Madrid announces nuclear war #155

As we have expected for quite some time, further escalation has taken place in the tension between Spain and Catalonia. A week ago, the authoritarian government in Madrid issued an ultimatum to the Catalan government: revoke everything or else... The deadline was ultimately moved to today 10 am or so.



155 is the Czech telephone number to call an ambulance.

The Catalan government has previously announced that it would ignore the blackmail and the deadline because that's not an acceptable format for the political discussions about such important matters. Every civilized person agrees with that. Shortly after the deadline, Rajoy's government in Madrid announced that it would ignite the nuclear option, the Article 155 of the constitution, on Saturday. It enjoys the support of the socialists, the king, and virtually the whole fascist nation.

Anti-inflation quacks supported not by science but by special anti-science social interests

Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a rant:

I totally mean it: Inflation never solved the flatness problem.

I would personally never allow a student to get a degree from theoretical physics or something like that if she were a quack like her who just doesn't get the most fundamental ideas in the field – and she doesn't. But there are good reasons why she can "totally mean it". Quacks like her may do well because while her total scientific incompetence is a minus from the viewpoint of the actual experts, it's a plus from the viewpoint of the bad people "around" science.

For example, George Soros just gave $18 billion (80% of his wealth) to his "charities". You can be sure that a part of this money will be used to attack science, just like it was used in recent years. Obnoxious antiscientific whores aren't that bad, are they? In fact, they are good, discriminated against by the evil white male scientists, so why don't we turn statements like "inflation never solved the flatness problem" in a virtue that should be rewarded?

Just try to appreciate how much evil may be done with $18 billion that is sent to carefully, ideologically picked corners.

The whole system underlying science and other meritocratic human activities – at least those whose importance isn't "immediately" impacting the well-being of the ordinary Joe – is collapsing as the people allow scum like George Soros to create "compensating" anti-meritocratic structures that switch the evolution into the reverse: What sucks gets to the top.

Czech elections: top 8 parties, programs, coalitions

I think that the number of readers of these posts on Czech politics is rather low but someone asked me. OK, we have elections on Friday and Saturday. Here is a forecast:



The top 8 parties above the 5% threshold are shown above. Sadly, the Party of the Free Citizens and similarly reasonable right-wing, new party of the Realists won't get to the Parliament, it seems, and they will subtract lots of votes of the wise right-wing voters. Also, STAN-the-Mayors have a slight chance to get to the Parliament, they're a more modern version of KDU discussed below.

What are the parties?

The winner is expected to be ANO, at 25% – it may be much more or much less. The name means Yes, and it is an acronym of the Alliance of the Pissed-Off Citizens. The owner of this movement is the second wealthiest Czech citizen (€3 billion, like Trump), former Slovak communist secret police snitch (now officially again) Mr Andrej Babiš. Everyone else in the party or movement is just a corrupt puppet so if and when someone physically removes Babiš, ANO will be dead, too.

Babiš, an owner of agricultural farms, production of chickens, chemical companies, newspapers, reproduction clinics etc. (through a trust) constantly plays the role of an outsider although he was the ultimate insider – top communist cadre – during communism; he's controlled the party bosses in the 1990s; and he's been the finance minister in recent 4 years. He repeats slogans that "everyone is corrupt but he can't be because he's a billionaire" while he steals billions in assorted subsidies, e.g. for his disgusting yellow rape (biofuels). He is being prosecuted right now for the €2 million EU subsidy fraud to fund his "Stork Nest" luxurious farm. He has done lots of other things that violated the laws, abused his power to destroy his competition etc...

At any rate, he's obviously the hero of the bottom 25% of the nation – mostly because he is a primitive just like them so they vote him as a member of their subspecies.

He has no ideology, he only cares about increasing his power and wealth. So he copies the majority opinions of the citizens on all these questions he doesn't care about. So he is somewhat skeptical about the EU and is considered to be a horror for the Brussels folks – although I believe this idea is wrong because it could be trivial for Brussels to turn him into a puppet. He is against the Euro, against the adoption of migrants – because a majority of Czechs is. He wants a much tougher terror against small businesses while collecting taxes and stuff like that. The EU may be dangerous but his desires to turn Czechia into a dictatorship seem much more urgent to me now.

