How does a player cheat at chess?

When playing online chess at home, on his or her computer, a cheater receives instructions, hints, and directions from a second computer, standing beside the first, that contains chess analysis software.

But how does a player cheat at chess over-the-board, or in-person? Often, the cheater will work with an associate, who will access that same software on a hand-held device and will then signal to the player the better moves. Or a cheater hides a cell phone in the restroom, and takes frequent breaks.

Magnus Carlsen, a 32-year-old Norwegian, and reigning World Chess Champion since 2013, lost a game to a brash 19-year-old American, Hans Niemann, on September 4, at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis. The next day Carlsen tweeted that he would withdraw from the event.

Then, on September 27, Carlsen issued a statement to the Chess world.

“I believe that cheating in chess is a big deal and an existential threat to the game. I believe that Niemann has cheated more than he has publicly admitted. Throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup, I had the impression he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions.

“We must do something about cheating, and for my part going forward, I don’t want to play against people who have cheated repeatedly in the past, because I don’t know what they are capable of.”

The scandal prompted Chess.com to restrict Niemann from their website, and also from playing in the Chess.com Global Championship tournament in the fall of 2022.

Hans Niemann admits he has cheated twice, both online, once when he was twelve, and again when he was sixteen, but he declares he is innocent now. He has filed a $100 million defamation lawsuit.

How did Hans Niemann cheat, if he did?

One possibility. Last July, a computer programmer named James Stanley demonstrated that he could cheat at chess by communicating with an associate through vibrations transmitted into his shoes.

If indeed Niemann cheated, the truth as to how he cheated will come out someday.

How did Lance Armstrong cheat at bicycle racing to win seven Tour de France races? He would “remove his blood prior to a race, store it in a fridge, and then transfuse it back into his body during the race. He also took testosterone to aid his recovery between races.” Blood doping gave him an edge.

How did Bernard Maddoff cheat? The short answer: he ran a Ponzi scheme. Like Charles Ponzi, namesake of the scheme, he paid off old customers with proceeds from new customers.

Religious organizations are not exempt. In the 1980s, Jim Bakker overbooked hotel reservations at his “Heritage USA Theme Park, by selling tens of thousands of lifetime memberships that entitled buyers to an annual three-night stay at a single 500-room hotel,” close to an impossibility.

Bakker was indicted on twenty-four counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy. Following a jury’s guilty verdict on all counts, Judge Robert Potter sentenced Bakker to 45 years in prison, and a $500,000 fine. After his sentence was reduced twice, he served 4 1⁄2 years in prison and was released.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate burglary, which occurred on June 17, 1972. According to Michael W. Pregrine, a Chicago attorney, this crime “exposed the capacity of the most senior of leaders to place ambition and expediency before individual responsibility and morality.”

“These scandals were the byproduct of human failings that never seem to go out of style: unbridled personal ambition, impulsive loyalties, pragmatic ruthlessness, and the absence of a moral compass within the organization.”

This week marks the second anniversary of January 6, 2021, the day when a mob stormed the Capitol building, at an hour when legislators were meeting to certify the 2020 election returns.

Each of the rioters believed and then acted upon Donald Trump’s claim, without evidence, that he had won the election, but that others had stolen it from him. He told the crowd that day, “We will stop the steal. We won the election. We won it by a landslide. This was not a close election.”

His words incited a riot inside the Capitol. Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general, had told the President that there was no evidence for election fraud, and yet he refused to accept that advice.

“How to strangle democracy while pretending to engage in it?” The answer: dispatch burglars into the opposing party’s campaign headquarters at night, and then try to cover it up, Nixon’s plan; or make up a story about voter fraud, and incite a riot, Trump’s plan.

On December 22, 2022, the thirteen members of the January 6 committee released their 845-page report, and in it, they made four recommendations.

“The former president should be prosecuted for assisting in an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements to the federal government, and for obstructing an official congressional proceeding.” It is now up to Jack Smith, special counsel for the Department of Justice.

A game of chess, a bicycle race, a business, a theme park, and two elections, shortcuts to winning.

Bill Benson, of Sterling, is a dedicated historian.

The crooner Bing Crosby first sang “White Christmas” live on the “Kraft Music Hall” radio show on December 26, 1941, nineteen days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

It was a frightening time, one of our country’s darkest moments. The nation felt wounded, violated, and every living American knew that a tough fight would follow. Holiday spirit was at a low.

Yet, Bing’s song set aside the worry for a moment, and because of its “nostalgia around the holidays, regardless of religion,” it resonated with audiences.

“It’s not upbeat. Its lyrics are wistful, even a sad recollection of past holidays.” Yet people loved its melancholy mood, and it has remained a holiday classic.

Irving Berlin, a prolific songwriter, wrote “White Christmas,” for the 1942 movie, “Holiday Inn,” starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, who sang the song in the movie, along with Marjorie Reynolds.

A story later emerged that Berlin raced into his Manhattan office and asked his secretary to take dictation, for, what he said, was “the best song I ever wrote. The best song anybody ever wrote.”

Irving Berlin was born Israel Bellin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, on May 11, 1888, in Tolochin, Russia, now in Belarus, and he died on September 22, 1989, at the age of 101 years and 4 months.

