Ukrainian ex-porn star wins legal residence in Czechia

Anastázie [Pavlivna] Hagenová née Hryšajová (*1985), known as Wiska, is a Ukrainian-born porn actress who stopped working in the field two years ago and she no longer finds the job fulfilling. (However, I was told that she shot another film, Vizi Solitari 2, in Italy half a year ago.)

I watched some Ukrainian officials who screamed that she was the only source of porn that the country was producing and therefore she had to be stopped. So she was at risk that they would arrest her or something like that for her past work that is perfectly legal in much of the West.

In similar respects, Czechia is an indisputable part of the Western Europe – the people's opinions about similar topics are comparably relaxed to the opinions of the Dutchmen if not more so. However, we also have some understanding for the very different values of the Eastern nations.




Because of the shared Slavic cultural ancestry and some Russian classes many of us would have to attend as kids, we partially understand Ukrainian. Still, their way of thinking is so different. However, the difference isn't something that would make us hate them. It may be more accurate to say that they remind us of our grandparents etc.




Czechia has had so many porn actresses that no one would bother to remember all their names. No one simply cares – except for the consumers who just want to watch something of the sort. She could actually face an immensely tough and numerous competition over here so it's a good idea that she stopped with that job, especially because of her three sons.



She found a tiny Czech village of Libice – with 50 inhabitants, about 30 miles South of Prague or 50 miles East of Pilsen – to be her new home. You may watch the video above to check that her house seems incredibly modest for a relatively famous porn star. Sometimes in the recent year, she ran out of money and Berkat.CZ along with both Catholic and Evangelic churches in Czechia actually collected some money for her family.

A month ago or so, she was refused political asylum once again – the verdict said that her application didn't contain a sufficient justification; I would probably give her one if it were up to me. At any rate, after several failed attempts, she won the permanent legal residence in the Czech Republic which is pretty much equivalent, anyway.

The children in particular don't deserve to undergo a childhood of prosecution just because their mother's job is found controversial by their very conservative compatriots. On the other hand, I also respect the opinions of the Ukrainians who dislike such things – for various reasons, sometimes even understandable moral reasons. The Czech Republic behaved in the way I find appropriate – not to aggressively interfere with the internal affairs of Ukraine and its policies that are needed for the happiness of the bulk of the nation; but help some folks who might really suffer if they stayed there even though they don't deserve it.

I actually believe that she must be a good mother. The children may be gradually prepared for the day when they find their mom's videos on the Internet for the first time but given the fact that almost no one is really shocked by such things over here, they probably won't suffer even for an hour. The family still looks "Eastern" in a sense – it reflects the relative poverty of the East. The youngest baby was already born in Czechia and looks almost indistinguishable from Czech babies.

Quite generally, I would describe the Ukrainian minority in Czechia to be problem-free. They're clearly not "almost just like us" which is a fair description for the Slovaks but they're compatible. The years when we would know about these folks because of the ex-Soviet mafia that shoots someone every week belong to the history books, too. Most of them keep an amusing Eastern accent – somewhat softer and with much more non-uniform stress on various syllables than Czech tends to have (which, I believe, must be correlated to the Czechs' pragmatism) – but there's no doubt that most of these people are being fully integrated.

Tymoshenko's relatives have been using Czechia as a refugee camp for years, too.

This also brings me to the Russian bill banning homosexual propaganda that was approved unanimously. Most people in the West don't get it. In fact, there are many places in the West where they would unanimously adopt a bill saying that everyone must pay lip service to gays every day ;-) i.e. everyone must constantly commit a crime according to the Russian law.

Some people in the West react intolerantly (I've seen several rants, even in Physics Today, attacking Russia for the bill) but I think theirs is a sort of cultural bigotry, too. A democratic nation has the right to decide what its children are being taught at school, and so on. If they believe that homosexuality is wrong and shouldn't be publicized, it's their right. If someone suffers because of these beliefs, help him or her. But you shouldn't terrorize or attempt to reeducate a whole nation just because you believe that its value system is wrong. One could argue rather convincingly that the Western tolerance towards all these symptoms contradicting the traditional family has led to a certain deterioration. One could also argue otherwise. It's a subtle thing that can't be convincingly settled one way or another.

I have nothing against gays but the "homosexualism" ideology, using one of the words coined by the Czech ex-president Klaus, the program to gain advantages for gays just because they're gays, the decision to stupidly celebrate and boast about something that didn't used to be celebrated at all, quite on the contrary, is just another example of political correctness run amok. Moreover, I think that to dismiss a whole nation of Russians – and many more nations – just because they're more socially conservative is a more dramatic example of a cultural bigotry than their own "homophobia".



Finally, I must mention a physics revelation that is indirectly related to the topic of this blog entry. Over the years, Tommaso Dorigo has said many things that many of us considered to be anti-supersymmetric rants. But it turns out that it was a huge misunderstanding. What Tommaso Dorigo actually meant whenever he said that supersymmetry got sc**wd by the LHC was that he got sexually aroused as soon as he looked at an exclusion diagram from the LHC. When the LHC experiments penetrate into the supersymmetric parameter space, he just calls it "screwing", whatever the verb means (I have no idea).

As Tommaso Dorigo must realize as soon as the arousal fades away, SUSY is doing very well.

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Feminists demand gender quotas for bodies buried in Panthéon

A 2006 article about the feminist totalitarianism attracted hundreds of Slovak visitors today because it was linked to in a discussion under a remarkable Slovak newspaper article about some incredible demands by the French feminists.



The story sounded like a hoax but Reuters was among the many well-known news agencies that ran the story which made me believe that in spite of its nearly comical content, the information is legitimate.

Panthéon, Paris was built sometime in the middle of the 18th century (I've been there once but that's enough). Between 1791 and 2011, 74 French figures were buried there. There are two women among them: the double Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and Sophie Berthelot. The latter is there only because she joined her chemist spouse Marcellin Berthelot; I don't know either of the couple.




So there will be an online poll. To make things even more brutal, it won't be a poll about whether this preposterous idea is tolerable. It will be directly a poll about the women who will be relocated there. President Hollande apparently supports this breathtaking rubbish. They will probably start with something like five new female tenants.




To make things even more absurd, the monument bears the inscription "To its great men, a grateful fatherland" ("Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante"). I wonder whether the word "hommes" will eventually be rewritten to match the new composition. Incidentally, because of the "hommes" description, even Marie Curie – who may be argued to have surpassed her husband – is there primarily as a wife.

You could find some OK enough women who are missing there – but many more great men are missing, too. This list of omissions includes Balzac, Stendhal, Michelet, Proust, Exupéry, Sartre, Camus. I could add tons of top mathematicians such as Cauchy, Laplace, Galois. They're missing, too.

