Yo-yo banned in Syria

Blamed for drought by Muslims

BEIRUT (Syria), [date]. Drought and severe cold is disastrously affecting the cattle in Syria, and the Muslim chiefs at Damascus have attributed the wrath of the heavens to the recent introduction of the yo-yo.

They say that while the people are praying for rain to come down from above the yo-yo goes down, and before reaching the ground springs up through the subtle pull of the string.




The chiefs interviewed the Prime Minister, and exposed the evil influence of yo-yos, so they were immediately banned.




Today the police paraded the streets and confiscated the yo-yos from everyone they saw playing with them.

---

Source: Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, New South Wales: 1888 - 1954), 23 January 1933

The censored date at the top was January 21st. I changed "Moslems" to "Muslims" so that it's not clear from the beginning that the text is ancient. Educated readers realized that anyway because Beirut hasn't belonged to "Syria" since 1943 (the correct name of the state should have been The French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, anyway) and because Muslim chiefs will only return to command police in Damascus after the possibly looming war.

At any rate, the similarity with the IPCC-backed religion cannot be overlooked. People see two things happening at about the same time (one of them has been happening for billions of years but they don't care), they decide that correlation and even coincidence is the same thing as causation, and the rest is just about making sure that the law enforcement forces enforce this deep life-saving insight. ;-)

The yo-yos probably resemble the rain droplets. Before they can reach the ground thanks to the gravity of the prayers, the force from an evil string returns them to the clouds. The springs, if any, stretched between the clouds and the rain droplets may look too weak but that's OK because they're surely strengthened by positive feedbacks. The debate is over.

Thanks to Steve Goddard for the URL

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Getting ready for a war against Syria

...robust Czechoslovak weapons unlikely to resist for too long...

The civil war in Syria sucks, like most civil wars. The rebels aren't saints (and Russia accused them of using sarin gas a month ago) but it's the Syrian government that may be expected to behave more responsibly. Given the strong indications that chemical weapons have been used, it's not surprising that the U.S. forces and allies are thinking about an attack that may begin as early as on Thursday.



Photo from syrianhistory.com

Such a reaction of the West is understandable but needless to say, the West may be playing with fire. And with Czechoslovak weapons, too.




An attack against the regime of Assad Jr is likely to be actively led by the U.S., somewhat emotionally supported by France, the next most hawkish Western nation, perhaps by the U.K., and more passively approved by pretty much every Western country (our new president Zeman, an outspoken critic of the Muslim world, immediately reported he wants to send troops to the Golan Heights i.e. to Israel's border region near Syria, in order to secure the superpower status of the Czech Republic and to speed up the incorporation of Assyria into Naphtali's Realm). In contrast with the peace rallies before the second war in Iraq, a decade ago, the peace activists don't seem too excited about protests because a war is raging in Syria, anyway.



The middle tenor, Erdogano (it's the guy who actually sings for everyone), won't support his two tenor comrades on the sides this time. Well, the left chap has been replaced by Rouhani. Music: Funiculi Funicula [CZ] (which surprisingly means "Funicular cable car in Naples is going up, funicular cable car in Naples is going down" – English is less efficient than Neapolitan [and Italian]).

Russia and China oppose the attack but these countries are hopefully not terribly involved in the situation because things could get really messy at the global level. (Saudis are offering oil incentives to Russia if it abandons Syria.) Meanwhile, most countries in the region, including Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are likely to happily support the attack on Syria (Israel needs to pretend lots of reticence that is probably fake). Libya is slightly against the attack but it won't actively defend Syria.

The most important regional supporter of Assad is obviously Iran and every responsible planner must be ready for the option that the expected American war on Syria will quickly grow into a war against Iran.




This is a Czech blog so I can't resist to semi-proudly ;-) mention a specific dirty role that my homeland – well, mainly its historical predecessor – would be playing in the war.

It just happens that no one else than Syria under Hafez al-Assad (the current leader's dad who was at the top between 1963 and 2000) was Czechoslovakia's most important non-European business partner during much of the 1970s and 1980s. Assad was a clear left-winger of his own sort and Czechoslovakia was his nation's favorite exporter.

The 1975 picture at the top shows the last communist Czechoslovak president, Gustáv Husák (left), teaching al-Assad how to blow the traditional Bohemian glass, at least a simplified version of it. Al-Assad must have been a good student. He also visited Prague in 1985. The reverse visit by Husák to Damascus occurred in 1979.



You may ask what was the most important category of industrial products that Czechoslovakia was sending to Syria. Well, yes, you shouldn't be surprised. Czechoslovakia has always been a great power in weaponry – and yes, my hometown used to play a very important role in that sector as well, but especially 100 years ago – and the answer is therefore weapons. To mention particular products, Syria has bought numerous T-55 tanks (shown on the picture above, during the martial law in Poland; also produced in USSR and Poland) and Aero L-29 Dolphin/Maya jet training aircraft (below; purely Czechoslovak).



At some moment, the Syrian debt with respect to Czechoslovakia grew to $0.9 billion which is a lot of money, especially because of the letter "B" at the beginning. All the debt has been repaid a few years ago. That's a good thing for our coffers because Syria could very well become broke this Friday. ;-)

Needless to say, the Czechoslovak-Syrian relationships changed from the friendly blowing jobs shown at the top to hostile interactions when Václav Havel took over after the Velvet Revolution. Al-Assad Sr has been reported to be properly pissed off by many words that Havel sent to the former ally in the Middle East. Well, Al-Assad Sr stopped communicating with my country but in 2001, when his son was already activated, the communication got restored and the new agreement about the repayment of the debt was signed in 2005 (a part of the debt was forgiven, anyway).



Omnipol, an existing Czech company that is selling similar weapons, is clearly doing some business with partners connected to Syria even these days. (And a few years ago, Wikileaks showed that the U.S. was anxious about these Czech exports in 2006, too.)

I don't know whether it's a part of a plan but our products are able to get to Syria indirectly. For example, some RPG-75s, Czechoslovak single-shot anti-tank weapons from the 1970s, were spotted in Syria this spring. The immediate country that exported it there was Croatia but it's still our weapons. A version of RPG-75 for schoolkids ;-) (or at least it says so) is shown on the picture above.

One must realize that they may have billions of current dollars worth of weapons just from Czechoslovakia which was surely not the only source of their weaponry. That's a lot of gadgets that are able to harm U.S. (and, less likely, allies') forces. Don't get me wrong: I do think that it should be straightforward to beat the Syrian regime, at most in weeks.



