacy on the city.International Olympic Committee officials acknowledgethat air quality remains a problem, but they say theair would be far worse without improvements made forthe Games. “The general trend is improvement,” saidSimon Balderstone, an environmental adviser for theI.O.C.But pollution is expected to remain a major, long-termchallenge as Beijing’s population may eventuallyexceed 20 million people. Scientists also say the citywill never be able to clean itself up if surroundingindustrial provinces are not cleaned up, too. Blue skies, in other words, will remain a challenge.Growth Offsets GainsIn July 2001, Beijing won the right to serve as thehost of the 2008 Games, a victory that carried a touchof vindication. Eight years earlier, the InternationalOlympic Committee had rejected Beijing’s first bid fora variety of reasons, including the city’s pollutedenvironment. This time, Beijing organizers promised a “GreenOlympics.”“Beijing has come a long way since its last bid in1993,” said Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympicsofficial, speaking at the city’s final Olympicpresentation in Moscow in 2001. “The city has takengiant steps to fight pollution caused byindustrialization and economic growth.”Beijing’s environmental program had begun in 1997 andbecame the centerpiece of the city’s Olympicenvironmental commitments. Urban sewage treatment hasdoubled since 2001. Use of natural gas has jumped38-fold as city officials have converted thousands ofdirty coal-fired furnaces and boilers. Factories havebeen shut down or relocated to the suburbs. Millionsof trees have been planted.“For many years, the city had few environmentalrules,” said Mr. Balderstone, the I.O.C. environmentaladviser, who regularly consults with Beijingofficials. “It’s like they are playing catch-up on alot of these measures.”But Beijing’s Olympic bid also intensified a stunningurban boom. Since 2000, Beijing’s gross domesticproduct has jumped 144 percent, according to BeijingOlympic officials. New office buildings and apartmenttowers seem to rise every week. More than 1.7 billionsquare feet of new construction has been started since2002, most of it unrelated to the Olympics. Cleaner Coal, but More of ItThe emerging cityscape is often dazzling, but alsoenergy intensive and polluting. Beijing now requiresfactories and power plants to burn cleaner, low-sulfurcoal, but it had also hoped to reduce overall coalconsumption in the years before the Olympics. Instead,the city’s coal consumption peaked at 30 million tonslast year. Beijing also has only one office tower thatqualifies under international and national energyefficiency standards as a green building.Construction, meanwhile, is expected to continue at arapid pace.“I think there will be another 20 to 30 years ofurbanization,” said Wu Weijia, a professor at TsinghuaUniversity’s Institute of Urban Studies. “The scale ofconstruction in Beijing will not slow down after theOlympics.”Meanwhile, an explosion of car ownership has wroughtgridlocked traffic and a halo of auto fumes. Beijingnow has more than three million vehicles and is addingmore than 400,000 new cars and trucks each year. Thecity’s reliance on cars and trucks leaves its air withfew reprieves. As in other Chinese cities, heavytrucks can only enter at night. Diesel exhaust is sosevere that Beijing’s levels of PM 2.5, a tinyparticulate deemed potentially harmful to health, ishighest between midnight and 3 a.m., according to onesurvey. Beijing is fighting auto pollution by institutingChina’s highest vehicle emissions standards. Nearly79,000 new taxis with lower emissions have replacedolder, outdated models. But Beijing has been unwillingto discourage private car ownership by institutingexorbitant fees as Shanghai has done. Depending on thecar, license plates in Shanghai can cost as much as$7,000; as a result, Shanghai adds about one-fourth asmany cars per year as Beijing.Beijing’s problems are compounded because its publictransportation system was neglected for years. Now,the city is expanding subway lines and finishing arail line from the airport to downtown, but carownership is expected to keep rising.“If you discourage people from having a car, thepublic transportation system would be overburdened,”said Mr. Wu, the Tsinghua professor.Taking Pollution’s MeasureMr. Kolb, the Canadian Olympic official, spent much ofAugust in Beijing trying to answer the questionhanging over the city as the Games approach: Has airquality actually improved?An environmental physiologist, Mr. Kolb visitedseveral stadiums, and sneaked into a few others, tomeasure pollution with a small monitoring device. OnAug. 5, his measurement of fine particles pollution,or PM 10, reached 200, roughly four times above thelevel deemed safe by the World Health Organization.