The shameless feminist group "Osez le féminisme" (Dare to be feminist) and its painful apologists want nothing less than to rewrite the history. It's just a historical fact that the great people of France who died in the aforementioned period (and it was an enlightened period from all sensible points of view you may think of) were predominantly men. Before you dare to be feminist and disagree, you should tell me who were the real female counterparts of Voltaire, Russeau, Dumas, Hugo, and (except for Marie Curie) Lagrange, Carnot, Pierre Curie, Langevin.

Let me help you: there have been no (other) true counterparts who would be in the same league.

To impose the quotas really means to bury some women who will belong to a demonstrably lower category than the average men who are already buried there. Where does it stop? A group of Algerians in France may also demand to bury a dozen of dark-skinned French citizens. Homosexualist NGOs will demand a higher fraction of gays. And so on and so on. Soon or later, the facility runs out of space and people like Lagrange will have to be thrown somewhere to the Seine river – because of women and Arabs you have never heard of who were pushed there by despicable political groups for which their own petty, egotist group interests are vastly more important than the greatest mankind's achievements.

Similar proposals open many inequivalent questions. One of them is whether the process of burying has been meritocratic in character since 1791. Well, it could have been imperfect but it was surely free of outrageous interventions by NGOs who would openly insist on burying (or not burying) people from a group for purely ideological reasons.

Another question is whether the burying should be meritocratic at all. It should – it's what gives the actual weight and importance to Panthéon and many other facilities and institutions. An institution deciding non-meritocratically will inevitably lose credibility. The feminist movement may benefit but the Panthéon and all of France will lose greatly.

A third question is whether the overwhelming dominance of men in Panthéon was just a special feature of the period (1791-2013) or whether the gender composition will change in the future (well, "would" change in the future because we're now told that the era of meritocracy is over). Well, I would personally bet it won't (wouldn't...) change much. But if it will change, it will be thanks to the work by great women who will do things comparable to Voltaire, Lagrange, and Curie and not due to the work by whining feminists who want to enjoy advantages with no work or achievements, just by organizing guerilla groups and by screaming that they're entitled to enjoy the same accolades as the greatest men in the French history.

I urge the husbands or fathers of the women in the feminist NGOs to spank them really vigorously because that's what they actually should be entitled to.

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Bob Carter's academic job "not renewed"

Climate alarmists' dirty hands were very likely behind the scenes

I met Bob Carter (and his wife) 2.5 years ago during a seminar he was delivering in Prague's Auto Moto Club, an event organized by the think tank (CEP) led by Václav Klaus, then the Czech president.

This Australian scholar is a geologist but his talks about the climate are perfectionist, comprehensive, comprehensible, balanced, reasonable, and focused on the most important points that are overlooked by many others. He is always careful to see things in their proper context and to assign them the right importance. He has also presented some special issues such as the Australian carbon tax in a very meaningful way.



Equally importantly, he is a pleasant and peaceful Gentleman and an entertaining companion with some interesting stories to tell.

For all those reasons and others, I was shocked by news published on Jo Nova's blog. Bob explained to me that he retired from a tenured position in 2001 but because he couldn't become inactive, he continued as an honorary Adjunct Fellow of the James Cook University, Queensland, Australia.




He was supervising a student, had an access to the library he was using in his research, and it cost nothing to the university. But this position was suddenly stopped and even his very access to the library and other tools needed for scholarly work were suspended. It doesn't require too much work to find out that some climate alarmist pressure groups were behind the decision of the cowardly officials at the university.

Needless to say, Bob Carter wasn't "fired" because he ceased to be a top scholar – at least among scientists of his age – with a perfectly rational and scientific type of argumentation. Just on the contrary, he was "fired" because he's become even better than years ago.




At least one may find a journalist, in this case a man called David Sparkes, who think the same thing about these events:

University dumps out-of-step climate change sceptic (Townsville Bulletin)

The article reminds us of 32 years that Bob spent at the university he still respects, including its other good scholars (but let me admit that Bob is obviously the only scholar at JCU I know, unless I forgot about someone else); about his book; about shows with Andrew Bolt, and so on.

Bob says nice things about the university – it's probably partly inevitable given his being a Gentleman and those 32 years of his life. But I haven't spent 32 years there so I may easily say something really tough about that school – it's on its way to be renamed as John Cook University.

Bob Carter's and (Australian journalist and illustrator) John Spooner's new book, Taxing Air, will be out in a week or so. I can't find a usable amazon.com link for you to purchase it so far but you may buy it through the link in the previous sentence and this is a topic I (or he) will write about again.

Right now, I am just going to watch a 1993 film rendition of the 1990 novel by another skeptic and late TRF reader Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park. I haven't seen it for many, many years...

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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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Valentina Tereshkova: 50 years ago

Exactly 50 years ago, on June 16th, 1963, the first woman went to outer space.

The story of Valentina Tereshkova is also a story of the remarkable similarity between the propaganda tools of the Soviet Union and those employed by feminism and other pathological ideologies of the contemporary Western society.



Gagarin, Popovich, Tereshkova, Khruschchev...

For some time, the Soviet Union appeared to be ahead of the U.S. in the space race. Sending a female cosmonaut to the orbit was a natural next argument designed to support the (preposterous) claims that communism was technologically superior to capitalism.

To make the message really strong and ideologically convenient, many details of the selection had to be social-engineered and many facts about the spaceflight had to be censored for decades.




Not everyone was eligible to participate in that Vostok 6 spaceflight. She had to be female. But any female wouldn't be good enough. It had to be a female from the "right" class, the working class. (I suppose that the PC folks in the U.S. would prefer a female "minority" these days – structurally speaking, those biases are the same.) So they were searching through factory workers and textile factory assembly worker Tereshkova who was an amateur parachutist looked great, especially because her father was a war hero of the Soviet Union, a tank leader sergeant who died in the Finnish Winter War. She was extraordinarily more-than-loyal to the party ideals and became a member of the communist party later, too.

I don't have to explain you how dramatically you weaken the pool of candidates if your cosmonaut has to satisfy not only the sexuological criteria but also the political ones. But the creation of the right "role models" was primary; meritocratic considerations were secondary.




The spaceflight itself was a 48-orbits-long sequence of mistakes, glitches, whining, violations of the plans, and a permanent existential threat.

Only in the late 1980s, people started to learn that she was crying throughout the spaceflight and begging to return to the blue planet as soon as possible. This article is among those that summarize all the incompetency and physical inadequacy that determined the character of Tereshkova's spaceflight. A much longer article about the fiasco launched by intrigues and plots was automatically translated from Czech (1st part; 2nd part about her near-cutting of her head etc.; 3rd part about bruises and censorship).

