A somewhat unexpected war erupted between two of my fellow warriors against the vaccination mandates and many other deeply counterproductive Covid-19 policies. On
two guests were invited mostly to agree with one another that the attempted censorship of Joe Rogan at Spotify is atrocious. Joe Rogan has been a comedian and a reporter from wrestling and he naturally doesn't look like the class of opinion makers that I would listen to. Well, his physique resembles the wrestlers and he is too centrist for me politically. But otherwise I think he's rather brilliant and perhaps #1 in his knowledge of the Covid issues among the people who present themselves as journalists.
Technical: A 12-year-old useless Statcounter widget started to malfunction on PC browsers yesterday, redirected TRF to an empty page with a number around 34 million (visits since 2010). I removed it. Mobile devices should have always worked. On PC, you may need to erase some TRF-related cache or something if you are still redirected.
Novak Đoković (I won't use the Yugoslav Đ, it is too difficult to type, it is just Dž for me, anyway) is usually considered the greatest tennis player ever. Such a judgement is unavoidably subjective to some extent and it is composed of some partial data that are mostly subjective and some data that are objective.
His colleague, the president of Czechia's oldest tennis club, Prof Václav Klaus recently called Djoković's game style intelligent. He remains himself. As this page reminds us, Djoković isn't surpassed by anyone in most objective quantities. He leads by the prize money, by the number of weeks at the top of the ATP, and is tied with Sampras in the number of year ends where they were at the top of the ATP (Sampras is unlikely to take the lead now). He is the only one with four Grand Slams in a row, leads by the number of Australian Open victories, and is tied in the number of Grand Slam victories with Nadal and Federer (much more likely than them to take the lead), tied with Nadal in the number of Masters 1000 titles, and so on.
I had tons of things to write about but didn't find any motivation. So just two links to events in the near future.
As von Stock told me, CERN's director Ms Fabiola Gianotti expects a very exciting year ahead, especially because LHC Run 3 gets under way. Tomorrow (January 13th) at 3 pm Swiss time (9 am Boston Time), there will be
Directorate Online Meeting (CERN).
Update: there is no public webcast here! Sorry, von Stuck just sends me garbage all the time and he has a crush on Gianotti, too.
CERN has to operate in the Covid Hysteria Level 4, whatever it exactly means (it doesn't mean a full curfew, she tries to calm us down), and the director seems to realize that Omicron is both more transmissible and far less deadly. Indeed, Washington University research concluded that the case fatality rate of Omicron is a whopping 100 times lower than that of Delta. Of course, I told you it was insane to be anxious about Omicron in Minute 1 of the Omicron hysteria; the hard data proving the near-zero fatality rate already existed at that time and the memes claiming to beat the data could have seen to be atrocious pseudoscience.
When the Covid hysteria started in February 2020 (and the fear actually peaked on March 23rd, 2020, long before the median Covid death), it was clear that the cash was going to lose its value. In early March 2020, I told you to invest into stocks on the following week. It was a great time but March 23rd was a better time.
At any rate, some people moved into stocks which was the most important good decision, the identity of the stocks didn't matter much. It was clear (from the recent dovish obsession) that the central banks and governments would react to Covid by a huge wave of free money or helicopter money, respectively: it has been sold as the universal recipe for all economic problems for more than a decade. In reality, they should have reacted in the opposite way, and perhaps at the very beginning (or almost from the beginning), because the lockdowns have primarily restricted the supply, not demand, so there have been guaranteed inflationary pressures from the beginning of the Covid response.
The outrageous remarks by the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, Markéta Pekarová Adamová, that Hungarians are to oust their long-serving Prime Minister Orbán in the upcoming parliamentary elections there, are hardly believable, an absolutely unprecedented hostile attack in the history of Czech-Hungarian relations by one of our highest constitutional officials.
In early December, a global online summit on democracy was organised by US President Biden. In the face of China's overwhelming economic and power ascendancy, the developed West wants to use this and similar events to give itself confidence and convince the rest of the non-Western world that our example is still the best and worthy of emulation.
Democracy, i.e. rule by the people, is the means of ensuring good governance, which is a condition for the prosperity of a country and its people. Based on long historical experience, we in the West have come to say that it is a necessary condition for such development. Today, however, we are often surprised to find that other countries, which do not have a tradition of democratic governance and are not even trying to adopt it, are developing faster, reducing the historical lead that we have gained in past eras and very often overtaking us in key development parameters.
