The Reference Frame

Has the war killed green, woke, other pathological leftist movements?

2022-03-06T06:22:00.009+01:00

Some of us already woke to Day Eleven of the War in Ukraine which has already changed the world more than the previous decade did – it partly threw us back to the 1940s or 1950s while the Russians are the new Nazis. Some of you remember that as recently as 12 days ago, things like the Omicron Common Cold, Green Deal, and Social Justice Fights were big topics. What percentage of readers followed these non-stories yesterday?

As musician Remy explained in his remake of Californication, Affluenflammation arises from excessive wealth and boredom. The West was largely inventing these non-problems because it didn't have any real problems and lots of people were simply bored or they (rightfully) felt useless for the society. So they invented and hyped all these fake non-problems and appointed themselves as the chief warriors against these non-problems.

"Climate change" was the dominant fabricated non-problem promoted by these useless people for a few decades, especially roughly from 2005 when this hysteria flooded the "mainstream" outlets. Initially, its main impact was to poison the public discourse, corrupt scientific institutions, and fill them with incompetent or lying crackpots, immoral profit seekers, and unhinged far left activitists who are covered by the umbrella term "climate alarmists". In recent years, this insanity started to impact the real economy. Some energy saving pressures were the beginning; insane promotion of economically ludicrous electric cars were a more expensive recent manifestation of the power that the "climate alarmist" saboteurs had acquired.

The production of electricity was still the most important result of this movement. The most natural way to "decarbonize" the economy would be to switch to nuclear energy but countries like Germany did just the opposite because they don't have any justifiable basis for their messing with the energy industry. They just decide that they hate ABC for ideological reasons and terrorize the companies that do ABC.

Fine. So the solar and wind power were the two most important intermittent sources of energy that were defended instead of the reliable fossil fuel power plants (and instead of the nuclei in countries like Germany). But these intermittent sources of energy aren't good replacements for everything because they are... intermittent. So the actual main trend was to replace high-carbon sources of energy, especially coal, by the lower-carbon sources, especially natural gas. It became a basic slogan that was frequently repeated by managers in utilities companies: we can survive for another decade if we replace these XY coal power plants by natural gas.

You can check various sources to see that in the lab, 1 kWh produced from natural gas produces 0.9 pounds (in the U.S.), just 50% of the emissions than 1 kWh from coal (2.2 pounds, in the U.S.). In this lab sense, natural gas is less "carbon-intensive". However, there are other procedures outside the lab that the real world usage of natural gas and coal require. And those are much more energy-demanding for natural gas. Consequently, the total CO2 emissions per 1 kWh of produced energy are very similar for natural gas and coal. It just doesn't make a detectable difference to switch from coal to gas. The "gas war on coal" has always been meaningless.

Now, we have the war and it's not clear how long time it will take before Russia completely surrenders (and whether nuclear bombing may be avoided). Even if Russia starts to behave seemingly well soon, it will remain untrustworthy and Europeans will feel that 20% of every dollar that they pay to Russia may soon be used against them. Russia will clearly have to be pressured and the boycotts became intense enough so that they are felt by now (if China were persuaded to join some sanctions, that would start to be another level!). Nord Stream 2 was made bankrupt (I have absolutely no reason to celebrate) but I find it likely that very soon, Europe will try hard to get rid of the dependence on the Russian gas that goes through older pipelines.

The funny fact is that Europe does depend on Russia in natural gas; but it doesn't depend on the Russian coal. Coal is almost everywhere, we don't really import much of it, and we don't need to import any coal from Russia. There is also oil; we import it from Russia and the Arabs and Russians are potentially redundant, too – although I believe that we may very well buy lots of "Arab" oil in the future which will be Russian oil re-exported through China and Arabs. If those tricky loops emerge and allow Russia to sell (or buy) almost the same as before, these boycotts become ineffective and should be cancelled.

It is completely obvious by now that Europe actually needs to urgently allow tons of the coal and other "dirty" (which are no longer dirty at all!) sources of energy and it's happening. We would run into blackouts very soon otherwise. See e.g. an article published one hour ago:

Europe Sacrifices Green Efforts Due to War in Ukraine.

Europe obviously can no longer afford this luxury powered by boredom, leftist activist, and "climate change" anti-coal pseudoscience. Maybe the impact may be negligible in North America but Europe simply has to re-elect King Coal to be our king again. With the filters that have been there since the 1990s, there is absolutely nothing wrong about coal. If you don't like nice weather and believe that we need to trace CO2 emissions, well, the world's CO2 emissions may add some 0.01 °C a year, Europe does 8% of it which is 0.0008 °C, and let's say that only an eighth of it, 0.0001 °C per year may be added by the revival of King Coal in Europe.

Now, you may ask. What is worse? Some 0.0001 °C added to the global mean temperature in 2022, or Europe's industrial collapse (or surrender to Russia) in 2022? This is obviously a rhetorical question only. I have always emphasized (well, for 20 years...) that the climate alarmists were filthy lying terrorists because no detectable global man-made problem involving the climate has ever existed. But due to the boredom and corruption, these terrorists have been taking over the media and they brainwashed the public's perception.

But I think that the war has changed that. We are facing rather serious real threats and we need King Coal for us to be resilient. If the threats for EU countries increase further and we really emerge in a quasi-war against Russia officicially (our support for Ukraine is still unofficial or "moral" although Russia threatens many of us every day and increasingly brutally), I will work hard to go after the neck of the climate alarmists who will turn into plain traitors, helping Russia to destroy Europe, I will support death penalty for the climate alarmists, and I think that in the tense conditions, I will have quite some support from others. The same holds for anti-fracking activists. Fracking is obviously a way for Western countries to be less dependent on Russia (and Arabs) and whoever fights against fracking is partly fighting in Putin's Army now.

It's similar with the woke insanity like the identity politics. A far left whackodoodle with the e-mail from a U.S. university claimed that it was "racist" to talk about the Russian national character and its being imprinted genetically. Again, many of these whackodoodles are gradually finding themselves to be warriors on the enemy's side and we need to take this fact into account. For decades, I have been nice to Russians (and I've met many fine or normal Russians) and encouraged everyone to behave to Russians as another nation that may be considered comparable to some typical Western nations (which could have prevented this war but I don't actually believe it now because their barbaric disrespect for Ukrainians' very existence doesn't seem to have much to do with some subtleties in the Westerners' behavior). That is clearly no longer defensible today. I was really wrong about my views how much Russia – and the Russians' prevailing thinking – advanced since the Stalin or Brezhnev years. While lots of Western brands have spread in Russia which became partly capitalist, the progress in their heads seems very small and in many respects, average Russians seem much more evil than they were during Stalin's or Brezhnev's years because they proudly embraced the role of the aggressors.

At any rate, I strongly encourage the far left activists who have been spreading ideologically rooted lies – and sometimes earning money out of them – during the years of excessive wealth, shortage of problems, and boredom to shut their mouth of face dramatic consequences. The war in Ukraine is a catastrophe but it has awaken the West and is in the process of curing some of its diseases as well. Your disgusting leftist movements are dead in Europe (and probably beyond). Get used to it, shut up, or face draconian consequences soon.

And that's the memo.

Greens brought coal to Ostrava (from Australia)

2022-01-25T07:56:00.006+01:00

...because bringing sand to the beach is no longer green enough...

Ostrava, a city of 285,000 in the far Northeast near the Polish border, is Czechia's 3rd largest city (just ahead of Pilsen). It's been a synonym of miners, black coal, and steelworks. There's been a lot of coal on the Polish side of the border, too.

The European Union, its gr@tins, and their carbon indulgences have turned coal into a Cinderella. (What happens to Snow White exposed to 440 kilovolts? A Cinderella, i.e. a cinders/ashes girl.) That's by far the main reason why the mining dropped and the current Czech plans want to end coal mining on the Czech territory completely by 2030 or 2033, depending on whom you ask. Meanwhile, what happens in the real world of early 2022? Czechs like me who follow events related to the climate hysteria were shocked by the news reports yesterday.

We're already routinely importing coal on railways but the capacity of trains is insufficient for our needs now. So we received our first ship filled with coal which came from... Australia.

The ship with 1400 tons of coal came from Australia to Germany where 300 tons had to be removed because our greatest Elbe River isn't deep enough. At any rate, the distance between Sydney and Ostrava is 15,800 kilometers – a straight line along the Earth's surface. It's possible that this Australian coal – which is a metallurgical one, ready to be turned to coke (a fuel, not a drug or a drink) – has a higher quality than hours. But do you really believe that this import of coal from Australia is the economically and environmentally best option we have? Well, maybe the energy needed to transfer coal to the opposite point of the sphere isn't very high but I still don't believe that this might be a sensible trajectory in a market that isn't distorted.

During the Prague Spring, the 1968 Czechoslovak communists' campaign to create a socialism with human face and some traces of capitalism (which was ended by the Warsaw Pact tanks in August 1968), the Pilsner-born (*1919) Czech-Swiss economist Ota Šik became the official leader of the economic reforms. He was a bright enough fellow, not just another communist apparatchik that were usually found in these jobs. And he liked to analyze defects of the communist economic system that we have had.

One story is that he found a coal mine near Ostrava; plus a power station in Ostrava. These two were a wonderful couple: the coal mine needs some electricity to extract the coal and it consumed as much electricity as the power station produced while the power station needed coal and consumed the coal mined by the mine. ;-) Now, the magic of capitalism is that such things don't happen or at least they don't happen on a sustainable basis. The owner(s) of the mine and the power station can't be making profit so they're not motivated to continue with the futile exercise. (Yes, left-wing readers. I forgot to tell you that it's useless to run a mine and a power station that only exist for one another.)

But in communism where companies don't have owners who are seeking profit, no one really cares about these identities and inequalities. Some abstract money (and tons of coal and megawatthours) belonging to the people (i.e. basically to no one) are moving back and forth in some complicated ways and everyone is happy!

Capitalism works because of a combination of natural processes and desires. People and companies seek profit and inputs as well as products are associated with some prices (including the wages) that are determined by supply and demand. The profit seeking means that the individuals end up doing something that has an added value, that is good for them as well as their business partners (or buyers) who voluntarily buy or sell things or enter various contracts. And because the society is basically the union of the individuals and each of those is doing the best to do something useful (profitable) for him, the society also benefits as a whole.

A 1990s hit by YoYoBand, "Karviná", about a de facto Eastern suburb of Ostrava which was also all about miners.

We are facing woke and similar sick postmodern ideologies but I still consider the misunderstanding of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, as sketched in the previous paragraph, to be the most important part of the definition of a leftist. Are you dissatisfied with the claim that the profit seeking by every person is good for the whole? Then you are a moronic commie. You can be a professor at an Ivy League school (and a very large fraction of the people with this belief are) but you're a moron if you just don't get these points and if you replace them with some mumbo-jumbo about social justice. You are a moron because the ideas about the social justice in the left-wing sense don't work in practice; and they don't even work in theory and any illusion that they do work results from logical mistakes and shifting, inconsistent definitions of the concepts. It is unavoidable that any system that gives some people claiming to "protect social justice" the right to overwrite the basic economic rules must end up badly because these claims and goals are inevitably distorted and abused.

I first understood the basic magics of capitalism when I was 8, when I deeply thought about some impressive booklet (in Czech) from the embassy of West Germany, "This is how we live in the Federal Republic oF Germany". The booklet had lots of nice pictures showing the West Germans' wealth, the short times they needed to work to earn a cigarette, car, or a villa with a swimming pool, but I wasn't satisfied just with these nice pictures and the tasty strawberry yogurts that my grandmother (and then each of my parents, separately) brought from Bavaria. It seemed like a duty to understand why those things work.

It is possible that the coke-ready, metallurgical black coal can no longer be found in our mines near Ostrava. But surely it exists somewhere in Europe, at a closer place than Australia, but at a similar depth. This import seems like an insanity that trumps the inefficiencies of communism that we knew before 1968 (and again, after 1968) but that our compatriots could only safely publicly discuss in 1968. Still, the weird things (like the coal and the power station above) seemed like inefficiencies. What we are usually encountering today aren't inefficiencies; they are full-blown insanities. At a formal level, our economy is way more capitalist than it was in the 1960s. However, the distortion by the green regulations, subsidies, and fines is apparently capable of producing an even crazier system than what we had in the 1960s. According to the formal laws, the present is still more capitalist; but when it comes to the rationality of the behavior of some markets, we could already be a more communism-like society than we were 60 years ago.

A Czech idiom talks about "bringing wood to the forest"; it seems that English speakers know "bringing sand to the beach" as their synonym. Now we're "importing coal to Ostrava" which seems even better. But I bet that the European Union is already creating plans to export sand to Egypt as well. Some nice Danish sand (from Den tilsandede Kirke) could be useful to build something in Egypt, e.g. freezers because Egypt is surely a great place to host freezers for European supermarkets, according to the EU.

Another contribution to the unusual routes to move fuels could be added by the Russophobia. It's been straightforward for us to get oil and gas from Russia. We're also importing some oil from the Arabs now – which is not spectacularly further. But the U.S. is also bringing American gas to Europe, to reduce the dependence on Russia, and if the tensions become too bad, Qatar may export some liquified gas to Europe. The U.S. is negotiating such a scenario. Good for us but is this really necessary? If someone really wanted to reduce CO2 emissions by a few percent, his support for the practical and cheap Russian fossil fuels would be a great beginning.

The climate alarmist policies are a form of batšit crazy communism, largely because of the staggering inconsistency with which the holy principles are being enforced (and these inconsistencies are unavoidable in any socialism-like system where some people have the right to use ideological big words to overwrite the rules of the markets). A Czech family is being brutally discouraged by idiotic TV ads not to eat a carp during Christmas. Meanwhile, 30,000 saviors from the whole world flew to Glasgow to another self-evidently pointless conference. We have seen so much hypocrisy of this kind, everyone can describe his favorite story about private jets.

But it's not just private jets. There are activities in which lots of energy is really being wasted. Like when fuels are being imported from much greater distances than necessary. Or when the Bitcoin miners are allowed to operate although their 100% useless activity already consumes about 2% of the world's electricity consumption! If this mining were banned, the electricity prices could be expected to drop 20% right away (the factor of 10 is from the "elasticity"). But when it comes to the terms that could actually make a detectable difference, unlike the carps, the gr@tins suddenly get silent. Their excuses are complete lies. It's all about politics and these control freaks' and sociopaths' obsession with ruining of other people's lives, what the gr@tins have been doing are effectively war crimes, and they need to be held accountable for these war crimes!

And that's the memo.

Not only technical education is a nuisance for German green ideology

2021-12-29T10:03:00.009+01:00

By Milan Smutný

Starting from the position of a "hungry" opposition, politicians from Germany's ruling Green coalition party have not only occupied key ministries, but also other influential positions in the civil service. A fundamental lack of education and the relevant competences do not prevent them from doing so.

As I wrote in my previous blog (CZ), the Green Party has gained a very strong position in the new German government coalition, even in view of the weaker election result. The two co-chairs – for the Greens, both genders must be represented in the party leadership (so far only two) – have become elite members of the Berlin cabinet of Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which includes the liberal FDP alongside the Greens. The 50-year-old Mr Robert Habeck became the vice-chancellor and the minister of the economy and the protection of the climate on December 8th, the 41-year-old Ms Annalena Baerbock was appointed the minister of foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, the German conservative media have taken a somewhat closer look at what this major power shift in Berlin has brought in terms of personnel in the ministries and offices that the Greens have just filled after years of "starvation" in opposition, and what competence they have to do so.

The co-chair of the Greens himself, Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, studied philology and philosophy and received his doctorate in philosophy in 2000 for his work on "literary aestheticism". He became a member of the Greens in 2002. He is married and has four sons who are members of the Danish minority in Germany. Habeck lists "fluent Danish" in his knowledge of foreign languages.

According to the official CV, Germany's new Foreign Minister Baerbock studied political science and public law. However, German media noted that Baerbock earned her master's degree from a private university in just one year. In Germany itself, she did not achieve a degree. Despite some funding from the Böll Foundation, she did not complete her doctorate. In addition to criticism of irregularities in her CV and the failure to declare side income, her election bid for the Green Party's chancellorship, according to the German media, was fundamentally damaged by the discovery that she had been accused of mass plagiarism and copyright infringement in a book she published in June 2021 under the title: "Now. That is how we will restart our country" ("Jetzt. Wie wir unser Land erneuern"). She joined the Green Party in 2005. She is married and has two daughters.

The careers and educational backgrounds of other Green politicians who have now gained senior positions behind their bosses add a very colourful picture. Habeck's ministry for the economy and climate protection has become an absolute Green "personnel oasis". Patrick Graichen, the former head of the think-tank Agora Energiewende, one of the key associations pushing for a sharp German version of green change policy in the interests of climate protection, has been given the post of state secretary in this ministry. That is the grade of civil servant known as B11 and it comes with a salary of 15,000 euros ($17,000) a month, according to German media. Michael Kellner, the political director of the Green Party, was given the same post. Robert Habeck has apparently forgiven him for his unfortunate involvement in the "creation" of Annalena Baerbock's biography and plagiarism book. Kellner's wife happens to be Patrick Graichen's sister and works at the Ecological Institute in Freiburg, one of Germany's key private institutions working on climate change (www.oeko.de). NGOs and consultancy firms will thus be really close to Green politicians. The German newspaper Tageszeitung has also noted that there may be a major conflict of interest.

Sven Giegold, an anti-globalisation opponent and prominent member of the Greens, has been appointed as the next Secretary of State. Rounding out the group of elite Green politicians as the next new Secretary of State is Oliver Krischer, who did not complete his studies in biology but still managed to become a scientific assistant for Green MPs in North Rhine-Westphalia without a degree. So now he has been promoted and there will be plenty of subordinates for the job. So he gave a good account of his self-sacrifice on a popular German TV show, where he hopelessly and embarrassingly defended his boss Baerbock's screw-ups.

The portal Kalte Sonne, which denounces the irrationality of German Green politics, has pointed to other Green politicians whose careers are now reaching their peak thanks to government involvement. Katrin Göring-Eckardt interrupted her theology studies after four years well before the fall of the Berlin Wall to work as a kitchen helper. After German reunification, she embarked on a political career and is now the chairwoman of the Green Group in the Bundestag, the German parliament. Claudia Roth threw in the towel after just her first year of studying theatre studies. With the Greens, she has made it to co-chair of the party and vice-president of the Bundestag in the past. Now, before retiring, she has become a state secretary (minister without portfolio) with responsibility for culture and media.

The German Green Party prides itself on being a socially permeable party. Yes, as you can see you don't need academic degrees to have a distinguished career in it, let alone actually graduating from a prestigious university, saving yourself the insane stress of studying and taking exams. You do, however, need to be in the right party and be an ardent and committed supporter of the most correct ideology, which the fight to save the planet from warming due to CO₂ now represents. And then they will be able to decide the fate of tens of millions of people or the whole of the EU with billions of subsidy euros without worrying about physics or mathematics and all those useless laws of nature. These are probably meant to be encouraging signals for the young Green supporters in Germany. To let young Germans know that the Greens are serious about them, they have pushed through a programme proposal from the new governing coalition in Berlin to change the voting law so that 16-year-olds can vote.

Every ideology in the past has been best propagated by its passionate proponents, who have not been unduly hampered by high education and accountability to the visions put forward, confronted constantly with facts and figures. We know this all too well in Europe from both totalitarian regimes, Nazism and Communism. It is often reported in the media that most of the fanatical followers of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement, which has reoccupied Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the USA and other NATO allies, including the Czech Republic, cannot read and write. Taliban translates as "students". Ideologies work with belief, not knowledge.

Source: https://smutny.blog.idnes.cz/blog.aspx?c=780930

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Insane costs and tiny benefits of Fit For 55, European Green Deal

2021-12-27T09:14:00.011+01:00

Last month, a great majority of my nation already buried the president, Miloš Zeman, who spent a week at the ICU. Most people thought he had the terminal cirrhosis. I trusted my president who previously said that "the alcoholic isn't a man who drinks a lot of alcohol but the man who doesn't know how to drink". Why wouldn't he know how to drink? He is both smart and an experienced drinker! So far, I am happy to brag, I was right and my president gave his standard Christmas Address (full transcript).