In the beginning of the first day, things looked sort of OK. She was communicating with Vostok 5 that already out there and even sang songs to Valery Bykovsky over there. It was also the first day of glitches. The spaceship was erroneously programmed not for landing but for taking the ship into a higher orbit. The error was fixed and everyone was obliged to remain silent about it. When I say silent, I mean for 44 years: only in 2007, Tereshkova admitted that the speculations were true and the potentially lethal programming glitch did occur.

In the official report, she complained that she had to vomit. Her helmet was too heavy on her shoulders and scratched her head while the spacesuit hurt her leg. She couldn't feel comfortable enough in the weightless state. The limited size of the spaceship was frightening, too. Needless to say, this official report of hers was censored as well.

More seriously, she had trouble to guide the spaceship. For example, her invalid maneuvers interrupted the communications just before descent began. General Nikolai Kamanin, the boss of the spaceflight sector at that time, revealed those things many years later and admitted that the selection of Tereshkova was a mistake. In the 1960s, he was behaving differently, however. For political reasons, he continued to sing odes to Tereshkova and criticized two arguably more prepared candidates, physically and by their skills, namely Valentina Ponomaryova (who had a husband, kids, love for cigarettes, and self-confidence, imagine that!) and Irina Solovyeva (who was not sufficiently socially active!).

Tereshkova couldn't follow the eating schedule – ate only 1/3 of what she was supposed to eat (she partly decided in this way because she was shocked that she should use the spacesuit to remove the feces, as prescribed) which is why she fainted at the end – and took her shoes off, for the sake of convenience, like a diva and in a conflict with the regulations.

After Tereshkova catapulted out of her capsule and parachuted to Southern Siberia – as expected – her location wasn't known for two hours because she landed about 6 miles from the right place. While landing, she bruised her nose by smashing it against the visor. The bruise was covered up by make up during ceremonies. We often tend to agree with Steven Weinberg that manned flights don't bring any real added value – except for a highly increased price. Sometimes we have doubts about that but I have no doubts that similar womanned flights bring no added values except for lots of extra hassle and unnecessary problems.

Tereshkova remains the only female solo astronaut in the history and the number of female astronauts is still limited. Someone tried to design an all-female mission but certain experienced professionals who are sometimes called "male chauvinists" have vetoed such plans. While Tereshkova's spaceflight was painted – and mostly is still painted – as a great success in the mass culture, the space program professionals evaluated the "success" so that they didn't send any new woman to space for 19 long years after her. When the world's second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya went to space in 1982, your humble correspondent was already watching, and so were most of you. ;-) Savitskaya had actually been not only a parachuter but also a trained (and employed) aircraft construction engineer, a world champion in some propeller aircraft disciplines etc., a really competent cosmonaut (she had no trouble with spacewalk, the first woman to do it) and at least her male colleagues' real peer (although another communist). But back to 1963.

Khrushchev arguably knew about all the fiascos surrounding Tereshkova's flight but he had the chutzpah to boast about the flight that "demonstrated the equality of men and women in our country [USSR]". Imagine how preposterous such a claim is given the fact that she did almost nothing well. The event was an achievement of several top men in the space program who faced no barriers when they put at risk the life of a nearly unprepared woman in the very same way in which they previously risked the life of Laika the Dog – to boost their own pride.

Sergei Koroliov, a big shot in the Soviet space program, wasn't a supporter of female astronauts as a concept but he at least insisted that the serious candidates would have to give up plans to have children etc. Most of the candidates at the beginning failed in tests of withstanding 80 Celsius degrees and up to 10 g of acceleration. The shortlist was composed of 18 women that were further reduced to 5 at some point.

Totalitarian ideologies and ideologies attempting to brainwash whole nations simply depend on certain "nice assumptions" and the claim that women are statistically equally good in similarly extremely physical and technical situations has always been one of the most favorite "nice assumptions" of this sort. They're really "not so nice lies", not "nice assumptions", but they're popular exactly because many other people know that they're not true. This fact has the effect of unifying those who are willing – or who were forced – to accept and defend the non-truth.

Tereshkova was a textbook example of a product of a spoiled ideology and a politically deformed job contest. But there were many personal deformations, too. Tereshkova was running around the offices, spreading insulting gossip about her competitors. Despite the de facto complete failure of her flight (except that she managed to return at all), she later became very prideful, convinced that she can do everything. So she was constantly deciding who should be the next one to get the orders of the Soviet Union etc. She was repeatedly drunk and fought against cops etc. but she was always freed and cleaned.

It may be nice to have role models but as soon as it becomes clear that the production of role models has become the primary obsession, and probably much earlier than that, sensible people should realize that the truth, meritocracy, and actual goals of the industries and programs are much more important than the good feelings created by the virtual reality. Propaganda sucks and so do the spoiled brats created along with it.

And that's the memo.

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President is right to veto Martin Putna's professorship

What is the most intensely discussed event in the Czech news these days?

Czech president Miloš Zeman decided to reject the recommendation of an academic council at the Charles University and not to name Dr Martin C. Putna as a full professor. The title "professor" is supposed to be somewhat more special in Czechia because the people with this proper title are named by the president of the country personally. In some sense, they're more analogous to the holders of the National Medal of Science. Like the amnesty, pardons, and members of the constitutional courts, the ability to influence the composition of the full professors is one of the traces of the power of the Czech president – a role that has become largely ceremonial over the decades.

Judging by the screaming in the media and comments and votes in various discussions, about 95% if not 99% of the people in the political parties, schools, and various intellectuals and pseudointellectuals criticize president Zeman for the decision. I can't even imagine how isolated I would feel if I belonged to that environment. In certain cases, one simply has to remain a dissident. When one dares to agree with such a decision by the president of the country, it's clearly one of these heresies.

It must be politically incorrect to point out that Mr Putna is a decadent moron and bigot who shouldn't be considered a good scholar – and who would clearly devaluate and humiliate the ring of the word "professor" if he were elected one. President Zeman must see it in a similar way and he wrote the justification of the refusal to the ministry of education. Many people are screaming that he must publish the justification except that 1) it's not the president's duty, 2) it would only lead to an escalation of the problems. How would it help if President Zeman pointed out that from a scholarly perspective, Mr Putna is just a pile of politically correct decadent crap? (Update, Sunday: Zeman suggested that the problem with Putna was his presence at Prague Pride, a gay parade.)




