Ethan Siegel, not Stephen Hawking, lies about the black hole radiation

Years ago, I thought Ethan Siegel was a decent science writer. His texts seemed to be full of data that sort of overlapped with some basic knowledge about many physics questions. However, in the recent year or two, I stopped following him after I saw a vast excess of totally wrong, unreasonable, and sometimes toxic "punch lines" in his articles such as the claims that:

• WIMP is dead (premature)
• only childish pictures are known about the electron (BS)
• consensus is the core of science which is defined as mindless obedience to a scientifically illiterate, psychologically ill Scandinavian teenager (!!!)
• it's shocking we still can't precisely count planets with ETs (not shocking at all, even the extraterrestrial life is basically ill-defined, and heavily uncertain, too)
• the so-called minorities' situation should never be fairly compared to ours, their supremacy cannot be questioned (he really wrote that almost precisely!)

and many others. I've probably missed many similar cesspools of lies, misconceptions, and far left insanities because I haven't followed him for more than a year. But because of John Preskill's Twitter account, I learned about another beauty:

Yes, Stephen Hawking Lied To Us All About How Black Holes Decay

Aside from some other arrogant manifestations of Siegel's complete misunderstanding of the Hawking radiation (and I will discuss what is arguably the most important example), he primarily repeated the sentence that "Hawking and his followers have lied to us for 32 years" when they said that the Hawking radiation may be explained by a virtual particle-antiparticle pair which becomes real, one member of the pair falls into the black hole, and the other one escapes.

Melbourne 2nd lockdown: fool me once...

First, basic facts. Australia has some 25 million inhabitants. Sydney and Melbourne are the largest cities, in the New South Wales and Victoria, respectively. The basic statistics page shows that Australia has had 9k cases and 100 deaths or so, only 4 of those were after May 23rd. The number of deaths per capita has been basically zero. Note that the seasons are reversed relatively to most of ours but the (currently ongoing) winter is really mild, too.



OK, because of "roughly a hundred positive tests per day", the Victorian authorities have re-established a harsh lockdown on the city. The 5 million people who are trapped inside cannot really leave the area for six weeks (a siege). They can't visit relatives. Restaurants, barbers, and most of other would-be non-essential things are shut down and so on.

Harvard's purely online learning is a fancy way to turn education into a complete farce

Harvard University is one of the most hardcore leftist places that want to cancel the in-person instruction entirely; all teaching and learning should be done online from the Fall. Donald Trump has rightfully pointed out that this decision is ridiculous, an easy way out for which they should be ashamed. Many other universities are "more moderate" and they prepare a hybrid system which is partly in-person, partly online.

More than 304,000 likes in 9 hours - among the strongest tweets for @realDonaldTrump in some time. Reopening schools is a powerful issue that crosses party lines. pic.twitter.com/JQY8MbEq5Q

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 7, 2020

Trump previously tweeted that the schools must open in the autumn. The tweet got over 300k "likes" which is unusually high even according to his standards. The desire to stop the hysteria and open the schools is almost certainly a "bipartisan cause". All pro-civilization people, including former voters of the Democrats, realize that the education is important, young people are pretty much completely resilient to Covid-19, and the benefits of the education vastly exceed the risks for the public health. And I strongly believe that the plan to remove the far left indoctrination from schools would also have a rather strong bipartisan support and Trump should add it as a visible part of his program.

Steven Pinker, the latest target of "cancel culture"

Steven Pinker is Harvard University's most prominent evolutionary psychologist, a man who knows how to explain why the people (and animals) evolved to think in the ways that we observe.

Aside from hundreds of technical papers that have collected almost 100 thousand citations, he is also well-known for many popular books dedicated (not only) to the intelligent laymen. "The Blank Slate" is one of them; his latest bestseller, "Enlightenment Now...", is an optimistic description of the world we inhabit. During the witch hunts on Larry Summers around 2005, I was fortunate to communicate with him as one of the beautiful minds with a spine. I've also attended some ingenious lectures he gave.

"Time will tell" has become a favorite replacement for arguments from those who spread lies

The seemingly innocent phrase is responsible for a big part of the decay of the West

Don't get me wrong. The sentence "time will tell" has been an innocent, and nearly tautologically true, sentence that many people have used at many moments. The sentence means that in the future, we will know more. It's true. To say the least, someone will know more about the events that lie in the "future" for us but they are the "present" for him, especially the events (and it's almost all events) that will be affected by Nature's quantum mechanical random generator.

