How to survive the Islamists

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

The murder of the "distinguished" and popular English MP David Amess, stabbed to death by a 25-year-old British man of Somali origin, has stirred the media waters. It seems that at least the right-wing and conservative newspapers are running out of patience with the evasive and cowardly attitude of politicians fearing accusations of Islamophobia. That strange trap set by the Islamists for politicians.



There is no such thing as a phobia of Islam. It is only Muslims who find any criticism not only of the Quran but also of political Islamism unacceptable.

The first time we heard this accusation was perhaps from the mouths of the Ayatollahs of the Shiite theocracy in Iran after the 1979 coup.

Death, injury caused by Baldwin were hardly unexplainable miraculous flukes

A tragedy occurred during the shooting of Rust, a Western film. Alec Baldwin stars as a famous criminal Harland Rust who learns that his grandon was accused of an accidental murder. Meanwhile, the actor also accidentally shot at Halyna Hutchins, the chief of photography, and Joel Souza, the film director. He killed the woman and injured the man. Condolences to Hutchins' family, starting with husband Matthew Hutchins and her son Andros.



Hutchins was born in Ukraine and grew at a Soviet Arctic military base between reindeer and submarines. An impressive background for someone who later became a rising star in the U.S. film industry.

Why "science replaced by hodgepodge" is even worse than alchemy

Maritime hodge podge

For two days, I wanted to write another text about the evil trend of "pretending that some chaotic playing with computers is the new science" and Robbert Dijkgraaf, the director of the IAS, pushed me above the critical threshold when he wrote

The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge

in the Quanta Magazine. The title looks bizarre, the normal thing to describe the body of his essay would be the opposite, "the usefulness of useless knowledge", a title that was picked by several authors in the past. Isn't it a typo? At any rate, Dijkgraaf argues that the "hocus pocus AI-based quasi-science" is analogous to alchemy which may look bad but it was very useful. And the periods of chaotic expansion of science and the epochs of systematic consolidation are equally important and they alternate which was good and it is good now, too.

Most Covid deaths are not due to Covid now

A simple calculation showing that Covid-delta is far less lethal than flu



One of the points that those of us who opposed the uncontrolled Covid hysteria emphasized from the beginning was the fact that

the people who got a positive PCR test were not necessarily ill.

In practice, what matters are the fractions. It is a quantitative question. Some of the Covid-positive people have been ill, some of those were hospitalized or they died. But some of the PCR tests are false positives and many truly infected people with a positive PCR test are asymptomatic (or their illness is so mild that it is not worth mentioning). A related statement was that

In most countries, a Covid death only means a "death with a positive PCR test" which doesn't mean that the death was fully or mostly caused by the Fauci virus.

Again, that is an important point to have in mind. But a year ago when the Czech daily casualties became substantial, I finally became certain that the distinction didn't matter in the 2020-2021 winter season. One can look at the total weekly numbers of deaths. In Czechia (10.7 million people), there were numerous weeks in which the normal weekly number of deaths (2100) was doubled (4000+). In fact, the 2020 excess deaths (17k) surpassed the number of Covid deaths by dozens of percent. Some of the other deaths could have been either due to the lockdown and a less inaccessible healthcare; or they could have been deaths that were secretly due to Covid, too.

IVK statement on Mrs Leyen's attacks on Poland

By former Czech president Klaus and his team

When there is a clear threat to democracy in Europe, or rather in the European Union, it is necessary for European democrats to protest loudly. This is no small matter today. Mrs Leyen declared in the European Parliament – quoted in the media, for example immediately by Czech [Public] Television – that 'the decision of the Polish Constitutional Court threatens the foundations of the European Union. The European Commission must protect the citizens of the Union and will therefore act'. That is an unprecedented statement.



Some time ago, the Polish Constitutional Court asked a question that all true democrats have been asking for many decades – should the European integration process result in the creation of a supranational entity that is superior to the individual Member States, or should these states continue to have their sovereignty and only part of it eventually be transferred to Brussels? This has been the whole problem of European integration since the 1950s. Everyone knows or should know. And no one must turn a blind eye to this question. Not even Mrs Leyen.

Aspects of a deleted Twitter account

Two hours ago, TRF commenter gnail was the first source that informed me that my Twitter account "lumidek" was finally deleted. It was created in 2012 and had some 2670 followers during the final moments. Of course it would have had much more, by orders of magnitude, if Twitter weren't running a massive campaign to suppress and/or delete right-wing accounts.