However, once again, I sincerely hope that the military planners in the U.S. know what to do when Iran responds in a dramatic way and so on. I also sincerely hope that the traders won't react too hysterically (over half a percent down on Dow Jones; the folks are clearly not calm). It's just Syria and if there's going to be mess in that country, it won't be much different from what is already happening over there now while the potential for a rosier future will be substantial.



Song "Syria" by Mr Sámer Issa, a Syrian-Czech singer and a local 2004 "American Idol" bronze medalist.

A war against a coalition of Syria and Iran could be lengthy, dramatic, and energy-consuming. On one hand, this coalition would be stronger than Iraq – and the war in Iraq was a bit nontrivial by itself. On the other hand, some regional allies could fight against Syria and Iran as well which could make it easier for the West. Do we really know that the benefits exceed the costs – on a human, economic, and political level? Isn't it a pity that the price and value of such an intervention and its consequences for the people in Syria, in the Middle East, and in the rest of the world hasn't been really publicly discussed in the West? I think it is. At any rate, if there's gonna be an attack against Syria, I wish the Western forces a lots of good luck in ultimately bringing some humanity to that country. I say "ultimately" because I don't think that wars can ever make societies more human "immediately".



Love in a Baguette by Mr Xindl X and Ms Olga Lounová, a desirable outcome of the war in Syria: a love song in McDonald's. The guy complains that he has to buy things he didn't want and to supersize them, too – just because she has a crush on the clerk. Aside from several related economics theories, the song also argues that the supply determines the demand. Currently there are no McDonald's restaurants in Syria, one of the signs of the inhumanity of the regime. I won't show you the beheadings and similar horrors because this blog has some taste.

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Detonation of the Sun

A frequent source of links has sent me the coordinates of a page

Explosion of Sun

introducing a paper by Alexander Bolonkin and Joseph Friedlander urging all the physicists to think about the possibility that a malicious regime will send a thermonuclear weapon into the Sun and speed up the reactions inside the Sun – effectively converting all of our beloved star to a giant H-bomb long before our main source of useful energy is expected to go red giant around the year 7.5 billion AD.



This picture contains just a real-world eruption! Via IO9.

In the authors' opinion, physicists and others have a moral duty to either exclude the possibility, or look for security measures that would protect us against such a rogue regime, or prove that such a protection is impossible.

First of all, is such an explosion possible?




I don't think so. Note that the concern isn't much different from the old concern that some fathers of the H-bomb had to think about – namely whether the H-bomb would start to devour the whole atmosphere and the rest of the Earth as it realized that it's a thermonuclear fuel that may be burned.

Why is it similar?




It's similar because the present authors are afraid of the increase of the Sun's temperature from the current 9-17 million Celsius degrees in the Sun core to temperatures that are at least an order of magnitude higher and allow the reactions to be exponentially sped up. Consequently, the present temperature is negligible relatively to the desired one. In that respect, the comparison of real and "desired" temperatures is analogous to the situation on Earth where the atmosphere is also much cooler than the temperature needed to change the atmosphere to thermonuclear fuel. In both cases, the initial temperature may be neglected and approximated by zero.

Moreover, the Sun density is about 1.4 times the maximum density of water so it is surprisingly comparable to the densities encountered on our blue, not green planet, too.

The arguments showing that such a risk isn't there are somewhat subtle – the "proof" that we're safe is in no way trivial from a beginner's viewpoint. But I am confident it may be formulated. It seems to me that the "detonating Sun alarmists", much like the "detonating Earth's atmosphere alarmists", are neglecting various other quantities describing the environment that go beyond the temperature and density.

It's plausible that you may create much higher temperatures in a cubic meter of the Sun – probably only on the surface because it's implausible that any material will be able to penetrate through the solar matter whose temperature starts at 6000 Celsius degrees or so (all conventional materials melt and/or evaporate around that point). But if you create such huge temperatures in a small region, it doesn't imply that they will spread.

It seems clear to me that the rate of cooling of the "detonatingly hot" region will be too high when the size of the region grows. More importantly, you just never obtain a high density in this way. The density of the Sun is what it is, dictated by the overall solar mass and the solar volume, and an extra bomb doesn't change this counting much. Because the density of the bulk of the Sun will remain fixed, the ultimate near-equilibrium temperature of fusion is pretty much dictated by this density, and this temperature is what we observed in the Sun today.

See also my answer Why Jupiter isn't a star, whether Jupiter may be blown up and what it would mean, how to stop or blow apart a star, why asteroids around us don't have relativistic velocities, or many other questions and answers about related dramatically catastrophic cosmic (im)possibilities. ;-)

For these reasons and others, I am not really afraid of a Khamenei who would like to turn the ancient Egyptian God, the Sun, into an unhinged Allah. ;-)

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Richard Lindzen vs Aljazeera gladiators

Some time ago, mostly Arabic-language-based politically correct TV station Aljazeera bought Current TV, a failed U.S. TV station, from former vice-president Al Gore and his partner for hundreds of millions of dollars.

They apparently got more interested in the climate and decided to debate Prof Richard Lindzen of MIT, a famous climate skeptic, in "Head to Head" which is described as "Al Jazeera's new forum of ideas - a gladiatorial contest tackling big issues such as faith, the economic crisis, democracy and intervention in front of an opinionated audience at the Oxford Union."



The video is 48 minutes long. Will you watch it?

The web page with some words and the video above is here:

Climate change: Fact or fiction?

My understanding is that Dick was hired as a bull while the brainwashed journalists indefinitely repeating the clichés about man-made climate change are supposed to be the gladiators.




At the beginning, Dick registers himself both as a skeptic and a denier, depending on what you mean. He says - and I also agree – that it's plausible that the CO2 emissions caused more than 50 percent of the warming in the last 50 or 90 years or whatever but what is the main mistake in the reasoning is that such an innocent assumption implies that there's a need to act, that there's an existential threat.




A hysterical white man asks about the catastrophe caused by the fact that we won't stop at doubling but we will continue indefinitely. Richard didn't really answer – or didn't get the opportunity to answer. It was a bit confusing. That's nice to be hysterical but even if we do, the temperatures will increase (counting the increase due to CO2) only linearly even if we expand the consumption of fossil fuels exponentially. That's due to the approximately logarithmic dependence. We obviously run out of the exponential trend at some point.

I had to turn the video off for five minutes because the dark-skinned jerk, the gladiator called Mehdi Hasan, just drove me up the wall with the constant insults against Richard who is "fringe" etc. I just hate this lynching, Nazi approach to finding the truth and I hate the people who are doing that. Yes, I want them to die. They're scum.