He supported the idea of mandatory vaccination – I feel sufficiently confident that this is absolutely impossible in Czechia now, after the Fall 2021 wave faded away and almost everyone sees it clearly that the reasons for Covid worries are over. He blamed NATO for the deteriorating global security, I agree with that; correctly warned against mass migration; proposed to abolish the tax loopholes in order to reduce the budget deficit; and, most importantly, he urged the Czechs to leave the European Green Destiny. Former PM Babiš "reminded" Zeman that we can't leave the Green Destiny because it would be too costly, something like CZK 1 trillion (USD 45 billion).

Except for the totally wrong support for the vaccination, applause for Zeman.

Despite some positive hints, Babiš made a big mistake that he didn't sufficiently resist the insane new green EU plans (there is a huge opposition to this stuff in the EU, not only in Poland etc., and hundreds of millions of Europeans understand that it is a road to hell) and he is making another big mistake when he suggests that "1 trillion crowns is too much to pay". Sadly, one trillion is a modest amount by now – it is the total budget deficit of Babiš' government for the two years 2020-2021 (i.e. roughly the cost of the Czech part of the Covid hysteria). The total damages caused by the European Green Destiny may be easily seen to be higher than that, probably much higher.

Zeman stated that the EU wants us to stop burning natural gas to heat our houses by 2030, and to stop using ICE cars by 2035. These statements are inaccurate (as the fanatical woke leftists in the current government immediately screamed) but the EU wants very similar things (by 2035, ICE cars cannot be sold and produced in the EU etc.; the EU wants to ban sales of energy-inefficient real estate, and tons of stuff like that) and many extremists in the EU want to introduce the exact things that Zeman mentioned. A green EU plan that is somewhat independent of the European Green Destiny is Fit For 55, an arbitrary communist central planners' idea that the CO2 emissions should drop by 55% by 2030. Some gr@tins just counted their excrements to be 55 and 30 and they found it cool that in the new Soviet Union that we increasingly seem to inhabit, half a billion people must follow their šit.

What does a person in the EU gain from Fit For 55?

Well, it's easy, he or she gains a little bit of cooling. The globe was recently warming by some 0.15 °C per decade. Let's generously assume that all of it was caused by CO2 (I actually believe that less than 50% is due to CO2). Now, 18% of the world CO2 emissions are made in the EU. And 55% of it is subtracted. So the amount of cooling by 2030 that the EU person gains by that time is the simple product

0.15 °C * 0.18 * 0.55 = 0.015 °C (cooling from Fit For 55)

Great. We will get a cooler globe by 15 millikelvins. A Slovak friend is telling me that he had -14.00 °C in the morning so on a similar day in 2030, he would have -14.00 °C without the European Green Destiny and -14.0150 °C with the European Green Destiny. What is the amount of money that you would be willing to pay for this cooling of the globe in a decade? I would literally refuse to pay a single penny. The amount of cooling is clearly totally immaterial and an infinitesimally warmer world is almost certainly infinitesimally better, not worse, anyway! OK, let's agree that the value of this "achievement" is 1 eurocent. Let me emphasize that every statement that the European Green Deal has another positive environmental impact beyond the infinitesimal uniform change of temperature is atrocious pseudoscience.

The benefits are about 1 eurocent per capita, and I generously neglected the fact that the sign is really negative because a cooler world is a worse one. What are the costs? With the current technologies, the price of the solar panels is already low enough so that it is not the actual main expense. You can really get to €0.1 per kWh of solar energy. The amount of land that has to be dedicated to the photovoltaic power plants would also be tolerable and you can get it for €2 per square meter, and that produces 100 W in average. A few percent of our territories could be dedicated to this source of energy.

But it is the intermittent character of the electricity that is the main problem. The Sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow when you need it, either. The total cost of the green policies heavily depends on the question whether the other reliable source of energy, nuclear energy, is "allowed" and encouraged. If it is, it can replace most of the coal-and-gas-and-oil sources of energy around us. If it is not, we are in real trouble.

If the nuclei are allowed, we would be "just" forced to switch to electric cars and rely on the grid. The nuclear power plants may be plentiful and may be hypothetically turned on and off during longer periods of excess supply or excess demand. But we should be aware of the fact that it takes a decade to build new nuclear power plants, we won't have a sufficient number of these sources by 2030. But after 2035 or so, we may have them, everything can be converted to pretty cheap nuclear energy, and it is mainly the ICE cars that have to be converted. The electricity could be as cheap as it was a year ago and the electric car would only mean the extra €10,000 per car, relatively to the comparable ICE car. The average person has 0.5 cars which means €5,000 per capita and per car update or €50 billion. This already slightly exceeds the financial cost quoted by Babiš, €45 billion per Czechia (10.7 million people).

Here, the main optimistic assumption is that the price of the lithium-based batteries would remain the same if we suddenly had hundreds of millions of electric cars. I don't believe it. There may be some sources of a decreasing price, from the mass production, but I ultimately believe that the increases of the prices from excessive demand and limited supply of some materials would win and the price of the lithium stuff would go up dramatically. Check this graph of the lithium carbonate price. In 2021, the price quintupled, from CNY 50,000 to CNY 250,000 per ton (CNY 1 is USD 0.16).

If the nuclear renaissance is killed, and maybe even the existing nuclear power plants are harassed and suppressed by the hardcore Luddites in the EU, the expenses would be far higher than €5,000 per capita (and per decade, the life expectancy of a battery or an electric car). How much higher? Well, you may have the cheap panels but you will need a lot of batteries to store the electricity from the solar and wind sources. For example, most electric cars would be charged at night (because the cars are driven or must be prepared to be driven during the day) and the Sun doesn't shine at night, by definition of a night. So when the millions of people are charging their electric cars from the solar energy at night, it effectively means that the electricity is flowing to your car's lithium batteries from some other lithium batteries that are closer to the power plants. (Some comments are dedicated to the saner alternative using the pontential energy of water; or thermal energy of hot water, which are just OK for solutions that don't need to be compact or mobile.)

I find it obvious that these "systemic batteries" must be able to store electricity for more than a week, and maybe for months, and it is all of electricity in the system, not just the part that goes to the electric cars (which store it for 1-4 days). In effect, the "power plants' lithium batteries" needed to deal with the intermittency of the unreliable sources of energy are higher than the electric cars' batteries, at least by an order of magnitude. That is why the cost would be some €50,000 per capita, 6-7 orders of magnitude higher than the benefits of €0.01 (ten trillion crowns per Czechia, ten times the cost of the withdrawal that Babiš claims to be too high).

And because all these batteries have to be replaced each decade, it is really €50,000 per capita per decade. Some nations like Norway can really afford it because it just means some €5,000 per year per capita for some totally unnecessarily luxurious "green" fad. It is closer to 5% than 10% of the Norwegian GDP. But the other nations that don't get as much extra money for their oil ;-), the actual source of the extra wealth here, simply cannot afford to waste €5,000 per year and per capita because it is often well above 10% of their GDP.

This "upgrade of the battery once per decade" is way too optimistic. I believe that these batteries would get unusable sooner than in a decade. Moreover, this whole new system involving lithium batteries wouldn't be sustainable at all. Even with recycling, a significant part of the lithium would get lost and within a century or so, the world would simply run out of lithium reserves for this incredible farce. The usage of large lithium batteries by billions of people is far less sustainable than the exploitation of any fossil fuels! I was way too generous in many other respects. Agriculture and other sectors also produce CO2 and it is even harder to reduce the CO2 there.

Even the "with nuclear" scenario seems utterly unacceptable and if there were a real threat that the European Green Destiny would be realized up to the bitter end, I find it obvious that it would be a great idea to pay a trillion or a few trillion crowns and leave it – and perhaps to leave the European Union, too. Although the difference wouldn't be as clear as the difference (between 10 trillion and 1 trillion above), I think that even hypothetical sanctions imposed by the Luddite EU (perhaps ban on most imports from Czechia etc.) would be cheaper than the cost of the European Green Destiny. Many of these losses caused by the disappearance of markets are temporary (we needed just a few years to redirect our economy from the USSR to Western Europe in the early 1990s). On top of that, the hypothetical CO2-free European Union would be a region in the state of a catastrophic decline and it wouldn't have much money to import, so this gr@tinist EU would become unimportant for our exporters for the same reasons why the USSR became unimportant around 1990!

The probability that the braindead gr@tins will keep on bastardizing and crippling the EU is very high. To leave the EU at a random moment, without a clear comparison of plans and scenarios, is masochism (even Brexit seems like a failure to me now, especially because their would-be elites seem as insane as the Brussels-based ones and sometimes more so) and I don't want to do it. But in the future, the probability that we will see such an acute exit as the lesser evil sounds extremely high to me and we simply need to prepare for that scenario.

Evil carps and CO2: a French-owned big Czech bank commits marketing suicide

2021-12-22T07:10:00.014+01:00

The French bank Société Générale owns a majority of a top 3 Czech bank by size, KB (Komerční banka which translates as The Commerce Bank); I am a minor shareholder but not a trivially minor one. ;-) Yesterday's "merger of the decade" (Moneta Money Bank plus Air Bank plus HomeCredit CZ+SK) will create a new top 3 bank instead, thankfully; I am a larger shareholder in that one LOL.

The banking folks should work hard on preserving the money in this explosive time of inflation etc. Instead, they prepared a bunch of Christmas video clips with immature, brainwashed influencers who try to tell lots of Czechs to replace light bulbs with LED lamps on your Christmas tree, use some special kinds of paper and ropes for the gifts, and similar nonsense inspired by climate gr@tinism.

The most shocking among these clips is this one which attacks the most characteristic Czech Christmas meal, the carp. Some 500 years ago, the Czech nobility created ponds across my homeland because they realized that carp is the fanciest tasting fish that may live in the landlocked central European waters, easily beating the freshwater salmons in the rivers which the nobility found dull. About 1/2 of the carp taken from the Czech ponds is exported; the half that remains in the country is mostly consumed during Christmas! For millions of Czechs, a carp is a once-per-year meal (evening of December 24th).

Now, the video clip above – which has nothing whatever to do with the business and expertise of the folks at KB – promotes the atrocious pseudoscience about the "evil" CO2 and demands... Czechs to stop consuming carps (or at least some reduction). The video is generally hated by my nation and at this moment, the video still has ZERO likes on YouTube and very many dislikes, indeed! However, the backlash was intense. In particular, Tomáš Zdechovský, a member of the European Parliament for our Christian Democratic Union (a substantially more Christian ones than the German namesake), dedicates most of his time to this attack on the Czech Christmas and is trying to make sure that the culprits responsible for this insanity are fired, starting with the director.

Here are three articles [Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)] dedicated to the story, for you to know something about the French-Czech pro-EU gr@tins' contribution to the atmosphere of Czech Christmas in 2021:

Komerční banka advises Czechs not to eat carp at Christmas. People are cancelling accounts and selling their shares
By Aleš Kulhánek

One of the largest domestic banking houses has come up with an unconventional advertising campaign before Christmas. For example, in short spots with influencer Lucie Zelinková, it advises people to limit their consumption and not eat carp at Christmas. The reason? To reduce the production of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Instead of carp, a fried cheese?

"Do you regularly overdo it at Christmas too? Carp, schnitzel (steak in dough), preferably twice a day, and a cookie to go with it? In the Czech Republic, 18,000 tonnes of carp are consumed at Christmas, which is equivalent to 32,000 tonnes of CO2. And that's a huge number," Zelinková says in her spot, which is sponsored by Komerční banka. "And don't you want to try it differently this year? Let's make this Christmas easier."

But it turns out that even the few figures given are full of inaccuracies. "Let's start with the fact that 18,000 tonnes of carp are not eaten at Christmas, but caught in a year. Of this, just over half goes for export, especially to Germany," Finmag magazine said on its Twitter account. "If 18,000 tonnes of carp has a carbon footprint of 32,000 tonnes, it is by far the least of all meat. So if that's what you're after, make sure you don't replace carp with pork chops. Or with a fried cheese." [LM: Independently of comparisons, 30,000 tons is still one millionth of the global man-made annual CO2 emissions, a tiny fraction, not a "huge" one. Surely our carp is more important than one millionth of what mankind is doing. I will fight hard not to allow anybody to downgrade this important tradition of my important nation beneath one-millionth of the civilization. Even if the CO2 emissions reduction were a noble goal, the CO2 emissions would drop much more if you eliminated something useless and toxic, e.g. all members of Greenpeace and the BLM.]

Zkusili jsme to na Vánoce udělat trochu jinak než @luciezel a @komercka, místo emocí jsme vsadili na fakta. Začněme tím, že 18 000 t kapra se u nás na Vánoce fakt nesní, ale vyloví za rok. Z toho něco přes půlku jde na vývoz, zejména do Německa. (1/x)https://t.co/75qM6m19ej
— FINMAG (@FINMAG_cz) December 19, 2021

Cancel the accounts

This is not the only advertising that Komerční banka is directing towards sustainability at Christmas time. On the atmosferavanoc.cz (The Atmosphere of Christmas dot CZ) website, it advises people on how to be as environmentally friendly as possible. For example, they should use recyclable paper, newspaper or fabric to wrap their presents. They should also not over-stock up on food, which they then throw away. They should make their own decorations if possible and light only with LED bulbs.

However, not everyone likes an advertising campaign that tries to speak to the Czechs' souls and change their habits, especially from a banking house. "I think wishes should be granted at Christmas. Therefore, I would like to ask you, my friends, if you have an account with Komerční banka, cancel it. Because only without clients can Komerční banka be truly carbon neutral," Honza Palička said on his Facebook profile.

Game developer Daniel Vávra (Mafia, Kingdom Come Deliverance...) then decided to sell the Komerční banka shares he had held for three years on the basis of these spots. (LM: Good for him if he can meet the three-year test to avoid the income tax LOL, I still can't.) "I don't need the bank to behave like the Green Party's central committee run by Greenpeace activists."

Carp spoil the air, says Komerční banka's spot. Its ecological Christmas moves the networks
Echo24.cz

A bizarre advertising spot for Komerční banka is stirring the Czech internet. The banking house has launched a Christmas digital campaign. It has received harsh criticism for one of its spots. It urges Czechs to be more environmentally friendly and warns that carp consumption pollutes the environment. But the video misstates figures and has drawn criticism from leading Czech figures, including politicians.

The "Atmosphere of Christmas" campaign focuses on people's unfriendly behaviour during the Christmas holidays and uses influencers to spread tips through social media on how to be greener and not produce so much carbon dioxide. Book influencer Lucie Zelinková suggests on Instagram that we should forgive ourselves for carp on Christmas Eve. Which caused considerable controversy and earned KB some harsh criticism.

Zelinková says that up to 18,000 tonnes of carp are consumed in the Czech Republic during the Christmas holidays, which is equivalent to up to 32,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. "Wouldn't you like to try it differently this year? Let's make Christmas lighter," the influencer concludes with an appeal not to have carp for dinner.

The consequences were not long in coming, and leading figures in domestic political and social life began to comment on the video. The video was criticised by journalists, fans of the influencer, as well as politicians and leading Czech personalities.

A wonderful carp commercial which is ten years old now: Master? [No no. ... He faints.] Yup yup, on TV screens, everyone can be sharp... Sharper than Chuck Norris. The new T-mobile satellite TV has a truly sharp image.

Jan Bartošek, a deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament, commented on the video on his Twitter account. "According to Komerčka, carp on a plate is a bad tradition. I really don't agree with that." He also writes that "as a deputy of the South Bohemian region and a fisherman, I am offended that the foreign-owned KB is campaigning to rethink the Christmas Eve menu with traditional carp! Some things should not be subject to fashion. I wonder what would happen in France if someone wanted to take their fishermen's jobs?" asks the lawmaker.

MEP Tomáš Zdechovský has gone even further, demanding the dismissal of the director of Komerční banka. "I have already written a complaint to France. This is over the line. That was the final straw for me. The director should be terminated immediately for this!" Zdechovský concludes.

The business magazine Finmag also reacted to the post and aptly points out that the numbers are absolutely not in line with reality. "Let's start with the fact that 18,000 tonnes of carp are not eaten at Christmas, but are caught in a year. Of this, just over half goes for export, especially to Germany," says the magazine.

The video goes on to offer no alternative to carp on the festive table. For a substitute, Finmag asks "If 18,000 tonnes of carp has a carbon footprint of 32,000 tonnes, it is by far the least of all meat. So if that's what you're after, make sure you don't replace carp with pork chops. Or a fried cheese," the magazine adds.

Uz jsem napsal stiznost do Francie. Tohle je pres caru. Tim u mě skoncili. Za toto by měl okamžitě skončit ředitel!
— Tomáš Zdechovský (@TomasZdechovsky) December 20, 2021

Other posts include an apt comment from a Twitter user. "What would a Komerčka want on her plate? That would be a Christmas turkey stuffed with edible chestnuts (la Dinde de Noel), with boiled vegetables. Or perhaps oysters, fatty duck liver foie gras, smoked salmon, pancakes or goose?" says a user hitting on the French owner of KB.

"Inaccurate expertise" apologised KB

Komerční banka subsequently apologised for the inaccurate information in the video. The data from expert Viktor Třebický allegedly did not take into account the fact that half of the carp are destined for export, KB spokesman Pavel Zůbek told Novinky.cz. He adds that KB still stands by the video criticising food waste. However, he says that intensive farming of fish and carp in particular, in domestic ponds, still causes a carbon footprint and other problems.

As part of its "Atmosphere of Christmas" campaign, Komerční banka is launching a series of recommendations for a "greener" Christmas. Among other greener tips are that people should use recyclable paper, newspaper or fabrics when wrapping presents, make their own ornaments and decorations from natural materials, save food, support local suppliers or light up with energy-saving LED lights. Other influencers who work with Komerční banka recommend more tips for a "greener" holiday.

After all, Czech Christmas is no longer dominated by Christmas Eve carp with potato salad. Carp has been overtaken on the festive table by fried schnitzel with salad, while young people are less keen on the traditional fish delicacy, according to a survey by Instant Research. Fried schnitzel won over carp by a few votes. Carp with potato salad was chosen as their favourite festive dish by almost half of people aged 54 to 65, compared with just a third of 18 to 26-year-olds. The young generation attributed the greatest popularity to schnitzel with salad, 53 per cent in total. We wrote about it here.

The Commercial Bank has allowed itself too much. In uncertain times, it teaches Czechs about a better world without traditions
Mr Tomáš Mrkvička, Mix24.cz

It's hard to believe that Komerční banka's marketing department has released advertising spots in which various influencers advise people how to behave in a way that minimises their carbon footprint. Something similar could be done by a company that has built a business on this and needs to convince the public of this direction.

The bank has crossed the line

But why would one of the largest banks venture into such waters, let alone in the very conservative Czech Republic? This is nothing short of outright marketing suicide.

Young jokers earning their money by posting more or less useless posts on Instagram advise hard-working people not to eat carp at Christmas and not to wrap presents in traditional wrapping paper, but rather in newspapers. And it does so on behalf of Komerční banka, an institution that its clients expect to look after their savings and investments conscientiously, not lecture them.

Nothing will ever be the same again

All of this is happening at a time when the established order is breaking down and life is already out of all proportion. The average person is struggling to stay healthy, to pay their hugely expensive gas and electricity bills and to ensure their finances are not eaten up by inflation. In such a situation, Christmas, full of great traditions, is a bright spot to hold on to and feel as if all is well, at least for a while.

And that's exactly when such a person is forced to watch the spots that tell them one thing: no, nothing is fine, your life is about to change from the ground up. It's just more evidence of the times falling senselessly forward. Instead of focusing on solving the epidemic, the European Union has decided to take it from the ground up and overturn all the established orders. The first big companies are already on board.

If EC smears nuclei as non-green, Czechia may leave the Paris Agreement

2021-12-20T10:43:00.009+01:00

I surely expected the Czech government's policies to get more incorrect and more suicidal after the five-headed monster took the power (OK, what is a neutral or beautiful creature with five heads, expresident Klaus had to ask yesterday? A five-headed Thor).

