Democrats of Europe, wake up!

Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a notorious Franco-German leftist.

In 1968, he would be a fighter at the barricades of Paris; his nickname has been Danny the Red (Dany le Rouge) ever since. In the 1970s, he would "love" children in an "anti-authoritarian kindergarten" which is why he also fought for the sex with the children to be legalized in the 1980s. Germany's Green Party recently made a huge U-turn and it now seems to claim that it was "unacceptable" to demand the legalization of peadophilia.

In a normal society, such a man would probably oscillate in between a mental asylum and a prison but we live in countries that have incorporated themselves into the European Union so this chap is much more than a rank-and-file member of the European Parliament. He co-leads the Greens-Marxists in the EU legislative body and is just planning to create a new, modern incarnation of the Communist International that should overtake Europe.




That's the main "planned action" according to his and Felix Marquard's 5-days-old article (also published by The New York Times),

The Fix For Europe: People Power,

where they plan to screw Europe and take the power from the people and democrats on the continent. Marquard is a dropout who did fine thanks to his rich parents and runs a P.R. agency – a spoiled brat Engels for the Marx-Bendit, I would say. In Poland, the article was reprinted under the headline Get rid of the nation state. Wow.

Normally, I would consider Danny the Red to be a marginal figure who is not worth an answer from many of us. His job in the EU Parliament is good for him (he announced that he won't run again in May 2014 elections) but I would doubt that his power goes beyond his preposterous individual existence. That doesn't mean that his opinions and plans aren't shared by a scary percentage of the people. But I would just feel that this particular politician doesn't have the power to change things today.




But I may be wrong. Czech ex-president Václav Klaus, his aides, and a few pro-freedom European politicians and pundits such as Nigel Farage have initiated the following manifesto:

Democrats of Europe, Wake Up!

You may join the supporters by sending a kind e-mail to democracy@vkinstitute.cz.

Klaus explains that some modernization of the language notwithstanding, Cohn-Bendit's and Marquard's rant structurally mimics Marx's and Lenin's projects and/or a roadmap to rebuild the EU into a federal melting pot of nations analogous to the USSR.

See also Bruce Bawer's analysis, "Europe's Would-Be Masters", of the Cohn-Bendit's and Marquard's rant written for the Front Page Magazine.

I agree with Klaus that those people do think in a more or less isomorphic way to the Marxists, Leninists, and Stalinists. I do agree that they're not a negligible fringe group that may be ignored. I do agree that democrats must show their teeth before the left-wing radicals insert their teeth into the flesh of necks of our European nation states and their democratic regimes.

It's just not clear to me whether the planned creation of yet another radical party is something that crosses the red lines, something that should suddenly energize and unite the opposition to these dangerous plans across the old continent. But maybe I will change my opinion later today. ;-) So far, it just seems to me that he will at most regroup some extremist parties enjoying something like 5% percent in the EU.

Am I wrong?

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Snowden: Internet encryption useless against eyes in NSA, GCHQ

Both HTTPS, SSL, and VoIP only good against little fish

Edward Snowden has provided The New York Times and The Guardian and others with some eye-catching revelations:

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web (NYT)

---

NSA and GCHQ unlock privacy and security on the internet (Guardian)

The two U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies "are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic" according to Director of National Intelligence who was quoted in the latest Snowden document about the $52 billion black budget. See also skeptical, technically sophisticated remarks by Wired. HTTPS, SSL, and VoIP are no longer safe; the correctly implemented strong encryption seems fine.



Of course, I got a bit excited: Have the agents finally built operational quantum computers? Have they made some progress that proves that \(P=NP\), after all?




Well, not really. Already the subtitle of the article in The Guardian makes it clear that the weapons that the agencies use aren't some groundbreaking advances in quantum computation or classical algorithms. Instead, they abuse the weaknesses of the human factor. Some big progress occurred in 2010, we're told.




So it seems that $250 million is spent every year to "encourage" the tech companies to insert weaknesses (backdoors and trapdoors) into their products. I suppose that to decrypt a message using state-of-the-art encryption programs, you either need to input a very long nonsensical sequence of characters that changes every day or you have to type "My name is Bond, James Bond". ;-) This sounds like a joke but it may be very close to the truth, too. NSA influences international agreements about encryption standards. Lots of supercomputers are running to break the codes by brute force but this hard work would be useless if the agencies didn't have secret agreements with folks in the tech companies.

Analysts aren't allowed to ask or speculate about the sources of the data or methods used to make the data readable. Having watched many superagent movies and having seen that I couldn't complete, I won't ask or speculate, either. NSA claims that without this control, the U.S. couldn't allow the access to the cyberspace to remain unrestricted. This claim surely sounds tough but it may have a point, too. A GCHQ team works with the "big four": Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo.

Well, as long as I feel that those agencies don't use their behind-the-scenes powerful tactics to harm free individuals for something that should always remain legal, I find the reports above just a little bit chilling. On the other hand, every capability or influence may be abused and what we're hearing seem to be extraordinary powers, indeed. It still sounds a bit more plausible when these powers belong to institutions whose composition may be refreshed according to the desires of the American (and British) voters.



Does this serious Gentleman have his own capabilities, too?

The British GCHQ seems to be among the "top two". That couldn't stop Dmitry Peskov, a Putin spokesman, from overlooking Northern Ireland and calling the United Kingdom "just a small island no one listens to" that plays no major role in the world politics and whose Chelsea and other upmarket London districts is being bought by Russian oligarchs. Cameron et al. claim that they believe that the U.K. continues to be a superpower. It's up to you to decide whose perspective is more ludicrous. ;-)

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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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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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Thiel-Kasparov debates

If you have 52 minutes, you may want to watch this video full of intelligent enough debates between the renowned chess player Garry Kasparov (a chronic world ex-champion and a sort of a political activist in Russia) and the renowned venture capitalist Peter Thiel (the founder of PayPal, the first major Facebook investor, a libertarian, and the supporter of world-changing projects, especially by college dropouts):



Video posted via Kasparov's YouTube channel

The topics include Google and its vision for the world, the replacement of humans by machines, the bad consequences of any looming nuclear war, politics in Russia, simultaneous chess games (in which Kasparov hasn't lost since 2001; Thiel is a very good player as well, he was surely strong enough in Nice a few years ago to beat your humble correspondent pretty much "reliably" back in Nice – but my chess scalp is surely not a source of pride for anyone who actually plays the game regularly).