I’m not saying he deserved it but didn’t he defend his racist Czech teammate that abused Glen Kamara.
Stamp out racism! https://t.co/ysRPt12rqH

— Mr NBT (@JoeNBT) October 17, 2021

I believe that the tweet quoted as an excuse for the deletion was a response to this distasteful tweet encouraging violence against Czechs because they are Czechs (a white nation that hasn't started to apologize for its existence). Of course this is not the "main" activity or topic that my account was used for; but I pointed out that BLM thugs that are responsible for similar violence belong to jails or should be punished even more harshly (the injury in the English soccer league could have been a coincidence; but injuries caused by this particular Twitter user, if any, are almost certainly not coincidental). It is a fact and you can't change it by the deletion of an account. Of course, Twitter stands on the side of the racially motivated violence and on the side of terrorism and fundamentalism.

Needless to say, I could have been banned for dozens of other reasons (true observations about Covid-19 were more likely these days). The Twitter moderation tools have been completely hijacked by nasty, dishonest creatures that are wrong about absolutely everything and that are crippling the civilization and decent individual people at every single level.

\(J\bar T\) deformations: how a non-local theory stays UV-complete and conformally symmetric

Two or three decades ago, theoretical high energy physics was much more lively. An aspect of this liveliness was the constant stream of uprisings and minirevolutions. Sourballs and crackpots may have called them fads and they may have criticized the fact that many researchers were joining them because of FOMO. But it was an overwhelmingly good phenomenon. People were sufficiently excited and the system motivated them to work. So when someone found something new – about twistors, BMN string bits, and dozens of other topics (later – many people (including young ambitious people) worked on them. Researchers could have been sure that someone cared about their paper on the fashionable topic and it further stimulated their research.



It's not necessarily Monica's cup of tea but Ozone's Dragostea Din Tei is the greatest product of Romanian culture since Count Dracula. ;-) Leony was recently inspired (what is the polite word for plagiarism?) by that song, the new one is in English.

I am confident that the number of such signs of collective excitement and widespread activity has significantly dropped in a recent decade or so, and especially in the recent five years (some sourballs and crackpots probably celebrate). But there are still examples of mini-industries that look as healthy as we used to know them, their number is just smaller. On Saturday, it will have been four years since the launch of one such mini-industry.

An integrable Lorentz-breaking deformation of two-dimensional CFTs

Monica Guica – whom I have known as a brilliant Harvard grad student (and who has been to Pilsen once) – has found a new class of UV-complete quantum field theories that are actually... not local. Well, this broader industry was founded by Smirnov and Zamolodčikov (Sorbonne+Rutgers; the latter approved my spelling of his name when he was my instructor LOL) in August 2016, i.e. a year earlier. They added some composite operators \(T\bar T\) to the two-dimensional CFT (conformal field theory) action. The action has some extra term that is bilinear in the stress energy tensor.

Where the policy of decarbonising the economy is taking us

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

Somewhat hysterical fears about the contribution of human activity to global warming have dominated the Western elite for several decades, but only relatively recently have the dismantling of coal-fired power plants and the ban on internal combustion engines planned for 2030-35 come into play.

Despite 20% predictions, just 2% of the Czech Parliament will be the Pirates

When I took the picture of the Piratostan bus and these Pirates, I told the comical Pirate that he must expect to be photographed, this is why he wore the hat, right? No, I was told, he wore the hat in order for other Pirates to identify him as a Pirate! ;-) A mature party LOL. I took a picture of their boss Bartoš and many other things there a week ago.

Czechia has more advanced voting procedures than the US or Germany so 1-2 hours after the voting rooms closed at 2 pm on Satuday (they opened at 2 pm on Friday), we had extremely accurate predictions. My Tricolor #8 didn't get in, its 2.76% was highly compatible with the average predictions of the agencies (the Tricolor will get $5 for each voter, about $500,000 in total). But after 100 years, communists dropped of the Parliament (the party was founded in 1921 and it became Stalinist in 1929). Good riddance. Social democracy dropped from the Parliament, too. They were below 5%, and so was the Pledge led by the cop Šlachta (who removed Nečas' government because Nečas' love got a nice purse, and two very similar "crimes").

So far, "Artificial Intelligence" comments are just a preprocessed message picked by a "coach"

AI bots and climate models aren't unique, important, trustworthy, independent sources of information. They are puppets designed to deceive gullible consumers.

In the last debate between some chosen 8 party leaders broadcast by the Czech Public TV (which was considered a terribly chaotic debate with no real opportunity to convey ideas, short time dedicated to each politician, and an excessively dominant or arrogant host, Ms Světlana Witowská), there was an unusual twist. They included Matilda, an Artificial Intelligence Bot (with a female face) who asked a question to each politician (which included the video of the artificial female face in the middle of the screen).



I think that this small farcical event was a good example answering some question about "what the AI subjects think", "who may have responsibility for it", "whether the AI should have human rights", and so on.

