tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86660912022-03-30T19:27:41.626+02:00The Reference FrameSupersymmetric world from a conservative viewpointLuboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.comBlogger8737125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-18062750238645031512022-03-30T19:16:00.004+02:002022-03-30T19:26:56.607+02:00AdSense became unusableFor several months, I have been getting direct censorship requests from Google AdSense. In recent days, the frequency increased to "several articles to be censored" per day. Sometimes they are articles about the climate, sometimes the blog entries seem completely random, innocent articles.<br><br>On top of that, even if the content of the article is completely deleted and replaced with "the text was deleted", and I submit the pages for verification, I am still getting "it is still scandalous, heretical blah blah" and "must fix".<br><br>There are clearly some braindead, fanatical terrorists operating within Google who are responsible for this absolute abuse of the tools and for their full-blown assault against the Western civilization.<br><br>It seems unlikely that the problem may be fixed before these terrorists are neutralized. So please be aware that I am unlikely to ever get any income from the ads again. I urge everyone to deal with Google just like you deal with any other terrorist organization.<br><br>I vaguely plan to delete the website completely – the conditions have become unbearable. Meanwhile, I will largely stop attempts to react to the harassment.<br><br>Employees of Google which is a set apparently including Leonard Susskind must be considered to be co-responsible for this unforgivable terror.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-66279755768795468982022-03-29T08:48:00.004+02:002022-03-29T08:54:55.195+02:00A West-compatible Russian nation needs to be established, supportedDuring the weekend, thousands of Russians and Belorusians were demonstrating in Prague (<a href="https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/demonstrace-shromazdeni-rusove-cesko-praha-podpora-ukrajina-protest-valka.A220325_135300_domaci_pmk/foto/nahledy">a gallery</a>, <a href="https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/galerie-a-videa/proti-putinovi-proti-valce-rusove-v-praze-vysli-demonstrovat/r~54f8cc56ad1c11ecab010cc47ab5f122/v~nahledy/">another one</a>), despite the fact that these people could get up to ~15 years in jail in Russia.<br><br><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-blue-white_flag"><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Anti-war_flag_of_Russian_protesters_%282022%29.svg/330px-Anti-war_flag_of_Russian_protesters_%282022%29.svg.png"></a><br><br>We also saw a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pigoB_mEEqM">video recorded by brave RU+Belarus students of the Masaryk University</a> in Brno, Czechia. Some of the banners shown at the rally were standard, we could see a Putler morphing picture (a compromise of Hitler and Putin), funny cartoons of Putin and Lukashenko, and unflattering comments about the president.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />A new omnipresent Russian anti-war symbol is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-blue-white_flag">white-blue-white flag</a> which differs from the Russian flag by replacing the red strip at the bottom with another white one. Some banners in Prague explained the meaning of this replacement very nicely: the red strip is the blood (and also violence and strength) and the anti-war demonstrators don't really want to see it any longer because it has led to bad implications.<br><br>Don't confuse white-blue-white with white-red-white, the historical flag of Belarus. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Belarus">The current flag of Belarus</a> is composed of red-red-green strips (2:1) with a decorative pattern along the pole.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Russians are generally sanctioned and harassed by the West but we simply need to start to discriminate. There are millions of Russians who are just like us, who haven't killed anybody, who haven't even started fires around Chernobyl and who didn't shell the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, one in Energodar. Millions haven't even voted for Putin in the past – which shouldn't be considered a crime anyway because before the end of February 2022, we didn't quite know what it would have meant.<br><br>Russia not only behaves brutally against its Ukrainian sibling; it started to violate the international law even when it comes to other "unfriendly countries" (it would be much easier for the Kremlin to list the friendly ones!). But equally importantly, millions of Russians – those who are sensibly against the war and related acts and changes of the Russian policies – are being terrorized in Russia itself. Democracy has been replaced with overt military dictatorship, freedoms are disappearing, and so is the market economy.<br><br>There are millions of Russians outside Russia and they face a very bad treatment although many of them don't really deserve it at all. The (extended) West needs to acknowledge that this is a mistake. I think that we should help them to start some official new nationality, let me call it "Western Russian" nationality (where "Western" is meant to be political), whose members would pledge their loyalty to some basic tenets of the international law and the Western civilization, including the commitment not to start aggressive wars; guarantee the freedom of speech (especially when it comes to anti-war sentiments and some other views that are common in the West) for Russian citizens; and the desire to allow some Western or international supervision over the weapons of mass destruction in Russia. The conditions must be minimalistic (and therefore inclusive) but sufficient to build a nation that may leave the isolation.<br><br>This new nation of Western Russians (WRU, *.wr) or perhaps Zakrainians (ZAK, *.zk, that's a prefix and a root meaning behind-boundary which reflects the European perspective), with the white-blue-white flag, would be removed from West's sanctions and protected on par with most other nations. It would also globally pick its government, the government-in-exile, which would be getting ready to take over Russia or at least a part of it. It could even establish its own army prepared to fight to retake Russia (with a lot of weapons donated by the West).Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-87489412400802166662022-03-27T20:17:00.005+02:002022-03-27T20:43:02.364+02:00Ukrainian refugees may be a net economic benefit<b>Just like emigrants from the Soviet bloc used to be a net plus for the West during the Cold War</b><br><br>On March 10th, I was <a href="https://motls.blogspot.com/2022/03/comparing-real-ua-refugees-to-fake.html?m=1">comparing the fake Muslim refugees of 2015 to the real Ukrainian ones of 2022</a>. The fake ones were mostly male; men of young productive age; foxy; optimizing a trip to the wealthiest places of Europe; planning to get amounts comparable to German salaries; planning not to work etc. The real refugees are mostly kids or women; people covering all ages; people who are satisfied with any safe place, as refugees should be; persons demanding amounts that are really close to a minimum needed to live; people planning to work if it is possible.<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CFsdRyE3bXs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br><em>"Dřou fest" (They Slave Away), a Czech Heavy Pochondriac's parody of "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNBjMRvOB5M">Go West</a>" by the Pet Shop Boys. The details don't work too well, the lyrics display a lesser degree of admiration for the Ukrainian nation than what we consider adequate now, but it's an old and witty song about hard workers from Kiev who move to the West.</em><br><br>You know that I've agreed with the Czech expresident Václav Klaus', whom I know in person, in something like 98% of statements he has made since late 1989. OK, one of the recent statements he made in the context of the refugees is that the total costs of the refugee situation will exceed the total costs of the Covid-19 restrictions by orders of magnitude. I may be wrong but I think that this statement will be proven to be completely detached from reality.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Fine. So Poland is receiving over 50% of the (3.5+ million) Ukrainian refugees and even on the per (Polish or Czech) capita basis, Poland got twice as many refugees as Czechia. But Czechia is surely among the top countries receiving the Ukrainian refugees on a per capita basis – partly because the co-existence has really worked well here; and our job market is extremely thirsty. We hear the Ukrainian language everywhere, in our concrete blocks (including my floor!), playgrounds, malls, everywhere.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />The population of approximately 10.5 million Czechs has been enriched by something like 300,000 Ukrainians, that's approximately a 3% increase of the density of people here. About 55% of the refugees are children (before 18th birthday); 2/3 of the adults are female. But most of the male ones are either very young or very old (the complement of the combat-ready men) so within the productive age, 80% of the adults are female.<br><br>How much does it cost? Well, the Czech lawmakers approved a CZK 5,000 monthly humanitarian gift for each refugee (USD 1 = CZK 22, so it is about $230 a month). Multiply it by 300,000 and you will get CZK 1.5 billion a month or CZK 18 billion a year (assuming that the situation will resemble a crisis for a year), less than one billion dollar a year. The number 300,000 refugees is unlikely to increase much because the daily doses of new refugees are already substantially lower than weeks ago; and some of our Ukrainians are already moving and will move to other countries, usually further to the West.<br><br>Aside from the CZK 5,000 humanitarian fee, we are hearing about CZK 3,000 paid to the people providing housing (plus breakfast) to the Ukrainians; CZK 5 billion for the integration of the Ukrainian kids to the Czech schools (the net amount by Fall 2022), and some similar terms. These are some of the "primary" expenses and we may actually receive the bulk of this money from some other countries in the European Union. I think it seems obvious that the annual primary expenses won't exceed "dozens of billions of crows" (a few billion dollars at most). That should be compared with the two years of Covid-19 budget deficits, 2 times CZK 500 billion i.e. CZK 1 trillion ($45 billion), which is approximately equal to the total costs of the Covid hysteria. I think that the cost of the Covid restrictions in my homeland will be 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than the primary expenses for the Ukrainian refugees in Czechia!<br><br>Alternatively, we need to share our product with the Ukrainians as well but those are just 3% of the people on our territory; and each of them needs roughly 10% of what the average Czech needs! So this could mean a net reduction of the GDP per Czech capita by 0.3% only.<br><br>Great. Then we will see some indirect or secondary effects, as Klaus importantly says. He thinks that those will be much higher expenses so that we will get to the ballpark of "CZK 1 trillion" losses – he seems to be saying that it will be higher than CZK 1 trillion. Oh, I don't see that at all especially because it seems very likely to me that the secondary effects will be mostly beneficial! The Czech economy suffers from a horrific shortage of workers, the unemployment rate around 3% is the lowest in the EU, and the fights to get the people and the wage increases are important reasons why we have one of the highest inflation rates in Europe, despite our national bank's being the West's leader in hiking the interest rates! The Czech National Bank has lifted the two-week repo rate from 0.25% a year ago to 4.5% now and it will be hiked next Thursday again, probably to or above 5%.<br><br>So I actually think that (in contrast with the foxy Islamic parasites of 2015) most of the genuine Ukrainian refugees will get a job within a month or two and there will be a strong selection that will keep the "employed Ukrainians" in Czechia while those without a job will be more likely to return to Ukraine. So after several months of stabilization, I think that most of these adults will have a job and as a community, they will be earning more than the amount of the subsidies paid by the Czech government plus the EU to this community. In fact, I find it plausible that even the taxes (a relatively small percentage of their income) will exceed the amounts that this community will need from the government. Perhaps in contrast with the "Ukrainian refugees are a catastrophe" folks, I think that the Czech government will feel painful to be getting taxes from these Ukrainian people – from some moral perspective, a big part of the taxes paid by these Ukrainians in Czechia should be paid to Ukraine and used to run and rebuild the country in these very difficult conditions!<br><br>It turned out that Vladimir Putin is really obsessed with some kind of medieval territorial expansion of the Russian Federation – a potential criminal organization that could also be called The Zombie Soviet Union – and after these surprises, I really feel that Putin doesn't mentally live in the 21st century. He's stuck somewhere in 1943 and maybe in the 17th century or somewhere in the distant past. I think that the value of the "bare square kilometers", especially if they are largely destroyed by the barbarian Red Army (think about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone where a nuclear power plant was attacked by Russians who are not willing to extinguish the fire in the nearby forests!), is extremely low relatively to the human capital that countries like mine are getting for free.