LIGO-Virgo detects a collision of neutron stars

First simultaneous electromagnetic and gravitational wave observation

Please watch here, look at the LIGO Twitter account, LIGO web pages about the event (news, detection, chirp sound), and read a Nature paper or the paper on GRB 170817A in Physical Review Letters that was released exactly when the press conference began:



LIGO detected the collision first. Sadly, Virgo saw nothing. So they turned this fact into a virtue and concluded that the event had to be close enough to one of the blind spots of Virgo.

Far left terrorizes Dr Amy Farrah Fowler over her wise NYT essay on sex assaults

Mayim Bialik is an amazing woman. She was a kid actress but didn't get everything she needed so she also earned her PhD in neuroscience, much like Amy Farrah Fowler, her character in America's #1 watched TV series – who has just married Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. At some moment, she realized that she can't live quite happily without her entertainment skills to be displayed and that's why returned to acting.



On Friday 13th, she wrote an op-ed for The New York Times

Mayim Bialik: Being a Feminist in Harvey Weinstein’s World

She wrote that she was "disgusted" by the magnitude of Harvey Weinstein's sexual predation. But the same sentence started with "though" and you may imagine – that was enough for a big problem for her.

Austrian elections: solid right-wing victory, greens implode

Recent Austrian presidential elections ended with a statistical tie. After some disputable oscillations, the green man defeated the younger anti-immigration candidate and became the president.

But Austria's right-wing inclination hasn't disappeared at all. On the contrary, today's parliamentary elections – with a shockingly high turnout around 80% – ended with a clear victory of the right-wing, "acceptably" anti-immigration party led by 31-year-old whizz-kid Sebastian Kurz. ÖVP has earned 32% which is 8% more than last time.



"Far right" and strongly antimigration Freedom Party FPÖ got 27.4%, over 6% more than the last time, and is Kurz's preferred coalition partner. The right-wing coalition will have a very safe majority.

At the end, the SPÖ social democrats led by current prime minister Kern dropped from the 2nd place to 3rd place with 26.7% but it won't be enough. They got as much as they did last time. Note that for an Austrian party to be successful above 10%, it has to have both Ö and P in their 3-letter acronym. So who lost deputies?

German interior minister: let's celebrate Muslim holidays

Czech readers were shocked by yet another dose of staggering news about the Islamization in Germany. The German minister of interior, Thomas de Maiziere, has recommended to introduce Muslim holidays in Germany. Shockingly enough, this man is a member of the "Christian" Democratic Union, CDU, the strongest party in Germany.



The proposal was criticized by some other politicians – especially those from Bavaria's CSU – but immediately praised by Martin Schulz, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Germany's second most powerful party. Incidentally, the Czech party with the same acronym – SPD – is led by a Czech-Japanese nationalist who wants to completely ban Islam, among many other things. ;-)

Calls to dumb down science at Wikipedia have to be dismissed

Journalists i.e. pompous fools love to pretend they understand things even if they don't have the slightest clue

I have started hundreds of science and hundreds of non-science articles at Wikipedia, edited thousands of others, and actually gained some automatic administrator privileges that allow me to edit certain articles when most of the regular people can't. Wikipedia isn't perfect but it's been immensely helpful to me – and I think that many of you – many times. Well, it's fashionable to sling mud at Wikipedia but scientists use Wikipedia more than they admit. A project like that had to be created but I am still grateful to Jimbo Wales for actually turning the vision into reality – currently the fifth most visited website in the world – some years ago.

Now, Wikipedia isn't perfect and in many cases, its texts are biased if not downright untrue. I think it's obvious that politically flavored articles are mostly left-leaning. Whenever a topic has been politicized, you should be careful and realize that someone could have hidden some key information or promoted some fishy memes. In particular, whenever you read an article related to the debate about climate change, it is very likely that William Connolley, an official at the U.K. Green Party, has "touched" it. In recent years, however, his vegetarian diet has basically destroyed his brain so he is no longer able to write a comprehensible sentence.

I would say that in most cases, the key facts and definitions are included in the important enough articles and if there's some bias, it's just the bias in the tone in which the article is written. When it is so, a sensible reader such as you may still extract the useful information and rephrase it in a neutral way which removes all the left-wing flavor.

Hours ago, journalist Michael Byrne at Motherboard.Vice.Com claimed that

Wikipedia’s Science Articles Are Elitist

His subtitle says

Maybe Wikipedia readers shouldn’t need science degrees to digest articles about basic topics. Just an idea.