Let me begin in the early 1990s. I started to study at the Charles University (Faculty of Mathematics and Physics) and because I was always kind of interested in politics, I repeatedly ran in the elections to the student senate and was elected as one of the 8 rank-and-file members.




We would be solving lots of silly things – parties, management of noticeboards, our opinions about the projects to expand the faculty etc., and so on, and so on. One of the things I was proud about was that as a secretary of sports of a sort ;-), I made it possible for students to register for a "workout in the student hostels' gym" as a sport course that saved lots of people's time.

But I want to talk about a different vote that is relevant here. Someone proposed to create a new, 18th faculty of the Charles University. The original faculties would include the Faculty of Maths and Physics; Natural Sciences; Law; some medical and theological faculties, and so on, you get the point. But the proposal was to add a "faculty of humanities".

We were even honestly explained what sort of "researchers" would be there. Feminist studies, professional blacks, postmodern philosophers, homosexual actitivists, and other perverse "fields" that were destined to flourish in the coming decades. I think that Alan Sokal just managed to publish his hoax in the Social Text around the same time. Of course that the student senate (of our faculty of maths and physics) rejected the proposal to create a new faculty of the ultimate pseudointellectual trash that would pretend to be on par with maths and physics but these folks had had already so many supporters that the faculty was created, anyway. For a while, it was just the Institute of Liberal Education (since 1994) but became a full-fledged Faculty of Humanities in 2000.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Martin Cyril Putna is already a representative of this new "faculty" that shouldn't have existed in the first place and he symbolizes pretty much everything that is wrong with these "humanities". I view him as the Czech counterpart of the feminist studies and professional whining blacks in the U.S., among others.

He is officially a historian of literature or a "comparative literature" expert. If you search Google Scholar for his name, you will find one extensive (800-page) 1998 monography about the Czech Catholic literature between 1848 and 1918 in the European context.

Several articles have closely related topics. The number of citations is 31 for the book and 7;4;4;3... for the several articles you will find. With two or three Polish and Russian exceptions, none of the papers referring to Putna was written by non-Czech authors. His work is not internationally competitive.

I have almost nothing against the history of the Czech Catholic literature except that it looks like an immensely narrow field and one shouldn't become a full professor if he only knows (or only knows how to copy and rearrange texts about) this narrow field (also, I believe that many amateurs who love to read books have the same if not more extensive knowledge of these special subtopics of the history and they don't demand to be even postdocs, surely not full professors). But this is not what I consider essential in this controversy. The essential thing is that he was recommended to become a professor for completely different reasons than several inconsequential articles about a topic no one really cares about.

He represents the ultimate political correctness of the most degenerated type.



In this video, Mr Putna tells us that he's been voting for the Green Party for 10 years or so because he views the party as the most profoundly spiritual one. Imagine that: these lunatics who are eating roots and earthworms, sleeping in the tree tops or in front of the power plants are "spiritual" from the viewpoint of a man who is supposed to become a distinguished professor.

You could expect Mr Putna to sort of support the Catholic Church. But he only supports a Catholic Church that would be led by homosexuals and all these things (that's why Zeman's refusal to promote him was praised by a Catholic official – a rare exception). So in the video above, we learn that the Green Party is spiritual because it supports homosexuals and other things! Holy cow. What is so spiritual about it? On the other hand, the churches are in no way spiritual because they are only interested about the church's assets and homophobia, we learn. A truly deep analysis of the church from someone who is supposed to become a distinguished professor focusing on the Catholic Church!

But that's not the main thing here. Putna was among the most intense critics of Mr Zeman during the presidential campaign. Zeman claims that he only learned about the fact yesterday, a long time after he wrote the refusal letter to the ministry of education, and if he had known about the criticism earlier, it could have increased (and not decreased) Putna's chances to be appointed. The most characteristic anti-Zeman tirade by Mr Putna is this would-be entertaining January 2013 video:



In a language that is supposed to resemble Russian but it's really the Russian language spoken by Czechs who don't really know Russian and who want to make fun of Russian, he pretends to be Mr Putin (their names are very similar, after all) who loved Mr Klaus and who will love Zeman, partly because Zeman also likes to drink alcohol. No other "ideas" may be found in the video.

(Well, I am not sure whether the hysterical support for Putna is mostly because he's anti-Zeman and anti-Klaus or because he is a gay activist but I am pretty sure that one of these two reasons is the key one. Let me clearly point out that one can't become a full professor just because he or she is gay: there are 250,000 gays in the Czech Republic which is still a rather high number.)

I just can't help myself. People who are satisfied with these extraordinarily shallow, oversimplified caricatures – Klaus is pro-Russian; Zeman is pro-Russian; Russia is always bad; someone's drinking habits are what politics is all about – are just indisputable imbeciles. I see no way how I could overlook this self-evident fact. It seems crazy to consider this moron a scholar, especially if he's supposed to be a scholar in the humanities, and the existence of other "scholars" who are ready to recommend this idiot for the highest academic titles must be viewed as a serious problem, not an example of the "academic freedom" which is how the would-be right of similar idiots to call themselves professors has been framed by many people in the media.

One could say that the video above is just a fun video, like my interpretation of the Tom and Jerry theme song. However, there's a difference: Tom and Jerry has manifestly nothing to do with theoretical physics, the reason why I had worked in the scholarly environment. On the other hand, Putna is a social scientist and videos such as the video above do reflect his opinions about his own field or closely related fields. This is really what his professorship would symbolize. (Also, the Russian in my YouTube videos e.g. in Jožin z Bažin in Russian is almost completely correct and the Russian viewers appreciate it for that reason, too. Putna is satisfied with the cheapest conceivable anti-Russian hatred and stereotypes.)

Let me avoid repetitiveness in the expression of my feelings and summarize. Most of the Czech nation – and not only Czech nation – is composed of gullible manipulated stupid sheep who have no idea about this would-be professor, his work, the functioning of the university system, and other things but they don't hesitate for a second if they can support a pseudointellectual wee-wee in his disagreement with the president of the Czech Republic who is actually a much more genuine scholar and intellectual than Mr Putna or anyone at the Faculty of Humanities, for that matter.

Ex-president Klaus hasn't used the right to veto the professors (he just said that in Putna's case, he would sigh but he has always approved the proposals) but I think that the president has always had this right. For Zeman, this part of the presidential rights seems more important than e.g. the amnesties and pardons. This is what the law says. So if people disagree about something, there is still something we should respect: the law. The situation seems completely clear to me. The president's right to veto such proposals isn't just legally sound: It's very healthy that an external authority that stands "above all the fields" is allowed to intervene into the decisions that would otherwise be made purely by cliques of friends who are often as intellectually inferior as the people at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University. I think that Larry Summers had played an analogous role at Harvard and everyone should have been grateful to him for that work.