<br><br>So I find it obvious that the Ukrainian ladies (and some extra men) will reduce the brutal shortage of the workers (especially workers who aren't afraid of doing hard work, often with their hands; one unfortunate Ukrainian woman stumbled in a Kladno factory and her hand had to be amputated, so heartbreaking!) and that will allow some extra growth of the Czech GDP (which may very well be close to 3%, like the increase of the population), and because these people are somewhat ready to be paid a bit less, the reduced pressure on the wage increases will also act as a negative contribution to the inflation rate (which will however be increased by the energy sanctions; and food shortages).<br><br>The war in Ukraine is clearly a vastly more important event than (the truly medical portion of) Covid-19. But Covid-19 wasn't the big economic event of 2020-2021; instead, it was the insanely futile Covid-19 restrictions that have crippled the world economy. The economic losses due to those restrictions were huge (roughly $10 trillion) and I believe it is implausible that the Ukrainian refugees will surpass these damages by themselves. Instead, I have argued and I believe that it is more likely that the Ukrainian refugees will actually be a net benefit for 2022 in countries like mine. Lots of people who aren't repelled by work will be "reorganized" within an economic system, namely ours, that simply works better than the recent Ukrainian system and that is more connected to the world markets, to buyers, as well as suppliers. This should be a good thing as a whole (maybe not just for my country but also for the whole world including Ukraine – Ukraine will surely lose a lot by having lost these people) and if this hypothesis turns out to be confirmed by the end of 2022 (it is expected that over 50% of the new Ukrainian will stay here), we will be obliged to solve the moral dilemma about the aid that we will be tempted to pay to those Ukrainians who have stayed in their homeland.<br><br>At any rate, people across the West should realize that these Ukrainians are real refugees and as typical refugees, they really need very little. Many of them are already OK with emergency housing in gyms and similar places; and $10 a day is just enough for their needs, and most of the adults are earning or will be earning much more. It might be a good idea for Americans to "adopt their Ukrainian" and pay those $10 a day or something like that. Putin's war is not only cruel and immoral but it is also insanely wasteful from Russia's economic perspective. But the arrival of these Ukrainians will turn out to be a net benefit for most of the recipient countries.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-78219975792176167992022-03-25T09:32:00.011+01:002022-03-25T15:39:17.537+01:00What to do with rubles, Bitcoin for Russian oil, gas<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_ruble"><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%8B%D1%87%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%8B_2020_%D0%B3.jpg/407px-%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%8B%D1%87%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%8B_2020_%D0%B3.jpg"></a><br><br>One of the twists in the war is the Russian decision to switch to new currencies needed to buy the Russian fossil fuels: <blockquote> <b>Unfriendly countries:</b> need to pay in rubles (Gazprom was given 4 days by Putin to switch)<hr> <b>Friendly countries:</b> may pay in their currencies or... the Bitcoin (this is a new rule) </blockquote>There are two immediate reactions. One says that Putin is an evil genius and this new rule (which is violating previous contracts and that's why the Germans and Poles are simply saying "no" to the change) is intended to bring some extra advantages to Russia and disadvantages to the "unfriendly countries". The other reaction, and that is one I choose, says that there is no evidence that Putin is particularly competent (and there is increasing evidence that he is just a lame and clueless Soviet apparatchik who could only become this powerful because much of his electorate is extremely undemanding; and obsessively willing to destroy any domestic opposition) and it is likely that this rule will be another self-inflicted injury.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />If you start by assuming that this attempt to revise the payment method is a clever trick (from Russia's viewpoint), you immediately continue by rationalizing it. It must be smart, your assumption says... so why is it smart? Well, it may be smart if the outcome is to cancel the U.S. dollars (and, to a much lesser extent, the Euros) as the currencies used in the trading with the fossil fuels. Putin will ingeniously replace them with rubles and the Bitcoin! By a Kremlin decree, Putin may have changed the main world's reserve currency from the U.S. dollars to rubles, the hardcore Putin worshipers may add.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Well, I think it is silly. Currencies (and other things) cannot really become this powerful by issuing a decree, especially not a decree in a relatively small, 11th largest in the world, economy, and especially not when it is an economy expected to record several years of the economic decline. The main reason why the U.S. dollar has been capable of becoming and staying the main reserve currency is that everyone realizes that the whole U.S. economy is using this unit of wealth and the U.S. economy is the largest one, and the economy with the most reliable expectation of a positive growth and the safest guarantees that it won't cease to be important in the following decades.<br><br>A Kremlin decree may force the buyers of the Russian gas to be obliged to find some rubles before they make the purchase but that doesn't mean that they will hold lots of rubles well before the purchase; or well after the purchase. Instead, the ruble-denominated transactions are an extra inconvenient bureaucracy whose main impact is to further strip Russia of the hard currencies (which is bad for Putin).<br><br>A normal buyer is expected to keep small reserves in rubles for a short time to be ready for the next purchase. This system is similar to the "purchases of cups of coffee for the Bitcoin", indeed. In principle, a coffee shop may force the clients to buy the coffee in the Bitcoin. But the price has to be calculated for each coffee separately and it changes violently every day (because all the expenses and wages are approximately fixed in dollars or some other currency, and making the coffee price fixed in the Bitcoin would either make the coffee too expensive for buyers, or loss-making for the coffee shop, soon), and it is likely that most people forced to use the Bitcoin for the coffee transaction only buy the required Bitcoin shortly before the purchase. Analogously, a normal coffee shop manipulated into these Bitcoin trades will sell the Bitcoin and acquire the normal money shortly after they get the cryptonothing, too. Any other strategy just turns the buyers and/or the coffee shop into gamblers.<br><br>On top of that, by being associated with the Russian government, an entity responsible for the most striking violations of the international law and the most brutal war in Europe since 1945, the rubles and the Bitcoin would be becoming criminal or terrorist currencies. I find it obvious that if these demands for the new payment method are made sort of successful, the West needs to heavily regulate and/or try to suppress or liquidate these currencies because they will become mainly tools to fund the war crimes (either the ongoing ones in Ukraine, or the likely future war crimes that may take place in other countries).<br><br>So I think that all the ruble trades done by the Western entities should go through some shared organization across the Western world which would be keeping a reasonable but small amount of rubles for everybody. That organization would be capable of killing a ruble-denominated transaction if it were deeply unnecessary; it could collect some fee on top of any ruble-based payment; and I think that this organizatino should try to tame the exchange rate to one that is basically controlled by the Western governments.<br><br>I think that the rubles should be manipulated to become e.g. 10% plus the Russian interest rates weaker per year, so one ruble would be dropping by 30% per year (some 2.5% a month) relatively to the U.S. dollar (the drop would be 10% if you managed to put your rubles in a Russian saving account). This would discourage everyone in the world from holding rubles (it should also become mandatory to sell excess rubles in the West) but the West's ruble bank would still be capable of keeping the ruble this strong.<br><br>On top of that, the Bitcoin should also be stabilized so that its value in the U.S. dollar decreases 10% a year, plus minus some allowed oscillations (a few percent). This would discourage people from just holding it; but the bank would be capable of maintaining this rate by operations on the Bitcoin future markets. With these methods, the ability of Russia to get the required funding would be dropping, the decline of the Russian economy would be partly managed by the West, and the transition to alternatives to Russia's fossil fuels could be gradual and slow enough not to cause huge problems for the buyers.<br><br>Also, all the Bitcoin wallets held by the Russian subjects should be identified and outlawed in the West and other wallets receiving the Bitcoin from these wallets, if these funds become a certain high enough percentage of the wallets, should be added to the black list, too. Cryptoexchanges and other businesses wouldn't be allowed to accept the Bitcoin from these criminal sources. So I am saying that the rubles and the Bitcoin should be "mostly outlawed" in the civilized world but it should be done in a clever way to minimize the damages to innocent economic subjects in the West.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-10334974706852645312022-03-22T08:10:00.004+01:002022-03-22T08:25:10.719+01:00Russians cannot rule themselvesIn most of our Western countries, freedom and self-governance are often painted as completely universal values that are appropriate for everyone. But even the comparison between the opinions in several countries or in their partisan camps shows that the views aren't quite universal. Nations' and parties' opinions sometimes differ by the extent, quantitatively. Sometimes, they differ qualitatively.<br><br><img src="https://d15-a.sdn.cz/d_15/c_img_H_E/6Uqd6H.jpeg?fl=cro,0,240,1280,720%7Cres,1200,,1%7Cwebp,75" width=407><br><br><em>Catherine the Great was both power-thirsty and a sex addict. As the adjective indicates, she was actually great at both.</em><br><br>In the U.S., it is a pretty much bipartisan consensus that slavery was one of the most terrible systems since the Big Bang. But you know, here in Czechia, it is completely normal for mainstream folks not to share this idea at all. My history teacher and class teacher at the elementary school, Mrs Marie Šilpochová, taught us lots of things and she had strong opinions. She loved the ancient Greece and Rome and told us lots of stories about them. One of the related opinions we often heard was that the transition from slavery to feudalism was a giant step backwards. It is not hard to agree if you just look at the quasi-modern Greek and Roman civilization around 0 AD; and compare it with the uncivilized mess a thousand years later.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Under slavery, mankind has built lots of things. Neither Rome nor the U.S. could have become superpowers without slavery simply because lots of work was needed. Slavery may be classified as a form of capitalism in which slaves represent an important part of the capital or the means of production. Someone who finds capitalism and "maximal privatization" more important than human rights could naturally agree that slavery was a better economic system. During feudalism, lots of work was still needed and the serfs were parttime slaves. In capitalism, people got free but it remains true that in many cases, the employer (plus government) has to largely take care of many adults.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />A big part of the modern fanatical backlash against slavery in the U.S. and other Western countries is due to the nations' bad conscience. But you know, nations like mine are unaffected by it. Czechs have never been full-fledged slaves but we didn't ever have slaves in the "evil" sense. But we have had asymmetric relationships with less civilized nations – and this applies to Slovaks, Rusyns, and perhaps some third world would-be socialist countries in which Czechoslovakia was an important supplier of factories and technology. But virtually all of these things were success stories to be proud about. We didn't really scr*w anybody; we were pretty nicely behaving to everyone; the positive results were spectacularly clear; and it was a lot of work so that Czechs weren't terrified by the idea that this responsibility was going to end. It's like a good jockey: after the race, it is the jockey, and not the horse, who is terribly tired!