But Nature's quantum generator has prepared a nice surprise for us, many of the new trends actually sound much better than in the last months of Babiš' government. To say the least, as an EU's Czech female green inkspiller did, the Czech climate stances remain in a rut. Thank God.

Dukovany nuclear power plant. You may see it is light grey and green. The upper part is blue but it is called the sky and it doesn't belong to the power plant. The color of the radiation is an X-ray color plus some neutron beam color but that is confined in the reactor.

Yesterday I discussed the new prime minister Fiala's rather unambiguous opposition to the planned ban of the ICE cars. He also supported nuclear energy. The rift between the nice and educated people on one side; and the unhinged anti-nuclear Luddites in the European Union has been restarted.

Due to a narrow referendum result in the late 1970s (which killed the planned first nuclear power plant in the country, Zwentendorf), Austria became Europe's main anti-nuclear jihadist (these whackos may largely afford the denial of nuclear physics thanks to the potential energy that their Alps transfer to the Austrian water in rivers).

Because of the irrational post-Fukushima hysteria, Germany is turning into a strict ally of Austria (this is just like when the unsuccessful Austrian painter Adolf Hitler started to be important in Germany, not just Austria; the remaining 3-4 plus 3-4 GW will be shut down in 11 days and a year later) and Luxembourg, a small Germanic nation that wants to be wrong about absolutely everything, is an eager cherry on the Austro-German anti-MeV pie.

Existing nuclear power plants "burn" heavy elements, not carbon, so they obviously don't produce the "evil" CO2 emissions, the gas that we call life. But you know that this movement is not about the climate or even CO2 at all, right? Most of th green jihadists, especially the German-speaking ones, want to declare nuclear energy "dirty" as well. They would love to outlaw all consistent sources of electricity so that people have to rely on solar panels, pinwheels, and cockchafers' muscles

Fine, so the suicidal Paris Agreement wants the countries to fulfill some plans to reduce CO2 emissions – plans which were initially voluntary and self-inflicted injuries but became more "tangible" in recent years. To achieve this (totally useless) outcome, the signatories have to replace the electricity production by some other sources. It seems obvious to the Czech politicians that nuclear energy is the only plausible source that could replace most of the carbon-based forms of power.

Czechia has two nuclear power plants. The older one is in Dukovany, 4x 505 MW, the newer one is in Temelín, 2x 1080 MWe (gross; it is 2x 1026 MWe, net). In total, these 4 GW make almost 40% of our power production. It used to be below 35% but the rest has dropped. Both Dukovany and Temelín are widely planned to be extended. Because of the Russophobia (that could have been imposed upon us by some U.S. overlords), the most economic solution, the Russian (plus Czech) one, was eliminated a year ago. The other options, especially French and Korean ones, seem to be more expensive and plagued with more uncertainty whether they can actually build the operational facilities at all. But if they can, I would bet that even these more expensive solutions are still widely better than the intermittent "renewable" sources of energy.

Echo24, a right-wing Czech daily, has a nice article about the situation and possible consequences of the nuclear EU rift within the EU. On top of the CO2 emissions, the European Commission (EC) will also make a decision which sources are "clean" and which are "dirty", arbitrary apparatchiks' labels that don't have to coincide with the CO2 emissions. Echo24 writes that if the EC decides that the nukes are "dirty", we may be forced to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This is a statement made by an MEP Jan Zahradil (ODS, the same party as the new Czech PM). I've never abandoned Zahradil completely and I've been a great fan of him although I would probably agree with Klaus that the opposition to wokism etc. in ODS is so weak that we don't need to discuss it or create hopes.

OK, the pro-science skeptic Zahradil says that we simply wouldn't be capable of fulfilling the current form of the Paris Agreement pledges if the EC labels nuclei "dirty". That label would mean that the EU couldn't subsidize the new power plants in the same way as it subsidizes the ludicrous sources of energy. On top of that, banks could even be prevented from giving loans for the construction which are huge and totally needed.

Zahradil is the only important enough active politician who talks about the possible withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. But Echo24 optimistically clumps his attitude with somewhat more ambiguous but equally pro-nuclear statements by PM Fiala and President Zeman. Both of them understand what Zahradil is saying. The reductions of CO2 are impossible if we can't extend the nuclear power plants. Of course I think we should abandon the Paris Agreement even regardless of some nuclear rift: it will cause trouble independently of the fate of nuclear energy in the EU.

If nuclear energy were labeled dirty, it would be extremely bad news for the extension of the reactors (I sincerely hope that we wouldn't succumb to pressure to shut down the currently operational ones, that would be a real suicide! I would surely prefer a Czechout if there were a credible EU pressure to destroy our nuclear reactors) but it could be great news for coal-and-gas power plants. Note that the pro-nuclear EU bloc which wants nuclear energy to be labeled "bureaucratically clean" include France, Poland (although it has no nuclear power plants so far; it has some plans, however), Bulgaria, Czechia, Finland, Croatia, Hungary (which seems OK with the Russian technology, even for the future), Romania, Slovakia (2x 471 MW in Mochovce [which should be extended within a year!] plus Jaslovské Bohunice, also 2x 471 MW: pretty much 1/2 of Czechia, as you expect), and Slovenia. I would like to believe that both of the insanities will be defeated and we will be expanding both nuclear and fossil-fuel-based power plants but please, Nature's quantum generator, don't allow the suppression of both! ;-) There seems to be a hope and a glimpse of some balls inside the Czech politicians. Let's pray that these balls aren't just some decorated vaginas or ovaries.

A new, 3-week-old, poll shows that 66% of Czechs support nuclear energy, up from 60% six months earlier.

Two little thumbs up for the new Czech government

2021-12-19T15:29:00.044+01:00

One for Covidism and one for the electric vehicles...

Slovak-born billionaire Andrej Babiš has been a top Czech government official for 8 years. In the first 4 years he operated as the very powerful finance minister (a dude who usually overshadowed the submissive social democratic PM Bohuslav Sobotka), in the last four ones as the prime minister. He left and was replaced with the coalition of 5 pro-European parties led by Prof Petr Fiala, a very boring political scientist who nevertheless seems to have some kind of intelligence, polished Czech rhetorical skills, and some professional diplomacy or restraint in his blood which some people admire a lot (I don't).

To win their majority in the Parliament, Fiala and the 5 parties have built on some cheap anti-Babiš sentiments (note that Babiš got to power 4/8 years ago through some populist "anti-corruption" claims against the likes of Mr Kalousek who may still be considered a close ally of Fiala's but the old arguments have faded away almost completely: the time has shown that this anti-corruption hysteria was tendentious BS, much like most hysterias) and this coalition is indeed considered the most uncritically pro-EU coalition in the modern Czech history (since the January 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia). The transition of power was as peaceful as you can get.

Days ago, President Zeman, widely expected to be a foe of the new coalition who would prevent the appointment of a new government for a long time, quickly appointed all the ministers including Bc Lipavský. Lipavský is a fat, incompetent student, a (far left) Pirate Party member, and a self-evident loser ("a weak head in the herd", as Zeman aptly called him today) with nearly failing grades who was appointed the minister of foreign affairs, probably because his ultra-stupid pro-German attitude was found convenient by someone in Germany (he wanted a conference of the Sudetendeutschenlandsmannschaft on the Czech territory from which the Nazi predecessors of these folks were expelled in 1945) and Germany exerted pressure on Fiala or others; or by someone in the U.S. because Lipavský is a staunch Sinophobe and Russophobe.

OK, Zeman has disappointed many of us, his voters, by his fast surrender to Lipavský (and indirectly to Fiala). Today we learned that Lipavský will respect the Government Program Statement including the friendship to Visegrád and Israel and the non-organization of the post-Nazi meeting in Czechia. I have my doubts whether the promise can be trusted. But I am not really mad at Zeman; I don't see what could be a final good outcome if Zeman continued in some obstructions. After all, Lipavský is not only a liability for Czechia but also for Fiala so it isn't necessarily Zeman's main task to fight such a Lipavský problem. Also, Zeman's speedy surrender seems like a natural consequence of Babiš' speedy surrender. Zeman was ready to appoint PM Babiš as the old-new PM twice but Babiš simply seemed certain that he would play a game that can't be won because well over 50% of the lawmakers seemed to be determined to refuse any offer from Babiš.

Note that Zeman has spent some time in the hospital (an ICU) and many people, including his predecessor and current soulmate Klaus, were suggesting that Zeman suffered from a terminal liver disease and was just weeks away from the end. But Zeman looked OK when he was diagnosed Covid-positive and talked to all the new ministers from his acquarium (not to infect them) and when I improve Zeman's today's TV clarification just a little bit, he said that the only disease he suffers from is the shortage of the Becher lemonade that is needed for him to get the appetite. Of course, I think it is great Christmas news that Zeman seems "almost healthy" now.

At any rate, the world is a šitty place, as Larry Summers liked to say, and folks like me have to think hard before abandoning our homeland which is in a much better shape than almost everyone else (there are almost no clearly adequate countries where a freedom-loving person could emigrate today!), even when it comes to the woke and green insanities that have spread through the EU much more than Covid did.

It has always been clear that the new government would be "less fanatical" a proponent of the woke and green delusions than the typical governments in (even more) Western Europe; while we shouldn't expect attitudes that completely match the Hungarian and Polish ones. Almost all of us expected the refreshment of the government to bring a divergence from Warsaw and Budapest, and a convergence with Brussels and Berlin. What will this new "middle of the road" Czech approach look like in practice?

The first two major signs are very encouraging. One of them is all about Covidism. The new minister of health, Dr Vlastimil Válek, has explicitly said that he doesn't plan to impose nanny state bans because "we no longer live in communism". Exactly (a far left Czech crackpot at a famous English university immediately had a hissy fit). So he recommended cautious behavior during Christmas and the New Year Eve's celebrations to millions of Czechs, including a reduction of parties. But an explicit gesture showing that we have moved inches towards freedom from Covidism was the attitude to the "state of emergency" (which is used for rather innocent things, not for a hard lockdown, but it is still an annoying overreaction). The government has made it clear that it won't ask the Parliament to extend the state of emergency which means that it should end on the Feast of Saint Stephen (next Sunday). Sounds great! Fiala has even correctly added today that "it is not risky" not to extend the state of emergency.

Meanwhile, in this Fall 2021 wave, the "cases" peaked at the end of November but because a typical person is positively tested several weeks after he got infected, this peak actually suggests a peak of the "actual infections per day" in the first half of November, I am pretty sure about this statement. Meanwhile, the number of new cases is crashing by 50% each 14 days again, see the Czech statistics page. It is extremely likely that this decrease is qualitatively independent of any restrictions now and if something changes qualitatively, it will be due to new variants etc. In a month or two months, omicron should be the dominant variant here and let me hope that our new government will understand that omicron is "milder than the average common cold virus" and won't fight against this harmless virus! I agree with the statement that based on the evidence, omicron is likely a safer Covid vaccine than the vaccines in the syringes.

It is useful to mention that Romania is currently experiencing a halving of new Covid cases each 2 weeks as well (but the cases per million are already 10 times lower than in Czechia). I mentioned Romania because it is both... the least vaccinated country in the EU, below 40%, and as the map above shows, the rare yellow-and-green country in the Balkans is also the least currently infected country in the EU! This is the kind of the basic facts – indeed, the relative non-existence of Covid in Romania is the most obvious pattern included in the map above – that the corrupt dishonest fascist aßholes, and I mean the vaccine proponents, would never tell you.

There may be graphs showing a higher number of "Covid deaths per million" in the less vaccinated countries but the important parts of the explanation why it is so are

highly vaccinated countries aren't testing much (because the vaccinated people usually don't need tests for venues: they may spread the virus without restrictions), and therefore many "fast" deaths (i.e. brutal heart attacks) of the vaccinated people are counted as non-Covid deaths even though they would be counted as Covid deaths if they were unvaccinated (and this is more often the case in the less vaccinated countries)
the more vaccinated countries are generally the more hysterical ones and they have millions of people who frantically avoid any human interactions, and this is how they are simply postponing the Covid infections by weeks or at most months and why they also bought the pro-vaccine lies

The general point is that correlation isn't causation and the causation proposed by the vaccine fascists to "explain" the observed correlations are demagogic and ultimately not the leading causes underlying the correlation. They have prepared these fraudulent arguments from the beginning – all these aßholes are in the business of fabricating or at least cherry-picking arguments that support their predetermined positions.

At any rate, the evolution of Covid is very healthy in Romania and in some way, Romania plays a similar role as Sweden did in the past, it is clearly a country whose Covid curves are worth replicating because the "neverending Covid" scenario seems very clearly avoided there. Also, in Central Europe, Poland finally emerged as a country supporting freedom from Covidism (which they should have been from the beginning but they were not) so Poland is full of vibrant Christmas markets (we are not!) where (unmasked) people absorb the wonderful pre-Christmas atmosphere (including a huge number of Czech tourists in Wroclaw).

Great. So far the new government seems more pro-freedom in the Covid business and this comparison wasn't obvious from the beginning because all these large parties were rather ambiguous about the very basic questions (like do we want more lockdowns for much for 2022? They only childishly screamed "we are better than the other side"). The other good news is about the Green Deal.

Just hours ago, the new Czech PM Fiala, the "apparent German puppet", has made a clear statement that he personally finds a ban on the internal combustion engines unacceptable. The complete ban hasn't been codified yet but its preparatory stages are already being signed in the EU and a complete ban (on the production and sales of ICE cars after 2035) is being prepared, too. Wow, I didn't expect he had a sufficient number of testicles that are needed to even make this innocent statement inside the insane European Union. The former PM Babiš gave a courageous speech against the climate religion in Glasgow and we expected Fiala to be far more cowardly (and Babiš may have only been brave, almost Klaus-caliber-brave, because he was retiring from the government).

Note that Czechia has some 10.68 million people (a drop by 20,000 in a year, both due to deaths-vs-births and emigration-vs-immigration) and roughly 5 million cars. Despite our less-than-medium size, Czechia is the world's 16th country in the (absolute) car production. We produce well over 1 million vehicles per year. Incredibly enough, Slovakia has just 50% of the Czech population and also makes over a million cars a year (so our brothers lead in the per-capita car production contest) but the Slovak cars are mostly small ones and there is no characteristic Slovak brand (they're the rather cheap assembly line for well-known global brands).

This extends to the fully electric vehicles, especially because of Škoda Auto, an important mass market subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group. The main plant in Mladá Boleslav, CZ, was upgraded to the only VW Group factory that produces petrol cars alongside the fully electric vehicles on the same place. Almost all the production of EVs is dedicated to Škoda Enyaq iV now, an award-winning sibling of the inferior VW ID.4 and Audi e-Tron. Enyaq is the Car of the Year in the Irish Examiner, the Scottish Car of the Year, Switzerland's Favorite Car of 2022, the 2nd most sold car in the Netherlands (almost tied with Kia Niro at the top), and it has been praised by an insane number of EV enthusiasts, you can search for it. I predicted a similar success of the Enyaq already in February 2020.

But despite our being a carmaking superpower, we make fewer than 100,000 Enyaqs a year. By this rate, we would need 50 years to replace our 5 million ICE cars, assuming that we wouldn't export any. But we actually export around 99% of our electric car production! With the ~1,000 cars that are made in Czechia and sold in Czechia, we would need 5,000 years to replace the petrol cars. And you shouldn't really expect the natural process to be any faster. Just 2% of the Czech drivers plan their next car to be electric (the same 2% as a year earlier); yes, some of the 30% undecided ones may be pushed to buy an EV.

Most Czechs who are interested in technology basically understand that the plan to replace ICE cars by electric cars is utterly idiotic, much like pretty much all other "technological statements" by Elon Musk (about the Hyperloop, automatic driving, civilization on Mars, and many others: I mostly like his political attitudes but what made him rich is almost pure snake oil). You know, our insufficient production of EVs is far from being the main problem.

We have the problem with electricity. The average car needs 10-20 kWh per day to be recharged, most people charge their cars at night and they needed a family house to do it (the German Greens want to ban family houses, too, so the life with the EVs would become even harder for almost everybody). (Enyaq consumes some 18 kWh per 100 km, you can imagine this to be the right number for any "extremely efficient family EV".) Because the night has some 10 hours, you need 1-2 kW to go to each electric car at night. In Czechia, our 5 million cars, if upgraded to electric ones, would need 5-10 GW of power. That is more than our nuclear power plants combined (4 GW at two roughly equally big places, Dukovany and Temelín; our nukes approach 35-40% of the Czech electricity production).

If electric cars ever became dominant, this 5-10 GW per "nation of Czechia's size" would have to be realistic, assuming that we don't really want to allow a forced massive reduction of people's traveling. Note that at night, the sun isn't shining (this could be considered a definition of the night) and the photovoltaic power plants are in trouble. The wind tends to be weaker at night, too. The explosive combination of "switching to electric cars" and "switching to 'renewable' i.e. ludicrous sources of electricity" is plain suicidal.

As I correctly predicted in May 2021, the European electricity prices went to the Moon. Over 3 GW of German nuclear power plants will be shut down in 12 days, the remaining 3-4 GW will be killed a year later. On top of that, the Russian gas is considering to stop its flow (if uncertain, it will ask the Kremlin for an advise) and Russia may use this powerful tool in a hypothetical Winter 2021-2022 confrontation with the West. Also, France which has 70% of electicity from the nuclei (and exports the power) is seeing an outage of 13% of its nuclear capacity, perhaps some 6 GW are subtracted for a month or two. The one-month futures prices went to over €1,000 per kWh in France on Friday. This is more than an order of magnitude higher than the prices we knew just a year ago.

A further decline of the supply; and the increase of the demand (through electric cars) might hypothetically add another order of magnitude to the electricity prices (at least some particular contracts). The secret to this big sensitivity is that most of us still pay a "small portion" of our budget for electricity. Most TRF readers are dollar millionaires (sorry if you aren't; some are billionaires) and those don't care about a doubling or tripling of their energy expenses. But this is exactly a reason why the prices may go this high or even higher: the growth of the electricity prices only stops when someone is actually pushed to visibly decrease his consumption! There are individuals and companies that need lots of electricity and don't have "much excess income" left. Those will be pushed to poverty or bankruptcy or something and that is how the supply matches the demand again (which is what the invisible hand of the market does in the most peaceful way that is possible, by increasing the prices! The increased prices, a "product" of Gretae, may suck and they are a problem for some consumers but they are still primarily a wonderful cure to a problem, namely a cure to the mismatch between the supply and demand).

The growing prices of electricity in this insane "green" environment are the biggest problem but not the only one. There will be similar shortages affecting lithium, cadmium, perhaps copper, and many other things. The people who bought the electric cars see the advantages and the immediate acceleration but after each year, they also see that (aside from the slow charging) their already lousy range gets lowered by 7% or so. After a few years, the electric car isn't really usable. A new battery is a solution after 5-10 years but such a battery isn't much cheaper than a new car. And the new car will be far more modern than the old one so no one will want to insert an expensive battery into an old electric car! In practice, you will need to buy a new overpriced electric car more than once a decade. It is not financially possible for most people, especially after the prices of electricity and materials increase further.

Although it is completely obvious that there is no "paradise" or "new usable equilibrium" at the end of this new green deal with electric cars, this insanity will probably keep on growing exponentially in the EU (and elsewhere) because the mental defect causing this green new deal disease is contagious (although I am happy to observe that even a self-evident candidate for an infection, Prof Fiala, isn't self-evidently infected [yet?]). Unless saner nations like mine manage to stop this suicidal path of Europe in 2 years, the damages will already be enormous in 2024-2025.

In a new TV NOVA poll (the largest commercial TV station in Czechia), only 4% of Czechs say that the battery cars are the best route for the future. Among the heterosexuals, 29% say that it needs to co-exist with others and 67% say that EVs are a useless and technologically obsolete solution.