They should have co-authored a book, The Blueprint, but the project has apparently been canceled. Maybe it was just delayed and renamed to The World of Fake Values where they argue that despite the widespread opinions, the world is switching to a slow development of technologies (Kasparov's words around 4:00 sound like an anti-singularity theme...). But maybe the comments about that other books are also obsolete and the book under this title was cancelled, too.




I am interested in your reactions to their ideas. This blog entry was later updated and extended.

At the beginning, Kasparov praises Thiel's intelligence and the breadth of his interests. I must confirm that. He was listening and meaningfully commenting on my remarks about particle physics and e.g. the discoveries that the LHC was or wasn't going to make back in 2010. And that was just a minor interest relatively to biology and evolution (or the lack of it) that he knows a great deal about – partly because he used to study it somewhere, or something like that. He also followed the climate debate (Richard Lindzen was the main speaker about this topic).

Around 3:30, Thiel betrays that it's really a program for Germans and he was born in Germany – he speaks German for a while. (Update: At the end, I learned that it was aired on ZDF, the Second German Public TV Channel, in 2010.)

At 5:00 or so, Kasparov says he had visited Google some weeks ago. It was about Deep Blue and computerized chess. Kasparov thinks that brute force "solved" the problem of computers playing chess well. Well, it's not a fully solved game, I would add, but the computers got better than the humans.

The discussion switches to the question whether machines or machine-human combinations are better and why. Thiel says that the Google ideology says that the computers will replace humans in 20 years. Technology advocates don't like to speak about the failures of technology, Thiel adds. To question a technology has become the greatest heresy, he thinks.

The next topic around 9:00 is whether politicians are smarter people, what they want to spend the money on, and whether Obama is a socialist. In an elevator, near 9:30, we learn that Kasparov isn't optimistic about too many things. Perhaps about the ability to convince the people to look for new ideas. Robots (and ancient ones; and some robots with GPS and cameras) showed by a guy. Another robot chap says that robot got faster and they're asked about the dates when robots will do certain things.

At 12:40, a 2010 Oslo talk by Thiel is shown, saying that technology may be used both for freedom and against it. We shouldn't be utopian about technology. Instead, it's important for us to use it, use it as the first ones, and use it now. At 13:10, Kasparov laughs as he describes the Internet just as a by-product of some work at CERN. Kasparov argues that except for speeds, iPads etc. can't do anything that PCs couldn't do 25 years ago. ;-) It sounds a bit exaggerated to me but I surely agree that the science-fiction novels written half a century ago were more optimistic about the speed of the robotic progress than the present reality. 40 years after Nixon's great words, we still don't have a cure for cancer. We're 40 years closer to the solution, however. ;-) Thiel adds that no one believes that the cure will come in 5 years. (I am actually ambivalent.)

15:50 – some fancy cars I've been in, too. ;-) 16:40 – chess was a good benchmark to measure the computers' progress because it has wisdom. Well, I surely disagree with that proposition. Chess has always been clearly just a particular game that is being won by brute force and the progress in the algorithms etc. was pretty much guaranteed to be just a gradual evolution, not a result of revolutions. There are other, deeper tasks that do require qualitative breakthroughs to be mastered by machines. BTW we're told that over a million of games a day is played via the Internet. At 18:00, they visit a chess club. A minute later, Kasparov doesn't want to play Thiel – it sounds like he doesn't want to crush Thiel but I am not sure whether he realizes that Thiel wouldn't necessarily be hopeless. ;-) Finally, Thiel plays a speedy game against the chess club manager. Thiel (white) doesn't accept draw at some moment. However, it seems he loses at the end and Kasparov is telling him what he should have played differently. Maurice Ashley, a British chess grandmaster, appears.

In the car, 25:40, Thiel says that when he's facing stronger players, he feels that the doom is coming gradually. Kasparov is skeptical and suggests that it depends on the strength of the opponent ;-) (he clearly wants to say that if Thiel played against Kasparov, Kasparov would destroy him rapidly, after a single move that turns out bad). Kasparov mentions his insane record in the simultaneous exhibitions (20-30 opponents at the same moment): no loss since 2001. Kasparov modestly tells us that he just has the stamina to walk around, keep pressure, and the 20-30 enemies just collapse. ;-)

At 28:00, they enter the Empire State Building. It sounds like I have been to the top more often than Thiel. :-) Kasparov boasts he knows the date of the construction. Thiel says that the inability to build a new World Trade Center for 9 years is a bigger failure than 9/11; this suggests that the video is from 2010, at least this part of it. Kasparov talks about some craziness in Russian politics. Kasparov said that the opposition wasn't important, the internal fights under the surface are more important, and young people massively want to flee Russia. Anywhere. Older folks are upset. A general degradation of the country follows.

They visit a human rights activist (in the Human Rights Foundation). He says things are getting worse. That's why they exist etc. Kasparov says that the West doesn't want to interfere, another problem. Thiel mentions a correlation between human rights and the economics (I mostly agree – after all, the human rights are a luxury that the wealthier ones are more likely to afford) – and a country with some ten-to-fourty inflation. The host prepared about 10 different coffees for Kasparov, all kinds – a repayment of the same debt. They discuss the immense inefficiency of the U.N. and lame excuses why it's inefficient (12 languages: but Marriott etc. can do these things profitably, anyway). Thiel says that in 20 years, the iconic status of the U.N. evaporated. The host partly disagrees – some people worship the U.N. – but he says that the U.N. isn't helpful. What should we do, the host asks? Shout loud, Kasparov suggests. Both famous guys propose technological progress as a solution to make the good guys and nations more influential. I am not sure it's this straightforward.