<br><br>It is simply important to realize that "scr*wing other nations" and "having a superior relationship to other nations" are two completely different things. The latter doesn't imply the former (because "rulers may be enlightened") and in fact, the former doesn't imply the latter, either (because people and nations are often damaged by quite some inferior counterparts!). And asymmetric relationships are often good. These statements may only be disputed assuming some ideological dogmas. One may argue that "imposing the power of one nation over another is the ultimate evil, imperialism" etc. But you know, "imposing the idea that all nations must govern themselves" is also a form of oppression and imperialism even though you could dismiss it as a minor "cultural imperialism". But is it really milder? It depends on what the oppressed nation considers more important for its self-esteem and well-being. Is it the idea that it must govern itself? Or is it the idea that it has the fredom to decide whether it wants to govern itself (especially because "being governed by someone else" is often a better way towards prosperity and satisfaction)? I find it obvious that lots of people don't really dream about freedom, neither individual freedom nor the nation's freedom. And we shouldn't overgeneralize our own values.<br><br>Now, let us turn to the Russian history. The Eastern Slavic statehood famously starts with the Kievan Rus in the 9th century. Kiev was a glorious city when Moscow was still just a wild forest. Between 11th and 12th centuries, the Kievan Rus started to disintegrate. There were no clear rulers with a natural authority, parts of the country started to harm each other. The country dissolved to several independent duchies. Russia as we know it really arose from one of them – which had the advantage of being able to expand its territory easily in the East.<br><br>Throughout the feudal history, Russia was governed basically just by two dynasties: the Rurik Dynasty and the House of Romanov. The Rurik dynasty had roots back in the Kievan Rus. In 1613, the Romanovs took over Russia (they had some modest beginnings in the 14th century). Originally, the House of Romanov was a genetically Russian family. But that family got extinct along the male line; and then also the female line (these problems with natality have always been more likely in Russia than elsewhere and the decision to send Putinjugend to the battlefront is an example of the monstrosities that make the situation worse). A surviving female member of the dynasty married a German dude. The German dude happily adopted all the Russian brands in order to rule the wonderfully huge Russian Empire.<br><br>Technically, the House of Romanov became Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. While the Romanovs were Slavic to start with, the main people in the brand suddenly became 50% Germanic and the percentage of the Germanic blood converged towards 100% in the subsequent centuries. The Romanov-brand rulers governed Russia between 1613 and 1917. In more than 3 centuries of the famous, pre-communist Russia, the empire was governed by half-German folks. Yes, Peter the Great who did really great things was still "mostly Russian". But he was succeeded by his comparably wonderful wife, Yekaterina I, who was half-Polish-and-Lithuanian, half-German. She was succeeded by Peter II, a grandson of Peter I who had a German mother. That was the last proper Romanov ruler with the original Y-chromosome ("last male agnatic member") and he was followed by folks without the Y-chromosome, and then without a substantial fraction of the Russian DNA in general.<br><br>Russians have found it OK to live under these de facto Germans for centuries. Well, no one has asked them too often but even if someone did, they just answered it was fine (well, for a few centuries, Czechs were equally loyal to their Austrian emperors but in that case, the difference between the regular Austrian and regular Czech folks was much smaller than the difference between regular German and regular Russian folks). Most Russians really want to be governed by a strong hand and it has been true at least for centuries. This attitude may have some genetic reason; but it is also justified by the "success of the strongmen" in Russia throughout its history and the relative "failure of the democratic men" in the same countries. I think it's important for us in the West to understand these basic differences.<br><br>If and when the West gets the power to decide or contribute to the decision, it shouldn't be afraid to reduce the Russians' control over themselves. At the end, a good leader who has fine enough relationships to the Russians – someone like Donald Trump – could be a very appropriate next tsar. If you assume that the Russians could never possibly accept such a setup, I think that you are wrong because it's not really the "supremacy of their DNA" which they are obsessed with (this was the German approach); it is the desire to have a strongman with a natural authority, and any strongman, at the top. And a tsar who came from another part of the world could very well be the superior pick for Russians themselves. People and nations aren't the same and asymmetric relationships are often superior. The denial of this simple fact is always an aspect of an SJW-like, left-wing, ideology even though many reasonable self-described conservatives agree with this kind of mindless "equality" at the national level, too.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-62466667181757458062022-03-20T14:39:00.005+01:002022-03-28T20:05:37.205+02:00The West should help President Bortnikov's Russia<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FO4a3WiXEAI9P-k?format=jpg" oldsrc="https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1503842986513338369/c5c4AOjh?format=jpg&name=small" width=407><br><br>It's always sad when a former president of Russia is turned to kebab on Sunday at 7 pm. But it's only 3 pm now!? <br><br><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">⚡️Ukraine’s military intelligence claim that Russia’s elites scheme to overthrow Putin to restore economic ties with Western countries. <br><br>Aleksandr Bortnikov, head of FSB security agency, is allegedly being considered as Putin’s successor, according to Ukraine's intelligence.</p>— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) <a href="https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1505518177932955649?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 20, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br>I scheduled this blog post to be sure that when it appears, Alexander Bortnikov is already the new president of the Russian Federation. Congratulations!<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bortnikov">Alexander Bortnikov</a> was the boss of the FSB so far, the renamed KGB, and he was a "silovik" inside Putin's inner circle. His son Denis is the deputy director of the VTB Bank, the second largest bank of Russia (after Sběrbank) and the largest bank that suffers due to sanctions. I am pretty sure that the Bortnikovs must be really angry now. That is why the information makes some sense. At the same moment, Bortnikov is both a KGB veteran as well as the man responsible for the information that "Ukrainians will welcome the Red Army with flowers in 2022".<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />The information about the replacement of Putin may be either real or totally fabricated. And when it's fabricated, it could have been fabricated by Putin, by the Ukrainian press/politicians, or even by Bortnikov's people themselves. An obvious reaction to this news is that Putin will become even more paranoid. He probably cannot check whether the planned coup is real, just like we cannot check it. So he could try to neutralize Bortnikov and he will probably do so, regardless of the trustworthiness of the information about the coup.<br><br>On the other hand, Bortnikov must also know that he is in trouble so he could actually make the coup to preventively protect his life against Putin! In this sense, the information about the planned coup could be a self-fulfilling prophesy. If fabricated by the Ukrainians or the U.S., it can be a plan to ignite massive internal fights in Moscow.<br><br>At any rate, it is possible that the plan has some substance and it could even be realized. If Mr Bortnikov will want to restore the economic relationships with the West, he will have to end the war. The proposals could be similar to my peace plan; plus some reparations. So Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk Regions would hold referendum (under some international supervisors) where they want to belong. The rest of Ukraine would be allowed to join NATO but prohibited from hosting missiles with the range over 200 km or some similar threshold.<br><br>Aside from the lives that cannot be restored, Russia has created the damage worth trillions of dollars. Most of it was done to "third parties" and should be forgiven. The damage done to Ukraine is at least equal to the total Russian reserves, over those $600 billion. Russia should keep a part of them, like $200 billion, the rest should be divided between Ukraine and the countries that were supplying Ukraine with weapons for free, and countries that took care of the Ukrainian refugees. On top of that, however, Russia should be commited to deliver Ukraine's 2019 consumption of oil as well as natural gas for 30 years for free.<br><br>Bortnikov would still be a very different man than the kind of politicians that the West imagines to be perfect for the job. But you must understand that Russia has really had a better experience with more authoritarian men, with "siloviki" who came from the power organizations (like army, police, intelligence...). Under the Soviet dictators, Moscow led a superpower (a fishy one but a superpower, anyway); under the democratic tolerant Yeltzin, Russia was dramatically weakening. Putin made it stronger again before he (nearly?) destroyed Russia in 2022.<br><br>The West should also achieve either a reduction or a partial control over Russia's nuclear stockpile. With these pledges done by Bortnikov's Russia, the sanctions should be removed and the Western companies (at least of a certain sufficient magnitude) could be obliged to restore the business in Russia if they had it before the war. The West could also promise to treat Russophobia on par with anti-Semitism and similar phobias. My main point is that the West shouldn't dream about making Russia "the same" as the Western countries because it is an unrealistic unicorn plans that denies the substantial difference between Russia and others; between the Russian experience and the experience of others; and that tries to promote the Western nations' opinions (about the right way to organize a nation or geopolitics) into totally absolute truths.<br><br>P.S.: I recommend President Bortnikov to split Russia into several countries, Predkraine, Zakraine, Dokraine, Nadkraine, and Podkraine.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-9679715866508141362022-03-19T20:08:00.006+01:002022-03-19T20:27:46.710+01:00Ukraine must endure, Russia is falling into the abyss<b><a href="https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/schwarzenberg-ukrajina-musi-vydrzet-rusko-se-riti-do-propasti-40390980">Interview with Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg</a>, a former Czech minister of foreign affairs</b><br><em>Questions by Oldřich Danda</em><br><br>Former Foreign Minister and Honorary Chairman of TOP 09 Karel Schwarzenberg expects that the ceasefire in Ukraine will not take place before two months. He believes that the Ukrainians will endure in the courageous struggle, but thinks that they will eventually lose part of their territory.<br><br><img src="https://1gr.cz/fotky/idnes/20/063/cl8h/LUH84500d_Schwarzenberg.jpg" width=407><br><br><b>Did you expect to live to see a war in Europe?</b><br><br>I didn't. And I was quite mistaken. I thought Putin was cooler and more reasonable. But that speech he gave just before the invasion of Ukraine, that was the speech of a very emotional man. It was very clear there that he had been planning this for a long time. I thought he was going to make a big show, that he was going to blackmail, but that he was going to start a big war, I never dreamt of that.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br /><b>You said in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, that if we did not help Ukraine with arms supplies, Putin would eat it piece by piece, and that if we did not do it quickly, it would cost us much more in the end. You seem to have guessed it accurately. Why do you think other western politicians haven't seen it?</b><br><br>They didn't want to see it because it's more convenient. It's the same as in the 1930s. People read Mein Kampf, where Hitler said what he wanted to do. But they didn't believe him, they didn't want to believe him because it's much more convenient. We should have helped Ukraine much more a long time ago. And also deal with Russia and explain to them where the limits are. But both were missed. The Americans only woke up in the last few months and started saying everywhere that there was going to be a war. But by then it was too late.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br /><b>What to do now?</b><br><br>We have to wait for a while and poor Ukraine has to endure.<br><br><b>Wouldn't it be better to intervene militarily?</b><br><br>We mustn't start World War III. If NATO had intervened openly against Russian troops, it would have been a big war. We can send weapons and so on, but it is hard to intervene directly. Now, given the economic situation, it will depend on how long Russia holds out.<br><br><b>Perhaps Ukraine?</b><br><br>The Ukrainians are fighting much better than the Russian military, this is proving to be very clumsy. No one knows for how long the Russians have the means to fight. War is an expensive business.<br><br><b>Do you think China will help them?