A looming Belarus-enhanced Russia-Ukraine war?

The West should offer a generous deal to Russia to avoid some really hot trouble

Some decades ago, it was normal for most people to praise peace and declare their fear of a war. These days, almost nobody in the West seems to defend peace or display the fear of a world war. Instead, everyone is supposed to be terrified by a cold virus (which is largely true in Russia, too).



However, while not certain, the probability of a major war in Eastern Europe that would include Russia is highest in decades. You may read articles about the war, Ukraine, Belarus through Google News or YouTube.

Interest rates, rising inflation and economic imbalances

By Václav Klaus, Czech ex-president

Many things are not discussed enough in our relatively small economic community, and even fewer are discussed to the point where there is even a rudimentary consensus on them. Before we make strong statements about the possible effect of our central bank's recent intervention in interest rates, we should seek to answer the question "what is causing our current inflation?". But this is impossible without each discussant subscribing to one of the well-known hypotheses for the causes of inflation and to one of the competing macroeconomic theories. Unfortunately, this is not happening.



One group of our economists concentrates on the easily visible particulars, on examples of the rise in specific prices (energy, housing, some foodstuffs) and on the various supply-side bottlenecks (caused by virus-related restrictions), while the other, along with Milton Friedman, is convinced that inflation is always a monetary, i.e. money-related, phenomenon, and that it is there – in the evolution of the money supply – that its cause must be sought. This was nicely described in a recent article by my good friend, the well-known Canadian economist Herbert Grubel (What's Causing Inflation? Bottlenecks or Too Much Money?, Financial Post, November 10, 2021).

Germany's sharp left turn

By Ivo Strejček

The move to the left is a long-standing trend in German politics. Chancellor Merkel is leaving and her sixteen years as chancellor are sad examples of this movement. The leader of the still nominally conservative CDU – but realistically a more moderate version of Germany's green social democracy – has helped drag Germany into serious long-term problems. By abandoning nuclear power, Merkel has played with the prosperity of more than just German industry. By opening her arms to mass migration, she has accelerated a dramatic change in the structure of the German population and that of other EU countries. By promoting von der Leyen to head the European Commission, she has moved German green extremism to the EU level. There, of course, "gr@tinisms" of all kinds had been thriving for years before – they were just waiting for a life-giving political impulse, which, of course, cannot end in anything other than a threat to living standards, poverty and hardship for normal people.



A statue of two vital opinion makers and activists in Berlin.

And yet – as the current developments in Germany show – it is never so bad that it can't get worse. This country, economically and politically decisive for the future of continental Europe, will be led in the coming years by a coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals. The future government's programme is another sharp left turn in German politics, often to extreme political positions, making it look as if it has been copied from the Greens' election slogans.

Metastrings and mysterious triality

Two new neat stringy papers

I want to mention two new hep-th preprints. First, Berglund, Hübsch, and Minić wrote

Mirror Symmetry, Born Geometry and String Theory

where they sell their love for the "bosonic string as the parent of the superstring" and the "doubled degrees of freedom for T-duality" including the new term "metastring theory", not to mention the "Born geometry" (a structure on the doubled tori, with some symplectic structure and modular group), but the real new beef of the 5-page-short paper seems to be their ability to get a manifest mirror symmetry out of the doubled starting point. Some non-commutative generalizations of the Calabi-Yaus are automatically included.

"Very high probabilities that theorems are true" are fallacious

David B. sent me a recent article by Mussardo and LeClair that uses the Mertens function i.e. the cummulative sum of the Möbius function to produce a statistical argument in favor of the Riemann Hypothesis. It's interesting but at the end, I believe that we already have lots of these incomplete "statistical arguments in favor of the Riemann Hypothesis". They have actually existed for centuries; most mathematicians have believed that the hypothesis was true and the "circumstantial evidence" was always an important reason of that belief.



Yes, this article hugely overlaps with \(P=NP\) is conceivable; there is no partial evidence in purely discrete mathematics (2014). See other blog posts that mention probabilities and Riemann or \(P\), \(NP\), proofs.

Fine, I have spent hundreds of hours with the Riemann Hypothesis in my life. Almost all my attacks on the problem were naturally thinking of "physical systems" where a function related to the Riemann zeta function was a partition sum or something similar. Some of them were just quantum mechanical problems of particles on some graphs (with line intervals whose lengths was related to primes), some of them had creation and annihilation operators for primes, the most sophisticated ones involved the tachyon minimum in string field theory or \(p\)-adic string theory.