The host says that the human rights fight has become bureaucratized and therefore unappealing for the young; it is mostly a business for old folks in suits who talk in the U.N. The foundation wants to change it. They want to bring in Thiel and his technology and Kasparov and his brain that defeated the IBM computer – and the host believes that he did. ;-) Thiel is frustrated mostly by places that are screwed for a very long time. The host says that we're "racists of low expectations" who think that Haiti won't achieve much which is why we're not holding them accountable. Nice but your humble correspondent of course adds that it's the rational attitude because the expectations aren't just pulled from the air. They are built on lots of hard data that probably won't go away and it would be foolish to think that they may be ignored and the countries may be suddenly totally different than they are. The host says that every country may switch from liberal democracy to dictatorship in a decade. Well, yes, but certain other key things – that also determine the potential to return to liberal democracy – won't really deteriorate this quickly. Kasparov says that democracy has become just a word that may cover terrible atrocities, too. It may but it is a valuable arrangement by itself, one that increases the nations' chances to be decent, too. The host gives the Russian skateboard to Kasparov and the Chinese (?) skateboard to Thiel. Kasparov asks why Thiel received the Chinese ones, the answer is incoherent, but Thiel doesn't get offended easily. ;-)

41:30 – skateboards loaded to the cars. How will it end, Thiel asks? Growth etc. is the only optimistic scenario. For Kasparov, Martians' landing is more likely. Huh? Various degrees of recession and depression are discussed along with the world war (I was never into these doomsday scenarios much). Another bad outcome is a move to the left: governments confiscate the wealth everywhere. If the money doesn't have any value, the system doesn't work. I think these are sort of weird conspiracy theories. Money had an important value even in the communist world. You just can't suppress such basic parts of the human nature and the life of societies.

44:20 – dinner. Peter: a moment for classical liberalism to return. (Klaus is perhaps returning to top Czech politics, as a savior.) Kasparov talks about Buffett who predicts America's fall (China is next). Thiel points out that Buffett is all about avoiding the technology completely. Even on Mars, people will eat candy bars. ;-) Regardless of China, Thiel feels that you can only do decent things in the U.S. Kasparov says that Obama et al. don't care about technologies. Obama is just the community organizer, not a leader. Thiel says that they're not focusing on important things. Kasparov says that they can't even identify them. Thiel idealistically says that technology is "doing more with less" (austerity is "less with less", printing is "more with more"). Food arrives. Worries about propagation of nuclear weapons. Thiel thinks that the risk is underestimated. Kasparov points out that nations value life differently. Dictatorships are powerful because of fossil fuels etc., if the dependence on them is reduced, things get better. Well, I think that he contradicts his previous comments. A reduced dependence on fossil fuels will make the fossil-fuel-producing countries poorer and therefore even more screwed. Thiel asks what makes Kasparov continue while being pessimistic about most day-to-day issues. Kasparov is a born optimist, we hear. There will be too many questions and a few people who will give answers.

End of dinner, good bye, it was fun.

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Aspects of Al Gore's lies on category 6 hurricanes

Two days ago, Al Gore gave an interview to the Washington Post

Al Gore explains why he’s optimistic about stopping global warming

in which he pretended to be optimistic that unhinged alarmists like himself may still morph from the hopeless dirty losers such as himself to winners. With his characteristic diplomacy, the former future U.S. president compared climate realists to champions of apartheid, to homophobes, and to an alcoholic father who explodes whenever the elephant in the room (more precisely, ethanol in the bottle) is being mentioned which is why his relatives prefer to be silent.



But it was his scientific contributions that led to the most widespread reactions:

Al Gore: ...Would there be hurricanes and floods and droughts without man-made global warming? Of course. But they’re stronger now. The extreme events are more extreme. The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6. The fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over these storms and extreme weather events.

Remarkably enough, pretty much all the climate writers on all sides of the conflict agreed – while using various words for the same proposition – that Gore is a shameful lying mongrel who should splash himself into a toilet.

Aside from expected critics such as Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, the Wall Street Journal, the Hill, Newsmax, Politico, The National Review, and many others, even the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang, The Union of Concerned Scientists and Climate Skeptics' Dogs, and their likes pointed out that Gore's claim was a science fiction that isn't backed by any credible enough experts.




One must still understand that the separation of hurricanes into categories, the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, is a matter of human conventions. But the experts doing these things are simply not adding any new category. Ultimately, the most important reason is that the hurricanes (and all other local weather phenomena!) are doing what they have always been doing and there's no reason for any change of the classification because we don't observe any fingerprint of any qualitative change, in a striking contrast with the claims by alarmist liars such as Al Gore.

Wikipedia's two paragraphs on Category 6 hurricanes actually tell you pretty much all the facts you need to know to understand the situation.




After some strong enough hurricanes, e.g. in 2005, various people proposed to create a new category 6 for the hurricanes. None of these people has ever been influential or successful. In the current terminology, Category 5 hurricanes include all the hurricanes with winds above 70 meters per second. If you allow me to simplify a table, the speeds in meters per second are:

Category 1: 33-42 m/s
Category 2: 43-49 m/s
Category 3: 50-58 m/s
Category 4: 58-70 m/s
Category 5: 70-∞ m/s

I hope you are able to translate the speeds to kph (km/h) or kn (knots). For each of the speeds, one may almost reliably predict the normal central pressure (lower than one atmosphere and decreasing with the category!) although it's an independent quantity and doesn't enter the primary definition of the scale.

Sorry that for some categories, the borderline speed is the same and for others, 1 m/s was added. They know how to round it and classify it in the marginal cases although the outcome may often be affected by the error margin, anyway.

At any rate, there is some minimal speed for which a tropical storm may be called a hurricane and the borderline speeds increase by roughly 10 m/s per category. Don't ask me why it's not uniform. But if you do ask me, it's because they wanted to associate the categories with the impact on man-made structures. But the final category (5) includes all the storms above a critical value.