</b><br><br>I don't think China will get involved because it wouldn't help them at all. Right now they're profiting from the fact that the Russians are in a shitty situation, and they don't have the slightest reason to help the Russians.<br><br><b>What if the Russians start bombing Ukrainian cities and don't look at civilian casualties? Will the Europeans and Americans stand by and watch?</b><br><br>If it would be horrific, they certainly wouldn't. Remember how the American intervention in Serbia began. Because the Americans couldn't stand to watch on television what was happening in Yugoslavia. So there was a lot of pressure to step in and stop the Serbs.<br><br><b>Yeah, but the Serbs didn't have nukes. That's why NATO had an easier decision.</b><br><br>That's why the Americans won't get involved now. They're also much more hardened now. But despite what the Western world is doing today - all those sanctions - the Russians won't last long. This is substantially different than the sanctions were seven years ago. That was just bullshit, but now the sanctions are working and the Russians are taking them seriously. In my view, the Ukrainians have to stick it out for another two months.<br><br><b>Won't it be sooner? I mean, the negotiators are already saying they are starting to find common ground.</b><br><br>Let's hope so, but it won't be easy. Perhaps the Russians have begun to realize that this is not going the way they dreamed it would. My old colleague Lavrov has already admitted that they have been had and that they have allowed themselves to be dragged into the conflict with Ukraine. Lavrov probably sees that Russia is falling into the abyss. He is an intelligent man and an excellent foreign minister, so he is probably already looking for a way out.<br><br><b>Why do you think the Russians went into this conflict?</b><br><br>Obviously, politicians are human too. And the otherwise cool Putin was overcome by emotion. He is a proponent of Greater Russia, which is as damaging a theory as Greater Germany and leads to the same trap.<br><br>Putin does not want to admit that Ukrainians are a separate nation and that they have a right to exist. Which was the entire content of his speech that started this war. Of course, he was bullshitting, because for centuries much of Ukraine was part not of Russia, but belonged to the Commonwealth, which was a joint state of Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and, for the most part, Ukrainians.<br><br><b>Do you think that if Western countries had imposed the same sanctions after the seizure of Crimea as they do today, the invasion would not have happened?</b><br><br>I don't think it would have happened. But at the time, Putin was not worried about our actions. Notice how surprised he is now by our reaction today. The West is not as degenerate and weak as he thought. He was surprised by Biden doing something, and by Europe showing that when a red line is crossed, it reacts firmly.<br><br><b>Did the Germans surprise you when they finally held their ground and moved to tougher sanctions?</b><br><br>It is a diplomatic masterstroke to be able to pit the Germans against Russia. Because for almost 200 years, the basic rule of German foreign policy - taken over from Prussia - has been never to stand up to Russia. When Frederick II lost to Russia at Kunersdorf (1759), he recognized that Russia was a great power and it was not good to dismember it. That didn't go wrong until the First World War. In recent years the Germans have returned to traditional politics, but the invasion of Ukraine was too much even for the Germans.<br><br><b>What result do you expect now? I guess it's an illusion to think that Putin will walk away empty-handed, don't you think?</b><br><br>We can certainly expect long negotiations. Ukraine will probably lose Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea for good, and that will be the end of it.<br><br><b>What about the condition for Ukraine to become a neutral state along the lines of Austria or Sweden?</b><br><br>That will be difficult for Ukraine. If you look at a map, there are quite a few states between Russia and Austria, and at least the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Russia. To have a powerful neighbour and be neutral, and unarmed at that, would be unbearable for Ukraine.<br><br><b>Sweden is a neutral country armed to the teeth.</b><br><br>That might be a viable route and I expect Europe will push them into it.<br><br><b>Do you think the Ukrainians will accept the loss of territory?</b><br><br>They will have to, but maybe not forever. When Putin is gone or overthrown, anything can happen.<br><br><b>Why have the Russians allowed it to get to the point where Putin invades a neighbouring, brotherly country?</b><br><br>Because it's a dictatorship! I've always said that, but no one here wants to hear it. What do you want to call the fact that Putin thought of attacking Ukraine and had no one to look up to?<br><br><b>You think Putin is behind everything?</b><br><br>Mostly him. Remember, when he announced the seizure of those two separatist republics, even the head of the Russian intelligence services didn't know what to say. Apparently, only Defence Minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov knew. Even Lavrov apparently did not know.<br><br><b>But now he's ably watching his back.</b><br><br>But clearly he didn't know, and he's unhappy about it because he's intelligent enough to know that this can't end gloriously.<br><br><b>You guys dealt with the gas crisis together in 2009, how do you remember it?</b><br><br>He's an old colleague. I remember we were in Moscow, everything was great at the meeting, but then there was a press conference and a Russian journalist - a pretty blonde - stood up and asked Lavrov the obviously agreed question, if an American radar is built in the Czech Republic, will Russia put its missiles in Kaliningrad?<br><br>Lavrov said that if there is an American radar in Eastern Europe, yes. I pointed out that, according to my geographical knowledge, it is a few hundred kilometres closer from Prague to the English Channel than to the Urals, and therefore we belong to Central or Western Europe, but not to Eastern Europe.<br><br>Lavrov turned to me triumphantly and said: At the UN, you belong to the Eastern European group, and therefore you are Eastern Europe, which means you belong to our field.<br><br><b>Do you think that if we were not in NATO and the EU, Russia would be grinding its teeth at us again?</b><br><br>Oh, yeah, they've already done that to us. I remember the Munich Security Conference in 2007, where Vladimir Vladimirovich himself came and gave a speech. I was foreign minister at the time and I gave a speech right after it and I listened to him very well.<br><br>In my speech afterwards, I said that I was grateful to the President for his speech because he confirmed to me all the reasons why it was necessary for us to join NATO and that we had done the right thing. The Germans then pounced on me and scolded me as to why I was angry with Putin if he was so accommodating.<br><br><b>Doesn't the West share some of the blame for the whole situation? For being arrogant with Russia and not listening to its demands? That Western politicians promised Russia in the 1990s that NATO would not expand eastwards?</b><br><br>That promise was half-hearted. I have studied it thoroughly. Nothing like that was ever signed. But it's true that there was talk of it. But you must not forget that if Yeltsin's course had been maintained in Russia, NATO would not have expanded. If Russia had been evolving towards democracy, this would not have happened. But there it took a backward course, a dictatorship began to consolidate.<br><br><b>But the annexation of Crimea happened after the Maidan in 2014. And the Russians had a problem with the fact that the Americans were too supportive.</b><br><br>That's bullshit. President Yanukovych built himself an incredible baroque mansion in a few years of rule, the corruption and incompetence was such that Ukrainians couldn't stand it. There was a real popular uprising. This was a warning signal to Putin that the Russians could be infected by the colour revolution.<br><br><b>But Ukraine remained divided into a pro-Russian east and a pro-European west. Was it not a mistake to ignore this and offer them membership of NATO?</b><br><br>Your Excellency, as we now see, the whole of Ukraine is resisting the Russians. It is Russian propaganda that has told you that the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine wants to join Russia. It's a bit like the situation in Ireland. When the Irish won their independence a hundred years ago, only a small part of them spoke Irish, most spoke English, and yet they did not want English domination.<br><br><b>But how was it in the Crimea? In a few days, almost all Ukrainian soldiers came under Russian command.</b><br><br>That's absolutely true, but the army there was still commanded by Soviet officers. The Ukrainians neglected it during the colour revolution. They didn't take care of the army or the navy, and that's why they lost ships and part of the army. There the army was neither Ukrainian nor Russian, but Soviet.<br><br>Also, there were mainly old Soviet flags flying during those events, because the Crimean population, after the original Tatars were expelled, arrested, killed, is mainly Soviet. Why? Because there were retired members of the Soviet army, police and secret services there throughout the Soviet era. Because it is a wonderful place to live and only a privileged part of Soviet society was allowed to do so.<br><br><b>Back to my question. Was it a mistake to offer Ukraine membership of NATO? After all, that was a red rag for Putin.</b><br><br>With forgiveness, we can fight about this. I remember the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008. Neither Georgia nor Ukraine got an invitation to join NATO there, but Putin took it as an invitation to march into Georgia - and a few years later into Ukraine. I'm not sure you're right. The opposite is true. The fact that NATO refused to offer Georgia and Ukraine membership was interpreted by Putin as weakness and he invaded.<br><br><b>When the Soviets started putting missiles in Cuba in the 60s, the Americans didn't like that either and threatened nuclear conflict. Isn't it the same that the Russians don't like NATO troops behind their back?</b><br><br>Nobody wanted to put missiles in Ukraine. The deal could have been that Ukraine would be protected by the Alliance, but that there would be no missiles there. It was negotiable. Sorry, I understand that as a journalist you ask this question, but you can't draw an equivalence between Putin and American presidents with all their disadvantages. After all, they are mostly democrats, and that's different from a pronounced KGB veteran and criminal. Sorry, that's different.<br><br><b>I'm making a distinction. In the US, at least, they follow the two terms and enough principle. Putin has been in power for a long time and still wants to hold on.</b><br><br>Of course, democracy has certain advantages. In Russia, only a predator can stay in power.<br><br><b>Is it the Russians' own fault for allowing this to happen?</b><br><br>Partly, but we helped a little. We let it grow too big. We should have recognized the danger sooner and acted accordingly. Even in the case of Chechnya and then Georgia, we should have helped them to defend themselves and not look the other way.<br><br><b>Coming back to Ukraine. If it holds out, what will change for it?</b><br><br>It will be up to the West to decide whether we are going to help. I think some kind of Marshall Plan will be necessary. The Americans and Europe should invest there together and put Ukraine in order economically. It could be better than before.<br><br><b>Is it a good thing they're fighting back?</b><br><br>Absolutely, it will help not only their national consciousness but also their reputation in the world. Thanks to its defence, Ukraine is gaining a completely different image in the world than it had before. We had a superstition that Ukrainians were second-class Russians.<br><br>We should learn from that. The Austrians under the monarchy had the same view of us: cleaners, bricklayers and masons. They said the Czechs were a nation of servants, but when we stood up for our cause and defended ourselves, they began to take us seriously.<br><br><b>It's a bit reminiscent of the Second World War. Britain and France quietly signed the Munich Agreement, which they only revoked when Kubiš and Gabčík killed Heydrich and the Nazis burned Lidice and Ležáky.</b><br><br>Because they started to take us seriously.<br><br>Does it always have to be bloodshed for the West to take us seriously? It's not just the West, it was everywhere. Benito Mussolini, who had no prejudice against the Czechs, wrote a play about Jan Hus because he admired him, so after Munich he said that a nation that doesn't defend itself has no right to exist.<br><br><b>What do you think about the solidarity with which we in the Czech Republic are accepting Ukrainian refugees?</b><br><br>Thank God. And the visit of Prime Minister Petr Fiala to Kiev is also the right step.<br><br><b>Wasn't it an unnecessary risk?</b><br><br>No.<br><br><b>What if he'd been killed there?</b><br><br>Then we'd elect a new prime minister.<br><br><b>Wouldn't that have led to World War III?</b><br><br>No, no, no, no, no. It would only happen if they killed Biden. Unfortunately, our Prime Minister isn't that important.<br><br><b>How long do you think we can keep helping the Ukrainians without grumbling?</b><br><br>I'm afraid six months at the most. Then we'll start grumbling, but I think we'll keep helping.<br><br><b>When the refugee crisis started seven years ago because of the Syrian war, nobody stopped helping refugees. Why the change?