A Prague Pride scene that, according to Zeman's weekend hints, may have decided about the veto of the professorship. The banner held by Mr Putna says "Catholic fagg*ts [uncensored on the picture] are greeting Mr Bátora [a conservative]". Putna's participation at this event wouldn't be my primary reason to reject his professorship but it's a negative issue, anyway, especially because these opinions about homosexuality aren't just his work-unrelated hobby. The promotion of the Catholic Church is a gay-promoting organization is what much of his work – or what they consider his present work – is all about. And sorry, this activism just isn't scholarly work compatible with the title of a distinguished professor.

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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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Obama, beauty, and sexism

I had to laugh when I learned that Barack Obama who has often benefited from political correctness has been caught to the PC trap himself. A very loud third of the Americans – the batshit crazy Americans – apparently think that the following comment about Kamala Harris is "sexist".

“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country — Kamala Harris is here.  (Applause.)  It's true.  Come on.  (Laughter.)  And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years.”

You can't make it up.




The most comical aspect of this "scandal" is that Barack Obama said these things because he wanted to be even nicer and even more politically correct than some people around him. But too much political correctness, much like too little political correctness and a medium amount of political correctness, may turn out to be politically incorrect.




Let me elaborate on my claim that he actually wanted to be more Catholic than the Pope. Including the things in between the lines, Obama meant the following:

“While your experience certainly suggests that there are fewer extraordinarily talented lawyers displaying a natural authority between women than between men and some extra trouble may arise when relatively young women face difficult tasks, you have to be careful in this case. First of all, she is brilliant. Second of all, she is dedicated and third of all, she is tough. And she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. Although her ethnic background – she is an Asian Indian American – may look more crazy than mine, she also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country — Kamala Harris is here.  (Applause.)  It's true.  Come on.  (Laughter.)  And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years.”

Now, because Obama called her "best-looking AG", he is considered sexist. PC is tough and treacherous. It is – more precisely the people driving it are – so insane that you just can't ever know where and when it strikes.

In the competition of old men, it's not a shocking fact that Kamala Harris is the best-looking U.S. attorney general. We should still be careful because the adjective "best-looking" is subjective. In particular, there may be a bias because heterosexual male subjects are more likely to consider women good-looking while the ordering is reversed for homosexual subjects and it may be reverted for female subjects once again.

Despite this subjective nature of the "good-looking" adjective, I think that there could be some neutral, asexual, consensus-based evaluation of who is good-looking and Kamala Harris could still win in this particular race.

May a woman get offended in such a context? Well, the only woman who has at least some remote reasons to be offended by the comment above is Michelle Obama. But as long as a possible romance between Obama and Harris will remain invisible, even Michelle Obama should be doing fine. Otherwise women – whether they're attorney generals or not – care about their looks and Kamala Harris is demonstrably not an exception. So chances are high that she was flattered.

On the contrary, she could be – and she should be – insulted and hurt by the comments that Obama's appraisal was sexist. Why? Because the people who say that Obama's judgement was sexist implicitly claim that he only said that she was best-looking because she was a woman – i.e. because of her female organs – while the official reason behind Obama's statement is that she is a pretty woman – or, I could even say, because she is a pretty person.

The public/media reactions to these things is substantially different in my country. Thank God. Let me mention an example.



The official billboard of Public Affairs, a small Prague-based centrist party, now defunct. It said "Release the boys into the water: vote for our girls." Ms Karolína Peake is the second babe from the right. She survived the death of the Public Affairs and created an even smaller would-be party, LIDEM (Liberal Democracy; the acronym also means "to the people"), that helped to save the center-right government in one of the no-confidence votes.

A few months ago, PM Petr Nečas proposed her as the next defense minister. President Klaus made it clear that this would be a problem with him. He smiled and said that he really, but really couldn't "imagine how the sturdy soldiers would accept this little girl as their commander". Of course, there wasn't a sign of a genuine opposition to Klaus' remarks. Pretty much everyone thinks that he was right and/or made an important point. One can play various games but the soldiers still have some values, opinions, and priorities, and if their motivation to follow orders and fight for the country gets diminished by something, the safety of the country may be at risk. These are serious matters that should never be beaten by infantile politically correct speech codes. (That's also why I think it's unwise to insist on flooding the military by 4% of proud and loud gays – and similar things.) And it's much simpler – and more democratic! – to choose a minister who will be acceptable for the soldiers than to try to "reeducate" the soldiers.

I was in agreement with Klaus despite the fact that I consider her a sort of talented politician - a Western-style modern politician, not the kind of politicians I would enthusiastically vote for, but I think she would score well in some global competition. (Incidentally, her husband, Charles Peake, is an Australian manager of Czech-Chinese origin. Her maiden name, Kvačková, is as Czech as you can get.)



"Release us to the water here." A center-right ODS party's answer to the girls' billboard.

The current president, Miloš Zeman, was in somewhat hotter water for his witticism during the presidential campaign. He was suggesting that his competitor, Prince Schwarzenberg, came from a degenerated dynasty (Schwarzenberg reacted pleasantly: this comment made Schwarzenberg younger because it reminded him of the 1950s when the princes were labeled "degenerated" as well). But Zeman – which means a member of lower, countryside-based nobility, gentry – added a much more detailed explanation why Zeman was less degenerated than the Prince. Centuries ago, Princes enjoyed the "right of the first night" (it's probably a superstition, but let's ignore it) so they had the right to terminate the virginity of their serfs' maiden daughters. This made their sexual life simpler which is why (according to Zeman's modified genetics) they got degenerated. On the contrary, "Zemen" had to rape the girls they had crush on. They needed to spend energy and train for that etc. So with this training, they didn't degenerate.

Even I could guess that this was a potentially tough, marginally perverse joke and there were several feminists who tried to say it was bad. But these feminists are so totally marginal in our society that it would be silly to talk about any real scandal. There wasn't any. It's just a joke cleverly built on Schwarzenberg's aristocratic origin and Zeman's surname.

Even those of us in Czechia who sometimes consider ourselves "socially conservative" often view Americans as similarly puritanical, controlled by taboos and medieval speech codes as the people in the Muslim countries look to the Americans. In some situations, the difference between Americans and the fundamentalist Muslims is actually rather modest and the "liberals", despite their being left-wing, tend to make this proximity even more self-evident.

If America can't protect people like Obama from blackmailing, libels, and intimidation by insane folks such as those who think that he was "sexist", i.e. from pressure that forbids to say certain things in practice, then its constitution along with the amendments are de facto just pieces of a dirty toilet paper.

