Czechia, Czechs don't have the right to stop coal mining in Turów, Poland

OK, I am ashamed of my government's actions against Poland when it comes to the Turów coal mine.



Left-click and drag the map above; the mouse wheel magnifies the view. Or click at "show" for a full screen view.

Some basic facts. The Polish area above (roughly 5 km times 5 km; with the lunar landscape that will be pretty later in this century, like many similar places in Czechia) is near the Czech (and also German) border. Czechia is in the South and the mine is one of Poland's largest lignite reserves. There should be around 760 million (metric...) tons of brown coal there. The annual production is 27.7 million tons of coal. I can't find the fresh prices but 1 metric ton of coal was around $35 in 2019. Multiply and you will see that the value of the coal there is some $27 billion and about $1 billion should be extracted in a year. A fraction of this price is eaten by the expenses, however.

Exactly 80 years ago, Heydrich arrived in Prague

They had no one sharper, says historian

Reinhard Heydrich, who arrived in the Protectorate on 27 September 80 years ago, was a beast, but above all a cold-blooded technologist of Nazi power, according to historian Jindřich Marek of the Military History Institute.



This is the 80th anniversary of the day Reinhard Heydrich arrived as acting Reich Protector. Why did he replace Konstantin von Neurath?

For a simple reason. In September 1941, Nazi Germany was thriving on the eastern battlefields, they took Kiev, they began the siege of Leningrad. They were occupying almost all of Europe. And to do that, they needed a supply of weapons and other material. The Czech armaments industry was a major supplier of German troops and the Germans, who like order, wanted absolute peace in the Czech lands and no resistance or sabotage.

He was preparing the cold-blooded murder of the Jews and the liquidation of the Czech nation.

Eastern Europe needs to be urgently Orbanised

Commentary by Štěpán Cháb

The elections in Germany [on Sunday, September 26th] look much more frightening than the [October 8th-9th] elections in the Czech Republic. There, the Greens are coming out with their 'nothing is green enough' and Olaf Scholz is likely to take over as chancellor from Angela Merkel. In yesterday's Die Welt, he gave some of his core ideas. Even if we elect the [Nazi-like] Workers' Party to government in the October elections, it will not have the same consequences as the elections in Germany in just two weeks' time [now: tomorrow]. Nevertheless, the importance of our elections is crucial.

When claims about morphology and evolution prove that the speaker hasn't understood evolution at all

Diptera's (flies') vein patterns are almost as diverse as human fingerprints but even much more easily recognizable as veins of some species.

There are millions of things to write about. I don't want to promote things like "tyranny in Australia" into a major theme of this blog so this is left to Twitter. The events are "small isolated incidents", anyway, despite the fact that the unifying theme – rise of tyranny (not only) in Australia – is obvious.

Instead, I want to make a short comment about two articles on biology in the Quanta Magazine.

The evolution was apparently accelerating when we were getting close to humans so you might think that a very long time (gigayears?) was spent with unicellular life at the beginning. Except that it's BS: it takes ~2 years for them to create multicell life https://t.co/Q5zwE7qoDa

— Luboš Motl (@lumidek) September 24, 2021

So if there is some acceleration and very short timescales involved in evolution, they are relevant both in the "recent evolution of humans" which seemed fast (the white race is just some 20,000 years old, for example); as well as in the early elementary evolution, e.g. the transition from unicellular life to multicellular life. That basic transition is fast mainly because one deals with very small systems. Some cooperation of the cells is "common sense" right from the beginning, you don't need to wait for billions of years for the cells to realize that "they can cooperate". The cooperation is ultimately some adaptation to the environment, anyway: the environment happens to include "siblings" which make some cooperation a good idea.

Rise of authoritarian leftists makes the Euro-American alliance meaningless

The Anglosphere leads the ongoing decline of the West. Those of us who follow these shocking events every day are often uncertain whether the developments are more insane in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Relatively to these events, the deterioration in other countries may look mild (although the French "pass sanitaire" is as criminal as the counterparts in the Anglosphere and events in Luxembourg, Slovenia, or other small countries may sometimes be even crazier but they're overlooked due to the small size of such countries).