Ruth Wisse as Fiddler on the Roof (of the Memorial Church at Harvard), illustration from the Spectator World
Three months after it was published, I finally found an excerpt from the October 2021 book by Prof Ruth Wisse, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, that appeared in the Spectator World:
I've exchanged a few messages with Prof Wisse – as two allies sometimes do – during the 2005 (or 2005-2006) feminist-led witch hunt on Larry Summers and I became aware of the fact that she belonged to a handful of Harvard professors who felt self-confident about their moral foundations and ideological compass. In early 2005, I found out that over 99% of the faculty members were either deluded extreme leftists or (and that was arguably the overwhelming majority) totally spineless opportunists who were eager to more or less overtly encourage any immoral and pathological evolution at Harvard. Ruth Wisse and Harvey Mansfield were the unambiguously voices of conservative morality... and if you thought about others with these extra conditions in mind, you could ask "Who is the third?".
Chaos and violence erupted in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country of Borat's (and 19 million other people) that used to belong to the Soviet Union. The people are pretty rich there, thanks to (mainly) oil, metals, and easy agriculture. Kazakhstan is both the country of Baikonur as well as a member of the CSTO, Russia's counterpart of NATO.
Almaty's Republic Square looks more lively than Pilsen's Republic Square.
Note that the Kazakh language is a Turkic language; but a large fraction of the population, especially the elites and would-be elites, speak Russian. The former capital is the reasonanly warm Almaty in the Southeast (2 million people) but they moved the government to Nursultan (1.2 million like Prague, named after a former leader) in the Central North which will experience –23 °C on Sunday.
The Czech Pirate Party was founded in 2009 and at the beginning, it was mostly meant to be a one-dimensional, anti-copyright party promoting Napster and helping other people to steal things on the Internet (yes, they got the name from digital pirates, not from the marine ones).
However, it gradually found experts in most other topics and it naturally obtained an ideological flavor. Whenever such a flavor was apparent, every sane person must have seen that the Pirates were a far left party. Most of the members promote all the woke, climate alarmist, and other "causes". The party belongs to the far left Green Faction in the European Parliament. Sadly, this fact largely boils down to the successful promotion of the woke and far left views by the EU-distorted schools among the Czech youth in general (the Pirates are mostly a young Czechs' party).
Pirátka, Jana Michailidu, členka rady politického institutu Pirátů, se VEŘEJNĚ HLÁSÍ K IDEOLOGII KOMUNISMU, ZA KETRÝM BĚHEM POSLEDNÍCH 100 LET STOJÍ SMUTNÉ ČÍSLO AŽ 94 000 000 MRTVÝCH. @SpoluKoalice se raduje, že se zbavili KSČM, ale mezitím stranicky podporují Marxovo dítě. pic.twitter.com/2gxXXotRJc
In the October 2021 elections, they ran in a coalition with STAN (Mayors and Independent), and this coalition got a good result. But because of the personal preference votes, Pirates themselves experienced a Waterloo: out of the 38 lawmakers obtained by the coalition, the Pirates only got 4 (although the Soros-style agencies often predicted them to be the strongest single party in the new Parliament with 200 lawmakers). Nevertheless, this hasn't prevented the party from placing whopping 3 people into the new Czech government (run by a coalition of a record number of 5 parties).
E.O. Wilson, a Harvard-Duke biologist sometimes nicknamed "the natural heir to Darwin" and "father of biodiversity" and "father of sociolbiology" (in the narrow sense, the world's most celebrated ants expert) died on Dec 26th. It has actually been 20 years when I reclassified Unscientific Unamerican as a worthless far left cesspool ("science defends itself from the skeptical environmentalist" did it for me back in 2002) and I am confident that I haven't seen a single valuable text there in the 2 decades (although it is true that I didn't try too much).
Maxim Turbulenc's song based on a poem by Josef Kožíšek. An ant fell ill, the whole colony knows it. At midnight, they called the ant physician. After knocking on the patient's heart, the doctor is writing a medical prescription... Of course the ant will get fine. Czech kids' most famous ant is Ferdinand the Ant by Ondřej Sekora, however.