Just after 12 minutes when I started to think that Dick is amazingly brave to come to this den of aggressive morons, it became pretty clear that the audience in Oxford overwhelmingly supports Dick. A viewer started to talk about the perfect consensus that used to be imposed by the Inquisition and was rewarded by a loud applause. ;-)

After Mark Lynas' monologue, I had to suspend the video for extra five minutes to avoid vomiting. For him, the consensus is not just 97% as we sometimes hear but 99% and we have to stop "the experiment with the Earth". Dear green imbecile, the big experiment on the Earth has been running for 4.7 billion years and it will be running for extra 7.5 billion years when the Sun goes red giant. If you don't like it, please kindly f*ck off this blue, not green planet where you have absolutely no moral right to pollute the intellectual atmosphere.

Lots of debates about the funding by the Big Oil. Dick says that BP, Shell, and others mostly support the climate alarm. It's OK what he says and he's a preeminent scientist whom I like and admire but I would still admit that there are (a bit younger) folks, like Morano, who would be able to use the same time to overwhelm the audience with hundreds of relevant (and accurate) numbers and facts. Surprisingly, they (including Lynas) sort of agree and admit that fossil fuels are needed, the alarmists get more money, and the dirty-funding accusations are ludicrous.

The host behaves as if he were surprised that Dick doesn't like the environmental movement much. ;-) If he's really surprised, then it shows that he must have been living outside the real world so far. Lynas also talks about some of his disputes with the movement – he is pro-nuclear. Richard says that no one is going to change anything that matters. "Save the Planet" is an extreme slogan.

The host is offended that Richard is relaxed instead of hysterical – every good person should be hysterical which is also why the host's near countrymates demolished some skyscrapers in New York 12 years ago. He shoots idiotic proclamations about the costs-and-benefits by William Nordhaus, some hostility from opportunist Kerry Emanuel's mouth, and so on. I had to suspend the video to write this paragraph and drank 0.01 liters of domestic rum ;-) which allowed me to save 5 minutes from the otherwise required good-mood pause.

Relaxed Richard says that if there's no doable solution that matters, it makes no sense to make symbolic acts. People should be free to get stronger, smarter, and reach whatever conclusions they're led to. Applause. David Rose of Mail on Sunday, pretending to be mostly skeptic, says that he surely wants emissions to go down – they need to – and it's being claimed that everyone in the debate agrees. Well, I surely think that Richard doesn't and I don't. So Richard repeats some things about the futile symbols that clearly imply that he disagrees. Myles Allen says some of the same junk as David Rose – that we ultimately need to decarbonize the economy. He only differs from other brainwashed alarmists in the technicalities. Richard is smiling.

Richard answers a woman's question – oil industry has (financial and survival) interests like everyone else. What a surprise. Someone asks whether the alarmist case relies on computer models. Richard effectively says that the estimates of the sensitivity do. Discussions on whether the non-specialists in the IPCC voted on the key IPCC statements. A dark-skinned woman asks what causes the hotter summers etc. if not her SUV and whether she should really buy a bigger SUV and pretend she can do it, LOL. ;-) Dick says that the assumptions are wrong, the summers aren't hotter. Richard explains that in a quasi-continuous function, it's pretty much guaranteed that most of the recent years have to be among the top ten etc. if there were a warming trend. Not shocking.

He didn't have the time to tell the woman that she has the freedom to buy a bigger car. Too bad that she will remain oppressed. Richard explains that the year-to-year variability of the local temperature vastly exceeds the annual increase of the global mean temperature that no one can feel. Allen screamed at Dick that he had to agree about the warmer summers but Dick didn't and I wouldn't, either.

A confused male visitor hysterically asks about the "sum" of the climate sensitivity, biological sensitivity, penal sensitivity, pylon alergy and several other sensitivities. LOL. Not even your humble correspondent knows how to add these apples, oranges, and comets up. I didn't find Dick's answer optimal but he's right when he said that the humans have shown a bigger capacity to create social instabilities etc. than the environmental ones.

Someone asked whether the IPCC's message to policymaker is pure junk or it contains something usable. Dick was sad that he couldn't give a specific answer. ;-) Richard says that scientists say innocent things, environmental activists translate them to scary stories, politicians get alarmed and pay the scientists, and so on, with some exponential growth. A younger woman who registered as an alarmist asked about the link between CO2 and the death of her relative. ;-) For Richard, it's specious to attribute deaths caused by weather phenomena – which have occurred for millions of years – to the man-made activities. A hysterically alarmed Asian man asks about a hypothetical catastrophe for the poor nations again. XY people will die. What is Dick's conscience and threshold for action? It depends on the action. If it is symbolic, we will never reach Richard's threshold.

It's surely funny when these intellectual dwarfs are trying to beat Richard in something he knows so well – they say that Richard is "being challenged" – but they should still be praised relatively to Al Gore from whom they bought a TV station because he wouldn't dare to debate Richard at all.

Hat tip: Mr Jan V.



BTW Alena Vitásková, the chief of the Czech State Energy Regulation Bureau, had to be given a special police protection yesterday. It's a result of an April 2013 assassination attempt when another car was trying to push her out of the superhighway. The State Security Council met to discuss the incident immediately in April but 3 months passed before an answer was given. The primary suspects are people doing business with photovoltaic energy and those with biofuel. She was investigating their efforts to get extra subsidies earlier and other things. These renewable gangsters should be treated like Taliban.

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Larry Summers vs Stephen Hawking

Four days ago, the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz published a de facto interview with Larry Summers, the ex-president of an ex-employer of mine:

Former Harvard president Summers rebukes Hawking for boycotting Israeli conference

Note that the fastest free way to get to the article (plus 9 more articles a month) is to "register for free" and choose "Facebook".

Summers, along with Stanley Fischer (an equally Jewish ex-teacher of Summers at MIT and an outgoing governor of Bank of Israel), was recently named as the most promising candidate to replace Ben Bernanke behind the steering wheel of America's central bank. He is bullish on the U.S. (and Israeli) economy, predicting a 3% growth by the end of the year and his answers don't unambiguously prove that he would accept Bernanke's job.




But the most important part of Summers' answers to Haaretz were his opinions about Stephen Hawking's boycott of a presidential conference in Israel. It shouldn't be shocking that Summers chose to publicly react because the "president" from whom the adjective "presidential" is derived is no one else than Shimon Peres, a long-time friend of Summers'.