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Klaus on abdication of Benedict XVI

I was sorry to learn about the reports that Benedict XVI resigned. Whatever the reasons behind the Pope's surprising decision were, the decision makes me sad.




For 8 years, Benedict XVI has been not only the leader of the Catholic Church but also a globally prominent statesman. In the wake of our meetings – both his visits to the Czech Republic, as well as those in the Vatican – but also from his numerous public appearances, speeches, and texts, I could perceive the proximity of our attitudes. He belonged among the rare personalities of the contemporary world who don't ride the cheap wave of the omnipresent progressivism. He was aware of the dangers that follow from the loss of the traditional values, the threats posed by the decaying institution of a family and a nation state as well as from the precipitous European integration project. He was able to make these concerns of his visible. That is why he was frequently attacked by the media – something I could understand well, too.



The lightning was genuine.

Despite his relatively short pontificate, the Holy Father Benedict XVI has left a visible trace in the world. I view his resignation as a symbolic part of the symptoms of the end of an epoch in which the voices warning about the direction that the contemporary world has taken could still be loudly heard. This is also how I understand the unsuccessfully masked joy of those who accepted his unexpected gesture with hypocritical acclamation. Those who are losing an important political and intellectual ally have no reason to rejoice. Pope Benedict XVI surely deserves thanks for his brave yet unfinished struggle.

Václav Klaus, February 12th, 2013, original in Czech

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HEP: the bias favors women

In the Time Magazine, when Jeffrey Kluger wrote about Ms Fabiola Gianotti, the spokesman of ATLAS at the LHC, as the runner-up for their "Person of the Year", he wrote, among other things:

Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t.

But that just isn’t so. Women in physics are familiar with this misconception and acknowledge it mostly with jokes.

This is absolutely accurate in most cases. Pretty much all competent women in high-energy physics whom I met acknowledge that this "myth about extra hurdles" for women is just nonsense. You won't hear about these women because their politics is inconvenient for the PC Nazis who have hijacked most of the media. However, the women with this opinion on the situation produce well over 90% of the actual scientific output that women contribute to science, an enterprise of all the humans.

(Some feminist activists who are good enough physicists, e.g. Melissa Franklin at Harvard, would love to deny the fact that there is no bias against women left and the bias that remains real has the opposite sign. However, their room to spread this fairy-tale about their "oppression" usually shrinks substantially once they're elected the department chair, for no really good reason.)

I could tell you dozens and dozens of examples of highly productive women – really the bulk of women in the proper science – who agree with me but I can't even afford to do this thing because they would face trouble with the PC Nazis just for the fact that their name has appeared on my blog in this context. So even though they're the majority among the productive female scientists, you won't hear about them or their opinions. They know something that certain people just don't want to be heard. Instead, you will always be offered stories by obnoxious, constantly whining, largely unproductive "also scientists" who want the vagina to become a universal excuse for incompetence so they will always be dissatisfied with something.

Sabine Hossenfelder and Tommaso Dorigo disagree with Kluger (and with your humble correspondent) and they try various incomprehensible sleights of hand to justify their claims. However, ironically enough, the fact that women are much more likely to have advantages rather than disadvantages is well documented by pretty much all the female names that appear in these texts. What do I mean?




Well, I also mean Sabine Hossenfelder herself. But if I followed this example and listed some details, this article could be excessively controversial.

So let's pick Fabiola Gianotti. An article about her – a discoverer of the Higgs boson – started this whole story. Is she an example of the discrimination against women?

I think she is a very good physicist, articles about her on this blog are universally positive (including comments about her wise choice of fonts, Comic Sans), but we should still notice that ATLAS is not the only major detector at the LHC.

There is also CMS – a detector surrounded by a collaboration that Tommaso Dorigo belongs to – and the CMS has discovered the Higgs boson, too. It was done in the same channels, at the same time, pretty much at the same confidence level (up to differences that were clearly due to chance). The spokesman for CMS is male and American, Joe Incandela of Santa Barbara.

In many situations in real life, one may compare "analogous situations" to see that women are surely not discriminated against, quite on the contrary. But non-experts may fail to understand which situations are really analogous to each other and which situations are not. Outsiders just can't determine whether two physicists are equally good or not.

However, almost by construction, we have a situation in which it may be done almost rigorously. Sociologically speaking, there is an almost perfect \(\ZZ_2\) symmetry between ATLAS and CMS – and their discoveries of the Higgs boson. Fine, who was in advantage in the wake of the discovery of the Higgs boson? Joe Incandela's description of the situation was arguably more clearly organized and more comprehensible – which is partly due to his being a native speaker.

When you look at the "Person of the Year" contest itself, you will find Ms Fabiola Gianotti but you will not find Mr Joe Incandela. The symmetry has been broken and it has been broken in the opposite direction than one you would hear from the dishonest promoters of the PC propaganda, right?

Just to be sure that we're not talking just about some perception of editors of non-scientific magazines, there's a difference in the funding, too. A recent Milner bonus prize gave some money to the experimenters in particle physics, too. How did the current spokespeople do?

Well, Ms Gianotti received $500,000 while Mr Incandela only received $250,000. Which number is larger? What is the ratio? Is it substantial? Is it meritocratically justifiable? Of course, by looking at the structure of the winners, one may find an "excuse" why Incandela got less money than Gianotti: three more spokespeople shared a million with him while Gianotti has only shared a million with one additional person.

But this would be a truly lame excuse because the current spokespersons have nothing to do with the number and composition of the past spokespersons. There is a symmetry between their work. A more natural distribution would give 1/6 of those $2 million to the six people. But it didn't happen. Why? Easy. I think that Yuri Milner is a meritocrat but he – or his advisers – just had to give a factor-of-two advantage to a visible enough woman in order to improve their image in the broader scientific/leftist community where the dishonest PC Nazis have accumulated a huge power.

I could give you tons of similar examples but the symmetry or asymmetry between the men and women in the story would be far less obvious to the outsiders so they wouldn't be as convincing and indisputable as this particular example.

Now, Ms Hossenfelder argues that some people working in the Academia (not necessarily scientists) heard her last name and talked as if they thought she was male. Well, it was their guess because it's far more likely that a random theoretical physicist is male and ordinary people simply use sentences with "he" or "she" and they have to decide.