</b><br><br>There were Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, these are foreign people to us, but Ukrainians are close to us, many of them have been working here for years. They are excellent workers. They have a language we can understand.<br><br><b>Won't they laugh at us now in the West if we want to help, after we rejected refugee quotas?</b><br><br>Some will think so, but they won't say so out loud. They will help, but probably not much.<br><br><b>What do you think of President Zeman's U-turn? On the eve of the invasion, he was still saying that the Russians would not go to Ukraine because they would be fools, and he called the US intelligence information a bluff. Now he has apologised for it.</b><br><br>I was wrong too, because I also thought Putin was not crazy to go to war. The President has a very developed instinct for what people think. And he knew very well that if he took the Russian side now, he would lose all sympathy with the Czech population. But I think he was genuinely outraged, I don't take that away from him.<hr><br><em>Translated with DeepL.com (free version)</em>Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-63227361118352830942022-03-18T07:30:00.018+01:002022-03-18T08:14:54.876+01:00Quantum mechanics makes very weak forces "probably strictly undetectable"Paul Wells has asked me what I thought about the October 2021 paper <blockquote> <b><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09386">Quantum Hair from Gravity</a></b></blockquote>by Calmet, Casadio, Hsu, and Kuipers (Brighton, Bologna, Michigan). Well, you may be a little bit impatient so let me start by saying that it is completely wrong and I find this wrongness rather disappointing because the mistaken thinking is rooted in the misunderstanding of insights that I consider at most advanced undergraduate quantum mechanics.<br><br>They claim that all objects in quantum theories involving gravity have "hair" i.e. lots of information that is carried in some small corrections to the gravitational field, especially in the corrections that may be quantized. While they talk about general configurations of matter (nontrivially shaped sources of gravity), it is pretty clear that they are doing it in order to argue that "black holes have some hair for obvious reasons" (so one can easily explain why black holes carry a high entropy etc.). But black holes don't have hair for obvious reasons.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />An omnipresent theme in the article is the claim that quantum mechanics makes various gravitational field configurations <em>more distinguishable</em> from each other than they would be in classical physics, and one can therefore distinguish a greater number of states from each other than one could distinguish in classical physics; sometimes this general claim is made with the buzzwords "memory effect" that was promoted by previous papers by Calmet et al. But the truth is exactly upside down: quantum mechanics makes states <em>more indistinguishable</em>, not more distinguishable!<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />This vaguely stated fact must be clear – in numerous more precise variations – to everyone who has understood the basics of quantum mechanics. The "reduced ability to distinguish" in quantum mechanics boils down to the fuzziness. For example, we may notice that the phase space – the space of possible initial conditions – is a classical space composed of points, labeled by some coordinates like \((x,p)\). It has infinitely many distinguishable points, even in small regions. What is it replaced with in quantum mechanics? <br><br>Well, the phase space may still exist but \(x\) and \(p\) are no longer commuting with one another. Instead, \[ xp-px=i\hbar \] and this fact guarantees that the phase space is a "non-commutative geometry". Only a discrete number of states ("points") in a region of the phase space may be strictly distinguished. If you study this question quantitatively, you will see that even though there is no "preferred or single derivable basis", there is one distinguishable state per volume \(2\pi\hbar\) of the phase space (or its positive integral power, for higher-dimensional phase spaces). You can get this rule, "one state per \(2\pi\hbar\) of volume", in many ways, for particular ways to organize the state or generally. For example, if the space is periodic (a circle) with period \(\Delta x = 2\pi R\), the momentum is discrete (because the wave function has to be single-valued) and the spacing between the allowed the eigenvalues is \(\Delta p = \hbar/R\). Note that the meaning of the deltas is different for \(x\) and \(p\) here. But you may multiply them and see\[ \Delta x \cdot \Delta p = 2\pi\hbar \] and this is the area of the phase space where a single distinguishable state finds enough (phase) space. So exactly because the pairs of quantities are "fuzzy" due to the uncertainty principle, you get the quantization of the momentum (in my example), and that is why the "fuzziness" is inseparable from the "quantization" (or discreteness).<br><br>So far, these points were pretty much "high school quantum mechanics" but there are some more technically difficult general insights that convey the same moral message in different contexts. In particular, it makes sense to talk about "long-range forces" and "short-range forces" in quantum mechanics. Long-range forces are e.g. the gravitational and electrostatic one (between massive or charged objects) whose potential goes like \(1/R\) at long distances (in 3+1 dimensions); the short-range forces (residual nuclear forces, the weak force mediated by the massive W-bosons and Z-bosons, and others, like van der Waals forces) decrease more quickly with the distance.<br><br>You must have heard about the separation to long-range and short-range forces. And if you haven't really understood why this terminology is used, you could have thought that it's just some random convention and there is no qualitative difference. Someone invented an exponent \(\alpha\) in \(1/R^\alpha\) and said that when the exponent is smaller than a threshold, we will call it a long-range force, otherwise it is a short-range force, but qualitatively, they are still the same.<br><br>Except that they are not the same. In quantum mechanics, short-range forces are really different from long-range forces. In particular, <blockquote> with short-range forces, the probability approaches 100% that they don't affect the state of the initial probe particles <em>at all</em>, not even in principle. </blockquote>If you had some quantum states associated with points in the phase space (some Gaussian wave packets), the aforementioned "cells of the phase space" whose volume was \(2\pi\hbar\) meant that for two nearby points "inside one cell", the probability was high, and approaching 100% if they are really nearby, that the two wave packets would be indistinguishable. In quantum mechanics, only orthogonal states (wave functions) are distinguishable in the physical sense! Two normalized states \(\ket\alpha\) and \(\ket\beta\) have the Born-rule probability \[ Prob = |\bra \alpha \beta\rangle|^2 \] that they will produce the same result to an arbitrary test (measurement of a maximum set of commuting observables). When the two states are sufficiently similar as elements of the Hilbert space, it means that the probability is high that you will have no chance to distinguish them even with the most precise apparatuses.<br><br>And this indistinguishability also applies to the effect of forces. The funny difference between very weak forces in classical physics and in quantum mechanics is that: <blockquote> In classical physics, very weak forces cause very small changes to the observables but those are in principle detectable; in quantum mechanics, however, very weak forces cause very small changes to the probabilities of one outcome or another outcome of an experiment, very small probabilities of a finite (not infinitesimal) change of the outcome! </blockquote>This difference is conceptual. The continuously evolving quantities in quantum mechanics (think about the overrated Schrödinger equation) are things on par with the "probability amplitudes" instead of the "objective values of observables" (the latter don't exist in quantum mechanics, everything that is observable is in principle observer-dependent or subjective). So when things are weakly modified by an extra very weak force, you can't really modify "how things objectively are". Instead, you change "the odds that things are in one way or another".<br><br>The quantum phase space is effectively divided to the "cells" of volume \(2\pi\hbar\) and when a very weak force allows the state to move from one state to another, it has some probability that you jump from a single cell to an adjacent one. But when the force is very weak, the probability approaches 100% that you remain in the same cell and the final state affected by the weak force will be indistinguishable from the initial one. They mathematically differ as wave functions (by a small function) but because the wave functions are not observable by themselves (like probabilities of separate events aren't, you can't precisely measure the probability that a soccer club wins a particular match) but physically, they encode a high likelihood that the situations are indistinguishable.<br><br>Even if you use a different or rather general basis of the initial and final states in quantum mechanics, you will find out that the very weak forces imply a probability approaching 100% that the original transition from a particular initial state to a particular final state works the same even with the force! In classical physics, a quickly decreasing force still changes the direction of a projectile by a small angle \(\gamma\); the probability that \(\gamma=0\) is basically zero. In quantum mechanics, a weak short-range force has a nearly 100% probability that \(\gamma=0\).<br><br>So because of the clumpiness of the phase space – which is really the "quantization" that gave "quantum" mechanics its name, and which may be derived from the uncertainty principle as well – quantum mechanics allows lots of forces and effects to have a "nearly 100% probability of having a strictly undetectable effect" or, equivalently, it allows the states affected or unaffected by the weak forces to be indinstinguishable. Quantum mechanics makes states less distiguishable, not more distinguishable. It guarantees that there are fewer states, not more states! Needless to say, this very general point (which must be obvious to everyone who has understood why the theory is called "quantum" mechanics at all) is totally unimaginable to all anti-quantum zealots. Inversely, everyone who fails to understand this point (that things are less distinguishable in QM, and therefore we get finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, finite entropies etc. although we would get infinite entropy and infinite numbers of points in regions of phase spaces classically) may be identified as an anti-quantum zealot, at least a partial one.<br><br>So these people may play with some corrections to gravitational fields that are seen in some multipole expansions in \(1/R\) but they are just wrong that the values of the corrections imply that lots of states may be distinguished by the gravitational field at infinity. Weak corrections like that really keep states strictly indistinguishable, with the probability approaching 100%.<br><br>"The memory effect" also brings an extra thesis that quantum mechanics makes many more states distinguishable because one can prepare complex superpositions, entangled states relatively to a simple unentangled basis. But this understanding of entanglement is completely incorrect, too. Awkward-looking superpositions or entangled states used as a basis of the Hilbert space are <em>just another basis</em> and nothing changes about the rules of quantum mechanics, and about the dimensionality of the Hilbert space, if you switch to a more awkward basis of the Hilbert space (one basis may be more convenient for a particular calculation but which basis is convenient generally depends on the problem or experiment that you want to predict!). At the very systemic level, all bases of the Hilbert space are equally good and there is a complete democracy between them. Also, all complex superpositions of your "normal" states in the Hilbert space must be treated as exactly equally "normal" or equally "allowed" or equally "real" or "unreal". This democracy of basis vectors with their superposition is called the superselection postulate and it is often quoted as the very first universal axioms of quantum mechanics! Everyone who keeps on looking for some universal preferred bases of a Hilbert space is an anti-quantum zealot who has completely missed the basic points (in fact, the first basic point) of quantum mechanics.<br><br>On top of that, developments such as ER=EPR show that "superpositions of states describing a geometry" may be totally physically identical with "non-superposition or basic states describing a wormhole geometry". At any rate, to claim that an entangled state or an awkward superposition is distinguishable from all the "basis vectors" that could have been used to build the superposition is self-evidently wrong. If you are a superposition of many state vectors, you can't be perfectly distinguishable from all of them. Instead, there is a nonzero risk that you are indistinguishable from each of them! By playing with superpositions and randomly rebuilt bases, you simply do not change the amount of "hair" – you don't change the dimensionality of the Hilbert space (or its subspace constrained by some bounds on energy or localization to a region).