Well, it's an extremely stupid and pernicious idea. Articles about scientific topics such as those he mentioned are written in the elitist, rigorous enough, jargon-dependent style because they're articles about objects and concepts that are being used by scientists, an elite, and science needs a certain amount of rigor and jargon. You don't need the actual degrees to understand specialized science articles but you need the same skills or knowledge that could bring you an actual degree if you wanted to get one.

If you don't have the skills or knowledge that are necessary for people to get science degrees, you shouldn't be surprised that you can't understand articles about science.

When even a muddled Maudlin trumps Nobelist 't Hooft in quantum mechanics

Off-topic, Nobel: the physics Nobel prize went exactly to the three men whom I recommended which is great. Now, Martin Rees wrote a tirade that teams (more than 3) should be rewarded instead. And an Arab inkspiller says that Einstein couldn't or shouldn't get a Nobel prize now (even though isolated theorists are still getting prizes in analogy with Einstein). Can you really read the damn Nobel's will? It originally insisted on one winner per year per field – which was already expanded to three – and there are extremely good reasons not to dilute the prizes further which simply can't change after 100 years. These prizes reward folks who have done way more than what they were compensated for by salaries. Generic workers and spokeswomen of LIGO etc. are just technicians and secretaries who were already compensated by their salary, at least approximately, for their business-as-usual. The LIGO Nobel prize went to 3 particular men and all the talk about "whole teams that win it" are just politically correct lies that all the important people are forced to parrot by the organized mediocre ones. They're bullšit and it's just absolutely terrible when this politically correct garbage is treated by someone as reality. I urge the Arab and Rees jerks to memorize the actual winners' biographies, shut up, and calculate.

If you don't know, muddled or Maudlin is a puzzle and the solution is "beery"! It's impossible not to mock a guy's surname whose first three consonants are MDL. ;-)

A reader sent me a few URLs to recent texts by the anti-quantum zealots. You can be sure that they haven't disappeared, either. A certain Don Weingarten has proposed a new, 51,682nd interpretation of quantum mechanics by rearranging the words "hidden variable", "theory", "single world", "many worlds" in a new way. Jess Riedel helpfully summarizes the the new important idea of the paper by pointing out that there's none. But according to Riedel, the new aspect of the paper is that it shows that some people find it appealing to use the words from another paper that has no ideas.

Last month, Nobel prize winner Gerard 't Hooft who became a full-time warrior against quantum mechanics some 20 years ago published

Free Will in the Theory of Everything

"Philosopher" Tim Maudlin has responded via Facebook – on September 22nd and October 3rd – and some people including 't Hooft have joined the discussion under these Facebook posts. On this blog, Maudlin's fake science has been discussed at least since 2011 when Maudlin displayed his anti-quantum exhibitionism under a guest blog by my former PhD adviser.

Junk PC subjects at schools spread like fire

Václav Klaus Jr, a shadow minister in the right-wing ODS and a son of the Czech ex-president, has received some mail from a mother of a high school student:

Good morning, I just found out that the gymnasium that my son attends has replaced geography by the multicultural education this semester. I am incredibly upset but I don't know how to proceed. I don't want any action to turn against him at the end... Would you kindly give me an advise? Thanks for your answer, have a nice day

The mother stayed anonymous and I am not sure whether Klaus has given any helpful advise to her. But he used this letter to shout "let us stop it". Many of us, his followers, have looked at some details about this multicultural education and its cousins.

Czech president's pragmatism too much for Ukraine

...and a new wave of anti-Russian hysteria in the West...

Czech president Miloš Zeman has given a talk in the Council of Europe – a human-rights organization covering European countries including Ukraine and Russia – in Strasbourg. He repeated that the sanctions against Russia are counterproductive.

Zeman asked his guards to "remove the Czech Television cameraman, otherwise I will kill him" ("I will kill him" is obviously just the standard slang for "he raises my subjective level of dissatisfaction") which created some extra responses.

But aside from his description of links between the Armenian genocide and the Islamic terrorism, he has also discussed Crimea, criticized Khrushchev's decision to incorporate Crimea to Ukraine, and said that "its incorporation to the Russian Federation is mission accomplished". He enumerated several top politicians and former politicians who agree with him that an "attempt to take Crimea from Russia would lead to a European war" which should be avoided. See TASS for a nice sketch.