Both the European Union countries and the North American ones have seen the rise of increasingly unhinged extreme leftists in politics, culture, and business, aside from most of the other important places. Because these ideologies were strengthening on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, does it mean that these pathologies could at least produce better relationships between the countries and continents, a silver lining we could perhaps enjoy?

Australia: Covid's tyranny

By a Czech-born Australian lady whose name is known to me

I have chosen to write this article mainly to let people around the world know the truth about what is happening in Australia. It is written according to the truth and my personal experience, nothing is second hand.



As of today (September 2021) Australia has had its borders with the outside world sealed for 18 months. With a few breaks, the borders between states are also closed. There are concrete roadblocks on the roads and not a mouse can slip through the police. Some families live only a few kilometres apart and have not seen each other for months. A single positive case of covid is often enough to lock down millions of people. Vaccination is moving forward at a snail's pace, we have nowhere to rush when there is hardly any covid. When the delta variant appeared in Sydney this June, there was a rush to vaccinate, but again there was nothing to vaccinate. The community is divided into two groups, the first is happy that the borders are closed, they don't travel anywhere anyway and it doesn't affect them in any way. The other group is furious. Australia is one of the most multicultural countries, at least half the people have family and relatives abroad. I'm in that group.

Will progressives destroy America?

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

Many years ago, the once classically liberal Anglo-American weekly The Economist, like many global companies, embraced the leftist and anti-capitalist ideology of "social justice." What a surprise when it devoted its editorial and a whole lengthy section (briefing) to "The Threat From the Illiberal Left" in late summer.

My first direct censorship at Blogger.com

Minutes ago, I received my first message about the direct censorship of content at Blogger.com, a Google-owned platform that runs this website. The page that was suspended was a short text revolving around a video commentary by the main father of the mRNA vaccines, Dr Robert Malone, about the current issues surrounding the mRNA vaccines.

It is another big leap for the arrival of the full-blown totalitarianism in California and beyond. I think that the individuals responsible for this nasty act violate even the most basic laws of my country. They must be punished. Google must immediately start to violate the Czech laws or the operation of the company in my country must be banned.

O tempora, o mores

Contemplation by Ladislav Jakl

Our world is changing. We are witnessing the rise of wild progressivism and the destruction of tried and tested social structures, virtues and individual freedoms taking place before our eyes.



What's more, the process of change is accelerating. It is no longer proceeding by the salami slicing tactics, as in the fable of the boiling frog. It is developing in a revolutionary way, without delay and without much discussion. Opponents are being silenced and socially liquidated. The liberal left, the progressives, are forcing their agenda on us in every way. Their propaganda attacks us in every other television commercial, in children's shows, in the arts in general, in the activities of pressure and interest groups, through the policies of banks and other corporations.

A bomb is great to cover one of the slits

Under the previous blog post about the quantum bomb tester experiment, Stillconfused forced me to discuss his main "weird fact" which is that

the experiment allows you to find out "whether the bomb is able to explode" without "exploding it".

There is clearly no real paradox here. A live bomb and a dud differ so they have a different impact on various other objects. This difference may be observed. You may only prove a paradox if you assume too much, including some of the assumptions of classical physics.



But I decided that the most illuminating explanation what is going on involves the double slit experiment. Richard Feynman liked to say that all the surprising new features of quantum mechanics may be understood if you carefully enough think about the double slit experiment. Nothing else is needed and all the new thought experiments are just repetitive games pushed by those who simply haven't mastered the basics, the double slit experiment.

There is no non-locality and no interaction-free measurement in the bomb tester

Anti-quantum zealots are deluded because they think that a whole history or classical trajectory (in the past) may be extracted from a measurement at one moment

I had some exchange with Petr H. about his claimed "non-locality" in QM and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment that I have discussed in quite some detail several times (click at the hyperlink to get the most extensive two discussions in 2018).