<br><br>Since 2012, we use the slogan ER=EPR (I formally call it the ER-EPR correspondence) but these insights about the entanglement-is-glue principles had quite some prehistory. I think that even the <a href="https://inspirehep.net/literature?sort=mostrecent&size=25&page=1&q=find%20a%20lin%20and%20a%20lunin%20and%20a%20maldacena">Lunin-Lin-Maldacena paper of 2004</a> may be considered an early manifestation of similar effects. LLM had found a map between states of free fermions and smooth yet nontrivial complex geometries in the anti de Sitter space and their topology was variable. Because of the ER=EPR-like equivalence between various entangled and unentangled states built from different classical geometries, quantum gravity makes physical configurations even less distinguishable than they would be without ER=EPR, just because of the general axioms of quantum mechanics.<br><br>So these authors effectively claim that some large entropy may be controllably stored in the coefficients of some multipole expansions of gravitational fields – which effectively remember most of the information about the mass distribution, and therefore the identity of the source of gravity. But it is simply wrong because the values of the multipoles (or some quantum functions involving them) are effectively quantized and there is simply not enough states for these coefficients to distinguish a large number of states (so that you could explain the macroscopic entropy of things like black holes). At the end, we know that some degrees of freedom do allow this high entropy to be justified, derived, or calculated, but these authors' claim that they can derive the "hair" in a controllable way by these naive methods is simply wrong.<br><br>There are of course lots of wrong papers like that, often by people who like to maintain the image of interdisciplinary folks who can "write about anything". From a pragmatic viewpoint, I feel that this blog post was almost certainly a waste of time as well because it is unlikely to play the apparent role – to help someone to overcome a subtle technical mistake that made him write or read this wrong paper. The reason is that this is not about a small technical mistake at all. The mistake is huge, basic, embarrassing, and it follows from a completely wrong attitude to "do physics" – their (and many other people's) attitude is to write would-be important papers about ambitious topics that the authors don't understand even at the undergraduate level. Why don't you sit down, Stephen and others, and learn the required undergraduate material before you write another would-be ambitious paper?<br><br><b>Bonus: Superdeterminism</b><br><br>Of course, there are even worse examples of bad science out there – which recently got some press in what used to be science journals (but they are trash today). Gerardus 't Hooft promotes the ludicrous notion of "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism">superdeterminism</a>", for example. By doing so, he proves that he has completely lost it. Superdeterminism isn't a theory at all; it is at most a conspiracy theory, a very unproductive loophole to promise an explanation (without actually explaining anything) why Bell's inequalities and similar results violate "local realism". The correct answer is that Nature simply isn't "realist" (which is just a euphemism for "classical"). Instead, it is quantum mechanical i.e. "non-realist".<br><br>But superdeterminism says that maybe it's impossible to prove that theorem because... experimenters don't have the free will and what they decide to measure (e.g. the choice of the axis) is determined by some massive cosmic conspiracy, too. The cosmic conspiracy is supposed to guarantee some massive correlation between the apparently random outcomes of measurements; and between people's psychological decisions what they want to measure. That is why the laws of Nature are completely different than what they look, we are told. Of course, this proposal hasn't led to any theory, any equations, any predictions, it is just a way to say "maybe science can't work at all". And indeed, it doesn't say less. All of science is based on the assumption that you may learn something about Nature by freely choosing what you do your experiments with and which quantities you decide to measure; if you adopt the role of an experimenter, you must assume that your thinking isn't controlled by a cosmic mastermind to fool yourself. Superdeterminism violates this.<br><br>But it's not just some violation of "unproven dogmas" that have been important for science. One may really see that the alternative answer served by superdeterminists is just wrong. Experimenters demonstrably have "free will" if defined in the relevant way (random numbers are sometimes produced inside the brain in such a way that the particular random number cannot be calculated from the past or from the degrees of freedom associated with regions outside the brain): the identity of buttons that are pressed (e.g. to decide which axis is chosen for a spin measurement) can be chosen randomly, by a very complex and chaotic random generator that just cannot possibly have a significant correlation with a totally different random number, the outcome of some random measurements. By maintaining that this correlation between the "Dirac choice" and "Heisenberg choice" survives in any apparatus, with an arbitrary chaotic random generator, superdeterminisms are making the ludicrous claim that one can't build better, more random and more chaotic, random generators.<br><br>On top of that, even if this totally implausible assumption of theirs (about the massive correlations between people's random decisions and random natural phenomena) were true, theirs is still a completely wrong way of "doing science" because they still don't want to do any science! They want to be celebrated for making anti-science comments that have no beef, that lead to no equations and no quantitative predictions. If they wanted to do science, they would try to find some theory or at least Ansatz for the magnitude of the correlations between the experimenter's behavior and the experiment's random outcomes. They would try to explain "how things look" according to a more predictive theory agreeing with their principles because science should still explain "why things look the way they do", even if "things look different than what you would naively think". But they are not interested in that at all. They postulate some omnipresent massive correlations in the people's behavior across the Universe which is always massively correlated with the random natural phenomena, and these people-Nature correlations are clearly not far from astrology, but they have no interest in understanding how to calculate these correlations or how to derive these values of correlations from some theory that makes at least some sense. It is a classical pseudoscience.<br><br>Also, Gerardus 't Hooft doesn't even use the word "superdeterminism" consistently because he is also using it for some naive hydrodynamics-like theories that must be classified as dysfunctional cousins of Bohmian mechanics. But Bohmian mechanics and superdeterminism are mutually exclusive "programs" to "revolutionize" and disprove quantum mechanics (both of them are similarly hopeless but at least Bohmian mechanics cares about some quantitative issues and has some equations).<br><br>I could be much more quantitative and discuss a particular Bell's setup, for example, and show that the superdeterminist talking points don't give us any way to say anything meaningful about the measured frequencies; and it is virtually certain that they will never be able to say anything about the actual physics in the future, either (and the assumption about the impossible-to-kill correlations contradict your common sense explanations of anything about the Universe). But at some level, all such detailed explanations are useless because if someone needs to be "guided" while understanding trivial questions such as "why superdeterminism is a complete non-starter" as a theory replacing quantum mechanics, he will have to be guided forever. And is that a good idea to spend lots of "teacher's time" with a schoolkid who still shows a complete inability to "start thinking as a physicist"? After decades of terrible results in efforts to teach physics to hopeless students, I think it is wiser to say "I don't find it constructive to talk about physics with someone who is interested in ultra-idiotic memes like superdeterminism".Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-29657912179393461262022-03-17T07:03:00.029+01:002022-03-17T19:33:19.284+01:00Don't they actually have a deal with Russia?A minute ago I unsubscribed from <a href="https://summit.news/" rel="nofollow">Summit.News</a>. In recent years, I have agreed with over 95% of Paul Joseph Watson's content – about things like wokism, the climate hysteria, and misguided Covid restrictions. Since the February 24th explosion of the war, I didn't follow these topics much and I didn't consider Summit News and similar sources to be primary when it comes to the information from the battlefront and related things that matter. After all, it seemed to me that Watson was also wrong about claims like 'Russia was pretty reasonable'.<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t28cff0yVHg" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br><em>Two days ago, the Slovak secret services published an incredible recording of a discussion between a Russian agent working under the embassy (right) with a writer on a Slovak conspiracy theory server (left). The Slovak dude collected 2x €500 for making the initial steps of hiring some tough Slovak gangsters to "hunting" the people who are (1) either against Russia, or (2) for Russia but expecting to be paid for that (and for some other things that Russia could find helpful)! I honestly didn't believe that this is what the Russian Embassy folks were doing in the 21st century; it is the behavior of organized crime. The Russian guy was expelled, the Slovak one was charged with serious charges. Details of the Russian man's preferences are interesting. He didn't like the Slovak dude's idea to pretend that he was pro-American (because it's too dangerous); and he didn't want him to befriend a minister, an assistant or a janitor with an access to shelves was preferred.</em><br><br>But I have looked and my pessimistic expectations were met. This website (and to some extent, several other anti-woke folks whom I liked) really look like a copy of the unhinged Russian fascist propaganda of the present. Europe is clearly experiencing the most bloody, inhuman, and criminal war since 1945 and 3 million people have been displaced. But even though Summit News talks about related topics, you just couldn't possibly find out that there is any war, a thousand of people are killed each day, a thousand of buildings are destroyed, and 150,000 people have to flee their country every day (it's a lot of people on the dozen of relevant border crossings).<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Instead, I can see lies and bizarre memes whose only possible purpose may be to increase the ability of the Russian terrorists to use their terror to influence not only their population of sheep but also Ukraine and perhaps many other countries beyond.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />So for example, the most frequently read article at Summit News complains that Facebook has (temporarily) allowed comments calling for an organized death of Vladimir Putin. This is so bad to allow this freedom of speech, the long-time defender of the freedom of speech whines! Come on. Every decent person who is following at least the basic events knows that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal who has already earned N times the right to be executed where N is a rather high number. There are good reasons to think that the physical elimination of Vladimir Putin and perhaps a few dozens of crucial villains around him could be the first step towards a fix of this terrible mess that mostly he (but not only he) has created although it probably wouldn't be enough for a paradise and it would bring some new risks.<br><br>The second article talks about Tucker Carlson's claims on TV that Ukraine and the U.S. should do whatever Vladimir Putin orders them to do with biological research labs. I think that Carlson has the right to say these things but it's common sense that such a statement shocks many other people and they have the right to respond. The demand that a self-evident war criminal decides about the fate of biological research across the world is utterly insane and whoever proposes that Putin should have this power can reasonably be speculated to be teamed up with Russia in a rather intimate way – and deserving to be arrested as an accomplice of the war crimes. There exists no tangible evidence that the labs were working on biological weapons there.<br><br>The third article is about Rand Paul, Fauci, and Covid but the fourth one is about 'the war but not really the war' again. The title says: <blockquote>30 Per Cent of ‘Ukrainian Refugees’ Are Actually From Other Countries </blockquote>Even before you study the facts, this very headline is quite a piece of disgusting demagogy because it is obviously self-contradictory. Ukrainian refugees are from Ukraine so they cannot be from other countries (the Muslim World including Africa, Watson means). The magic key to the self-contradiction of the headline hides in the apostrophes, of course. It is 'Ukrainian refugees', meaning 'someone claimed to be Ukrainian refugees', and 30% was calculated from some set that wasn't specified in the title at all.<br><br>The real resolution of the self-contradiction is simple. 