Some EU laws are unconstitutional in Poland

The belief that Poland has transferred most of its sovereignty to unelected EU officials and declared the primacy of "EU laws" over the Polish constitution is legally incorrect

Some institutions of the European Union have been attacking Poland by saying that their judges didn't have enough independence. Well, the Polish constitutional tribunal just showed quite a lot of independence when it sensibly analyzed the legal conditions and concluded that many laws of the European Union are incompatible with the fundamental Polish law architecture.



OK, Evacuation just sounds as a good song for the talk about the "legal Polexit". ;-)

In particular, it is the laws that were constructed without a tangible influence of the authorities of the Republic of Poland. Note that in 2004, Poland and others joined the European Union which was conceptually still an international organization with a large number of multilateral treaties that are usually signed and obeyed by all member countries. The conversion of the EU to "something else" (a superstate or an empire) was already planned by the 1993 Maastricht Treaty but in 2004, the EU was still just an intense collection of treaties between sovereign countries.

Blanket electricity subsidies are yet another communist insanity

I simply have to return to the topic of inflation which I last discussed four weeks ago. Things have clearly gotten more exreme. Inflation has jumped in most countries; and the deniers of the inflation have become even crazier. Only a few central banks led by the Czech National Bank do the right thing – which is to truly aggressively hike the interest rates (which really shouldn't have been lowered in 2020 at all because the crazy Covid lockdowns mainly brought a reduction of the supply which is really the "opposite" than a reduction of the demand).



Five months ago, I correctly predicted that the European electricity prices would go to the Moon. It was unavoidable because there were many effects that implied an increasing and perhaps accelerating demand (post-Covid recovery, wealth of people from the Covid helicopter money, and the expansion of the silly fashion of the electric cars, among many other things); and a decreasing supply (the constant shutdown of fossil fuel and German nuclear power plants). Also, the wind wasn't really blowing as expected etc. What a surprise, if you go to PXE.cz, the quarterly Czech prices are 267 and 416 Euros per MWh, beating yesterday's already wild record by some extra 40%. It looks like a singularity, we are approaching the point when the prices will have added an order of magnitude in a year.

Global warming: Nobel Prize in Physics has become a joke, too

Yesterday, Scandinavian officials announced that the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to some folks who discovered the receptors of temperature and touch which sounds like interesting biophysics (in fact, a better candidate for a physics prize than what we discuss below). However, minutes ago, a new shock awaited us, especially 1/2 of the announcement is utterly shocking.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

Giorgio Parisi got one-half

for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales

which is acceptable although I would obviously vote No. Giorgio Parisi has been a top notch particle physicist who has worked on QCD, partons, asymptotic freedom, Monte Carlo simulations, and even SUSY, and co-authored with men like Virasoro, to show that he has really been close to "my field" (his collaboration distance from me is 3, through Ferrara and Freedman). He increasingly focused on things like spin glasses, complexity, behavior of flocks of birds and planetary systems, and similar things.

Complexity-related ideas may be interesting but none of them is true Nobel Prize-level material – well, with this drop of the Nobel Prize, my assertion just became tautologically false.

Facebook outage highlighted the instability of the dependence on the web and its Gleichschaltung

Facebook and all of its services such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, among others, had a 6-hour-long outage yesterday. Because of the transfer of the unsatisfied FB users elsewhere and their need to constantly check what is going on, other parts of the web got overloaded. The UPC-now-Vodafone cable Internet which I use was down for more than an hour in Czechia, too. It seems that a similar "secondary effect" explanation applies to outages of Bank of America, Southwest Airlines, Zoom, Snapchat, and others.

Situation of telegram and Zuckerberg's apps right now#DeleteFacebook #MessengerDown #Telegram pic.twitter.com/pkP6q4Joyo

— khadem (@unknownnnboy1) October 4, 2021

The root cause was a disappearance of the routing data for Facebook servers from the Internet. Someone did a BGP update, apparently through a web interface, and made a mistake (or a deliberate sabotage, whatever we think about the existence of an intent). The routers across the world were preprogrammed so that no domains related to Facebook existed. This has resulted not only in an inaccessible Facebook for billions of users across the world (all of them); the employees of Facebook couldn't work (which they do through "Workspaces"), either. Independently of that, it was claimed that files with 1.5 billion users' data were offered for sale. Some people have speculated about the relationship between the outage and the screaming by a whistleblower (as far as I understand, it is just some worthless activist who is even more far left than Facebook itself and doesn't have anything whatever except for insults around "hate speech" and similar BS).

In fact, a more dramatic (and comical) consequence of the glitch was that most FB employees couldn't get to their buildings because the locks are operated by an electronic mechanism that basically requires a Facebook login as well. Because you can't log into Facebook, you can't make your key card operate, and that is why you can't even get to the building which might be needed to fix the problem with the Facebook login!