How deep the cesspool has sunken by 2022 is truly incredible. To mark the departure of the famous biologist, UnsciUnam published the "opinion piece"
by a black nurse who looks like a Bill Maher decorated in a transsexual, transracial way. Her "scientific" "articles" universally follow the template "How to make sure that a black patient or a black nurse is a true pain in the aß for the whites in the hospital", garbage that shouldn't have been written, let alone be listed on Google Scholar. The text says something like the following:
We must reckon with Wilson's racist ideas [subtitle]. The ideas are racist, just like Mendel's and Darwin's ideas, because they have claimed that biology influences humans. He has even used the so-called normal distribution which is racist because the mean [the author doesn't seem to know the word "mean", however] represents white supremacy that blacks must be compared to. All people doing this white empiricism [in our white English, it's called science] must be eliminated and replaced with nurses who would fire everyone who would dare to do anything resembling the evil white empiricism.
Add about 10 typos and replace some words with repetitive ones. Excellent. Let me propose an alternative solution. Every adult that is left in the room (of the Academia and hospitals) must immediately fire the author and every single individual who either agrees with this staggering garbage (like a shockingly moronic female calling herself the editor-in-chief), or who is uncertain for more than 5 seconds. These creatures must be stripped of their high school diplomas because high schools do teach all successful students about the importance and universality (and apolitical character) of natural sciences, their giants, the normal distribution, and lots of other things and the high school alumni simply cannot be animals who just mindlessly and stupidly throw their excrements on these essential things.
My sister in the French Riviera just informed me about doubly sad news. Both Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff died of Covid at Parisian "Georges-Pompidou" ICUs; see some French Google News. I think that among victims of the disease, they were closest to me personally (although I am uncertain about the cause of one death of a much older man).
These faces of popular science shows on French TV screens (most famously, Temps X in 1979-1985) had a genuine passion for science and obtained PhDs in theoretical physics. While I wouldn't see their dissertation as a fully meaningful foundation for further exciting research, I think that the papers were at least comparable with the average work that can earn PhDs. Or, I can't resist to make the comparison, with Pierfrancesco's recent paper. But their combination of the concepts was much more passionate and mathematically artistic (and spending more energy with mathematically nontrivial structures and patterns including quantum groups and the KMS state). Their writing was a piece of art that greatly resembled real papers about similar topics and with similarly many equations.
The term "Bogdanov affair" was invented to claim that they have staged a Sokal-like hoax; that was clearly nonsense, they genuinely and obviously believed their work to have been great science. With my roughly neutral approach (combined with some self-evidently positive underlying emotions), I was sufficiently unusual and they liked it. They also helped me to publish a popular book about theoretical physics that discussed many "regular" topics but that has used some of the concepts (and combinations) from their papers as a launchpad.
Alarmism and hurtful, ludicrously ineffective methods to fight the overhyped threats have become an omnipresent part of policymaking and a giant pain in the aßes of those of us who aren't brainwashed morons (and especially those of us who often have to pay for this craze, unlike the fearmongers who usually benefit from the destruction instead).
It's common for millions of psychopaths to talk about climate threats and demand hundreds of medieval rituals claiming to improve the weather. The Wuhan virus and the corresponding respiratory disease, while very real, have been uselessly fought against by regulations whose total cost exceeded 10 if not 20 trillion dollars and most of which have had no detectable positive impact and many of which continue even now when the epidemics is demonstrably over.
But people can invent new kinds of alarm, can't they? The conspiracy theories about 5G have been associated with "truly independent", usually right-wing, folks who don't hide their negative attitude to standard science. For example, we've heard that 5G has killed birds. These low frequencies are extremely unlikely to cause any health issues in any organisms. Low-frequency radiation isn't ionizing and from the cells' viewpoint, they are just slow waves on the ocean.
that was published on the last day of 2021. A new dramatic improvement was achieved in one parameter, the duration, at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST, an acronym that is slowly getting hotter than the WEST again) in Hefei, China. Many of us, sinologists, call the device simply 先进实验超导托卡马克实验装置. The advantage is that you may write the name of the experiment four times a second (at least with the help of Ctrl/V).
The previous record achieved in this facility in 2021 was over 100 seconds, now they added another order of magnitude, to stand above 1,000 seconds. They have reached the last one among the three dreams (or three communist party's plans), 1,000 seconds, 100 million kelvins, and 1 million amperes of current. Their next plan is to reach these three impressive values in one run simultaneously.
Due to some breathtaking recent expenses related to my free expression, I really need your material help... Also try PayPal.me/motls (EUR,CZK avoid a fee)
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