It's been reported that Noam Chomsky and a few comrades were behind the pressure that led Stephen Hawking to the boycott which is why Summers may want to start to bring some ethical principles back to his town, Cambridge Massachusetts, before he chastises a famous physics professor in the other Cambridge.

I know both men rather well, admire them (although, if I weren't afraid of being insulting, I could say that in recent years, Summers the economist sometimes sounds like Paul Krugman light: I actually do remember Summers the warrior against a spiralling debt rather well), have spoken to Summers many times and, have touched Stephen Hawking ;-) (although being a co-author of Andy Strominger who's been a co-author with Stephen Hawking might be counted as a more intimate path towards Stephen Hawking; no, I haven't fainted in his office yet).

The men would probably agree with one another – and with your humble correspondent – if they discussed feminism and related topics. But needless to say, Summers is right when it comes to boycotts.




Summers says that the right path towards the resolution of things that we see as offensive is a debate rather than ostracism. Academic interchange shouldn't suffer just because this suffering may be used as another tool of political pressure. Except for extreme circumstances. Right. Moreover, Summers disagrees with the idea of singling out Israel – a country that surely doesn't look like an exceptional black sheep in the context of the Middle East where brutal human right violations, chemical weapons, and beheading are on the daily schedule.

I totally sympathize with his second argument and I do agree with most of the first one, too. Well, there exist contexts in which politics and the law are "at the top" and the scientific interactions are nothing else than "examples of trade and aid" that may be uniformly banned if a rogue state could benefit from those things. On the other hand, it's very problematic if such boycotts are invented by individuals or "cliques" in separate industries such as science and it's counterproductive if interactions that may only bring people closer, and not further, and that don't represent a tangible physical threat are discouraged. After all, the freedom that our nations and their governments guarantee for researchers are among the things that make us better than some... other nations (not to mention our own nations in the Middle Ages).

Needless to say, these debates about the right way to criticize Israel are completely academic from my viewpoint because as far as I can say, a politically sensible person in Europe or America should think about the optimum ways to strengthen and extend Israel – to add "Palestine", Syria, and Lebanon to its territory as first three steps, for example – instead of thinking about ways to harass this island of relative freedom and reason in the ocean of unrestricted violence and medieval brainwashing.

Moreover, the boundary between anti-Israel proclamations and bad ol' anti-Semitism is very subtle.

I would say that anti-Zionism is just the "politically correct" label that contemporary anti-Semites (sorry, Jews, your being Jewish doesn't mean that I can't count you as elements of this set! In fact, due to some characteristic Jewish masochism, many of you are among the near-leaders of the set!) like to use for their attitudes whose beef is still the same. Also, I have carefully studied the evolution of anti-Semitism here in Central Europe of the 1930s. It did start with various selective regulations that encouraged non-Jews to treat Jews differently (less pleasantly) and the gas chambers were largely inevitable end points of this journey. This whole journey is unacceptable for me from the very beginning and I think that it's an ethical rule to treat Israel on par with any other similarly large (e.g. European) democratic country that is comparably advanced. Anything else is more or less manifest anti-Semitism.

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Chechnyan terrorist's favorite videos

An insane combination of ignorance of geography and PC

The hunt for the Boston Marathon terrorists turned out to be faster, more efficient, and more dramatic than I expected. One of the results of the developments is that most Americans want my country to be bombed. ;-)



The Huffington Post offers some helpful graphics to help Twitter to remind itself that Czechia isn't Chechnya. Even the Czech ambassador to the U.S. had to publish a special press release LOL. Also, see this huge collection of tweeting Americans who confused the places, via Jason Brown.

What I find characteristic is the symbiosis of this breathtaking yet proverbial ignorance of geography with the political correctness. All foreign nations are apparently equally good and equally important and it's OK to mix them up in this way. Well, let me tell you something.

Chechnya, the original homeland of the terrorists (well, they're administratively from the adjacent Republic of Dagestan but they're still ethnic Chechen), is a tiny region in the Caucasus with 1.2 million inhabitants who are mostly savages with almost no economic activity. The Czech Republic is a somewhat important cultural nation in the middle of Europe, 1,500 miles away from Chechnya, while Chechnya is just a pain in the neck of Russia.




Chechnya is the most important borderline region that is trying to pump Islam into Russia; Czechia is the most atheist country in the world. The last difference is where the wind really blows from; the Boston Marathon attack was just another terrorist act by Islamic fundamentalists – although ones with an ethnic background that is somewhat unusual in the U.S. After all, they used a cooking explosive right from the Al-Qaeda textbooks.




However, this ethnic background is not unusual for terrorist attacks in Russia at all. (They shouldn't really be called "darker faces" because they're typical Caucasians and "Caucasian" has become a word for the prototype of the white race.) Recall e.g. the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis. In the West, some events of this sort are sometimes spun as examples of an evil large nation of Russia that suppresses the freedom warriors such as those in Chechnya.

In reality, these folks are terrorists of the very same kind as those mostly Arab ones that are more familiar in the U.S. But it's a common feature of the double-faced postmodern media to evaluate almost the same event in two diametrically opposite ways – depending on who is the victim.



One of the two attackers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev (the guy who was killed: his brother Dzhokar is in custody now), has favorited five YouTube videos; via the Foreign Policy Blog. Most of them are Russian-language videos and their main goal is to worship Allah or, in one case, to attack the Chechen leaders who co-operate with Moscow. The first video admires Allah because He is a chameleon. The last, English-speaking video is about Allah and as far as I understand, it is a relatively peaceful one. But I can't resist to point out that it is just so stupid. The people who are impressed by this low-brow religious babbling must be extreme morons – (almost) whole nations of morons. Some of them turn out to be killers but this may be just an accidental consequence of their being extreme morons.

I am disturbed by the fact that most of the U.S. media are trying to suppress the debate about the basic identity of the terrorists. It's another example of political correctness run amok, it's what allows so many ordinary Americans to conclude that the terrorists were Czech, and it's extremely dangerous because many extra bad things may happen to you if you don't know your enemies. It seems to me that even when the Americans learn about their Chechen-Czech mistakes, they won't feel guilty because they will think that Czechs shouldn't be insulted if they're compared to the Chechens. Well, the only reason why we're not insulted is that we know very well that most Americans are ignoramuses who don't have a clue about the world behind the U.S. borders (not to mention the Solar System) so we treat them in the same ways as puppies who violate some rules of grammar while barking.



A map of the official countries in the region. Chechnya is a de facto country around Groznyy ["Horrifying, horrible" in Russian] in the map.