So both of the attitudes, to Covidism and to electric cars, brought us a nice surprise about the new government. It is possible that in Brussels, he will claim that he was misquoted. And we also have the other issues. Are there 2 sexes or 147 genders? Would Fiala have the testicles to say that there are 2 sexes? That female champions cannot have a penis? That native Czechs could be better for the well-being of Czechia than one million new Arabs? And if he has the courage to say these things in front of the Czech journalists, is it enough for him to repeat this assertion in a Western European language in Brussels, Strasbourg, or Berlin? Stay tuned.

P.S.: Joe Manchin said his final No, the Brandon's & Bolshevik Boneheads' Build Better Back Bullšit (BBBBBBB) is gone. Congratulations to the U.S. B7 was the central domestic plan of Biden's and wanted to raise most taxes and throw the extra stolen trillions of dollars to the black holes of the unhinged climate mujahideen's, woke people's, and similar stinky black holes (and harm coal, like Coal in Manchin's coal country, along the way).

Contemporary West's far left "religions" are as dumb and devastating as radical Islam

2021-12-04T09:32:00.020+01:00

As recently as 5-10 years ago, I took it for granted that the fuzzy region referred to as the West had an advantage in comparison with the Muslim World that was way more important than the immediate wealth: the ability to think impartially, fairly, rationally, and calmly – a broader pattern of behavior that produces things like science, mathematics, and rigorous trials in the courtrooms as special branches. The Westerners looked so different from the Palestinians or black Africans or Indonesians... when it came to such things. And the rational, balanced judgement is ultimately the primary cause that gives rise to the potential to create wealth and happiness; it is more fundamental than the wealth and happiness themselves.

In recent years and especially months, I realized that it was necessary to revise this judgement. The West's mental superiority could have looked like a fact for decades or centuries but in the truly long-term perspective, it was probably just a mirage. The brainwashed leftists that are all around us seem to act and (fail to) think in a nearly isomorphic way to the most hardcore fundamentalist Islamists. Their relationships to the "authorities" like the far left TV stations are on par with the mindless Islamists' relationship to the mullahs. And the percentage of the lies and stupidities is about the same, too.

The amount of absolute insanity that is taking place – and that is clearly devouring tons of people around us – is so high that I increasingly insert whole days when I mostly isolate myself not only from the news on the Internet and in the "media" but also from all people who seem likely to be hopelessly brainwashed morons. I just really physically suffer when I am exposed to the human stupidity and its concentration in our environment is just unbelievable these days.

This loose network of far left quasi-religious cults – including the climate hysteria, Covid hysteria, hatred towards the whites, men, and members of all groups that are seen as achievers etc. – has recently gained some traits that make it really equivalent to the fundamentalist Islam as believed by the suicide bombers and similar mammals:

Absolute faith in all the sources that paint themselves as radical believers
The complementary trait: the desire to eliminate and punish everyone whose faith isn't perfect and who becomes an infidel
The internal drive to purify one's own faith and become even more fanatical without the help of others

The "content" of the beliefs isn't too important, it only decides about the technicalities that these cults use to cripple the societies in which they have propagated. But what is important is that these cults are completely willing to destroy all slightly opposing truths or hypotheses – and only a negligible fraction of the statements produced by such cults are true – and even the very chance that the actual truth could be found and approached. It is common sense that almost everything these cults say are falsehoods because you are unlikely to create important (or catchy) truths from random combinations of words or from a clearly invalid extreme "principle" chosen as your starting point.

In the climate hysteria cult, some basic dogmas have clearly been adopted that every person with the ability to control his emotions and with the IQ above 80 must know to be absolutely wrong: the main dogma is one that states that in the argument about the climate between two people, the more hysterical person must be right. Again, every sane person knows that someone who believes such a thing is so hopelessly braindead that euthanasia may be the only viable solution for him. But this assumption is nevertheless real in the climate hysterical cult. You may observe how these people – whom you have previously identified as members of this insane cult – react to any questions or arguments and I think that you won't find a single counterexample.

If you want to avoid explosions, you can't even state the simple claim that there exists no problem with the climate. This very simple truth is just so far from what these loons are capable of hearing calmly!

In spite of that, these cultists often say that they follow the science. It is a religious ritual for them to say so. But do they really believe that there exists a scientific paper that has proven that the more hysterical participant of a dispute is always right and the less hysterical is wrong? Indeed, they don't believe such a preposterous statement (which is clearly isomorphic to "Allah is the Greatest") themselves but they are no longer capable of thinking rationally or calmly, not even for seconds. Instead of rational thinking, they have adopted the attitude that "they need to be as hysterical as possible" and defend the hysteria as "something that is maximally justified, sane, and scientifically proven" regardless of any facts, against any facts, and while ignoring all facts, evidence, and argumentation.

The same self-amplification of the hysteria works in the case of the coronavirus hysteria. So these people who have been turned into the Islam-like zombies believe that whenever two options for a "truth about Covid", and it may be any major point or a technicality, emerge, the more hysterical one must be true and supported by them. This self-radicalization drive may be partly explained by the "precautionary principle": they just think it is their moral duty to always consider the worse options among two as soon as these two are just pronounced by someone. We might say that the precautionary principle is the same thing as a religious duty to make yourself ever more fanatical in a predetermined direction! Through this self-radicalization of these loons, you find whole nations where a majority believes that over 20% of the infected people die from Covid-19 (it was ~0.4% with the oldest variants and well below flu's 0.1% now). These mammals are absolutely disconnected from any reality and it is a self-inflicted injury. At some moment, they decided to become unhinged runaway radical loons (there was probably a well-defined moment when they told "let's go" to themselves) and everything else follows from that decision. The decision wasn't hard for them because these people have always been conformist and they have never used their own brain much, not even a decade or two ago, but they just decided to be much more rigorous in this outsourcing and termination of their mental activities.

A related, newer dogma of the Coronazi cult is the (equally ludicrous) claim that every "nice" statement about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (and even about the process of vaccination of anybody; and even vaccination mandates) must be true; and every statement that is "not nice" or "skeptical" about the vaccines (or vaccine mandates etc.!) must be wrong. Again, it is common sense that everyone who actually believes in these general statements is ripe for euthanasia because his brain is just not functioning at all. Nevertheless, dozens of percent of the population of the West voluntarily joined the ranks of these absolute loons.

The number and power of these zombies is so staggering that they have already intensely crippled the world economy (tens of trillions in damages) and civil rights in most countries (which really ceased to exist). The signs of totalitarianism that are happening every day are absolutely out of control. Prick Donkey resigned as the CEO of Twitter and an Indian technocratic CEO was picked instead. The most widespread expectations among the experts are that he will be even worse with censorship than others. And what he has already done is just plain crazy, indeed. For example, all photographs with human appearances that don't have the consent of the person on the photo will be banned. Imagine such a dramatic change in the freedom to post on that server but he finds it natural.

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 New study and warning from American Heart Association: mRNA vaccines dramatically increase risk of developing heart diseases from 11% to 25% 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨https://t.co/7QxltagOPj
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) December 2, 2021

Yesterday, Twitter attached an insulting warning to the hyperlinks going from Twitter to an article in the Journal of the American Heart Association (AHA), pretty much the main U.S. journal (and organization) for cardiologists. The article shows quite some microscopic details explaining why the mRNA vaccines dramatically increase the heart inflammation and similar conditions. But just because this conclusion (which is self-evidently on the right track, to say the least) is heretical according to the "Pfizer-Moderna Allahu Akbar" (God Reincarnated In the Covid Vaccines is Great), the loons at Twitter have inserted this insulting warning page in between Twitter and the article about the heart inflammation (try to click at the word "Abstract" e.g. in the tweet above). This warning page has mostly been used for phishing and related criminal websites but now it's used for professional cardiologists because by explaining how the heart inflammation caused by Pfizer and Moderna seems to work, the cardiologists have become heretics!

Some people who have previously claimed to be interested in science and who fight against this AHA's heresy (Pfizer+Moderna damage many hearts) must really believe what they say. A frequently repeated comment is that "those antivaxx people are the same people who eat junk food and then they reject an innocent droplet of chemistry in a vaccine, wow, they are stupid". On the contrary, you must be absolutely stupid to think that a hamburger is less healthy than the vaccine. The vaccine damages the heart as much as something like 100 thousand hamburgers (whatever number is capable of doubling the rate of heart attacks etc.). If you think it is the other way around, you have been turned into an absolutely braindead zombie. There is pretty much nothing wrong about a hamburger but this statement cannot be said about these mRNA vaccines.

Just try to appreciate how hopelessly fudged up someone has to be in order to "defend the science" by blocking the actual articles about this important topic in cardiologists' journals (with the impact factor of 5.501). The censors understand this portion of biology about as much as the average Islamic suicide bombers or the average mammals in a cowshed but they have gained so much arrogance and religious fanaticism that they just find it OK to censor the main U.S. cardiologists' journal while claiming that they are the defenders of science by doing such things.

And this atrocious anti-science sold as science is absolutely everywhere. So yesterday, the Czech Vaccinological Society rejected the vaccine mandates for people in 60+ although it supported the mandate in some occupations. Of course, the singing minister of health wouldn't give a damn about it so he plans to introduce a public notice about the mandatory vaccination of seniors sometime next week.

The attacks by Coronazi and vaccination fundamentalist bigots are seen everywhere and every day. Note that a week after the Omicron Armageddon-level global hysteria was engineered by the filthy CNN-like madrasas, the WHO isn't aware of a single death due to Omicron! The Brazilian president has concluded that the Covid vaccines accelerate the course of AIDS. I have no idea whether it's possible but Bolsonaro has studied Covid-related questions in much more detail than the average politician or a judge. A bunch of Coronazi politicians want to block him from accessing the social networks, without the tiniest glimpse of evidence that his claim is untrue (they basically admit that this has nothing to do with the truth at all, they are not even trying to pretend that they have mastered some scientific research that is relevant for such questions, it is all about the heresy) while a court wants to arrest him for that conclusion (also while giving less than 1% of Bolsonaro's arguments). Even if Bolsonaro's statement were false, he has the totally indisputable right to publish such a conclusion or hypothesis. With the overwhelming evidence that these unhinged Coronazi fundamentalists want to stage a coup and/or rob the Brazilian citizens including the leader of the basic human rights, I would use (in the president's skin) all my powers to catch these insane criminals and arrest them or shoot them dead if it can't be done in a more peaceful way. These developments are just way too serious. You just mustn't allow a violent criminal quasi-religious sect to terrorize whole nations and their economies and blackmail or silence billions of people. They need to be caught and contained or neutralized!

We are fighting against all these braindead self-radicalized mammals who, at the end of 2021, still haven't noticed that pretty much everything served at the CNN, MSNBC, WaPo... are shameless lies and propaganda designed to ruin the whole Western society while making a bunch of lying criminals richer and more powerful. Even more seriously, dozens of percent of the rank-and-file brainwashed loons are actively "improving" all these radicalizing CNN-style lies and they make them even more insane and more harmful because they have been programmed to behave in this way. This is really a transformation on par with the Islamic fundamentalist takeover of the West and before it is really too late, we must appreciate that the outcome of such a destruction of the West would be far graver than the unfortunate neutralization of a few thousand hinged untruthful fanatics which probably has to take place now.

And that's the memo.

Václav Klaus's answers to questions posed by the server iUhli.cz (iCoal)

2021-11-26T06:39:00.005+01:00

Interview with the Czech ex-president

One of the main topics of today is the Brussels plan for a rapid comprehensive transformation of the EU member states, called the Green Deal (or the Green Destiny in Czechia). It has its supporters and opponents. Which group do you belong to?

I am, of course, a total opponent of the Green Deal. One thing is the reason for the aggressive and destructive fight against global warming and CO2 emissions, the other is the EU's own plan to "green" [verb] Europe, the European economy and to create carbon neutrality in Europe, and presenting it as a way to make the European economy more efficient. The opposite is true. I have been actively involved in these issues – writing and lecturing – for at least 15 years, and passively, that is to say, with marginal comments, for three decades. It's the same "song and dance", the arguments on both sides remain the same. I already saw the "end of the world" in the formation of the Club of Rome in the late 60s and early 70s.

The terms energy self-sufficiency and energy security are often used in connection with EU plans. How important is it for the Czech Republic to maintain both of these qualities?

Energy self-sufficiency is economic nonsense and an unrealistic goal in reality. In this sense, the entity called the state is quite economically and energetically very random and cannot be self-sufficient. It has to import many products, including energy products. That is why we have foreign trade. Energy security, on the other hand, is a meaningful concept. It is not possible to import everything and be totally dependent on imports for any essential thing, from food to energy. For our security, we need to use our domestic resources in a rational way and not give up our resources in the name of very controversial ideologies.

The Czech Republic has its own available coal reserves until 2050. In light of the fact that China and India are still building more and more coal resources, is it necessary for the Czech Republic to run out of coal before the 2038 date proposed by the Coal Commission? Does this make sense from a security point of view?

I don't know whether we should say that we have available coal reserves by 2050. Do we know the level of machinery and other technologies in 2050? After all, availability is determined solely by the profitability of extraction, but that depends on the level of technological progress in 2050, not today.

The decision to mine coal is an economic decision. And it should be our decision. What some countries in Western Europe do on the one hand, and China and India on the other, is completely irrelevant to us. Setting targets like – end coal mining in 2038 – is a pointless, suicidal policy. No sensible country should make it. Of course, this presupposes that the state is sovereign in its decision-making, which the Czech Republic is not within the EU today. Yet many EU member states make their own policies on energy matters and do not look to the EU for much guidance.

If the demands of Brussels for the rapid withdrawal of coal from the European energy sector are to be met, the only quickly available substitute is natural gas. European countries get this mainly from Russia. Taken only strategically, is it safe to focus on just one supplier for the supply of a vital raw material?

I do not accept the EU's demand for the rapid elimination of coal as an energy source, and therefore I do not think it is necessary to seek a replacement at any price. Just as it is nonsense to be tied to one energy source, it is nonsense to be tied to one supplier. As Prime Minister in the early 1990s, I know that we saw it as crucial to get rid of our dependence on oil imports from Russia and to create a replacement pipeline, and we must do the same with Russian gas. Does anyone else remember the Ingolstadt pipeline? This holds without any demonisation of Russia, which is being carried out by some irresponsible politicians and journalists in this country.

There are virtually the same carbon dioxide emissions associated with gas as with coal. (About half of the emissions from gas come from extraction and transport.) Does the imposed switch from coal to gas make any sense to you in terms of emissions?

I don't want to go into a detailed comparison of CO2 emissions from coal and gas, or compare emissions from extraction and transport against emissions from using one or the other emissions source. There is probably some difference between gas and coal here. But the coal and gas lobbies should not fight each other; if the fight is irreconcilable, the third party – the Greens and the Pirates - will win. And Greta Thunberg, too. And we will all lose.

Import dependency also threatens EU Member States in the field of renewables. The vast majority of photovoltaic panels come from Asia, especially from China, and wind turbines are also mostly imported, and again often from China. Is this a good trend from a safety point of view?

Europe's import dependency, thanks to irrational policies, is extremely high in all sectors, not just photovoltaic panels. Europe is forgetting that it is necessary to produce, not just consume, however attractive, progressive and politically correct this may be. For a while, Europe will sustain itself as an open-air museum, and tourists will continue to come for a while, but it will not replace industrial production. The illusion of a knowledge economy is a deliberately promoted stupidity, unfortunately even among the youngest generation in schools.

What do you think a transformation of energy, centralized heating plants as well as individual home heating, motoring, and industry would look like that would be responsible to people and the economy and be both energy and strategically secure? Already now Brussels admits that over a quarter (120 million) of the EU's people will fall into energy poverty, but in the eastern – poorer – part of the EU it is highly likely to be more than that quarter...

No transformation of the energy sector and the other sectors of the economy you mention is necessary. In particular, there is no need for transformation with a capital T. Energy is undergoing a permanent transformation, but it is an evolutionary, market-driven transformation, not a state-organised one. Communism has shown that a state-organised economy is nonsense. Let energy live, respond to market demand and fully absorb unorganised technical progress. Energy in 2021 is different from energy in 1921, but not because of state planning, nor because of European subsidies. If and when the state, which today means Brussels, interferes, the "energy poverty" you mention will arise. But it will be poverty in the general sense, not just in the energy sector. We will indeed be poorer, something that humanity, especially the western part of humanity, has largely forgotten over the last century. Yes, we will be poorer.

How far should the Czech Republic, if necessary, resist the Green Deal and the associated bans and changes to life in Brussels and the EU? Could developments in this area reach a stage where the only responsible and safe way forward is to leave the EU?

Resistance to the Green Deal and other similar issues is a duty for all of us, not least our government, which is preparing to enter the scene. I don't know if it knows that, but I fear it does not. This duty has nothing immediately to do with leaving the EU, which is not realistic in the foreseeable future.

Přemysl Souček, iUhlí.cz, 25. 11. 2021

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Let's not let finance and banking turn green

2021-11-17T07:22:00.004+01:00

Let's not make old mistakes
By former Czech President Klaus

In the early 1990s, I polemicised the use of completely misleading adjectives that usually denied rather than developed the following noun. It was a well-known battle in Europe, which had its main meaning in the German-speaking world, over the so-called soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy). The society (not only the economy!) of Germany and Austria was based on it in the second half of the 20th century. And it was to be ours too.

LM: I guess that my choice of this 1989 photo will raise Klaus' blood pressure (he was medically treated for that recently) but it's November 17th today. ;-)

But I and the people around me wanted to introduce a "market without adjectives" in our country. It goes without saying that society must also think socially (I did not deny this for a second, even though many did not and do not want to know), but I considered it necessary that the word "socially" should follow the word "market", not precede it.

The market must first function, only then can social elements be added to it. Rational social policy must be a complement, an addition to the market, not an a priori restriction or blockage of it. Perhaps I can rightly say that we won the argument about these things in our country in the early 1990s, and that this was a prerequisite for the success of our radical transformation. It was also then that the famous hyperbole that horses must be harnessed in front of the cart, not behind it, became 'famous'. It seemed to me that we had explained this to our public at this point, at least to the part of it that wanted to think.

It was, of course, difficult to explain it to socialists of all kinds (scattered in all political parties), because they – as communism exemplarily demonstrated – wanted mainly to own the wagon (as full as possible a wagon) and wanted to give out of it. In their naivety, short-sightedness – and I must accuse them of malice – they took quality horsepower for granted. As communism has shown, it was not a given. I insist that socialist thinking is inherently based on a misunderstanding of this trivial truth.

When it began to seem in the past decades to superficial observers of the advanced and rich capitalist economy that the social (and therefore actually economic) problem of humanity had been solved (at least in the society of the advanced West), that therefore the colour red was no longer so important, the Greens came up with their colour green. The adjective social was not enough for them, they needed to add – I repeat, in front of the carriage – the colour green and thus fundamentally damage the quality of the market, the quality of the economy. The social imperatives were no longer enough, mainly because they did not mobilise the "masses". Therefore, they began to be supplemented at first, but later significantly overtaken by green (or ecological, or environmental) imperatives.

The crown of this radical social shift was set by the transformation of environmentalist thinking from cleaning wells to fighting the climate. It is this event that has brought us to the present day, to the theatre of the absurd (or fair of crazy ideas) in Glasgow, Scotland, which may be the x-th gathering of its kind, but it is evident that the shift underway there is now reaching a new quality. The demand is no longer die soziale Marktwirtschaft, the demand is becoming die ökologisch-soziale (or perhaps ökosoziale) Marktwirtschaft. We know that one such adjective was already too much, but two adjectives at the same time are not enough for the market – and thus the prosperity of the contemporary Western world – to bear.

I remember that we discussed these problems even under communism. Albeit in slightly different terminology, but with pretty much the same beef. Those of us who resolutely rejected the communist system of economics did not ask to exclude the word social, we could not have gotten away with it, but we asked to ensure the maximum degree of autonomy of the economic system from politics. It was no accident that not long after November 1989 I understood that politics had ceased to take precedence over economics. For a time this was true. That was our great victory, but only for a short time.