Farcical pseudoscience of the new South African variant

Omicron is a dumb story designed to bring the Coronazi ultramorons' hysteria to an even higher level

In the morning, I needed some 10 minutes to find out why the stock futures are collapsing today. Yes, when the movements are sharp, there is usually a single explanation (while the attributions of smaller, noise-like movements are usually fuzzy fairy-tales) and today it is

A new Covid-19 variant could show immune evasion and enhanced transmissibility, South African scientists warn (CNN)

Oh I see. So some African "scientists" have found a new genetic code of a SARS-CoV-2 descendant and called it the B.1.1.529 variant, also called "omicron" by the WHO or "nu" by others or (by the nutty Belgian PM) Covid-21. It has the highest number of mutations and maybe, perhaps, it will not only be more transmissible but also evade the immune system and other things. Millions of people clearly buy the garbage "science" news every day and today, this stuff is apparently enough to subtract 4% from DAX (the German index) while the Prague Index only lost 1.67% at the end (thank God, a lukewarm version of the psychopathy is here); some of the drop is "justifiable" by the fact that politicians are discussing new travel bans and similar things again (VIX, the index of fear, goes up damn 46%). How totally braindead do you have to become to buy something like that and react in this way? I am absolutely shocked by the sheer stupidity of so many people.



Botswana

In fact, everyone who believes any alarmism sold as "science" is a completely braindead pile of šit. There has never been a single prediction made by these alarmist scientists that turned out to be accurate and useful. Instead, virtually every single meme that these "scientists" (which are not scientists in the proper sense) have ever produced to get their dirty money has been deeply harmful for our societies because almost all of them have pushed millions of people to behave completely irrationally.

Václav Klaus's answers to questions posed by the server iUhli.cz (iCoal)

Interview with the Czech ex-president

One of the main topics of today is the Brussels plan for a rapid comprehensive transformation of the EU member states, called the Green Deal (or the Green Destiny in Czechia). It has its supporters and opponents. Which group do you belong to?

I am, of course, a total opponent of the Green Deal. One thing is the reason for the aggressive and destructive fight against global warming and CO2 emissions, the other is the EU's own plan to "green" [verb] Europe, the European economy and to create carbon neutrality in Europe, and presenting it as a way to make the European economy more efficient. The opposite is true. I have been actively involved in these issues – writing and lecturing – for at least 15 years, and passively, that is to say, with marginal comments, for three decades. It's the same "song and dance", the arguments on both sides remain the same. I already saw the "end of the world" in the formation of the Club of Rome in the late 60s and early 70s.

The United States is falling apart

The United States is in danger of chaos and possibly totalitarianism, then a new state will emerge
An interview with Erik Best, a US journalist based in Prague since Feb 1991 (CZ audio)

Host Martina Kociánová: The rapid transformation of society throughout the Western world. This statement could be used to introduce many episodes of our interviews with various experts, scientists, analysts. What is happening? How come so fast? How is the world changing? Where is it heading? Where are the changes coming from, and what can we do about it? These are the most common questions that you, our listeners, and we are equally interested in, and that we always try to ask as well. The answers, of course, often raise concerns, because they usually say nothing about a beautiful bright future in which we will all lovingly hold hands and walk with a happy song towards a sunny horizon. That is how the future is portrayed by ideologues, not by people with their feet on the ground, and perhaps that is why so many people fall for ideologies. Maybe they want to believe the dream because it's more pleasant than facing an increasingly difficult reality. It is about ideologies that we are going to talk today, and how they are gradually metastasizing into our lives, but of course not only about them. For example, we will look at the United States through the eyes of a journalist from America who has lived here for 30 years. I'm going to be talking with my colleague, journalist, commentator, analyst, Erik Best.

Responding to a bunch of Coronazi demagogies

I just saw a very disappointing article written by a person whom I believed to know better. Except for the disappointment, it doesn't seem to matter who wrote it because the fans of Covid fascism seem to parrot the lies (and all the blackmail and insults) they heard from their comrades virtually verbatim. The title says

Everyone has the right to have his opinions but not his facts.

This slogan is not new, it has been popular among the extreme leftists for many years. The problem is that people don't agree what are "facts", either. Another problem is that almost all the "facts" spread by the Covid fascists are lies; and it is mostly the opponents of Covid fascism who mostly (but not always) reproduce the actual facts in their reality. At any rate, people have often disagreed what were the facts and this is why civilized societies of the democratic type have always allowed the freedom of thought and therefore "many possible truths". The truth is the first casualty of war, in this case a war that the Covid fascists wage on the not too harmful virus and especially on everyone who doesn't worship that virus. Covid demagogues suddenly think that they have the right to impose their "truth" on everyone else, including people who know vastly more about viruses than they do.

Czech crown billionaire-mathematician becomes an unlikely hero of anti-Coronazi resistance

A decade ago, billionaire Andrej Babiš created a movement that turned him into a top Czech government politician for many years. The era will end next month. His ANO (=YES) movement was originally all about "his fight against corruption" and populist claims that corruption was omnipresent. One of the folks who were indirectly helping him was another rich dude, Karel Janeček (net worth: $150 mil), who was born a few months before me and who is also an alumnus of the Math-Phys Dpt of the Charles University. (I say indirectly which means "by provoking the anti-corruption hysteria"; Janeček hasn't ever directly worked for Babiš.)