On this website, you may probably find dozens of copies of this sentence written by me, too. However, in recent weeks, I saw that "time will tell" has turned into something much less innocent: into a religious slogan that is particularly favored by those who are wrong about all the important propositions they are making – and who are demonstrably wrong because they simply deny facts and proofs that already exist now.

Cumrun Vafa vs sloppiness of "lessons from JT gravity"

A decade ago, the main topic that clumped fundamental physicists to two camps was almost certainly the anthropic reasoning – or its flawed character. It gradually faded away because people agreed that there was no argument that would settle the question – and in the case of the anthropic approach, there wasn't a consistent theory that was ready to be used. Aside from some correct propositions that were worthless because they were tautological, the anthropic school was just an extreme ideology and it remained an extreme ideology.



Coleman's \(\alpha\)-parameters from baby universes were a prank or funny gesticulation, not a serious lecture about the actual mechanisms of quantum gravity.

But numerous other topics were fundamental enough and answered by highly controversial views. For example, late Joe Polchinski and his co-authors who are alive and kicking were promoting the idea that there was a firewall on the boundary of every black hole. It's obviously wrong and Joe was sort of accepting that it was wrong – but some people still enjoyed giving evidence to the answer that was wrong, the arguments were clever, and as long as you didn't throw away your common sense, you could have learned some things.

July 1st: end of nationwide Covid restrictions in CZ

Czechia had some kind of a lockdown since March 12th, before there was any "fatality with Covid" in the country. On March 18th, after just 3 days in which the experimental "face mask meme" spread to many corners of the Czech society, we became the first white nation with mandatory and omnipresent face masks (many of which were homemade at the beginning). In late March – which was arguably the peak of Covid hysteria – the percentage of Czechs who walked outside with face masks exceeded 98%.



Yo Yo Band: Karviná, 1993, an extremely famous post-Velvet-Revolution song. In the most recent week, the miners' town of Karviná in Northeast Czechia (well, Moravian Silesia) became "our closest proxy to Bergamo", beating the "cases per capita" in other towns by orders of magnitude, but still at negligible levels. [Accidentally, I just had a call with a woman in Karviná who wanted my electricity to be moved to Innogy LOL.]

For some six weeks since March 12th, many shops and almost all restaurants were closed. Some factories including Škoda Auto were shut down for a month or so. During these six weeks, it was gradually becoming more certain that the number of newly infected Czechs was dropping (the statistical significance of this proposition was going up). The hysteria was correspondingly fading away during April. In late April, a 5-stage plan to reopen Czechia began. First, small shops were opened, restaurants could be opened in the takeaway regime, some sports activities were allowed etc. Things looked really good so the 5th stage was sped up and merged with the 4th stage which was in late May (instead of June 8th as initially planned). For more than a month, we didn't have to wear any masks outside.

Appeasement towards unhinged leftists may be a bigger mistake than in 1938

The Cultural Revolution in the U.S. has accelerated. Aside from the liquidation of statues including the presidents such as Wilson, Roosevelt, Jackson, and even Lincoln, the "revolutionaries" have abolished the flag of Mississippi, are planning to ban the U.S. anthem and the name of John Wayne from an airport in the Orange County, have erased some of the most famous images and labels on the U.S. food products, and performed an incredible new Stalinist surge on the big Internet servers. Similar and increasingly bad events are happening almost every day.



Just yesterday, within several hours, Reddit deleted the forum The Donald which had 1 million users who were rather essential for Trump's 2016 victory; Amazon-owned Twitch deleted Trump's own account (it's a server for posting conversations in the video format); and YouTube has banned Stefan Molyneux, a prominent Canadian centrist philosopher who had 1 million subscribers and 650 million views, aside from many others. In fact, the number of banned YouTube accounts was 20,000 just yesterday; it is clearly in the Stalin's category.

Madmen at Princeton remove Wilson from a school, everything

Burning of the bridges has arrived to universities, Czech media informed us in the morning. The stated reason: "He was a racist", of course. The Wilson's School of Public and International Affairs has to be renamed, a board of unwise fat cats has voted.



Prague's main train station, the station of president Wilson. The second part of the name was the main name in 1945-1948 and since 1989, it is considered an "honorary name" that is only used during historical and official events.