Recall that the silly conclusion that "there is some action operating backwards in time" in the quantum eraser experiment is just an artifact of a totally irrational psychological (or psychiatric) disorder of some people. When they read the probabilistic distribution for a discrete variable and a continuous one, \(\rho_j(x)\), they always imagine that the discrete variable \(j\) must be the primary switch, the cause, something that decides about the functional dependence of the probability on the continuous variable \(x\) (in particular, whether the probability as a function of \(x\) has one interference pattern, the opposite one, or none).

But that's completely stupid because even in this mixed, discrete-continuous, case, we can equally well read the probability distribution for 2 variables in the opposite way: \(x\) may be decided first while the probabilities for various values of \(x\) are the "inclusive" ones (and indeed, a photon may land on a continuous photographic plate first) and then the relevant probability distribution is reduced to a finite collection of probabilities simply by substituting the right continuous (just measured) value of \(x\) into \(\rho_j(x)\): we get some probabilities \(P_j\).

Report on the Congress of Dissidents

Commentary by Alexander Tomský



I have received an invitation to a seminar "The 2021 Elections - Will they be about anything?". And so, full of curiosity, I set off. The Grégr Hall of the Municipal House in Prague became a standing only room, some even stood, but it could only hold 150 people at most. As in the past, even in the present era of normalisation, there may be no more than a few thousand dissidents in the republic (Charter 77 used to have 2,000 signatories). Five speakers spoke from the podium, and they spoke eloquently.

Deniers of inflation as a problem approach a psychiatric diagnosis

I have thought about the (monetary) inflation a lot, perhaps more so than about cosmic inflation; monetary inflation is clearly a cheaper genre, however. ;-) You may look at some of the blog posts in the past that included comments about the interest rates, negative interest rates, inflation etc.



A German man is pushing his wallet in the Weimar Republic of the early 1920s, a century ago. In 2021, economists should know that such events are possible with irresponsible enough helicopter money policies. The problem is that many of them just don't care or they actively want to impose similar wallets on everyone again. With the digital money of the modern era, wheelbarrows could be avoided but the cash could disappear instead. This dependence of the citizens on the central authorities (that store their usable money) is attractive for lots of totalitarian pundits, of course.

Five or ten years ago, there was a fashionable opinion that the inflation would forever disappear and the interest rates would be zero and we would enter a new geological epoch in which the central banks would invent zero or negative rates forever. I have always emphasized that this "end of monetary history" idea was a complete nonsense and the negative interest rates were at most a short-term anomaly that simply couldn't last (much like the tunneling effect in which the apparent kinetic energy may drop to negative numbers for a while but it's not a sustainable situation because classically, the kinetic energy cannot be negative).

As long as people with some interests and skills live, the history can't be over, conflicts can't be over, science can't be over, recurring inflation can't be over (if someone uses fiat-like currencies). I think it's clear by now that I was completely right and the "economists" who were preaching zero or negative interest rates forever were completely wrong.

Worshiping of complexity is junk physics, junk computer science, junk neuroscience

...and junk climate science, not to mention other disciplines of junk science...

After I read this Quanta Magazine article discussing whether individual neurons are "complex",

How Computationally Complex Is a Single Neuron?,

I realized that there is a whole industry of antiscience that has made it to numerous scientific disciplines including fundamental physics, computer science, and neuroscience. The article above describes the comparison of separate neurons in the real world biological brains on one side; and the artificial neurons used in the simulations that are meant to behave as natural neural networks on the other side. The workers have decided that they needed at least 5-8 layers of artificial neurons to fit a biological neuron and this kind of a result is claimed to be an insight about neurons and brains; and progress. They indicate that they want to be paid as neuroscientists for X more years in order to find out whether the right number is 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or something like that.

Well, it's not progress. It's not cool. And neither is a simple algorithm that produces an irregular, chaotic pattern; nor the fact that we don't have a polynomially fast or otherwise effective algorithm for a problem X or Y. And it's bad when you use a complicated computer simulation (whose behavior you can't replicate in your brain, not even roughly) to answer a simple question about the climate. All these situations have something in common – and I called it the worshiping of complexity. These people think that their worshiping of complexity is a sign of good science or scientific progress; in reality, it is really a sign of bad science, failing science, or the absence of any scientific progress.