Obama goes on record as the first US president in the country’s history to support gay marriage. I think we have a winner, you guys.

“Zugzwang is a term used in chess to refer to a position where every move you have is a bad one. Once you’re in zugzwang, things like having more pieces than your opponent don’t matter anymore. If you can’t use them to attack, you may as well not have them at all. Often players who find themselves in Zugzwang simply resign.

A growing number of people in America know what it feels like to be in Zugzwang. For some of them, their whole life has been one long zugzwang. They can’t remember ever having any good options. Without catching a lucky break, a lifetime of hard work, for most people, results in just that: a lifetime of hard work.

For others, they maybe once have thought they had it all - good job with a pension, a nice house with a payment they could afford - set for life! Then, in an instant, it all disappeared. House is underwater, ARM is popping on the loan, pension fund bought a bunch of mortgage-backed securities, and all that’s left is utter, hopeless zugzwang.

In chess, you don’t have to resign when you’re in zugzwang. You can always make a sacrifice. A sacrifice, in chess, is when you intentionally give up some material to your opponent, and there are two kinds of sacrifice: a straight sacrifice and a sham sacrifice.

A sham sacrifice is basically a kind of hustle: your opponent gives up material for you, but it’s a trap. If you get greedy and take the piece, you’ll lose… once you take the bait, all the uncertainty [of zugzwang] disappears.

The other type of sacrifice, a straight sacrifice, is when you accept a disadvantage to break the current position. The only way out of zugzwang is to create a new position where you and your opponent have a different set of options, even if it means you play from less strength… It is a risk, but whenever your other option is resignation it hardly seems like one.

So really, the question you have to ask yourself is this: do we fight to keep what little we have, even though what little we have isn’t really working? Or do we offer up a straight sacrifice? Should we throw a major piece out into the line of fire knowing that - while it puts us at a temporary disadvantage - it can also fundamentally shift the game?”

The Punk Patriot

Happy Easter to Rick Santorum.

Voting Republican.

On March 12, 2012, the hashtag #ToMyUnbornChild became a trending topic. People used this hashtag to “tweet to” their future child. Here are 100 real tweets from real people — all within 24 hours — saying they would murder their child if he or she was gay.

The sad news out of Syria, as if it weren’t unfortunately expected, things are getting worse. Yesterday marked a new assault on the town of Idlib, where tanks and heavy artillery began to shell the city. More death, which will likely be in the hundreds by Monday. The current death toll since last year is reportedly nearing eight-thousand.

The violence has been spurring civilians, whom are able to evacuate, to flee to neighbouring countries, including Lebanon and Jordan; al-Jazeera reports over 80,000 Syrians have fled across the Syrian-Jordan border, many of whom are now forced to live nomadically in cramped tents, looking for harvesting work to support their families.

The world, however, remains motionless in political deadlock. The Russians conduct a “do as I say, not as I do” policy of continuing to stand behind Syria and arming the regime with weapons while simultaneously condemning the violence. The Arab League sent Ghanian Kofi Annan as an envoy in hopes of creating dialogue toward diplomacy. Let’s just say that al-Assad is stubborn, and has vowed to destroy what he calls “armed terrorists” attacking his country.

High ranking Syrian officials are beginning to defect from the regime, more regime soldiers are switching sides to the Free Syrian Army - a group with no political goals - and Syria begins to come to grips with the realities of a growing civil war and a worsening humanitarian crisis.

As if Romney didn’t have enough trouble proving how rich he isn’t, Romney’s attempted “let’s get the family in shirts to spell my name” tactic went off with a slight hitch…

Politicians before and after the elections.

It sucks to be a millennial.