Our defenders of the word "social" were apparently sidelined by the fall of communism and – crouched – remained silent. The defenders of the word "green" were already sticking their necks out, but they did not – until the victory of the global warming doctrine – have enough strength. The idea that central bank monetary policy could set social objectives was then beyond any discussion. There was a debate about whether the central bank should only look at inflation as its primary objective, or whether it should also look at the development of output, i.e. GDP, and thus employment. This is, to some extent, a legitimate debate. However, it would never have occurred to anyone at the time that the central bank should bring social aspects down from the macro to the micro level, i.e. from the central to the commercial banking level. What I am just recalling now was considered elementary textbook truths for freshmen at universities of economics.

I believe it would have remained so if the word "social" had not been reinforced by the word "green". Equally, I believe that it would have remained so if the word "green" had not shifted from cleaning not only wells, but also, for example, the river Bečva (which was recently poisoned), to the battle for the climate, for the average global temperature. If the belief in a direct proportionality (perhaps not just a linear, but rather an exponential relationship) between CO2 emissions and average global temperature had not prevailed in world politics (not science!). There is not the slightest doubt that this completely unscientific relationship is not held by serious science. Yet the entire tirade of the last few days and weeks in Glasgow is based on the existence of a hypothesis of the undisputed validity of this relationship.

I have been following closely the whole endless series of meetings of this kind. They have taken place several times at the UN General Assembly in New York, and I have spoken at them. For a long time it was of a different character from today. They talked mainly about reducing CO2 emissions through structural changes in the economy, through the elimination of heavy industry, through the extraction and use of fossil fuels, through the reduction of motoring, etc., and they recommended that governments make these structural changes. This was applauded at such meetings by politicians, the new central planners. Therefore, the methods of how to make these structural changes (without changing the nature of the economic system) were not discussed; the new-age central planners seemed to be able to do it directly. By directives on the one hand, taxes and fees of various kinds on the other. Mostly by emission allowances, which even some economists (but that word should be put in quotes) considered to be a market-conforming solution.

Nobody thought of directly tasking the banking (and financial) system. Ideological science had to help, a new monetary doctrine had to emerge, which quite appropriately came to be called new monetary theory. Where else could this have happened but in the bastion of progressivism, the USA, although the European Union did not waver. A few years ago it was also discussed at the annual August meeting of bankers, economists and politicians at the magical Jackson Hole in the Teton Range in far western Wyoming, which I also attended several times. It was always there that monetary policy, or the basic contours of monetary policy for the future, were determined.

The Trump-appointed (!) head of the Fed, Jerome Powell, implicitly subscribed to the new monetary theory there, in full view of the entire professional world, by saying that central banking must also take into account the social and environmental aspects of its macroeconomic policy, and that the social and environmental aspects must be taken into account today and every day by commercial and investment banks in their micro-policies. The US Federal Reserve has even joined the "Network for Greening the Financial System", which is an international group looking at how to build climate thinking into banking.

When I first read these views, repeatedly critically analysed in, for example, the CATO Journal, I couldn't believe my eyes. But it didn't take long for it to become part of mainstream thinking. In the serious British journal Economic Affairs, I recently read a review of one of the "bibles" of the new monetary theory (Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of People's Economy, John Murray Press, 2020) and I could not understand why the reviewer did not dare to say why it was all nonsense. The lofty mathematical equations may impregnate it with mystery, not substance.

So let's not try to greenwash monetary policy. It is bad enough that various commercial banks do so in their TV commercials. Will their clients want the bank they have entrusted their money to abandon pure economic thinking and address global temperature? After all, the term green banking has been around for a long time, but it used to mean Islamic banking, which is not what we are concerned with now.

Václav Klaus for the weekly Hrot [The Spike], 15 November 2021

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

The absurdly pathetic "result" of COP26

2021-11-14T09:06:00.008+01:00

Another summit of the climate psychopaths and their spineless collaborationists ended in Glasgow. The format was the same one that we remembered in dozens of previous summits: 30,000 parasites arrived by private jets and have bullšited about the evil of CO2 emissions for two weeks. The content of their talks was just nonsensical irrelevant gibberish, there was no agreement about anything, the talks had to go to overtime, like always, and some "result" was announced afterwards:

Nations including China and India agreed to say something about the "phaseout" of coal while all words that indicated some substance were deleted or softened to become completely ill-defined.

Even if some of these statements about the future were well-defined, it would still not imply that these statements will have anything to do with the truth. These statements are just would-be prophesies by idiots who think that they are about 1,000 times more important and powerful than they are.

I am sure you don't need to know anything else about this "event". Billions of dollars were wasted for another farce, the CO2 emissions created by these morons are obviously the least of the problems because there exists nothing such as a global problem with the climate, let alone one caused by CO2, and even if there were a problem, the subtraction of carbon dioxide's contribution, at most 0.01-0.02 °C, from the warming per year would clearly do nothing to avoid the problems. Do you really need to move 30,000 morons across the world and store them in hotels for 2 weeks if the only outcome is just another hateful remark about the fossil fuels which is completely detached from reality?

Jeremy Clarkson is the guy who should be getting a substantial portion of the money that was wasted for this farce. A week ago, he pointed out that Greta Thunberg was an uneducated arrogant moron and what she needed was a smacked bottom. But it has become politically incorrect to spank filthy bastards such as the Scandinavian dropout. Almost all the 30,000 participants of the farce need smacked bottoms, too. But the media landscapes in many countries are so fudged up that their members dare to disagree with Clarkson's self-evidently correct and important remark. In fact, if they could, they would make sure that Greta spanks Clarkson instead of the other way around!

The degeneration of the society has led to the birth of an entire extraordinarily annoying and idiotic parasitic class that believes that they are doing a very important work e.g. if they fly to a distant hotel for 2 weeks, babble nonsense that reveals their complete scientific illiteracy, and then they sign a hateful remark about King Coal, the 964,253rd such remark. Some of the "work" was probably all about the selection of the key word. "Phaseout" defeated "suppression" and even "ching-queng-kung-pao" (the "right" translation of the hostile verb to other languages surely consumed the work of hundreds of translators for many hours: Czech alarmists seem to have adopted "odklon" which could be back-translated as "deflection"). The word "phaseout" is the product of their work. They imagine that they are really controlling the world, they have eaten Solomon's excrement which promoted them to the smartest people in the room, and their choice of the word "phaseout" has the value of trillions of dollars that they deserve to be paid.

They are neither. Already much more modest green policies that have been imposed on nations so far have led to the meteoric rise of the fuel and electricity prices that is seen to be painful for billions of people and by billions of people. To make a truly significant impact on CO2 emissions – which would still have virtually no impact on the climate – they would need to increase these devastating policies by an order of magnitude or more. If that happened, the 30,000 parasites wouldn't be spanked, they would be eradicated. Their idea that they may command 8 billion people is breathtakingly arrogant but it is also dumb. Your own far left media have deceived you, aßholes, not only about all the science and economics but about your status, too. You are not the elites. You are braindead trash of mankind that will be eliminated by the bulk of the nations when it becomes really necessary and you are doing maximum you can to bring that moment closer. Your demise will almost directly follow from the basic laws of Nature, economics, and human psychology. It's too bad if you didn't bother to learn either of these laws.

The Czech name for the green deals

Czechia obviously belongs among the nations where some folks with common sense keep on controlling the key institutions, as the outgoing PM's talk exemplified. Incidentally, it is cool to observe that the climate skeptics' preferred translation of the "European Green Deal" seems to be winning in my homeland. We call it "Zelený úděl" while the EU's official term is "Zelená dohoda". It is a funny and not so delicate difference. As I learned after the years in the U.S., a "deal" is mainly just a small treaty, contract, something that you codify by a signature or a handshake. That is "dohoda" but the first backwards translation of "dohoda" would simply be a "treaty". Instead, we are using "úděl" for a "deal" which could be back-translated as a "fate", "destiny", and it has a rather negative content. Jesus had this "destiny" when he was force to carry his own cross. The Europeans are being forced into something similar that the Jews have imposed on Jesus Christ. It doesn't sound optimistic.

I was wondering why it is so that "Zelený úděl" was so widely accepted by the writers including the most influential mainstream media. One reason is that the climate realism is just way more widespread here, including in the media world and the important institutions. Another reason is historical but I only fully appreciated it a few days ago: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal", i.e. the original one, has been translated mostly as "Nový úděl", the New Destiny, for almost a century (I am not 100% sure that it was the translation already in the 1930s, i.e. before the rise of the Czechoslovak communists, but I tend to believe so). And that makes a difference. Of course the Green Deal has to be an "úděl", too.

I think that you should back-translate our terminology and pick a more realistic phrase, perhaps Green Destiny, Green Fate, or something like that, to more correctly convey the fact that the Green Deals are fatally dangerous plans.

Green suicide

2021-11-01T18:31:00.007+01:00

Babiš criticised the European climate package in Glasgow
Czech Press Agency / Novinky.cz

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš criticised the European climate package known as Fit for 55 at the UN climate change conference COP 26 in Glasgow on Monday. He said the green deal could become European green suicide without a rational approach. [Full speech, video, in Czech.]

According to Babiš, it is first necessary to address whether the targets are too ambitious, how much money the transformation will cost and whether Europe and individual countries can afford it.

In recent years, according to the Czech Prime Minister, environmental protection has been replaced by the fight against climate change. He recalled that the European Union wants to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, but the Fit for 55 package goes much further than what the EU has agreed. He criticised, for example, the fact that the European Commission is proposing that new cars in the EU should not produce any carbon dioxide emissions from 2035.

According to Babiš, Europe produces about nine percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. "The European Union cannot achieve anything without the involvement of major polluters such as China and the United States," he said.

The Fit for 55 package, he said, takes no account of the conditions and capabilities of individual EU member states. Babiš also said that without answers to questions about whether the targets are too ambitious or how much the transformation will cost, the Green Deal will become European green suicide.

Babiš considers it absolutely essential that member states should be able to choose their own energy mix to achieve carbon neutrality. He advocated nuclear power as a clean and safe source of energy.

According to the prime minister, the green deal may lead to social, economic, political and geopolitical costs, which may create enormous tensions in society or among allies and open the door to radicals. The deal, he said, could be responsible for the loss of competitiveness of the European Union, rising unemployment and astronomical energy prices.

At the end of his speech, Babiš called for a critical, rational and non-ideological approach to climate policy.

At the Glasgow conference, the heads of dozens of countries and governments are appearing to present plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Speeches have been made by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

The strange allure of COP26, the "World Conference Of the Parties"

2021-10-30T16:34:00.001+02:00

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

On Sunday, thousands of delegates from almost every country in the world will descend on hapless Glasgow, one of the UK's ugliest cities, to assure each other that the globe's air is dangerously warming by the release of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, and, as they do every year (for the 26th time), to promise each other what they intend to do about it.

There is little doubt among these politicians, scientists and the elite that since the Industrial Revolution humans have been contributing substantially to dangerous global warming by their lifestyles, and everyone in the world repeatedly promises how they intend to achieve zero emissions by 2050 so that the air temperature will not rise more than 1.5°-2.0°C above pre-industrial levels.

This time, delegates are to present their governments' detailed plan for eliminating the "carbon footprint," as it is now fashionable to call the policy of "decarbonization." Simply put, all countries are to stop burning coal, stop cutting down forests, and instead introduce solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. Six years ago, at the Paris Summit, the rich countries promised to put together USD 100 billion a year to help the poorest, but so far they have failed to do so. The slogan of the conference is 'coal, cars, cash and trees'. They have 12 days to wrangle, but there will be no binding signatures. You can't make a promise with a promise.

The problem is, it's like nuclear disarmament, you can't do it globally unless everyone signs up. Asia (with Australia) consumes three quarters of the world's coal production, China generates half its electricity from coal and India even three quarters. Of the 1,000 new coal-fired power plants planned, 865 are being built in Asia, most in China, which doubled its pace this year. And coke-intensive cement and steel production there is also soaring. Rising living standards in Asian countries are boosting car and airline ticket sales.

The International Energy Agency estimates that Asia will increase atmospheric greenhouse gases by nine per cent by 2030, more than the rest of the world. That's why China's dictator Xi Jinping won't be attending the conference, nor will India's president, most likely. Both agree, of course, that decarbonisation is necessary, but not at the expense of their economies and living standards.

However, the European Union, the US President and the British Prime Minister intend to severely reduce the prosperity of their citizens. The unanswered question – how long will their voters put up with this?

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, the taxes just introduced, which raise the tax quota to the level of the disastrous 1970s, will deprive the average taxpayer of £13,000 a year. And it will face post-caucus inflation and unaffordable energy costs that wind and sun can never replace. (No mention of nuclear).

By the end of September the price of electricity had trebled and the price of gas had quintupled, with a further 30 per cent increase expected next year. And although Britain is a world champion, generating 40 per cent of its electricity from renewables, it has blackouts when there is no wind, yet it has drawn up an ambitious plan to subsidise electric cars and heat pumps.

Boris Johnson styles himself as the world's green leader, but without the agreement of Russia, India and, above all, China, the zero emissions conference is an embarrassing farce. In his memoir Promised Land, US President Barack Obama wrote one profoundly true sentence: 'China's economic rise means the end of the agreed rules of international trade. China will nod to everything, but it will avoid or bend and break every rule."

And zero emissions? The Europeans and Americans produce (excluding imports) about 18 percent of global greenhouse gases, yet they believe they can influence the world with their green policies. Global warming is hardly talked about in Asian countries (even democratic ones). So it is no wonder that English jokers have renamed the summit a cop out (dodge) or a cop up (fiasco).

Translated with DeepL.com (free)

Speech by Václav Klaus on the occasion of the national holiday on 28 October

2021-10-28T16:32:00.004+02:00

Mr Chairman, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate the repeated invitation to this traditional gathering of yours, which for many years now has been held at this very moment on the Czech Republic's national holiday. Thank you for the opportunity to share with you some of the theses that this day and this anniversary evoke in me. My aim is to suggest that this anniversary is taking on a new relevance right now.

We chose 28 October as a public holiday because on this day, 103 years ago, our national sovereignty was restored and modern statehood of the Czech nation was established with the proclamation of the independent Czechoslovak Republic. After three centuries of living in a multinational Habsburg confederation and under foreign domination, our ancestors dared to take the administration of their affairs into their own hands. The tragic experience of the First World War and the unequal position our nation occupied in the former monarchy contributed to this.

Although the past century has brought many difficult, painful and tragic events, we have never regretted what our ancestors did on 28 October 1918. At least the vast majority of us. The anniversary of that act – and with it the tradition of the First Czechoslovak Republic and its democratic legacy – has been and remains to this day a lasting inspiration and strength for us. We know, however, that we have not won. The new threats emerging and growing dangerously right now require us to make new efforts to secure our national existence and its future. The only question is whether the generations alive today will be capable of the kind of actions that the generation of the so-called "men of October" performed in 1918.

On this day we remember all those who worked for our freedom and independence and who shed their blood for it. We are aware that without them our present would not exist as we know it. I appreciate that even today, in the unexpectedly turbulent conditions of the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, your organization brings together a group of people who care about the freedom of our country and who care about preserving the legacy and memory of those who have contributed most to it. This is already an exceptional attitude in our country today.

Although we are experiencing the longest period of peace in our history, we cannot look to the future without fear. I am not referring only to the global covid epidemic and the associated restrictions and straitjacketing of our lives. Also because of the policies of our governments, its consequences have become an unintended part of our lives. We are facing attempts to socially engineer and remake the world that our ancestors fought for and in which we grew up, according to the ideas of a new generation of ideologues who hide their anti-humanist ideas and their world-governing ambitions behind platitudes about saving the planet, about fighting climate change, about eliminating arbitrarily defined discrimination, about a supposedly necessary global government and other such progressivist goals that are not ours.

The thorn in the side of these radical destroyers of our world is the existence of nation states such as our Republic, the existence of nations as such, the existence of the family and even human nature itself. Gradually they have managed to dominate public opinion throughout the developed West, subjugating politics, academia and the media. In particular, they have managed to take over education and thus dangerously infect our children.

We are also facing their attack on all that is essential about 28 October and the traditions of our modern statehood. They are rewriting the history of the struggle for our freedom, they are trying to make the victors and the real saviours of Europe and the world after the Second World War look like war criminals, they are defaming our victories. And they find among us not a few who are willing not only to listen to them, but also to sympathise with them and even to promote their views.

These radical ideologues use international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union, in particular, to achieve their goals. As a result, Brussels' policies are also pursuing goals other than freedom, prosperity and raising the standard of living of the people of Europe. The people and their well-being are to be sacrificed to an unscientific climate chimera, which, after all, is – as so often in history – just a cover for a classic power struggle. A ruthless assault on the living standards and lifestyles of the people of Europe is under way, high and certainly not short-term inflation is running rampant everywhere, and civil rights and freedoms are being curtailed under the pretext of the Covid-19 epidemic.

I dare say that we are at yet another key crossroads where everything is once again on the line. And that includes everything that 28 October symbolizes for us. That is not a phrase that can be used at any time. Unfortunately, few of us are sufficiently aware of today's new threats and risks. Others are very comfortable fighting past wars, increasingly succumbing to media manipulation and paying insufficient attention to what is happening around them. This is unforgivable.

Attitudes of this type were demonstrated in the recent parliamentary elections, the outcome of which was influenced by proxy issues rather than clear views on the key ideological, political and economic issues of the day. The winners of the elections talk very unconvincingly and vaguely about the change they want to bring about, but they do not mean change in the dangerous trends we are experiencing and which threaten our future. They do not have the courage to confront them, they prefer to give in to them. Moreover, they imagine change in a completely different way from the silent majority of our fellow citizens.

This year, the traditional celebration of the national holiday will not take place at Prague Castle. The reason for this is the health condition of the President of the Republic, Miloš Zeman, and his hospitalization. This fact also seems to symbolise the peculiarities and risks of the times in which we find ourselves. I am therefore very glad that we were able to commemorate and honour our national holiday on 28 October with dignity, at least here in the Prague Castle Ball Games Hall.

Thank you once again for the invitation and for the opportunity to say here what I consider to be very urgent words.

Thank you for your attention.

Former Czech President Prof Václav Klaus, Ceremonial Assembly of the Czech Freedom Fighters Union on the occasion of the National Day of 28 October, Prague Castle Ball Games Hall, Prague, 28 October 2021. Video.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Where the policy of decarbonising the economy is taking us

2021-10-11T15:48:00.006+02:00

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

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

Even the current energy crisis will not immediately defeat the ideological consensus; people are conformist, parties and governments do not like to admit error, yet the threat of recession has already unnerved many economists and commentators, especially anonymous ones.

"High gas prices and the financial crisis are hitting it off" (Bloomberg). "We can't live with fossil fuels, but we can't live without them either." (The Economist).

Few today would subscribe to the recent statement by the famous American economist Jeffrey Sachs: "With the brisk progress of zero-carbon energy technologies and sustainable agriculture, the world can end greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century at low cost."

We now know that the total, often disguised, cost of renewable energy is prohibitive, the zero carbon ideal mere wishful thinking. Only the brave will say it fully; Western democracy no longer professes freedom of speech, and careers depend on agreement with the ruling ideology as they did under the communists.

How could it be that fossil fuel prices, with such huge (known) world reserves – oil enought for 200 years, coal and gas enough for at least 1000 years (International Energy Agency) – have suddenly risen so rapidly and the world is facing an economic crisis?

The first thing that springs to mind is the inflated volume of cheap money that governments are pumping into the economy for dear life and the post-Covid demand. The broken global supply chains are responding badly, not to mention the shortage of people in transport and elsewhere who have found better jobs during the pandemic. After the winter season, things will calm down a bit and fuel will get a bit cheaper. But the bottom line will not change; the fossil fuel extraction and industry has been vilified for at least a decade. Many investors have left because of bad conscience, others want to make as much money as they can before immoral extraction is banned by governments altogether. An industry that used to spend two-thirds of its annual profits on maintenance and investment is not going to invest without a secure future. The international oil cartel OPEC + Russia have refused to increase production (October 4) and this time US producers are also waiting. Annual investment by oil producers has fallen from $750 billion since 2014 to an estimated $350 billion by the end of this year (Trafigura) and half of the major projects have been abandoned by entrepreneurs.