Fox News is a positive exception here because the station tries to discuss whether they are Chechen separatists or Islamic terrorists – and concludes it's the latter. I am not 100% certain whether the conclusion is right but I am almost 100% certain that the right description is one of the two descriptions in the Fox News' title.

For those Americans who don't get their data from Fox News, most of these things will remain taboo. So the perpetrators will remain some random people from a nation starting with Č – whether you spell it as Ch or Cz is already beyond their resolution – and the motive and thinking behind the acts will remain an almost complete mystery.

I can't believe it. This result depends on the media's deliberate obfuscation and censorship of the basic facts in the name of (pro-Islam, in this case) political correctness; it also depends on the lack of readers' desire to know the truth. It seems to me that most people who follow these stories don't even dare to ask "Why" i.e. "Why they did it".

An article by Earl Ofari Hutchinson provides us with an insight into the censors' minds: hunt terrorists, not witchhunt Muslims. Nice except that the goal here is to obfuscate that it's probably the Islamic terrorism that Boston has faced.

I am also amazed by articles such as this one in Long Island News. The Russian community in Brooklyn is so surprised that their "compatriots" have done such a thing. The basic message seems to be that Russia is responsible for everything that the Chechens do. In reality, it's just like if you force Americans to apologize for what their compatriots who are Afghani did: Afghanistan has a similar "protectorate" status relatively to the U.S. as Chechnya has relatively to Russia. Would you agree that in the Afghan-American case, it would be crazy?

I am convinced that a vast majority of Russians don't consider to be the very same nation with the Chechens. To say the least, the Russians don't speak the Chechen language – which is an extremely different, archaic language of the Caucasus.

This sort of ignorance about geography is bound to become even worse in the future if the political correctness and the taboos imposed by it continue. In effect, the media and other "official pundits" (which arguably include the schools) are teaching the people not to be interested in the basics of cultures, religions, nation-specific values, and pretty much all differences between various groups of people because they're already building a "unified people". People who don't discuss whether the terrorists were Muslims are apparently labeled "nice" even though a more accurate description would be "uneducated and brainwashed imbeciles".



Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's skin is as white as you can get. He is a Caucasian and the "Caucasian" nations are the defining ones for the white race. Still, you may perhaps see something Eastern in his handsome face and being white doesn't protect one from behaving as a savage. In certain nations, this behavior is far more frequent than in others.

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Walter Kohn: 90th birthday

On March 9th, we commemorate the death anniversary of Hans Christian Ørsted. But there is a happier anniversary today, too.

Walter Kohn, a physicist who received the 1998 Nobel prize in chemistry along with John Pople, is turning 90. He gave the density functional theory to the chemists, highlighting the fact that chemistry is applied physics. Young physicists may know him because of the Kohn Hall at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, however.

He was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923. His father was a committed pacifist, perhaps because his brother died while fighting for the Austrian interests in the First World War. Walter Kohn has never accepted pacifism. In fact, he was accepted to Canadian Infantry Corps on the last year of the Second World War. Decades later, he would fight against the Cold War arms race, however. But let me return a little bit.




Kohn is obviously Jewish. After all, Czech readers know "a Kohn" as one of the three main heroes of most of the Czech Jewish jokes, along with "a Mr Roubíček" and "Sarah". Walter Kohn has always had a strong Jewish identity. His father was born in Hodonín, Moravia, Czech lands of the Austria-Hungary, today Czechia, while his mother was born in Brody, Galicia region of Poland, today Ukraine.

Her parents were orthodox Jews who lived like monks in a synagogue. The rest of the family had a contact with traditional Judaism through them.

Walter Kohn's father had a business that produced postcards and ran into profitability problems sometime in the 1920s. He was sort of secular. Walter Kohn's mother was highly educated and spoke German, Latin, Polish and French and she had some acquaintance with Greek, Hebrew and English.




In the 1930s, Walter Kohn received some excellent education focusing on Greek and especially Latin (which he loved, especially because of their architecture). He had no interest in maths and got the only C at his high school. ;-) And when he was 7, he was photographed as the "Professor Know-Nothing". The 1938 Anschluss (annexation by the Third Reich) of Austria changed everything. Father's business was confiscated but he was still obliged to work in it. Walter's sister quickly emigrated to England. Walter himself found some defense in a Jewish school where they led him to science for the first time.

The people who pumped some love for science into Walter Kohn became victims of the Nazism. And so did both parents of Walter Kohn who couldn't manage to escape Austria. Be sure that one could add some details and additional stunningly sad stories but this may have been enough. You should have gotten the picture by now.

At any rate, Walter Kohn arrived to England in August 1939 as a saved child in the Kindertransport program. We in Czechia associate this program with Sir Nicholas Winton who saved 669 Czechoslovak children. Once Walter Kohn became a Briton, he was thinking about an occupation that isn't quite typical for the Jews. He wanted to be a farmer. ;-) Fortunately :-), he contracted a serious meningitis so the farmer training plans were scrapped and Kohn's adoptive parents redirected him to the school that helped to turn him into a scientist.



The Kohn Hall in Santa Barbara

In May 1940, Walter Kohn was interned in a British camp for "enemy aliens" – after all, he had an Austrian passport. While this looks like an absurdity stemming from this policy of Churchill's, it did help science once again because mature scientists were giving lectures on maths and physics over there (which Walter Kohn largely misunderstood). I guess that this wasn't the usual daily program e.g. in Dachau. ;-)

In July 1940, he was moved to Canada along with various German civilians. Quebec. New Brunswick. High school exams. McGill University junior exams. Things had to change rather quickly because when Walter Kohn was 18, he was already firmly looking forward to a career in physics with mathematics as the plan B. ;-) Let me tell you something. Such a speedy and total transformation of the officially worst mathematician at a school to a Nobel prize winner who brutally depends on advanced maths is only possible – realistically likely – in an ethnic group that has lots of excess, unused IQ.

Walter Kohn did receive various kinds of help, could buy some books, including Slater's Chemical Physics, and in 1942, Scotland Yard even cleared him of being a spy. ;-) In Toronto he also met Leopold Infeld, a collaborator of Einstein's, who recommended Kohn to enroll in a special maths-and-physics program. Chemistry was required but as a "German", he couldn't enter the chemistry building. A dean allowed him some exceptions for maths etc. He met many other important scholars – H.S.M. Coxeter is an example I knew.

During one or two summers, he worked for a small Canadian company producing electric devices for the military aircraft. He joined the army once he finished his junior year. In this context, he worked with tops a lot. In 1945-46, he was expelled from the army and took some crash courses that completed his graduate knowledge of tops and wave functions. Wise people told him not to stay in Toronto. One should learn different places, avoid stagnation, and so on.