Robert Simpson, a co-author of the Saffir-Simpson scale and a scientist who is now over 100 years old, gives a simple reason why it's a bad idea to introduce a higher category – even though you may find it natural to introduce an arbitrarily high category: he claims that the final category is rupturing buildings independently of the engineering methods that were used to construct it so there's no good reason to finely discriminate. I am a bit skeptical about the claim that the men can't design better materials and structures that simply withstand greater winds than the minimal Category 5 hurricane winds (in other words, I am probably more optimistic about the abilities of the new technologies) but I hope that he has some reasons to make this general claim.

However, there's another reason why the new category isn't even being considered. The number of such "Category 5 hurricanes on steroids" in the record is too small. Among the 35 Atlantic Category 5 hurricanes on the current record, 17 exceeded 78 m/s and 8 exceeded 80 m/s. You see that near 80 m/s, the number of storms seems to be dropping quickly. Similar decrease is seen in the Eastern Pacific hurricanes. Recall that the Northwestern Pacific tropical storms are usually classified with a different terminology than this scale and one talks about typhoons and supertyphoons etc. that have independent definitions.

If you introduced a new boundary near 80 m/s for the Atlantic hurricanes, the classification of Category 5 vs Category 6 would finely depend on the speed (on accidents, roughly speaking), and this extra splitting wouldn't be too useful, anyway. If the borderline speed were much higher than 80 m/s, you would probably be left with no or almost no hurricanes in the new group. If you're looking forward to some very strong hurricanes in their new class and you need some terminology to talk about them, why don't you directly talk about their speed? Try to make people excited while they are waiting for the first 85+ m/s Atlantic hurricane (that would mildly beat Camille 1969 and Allen 1980: you will probably never see one). Such an ad hoc threshold speed surely sounds less sexy than a new category but meritocratically speaking, this topic of the top hurricanes isn't sexy so you shouldn't try to pretend that it is. After all, the strongest hurricanes are remembered not according to their modest differences in the speed but according to their location and impact (a slower hurricane may be much more influential than a faster one) and these things are so dependent on the culture that no objective assignment to the categories could be done according to such criteria (but the classification should be objective so that we know that the distribution isn't changing with the human mood).

An essential fact to notice is that nothing seems to be visibly changing about the distribution of the tropical storms and hurricanes into the categories. Saffir and Simpson did some work in evaluating the data and dividing the hurricanes into useful categories and because the statistical data is pretty much the same (but more extensive) today, they would probably end up with the same results today, too.

None of the hurricane data shows a clear, statistically significant trend. Statistically insignificant trends may be positive and negative depending on what you precisely quantify and how. Theoretically, there exists a good fundamental reason – often emphasized by Richard Lindzen – why one should expect fewer hurricanes and weaker hurricanes in a warmer world (which we're very slowly entering, according to some claims and according to linear regression in the last 30 or 100 years): a warming occurs primarily in the polar regions that were and still are much colder than the equatorial zone (due to various polar e.g. ice-albedo feedbacks) and that's why the globally widespread warming trend also means that the polar-equatorial temperature difference decreases. But this difference – locally speaking, the gradient – is one of the main causes that power the storms (not only tropical storms) so if it goes down, so should the frequency and strength of the tropical cyclones.

It's plausible that someone has built a climate model that produces the opposite result but it's almost certainly an artifact of some numerical (or conceptual!) defects of the models (if I avoid justifiable accusations of fudging). Because there doesn't exist any theoretical, computerized-oracle-independent argument why the hurricanes should be getting stronger or more frequent, we should use Occam's razor and ignore such a complicated extra hypothetical trend until we have a reason to think otherwise.

At any rate, no one in the world of experts is proposing anything such as a sixth category for the hurricanes. It's too bad that Al Gore began to think that any lie that goes in the alarmist direction is excusable. I sincerely hope that his lying dirty mouth will start to be broken into many small bloody pieces whenever he says something comparably outrageous so that by the time he possesses one last tooth, he learns to speak the truth, at least sometimes. Unfortunately, most Americans are cowards who are afraid of beating scumbags such as Al Gore on the street while a minority of Americans even sympathizes with similar scumbags. Yes, I sort of preferred the America from the Westerns where Category 6 assholes such as Al Gore are finally shot by the heroes.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger orders gas chambers for some conservatives

...with his thick Austrian accent...

The Terminator's comments at the National Clean Energy Summit were... unfortunate.

According to the Huffington Post (via Junk Science and Climate Depot), he has proposed a final solution to some disagreements with his opponents that seems to be highly popular among famous Austrian-born expats (let me not mention a former German chancellor by his name), perhaps even more popular than their irrational opposition to peaceful nuclear energy:

Speaking of greenhouse gas deniers: "Strap some conservative-thinking people to a tailpipe for an hour and then they will agree it's a pollutant!"

An interesting but not original (as visitors of a camp in Poland know) technique. But will it achieve what the ex-governor believes that it will achieve? Will the conservative-thinking people agree that CO2 is a pollutant?



Arnold admitted he used to be a big admirer of his countrymate Adolf and has been lying about this relationship for decades.

I don't think so. It seems more likely that they will agree with nothing because they will be dead and dead people can't agree with anything. Instead, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be tried for crimes against humanity – and I guess that the judges would agree that this method to terminate the lives of some conservative-thinking people is a crime against humanity. He will be shown that the Terminator's being human is a film propaganda and his abilities to escape justice indefinitely are movie fantasies.

Moreover, their death won't have anything to do with CO2. Why?




Open the Wikipedia's definition of exhaust gases – this encyclopedia is unlikely to be conservatively biased – and you will see the following:

Composition

The largest part of most combustion gas is nitrogen (N₂), water vapor (H₂O) (except with pure-carbon fuels), and carbon dioxide (CO₂) (except for fuels without carbon); these are not toxic or noxious (although carbon dioxide is generally recognized as a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming). A relatively small part of combustion gas is undesirable noxious or toxic substances, such as carbon monoxide (CO) from incomplete combustion, hydrocarbons (properly indicated as C_xH_y, but typically shown simply as "HC" on emissions-test slips) from unburnt fuel, nitrogen oxides (NO_x) from excessive combustion temperatures, ozone (O₃), and particulate matter (mostly soot).