The decline in investment will inevitably drive the fossil fuel-dependent world into recession. In vain do the greens rejoice that this will give a relative boost to the price of renewable energy, which, too, with demand artificially driven up by the scarcity of precious metals and copper for windmill masts, is soaring, as are battery prices. By the end of September, the average price of electricity in Europe had risen by 40 per cent.

A paradoxical consequence of the crisis unleashed by Western policies is the situation in China, which is opening one coal-fired power plant after another due to the rising cost of fuel and is estimated to build twice as many (120) next year. It is not worried about global warming and will not let its heavy industry be destroyed. It is strange that the zero-emission advocates do not criticise the Chinese dictator.

The ideology of total decarbonisation of the world is totally unrealistic, it is the science fiction of a sick mind, even the Western advanced economy is not capable of completely replacing fossil fuels at today's technical level, unless – and this is an incomprehensible question – we return to building nuclear power stations, which ideological unreason forbids.

Poverty, power cuts, social and political disintegration and perhaps even a world economic crisis await us.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version).

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

2021-10-09T11:07:00.011+02:00

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

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

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

The main problem concerning this usage of the AI is that the viewers, potentially millions if not (globally) billions of people, are led to the utterly stupid view that "there exists some very smart new way of looking at things" and "the questions that this technology produces must therefore be unique and important". But that is a complete lie. Artificial Intelligence is just some package of software that ends up looking like it is thinking analogously to humans. But the catch is that there is absolutely no "unique way how it should be done" let alone "unique way how it will think and what it will care about or ask". The class of programs that "resemble human thinking" is extraordinarily fuzzy and ill-defined.

So Matilda unavoidably ends up being a puppet whose behavior is heavily affected, if not completely determined, by the humans who coded "her" or trained "her". There are really infinitely many ways how "some computer code seemingly resembling human intelligence" may be programmed and each of them may be fed with "input" in infinitely many ways. The input may consist of long sequences of training sessions that may include random numbers from many sources (including the random generators of computers). Someone has to pick the sources that were poured into the AI bot. The spectrum of possible results is at least "infinite squared".

In practice, Matilda was coded in such a way that her "choice of some questions" was one of the skills that was demanded from Matilda from the very beginning. And while the code can hopefully do much more than just to parrot sentences, it is software that was trained by pouring lots of sentences from a certain ensemble. The coder probably knew in advance "what rough class of questions" would come from such a Matilda if she is "allowed" to ask questions. "She" could have been politically pushed to ask more political questions or less political ones etc. by adjusting some parameters in the code or by adjusting the choice of the "corpus" that was inserted into "her" as the training data.

The diversity of possible outcomes is therefore even larger than e.g. the diversity of possible DNA molecules (and corresponding organisms) that have ever lived on Earth. When someone is ordered to prepare such a Matilda and/or her questions for several politicians, he must choose one of the infinitely many ways to solve this problem. The choice may be partly random; much of it will reflect the coder's or software user's own personality. If Matilda were considered "human", it would still be true that "she" would be absolutely brainwashed. "Her" dependence on "her" puppet masters could even trump the dependence of many sheep on their puppet masters – and millions of people are much more sheep-like than the actual sheep today, indeed. But AI may be even worse, partly because the people "totally enslaving and manipulating" such AI bots face no sanctions for their dictatorial or slaveowner-like behavior.

Equivalently, my point is that the "identity of a human and/or his or her human rights" unavoidably includes all the events that have shaped the human life because those things were encoded in his identity and his way of thinking. Each of us (and certainly each AI bot) has a very specific sequence of such (to one extent or another) formative events. None of us the same as someone else. Even for twins, the perfect symmetry is broken soon after the egg divides to two organisms. Once the twins get out of their mother, they will look extremely similar but their identities will diverge due to the different events in their lives, anyway.

People are believed to worship similar things including "AI" and they are led to believe in some kind of "uniqueness" of these entities which just doesn't exist at all. As a Slavic speaker, I have no intuition for the existence of the word "the" before Artificial Intelligence. But indeed, the point is that it is completely wrong to place "the" in front of AI! There are "very many of them" instead. If you imagine that some "artificial humans" will be produced at some moment, people will ask whether such humans should be given various human or political rights, or whether they should be liquidated, whether it's OK to terminate them, change them, clone them, and do many other things.

The answer is that there just cannot exist any objective, unique answer to these questions. First, science just never answers questions like "should you do this or that" (e.g. should you grant human rights to a robot), such decisions always depend on people's values and interests (and on random numbers fundamentally produced by quantum mechanics). Second, even if you specified the people's values and interests, it will still matter on the exact identity of those AI beings and how their identity and behavior will have been developed, trained, or selected; and what can be expected from one decision or another. Many people may get emotional if these AI bots behave and speak just like sensitive humans. But it's aleady the case of pets or cars, too. People may already get emotional. Whether they "humanize" or "dehumanize" a given AI bot will still depend on all the details that I mentioned and many more.

As long as the AI bots are completely controlled or owned by some humans, it will be completely stupid to imagine that they have their own moral or legal responsibility for their behavior, like humans usually do. The complexity of the software or the large size of their memory or storage is not what should give them the "human independence", "human rights", or "accountability".

Instead, it is their freedom itself, the proven ability to "survive" in the free world, and the society's respect to that freedom and its consequences that allows to treat these AI bots on par with humans! But even if such conditions were obeyed, many people may still choose to consider some AI bots to be their enemies, just like other humans may be enemies.

As long as the AI bot is completely controlled by John, the AI bot is just a tool on par with a hammer or anything else. It just doesn't matter that the AI subject has a lot of knowledge or mental abilities, probably greater than John himself. The decision whether we allow the AI bot to do whatever it "wants" – whether we ever allow particular classes of AI bots to move freely and manipulate with our virtual and then real world – is not a function merely of the internal architecture of the bot. It will also depend on the precise way how the bot was trained. And people will ultimately allow those things that they believe are beneficial for their (the people's) lives! It just can't be otherwise. All these decisions are fundamentally political, not scientific. There cannot be a scientific way to determine such answers. Many possible scenarios are possible. AI bots may become human-like and get lots of freedom which will be self-enforcing. Or humans may prevent them from getting that freedom, too. At various places and at various moments, distinct scenarios may materialize.

When I mentioned that the AI bot is only a fancy decoration reflecting the desires of some human puppet masters (plus some random influences that were allowed to stay random), I must mention that almost the same thing holds for the climate models. They are also often presented as "unique" and giving us "useful information" (this is surely a statement included in the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics) but it is a complete lie. They are extremely non-unique, non-robust pieces of software that depend on many coding and approximation... choices plus some explicit extra parameters and switches that must be picked by humans and that is why they may be described just as sophisticated tools to convey a message that the "humans in control" want to convey!

So of course all models that produce the prediction of 4 °C of warming per century are really just a lipstick on a pig that was ordered by a human, a lipstick that the human wanted to convey. The human decided to allow some large feedbacks that were almost guaranteed to overstate the sensitivity; some instabilities in the numerical calculation that were likely to make the whole evolution dramatic, and some parameters may have been chosen "large" by hand. Even more importantly, the person responsible for the coding and usage of the climate model and its results has chosen not to throw away a particular climate model even though, as a scientist, he should because a 4 °C of warming is already rather safely incompatible with the directly measured temperature data (no empirical measurements indicate a trend that is safely higher than 2 °C per century)! In science, "if it disagrees with the observations, it is wrong" but the people in charge of these models decided to ignore this most fundamental dictum of all sciences. In practice, almost all the people working on this stuff are corrupt parasites who are primarily thinking about their own income and their influence that may help to preserve that income. It is very trivial for these people to adjust the software and/or its usage in order to get whatever they want. They may "murder" or "abort" as many Matildas and climate models or runs as they want and they may pick the survivors.

Just like Matilda, the complex climate models are therefore not really "independent sources of useful information" at all and whoever who is behind them and who pretends that they are independent sources of useful information is a dishonest manipulator. And whoever buys this message is stupid. The "independence of these entities' messages" may only emerge (in a distant enough future) once the AI bots or the climate models start to live full, free lives which are subject to some selection that favors "the true and useful things" and/or eliminates the "false and useless ones". In this sense, there is just no human-like intelligence and there are no independent sources of the useful information without freedom!

And that's the memo.

Global warming: a Nobel Prize

2021-10-05T12:39:00.015+02:00

This text was deleted in March 2022.

Zero emissions in Britain

2021-08-20T19:52:00.000+02:00

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

How is it possible that we are ruled by lunatics? English people often ask in uncharacteristic indignation under articles about zero emissions and green government policies in the right-wing media. It's hard to know how many of those raving lunatics there are. Two years ago the Johnson government enacted a programme of total electrification of the economy from renewable sources by 2030 (it already has the highest proportion of green electricity in the world, 30 per cent) and banned the production of internal combustion engines from 2030. So far people are not revolting. It's a long way off, no one knows what will happen. Maybe in time, they think, when we start getting poorer, the new overlords will change everything.

Even the EU is not lagging behind with its "green deal". It is a mystery why pragmatism is not enough for politicians, why do they need visions? A beautiful zero-emission world is not feasible without a scientific and technological revolution. That's why critics are so furious and count the astronomical costs.

Britain emits less than one per cent of the world's CO2, even less than under Queen Victoria at the height of industrialisation in the late 19th century. And it has more than twice the population today and is many times more affluent. But according to the UK's Climate Commission (CCC), zero emissions are "necessary, feasible and cost-effective". Of course, none of those three apply.

But why zero, wouldn't half, three-quarters of today's emissions be enough? To aim for absolutes is extremism. Electric cars will always be expensive (the price of precious metals for battery production is skyrocketing due to scarcity and expensive mining), do politicians intend to deprive half the population, especially rural areas, of cars?

Government documents sometimes admit that a reduction in living standards is necessary, we are to set an example to the world, as in the industrial revolution, and the investment (£12 billion) in electrification development is to bring 8,000 jobs in hydrogen factories. For God's sake, the sceptics fret, since when are subsidised jobs a benefit to the economy, someone has to pay for them. And pure hydrogen from gas will always be the most expensive fuel in the world due to carbon removal, not to mention electrolysis.

Johnson is going to chair the UN climate change summit in Glasgow later this year. He will be talking about the fiasco of the previous agreement in Paris five years ago. Several dozen countries reneged on their then much more modest pledge to cut emissions, including China and the US, and last year alone China built 48 new coal-fired power stations. While Britain will close its last coal-fired plant next year, the number is rising around the world, especially in India, which may prefer not to send delegates to the summit.

The big sinner, oddly enough, is Germany, which produces 24 per cent of its electricity from coal and operates six of the ten largest power stations in Europe. In time, it will replace them with gas, but that is far from clean energy. The dogmatism of the Greens is certainly responsible for the alarmism and hysteria about global warming, but it is hard to believe them when they reject nuclear power and do not help the Third World to dismantle coal-fired power stations. Something is wrong here! Wouldn't that cost less than lowering the standard of living of the West?

The British government intends to force households (26 million) to replace their gas heating with heat pumps and electrify their kitchens and bathrooms. But that won't reduce emissions – for the same reason why we like to say in Czechia that an electric car has an exhaust pipe in Počerady [a large brown coal power plant owned by Mr Tykač]. And where to get so much electricity when 12 percent is already imported, perhaps millions more windmills? There is plenty of space in the Strait, but construction costs are rising due to the price of copper and nothing can be done without subsidies. There is no discussion of the cost, the impact on productivity and the competitiveness of the industry. The Minister of Finance was supposed to publish an estimate of the total cost in April, and it is no wonder that he has not. But the main obstacle to the green vision will be workers, those new voters who abandoned the socialists and voted for Johnson and Brexit. There are millions of them, and there is no money to insulate their houses, to convert these houses to clean energy, and there won't be any money available in the immediate future. Electrification is a hobby of the rich and the total visions are totalitarian in general.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Yesterday, when I was young, winters were cooler

2021-08-09T18:37:00.024+02:00

But is it true?

The arguments supporting the climate hysteria are hysterical, ideological, and they usually want to sound scientific even though they contradict even the most elementary scientific facts. But as a Slovak e-friend who will be referred to as Simon just reminded me, there is one phenomenon (a totally non-ideological one, I would say) that makes it easier for the global warming pseudoscience to be widely adopted by millions of seemingly neutral people. And it's their view that they can clearly detect that when they were kids, the weather was colder and winters were cooler, among similar observations.

So Simon remembers that he could ski around his house (near the Small Fatra Mountains); it is impossible now when he is an adult. The snow started 200 meters lower than it starts now (which, if multiplied by the lapse rate, produces a realistic 1 °C of warming but those 200 meters were always extremely far from a constant and they were hidden in a much larger noise). The warming trend is self-evident, he believes: he has measured it by the simplest observations he could make in his life. Any week-long visit to his childhood combined with any week-long visit to his adulthood is enough to establish the difference that the climate has undergone. But is it true?

Of course it's not. The temperatures have been changing rather chaotically and you may only break the a priori symmetry between the cooling trend and the warming trend if you carefully and accurately enough observe the temperature that is

averaged over whole days
averaged over whole years (and you need several years both in the recent era and in the past era that are compared)
averaged over the whole globe or a big portion of it

Clearly, an accurate enough network and a statistically robust evaluation of the data is needed to satisfy these three conditions. A sketchy observation by one person at one place at a bunch of moments just can't possibly be enough to legitimately establish a warming trend. If you neglect at least one step, the apparent trends in the temperature data are reduced to a noise with an unpredictable sign; and if you always get the same sign, that sign is spurious, due to a systematic error, not a real asymmetry in Nature. For example, a decade ago, I showed you the Mathematica code implying that 30% of weather stations display a cooling trend during their existence. The positive sign of the warming trend is no omnipresent universal law; it is only a sign that is more widespread among weather stations than the opposite sign, roughly by a 2-to-1 ratio. Similarly, if you fail to average over all months, you will see the dominance of the noise even in the globally averaged data.

I think that I have the advantage of being a mental kid (as my relative in the French Riviera would say). In fact, I still think like a 4-year-old kid and have the same ideals; and when I was 4, I was already thinking as a scientist. In the key aspects, I haven't changed at all and the multiplication of the age by a factor of 12 doesn't represent a problem. The effect of "winters of my childhood were so much cooler" may be overwhelmingly described as an illusion and it is mostly an illusion due to a selection bias. In the kindergarten, I was already obsessed with illusions and my maternal grandfather was probably the main person who encouraged this interest of mine.

A crucial part of the illusion is the different psychology of kids and adults. In particular, kids may be really amazed by snow and ice when they see it for the first time. Or the second time etc. Appreciate the small number of days that you fully experience when you are still younger than 4 years. It is just some 500 days, exceptional days of your life. Childhood is a precious metal in the temporal space. I sort of remember the first large icicle that I have ever seen at age of 2-3. It was in the mountains (Bohemian Forest) which is a pretty naturally sounding location. It was so amazing! My understanding of thermodynamics and phase transitions was somewhat limited at that time (I still feel ashamed of my childhood holes in the Landau theory of the second-order phase transitions) but I did understand that some feelings may be illusions and one must think hard not to fool oneself. Although I didn't follow all the details of the Gaussian normal distribution (and I didn't even know that phrase), I was trying to place my exciting experiences into some distributions and quantitatively estimate the frequency of observations. I felt certain that many years later, I would try to remember what I exactly felt and how often I felt that, so I did spend a lot of energy by trying to make all the memories credible.

So aside from the first large icicles (which were still less stunning than the frozen car covered by the supercooled water near Lake Geneva), I remember winters when it was possible and convenient to cross-country ski in Pilsen (which I could do half a year ago, too, but I do remember more solid snow covers in Pilsen). I remember a day when I was 10 when the tramcars couldn't bring me to the school on the other side of Pilsen because the tracks and trams were frozen. I remember the shock after seeing –20 °C on the thermometer roughly at the same time. But I also remember many copies of a "disappointing" muddy Christmas when I felt robbed and cheated. In fact, I remember a huge amount of dirty snow in Pilsen that melted because of the intense smog of the 1980s (mostly caused by the Škoda Works chimneys; the sources have changed profoundly). And perhaps more importantly, I remember enough about my own psychology to know that the dirty, quickly melting snow was easier to be forgotten. I still haven't forgotten much of it! Most of these preserved memories only exist because I had adopted a plan not to forget a selection of the otherwise forgettable but standard perceptions.

Rationally speaking, the snow cover has dropped because of the warming trend which could have added some 0.5 °C to Pilsen's temperatures since those times; but the snow cover may have increased because the smog that quickly polluted the snow and made it melt quickly has almost entirely disappeared. I am not sure which effect is stronger but I bet that the latter (disappearance of smog) can't have a much lower effect than the global warming and probably wins.

OK, I remember some impressive icicles etc. that I saw for the first time in my life; some other pleasures of the winters, skiing, skating, snowmen, snowwomen, snowkids, and snowball fights. But I also remember muddy winters; and I remember that I have remembered the cooler and more pristine pictures more reliably than the muddy (and mostly sunny) ones. I remember some amazing floods with new huge seas in the early 1980s which approximately matched the huge floods in 2002 (nothing comparable for 19 years). And I honestly remember July 27th, 1983 when the Pilsen-Bory temperature reached 40.1 °C, almost matching the Prague-Uhříněves new absolute Czech record of 40.2 °C on the same day. The record high was suddenly improved by several degrees.

Some of the summers were really hot back around 1983, five years before James Hansen and the MetOffice/IPCC started to make the babbling about global warming a global duty, but we still came to Croatia-in-Yugoslavia (and some other Southern countries) where it was even warmer. Note that 1983 is already damn 38 years ago and it is still defines the hottest "day at home" that I remember. So much for the claims that every year must be warmer than the previous one. The absolute Czech record from Prague-Uh. was beaten in 2012 (August 20th, Dobřichovice near Prague) but the new one is 40.4 °C, just 0.2 °C above the 1983 record. It is a statistical tie.

The weather has always fluctuated and memories can be easily distorted by the selective remembering or selective forgetting. That's a point that I actually understood very well when I was a kindergarten scientist; too bad that many kids don't get this important point even when they are 80-year-old professors celebrated by the far left batšit crazy inkspillers. You know, there is a question that may easily prove that this whole "perception of a vastly cooler childhood" is nothing else than an illusion, and it is the first quantitative question you may ask:

Using your memories from your cool childhood, estimate how much warmer the weather (annual mean temperature) in your city is today, relatively to when you were a kid.

Just try to ask this question to someone who is telling you with certainty that his childhood was much cooler. The answer you will get will be at least 5 °C. But it is obvious that such a high figure cannot have anything to do with the objective change of the temperatures because the latter were just about 1 °C per century, 0.5 °C from the childhood of the 50-year-old adults, and the latter 0.5 °C may get doubled when you evaluate it in a country (a piece of land where the trend was faster than the ocean trend). But it's still at most 1 °C of a change from your childhood that survives the scrutiny involving the thermometer record. If you feel that your childhood was at least 5 °C cooler than the present, it has been just proven that at least 80% of your memory is BS! BS caused by wrong or distorted memories and especially by the biased forgetting algorithm.

And be sure that it is the case. The first big snows, thick ice, icicles etc. are impossible to forget. You may talk about them for the following 50-80 years and pretend that this is "what your whole childhood looked like". Except that it didn't. Your childhood was full of disappointing mild winters, winter days when you couldn't ski so you were playing games at home (and completely ignored the weather at that moment), muddy Christmas days when you felt to be screwed by Baby Jesus but you had no social network on the Internet to complain about Him and His pathetic gifts, and many other things. On the contrary, when you saw an icicle or a snowy meadow in recent years (the very same ones that stunned you when it was the first time), you didn't give a damn because... it just wasn't the first time any longer. The psychological X-factor has faded away. Once you admit that 80% or at least way over 50% of some people's (or your) memories about their "cool childhood" is caused by an illusion, you should also be capable of understanding that it is totally plausible (and it is really the simple hypothesis preferred by Occam's razor) that almost 100% of the effect is an illusion (and more than 100% of it is possible, too). Probably a statistical illusion.