So finally he received the Lehman fellowship at Harvard. J.H. Van Vleck was the department chair at that time. He was clever enough to rename Walter Kohn to Toronto-Kohn to distinguish him from another Kohn. Van Vleck offered Walter a project on the band theory of solids. Walter Kohn had no clue what to do with it. So the project was finally picked by a similarly named Thomas Kuhn, later a philosopher of science, but the idea was paradoxically enough later developed by Walter Kohn (and others), too. ;-) Van Vleck and Kohn became life-long friends despite the bummer.

Of course, there was another potential stellar adviser at Harvard. Walter Kohn became one of many students of Julian Schwinger. Kohn said he wanted to use the variational method somewhere. Schwinger told him to develop the method for Green's functions in three-body scattering problems, a task that Schwinger couldn't realize. For six months, it led nowhere but then Kohn dropped Green's functions and invented Kohn's variational principle for scattering – useful for nuclear, atomic, molecular physics. Schwinger was apparently disappointed that Green's functions were sacked but the work was still good enough for Kohn's 1948 thesis.

Phil Anderson, Ben Mottelson, and other sons were Kohn's friends at Harvard.

Kohn left Harvard after some postdoc jobs when Schwinger's work looked too deep to him. He accepted a job in the Polaroid labs in Cambridge and was encouraged to learn some condensed matter physics. He was again asked by Van Vleck to teach solid state physics or something like that. Because Kohn was frustrated by QED even more than by solid state physics, he agreed this time. The best way to learn something is to teach it and that's what Kohn did, too. Some students may have understood more stuff than he did but they were kind.

Walter Kohn considered himself a Canadian patriot and was looking for a more long-term job. By some accidents he moved to Pittsburgh and, equally importantly, to Copenhagen. Kohn scrapped his plans to become a nuclear physicist again because he had learned solid state physics in the recent years. Niels Bohr has never heard the phrase "solid state physics". So Kohn worked on older projects including scattering theory and criticized a wrong pre-BCS theory of superconductivity. He fell in love with Denmark where he could stay through 1952.

He has gone to other places, including Chamonix, France, and listened to Wolfgang Pauli's questions whether Kohn was a professor of physics or sodium after a not-too-convincing talk by Kohn. (Pauli also referred to himself as the child wonder in menopause.) After some time at Princeton, Kohn returned to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. Lots of other things happened in Kohn's life – that had something to do with Bell Labs, the discovery of the transistor, BCS theory of superconductivity, and so on.

He developed the density functional theory in 1963, while on sabbatical in Paris where he was affiliated both with physics and metallurgy departments. The results he obtained looked shocking and shockingly simple to him. He couldn't believe them for a while. In subsequent decades, he worked on more or less related problems in San Diego and Santa Barbara. In Santa Barbara, he founded the ITP which is why the Kohn Hall was named after him. At least, I am convinced that it was called the Kohn Hall already in Spring 1998 when I visited KITP for the first time – half a year before he got the Nobel prize.

Congratulations!

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Slovak CIA spy caught in Iran

Communicating scientific secrets? Hunter in trap

Four days ago, TV viewers in Iran could have seen this dramatic 20-minute James-Bond-like report (that partly resembles the Czechoslovak communist sitcom, Thirty Cases of Major Zeman):



The hero of this video is Mr Matej Valúch, a 25-year-old Slovak recruitment and international management expert, the kind of guy who connects with everyone and who is apparently very good at it, as his LinkedIn page (and a similar Slovak page) testifies.

In Slovakia, he has been unaccounted for since September 2012. You may also see that he is a marathon runner, with 3:14:02 as his best time I can find.




His Iranian friends caught him and forced the obviously relaxed, happy Slovak guy to say (confess?) that he came to Iran in 2008 – if my Farsi is good enough ;-) – and was later contacted by CIA agent whose name I don't want to reveal so that Steve Logano doesn't have some extra trouble. ;-)

Valúch says that he was sending Logano some secret information about the Iranian science – probably nuclear physics. The Iranian TV suggests that because of their success with Mr Valúch, they managed to catch several other U.S. agents, too.

This blonde guy describes his task to be meeting Iranian scientists and communicate the latest successes of the Iranian science to his American overlords. Well, to a large extent, it seems as some amusing Iranian official propaganda addressed to not too demanding viewers. Iran is so great that America has to work hard to catch up with the amazing progress over there! ;-) First, Iran has successes but in most of them, America is well ahead of the country modernized by the Shah and these advances aren't dangerous or important in any way. And some possible exceptions are surely monitored in more reliable ways.

Second, I find it extremely hard to imagine that this guy who doesn't really have any scientific or technological background – as far as I can see – would know how to ask about relevant questions, choose the important issues, and meaningfully communicate the answers to his bosses in the U.S. Don't get me wrong: I am not suggesting he wasn't hired by CIA. I just think that if it has been the case, CIA was very careful to give him tasks that wouldn't require any technical knowledge whatsoever such as "pick papers XY" or "ask UV to call ABC". ;-) If CIA has equipped this "soft communication occupation" guy with some secret enough information, then I must say that they have deeply screwed it!

Equally likely, it seems plausible to me that this whole story about the hot Iranian scientific breakthroughs and the lame and futile U.S. attempts to steal them :-) is fabricated and Matej Valúch was simply hired (and nicely paid, as his satisfied face suggests) by the Iranian government to be the main actor in this theater and he has never been in touch with any CIA agents.

What do you think?



Other news from Slovakia:

The second largest city of Slovakia, Košice, became one of the two 2013 European capitals of culture. The opening ceremony took place yesterday – more than 40,000 people attended it (the population is 240,000). An ex-GF of mine was from the city.

The differences between Czechia and Slovakia and the national character of the nations etc. are surely detectable but don't be mistaken, the proximity is still dominant. There are so many constants: some Gothic cathedrals, passionate ice-hockey fans, Pilsner Urquell as the right beer at 1:22 ;-), no Golden Pheasants, despite their great ads.

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Al Jazeera buys TV from Al Gore et al.

There's been lots of interesting science news – for example, Neil Armstrong has apparently lied to us when he was saying that he invented the "one small step for man" line on the Moon. He had been thinking about it for quite some time, his brother recently told the BBC, and he was even collecting feedback e.g. from his brother.

I am sure that most readers follow the news, especially those related to science. But this news is kind of special:

Al Jazeera buys Current TV, will launch new channel (CNN Money)

The failed 2000 U.S. presidential candidate and the failed demagogic promoter of the failed climate hysteria has sold his and Joel Hyatt's failed TV station, Current TV, to an Arab broadcaster.