Carbon dioxide, while a greenhouse gas, is not toxic and it is not noxious. It's probably carbon monoxide that will be responsible for the genocide. Too bad that Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't attend an elementary school during George W. Bush's administration because the "No Child Left Behind" program was firmly in place. He didn't have to become a child who was left behind and a walking confirmation of the stereotype that people with his physique are stupid and redundant piles of pork and related proteins – and be sure that I used to think that he was much, much more than that.




The Wikipedia page linked to above also describes the composition of the exhaust gases. In average, they contain something like 71% of nitrogen, 14% of CO2, 12% of water vapor, and 1-2% of carbon monoxide. Trace elements are below 1%.

You see that the nitrogen content is approximately right. The concentration of CO2 is a bit too high. The air that we exhale contains 4% of CO2 so the exhaust gases are about 3.5 times "richer" in that gas. However, on the percentage basis, it is not such a huge difference. CO2 becomes detrimental to life at concentrations about 5% – the atmospheric concentration is 0.04%, more than 100 times lower. Sensitive individuals start to feel dizzy at concentrations of CO2 around 1%, about 25 times higher than the current atmospheric concentration.

So the excess of CO2 would surely be enough to threaten your life after minutes or an hour, to say the least. But it is far from being the main property of the composition that would cause your death.

You may notice that the exhaust gases don't contain any oxygen. It's been used to burn the fuel, stupid. You should really be getting at least about 20% of oxygen (100% is no problem, as astronauts know), otherwise you're not getting an important gas. In fact, many of the health problems appearing in elevated CO2 concentrations are incorrectly attributed to the excess of CO2 even though the main problem is actually the shortage of oxygen.

Most importantly, the exhaust gases are said to contain 1-2% of carbon monoxide, CO, which results from "imperfect combustion" (perfect combustion ends with the perfectly harmless oxide of carbon, the carbon dioxide). You see that the concentration of CO in the exhaust gases is just 7-14 times lower than the concentration of carbon dioxide.

What are the dangerous concentrations of CO? This page on CO poisoning says that concentrations 100 ppm i.e. 0.01% and greater can be dangerous to human health. So the exhaust gases contain 100-200 times greater concentrations of carbon monoxide than the dangerous ones while 14% of CO2 is just 3.5-14 times greater than the dangerous concentrations of CO2, 1%-5% (CO2 only starts to be dangerous at 100-500 times higher concentrations than CO).

You see that the carbon monoxide content is about an order of magnitude more lethal than the carbon dioxide content. Something like 85-98% of the death of the conservative-thinking person should be blamed on carbon monoxide, a very different gas than carbon dioxide. The high content of water vapor isn't a good thing, either, but the complete absence of oxygen is obviously much worse.

It's mostly carbon monoxide that would kill the people in the gas chamber. Let me also mention that this toxic gas is not considered a greenhouse gas. First, its diatomic structure is too simple and makes its infrared spectrum very limited. Second, carbon monoxide is short-lived in the atmosphere due to its reactivity and solubility. The most evil gases are not greenhouse gases while the main greenhouse gases (water vapor and carbon dioxide) are some of the healthiest and most harmless gases around. The relationship between greenhouse-ness and toxicity is exactly the opposite than the alarmist demagogues love to say.

So if the ex-governor were able to realize his dream and attach the conservative-thinking people to his gas chamber and if he were able to claim that the people were murdered by carbon dioxide, you would know that the court system has probably been hijacked by Arnold's murderous ideology because science says something completely, completely different.

Most importantly, CO2 produced by the cars, factories, and other human activities – and by all breathing animals in Nature, among other natural sources – is definitely not a pollutant simply because this production of CO2 only leads to concentrations (and at least, for thousands of years will only lead to concentrations) that are not harmful to anyone and they're actually beneficial to all plants on Earth.



Arnold Schwarzenegger Exhaust, a stupid video formally related to the topic of this blog entry

To summarize, Arnold's "science" is a complete crackpottery which means that the only contribution he is offering to the mankind is his desire to murder people who are vastly smarter than he is.

And that's the memo.

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Some hysteria about Czech politics in the media

The Czech media hype some articles, especially in the German-speaking media such as Die Presse, as evidence that everyone thinks that we have become a banana republic. The president has become a king, we're becoming a Putin-style democracy, and so on. A new Bloomberg article talks about a paralysis and other dramatic words.

I just don't understand what they're talking about. What happened?




Recall that in June, plasma physicist Petr Nečas' center-right government was forced to resign after a bizarre police raid against various powerful people who were linked to the (then) prime minister's secretary and sweetheart, Ms Jana Nagyová.

The three cases "addressed" on the same day had almost nothing to do with each other and they had totally different degrees of severity and plausibility. One of them was that Ms Nagyová succeeded in ordering some units of the military intelligence to look for discrediting materials about Nečas' ex-wife (they were divorced 2 days ago from now). The second one was an accusation against some rich folks in Prague who may have been linked to politics and may have bribed someone or befriend someone but why they think that something serious has happened and what it was remains unknown. Third, three rebel deputies of the center-right party who allowed the government to survive in late 2012 – even though the government insisted that its fate was linked to a non-right-wing plan to increase the value-added tax which the three rebels rightfully disliked – were claimed to be corrupt because they were offered some jobs controlled by Nečas if they leave the Parliament. Ordinary political deals were criminalized.

At any rate, the Nečas government is gone and the constitution says that it's the president who may appoint anyone as the new prime minister.




Mr Miloš Zeman, a self-described leftist who is more right-wing than many right-wingers, was elected the new president and Václav Klaus' successor in early 2013, after a decade he spent in the countryside as a modest pensioner. He has always been a political heavyweight and in some contexts in the 1990s and the following decade, he was almost a full-fledged Klaus counterpart on the left side.