I was searching for the Czech words that I would use in a text similar to this one and I quickly found this 2016 essay whose message is almost isomorphic to the message of this blog post (the discovery is "completely independent"). But that Czech essay also brings graphs of the maximum snow cover in Budweis, South Bohemia; and some other graphs, including the maximum snow cover experienced by people aged between 3 and 13, plotted against the year of their birth. The message is that the objective graphs of the snow are an almost perfect white noise; and almost everyone can find some childhood winters that were cool and spectacular enough. However, everyone can also find some mild and disappointing winters, including a series of several such consecutive winters (in most cases).

These days, everything about the weather tends to be politicized because dishonest gr@tins find this politicization convenient for their dirty personal interests. But if you subtract all this ideological garbage, what is left is an assertion that has been with us for centuries and probably much more than centuries. People of all generations in memory have been saying "yesterday, when I was young, winters were cooler".

This version of "Yesterday, when I was young" by Charles Aznavour was co-sung by Elton John. Of course, I prefer Karel Gott's Czech remake because yesterday, when I was young, Karel Gott had a much better voice (to to mention that he was alive). Also, Gott's song is more informative (even when it comes to the atmospheric data and the data about pollution) and describes Pilsen (where Gott was born on the Bastille Day in 1939, exactly 150 years after the French event) between the Protectorate [Nazi occupation] years and the Stalinist years. The world in Pilsen was apparently so wonderful when Gott was a kid! ;-)

Before CO2, gr@tins, climate change, and global warming made it to every other sentence about the weather, people still had these twisted memories and they were fooling themselves with the same illusions. Here is a wonderful 1926 text published in the Czechoslovak Courier that has described the (then) recent mild winters. While the text fails to mention Gr@ta and CO2 (not even the time-traveling Gr@ta can be found there), most of the sentiments, whining, beliefs, discussion about the practical consequences sound just like in the texts written 95 years later. So the pioneers of skiing suffered because of some mild winters including 1881-1882, 1898-1899, 1912-1913, 1913-1914 (especially April 1914 was much warmer than it should have been), 1915-1916, 1918-1919... Many of these winters were said to be warmer than the latest one (in 1925-1926). The author of that essay clearly felt the urge to defend some sanity – he or she has played a nearly identical role as the climate skeptics play today. From some perspective, this argument hasn't changed at all and the "character" of the people in both camps has really remained completely constant! The "believing" side loves to remain superficial and be fooled by illusions; the "skeptical" side loves to identify the illusions, penetrate beneath the surface of the appearances, and escape being manipulated.

The 1926 text contains not only the usual talk about the consequences for the pioneers-skiers. There are also numerous fun paragraphs about the scientific explanation of the causes (note that even if the CO2-caused warming trend deserves a discussion at all, its magnitude was more than 10 times smaller in 1926 than it is in 2021 so changes of CO2 were clearly negligible for the climate at that time):

We hear all sorts of impossible explanations about the causes of these mild winters. There are stories of variations in the Gulf Stream which, according to the evidence, do not exist at all, of cold waves from America which have partly mistaken their path, or even of increased irradiation of the high air.

As for the cold waves of the Americas, wireless telegraphy has enabled us to monitor the daily progress of the weather throughout the North Atlantic and the North American continent. Here we can well observe how cold currents with a temperature of about -10 to -20 degrees are released off the North American east coast, penetrate periodically in a southeasterly direction, and, mixing with the warm air hovering over the ocean, gradually increase the temperature of the ocean.

If these waves then arrive at the Azores, they may at most cause a cooling from +15 degrees to +12. If, exceptionally, they move westwards and arrive in a long current across the Gulf Stream to the British Isles, they act directly there as 'heat waves'.

Our cold waves always come either from Greenland or - and most impressively - from Russia. The latter cause our usual severe winters, such as the freezing winter of 1923-24, while the Greenland cold waves warm up considerably on their way across the ocean and bring us our usual cold-wet climate.

The warming of the high air layers by intensified irradiation, given as the cause of the mild winter, becomes an utterly untenable idea if we only realize how easily our atmosphere transmits the sun's rays. The atmosphere cannot in any appreciable degree convert sunlight into heat, and derives its own temperature almost entirely from the backward thermal radiation of the earth.

The circumstance that, in winter territories undisturbed by high flakes, we find the air warmer at the height than near the ground, is explained by the fall of the heavier cold air of the layers nearest to the earth, which takes place undisturbed by calm weather with high pressure.

In spite of this, the sun and its rays are the true cause of mild winters and our weather in general. The particularly impressive solar radiation in the equatorial territories is decisive in this respect.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

A few days ago, you must have heard about the stopping of the Gulf Stream again. The anonymous Czechoslovak author discussed this possible theory already in 1926 and he or she was clearly far more scientifically informed than the average inkspiller writing about the Gulf Stream in 2021. The 1926 text doesn't talk about "stopping of the Gulf Stream", just about some major fluctuations in its strength which are still impossible. The author almost certainly understood that the Gulf Stream is ultimately driven by the statistical asymmetry in the direction of winds and that asymmetry exists because of the spinning of the Earth – and the latter just won't stop. Aside from debunking the decelerating Gulf Stream pseudoscience, the 1926 texts discusses other ocean-based, atmospheric, and solar explanations. I would have comments about everything but it is absolutely unquestionable that this author was smarter in weather science than the average people who write about the same topic 95 years later! In particular, the author clearly understood that the temperature of the atmosphere isn't obtained "directly" from the solar heat; and he or she has thought about lots of regional geographic data and regions that were sending us one kind of the weather or another.

OK, when we were kids, icicles looked larger because they were larger, in the units of our body size. Everything that we saw when we were kids (like my kindergarten, I mean the building) looks rather small now. But it used to look big because it was big – it was a larger multiple of your height (which was small when you were kid but now it is larger). It is important to realize that this trivial illusion (resulting from your growing body: your linear dimensions were 50% of the adult ones when you were three!) applies to many procedures "evaluating the weather", too. So the same icicles looked bigger and scarier because you were small (they were really more dangerous for you!); the same snow cover or ice sheet looked thicker because they were thicker relatively to your height as well, and so on. It was easier for you to freeze in the winter because your fat layer was probably thinner than it is now and it took a shorter time to the freezing temperatures to penetrate to the core of your body, the snow survival time was much longer (in the units of your age which used to be lower when you were a kid) and so on.

So the harsh winter days brought some experience that is nearly unforgettable, unlike the boring muddy winter days. Every sane person should realize that this illusion is real. No person below 40 can have his own empirical evidence that would statistically significantly demonstrate a warming trend from his childhood; a vast majority of the claimed "signals" in all such would-be justification is an illusion, it is just bullšit. It is bullšit that has existed for centuries and well before the global warming pseudoscience became popular, adults were talking about their childhood in this way. The global warming pseudoscience was created as a nasty New Age religion that abuses this omnipresent bias. People, even seemingly neutral people, are led to confirm the basic (wrong) claims by their own experience (which is really just a set of illusions and selection biases) and such people also become more likely to approve the criminal "cures" for this non-existent problem.

Emperor penguins will obviously not get extinct due to "climate change"

2021-08-08T16:52:00.017+02:00

The omnipresent far left-wing media have become a formidable tool of mass misinformation, especially when it comes to questions that depend on nontrivial science (and quite often even stories that depend on totally trivial science). Despite the stories about their growing irrelevance, their impact is stunning. I find it obvious that way over 90% of the basic claims about scientific topics – let me say over 90% of the headlines of science-loaded news stories – are straight lies.

Also, I think that over 90% of the people in the Western world, and it's getting close to that level even in the skeptical Czechia, are successfully brainwashed by almost all of its garbage. Tons of people – including people who have often pretended to have some basic scientific education as well as independently operating brains (or maybe only such people?) – still have to ask me about elementary questions. And it is basically the same questions again and again. I got totally tired because I think that this fight is futile and I have been just wasting my time whenever I tried to increase the public's understanding of science. If you are ready to soften or change your mind about an elementary scientific point that I explained to you just days ago as soon as you hear some self-evident brain-dead or lying crackpot on your left-wing TV channel who says something that directly contradicts facts that you should have known and perfectly understood since the kindergarten years, or at least for days (because that's when I explained those things to you), it is very clear that you just don't have a well-functioning brain.

It is a waste of time to try to explain something to you because just like the opinion of a parrot, your opinion is determined by the sources that you hear most often (you don't understand anything in the world and you have never understood anything in the world, despite the illusions indicating the contrary), and I just can't compete with the braindead gr@tins, Coronazis, and similar unscientific lying subhuman cr@p that you clearly enjoy to listen to and parrot – and you haven't understood that you are just swallowing and parroting feces almost all the time. Please, if you heard some repetition of the usual lies about the Covid hysteria or the climate or broken quantum mechanics or problems with string theory, don't try to ask for my opinion ever again. I have stopped this communication and I viscerally despise and hate brain-dead moronic sheep like you (even though I appreciate that there is a whole class of people who are even worse because they wouldn't even dare to ask me!). I am amazingly disgusted by every second that I have to spend with biological junk like you, OK? Return to your WaPo and Nude Socialist cesspools, this is where you belong.

OK, so these days, the far left-wing media continue to promote the delta Covid-19 hysteria. Every person whose IQ is above 80 and who has been paying at least some attention to the real world data must know that delta is an example of a common cold virus. Far fewer than 0.1% of the infected people die. It's clear in India where "delta" was first identified, in the U.K. where it moved afterwards, and in Pilsen-City district which led the Covid-19 infection rates among 76 Czech districts (plus Prague) for a month.

The basic reproduction number is as high as $R_0\approx 8$ because the running nose (which is the symptom that defines common cold) easily spreads the virus. It is utterly stupid to "fight" against such a growing infectious disease. You are guaranteed to lose this fight — which is just a fight against the most obvious laws of mathematics – and every nation that becomes a nation of losers deserves to lose this fight simply because winning nations must avoid the gravest mistake of fighting against the most powerful laws of Nature and mathematics. As I told you in June, delta was going to grow in Australia as well and there was no way how those criminal totalitarian lockdowns could have changed this fact. Was I right about this prediction? You bet. The running nose also means that the virus doses are shrinking well before the virus starts to occupy the lungs where diseases become serious. So just like every other virus with this behavior, a.k.a. every cold virus, it causes a mild disease.

Pilsen-City has been the most intense district in "Covid cases per 100,000 people". In recent weeks, the percentage of "cases" that are just delta (common cold) has been over 90% and this percentage may keep on growing (whether it is delta or delta-plus or Delta DeLuxe is irrelevant). Between July 11th and August 4th, the reported numbers were above 40 cases per 100,000 per 7 days in my district, the peak was above 50, and the latest figure is below 22 again, indicating a clear drop that is very likely to continue now. The half-width of the Gaussian-like curve is less than one month; this "delta wave" lasts for a month, it can't really be prolonged well over this duration unless you do something really, really unnatural. What about the deaths? The total Pilsen-City deaths (for 190,000 people) were 516; it was 518 on August 5th. Just 2 people died; delta has only increased the number of Covid deaths by 0.5%. This will obviously be true everywhere. Without the mass indoctrination by antiscientific lies and hysteria, we would have no chance to detect anything unusual about the two deaths. Some two extra people have died in July and they just had a cold during the death.

Another topic of intense lies by the far left-wing activists who have hijacked almost the entire media space deals with vaccination. It is very clear that the vaccines are far less effective than they were claimed to be. They don't reduce the chances of being infected by 90+ percent as it used to be claimed. In fact, it looks like they don't reduce it at all. They don't even reduce the probability of hospitalization. The data from Israel, Iceland, and lots of other "fully vaccinated places" speak a clear language. The number of "cases" was growing in most such "fully vaccinated" countries and a majority of the hospitazed people were fully vaccinated. You must live in a bubble of lies if you have missed these basic facts. On the other hand, post-communist countries such as Bulgaria have the lowest vaccination rate but they also have the lowest Covid-19 activity in recent weeks. The natural immunity does greatly help; vaccination, not so much. It has been the case from the beginning (even for diseases well before Covid-19 existed). There is no evidence that the vaccines are helpful at this moment. They have almost certainly worked against some specific variants for a month or two but this time is over. There are tons of data showing the huge risk of death or serious diseases caused by the vaccines (loss of hearing, inflammation of the heart muscles, heart attacks etc.). People who are trying to force these vaccines on young people or even children are war criminals and they must be executed at some point in the future when this insanity stops, hopefully within a year.

Finally the penguins

Meanwhile, the climate hysteria hasn't gone away, either. Three days ago, the global cabal of antiscientific liars has spread the meme that emperor penguins will go extinct because of man-made climate change. Check Google News for this new penguin hype (the hysteria clearly didn't work with polar bears that are thriving more than they were thriving for a very long time so penguins are the second natural choice). The Czech public TV has joined this stunning garbage even though we are obliged to pay the TV fees here. Oh, so CO2 will make emperor penguins extinct?

Lukáš Pollert, a physician and a double Olympic medalist (decades ago), gave the appropriate reaction which is one tweet. The claim is ludicrous simply because penguins are a category of species ("order" or "family" if you wish) that are 65 million years old. And during that time, the Earth has been much warmer than it may possibly be by 2100, and the penguins did just fine. That is the end of the story. The claim is just preposterous.

If you want to focus on the emperor species, well, the oldest known fossils of emperor penguins are 60 million years old, just ten percent newer than the penguins as a family.

What about the temperature? Just look at some geologic temperature record. If you are really dumb enough not to be able to do this "research" yourself, not even with the help of a search engine, I made the task even easier for you. Just fudging look at the graph above. Or click at the image above. It means that you hold your finger above the mouse button (it is not a real mouse, it is a gadget that fits into your palm that just looks like a mouse), and press the finger hovering above the left button. The graph shows that 50 million years ago, the polar oceans were as much as 12 Celsius degrees warmer than some normal over the recent "several million years". I want to avoid all the geological terminology because you don't need it. We will clearly not achieve a 12 °C warming over there in a century. Or two centuries. The emperor penguins have surved tens of millions of years of temperatures that were much higher than those that are possible in 2100 and they haven't gone for such a long time. So the slight elevation of temperature clearly isn't a sufficient condition for the extinction of emperor penguins. If they go extinct, and there is no actual genuine reason to expect it (because some alarmist aßhole's decision to make up a scary story is not a genuine reason to expect anything), the reasons will be different from a two-degree change of the temperature.

More generally, the statement "it is warmer than it has been in 3 million years" is something that may only impress the totally scientifically illiterate morons. Three million years may sound like a lot but it is 1/5,000 of the age of the Universe, 1/1,500 of the age of the Earth, and it is known to be (mostly) the Pleistocene, by definition a very cold geological epoch (when the regular glaciation periods took place, they didn't exist before that). So it's easy to be warmer than this very cold period. While 3,000,000 is a number much larger than one, it is still a shorter period than the age of virtually all orders of organisms on Earth. Even the human species (one of the newest species) are only about equally old, ~3 million years with some definition "homo" and some choice of the allowed evidence. But when it comes to the climate, we expect the very same climate as mammals who live in the same climate zones. Very close ancestors of mammals have been around for 300+ million years and the new equilibrium with impressive mammal-dominating ecosystems has existed for 30 million years. 3 million years is a very short period in comparison and this meme is often repeated because the authors of this deceitful claim know that there are tons of people who have no clue about geology or evolution of species, who have no idea what "3 million years" means or doesn't mean. I think that even among TRF readers, despite the brutal selection that I have tried to encourage for 17 years here, such ignorant people may be a majority. It's likely that you don't understand why the "3 million years is a long time" claim is utterly demagogic and anti-scientific. I know the exceptions among you.

But like thousands of other explanations, basic facts and observations like those above are a waste of time for a great majority of the people who are just brain-dead sheep who ultimately buy an arbitratily preposterous pile of junk as soon as it is said by the media (or repeated twice, or repeated five times, or at most ten times, and it is easy to do so because all these filthy liars are coordinating their lies). And they have the power to repeat lies which is why all these sheep, including individuals who pretend not to be braindead sheep in front of me, but their pretending is 100% deceitful, simply buy any lie.

The rest of us who still have a brain must abandon democracy as it has evolved by now, one that counts these stunningly dumb sheep as our peers. They are not our peers. They are hogget and mutton. We must treat them as cattle because it is a vastly more accurate approximation of their identity than "our peers". If we allow them to reproduce and if we allow them to be treated as our peers, they will conquer the world and our species will devolve into a species of cattle again.

Science Magazine, climatologists: models overstate temperature changes by a factor of two or more

2021-07-28T19:12:00.007+02:00

Dr Roy Spencer's 2014 page. Similar graphs showing that almost all the models simply overstate the warming have been published by climate skeptics before 2014 as well as after 2014. It's clear that the longer time the climate modelers follow a flawed methodology that clearly overstates the warming rate, the larger the deviation between the models and the reality becomes – and at some point, the climate modelers won't have the stomach to defend models or a model methodology that is clearly flawed. Note that Al Gore and the IPCC got the Nobel Prize in 2007, it is almost 14 years ago. For that time, median models predicted over 0.4 °C of warming but we only observed 0.2 °C or so.

Bill Z. sent me a remarkable pair of articles by Paul Voosen, a staff writer, in the Science Magazine:

U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming
New climate models forecast a warming surge

It has been eight years and... the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change) will release its first new assessment since 2013. What has changed since 2013? Well, nothing detectable has changed about the climate – Voosen has the duty to start his first article by writing that the Armageddon has escalated, almost all the ice has disappeared, the end of the world is very close now. Nice. It is ludicrous but no longer surprising. What is surprising is what he writes after that.

Well, one change that has occurred in the irrational climate hysteria since 2013 is that the IPCC has become pretty much irrelevant. Eight years ago, it still seemed important for the movement to find some people with PhD degrees and scholarly positions to say completely wrong (catastrophic) things about the climate that were convenient for the anti-freedom pseudoscientific movement. It's no longer necessary. The main people driving the movement are no longer people pretending to be great scientists. Instead, it is people like psychiatrically ill, unhinged Scandinavian teenagers. The IPCC has become these teenagers' increasingly irrelevant appendix because everyone in the movement understands very well that proper science has never been the point or the goal.

OK, the political movement is still intersecting with a scientific activity that has some legitimate or even interesting aspects; and that at least resembles scientific research. So people are still simulating the climate by methods that are roughly similar to the physics simulations in computer games. To simulate the atmosphere, as the article reminds us, the representation of the clouds remains the most difficult detail, one that is likely to introduce the main mistakes.

In the previous generation of models, clouds were mostly about "ice crystals". The newest models expected to be used for the coming assessment reports clouds contain lots of "supercooled water" instead. They must think that this change of the rough picture is progress, it may be debatable whether it's progress. They also praise most of the models as realistic. However, in those articles, as Gavin Schmidt (the post-Hansen boss of a NASA climate body) and others confirm, their current models overpredict the temperature changes, especially swings caused by CO2, by a factor of two or more.

Needless to say, the comment that the climate models overstate the sensitivity to CO2 by a factor of two or more has been said by climate skeptics for decades. It's really completely trivial to establish this proposition. Climate models like to predict the warming trend by more than 3 °C per century; but the trend in recent decades (which has no reasons to significantly accelerate in the future: the dependence is roughly logarithmic and the CO2 emissions' "acceleration" has dropped to zero, anyway) indicates something closer to 1.5 °C per century.

So it's great that after these decades, folks including Gavin Schmidt finally admit that indeed, the predicted warming is excessive. In the article, the excess is mostly blamed on some positive feedbacks from cumulus clouds (mainly in the tropics) that should act much like some powerful extra greenhouse gases according to the models; but seem to have a very little impact according to the observations. For decades, climate skeptics knew about the wrong fingerprint. Models predicted the fastest warming 10 km above the equator; the real world observations see a very small warming rate there. I've had these pages in my presentations for over 15 years. Great, in 2021, the Science Magazine finally admits that indeed, the (late) Fred Singer and Luboš Motl (whose names are suppressed) have been right all along and the greenhouse-with-feedback prediction for the tropopause above the equator contradicts the observations. The observations don't produce any significantly elevated warming there.