Current TV is dead; long live Al Jazeera TV U.S. Al Gore has shown his pride that his failed product could have been sold at all – and moreover, to a company located in a region that gave the world a climate alarmist who was even more famous than Al Gore himself, namely Osama bin Laden, before he was neutralized by Al Gore's former ally, Barack Obama.

Let me admit that this "marriage" doesn't sound surprising to me at all. Al Jazeera has always been driving me up the wall. It's a kind of an Arab station but it's clearly not a typical Arab station reflecting the Arab culture and the medieval traditions that are still hot in the Arab world. Instead, Al Jazeera tries to resemble the Western stations – and what it takes from the Western stations is the most shameful and disgusting part of the contemporary Western lifestyle, namely some kind of a generalized political correctness.

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Palestinian statehood and the U.N.

Update, vote: 138 Yes, 9 No (including Czechia), 41 Abstain

The State of Judenfrei Palestine was painfully accepted to UNESCO one year ago. Today, another vote of this kind is expected. It's almost certain that a vote will determine that the Israeli Arabs will win the same status in the U.N. that the Vatican enjoys – the status of a non-member state recognized by the U.N.

It doesn't seem fortunate to me that just weeks after the Israeli Arabs launched a missile campaign against Israel, the world's "peace organization" is going to declare by a vote that they're a suppressed group of victims who may be living on an occupied territory. If the opposite of occupation is that they are free to throw rockets to any neighbor they find, then occupation is a necessary condition for peace.




Most U.N. members will support the wannabe "state". Also, almost 1/2 of the EU member states will support it and almost everyone in the rest will abstain.

Israel, the U.S., and Canada have said they will oppose the bid. The list of other supporters sounds like a joke, Micronesia and Guatemala. I hope it's still likely that the Czech Republic (along with one or two Baltic states) will belong to this group, too. The leading politicians as well as most of the population opposes the Israeli Arabs' political projects.

But I can imagine there is some pressure from the West. Until very recently, Germany was thought to vote "No" as well but it may have changed its mind and it will probably abstain. I am sure that there are pressures – including pressures from Czechs for whom the mindless obedience to the EU is the greatest political value - that are trying to align the Czech attitude with the prevailing group think in the EU.



A red heart of Europe is still pulsating at the heart of Europe.

And much like in the 1930s, anti-Jewish sentiments have become fashionable in the EU again. The European Union wants to ban Jewish settlers in Europe because they're "violent" or "aggressive" and their products have to be labeled by a yellow star (or another "politically correct" equivalent; symbols evolve but the basic logic is still exactly the same, namely the opinion that the Jews are a special nation that doesn't have the right to settle anywhere). When I heard about these things, I thought they were jokes but they're apparently and unfortunately not.

I hope that the pressures attempting to make Czechia neutral in this vote will lose. We're surely less potent an ally, but I would say that the Czechia is an even more determined and reliable ally of Israel than the U.S. and Canada.

Update: Around 5 pm our time, foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg leaked that we will vote against the statehood bid (assuming Mr Schlafenberg won't fall asleep) because we our policy including opposition to all unilateral steps should be consistent. It seems that the official Iranian agency's claim that Czechia would abstain was based on no real data whatsoever (typical shameful propaganda), just someone's vague "guess" that we should always mimic Germany. But despite our proximity and dense relations, since 1945, we don't have to, you know. ;-)

At any rate, I don't expect this vote to be game-changing because of many precedents I remember. Sometime in the late 1980s, during the last months of communism in Czechoslovakia, there was a similar vote in the U.N.

My classmate V.K. – who later became the president of Patria Finance – was immensely excited that we were just living on a special day when a new state, and it was Palestine, was born. Needless to say, the situation remained exactly as muddy for the following 20+ years as it had been previously.

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Doha, Qatar will host a climate conference

What a paradox!

Qatar is a peninsula located on the opposite side of the Pilsner Gulf than Iran. Its economy is the wealthiest one not only in the Islamic world – even in comparison with Kuwait and UAE – but it's almost certainly richer than the economy of your country. The GDP per capita exceeds $100,000; no kidding. Not bad for a nation (2 million people) whose average IQ is 78. Sometimes if your ancestors are dumb enough to choose a desert as their home, you may benefit out of the stupidity because even a desert may harbor amazing wealth.



The conference center above in the capital, Doha, will host the 18th session of the Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC, the loons who want to regulate carbon dioxide. That's what I call an irony. ;-) The meeting will start in one month, on November 26th, and will continue through December 7th.




You must have seen some of the unbelievable projects showing the incredible wealth of Qatar. I will return to them momentarily. Where does the wealth come from? Well, yes: it's mostly about oil. Petroleum represents over 60% of the GDP, 70% of the government revenue, and 85% of export earnings. And make no doubts about it: even the remaining part of the GDP is inflated because the products and services are sold to people who are rich because of the oil (see costs of living in Doha: 1 Qatari Riyal is $0.27) so the export fraction 85% is surely a more faithful representation of the relative importance of the petroleum.

Now, this nation hosts a conference of nutcases who want to regulate if not ban fossil fuels. Do you really believe that the folks in Qatar want to do something like that and send their economy towards another Islamic role model such as Bangladesh whose average IQ is actually higher, 82, but due to the absence of petroleum, its GDP per capita is 60 times lower than the Qatari one? Do you think it's fair that Poland whose GDP per capita is 6 times lower is being harassed because of every new coal power plant while the people who annually export oil for more money than the whole Pole's annual income are treated as generous hosts who are surely helping Pachauri et al. to fight against the evil fossil fuels, aren't they?

Maybe the Qatari folks – who have the highest per-capita CO2 production in the world – will get an exception for their good services to UNFCCC, just like Al Gore and lots of other privileged assholes who don't walk the walk.

It's just totally crazy. All the participants of the climate conference must know that it is just a preposterous theater, a sequence of crazy excuses for an exotic trip, an attempt to create policies that are so incredibly unjust and irrational that they simply can't be adopted by almost any nation. Everyone must know that the true believers who will go to Doha are much more irritated by climate skeptics who are trashing their pathological climatic religion than by those who are producing and selling megatons of fossil fuels.

Now, let me return to their not quite cheap projects.



This is Syd Mead's plan to rebuild Doha. Personal jets flying around skyscrapers resembling huge wine glasses, or whatever it is. It may look like a picture from science-fiction novels except that many very similar projects are becoming a reality on a daily basis. For example, Pearl-Qatar is a multi-billion artificial island with skyscraper homes. See Google Maps to verify it is real.