He appointed Mr Rusnok, an ally and an economist who left the social democracy because it was too populist for him a few years ago. He also had clashes with the left-wing party a decade ago when he decided to support Klaus as a candidate for the president instead of the assorted losers, 2nd league politicians, and non-politicians who were officially running as candidates of the social democratic party. Recently, Rusnok was working in some private pension insurance industry.

It was important to realize that the government appointed by the president starts to govern and it is only replaced once another government is named by the president. This is not really a bug of the constitution; I have always believed that this was a deliberate solution to avoid various government-less crises. At any rate, Rusnok's government didn't win the confidence vote yesterday as it only got 93 out of 200 votes – only a few votes were missing. The result was "no" but it wasn't a debacle Rusnok would have to be ashamed of.

Strangely enough, Zeman succeeded in convincing the social democracy (along with the communists and the Public Affairs, the right-wing populist party that used to be the smallest part of the right-wing coalition but it betrayed so that only its smaller leftover, now defunct LIDEM, remained the only member of the center-right coalition) that they should support the government so they did while the fired center-right coalition essentially voted against the government (with the exception of two new rebels; I would probably be a rebel as well if I were an ODS deputy these days). This polarization is already a bit illogical and shows that Zeman celebrates successes in overtaking the social democratic party he lost a decade ago. Mr Sobotka, an annoying leftist and the current chairman, planned not to support the technocratic government but Zeman and his allies in the party ultimately won. As far as I can say, it's a great news if the social democratic party is returning from the obnoxious true i.e. hateful leftists to more sensible and pragmatic folks close to Zeman. I surely prefer a social democratic whose election doesn't look like a catastrophe to me – Zeman's ČSSD obeys this condition while Sobotka's ČSSD may not.

At any rate, Rusnok's government will govern despite the lack of confidence because this is what the constitution says. The president is expected to search for a "new attempt" after such a no-confidence vote but there's really no constitutionally enforced deadline so he can keep Rusnok in his job for months or a year and at least so far, it could be good if he were there until the regular 2014 elections. (The early elections may arrive as early as October 2013, too. It would sound a bit scary to me.) It would help the right-wing parties to score better in the elections, too, because every government is unpopular and Rusnok's government would undoubtedly be marketed as a left-wing one even if it were not. ;-) And yes, there exist aspects in which I prefer weak centrist governments even over right-wing ones because they screw even less things than the nominally right-wing governments – the less government, the better.

None of these developments should have been unexpected. For years, people like Klaus (or myself) would say that the direct presidential elections don't mean any "increase of democracy". It mainly means that some political power groups (including the media – that were not too successful in this case, thank God) decide about the result of such elections and the resulting president will feel much stronger than the presidents chosen by the Parliament.

I think that it wasn't a great idea to switch to presidential elections. But I don't think it was such a catastrophe, either – at least given the fact that Zeman was the winner at the end. So needless to say, I immediately adapted to the direct presidential system. It gives more power to the president. He feels more self-confident. But if he's better than other political forces, it may be a better setup. Every sensible system of rules may work. I used to care whether majority or proportional systems were better, and so on, but I tend to think that these obsessions were childish. It doesn't really matter in average.

The hysteria about the new arrangement is incomprehensible to me. For example, someone says that we're switching to a Putin-like system. Maybe. But we're also getting closer to the American or French presidential systems. Obama was also directly elected, is powerful, and is often able to deal with the Congress as if he were equally strong or stronger. It's interesting that the critics of the current setup never mention the American analogy.

Bloomberg chose a dramatic headline,

Czech Paralysis Extends as President Zeman Seizes Spotlight.

You know, having a technocratic government in resignation isn't supposed to be – and isn't - paralysis. It's business as (almost) usual. There is a government. It enjoys some political support because it was appointed by the president who was elected by the people. This government is doing some usual work (they promise not to do too radical things). And a government that would also enjoy the support of the Parliament is being looked for, at an undefined timescale. Hysterical words such as "paralysis" are totally inappropriate. If the authors of the constitution thought that a no-confidence vote for the government automatically implies a paralysis, they would make sure that this doesn't happen. ;-)

So the direct presidential elections have surely made the president more powerful, just like some of us were predicting, but this doesn't imply any catastrophe.

The first paragraph of the Bloomberg article says:

The Czech Republic’s political deadlock was extended yesterday as President Milos Zeman’s defiance of lawmakers threatens to hamper the country’s ability to tackle its longest economic slump on record.

This is complete bullshit. Virtually no politicians – or journalists – are talking about an "economic slump". We have just gone through some quarters in which the growth was around minus one percent. There's no law of physics saying that the growth has to be positive every year. It's just not, OK? The economy sometimes goes down for a while, too. And it's not always the government's fault much like the growth of the economy isn't always the government's success. You ate or drank too much last night, got bills to pay. So today, your head just feels in pain, you miss Ed dhe bus, and your productivity and consumption goes down. It sometimes happens and it has nothing to do with the government's recent actions.

It's just completely irrational to get obsessed about two or three quarters with a negative growth of order one percent (annualized) if not smaller, something that no one can really detect. The negative growth reflects the reality in the world economy – we're heavily connected to the global economy – at least that's the impression I am getting. It's great that no one in the Czech Republic is getting obsessed about fractions of a percent of the GDP numbers. And it's great that no politicians are obsessed about it, either.

Some nations' politicians will do anything to make these GDP numbers positive. In most cases, this obsession resembles a 40-year-old lady who will buy an arbitrarily expensive make-up to boast skin that looks like the skin of a 15-year-old girl. It's just stupid. It's a denial of reality and whoever doesn't see that it's just a stupid game is being had. And if this growth is just being bought for the increased public debt i.e. by increasing the deficit, it's even more stupid than in the lady's purchase of the makeup. One should really talk about the GDP minus the budget deficit so that these ways to mask negative growth by buying makeup and piling debt would be discouraged because they would be rendered futile.