In the U.S., I have met almost no one among these people who would pronounce my name correctly at all and I have never complained. In fact, I would have wanted too much if I expected the Americans to correctly guess whether Luboš is a male or female name. ;-)

Ms Hossenfelder would do better in the Czech Republic because almost all surnames are nontrivially feminized. Her name would be Sabine (or Sabina, if truly Czech) Hossenfelderová. This is not a joke: this is how a book or article about her would really write down her name as long as it would respect the rules of grammar. The ending -ová produces a feminine adjective related to the original male name, Hossenfelder. When her name would be pronounced by Czechs in the proper form, Ms/pí Hossenfelderová, everyone would know it's "she". But I am afraid that in Czechia, she would also complain – namely about her name's having a different, derived form! ;-)

(Incidentally, -ová is one of the numerous possible feminine suffixes. We use the flexibility of the language and the diversity at many places, for example in chemistry where they distinguish the oxidation number. So -ová also appears in "kyselina sírová" which is "sulfuric acid" and denotes the oxidation number six; "síra" is "sulfur". Kids learn the suffixes for oxidation numbers between one and eight as -ný, -natý, -itý, -ičitý, -ičný/-ečný, -ový, -istý, -ičelý. The masculine letter "-ý" may be replaced by the feminine "-á". It's kind of clever and poetic.)

But at any rate, janitors' guess that Hossenfelder is a man isn't a discrimination. On the other hand, keeping someone whose latest 10 papers are absolutely and entirely wrong, nonsensical, and absurd in the system for many and many years is an example of reverse discrimination.

Incidentally, their comments about the need to take care of children are inappropriate, too. A woman may play the more important and less avoidable role in the care about children and it's important and the society may appreciate it. But if that's the key activity that a woman is doing well, she should be getting some special money for her being a mother – and not for her being a physicist. In the same way, a day care center is something else than a physics department. Be sure that some people confuse these two things deliberately because a physicist's salary is still significantly larger than some social aid that mothers may be receiving. But one simply shouldn't confuse these two activities.

Please, feminist demagogues, be ashamed, be very ashamed. You must know very well that the claims about the discrimination against women are just malicious lies but you use them nevertheless to elevate your status and the status of your political ideas/delusions/lies.

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Anthem, foreigners, and PC: Czech edition

Related, political news: When Václav Klaus leaves the Prague Castle in March 2013, he will become a fellow of the CATO institute (search for Klaus in the linked PDF file).

There is some sense in which I personally like Karl Schwarzenberg, the 75-year-old prince who will become Václav Klaus' successor as the Czech president if he beats Miloš Zeman next Saturday.

I think that he's been doing good things throughout much of his life, he isn't really obsessed with harming or restricting other people, I have no problems with his links to the late ex-president Havel that he managed to build, I like some of the residual aristocratic manners he still displays, and I acknowledge that he has inherited some good things (in my opinion) from the Czech character. Many friends and family members will vote for him – and they have already voted for him, and so on.

But despite his being described as a right-wing candidate, his victory is becoming a very bad scenario in my eyes because even though he wouldn't be hurting people himself, his arrival could signal the victory of the nasty, Nazi-like political correctness and submissiveness to the Eurocrats in my country. And that's something we should avoid.

In the same way, Zeman is a self-described leftist and in many ways he is a left-winger, indeed (he claims to support high taxes, Keynesianism etc.), but still, he despises the green parties and activists and many other PC groups as much as I do and those are the cultural things that the president primarily influences. The economy is controlled by others.



The video above – Schwarzenberg trying to sing the Czech national anthem in the wake of his success in the first round of the presidential elections – has led to some humiliation as well as scandals. What happened?




First, his attempts make it clear that he is tone-deaf. This is somewhat surprising for me if I compare this fact with the stereotypes about aristocracy I still mostly believe. It's my understanding that the aristocratic families spend so much time and money by educating their kids that even if someone were tone-deaf, they would turn him into a potential Mozart competitor. It has clearly not worked for Karel.

Of course that there are many tone-deaf people but I actually count the "understanding" relationship of a person to music among the top 20 criteria that determine whom I consider a good presidential candidate. I don't expect everyone to understand music but it's simply among the selection criteria for a presidential candidate. Sorry if you disagree. The founder of Czechoslovakia liked to sing, especially the folk song "Oh My Son My Son" ("Ach synku, synku").

His successors had mixed records and backgrounds when it came to music and arts – and I don't know much about most of them. I don't know about the singing by Emil Hácha, the president during the Protectorate, but he translated books including Jerome Klapka Jerome's books into Czech (including Three Men In a Boat). He passes in "arts" in general.

When I jump to the modern free country again, Havel was an OK singer and Klaus was a very good singer – he used to be a member of a choir decades ago, after all. He has loved jazz, including jazz that looks contrived to me (and a friend of mine who often accompanies me at "Jazz at the Castle" events and who has "officially" played the piano for 10 years and not just 8 years like myself). :-)

But the lyrics are even more important. Schwarzenberg often pronounces some voiced Czech consonants as their unvoiced counterparts (especially "t, kt" replacing the correct "d, gd") – a typical defect of the Czech spoken by Germans and Austrians. Add some shortened vowels, also a disease of German speakers. Even more importantly, he doesn't seem to know the full lyrics. It's just one minute but he got completely lost at several points.

This is a problem for me. I believe that the Czech president should know the lyrics of the Czech national anthem – to a large extent, he should be able to sing it with the right consonants, too. And I believe that the attempts by some people to "force me" not to care about this thing is a frontal attack on my basic rights and on the sovereignty of my nation. The anthem is one of the basic symbols of the country so it simply matters for the first politician in the country, especially if we talk about a presidential candidate whose offered "form" seems to be stronger than the "content", and I am convinced that this is a fair description of the prince.



Maybe the prince would be able to sing the anthem of the Austrian Empire, a beautiful piece of music composed by Joseph Haydn at the end of the 18th century. The video above combines the music with the official Czech lyrics [now just a part of the history] – cute and submissive towards the House of Habsburg. After the Austrian monarchy decayed in 1918, the "free-floating" composition was stolen by Prussia which is why it later became the anthem of the Third Reich, West Germany, and – now – re-unified Germany.

Fine. But the Czech national anthem is a different cute song today and the Czech president should know its lyrics (and melody!). I would personally be happier if Schwarzenberg were singing flawless German lyrics of the Czech national anthem while I know that it would be far less popular with most other Czechs for whom ignorance is almost always preferred over knowledge of something they don't know. ;-)

Klaus Jr in trouble

But let me get to the truly worrisome news. The president's son got into trouble. Václav Klaus Jr (yes, his face has some asymmetry) is a principal of a prestigious high school PORG. I was standing next to him at the pre-Christmas banquet at the Prague Castle a month ago. Some private correspondence in which he satirically emulated Schwarzenberg's pronunciation of the anthem went public. A scenario so similar to lots of others. A petition was written to protest Klaus' humiliation of Schwarzenberg's "singing". Fifty signatures of students, some of them not real, not a big deal. But it was interesting enough for the petition to become the #1 story on iDNES.cz, a leading Internet news server, today. So of course lots of advocates of political correctness as well as haters of the name "Klaus" add their voices to attack Klaus Jr. The petition has been amplified by several orders of magnitude by the journalists.