Needless to say, the school was a perfect match for Wilson's name because he's done a lot to create a modern world based on redefined public and international affairs. While many Republicans may be annoyed that he greatly contributed to the rise of the "Big Government" in the U.S., and I understand how they feel, the Czechoslovak Republicans among us appreciate that Wilson was a de facto co-founder of Czechoslovakia, and that's the main reason why Czechs and Slovaks celebrate him.

SJWs murdered modern Czechia's most famous martyr 70 years ago

Her name was Milada Horáková...

Exactly 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post about the 60th anniversary of the most famous judicial murder in the modern Czech history. You may also watch this 5-minute-long video summary in English.



Even though my former colleague Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the first Czechoslovak working-class president and alcoholic Klement Gottwald (just like Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, and many others), Gottwald kickstarted her execution by his signature. She wrote a very touching letter to her daughter and other relatives, resisted for 15 minutes on the rope, but ultimately she surrendered and was hanged. Mr Mrnka recorded the movie about her in 2017; it probably isn't too deep and personal a movie. (The film director Mr Mrnka didn't get any money from the Czech pro-film government institutions, Czech billionaires, and others, all of them had some complaints or excuses: only Netflix said Yes at the end. An Israeli actress starred as Horáková.)

Stunning dishonesty behind the "second wave" fake news

While Czechia has apparently restored its sanity completely and the last traces of the Covid-hysterical era should be removed on July 1st (e.g. face masks in the public transportation), and even the hexupling of the percentage of the positive tests isn't changing much about it (from 0.5% at the lows to about 3% now; epidemiologists do manage to preserve the realistic image of the elevated number of "cases" as a measure of irrelevant local outbreaks that are wrestled with locally), the U.S. fake news media have apparently decided that they have the power to start the second wave of the coronavirus hysteria in the country.

(That wave has already started in Australia, because of 1 "Covid" deaths after more than a month: 1,000 soldiers are visiting every house in Victoria and lots of people even restarted the crazy punic buying, holy crap.)

Open CNN.COM now and you will see a huge headline "US sees record number of new Covid-19 cases". What a news story. The U.S. is doing many more tests so of course a larger absolute number of them end up positive. It seems very clear by now that this filth wanted to increase the number of tests just in order to be "able" to create these fraudulent headlines. The actual disease is obviously much weaker in the U.S. than it was some two months ago.

If many ETs exist, they have diverse characters and political views

But it is still true that SJW-like and similarly pathological species get extinct soon

A week ago, under a SETI article, the discussion evolved towards a widespread theme in the extraterrestrial discussions: What behavior can be expected from the ETs? Are they predators? Are they shy? Are they downright cowards? Do they favor equality? ;-) There are lots of questions of this kind. As the title indicates, the main message of this text is the answer "it depends" or:

Among many ET species or civilizations, there will be a big diversity of behavioral patterns, moral characters and personalities, and political views.

Can I prove it? I can't. Sociology of ETs isn't as rigorous as mathematics. Well, as you know, it isn't even as rigorous as physics. To make things worse by several levels, it's less rigorous than social sciences about humans. It's much more speculative because the existence of the ETs is just a possibility, not a fact.

Redistributed money is the outsourced power to decide

And that's why I don't want the money to be redistributed to less refined people

European and other countries are capable of feeding all their citizens. One may nicely survive with $200 for food per month and even the most modest welfare systems give much more to the people who can't earn more by themselves. The governments may also provide everyone with some housing and other existentially needed things. My point is that a vast majority of the money we produce is "excess production" and goes to some kind of "non-minimal if not luxurious things". It has been the case at least for decades.

As a rightwinger, I think it's ideal when almost all the money is left in the pockets of the people who earned it and who can decide what to do. Some portion of the money is redistributed. Police, armies, courts, and a few other things undoubtedly represent the most important things that are paid from the public budgets (and all the people who want to abolish the police are dangerous psychopaths). In reality, various social programs swallow much more than that.

It's clear to me that the construction of several state-of-the-art big projects that do something new, like some cutting-edge space research or the largest synchrotron (or a bunch of other pure science projects), belong to the most exciting, most justified, and most permanent ways to spend the concentrated taxpayer money. What is good about them is that they are supposed to produce visible results – and in the case of colliders, I emphasize that the collider itself (with maps of collisions) is visible, one doesn't need a new particle. People's energy is concentrated to do something that may be admired and that may even have a lasting value.