Nedopusťme návrat doby, kdy se nesmí zpívat. pic.twitter.com/kIIdtMLmPu

— Karel Janeček (@janecek252) November 19, 2021

Janeček previously became rich through some clever playing in Las Vegas (first million); and especially through algorithmic trading. He was capable of greatly extending the initial capital from his business partner Václav Dejčmar (who earned some millions from the early Czech Facebooks of the 1990s). Both are philanthropists and sponsors of science, among other things. I have known VD in person, much more than KJ, already from some discussion servers in the mid 1990s. I have met Janeček as well, in the case of KJ only during a dinner in their Field Restaurant in Prague (which just defended its Michelin star; the chef is Radim Kašpárek; it is located in the restaurant with many clocks in Best Offer, a movie).

President Klaus' speech on 17 November was timeless

...highlighting the importance and bravery of students during the events of 1939 and 1989...
By Ivo Strejček, IVK

On the festive day of 17 November 2021, there was only one prepared, thoughtful and serious political speech. It was delivered by President Václav Klaus at the memorial site in front of Hlávka College. This seems to be the only possible place to reflect on the meaning and legacy of 17 November 1939 and 1989 and to use this opportunity to reflect on the connections between these important milestones in modern Czech history and today. Performances with similar political speeches are no longer allowed on the National Avenue that was turned hysterical by the "truth and love warriors" [Czech SJWs named after Václav Havel's appealing but cheesy quote, "the truth and love must defeat the lies and hatred"].

Václav Klaus delivered a statesmanlike and inspiring speech to the high representatives of Czech academia and their students. It is not his fault that the reporter present (or a news editor?) narrowed the content of the speech to a shortened excerpt from his extensive speech to the sentence that "communism was not defeated by students or dissidents", only to have this shortcut subsequently taken up by the rest of the media. This is such a gross and purposeful misrepresentation of the content of the speech (which was subsequently used by all those who take every possible opportunity to smear Václav Klaus) that such journalistic sloppiness cannot go unnoticed.

Other people's inner consciousness is scientifically meaningless for you

...but that doesn't mean that the laws of Nature may be applied without a conscious entity...

Feedly.com threw a text by Sean Carroll at me. He argued in favor of "physicalism" (we live in a P-world where everything follows from consciousness-independent, objectively applied laws of physics) and against "panpsychism" (we live in the Ψ-world where the existence and omnipresence of consciousness is essential for things to work).



Carroll claims that we must live in the P-world because he mentally lives in the world where physical phenomena are described by classical physics.

But as the letter Ψ (Psi) and its well-known affiliation with quantum mechanics makes more than clear, the correct laws of Nature have been known for 96 years to be quantum mechanical i.e. dependent on the observer's consciousness. For quantum mechanical laws to be applied, one needs to insert the information about the results of observations which may be translated to the initial state. For the results of the observations to be well-defined, the observations themselves must be well-defined and the choice "what has been observed" is clearly subjective i.e. dependent on the observer's subjective choices.

Novelties of the non-existent Fall 2021 Covid wave in Europe

The Euromomo charts of the total deaths speaking a clear language.



Covid-19 has caused an enhanced wave of dying in Spring 2020 that was about 100%-200% of the usual excesses in early 2017 and 2018; and another, grander wave of dying in Fall 2020 and Winter 2020-2021 that was some 300% of a usual addition to deaths from flu. Covid, a new flu-like disease, temporarily trumped flu but not "qualitatively".

In Fall 2021, there is clearly absolutely no statistically significant excess of deaths in Europe which is why it's possible for the end of the graph to show the below-the-normal deaths although the latest weeks may be updated soon (yellow). For some 20+ weeks, Czechia has exhibited below-the-normal total deaths in almost all the weeks (and tiny excesses in 2 exceptions), too.

Let's not let finance and banking turn green

Let's not make old mistakes
By former Czech President Klaus

In the early 1990s, I polemicised the use of completely misleading adjectives that usually denied rather than developed the following noun. It was a well-known battle in Europe, which had its main meaning in the German-speaking world, over the so-called soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy). The society (not only the economy!) of Germany and Austria was based on it in the second half of the 20th century. And it was to be ours too.



LM: I guess that my choice of this 1989 photo will raise Klaus' blood pressure (he was medically treated for that recently) but it's November 17th today. ;-)

But I and the people around me wanted to introduce a "market without adjectives" in our country. It goes without saying that society must also think socially (I did not deny this for a second, even though many did not and do not want to know), but I considered it necessary that the word "socially" should follow the word "market", not precede it.

Satoshi Nakamoto Florida trial

Willie Soon sent me this fresh article at the Daily Mail (see also Google News, Twitter) talking about an ongoing trial, Dave Kleiman's relatives vs Craig Wright, about the ownership of roughly 1.1 million Bitcoin ($65 billion by current near-record prices) which were mined in the first year of the Bitcoin.



Kleiman died some years ago. These two men clearly knew one another very well, they were friends for some time, Kleiman contributed to the decline of Wright's marriage, the relationship soured for other reasons as well. They had some contract to share those BTC 1 million. The question is whether both of them owned it. A technical "detail" that helps to clarify these things is the question whether Wright himself or Wright+Kleiman were the fathers of the Bitcoin, aka Satoshi Nakamoto. I have discussed this question since 2019 and sketched it already in 2015.