I find it totally unacceptable for some groups to blackmail Klaus Jr and try to force him not to express his opinions about Schwarzenberg's (or anyone else's) knowledge of the state symbols of our country. He expresses his legitimate opinions, I share them, and counting the votes under my comments, roughly 1/2 of my nation agrees with us, too. The anthem matters. A foreigner isn't quite "equally good for me" as the Czech president (Schwarzenberg's case is marginal, he is somewhere in between) and I will never allow anyone to intimidate myself into thinking or saying that my opinion about this important issue is something else than what it is or e.g. that a Muslim Arab would be an acceptable candidate for me (most likely, she or he would not). Moreover, Klaus Jr should be even more free to write such things in his private correspondence. As far as I am concerned, he should be the #1 person who decides whether such recent events should be a part of the education at his own high school – students should arguably be led to follow and understand the recent events in the real society as well – so it's ludicrous not to allow himself to express his opinions.

But the critics seem to think that their attack is justified. I don't want to discuss all the examples of that because some of the criticism is about the nearly omnipresent anti-Klaus rubbish that certain people just love to write regardless of issues of the freedom of speech (and regardless of any facts). But at any rate, while I am not scared by any personal characteristic of the prince, I am scared that in the case that he defeats Zeman, the true victors will be the aggressive defenders of the political correctness who will do anything and everything to harass, suppress, and worse all the people who believe in some old values, who believe in the existence of our nation and the need to protect it, and those who still have common sense and rudimentary knowledge when it comes to nations, races, sexes, and other things.

I am afraid that Schwarzenberg's victory would be a green light to various feminist, Euronaivist, reverse racist, and other degenerative and dishonest ideologies that are plaguing much of the West and that the Czech Republic has been relatively immune to so far – partly due to President Klaus but not only because of him personally. With Miloš Zeman at the Castle, my worries about these scenarios are greatly diminished – in spite of that he calls himself a "eurofederalist". Zeman has personally always tried to probe the limits of the freedom of speech by his own witticisms and he isn't afraid to point out the idiocy of anyone (including himself) as he believes that a left-wing idiot may be as good an idiot as a right-wing idiot. ;-)

Positive evolution by Mr Janeček and fascism

There is one more recent story where I totally agreed with Klaus Jr. He wrote an article explaining why the so-called "Positive Evolution", a bizarre movement led by a Czech multimillionaire to get rid of corruption in politics – is effectively equivalent to the emergence of Nazism of Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

I totally agree with Klaus Jr – needless to say, he's been criticized by some loud groups for his article, too.

Karel Janeček was born in the same year as your humble correspondent. He studied the best high school in Czechia, one in Prague's Korunní Street, and in fact, string theorist Martin Schnabl was his near classmate. He earned his first million of dollars by some sophisticated calculation-heavy tricks in Las Vegas (blackjack?) which are no longer allowed there and he's earning billions of crowns by having acquired servers near the London markets that can trade things within milliseconds so he's collecting some percentage of the transfers (he claims to have earned billions by fast trading himself but it's hard to know whether it depended on the location of servers or very clever algorithms).

Fine. It's not my business to study whether those things were or are kosher and/or whether his remarks about his life story are accurate. I don't care much and I of course respect his being wealthy. What I don't respect is his self-described role as the leader of a movement fighting against corruption. As far as I can say, his political capital and his moral authority in these matters as well as other political matters are equal to zero (at most) and he has shown no skills and no trustworthiness among the Czech voters when it comes to politics.

Still, his plan is to radically transform the Czech politics without his entering into politics (according to the existing laws and rules) at all. So everyone who is in politics today is corrupt, we hear, everything is screwed, and everything must be replaced. This totally negative and I would say hateful propaganda is labeled by positive words such as "positive evolution". The movement is otherwise free of any ideas – the only kind of values he seems to defend is that the "new politicians" must be close to him personally. But during the meeting, he's ready to become friends with the defenders of the Occupy Wall Street/99% (defunct) movement, left-wing parties, right-wing parties, anyone.

Much like Klaus Jr, I also think that this screaming that all of politics is corrupt and the democratic parliamentary system is corrupt pretty much by construction and a radical change that may eliminate those things entirely is the key part of fascism. When he is proposing some methods to get rid of corruption, I sometimes tend to think that it's just because Mr Janeček is childishly naive when it comes to politics. He doesn't understand how things work at all. However, when I think about it more generally, I usually decide that he must know what he's doing and why.

So far, the support for his movement in the Czech society is negligible. A hundred of people may come to his meeting in a city that is as large as Pilsen. His YouTube videos from these events attract hundreds of viewers. They're remarkable non-events for a billionaire who wants to get enough supporters to "force" everyone to radically change the laws. But with some institutionalized/media support, he could become the new Hitler. I am somewhat worried about this scenario. I am already terrified by his own and his fans' sanctimoniousness. I am terrified when they want to liquidate the politicians who are the natural products of democracy – natural representatives of typical citizens who are very similar in characteristics that don't affect their election and who are better in some things that do affect their election. I am terrified when they try to scare people like me who think/know that corruption isn't a key problem in our country (and many others) and when it comes to this problem in its genuine proportions that aren't spectacular, there isn't any easy way to quickly improve the situation except for steps that would mean to replace the rule of law by a police state i.e. that would mean the end of democracy as we have known it. I just don't want it, OK?

When it comes to Janeček's declared methods how to build this paradise on Earth, he offers steps that couldn't possibly matter. Among them, the whole Parliament would be voted by a majority system – I have no opinions but it's a technicality that wouldn't have too much impact. We may see that despite the different systems, both chambers of our Parliament finally boast similar politicians in the long run.

He also wants to introduce negative votes. He adds some pseudo-arguments why they're the magic cure for all the troubles. As a teenager, I was thinking about such things, too. Of course that I think that they wouldn't change much after all – they wouldn't change much in his favor or his opponents' favor. At the same moment, I think that I understand why the wannabe new fascist wants the negative votes: they're a method to get rid of all the opposition against his movement once the movement gets powerful enough (hopefully, it will never do).

I am scared by the mindless people trying to impose this new group think – including the opinion that this political non-achiever is the new Jesus Christ who fights corruption and every good person has to support him. I think that almost every good and realist enough person opposes him.

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