Check also the "sustainable" Amphibious floating island. They probably also have some rotating skyscrapers even though the picture below may be from Dubai (in United Arab Emirates).



Sure, all these people will be thrilled by the ideas to ban fossil fuel. Also, they like means of transportations that don't depend on fossil fuels, for example bicycles. So Doha built a 35-kilometer-long network of cycling paths:



This is a paradise of energy-efficient transportation. Well, wait a minute. This cycling path is actually fully air-conditioned by mist. Imagine that while the EU or EPA bureaucrats are terrorizing you for turning on an incandescent light bulb, the biker on the picture enjoys the ride through 35 kilometers (yes, longer than the LHC) of a thick, not isolated tunnel that is cooled down from 115 Fahrenheit degrees i.e. 46 Celsius degrees (in the summer, average high is 41 °C i.e. 106 °F) to pleasant temperatures. Relatively to an incandescent light bulb, you surely don't need much energy for such a megafridge of pleasure that was built inside a desert, do you? ;-)



Well, a desert, sorry, I didn't want to insult you. For over $5 million, one hectare of the desert is going to pretend it is green. In the Czech Republic, you may buy one hectare of a forest for $2,500-$20,000, about three orders of magnitude cheaper than in Doha.



There are of course some projects related to the production of gas and other fossil fuels, for example the modest construction above. Also, Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup so it will build about a dozen of stadiums similar to the picture below – click at it for more (most of them are powered by solar panels):



Or compare this railway station with the railway station in your town or city:



Or check some of the hotels in Qatar.

I could go on and on and on. A vast majority of all these things has been paid, is being paid, or will be paid from oil revenue. But the climate warriors are going to transform Qatar to a global symbol of the fight against fossil fuels next month, anyway. The number of psychiatrists in the world is clearly insufficient to deal with this overload of cases. ;-)

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Harvard's divestments: Israel and fossil fuels

Harvard-related fun news: Next Tuesday, on October 9th at 10 am, Czech President Václav Klaus will host Larry Summers at the Prague Castle. Two important politically incorrect economists who know me in person. ;-)

When I was at faculty of Harvard, I also got familiar with many undergraduate students, went to the (usually Harvard) Pub with some of them, and deduced a realistic picture what they look like and what they care about.



There is a very high percentage of highly talented young people among them. (Philip Streich from Howard Georgi's house who tragically died a week ago in a family farm accident was probably one of them: an Intel Foundation bronze medal winner, a graphene company CEO since his teenage.) On the other hand, when it comes to aptitudes, I believe that the average Harvard undergraduate doesn't differ "strikingly" from the average student at other colleges that are just OK. Those folks are later unusually successful as well – but I tend to think that the Harvard diploma (and the contacts they develop over the years in the college) may be more important for that than their actual skills and hard work.

While the Harvard faculty is insanely super duper left-wing, Harvard students are much more moderate. This is manifested in many ways. For example, they would largely endorse Larry Summers when the far left (for readers who are U.S. conservatives: Larry doesn't belong to this set, according to Harvard's conventions!) organized the witch hunts against him. Of course, Harvard students are far less ideological and more practically oriented than the Harvard faculty. After all, we could say that they're normal kids with pretty normal interests.

While they drink stuff and have lots of sex, they are publishing an "adult" daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, too. I feel that the students – because everyone knows that they pay tuition etc. – have a significant impact on the Harvard policies. And Harvard University is a sort of a role model for many other U.S. universities, institutions, and even corporations. So you may want to follow what those kids think. They are kids who are programmed to "control the world" and to be pro-actual-establishment in every single dimension you may think of. So they're still highly politically correct – especially the self-proclaimed spokespeople of the student body. When it comes to students whom the Harvard environment naturally converts into spokesmen, think of slick, superficial, and self-centered folks like Sean Carroll; he used to be a Harvard graduate, not undergraduate student, but you may still get the idea.

I will discuss divestments – decisions to sell all holdings related to XY whenever XY becomes politically inconvenient or politically incorrect.




In 2002, a community of Harvard's anti-Semites and outcast Semites decided to ventilate their anger with the most functional country in the Middle East by proposing that Harvard isolates itself from the "dirty Jewish state" and that its management company should sell all its holdings related to Israel.

Many people at Harvard supported the move. Alan Dershowitz was one of the brave exceptions who were fighting the bigots. The discussion continued for years and the divestment wasn't coming. However, it was suddenly revealed in August 2010 that Harvard had sold all its Israeli holdings even though two days later, Harvard stated it wasn't divestment (because Harvard stated it wasn't one), it was just financially indistinguishable from one. ;-)

Clearly, the management company chose to please the anti-Semites while verbally pretending to be a "neutral party". Still, Harvard has helped to legitimize the efforts to treat Israel in a bad way – in a way that no rogue state in the region could ever be treated. The direct impact of the decision on Israel was negligible, of course; however, the indirect impact caused by the "legal" anti-Israel attitudes seen at Harvard may be significant.

Now, the climate

In 2009, some Harvard students founded a college chapter of Students for a Just and Stable Future which – despite the vague progressive name – is just another climate alarmist organization. They want Harvard to sell all its holdings that are related to fossil fuels and perhaps any other carbon-dependent industry, too.

Five days ago, the Crimson published an editorial which said that Harvard students should help the alarmist cause by all other means but the divestment was a bad idea because in the past, all proposals for a divestment were restricted to companies linked to human rights violation (I guess that the implicit assertion was that the most respectable country in the Middle East when it comes to human rights, Israel, may also be criticized for human rights violation).

However, two students who are fighting for the "just and stable future" were allowed to publish a response today. So they scream that the divestment is necessary, repeat some usual alarmist talking points, and – now, this is the shocking point – they argue that global warming is a human rights issue, indeed. Holy cow.

I know that there are many sensible people among the students at Harvard but the environment and its habits just immediately downgrades them to "also students" who are obliged to be quiet. Be sure that I have met a couple of Harvard undergraduates who complained that they were heavily harassed for their world view – especially those who were practicing Christians. This is apparently the "good", semi-officially sponsored harassment.

Kids who propose to launch a war against fossil fuel companies – which belong among the pillars of the modern civilization – should be intensely spanked by their parents at least for half an hour. At Harvard, some of these deeply confused, spoiled frats not only fail to be spanked but they indirectly influence the thinking in the whole American society. Many of us are underestimating how much harm stupid kids at disproportionately influential places may do.

And that's the memo.

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