“We’re worried,” Mr. Kolb said. Of Beijing airpollution, he added: “There’s no doubt about it. It’soff the charts.”A decade ago, Beijing introduced the Blue Sky programto measure sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and PM 10.Under the system, monitors take regular readings ofeach pollutant and then calculate a 24-hour averagefor each. The daily Blue Sky rating is determined bywhichever pollutant has the highest 24-hour average. For China’s authoritarian government, the systemrepresented a breakthrough. But it is less stringentthan air-quality indexes in the United States. Indeed,a day that rates “good” in Beijing would usually berated polluted in the United States. In 1998, Beijing recorded only 100 Blue Sky days. Eachensuing year, the city has improved the number untilreaching the current 244 and pending. Cleaner coal hashelped reduce sulfur dioxide by 25 percent since 2001.Nitrogen dioxide is also down. But Beijing’s biggestproblem is PM 10 and other particulates, which areattributed to construction, industry and cars.Average daily levels of PM 10 exceed national andW.H.O. standards. In 2004, the concentration ofairborne particulates in Beijing equaled that of NewYork, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and Atlantacombined, according to the United States Embassy inBeijing. Earlier this year, a report by the UnitedNations Environment Program concluded that “airpollution is still the single largest environmentaland public health issue affecting the city.”“Particularly worrying are the levels of smallparticulate matter (PM 10) in the atmosphere, which isseverely deleterious to public health,” the reportstated. The Blue Sky system sets a maximum rating of 500,meaning that on the worst days the actual pollutionlevel could be even higher. “Good” air in Beijing isany Blue Sky rating below 101. But even good air isoften not very good; this year, Beijing has had 65days that rated between 95 and 100. That bulge justinside the break point has attracted attention on Websites and even at one foreign embassy, which compileda statistical analysis casting doubt on the Blue Skyresults, though the embassy’s officials refuse todiscuss the findings.Du Shaozhong, deputy director of Beijing’sEnvironmental Protection Bureau, said the ratings werenot manipulated. “People used to ask me if the ratingsare scientific, or if we are playing any tricks,” Mr.Du said. “But this is most advanced equipment in theworld.”Mr. Kolb said Olympic athletes were worried aboutozone, which can inflame the respiratory tract andmake it more difficult to breathe. But Beijing’smonitoring system does not measure ozone, nor does itmeasure the finer particulates known as PM 2.5.This year, a team of Chinese and American scientistsanalyzed air quality issues for the Olympics and foundthat Beijing’s daily concentrations of PM 2.5 ratedanywhere from 50 percent to 200 percent higher thanAmerican standards. Their study, published in thejournal Atmospheric Environment, also found that ozoneregularly exceeded levels deemed safe by Americanstandards. Studies are under way to assess the health impact ofpollution in Beijing. One 2003 study warned that airpollution could be a major contributor to prematuredeaths related to chronic pulmonary disease,especially in the winter. Another study showed thatvisits to hospital emergency rooms rose on days withhigher pollution levels. On a recent afternoon at Beijing Hospital, Dr. Li Yi,a respiratory specialist, said he now saw 50 patientsa day for respiratory problems compared with abouthalf that a decade ago. He said asthma cases hadincreased sharply, as had the number of patients withnonsmoking-related lung cancer.“You can’t say that pollution is the only reason,” Dr.Li said. “But nonsmoking-related lung cancer is nowincreasing more quickly.”Beyond the OlympicsIn August, Beijing marked the one-year countdown tothe Games with a celebration at Tiananmen Square andseveral test competitions at different sites. JacquesRogge, president of the I.O.C., applauded Beijing’spreparations, but also cautioned that pollution mightforce the postponement of some endurance sports. Hu Fei, director of the Institute of AtmospherePhysics in Beijing, said any concern was misplaced.“Don’t worry about the Olympics,” Mr. Hu said,expressing confidence that contingency plans wouldproduce clean air for the Games. “We need to beconcerned about the long term.”Mr. Hu said finding a long-term fix is difficultbecause of Beijing’s geography. Surrounded bymountains on three sides, Beijing depends on strongwinds to disperse pollution. Yet winds also drawpollution into the city. The study in AtmosphericEnvironment estimated that as much as 60 percent ofozone detected at the National Stadium could be tracedto outside provinces.“Beijing is a pollution source itself, and it issurrounded by other pollution sources,” Mr. Hu said.“When you have wind, it brings in pollution from othersources. When you don’t have wind, the local pollutioncannot disperse.”Xu Jianping, 55, a business consultant, does not needto be told that Beijing is overrun with cars andconstruction. He is an avid in-line skater who enjoyedskating to work until pollution left him spitting outblack phlegm. He went online and ordered a gas mask.“But I don’t want to wear it,” said Mr. Xu, fearinghis mask would be misinterpreted as a protest againstthe Olympics. “It would hurt China’s image.”So until the Games are over, Mr. Xu is taking the busto the office. He plans to vacation outside the cityduring the Games. Then, when life in Beijing returnsto normal, he plans to resume skating to work — withhis mask, if necessary.Zhang Jing, Ma Yi and Huang Yuanxi contributedresearch."

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