The growth will undoubtedly return to the Czech economy but I think it's a sign of communist thinking if someone assumes that the timing of this revived growth primarily depends on the top politicians' decisions. I am happy that most Czech commentators and politicians share this viewpoint of mine – most of the growth issues are due to internal dynamics in the economy, not due to some political puppets. Politicians may quickly influence the makeup-like numbers on the surface only (including funny games to move a billion from one coffer to another), not the real state of the economy. Yes, Czech politicians and media talk much more frequently about the goal to reduce and keep the budget deficit below 3% of the GDP – very likely to be the case in this year – than about the hysterical "slumps in the economy".

Bloomberg adds:

The showdown with lawmakers came to a head when technocrat Prime Minister Jiri Rusnok lost a confidence vote. His nomination by Zeman in June without parliamentary backing was an unprecedented snub to parties.

Well, it's not the first time when a government lost a confidence vote. So it's wrong to say that this main outcome is unprecedented. In this case, Zeman could have expected that the Rusnok government wouldn't win the confidence vote. But it was a speculation because the results of votes are never quite known in advance. So there's nothing unprecedented about this issue, either.

The country may now face a snap vote as its increasingly fractured politics remain in crisis.

I would like to know how the bit whether "politics is in crisis" was quantified. Where does this claim come from? What is it supported by? What I see is lots of people who have no idea about the art of politics and who are emitting similar negative statements about the Czech democracy – and other democracies. What I am seeing isn't any politics in crisis. It's business as usual that follows the basic rules described by the constitution. In democracy – or other parts of the real world society, for that matter – it's just not determined in advance what will happen with a government, a parliament, a political program, or other things. It depends on the dynamics of the politics and the ability of the politicians (professional representatives of various groups' interests, philosophies, and values) to pick the right "moves" that will allow them to win certain political battles. In my opinion, people who hate this very dynamical face of the democratic politics are fascists. They are waiting for a new Hitler who will make the world simple, predictable, and not at all "fractured" again. Thank you, I just don't want that. I want politics to be allowed to be fractured. I want politicians to be able to achieve unexpected outcomes as long as the law is respected in the process. I want the deputies to have a de facto and de iure right to disagree with the majority of their partisan clubs – if they were just homogenized screws doing the same thing that a leader orders, they wouldn't have to be there at all. Counting them in advance would be enough.

The Czech government was borrowing the local currency for 1.48% in June and 2.25% today, below the yields of the U.S. treasuries, and the Czech economy remains at the highest GDP-per-capita level except for a slightly stronger Slovenia among the post-socialist countries so I think that these numbers suggest that the markets don't think that some catastrophe is being prepared. The Czech koruna has been stable for years (after many years of fast appreciation) and strengthened by 0.5% or so today, too. But these are not the events and numbers that the Bloomberg writers would care about.

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CATO: against all public funding of science

Terence Kealey, a clinical biochemist at a private university (of Buckingham), wrote the lead essay for the new issue of the libertarian CATO Institute's magazine,

The Case against Public Science (CATO Unbound)

His text is deeply provocative yet insightful but ultimately wrong at many levels. While I have enough libertarian DNA in my blood so that I can imagine a better, more efficient world in which there is no public funding of science, I am also conservative enough to appreciate that the complete abolition of the public funding of science would represent a dramatic revolution and I am against such revolutions unless their positive impact is supported by really solid arguments.

In his interesting essay, Kealey overlooks many important things and makes implausible statements about others. So let's start to ask: Why is the taxpayer paying for the science?




Kealey sketches the arguments rather nicely. It is being said that scientific research brings benefits to the whole society but the discoveries are being almost instantly copied and used by everyone else – the ideas may be (and should be) easily "stolen" – which is why individual sponsors wouldn't be motivated to pay for the research and the governments should overtake and play their role instead.




He traces the history of the public funding of science to 1605 when Francis Bacon (GB) investigated why Spain was the dominant superpower at that time. He concluded that they took the wealth from the American colonies and they were discovered thanks to the scientific research which is why nations should pay for the scientific research if they want to beat Spain (which is not so hard today – apologies to Spaniards who didn't want to be announced the bad news that the 17th century has ended).

The need for the basic research is also discussed in the context of the Second World War when nuclear bombs and other devices had to be developed. Kealey later suggests that there was no link between the "great powers" status of countries and the countries' support for research and development. I beg to differ. Spain was dominant 4 centuries ago and this started his story. When Britain dominated sometime in the 19th century or so, it was also the headquarters of science (think about electromagnetism). Germany's rise to prominence in the early 20th century (1920s and 1930s, regardless of the regime) was accompanied by its leadership in science (it's no accident that the papers that established relativity and quanta were mostly written in German). And the birth of the new only superpower, the U.S., after the war also meant that the U.S. became the leader in sciences. Sometimes it's subtle to determine what is the cause and what is the consequence but the overall power status of nations has always been tightly linked to their visibility in the sciences.

Kealey finally rejects the arguments in favor of the public funding of science for two main reasons: the empirical data don't show that there is any correlation between the GDP growth and the expenditures for the scientific research; and because the fundamental assumption of the pro-public-science arguments, "copying is easy", is wrong.

Both of these reasons he uses suffer from serious flaws. Concerning the first argument, the GDP indeed shows no high-frequency correlation with the scientific expenditures and it shouldn't, for two main reasons: First, the economic impact of the research, especially basic research, arrives with a significant delay. The more basic research we consider, the longer delay we should generally expect. Some basic research isn't done for profit at all. Second, the scientific discoveries are usually spread all over the world so even whole nations that funded the science usually get no advantage that would go above the benefits shared by everyone. The nations that make the discoveries – which quickly belong to everyone – earn the prestige and other things.

Concerning the second argument, copying may be hard and expensive (every kind of work has to be paid for, not only the most spectacular work!) but the work needed to copy is clearly less valuable than the original discovery because it does depend on the original discovery. Moreover, if it were easier to discover things than to copy them, companies wouldn't ever be copying. ;-) Kealey points out that companies pay lots of money for copying but the question isn't whether the copying costs a lot but whether its value exceeds the value of the original discovery and the answer is clearly No.

But let me present my own case in favor of the public funding for science.