During that century plus of living, he wrote hundreds of songs, including: “God Bless America,” “Easter Parade,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and the wedding song “Always.”

“White Christmas” though was his most popular, and it sold the best, by far.

Irving Berlin and his second wife, Ellin Mackay—an heiress of Irish Catholic descent—had four children. One son, Irving Berlin, Jr., though died at the age of three weeks, on Christmas Day, 1928.

Although Irving did not celebrate Christmas, he and his wife visited their son’s grave every year on Christmas Day. Some have speculated that the song was Berlin’s method of coping with his tragic loss.

In 2002, the author Jody Rosen wrote a book, “White Christmas: The Story of a Song.” In it, Rosen said, “The kind of deep secret of the song may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to his melancholy  about the death of his son.”

Of the song, Berlin’s daughter, Linda Emmett, said, “It’s very evocative. The snow, the Christmas card, the sleigh, the sleigh bells, and it’s entirely secular.”

The poet and biographer Carl Sandburg wrote, “We have learned to be a little sad, and a little lonesome without being sickly about it. This feeling is caught in the song of one thousand jukeboxes that is whistled across streets and in homes. ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.’

“When we sing it, we do not hate anybody, and there are things we love. Way down under the latest hit of his, Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace.”

Richard Corliss, a film critic and editor at “Time” magazine, said, “[The song] connected with GI’s in their first winter away from home. It voiced the ache of separation, and the wistfulness they felt for the girl back home, for the innocence of youth.”

Bing Crosby said that whenever and wherever he performed for GIs during World War II, they shouted at him on the stage that they wanted to hear him sing “White Christmas.”

Jody Rosen speculates that Berlin may have written the song in 1937, when he was in California, away from wife and kids and home, when making a movie in Beverly Hills, California.

This makes sense when one considers the lyrics to the song’s sole verse that no one knows or hears.

“The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway. There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills, L.A. But it’s December the 24th, and I am longing to be up north. I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.”

All we hear Bing Crosby sing, or anyone else sing, is the chorus, composed of just three sentences.

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know, where tree tops glisten, and children listen, to hear sleigh bells in the snow.

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, with every Christmas card I write. May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmas’ be white.”

The song became an even bigger hit for Bing Crosby when he sang it in the 1954 movie, “White Christmas,” which starred Bing, along with Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen.

According to the Guinness World Records, the song “White Christmas” is the all-time best-selling Christmas song, and also the all-time best-selling song ever, with some 50 million copies sold.

The closest to that record is Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind.”

A white Christmas is not that unusual for those of us who live in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, South and North Dakota, on the Great Plains, but it is for those who live in California, south Texas, Arizona, and Florida.

We can dream about a white Christmas, and we may get it. Have a Merry Christmas!

Bill Benson, of Sterling, is a dedicated historian.

Twenty-eight-year-old Naomi Biden married twenty-five-year-old Peter Neal on the south lawn, at the White House, on Saturday, November 19, 2022, beginning at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time.

Because there was no tent, and because the temperature was a chilly 39 degrees, some 250 guests received shawls, hand-warmers, and blankets once they arrived. They also checked in their cell phones.

The President and First Lady Jill Biden hosted the ceremony, and the family paid for the wedding.

At a few minutes after 11:00 a.m., the bride’s father, Hunter Biden, and her mother, Kathleen Buhle, walked alongside their daughter on a white carpet leading from the White House’s south door to a point on the south lawn, where two officiants completed the ceremony a few minutes before noon.

That evening inside the White House, some 325 guests attended a reception that featured desserts and dancing.

The President said, “It has been a joy to watch Naomi grow, discover who she is, and carve out such an incredible life for herself.” The next day, Sunday, November 20, Joe Biden turned 80 years old, the first octogenarian to serve as President of the United States.

This was the nineteenth wedding held at the White House, although a first for a granddaughter and a first held on the south lawn.

A wedding that could have been—and perhaps should have been—held at the White House was when Franklin Delano Roosevelt wed his fifth cousin, once removed, Eleanor Roosevelt, niece of the then current President, Theodore Roosevelt. The day was March 17, 1905.

Instead, it was held in New York City, in Mrs. Henry Parrish’s home, Eleanor’s aunt.

On December 7, 1892, when Eleanor was eight years old, she lost her mother due to an outbreak of diphtheria. Two years later, when ten, her father Elliot Roosevelt died of a seizure, due to his prolonged alcoholism. Eleanor’s maternal grandmother, Mary Livingston Hall, stepped in and raised Eleanor.

Elliot Roosevelt was Theodore’s younger brother. Hence, the President was fond of Eleanor, a niece.

The wedding was set for March 17, because the President was scheduled to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City that same day. At the wedding, the President walked Eleanor down the aisle, and gave her away. This was news for the city’s news reporters.

Theodore though was a master at self-promotion. His daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth remarked, “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.”

Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage held fast, even after she discovered that Franklin was having an affair with her social secretary Lucy Mercer. A historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, said, “Their union from that point on was more of a political partnership.”