'Someone' made or makes the tautologically untrue statement that 'a non-Ukrainian refugee is a Ukrainian one' and this is the person who is doing something wrong. But it matters a lot who is that 'someone'. Watson constructs the headline – and pretty much the article – in order to make gullible readers think that 'something is wrong with the Ukrainian refugees because they are not Ukrainian and they are lying' (and obviously, harming Ukrainians even when they are already displaced is one of the goals of the subhuman crappy propaganda emitted by the Kremlin). But there is nothing wrong with Ukrainian refugees. They are Ukrainian, tautologically, and measurements indicate that they are saying the truth about basic issues. It is the Muslims and their woke apologists in France, a completely different set of people, who is lying and cheating and Watson intentionally obfuscates the difference between the Muslim refugees and the real Ukrainian ones, in order to harm the latter.<br><br>The fraction 30% is calculated from some people who claim asylum in France. But a detail is that France is next-to-irrelevant in the refugee crisis. France is getting fewer Ukrainian refugees than the 10 times smaller Slovakia, for example. Meanwhile, the millions of real Ukrainians are being displaced, a topic that Paul Joseph Watson seems unable to see or he is completely uninterested in it. So the real 'story' (which is not important at this moment) is that some Muslims are predictably using a real refugee crisis to help themselves in France where they are likely to get away with this fraud. But I assure you that virtually all the Ukrainian refugees here in Pilsen, or all countries which actually experience the massive influx, are from Ukraine and you can see it quickly. So this article about '30%' is just a disgusting manipulative rant leading the readers to be (absolutely unjustifiably) skeptical towards the Ukrainian refugees while denying that a real refugee crisis is ongoing. A similar topic is comparably manipulatively covered in his 'what could possibly go wrong'. He really discusses some minor trick by hundreds of Muslims who are already in France – when the real relevant story revolves around millions of real Ukrainian refugees in other countries that are closer to Ukraine.<br><br><img src="https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0566f8313327995a858ffb28b64a0ccf-lq" width=407><br><br><em>Victory Day, Moscow, May 2022</em><br><br>The following article is about a Ukrainian TV host who calls for 'genocide of Russian children'. That statement is cruel and despicable but Ukraine is facing an actual war and mass killing of the civilians including hundreds of children by the centrally managed Russian terrorists. It is absolutely understandable that tensions run high. It is a matter of common sense that millions of Ukrainians viscerally hate Russia and Russians now and statistics guarantees that some of them feel a sufficiently powerful hatred that can push them arbitrarily far. It is common sense that you find a TV host or two who makes a similar statement – as a matter of revenge. But Watson – who has agreed with me for years that actual violence, and not words, are crimes – suddenly stands on the exact opposite side. For him, it is the words, especially the totally understandable statements of the form 'most Russians suck', that are the real crimes! The actual ongoing destruction of a country of 40+ million is suddenly completely uninteresting for him. It is only the thought crimes against Vladimir Putin's ego (and against the Russian nation that Putin claims to defend although he is ruining it for generations) that Mr Watson fights against now.<br><br>Yet another article attacks Tony Blair because he dared to say that it was a strange tactic for the West to declare that it wouldn't participate in a nuclear war. I made virtually identical points as Tony Blair on <a href="https://motls.blogspot.com/2022/03/we-need-to-think-how-to-win-third-world.html?m=1">March 4th</a>. The nuclear warheads were produced for a reason and the reason is that they may be needed as an extreme tool in extreme circumstances, or at least credible threats of their usage may be helpful to achieve something. If you have nuclear weapons but you pledge not to ever use them (and maybe you even promise to never issue any threats), then they are completely useless. Years of work of the best physicists (and lots and lots of money) would be wasted. The problem with Russia is that Russia is more willing to use the weapons (and to threaten others with them, too) and this 'advantage' arguably has objective reasons – Russia would lose less because it's already a troubled country (and a large one which is hard to be covered by nuclear blasts, so some small towns would survive even the full deployment of the world's nuclear stockpile). But the West would be stupid to help to amplify this advantage for Russia. Of course the West needs to be ready to participate in a nuclear exchange and consider even the possibility that it might be better (a lesser evil) if the West started the nuclear exchanges.<br><br>Watson may disagree with me and Blair about these issues. But the way how he writes the article suggests something worse than a disagreement. It seems to me that Watson wants to 'cancel' Blair for the heresy of sharing his opinion that the West shouldn't brag about its weakness and cowardliness. Is it the same Watson who has mocked the West for its weakness and cowardliness for years? He was against the surrender to the BLM when the terrorist organization was crippling U.S. cities but when the Russian Federation is doing almost the same (but worse things in total) to Ukrainian cities, then Russia deserves to gain power and no one should try to reverse this trend? Why is he doing the exact opposite now? Why would Watson want to 'cancel' someone with this totally understandable opinion? Doesn't his article make it clear that he actually wants Russia to be capable of blackmailing the rest of the world in this way (by throwing a few thousand dumb bombs at random places, and threatening the usage of some more powerful museum bombs on top of that) while he wants the rest of the world to lose, to shut up, and/or to be eliminated? Would you be really surprised if I (or anyone else) were starting to consider the possibility that Watson's ties to the Kremlin are more intimate than I/we could have ever imagined?<br><br>And it goes on and on and on. In another article, 'Biden' is criticized for sending thousands of troops to Australia because of a possible conflict involving China (I guess that Biden himself doesn't make any crucial decisions and Watson used to agree with this point but this agreement seems gone as well – Watson has suddenly promoted Biden to a consequential leader and strategist). Is that really hard to understand that this is a common sense move in these conditions? China is sadly displaying tendencies to tilt its neutrality towards an unambiguous support of Russia (and it is these Beijing's decisions that may be most important for the future geopolitical architecture). Of course that would mean some looming anti-Chinese sanctions and it would mean that the U.S.-Chinese relationships would dramatically deteriorate and a military confrontation could become (and has already become) much more likely. Australia is among the first de facto islands that China could take over. Are you really so dumb that you really need to be explained why more soldiers are sent to various places that could be relevant in the case of similar confrontations of the U.S. against Russia and China (which includes Eastern Europe and Australia)? Or do you realize that this article is another insane stupidity but you find it normal to parrot the unhinged Kremlin propaganda basically claiming that Ukraine and the West must be demilitarized and silent while Russia has the 'right' to perform its 9/11s all over the Earth so that Putin is ultimately the world dictator?<br><br>Another article complains that some Russian schoolkids in Denmark were bullied. Oh, this is a top story of the recent weeks? Between 1 and 2 million Ukrainian children were forced to escape their homeland, most of those haven't seen their father for weeks, hundreds of kids have died, tens of thousands have lived in a building that has been destroyed, thousands know an adult who's been killed, and the economic prospects of those millions of Ukrainian children have been apparently crippled for their lifetime. But Mr Watson is most worried that several little Russian bastards are called little Russian bastards, isn't he? Oh, such a terrible microaggression, the long-time warrior against the concept of microaggressions claims. Sorry but the ongoing terror isn't purely done by one person in the Kremlin. He has been elected by a certain dominant culture in the nation – and it is a culture that is more authoritarian and more collectivist than in almost all nations on Earth, and that fact makes it more justifiable to approach the Russians in terms of the collective guilt. Every Russian adult who doesn't do enough to stop this insane war and remove the war criminals who act as a 'government of Russia' is clearly an accomplice to an extent that is no longer negligible. Most kids don't have any meaningful fraction of the guilt but they are getting older and they are being reshaped by the fascist Russian propaganda to become a part of the godless Russian killing machine. It is absolutely right for them to be subjected to the opposite pressures pointing out that what Russia is doing now is unacceptable and even the fraction of the guilt done by every Russian who doesn't do enough against the Putin regime and its crimes is still a huge amount of guilt. (Even the statement about the Russian kids' innocence could be debated. It is possible that if they were decent sensitive kids, and not <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/03/17/in-russias-pro-military-z-campaign-children-are-placed-front-and-center-a76976">this kind of hopeless brainwashed little warmongers</a> who are so similar to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illF1vt5g1Q!">little singing Palestinian jihadists</a>, the Russian kids would be so sad and crying about the ongoing terror in Ukraine that their sadness would force the Russian adults to stop it! The Russian kids apparently fail to cry!)<br><br>Some 'bad treatment' of Russians across the world is already taking place (including the sanctions against the rich Russians: I think that many of them should be given carrots instead but that would be another big topic), it is justified to quite some extent, and it is absolutely unavoidable. It's completely wrong for the police forces in Western countries – let alone journalists – to become protectors of Russians against the discomfort or against the true statements by others that in recent three weeks, the Russian nation has been turning into a criminal organization that has to be dealt with. Russians should only be protected against unambiguous crimes; if someone is supposed to protect their comfort, it is the Russian government. I personally think that at least up to the end of this war that is considered an acceptable resolution by most peoples represented in the U.N., businesses should have the right not to serve Russian clients. In some cases, a visible enough usage of a business by Russian clients may harm the long-term image of the business and cause some other risks.<br><br>I could continue and to a lesser extent, I feel rather bitter about the Ukraine-related statements by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard, too. Three weeks ago, I didn't believe that a full-fledged invasion was getting started. In the short term, the reasons were 'strategic' because Russia's forces were just not strong enough for a Blitzkrieg inside a massively hostile country and if Putin couldn't see this obvious point, it only showed that he lived in a fantasyland, surrounded by tons of worthless Da-Men (Da means Yes). In the long run, I was always afraid of the (rationally understandable) Russia's greater desire to start a war (because Russia seemed more competitive in the military enterprises than peaceful business but I am no longer sure even about this statement) and I was trying to discourage this scenario e.g. by promoting a decent behavior towards Russians. But already after the Monday Feb 21st recognition of the Donbas republics, I found the probability highly elevated that the real invasion would begin. It did begin and I adjusted my views about the Kremlin, the political atmosphere in Russia, and lots of other things. But it seems to me that these people haven't updated much – they largely seem to continue in some pro-Russian propaganda that completely ignores all the important facts and events (like the damn war!) and invents fake facts, conflations, conspiracy theories, and accusations and memes to insult everyone who stands on the other side than Mr Putin (along with threats against those who dare to say that we have a problem with Russia).<br><br>Some of my Russia-related assumptions have proven wrong and, sadly, I am ready to consider the possibility that some of the accusations saying that 'some of these talking heads have a rather formal arrangement with Russia' could have been true, after all.<br><br>P.S.: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-putin-warns-pro-western-traitors-ukraine-1.6386960">Putin's speech about the traitors and fifth column in Russia</a> that the large country will spit out as if they were flies that accidentally fly into one's mouth was utterly terrifying. I think that tens of millions of sensible Russians need to look for ways to escape this new Stalinist Gulag Archipelago. Their lives are otherwise at risk. Serbia's main airlines have also stopped the traffic. You just need to find ways to travel to Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, or other countries, look at the map.