I think that while the models may look like rather good, realistic computer games (I still believe that the physics simulations in commercial PC games serving the gamers have better physicists to do such things than the climate community, however! The commercial sector attracts better talents in the physics simulations), their usefulness for the predictions of the climate change in the next 100 years or so is basically non-existent. It's because the realistic description of some local phenomena and patterns is basically completely separated from some long-term parameters such as the climate sensitivity. This separation not only sounds as Ken Wilson's "separation of effective theories according to the scale". Instead, the climate separation is a special example of Ken Wilson's separation!

The reason is that all the cumulative effects from the microscopic or local phenomena are "renormalizing" all the overall fundamental parameters such as the climate sensitivity – here I am comparing the climate sensitivity to a parameter in a renormalizable quantum field theory. So to do this complex physics correctly, you should basically introduce a fudge factor (or a counterterm) to renormalize any effect like the CO2 warming effect. A cloud has a complicated shape, the simplest representation of a cloud affect some quantity by X, but you must admit that the right effect is K*X where K is a coefficient of order one. At the end, the coefficient of the fudge factor must be extracted from the observations because it's not feasible that your model is so accurate that the complex effects of the turbulent clouds and their relationships predict the correct fudge factors from the first principles.

Because your models can't calculate difficult long-term or long-distance "emergent" quantities from the first principle, the observed value of the climate sensitivity finally has to enter the calibration of the coefficients as long as your model is realistic (and admitting that the simulation from the first principles is not feasible). But if you agree that you are basically adjusting the climate sensitivity (through the fudge factor) by using the observations, there is no reason to use the models for predictions of the global temperature change at all!

You may very well just take the observed change of the global temperature change from the observations; and calculate the future temperature change as a multiple of it. (I am almost sure that I have made this pro-phenomenology on this blog many times, despite the fact that my character is that of a "pure theorist", not a "phenomenologist".) Because the CO2 emissions will continue to be roughly constant, we will be getting the same roughly 1.5 °C warming trend per century that we saw in the thermometer data in coming decades. Every model that predicts something "totally and obviously different" should be labeled an experimentally falsified model!

I think that the whole problem – these models' getting a 4 °C per century of warming instead of less than 2 °C per century etc. – occurred simply because many people wanted the result to be higher because more alarming "predictions" is how they get larger and new grants! If this bias and failure of the scientific integrity were completely removed, it seems obvious to me that all the fudge factors – which have to be there – would be adjusted to predict the same warming rate for the coming decades as the rate that is indicated by the direct observations, namely something like 1.5 °C per century, and the overstated and underestimated values would be approximately equally represented. The realistic local details of the computer-game-like models are completely useless for the most important quantities that some people claim to "extract" from these models – but it is really impossible to extract them.

The extraction of such long-term and macroscopic parameters from the realistically looking computer simulation is as implausible as the following random PC game example. Imagine that you have some great PC game which simulates the movement of many soldiers. There are tons of NPC soldiers (controlled by some artificial intelligence) whose behavior seems realistic in the details, in the short run and locally. But then you decide to use this bunch of NPCs in a computer game to calculate how much time it takes for a real world army to annihilate the enemy. Well, you just can't because the fudge factors are still necessary. When a soldier shoots successfully, he may need some time to regain the energy to keep on fighting, or he loses the precision as a function of the distance between the enemy's soldiers, and so on (effects that go beyond the "realistic appearance" at the very short time scales or distance scales). All these details add new parameters or fudge factors to your simulation – that you are almost guaranteed to do unrealistically in your first simulation. When you realize the hopeless complexity of the fudge factors that should be there but they're absent because your PC game is ultimately rather naive, you will agree that it's easier to measure the speed of annihilation of armies in the real world battles, not in the computer simulations that only "look" realistic but they are actually not realistic in the aspects that haven't been trained to match the observations! And it is only the "appearances of realism", usually some short-distance patterns, that are programmed to "look" realistic!

Again, the time (or distance) scales are separated from each other which is why the short-distance or short-term realism of a simulation says nothing about the accuracy of its prediction for emergent, long term (or long distance) quantities.

This meaningless game of using complex models for predictions of long-term parameters should be completely stopped because it's not feasible at all. The warming apparently caused by 1/2 of a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere may be approximately extracted from the thermometer data (it is roughly one degree per half of the CO2 doubling), it has some error margin (that also increases with the uncertainty whether CO2 was dominant for the temperature changes in the 20th century at all, but let me say that a 50% error is OK), and this figure (including the error margin) may be employed to predict the future warming, too. PC game-like simulations may look sexy and realistic but they don't actually help to calculate the unknown emergent parameters at all and the increasingly impressive hardware and aesthetics only simulation are only useful to obfuscate this uselessness in the eyes of the people who can't actually see what is going on, what is the actual flow of information, what can be derived from something else and what cannot.

You may want to watch e.g. this 16-minute comparison of the 2002 Mafia game and its 2020 "Definitive Edition" remake. The point of the remake is that the storyline and places should be equivalent. The original game was incredibly realistic; but those 18 years are seen damn too well. The 2020 edition is strikingly more realistic than the original. But think about the question which is analogous to the case of climate models: Would these improvement of the superficial realism of the scenes allow you to calculate more accurately e.g. "how many people in the city you kill if you drive along some trajectory in the city by some speed?"? It is a matter of common sense that the increased realism doesn't allow you to be more accurate about those things because they have nothing to do with the realism. The realism only applies to the "appearances" of the processes at the 1-second and 1-meter scales. The behavior of the pedestrians and their likelihood to be hit by car is still a parameter that you need to multiply by a fudge factor (extracted from experiments) if you want the game to be realistic in that respect. You just cannot realistically extract these numbers from the first principles because the realism of the pedestrians is still being faked and only trained to be realistic at some time scales. The same thing applies to the complex effects caused by clouds in the climate models.

Let's divide the European Union

2021-07-25T16:39:00.015+02:00

By Dr Jiří Weigl, July 22nd, 2021

Last week's publication of the European Commission's plan for a green "great leap" in the holy struggle to save the climate has definitively confirmed that the gulf of opinion, ideas, and interests between the EU's West and its post-communist East has reached an insurmountable dimension.

The EU West, which controls Brussels and all European structures, has completely succumbed to the phantasmagorical progressivist ideology and is not willing to discuss it at all, but on the contrary wants to impose it by force on everyone, regardless of their views. We are in danger of something strongly reminiscent of the [fatal 1620 Battle of] White Mountain and the subsequent 1627-1628 Verneuerte Landesordnung [Restored Land Order, a new constitutional document] which was octroied [by Ferdinand II i.e. circumventing the legislative assembly of the estates], i.e. intolerant foreign domination, ideological monopoly enforced from the position of strength, persecution of those who disagree, de-nationalisation, and disenfranchisement.

This is not an exaggeration. Progressivist anti-humanist pseudo-salvation of the planet cannot do without such actions and suppression of dissent by force.

Hypothetically, the following possible responses are offered:

Submission and relying on somehow surviving again. That may no longer work in today's world.
Fight within the EU. An unrealistic scenario, because there is no chance of convincing Brussels and the West of the need to change the current policy.
To respect the balance of power and agree with the other dissatisfied parties to divide the whole, whose direction is not to our liking, while preserving the maximum of the positive from the common past.
To come forward individually, which in the current constellation is not a realistic project for which we have the strength.

We have to respect that our Western European partners, disgusted by their current excess of wealth, see a meaningful future only in poverty, sacrifice, and renunciation for the sake of the planet. Let us respect that they want to renounce consumerism, flying, and personal transport, meat-eating, child-bearing, and other pleasures of life. Let us accept that polyamory and marriage for all will take the place of family for them. Let us give our Western friends the pleasures of doing good deeds in opening their borders and caring for all who head to them from the world for an easier life. Let us allow them to live in a multicultural, Islamized society with free choice of gender and total equality for every conceivable minority, protected by the surveillance of inquisitorial political correctness. Let us allow them to have their own experience of the restriction of civil rights and liberties and the only ideology allowed.

However, let us firmly demand that they respect that we – Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, and other Central and Eastern Europeans – do not want to live in such a society, that we did not enter the EU with such goals and they were not outlined to us at the time. We have our own experiences of totalitarianism and social utopias and we do not want to repeat them. We want to live in our own way and not under someone else's dictates.

Let us try to avoid the imminent conflict and destruction of European cooperation rationally – let us divide today's EU with respect for one another and preserve the maximum of the good that unites us. Only in this way will we be able to overcome today's tensions that threaten to destroy the entire current shaky European construct. We Czechs and Slovaks may have something important to say about this. By taking a similar step, we avoided the serious threats after the fall of communism.

As we know, it was not beneficial for anyone to stay on the Titanic after the collision with the iceberg. The European Commission itself put such an iceberg in the EU's path. Let us try to get off a ship that we cannot stop at any cost if we care about the future of our children. The planet will survive.

The author is Executive Director of the Václav Klaus Institute and a trained Arabist, Orientalist, and economist.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Will the Green Deal destroy the EU's destiny?

2021-07-25T15:00:00.035+02:00

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist empire, the West has been pushing two ideologies that normal everyday people cannot believe and wonder how it is even possible that they are promulgated by educated people, at least in the sense of people with university degrees. Few suspect that this is a hidden disease of the speculative intellect.

One proposes to build a new hierarchy of social and societal justice (equality), multiracial and multigender (LGBTQ+) minorities. The majority, silenced and intimidated by political correctness and egalitarian legislation, will hopefully sooner or later reject the new political religion; accusations of transphobia, innate white racism, and the enforcement of consent that there are no substantive differences between men and women are not sustainable in the long run.

The latter ideology, which has also found a home in the European Union, will have an economic impact. For the first time since its foundation, the Union has an agenda to impoverish Europeans, and it makes no secret of it. According to The Economist, which quotes enthusiastic Eurocrats, the "Green Deal" is nothing less than a painful revolution that will fundamentally change the lifestyles of Europeans, securing the EU's place in the world (presumably an honourable one) and purpose for a generation.

Why do we need another deal? So far, the Eurocrats have pretended that everything they do increases Europe's prosperity. The single currency was supposed to reduce the transaction costs of fluctuating national currencies and the risk of investment, and while it has done so, it has caused and is still causing astronomical damage to the southern states of the Union. The single market also brought great benefits initially, but through continued integration and bureaucratisation it has long lost momentum and the EU's share of the world economy is declining. The most the EU can do for itself is to charge the same tariff for telephone calls.

However, the energy and climate revolution promoted here last week by EU Vice-President Frans Timmermans is a truly insane and costly road to nowhere in economic terms, an "oo-topos", as the ancient Greeks used to call an unworkable utopia. Rebuilding the power grid, replacing gas boilers and cookers, producing green electricity for all vehicles simply cannot be done.

Jan Macek, a professor of power engineering at the Czech Technical University, says that just charging 20 million cars at night would mean the power of four and a half Temelíns [T. is the newer Czech nuclear power plant, 2.168 GW in total]. Renewable energy is not enough for such a thing. And so fossil fuels will be taxed, internal combustion engines will be banned (2035), building heating and carbon allowances will become more expensive. And especially cement and steel. Housing for the younger generation will be even more unaffordable than today. Agro-industry shall be organic and meat shall be expensive. A carbon tariff will be introduced, this will occur in order to prevent our overpriced organic industry from collapsing. India and Australia are already complaining about the European protectionism.

Given the scarcity of precious and even those not so precious metals for batteries, electric cars will become increasingly expensive to produce. One English engineer has calculated the full cost of the unattainable electrification of homes and cars and remarked, uncomprehendingly, that drastic reductions in living standards make no sense, since Britain emits only one per cent of the world's emissions. He seems not to have understood that the Puritans of the Green Deal intend above all to reduce the consumption, rampant consumerism, and free lifestyle of Europeans. If they really believed we would be baked in twenty years' time, they would be promoting nuclear power stations. If their crusade succeeds, cars, meat, and seaside holidays will be for the rich, just as they were a hundred years ago.

Translated by DeepL.com

Will the people rise up against the EU?

2021-07-16T13:18:00.002+02:00

Czech expresident Václav Klaus darkly on the car ban and the protests: 'It fizzled out into nothing'

Mr President, as a long-time campaigner against green bans and restrictions, what do you think of the European Commission's rather bold 'climate package'?

This climate package is not bold. It is stupid and nonsensical. It is unrealistic, and if it were to be implemented, it would be a completely destructive package. Completely destructive to the lives, freedom and living standards of the people of Europe.

If the package is fully implemented, what good will it do for our planet, globally speaking, if we in the EU reduce carbon emissions by 55% by 2030 and become 'carbon neutral' by mid-century?

That this package can do any good for the planet is something only green activists, only the advocates of the utterly unsustainable doctrine of climate alarmism, can think. Only people who believe in an immediate linear or even exponential relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the average global temperature. I am not one of these deluded individuals who have managed to garner such absurd media coverage. Man's role in the evolution of global temperatures over the long term is completely negligible. Moreover, CO2 has already played its potential role in influencing temperatures. The intention of carbon neutrality is an anti-human policy. It has almost no connection to temperature.

The measures relating to the car industry have resonated in the media, whereby, according to the proposal of the European Commissioners, cars with internal combustion engines would not be allowed to be sold in the EU from 2035. Is it even sane to want such a thing in such a short space of time?

I do not want to, and cannot, speculate on what kind of powertrain cars will have in twenty or fifty years' time. Technical progress develops according to its own laws, and so it has been in the development of mankind so far. And that would be a good thing. When technical progress produces a revolutionary model of non-combustion engine cars (which will be affordable and competitive with those of today), then surely today's internal combustion engines will belong in a technical museum. This is not the case today and will by no means be the case in 2035.

Michal Půr, editor-in-chief of Info.cz, believes that we are dangerously close to the point where EU membership may not be worthwhile. Could these radically green proposals provoke more resistance even from those member states that have not yet been too rebellious?

The debate about how much EU membership pays off for individual states depends on many things. Economic integration, the rational permeability of borders for goods, labour and capital, and a minimum of state interference in the functioning of the market certainly help the economic operators of the individual Member States and have an economic effect. But that is not what the EU is about, or only minimally. The EU is about promoting irrational, economy-destroying proposals, of which the green climate package is the prototype. To leave such an EU would be a rational step. However, a small country like the Czech Republic - seeing how the great UK has been 'tortured' - would bear heavy costs for quite some time. I do not think that individual Member States would rebel now. Submission has already reached a high degree in Europe and throughout the West.

As far as the citizens are concerned, we have seen in the past what caused fuel prices to rise dramatically in France, the yellow vest movement growing into massive national demonstrations. Can the EU's green plan trigger something similar in Europe? And would you think it would be appropriate? Could extremes of this kind start the downfall of the EU?

I was a fan of the "yellow vest movement", it played its positive role, it became a national activity, but it fizzled out into nothing. I do not believe that the climate package can trigger something so massive in Europe that the owners of Europe will start to fear it. Europe - because it has succeeded in breaking up the system of nation states through unionisation - is not operational. Nor can the climate package trigger anything like the yellow vests in our country, or even in our country in particular. We have already too deeply succumbed to that - in the Houellebecqian sense.

Radim Panenka, Parlamentní listy [Parliamentary Letters], 16 July 2021

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

M-theory on $G_2$ manifolds, heterotic strings, oceans, climate, and carbon

2021-06-09T07:17:00.011+02:00

This unattractive Titanic-like building will become Czechia's tallest building (135 meters) and will be built just miles from the Prague Castle, in order to make us remember that the "architect" was impressed by the climate hysteria and willing to promote the lies about the climate.

Among the new hep-th papers that were released today, five mention a "string" in the abstract. I think that the following paper is the most interesting one:

Non-Perturbative Heterotic Duals of M-Theory on $G_2$ Orbifolds

It's a nice paper that could have been written during the Duality Revolution in string theory of the mid 1990s but it waited up to 2021. It is a six-or-seven-dimensional or $G_2$ counterpart of the statement that the $T^4/ \ZZ_2$ orbifold is a special case of a $K3$ manifold; and that the $K3$ manifold may degenerate into two "half-$K3$" manifolds that are connected by a three-toroidal throat (times a line interval with irregular ends).

These $G_2$ compactifications of M-theory which degenerate into $T^7 / \ZZ_2^3$ orbifolds have their dual (equivalent) heterotic $E_8\times E_8$ descriptions. But in order to distinguish between the precise shapes of the seven-dimensional $G_2$ geometry, you need to imprint some extra data to the heterotic string, you need some extra data which are naturally "non-geometric" because one dimension is being subtracted. And the non-geometric data are some data about bundles describing instantons at the orbifold singularities.

There isn't sufficient demand for me to write more about technical physics questions although I have needed over 15 years to fully appreciate that I have always been throwing pearls before swine – swine like you who may prefer mediocre anti-physics activists' lies over world class physics.

But what I found tragic is the analysis of the authors. They are

Bobby Samir Acharya, Alex Kinsella, David R. Morrison

Of course, I know Acharya and Morrison very well. They are brilliant senior physicists of higher-dimensional supersymmetric compactifications. Bobby (who has also worked as an experimental particle physicist for ATLAS) is tied with the Kings College in London and with Trieste; Dave is in Santa Barbara. It is the third name that is new and junior. Great, he is a PhD student in Santa Barbara, I thought, a sign that a younger generation is capable of doing serious exciting science.

My excitement didn't last long. I found this web page:

Kinsella.Earth

Roughly at this time, Kinsella is getting his PhD under Morrison for "holonomy in geometry, analysis, and physics" and he will start a postdoc job in July 2021. So far so good. But keep on reading:

...In July 2021, I will start as a postdoctoral investigator working with Amala Mahadevan at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

My work in oceanography is motivated by the question of how ocean circulation and turbulence affect Earth’s climate. I’m interested in the ways that geophysical fluid dynamics in the ocean and atmosphere determine distributions of heat and carbon via transport phenomena and biogeochemistry.

Holy cow, oceans, climate, and carbon? You can see that it's full of buzzwords that are convenient lies for the likes of Gr@tins Trautenberk. The new boss of Kinsela's, Ms Amala Mahadevan, has been at least a proper oceanographer and her papers were mostly about plankton. But how Kinsella describes his future "research", it is already a straight climate alarmist pseudoscience.

How may something as terrible as this thing happen? Was Kinsella unable to get a job in proper theoretical physics or geometry, something that he is clearly very good at? Was he blackmailed by the deformed job market in which governments – largely controlled by filthy and dishonest far left activists – favor pseudoscientific garbage over quality science? Or has Kinsella been truly brainwashed not to understand that what he is planning to do is a hardcore example of pseudointellectual prostitution? At any rate, I am utterly disgusted. This is an example showing how this whole generation has been turning and is still turning into a giant worthless cesspool.

The Reference Frame

Has the war killed green, woke, other pathological leftist movements?

Greens brought coal to Ostrava (from Australia)

Not only technical education is a nuisance for German green ideology

Insane costs and tiny benefits of Fit For 55, European Green Deal

Evil carps and CO2: a French-owned big Czech bank commits marketing suicide

If EC smears nuclei as non-green, Czechia may leave the Paris Agreement

Two little thumbs up for the new Czech government

Contemporary West's far left "religions" are as dumb and devastating as radical Islam

Václav Klaus's answers to questions posed by the server iUhli.cz (iCoal)

Let's not let finance and banking turn green

The absurdly pathetic "result" of COP26

Green suicide

The strange allure of COP26, the "World Conference Of the Parties"

Speech by Václav Klaus on the occasion of the national holiday on 28 October

Where the policy of decarbonising the economy is taking us

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

Global warming: a Nobel Prize

Zero emissions in Britain

Yesterday, when I was young, winters were cooler

Emperor penguins will obviously not get extinct due to "climate change"

Science Magazine, climatologists: models overstate temperature changes by a factor of two or more

Let's divide the European Union

Will the Green Deal destroy the EU's destiny?

Will the people rise up against the EU?

M-theory on \(G_2\) manifolds, heterotic strings, oceans, climate, and carbon