Stage 1: Hopeful Optimism and Intellectual Maturity
Hopeful Candidate - Ron Paul

Stage 2: Starstruck
Hopeful Candidate - Donald Trump

Stage 3: Batshit Crazy Optimism
Hopeful Candidate - Michelle Bachman

Stage 4: The “We’re Not Racist, Just Extremely Prejudiced” Phase
Hopeful Candidate - Herman Cain

Stage 5: The “Fuck That, We’re Fucking Racists” Phase
Hopeful Candidate - Rick Perry

Stage 6: The Average Republican Rationality Phase
Hopeful Candidate - Mitt Romney

Stage 7: Iowa, or I DON’T KNOW WHO TO VOTE FOR FUCK IT!
Hopeful Candidate - Rick Santorum

Stage 8: “Okay, Let’s Just Relax,” or the New Hampshire Primary
Hopeful Candidate - Mitt Romney

Stage 9: The “Isn’t Mormanism an STD?” Phase
Hopeful Candidate - Newt Gingrich

Stage 10: The “Fuck That, We’re Fucking Racists” Phase (remix)
Hopeful Candidate - Rick Santorum

The inaction of China and Russia to block UN intervention in Syria is an outright injustice to humanity. Syria enters a critical moment of violence as the Assad regimes further intensifies the violence.

_____________________

The number of martyrs in Syria today [Feb 9] has reached 105 so far including 10 children. Ninety-three martyrs in the affected city of Homs, four in Maarat Al-Noman in Idlib, five in two Damascus suburbs (Madaya and Zabadany), two from Ain Al-Arab (Kobany) in Aleppo and one in Lattakia. These numbers were reported by activists and doctors in the fields in the different areas. We are not able to document the names of martyrs due to the intense shelling.

“It started with a massacre. Trucks of soldiers pulled up. They executed the women and men inside the house and stabbed the children with knives. They killed four members of the Bahader family, 11 from the A’kra family and six from the al-Muhammad family on 26 January,” [an eyewitness] says.

One activist, Raji, speaking from a basement inside Baba Amr, said Syrian forces had begun using heavier artillery rounds with devastating effect. In addition to the 27 killed, he said many people were lying dead under the rubble of their houses. There were also reports that 18 premature babies had died in hospital after power cuts caused their incubators to fail, according to the BBC. State TV denied the reports.

Syria continues to spin out of control.

“The regime didn’t expect us to continue our struggle against them,” activist Karam Abu Rabea said via Skype. “They didn’t think we would persist. So now it is using its last card. It is the genocide card.”

Here are my results on the political compass. What are yours? http://politicalcompass.org/test

Syria Spins Out of Control

As the U.N. Security Council meets today to discuss how to halt Syria’s descent into civil war, the available statistics show a country more violent than ever — and increasingly defined by armed conflict.

In mid-November, I charted the rising bloodshed in Syria and found that the country was on pace for its deadliest month yet. Since then, the United Nations has admitted that it can no longer keep track of the country’s death. However, the Violations Documenting Center in Syria (VDC), which is affiliated with local activist groups, has continued to keep track of the body count — and the picture isn’t pretty.

The past three months have easily been Syria’s bloodiest, resulting in 3,029 deaths. By way of comparison, roughly 3,100 people were killed during the first six months of the revolt — meaning that violence in the country has doubled since then. And it’s only getting worse: 829 Syrians were killed in November, 1,049 were killed in December, and 1,151 were killed in January.

The statistics also bear out the view that the revolt increasingly resembles a guerilla war. According to the VDC’s statistics, 312 soldiers were killed in January — 27 percent of the total death toll, the highest proportion during the entire conflict. By contrast, in December, military members only accounted for 18 percent of the deaths. It is unclear whether the VDC counts the deaths of defected Syrian soldiers as civilian or military, so the actual percentage of combatants killed in Syria could be even higher.

This February also marks the 30th anniversary of the Hama Massacre, when President Hafez al-Assad initiated a brutal crackdown in the western Syrian city in order to put down a rebellion. Since then, Syrians, historians and policymakers have wondered how a regime could be allowed to virtually destroy a city while the international community sat and watched.

The low-end casualty estimates for Hama stand at around 7,000 people. According to the VDC, a total of 7,054 Syrians have been killed in the past year. Three decades later, it seems, we have our answer.