First, let me say that all sensible people should agree that the funding shouldn't be "arbitrarily high" and it should follow some meritocratic rules because otherwise lots of money may be wasted – the sticker "science" simply can't prevent money from being wasted. So some competition for funds is desirable and I would even say that to a large extent, it exists in the real world. Also, people should sometimes try to quantify the value of their individual findings, papers, and so on – so that the sum is equal to their salary. Imagine that you're paid just for papers and you write 5 papers in 5 years. So the value of each paper seems to be one times the annual salary. I think that if many people looked at such average papers, they would be shocked what a small pile of garbage may often cost $100,000 or so.

But these are obvious comments. For the distribution of the resources to be meaningful, there has to be an internal competition and meritocracy. Even internally, the research industry has to emulate the rules of capitalism. This is the uncontroversial part of the story, I think.

The controversial part of the story is whether the basic research community, if I unify and call it in this way, should be getting finances from the public. Three weeks ago, a friend of mine in Southern Bohemia told me the fundamental reason why scientists should be paid (and why he thinks that the salaries should be much higher than what I think):

The society should bribe the scientists so that their discoveries are more likely to be used to benefit the society and not against it.

In my opinion, this is the most natural perspective one should take to understand what's going on. You don't need to expect that average citizens will quantify and enforce some perfect justice, rewards for scientists who wouldn't be rewarded otherwise, and so on. They may be assumed to act in the usual egotist way. The reason why citizens as a group pay money to the scientists is simply to possess the results, at least partially, and to expect the scientists to feel loyal and to use the results so that the other citizens aren't harmed.

If you analyze the current situation, you will see that it's distorted relatively to a laissez faire utopia. But it's distorted in several ways and the other side of the coin is completely overlooked by Kealey.

So it's true that scientists – and sometimes unproductive scientists – are getting lots of money from the taxpayer which makes them richer than what they would otherwise be (and this also creates the annoying class of "average and subpar also scientists" who are almost entirely left-wing). But the other observation is that no scientists are "owning" or controlling the human society even though they possibly could.

Let me mention an oversimplified, not quite realistic, but not quite impossible example. The Manhattan Project could have been paid by a wealthy friend of the top physicists. They could have used it against the American nation and other nations and turn them into slaves of this group that is in possession of the nuclear weapons. The most disobedient cities or towns would be detonated away every Monday.



Yes, this story may sound like Humanist Cafe's sick dream about the Gulf of Arkansas and other "denier states" conquered by the sea level rise except that my story could have happened. Science often gives one some rather amazing powers that are sometimes expected and sometimes unexpected (I wish you lots of faith that your humble correspondent hasn't developed any string M-bomb). The development of the nuclear weapons could have been advancing in pretty much the same way as it did in the real world but if the funding flows were different, the bomb could have been used very differently, too.

That's one simple reason why ordinary citizens, even though who don't care about the scientific truth at all, contribute to the research. It's an insurance that they will be able to impose the society's laws saying that new potential discoveries won't be used against the citizens etc. The citizens are a part of the story – they have paid for some of the research – so they can also "punish" their employees, the scientists, and so on.

The idea of Richard Feynman and his friends who enslave the American nation may look extreme or unfair to you but it could have been them who decides what the word "justice" means so your opinions and feelings could have very well been irrelevant. I could say that many other "progressive" changes in our society, including the abolition of slavery, were anti-free-market in a sense because the owners had to abandon some powers that they used to enjoy. Today, we like to think that the slaveowners have never "owned" the slaves except that they did – and they could physically prove their ownership in any way you ask – and the liberation of the slaves was therefore a confiscation or nationalization much like many other cases of it.

Finally, as always, champions of pure science such as myself should emphasize that the most basic research isn't being pursued for economic profit, not even in the very long run, but due to the passion for the truth. People just want to understand how the Universe works. It's popular among the extreme free-market advocates to say that such a thing – research that seems almost obviously free of practical implications – shouldn't be funded at all.

But take it pragmatically. If the very basic research takes about 1% of the GDP, it doesn't mean that every citizen is eager to spend about 1% of her income to fund science. When it comes to the taxation, such rules don't hold in the funding of science and they don't hold for any other entries in the budget, either. It's more realistic to say that about 10% of the society is willing to pay 10% of their income for pure research. The remaining 90% would prefer to pay for other things and the tax system just averages all these amounts over whole nations.

Think about it. I am saying that 10% of the society finds it appropriate for 10% of the GDP – and their own income – to be paid for the scientific research. If you had 30 classmates, I am saying that about 3 people in your class attribute this "10% relevance" to the basic scientific research. Think about various classes you have attended and you will probably agree that it's a very realistic estimate.

Some of the people who don't want any money to be paid to the scientific research simply belong to the "aggressive part of the 90%" that doesn't want to admit that some people have different preferences than themselves. If you changed the redistribution of the tax revenue so that everyone would decide where his money goes, you would ultimately see 1% or so going to basic science, anyway. It's the percentage that the society as a whole finds reasonable and so do I, we could say. If your ideas about the "right funding for science" is much lower than 1%, for example zero, that's fine but you and your soulmates are not the only people in the society. Moreover, the very same complaint could be raised against every other item in the government's budget – warfare and law enforcement, construction of infrastructure, education, unemployment support, anything else.

These are some of the reasons why I am no fan of the utopias such as "abolish all public funding for science". While it's clear that the existing system of the funding of research is extremely far from the principles of the free markets, the society would reorganize itself in such a way that the net funding would be roughly similar even in a free-market-based setup. Moreover, I believe that the general "abolish all public funding for science" is driven by some general negative sentiments against scientists and science itself and not by solid free-market-based or economic arguments. This observation is also supported by the fact that Kealey and his soulmates overlook the powers that the discoverers have given up even though they didn't need to do so.

Via Preposterous Universe

Incidentally, Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler primarily discuss a smaller topic, the stopped NSF funding for political science. I think it's right to stop it; it's not a science foundation's business to fund political science which isn't really a science. It should only fund research that may be agreed to be impartial in the scientific sense and political science just isn't an example. It would be great if the funding for various professional women's and professional blacks' departments could be slashed, too.

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