Eleanor wrote opinion columns and gave speeches in person and on the radio, and in her media announcements, she championed the rights of women and African-Americans.

On Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, the White House received word that at 8:00 a.m., Honolulu time, Japanese air forces had bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, killed hundreds of American sailers and destroyed the Pacific fleet, save for the aircraft carriers, then out at sea.

Because Eleanor was scheduled to give her weekly radio program that same evening, “Over Our Coffee Cups,” she decided that she would speak first to the American people about the Pearl Harbor attack, before her husband, the president, did so. She told the American people,

“I am speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history. The Cabinet is convening, and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the President. The State Department and the Army and Navy officials have been with the President all afternoon.

“In fact, the Japanese ambassador was talking to the president at the very time that Japan’s airships were bombing our citizens in Hawaii.

“For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads, and yet it seemed impossible to believe. That is over now, and there is no more uncertainty. We know what we have to face, and we know we are ready to face it.

“We must go about our daily business more determined than ever to do ordinary things well.”

The next day President Franklin Roosevelt addressed Congress, and asked for a declaration of war. He said, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

“But always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.”

The vote was 82-0 in the Senate, and 388-1 in the House. Jeannette Rankin, a Montana Republican, the first woman elected to Congress, and a pacifist voted against a declaration of war.

FDR and Eleanor faced hard times: a Depression and a war with Japan and Germany. Yet, they had Theodore Roosevelt’s presence and blessing at their wedding, and Naomi Biden and Peter Neal had the presence and blessing of the current president at their wedding. We can wish the young couple well.

Bill Benson, of Sterling, is a dedicated historian.

Elias Boudinot, a member of Congress in the new Federal Government, introduced a resolution in 1789, to form a joint committee that asked President George Washington to call for a day of prayer and thanksgiving. That joint resolution passed both Senate and House. Washington chose to respond.

On October 3, 1789, he called for a day of “Public Thanksgiving and Prayer,” that he set for Thursday, November 26, 1789. Washington celebrated that early Thanksgiving, by attending services at St. Paul’s Chapel, and giving beer and food to those in jail for failing to pay their bills.

Washington set another day of Thanksgiving late in his administration, in 1795, after armed forces defeated the Whiskey Rebellion.

Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800, but he refused to proclaim a day of prayer and Thanksgiving, based on that “wall of separation between Church and State,” spelled out in the First Amendment. He also believed it the duty of the states to determine special days of observance.

Yet, when governor of Virginia, Jefferson had declared a day of Thanksgiving and Prayer. The idea of a national day of Thanksgiving died though with Thomas Jefferson, and remained almost dead until the Civil War split the country apart, over slavery.

The one exception was James Madison who called for a single day of Thanksgiving.

Sarah Josepha Hale, editor at Godey’s Lady’s Book, a women’s magazine, had lobbied governors, Congressmen, judges, and presidents for four decades, pleading for a national day of Thanksgiving.

She asked the same thing of everyone, that “the last Thursday in November be set aside to ‘offer to God our tribute of joy and gratitude for the blessings of the year.’”

Lincoln was the first person with any authority to respond to Sarah Josepha Hale’s letter dated September 28, 1863, but then Lincoln faced a rebellion and a war and needed some good news, something positive to redirect the nation’s attention.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in the rebellious states. On July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Union forces had stopped the Confederates’ attack on Cemetery Ridge, south of the town, dooming Lee’s march into the North.

On July 4, 1863, the Confederate Army of the Mississippi, led by Lt. General John C. Pemberton, surrendered to Union Major General Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg, Mississippi, after a 47-day siege, dividing the Confederacy into two parts. The Union now controlled the Mississippi River.

Partly as a result of the welcome news on both fronts, President Lincoln read Sarah Joseph Hale’s letter, and chose to act.

On October 3, 1863, the same day as Washington’s proclamation, Lincoln issued his proclamation, “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, drafted the proclamation, and Lincoln signed it. “A year later federal officials chose to sell that document of the proclamation, in order to benefit Union troops,” an archivist’s worst outcome.

On November 19, 1863, Lincoln boarded a train in Washington D.C. that carried him to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he spoke for a few minutes at the dedication ceremony for the new national cemetery, a fitting burial site for those Union soldiers who had perished over three hot days in July.

Lincoln finished his address, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

A week later, on November 26, 1863, when back in the White House, Abraham Lincoln, with Mary Todd, and their sons, celebrated that day of Thanksgiving and prayer, as did countless other Americans across the country. What a monumental year 1863 had become! Thanksgiving began to bind the nation.

William August Muhlenberg, an Episcopal clergyman in New York City, read the President’s proclamation for a day of Thanksgiving, and on that day, he jotted down the lyrics for what he called a President’s Hymn, that he entitled “Give Thanks All Ye People.”

“Give thanks, all ye people; give thanks to the Lord. Alleluias of freedom, with joyful accord. Let the east and the west, north and south roll along; Sea, mountain and prairie, one thanksgiving song.”

May all of you, my dear readers, enjoy this Thanksgiving, as it binds our families and our nation together once again, over a noon meal on a Thursday, the last week in November, the way that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln wanted it.

Bill Benson, of Sterling, is a dedicated historian.