He recommended Russia to compensate Ukraine for its lost territory – either by money or by fossil fuels. In this way, Zeman managed to unite most Ukrainian politicians and some Russian politicians in their anger. While his view is sensible and pragmatic – of course, reasonable people should be able to figure out some "fair solution" and compensate the real world's deviation from this "fair solution" financially – he indicated that the Ukrainians are prostitutes who are eager to sell their organs for the money; while the Russians are thieves who have done something wrong and must pay something for it now.

These negative reactions simply reflect the existing and nurtured tensions between Russia and Ukraine. If they were willing to look at things impartially, like e.g. Zeman, they could see some approximate "objective reality" that is the same for Russians and Ukrainians, and something may be done to calm the situation down and improve it.

America signs a peace treaty with coal

Some mixed feelings about the happy death of the Clean Power Plan

Donald Trump isn't the first president of the U.S. Some younger readers probably no longer know the name but Trump's predecessor was called Mr Barack Obama and he has done some mad things to please America's extreme left-wingers. One of them was the adoption of the "Clean Power Plan" that was basically killing coal as the source of energy in the U.S. – while using the pseudoscientific excuse that there was something wrong about the CO2 emitted when the coal burns.



The impact of acid rains which have nothing to do with CO2, as I will remind you.

The "Clean Power Plan" was insane from any economic viewpoint. For example, even if you thought that it was a good idea to try to cool the globe by reducing CO2 emissions, and it's not a good idea even qualitatively, folks like Bjorn Lomborg have calculated (as mentioned in a 2015 blog post) that the whole "Clean Power Plan" would reduce the global mean temperature by 0.013 °C before 2100.

Just imagine that. The world's main superpower was supposed to abandon the cheapest source of energy – or one of the two cheapest sources, we could say – in order to reduce the temperature by the undetectable 0.013 °C. And you have to wait for almost a century to feel it. And most of you won't really agree that a cooler weather is a better weather – indeed, most of the people on Earth have good reasons to say the opposite thing. Regardless of debates about the greenhouse effect, the economic evaluation of the "Clean Power Plan" was obvious: the plan was plain insane.

The Spanish-Catalan deal

We, the Spanish king, Spanish prime minister, and the president of the Catalan community thank The Reference Frame for the mediation and

solemnly declare

our desire to conclude the centuries of the mutually beneficial co-existence of our nations and peacefully create the Catalan Republic on the territory of the Catalan autonomous community. The separation of the Kingdom of Spain to the new Kingdom of Spain ("new Spain") and the Catalan Republic ("new Catalonia") will proceed according to the following principles:



Succession. The new Spain will be the only successor of the Kingdom of Spain. It will inherit the membership in the international organizations and symbols from the old Spain. Both countries pledge to keep the united leagues in major sports up to the end of 2020, unless agreed otherwise.

HSBC Czechia cooperated in Babiš's subsidy fraud

The second wealthiest Czech citizen and a former Slovak communist police agent Mr Andrej Babiš is believed to earn some 27% in the parliamentary elections two weeks from now – with his Führer-style "ANO" ("Yes", an acronym for "The Alliance of the Pissed-Off Citizens") movement. He's the most likely "future prime minister" according to most people (well, I, for one, have big doubts about it, but maybe I am just too optimistic). But his apparent criminal record is rich and diverse. He's been stripped of his immunity as a lawmaker and he should receive the official charges (subsidy fraud; damaging of the financial interests of the EU) from the police today or in a few days. (Update, Monday 3:50 pm: as I predicted, Babiš just received the charges from the police today. He immediately started some complaints and appeals.)

The Šuman Group is an unknown individual or group funnily named after Julius Šuman, a former officer at the communist secret police who acted as Babiš' boss throughout the 1980s. They have released numerous recordings showing that Babiš has done many bad things as well as some juicy things. The Šuman Group was silent for a few months but we got something yesterday.

You should look at the recent Šuman GIFs because they're in English. They're the internal documents and correspondence of the HSBC Holdings, a large British bank that has a Czech subsidiary. The Czech subsidiary isn't one of the banks that every regular Czech knows or opens his account in. It's mostly a bank looking for big fish – like Babiš – and I guess that all the loans are checked in London.