<br><br>Shortly after the terrifying Stalinist speech, Roman Gavrilov, the #2 man in the Russian National Guard, was arrested by the FSB. He either "leaked some information" that led to a loss of resources (lots of his troops were absorbed by the Ukrainian soil); according to other sources, he was "wasting fuel". A third source claims that he took Putin's last lentilky (M&M's) (just kidding, Nestlé is still selling in Russia, too).Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-22696416483544976462022-03-16T07:01:00.016+01:002022-03-16T11:03:34.569+01:00A bold trip to KievThe First World War started by the 1914 assassination of the prospective Austrian emperor in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The Second World War pre-started by the March 15th, 1939 occupation of rest-of-Czechia. What about the third one? Was there a risk of hybridization of the previous two scenarios (assassination from the first one combined with the date of the second one)?<br><br><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="cs" dir="ltr">Dnešní cesta do Kyjeva s premiéry <a href="https://twitter.com/MorawieckiM?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MorawieckiM</a> a <a href="https://twitter.com/JJansaSDS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JJansaSDS</a> a vicepremiérem Jaroslawem Kaczyńským za ukrajinským prezidentem <a href="https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ZelenskyyUa</a> a premiérem <a href="https://twitter.com/Denys_Shmyhal?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Denys_Shmyhal</a>. <a href="https://t.co/AzT03Gi19G">pic.twitter.com/AzT03Gi19G</a></p>— Petr Fiala (@P_Fiala) <a href="https://twitter.com/P_Fiala/status/1503770123752120335?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 15, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br><em>Czech PM, a professor of political science, was planning the route in between the Russian artillery. According to <a href="https://twitter.com/MorawieckiM/status/1503782996444340224">Morawiecki's photo</a>, it was Morawiecki who did the thinking, however LOL.</em><br><br>While 3 million out of the 45 million inhabitants of Ukraine (1/15=6.7%) escaped their homeland, 3+1 politicians decided to go <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z8FQSRq61A">against the storm</a>. They took a train to Kiev to meet the Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal and the dude that Russia has turned into the ultimate superstar, President Volodymyr Zelensky.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />To minimize the risk of death, they wisely decided not to fly. Lots of Ukrainians as well as people from their countries have demanded a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The (erroneous) removal of the aircraft by Ukrainian forces would be too likely and "logical". So they took a train. From the Polish town of <a href="https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?planovani-trasy&x=26.9390708&y=50.2329370&z=7&rc=u0oplxWLHUuSsvGxZpHG&rs=osm&rs=osm&ri=13159&ri=136390644&mrp=%7B%22c%22%3A111%7D&xc=%5B%5D&rwp=1%3BuBtVexWNyvu27lSxXLN-uFTFSkwHuGZp5xYmZvuHeOBx-G7suIBsnx-uOduJo5X3.9uMeZ3x-6kquNkZ7xZPLuuQT0PxZs0c&rut=1">Przemyśl near the border</a> to Kiev. They probably went through Lvov and the normal route would go through Zhytomyr but these days, it is safer to take a more Southern route, through Ternopil.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Aside from some assistants, the participants were: the Polish spiritual leader (the boss of the main party) Jaroslaw Kaczynski (whose twin brother Lech has died in the Smolensk air disaster while the active role of the Russians has never been either proven or disproven); and the Polish, Czech, Slovenian prime ministers Mateusz Morawiecki, Petr Fiala, Janez Janša. Among these four men, Czech PM Fiala is the only one who hasn't been branded a "populist" by the globalist, SJW-controlled, politically correct press before the war. And this makes me particularly impressed.<br><br>Fiala leads the centrist (formerly right-wing) party ODS founded by expresident Václav Klaus which I supported between 1991 and 2019 or so. There were roughly two main reasons why I didn't consider voting for Fiala's ODS in recent elections. About one-half of the reason is truly ideological; I just can't stand their unholy alliance with the far left and their causes including the insane green deal, some wokism, and stuff like that.<br><br>Another part of the reason why I hadn't voted for guys like Fiala is personal (and yes, the personal and ideological aspects overlap, sometimes in confusing ways). I just didn't have any respect towards them as politicians or human beings. They seemed like a bunch of self-serving, cowardly opportunists. Especially in the case of Fiala, the word "cowardly" was an important one for me. Well, I just erased it. This trip to meet Zelensky was extremely far from Fiala's normal, older cowardly image. It is probably not enough for me to actively support Fiala's ODS but a nontrivial part of this previously unimaginable move has been made.<br><br>Maybe, I wouldn't find enough courage to go there myself. Also, one may compare this brave trip to the attitude of former ("semi-populist") PM Babiš who joined the "Czechs are more important than Ukrainians" camp. Given the ongoing events in Ukraine, the care for Ukrainians is actually more important than the care for Czechs – because the Ukrainians suffer vastly more; and because their truly bad outcome could be a demonstration showing the future of other nations including ours.<br><br><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="cs" dir="ltr">Tisková konference Volodymyra Zelenského po setkání s <a href="https://twitter.com/P_Fiala?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@P_Fiala</a> a premiéry Polska a Slovinska.<br>CZ titulky <a href="https://t.co/vkV4tJ5ND5">pic.twitter.com/vkV4tJ5ND5</a></p>— Nikola Repin (@nikorepi) <a href="https://twitter.com/nikorepi/status/1503854545805402112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 15, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br><em>A piece of the press conference of Zelensky and his guests.</em><br><br>Roughly 100 civilians (out of 40 million) are killed in Ukraine every day and these 3+1 politicians could face a similar risk which is rather low (a much lower risk of death than Covid, for example). However, when all aspects are included, I think that such prime ministers (plus spiritual leader) had a much higher probability of being killed than average Ukrainian civilians. They had to move and they were attractive targets for many Russians who really hate the West (and some fraction of those must be present among the troops). Also, the risk of a friendly fire could be substantial.<br><br>If they were killed, that wouldn't automatically activate the NATO treaty's No. 5 article, NATO enters the war, but there would surely be huge pressures to enter the war, anyway. The risk was mainly personal for these men. At the end, I don't really believe that "behaving respectfully towards the Kremlin" reduces the probability of a world war now. Putin is attracted by a perceived weakness and this is one reason why he (erroneously) tried to invade Ukraine. Arguments that "we don't want to give Putin an excuse to escalate the war into a global conflict" seem completely wrong to me now because Putin already "has enough excuses". If he wanted to promote the conflict to a global one, he would have done so (or he will do so). Other countries have surely interfered with the war in some way and that's enough as a justification for his brainwashed voters (he has already exploited much lamer excuses for similar acts). So this "be respectful to Putin if you want to be safe" is just a dumb defeatist attitude that simply doesn't work now. NATO needs to decide whether it wants to directly attack Russia according to strategic considerations, not through a "respect to Putin" that won't be reciprocated.<br><br>The delegation came from three Slavic EU countries: PL, CZ, SI. There are three more Slavic countries in the EU: Slovakia, Croatia, and Bulgaria. I think it is not quite a coincidence that the last three countries (Slavic EU states that didn't go to Kiev) are exactly those whose "locally elected leaders" showed pro-Hitler attitudes around 1941-1944: don't forget the names Ustaše, Tiso, and Tsar Boris III plus PM Filov. ;-)<br><br>Also, the correlation with the "populists" is far from perfect; the pre-war "camps" have undoubtedly been seriously reshuffled. The Slovene and Polish PM may be "populists" but the Czech one is not (although any moderate enough Czech is surely insufficiently PC for the far leftists in Brussels now!). On top of that, the most famous "populist" in Europe, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, was extremely far from going to express his sympathies to Ukraine. Instead, he could be rather likely to do exactly the same to Russia. He still believes to have some special relationships with Putin but I think that the recent events make it clear that these ties wouldn't be enough to prevent a terrible treatment of the Hungarians by Russia in the hypothetical case that Russia is allowed to elaborate upon these war insanities while Hungary emerges as a neutral country outside alliances. As Trump – another quasi-friend of Putin's – said, Putin has changed and it is sad. All the optimistic expectations about Putin's gentlemanly behavior have to be revised. What's been happening since February 24th changes the moral evaluation of everyone, plus expectations, by an amount comparable to all the events in the previous 10-30 years combined. You should better update your priors. Orbán should better do the same.<br><br>Meanwhile, fighting continues in Ukraine and the Russian army hasn't substantially advanced anywhere for more than a week. It has conquered the Kherson Region, just North of Crimea (about the same size). But Kherson only has 300,000 people and the whole region has 1 million. This temporary occupation is the kind of a success that Russia has bought for 2-10% of its army that has been destroyed, plus some 20% of its GDP and the reserves? The economy of this war is insanely bad from the profit-seeking Russian point of view (but the destruction of Ukraine may be a great benefit for them by itself). Even if Russia were able to sacrifice its whole army – which it can't because most of it has a lot of work to maintain the safety in many other regions of Russia (and beyond), and it may soon be needed against uprisings across Russia, that army would only be enough for the temporary occupation of regions with ten or at most a few dozens of million of people. I wrote "temporary" because I find it very likely that even the Kherson Region will be hardly sustainable.<br><br>Ukraine is surely facing a stronger enemy when it comes to the number of tanks or aircraft so it is fighting an asymmetric war. But it is doing so wonderfully, with the help of the Javelins, Stingers, and Turkish drones. They seem to work impressively to basically label the Russian pride outdated and useless. On top of that, the individual Ukrainian warriors seem to do better.<br><br><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion">The Azov Batallion</a> seems to be the professional gem inside Ukraine's defense, whether you like them or not. The main folks who created this group in 2014 had been ultras (hardcore fans) of FC Metalist Kharkov – who used to be good friends with their counterparts in FC Spartak Moscow, to emphasize the irony. OK, these ultras have their typical opinions that you may know from your local clubs. Of course some Nazi-like hobbies are widespread. The Azov Batallion has absorbed lots of experienced warriors and tough guys who often like the ancient Ukrainian as well as Nazi symbols (but also things like the old Slavic Pagan religion, not exactly the hottest spiritual direction in the world of 2022: but e.g. Radegast would easily defeat Allahs and Zeuses, learn about Him). Whether their links to Nazism are genuine, official, legal, or acceptable have been questions "on the edge" in those 8 years.<br><br>Great. So the Azov Batallion members (a few thousand dudes who are much better at fighting than the rest) sometimes use Nazi or Bandera symbols. Big deal. In Russia, they sell this fact as a justification for the destruction of Ukraine, a country of 45 million. This propaganda is basically the same as that of the SJWs who also think that if they call someone a "Nazi", that person is totally damned and canceled. Well, he's not. A person, e.g. an Azov Batallion fighter, may like symbols of the German Nazis but he still isn't personally responsible for the Holocaust or any other serious crime, for that matter. In that way, they differ from the Russian troops who are surely co-responsible for the <em>ongoing</em> war crimes.<br><br>On top of that, the automatic assumption that "everyone on the side of the Nazi symbols" is the bad guy while the Russians are always the good guys – the best anti-Nazi warriors – is extremely fishy by themselves (at least all sane people outside Russia must realize that it is). When integrated over time, Hitler and Stalin (and their regimes) have killed about the same number of people, they were totally comparable packages of evil. During the Second World War, Hitler just seemed like a more urgent, more fatal, faster danger, and this is why the peaceful and democratic nations teamed up with the Soviet Union. But they had to choose a "lesser evil" and there is no law saying that "among two people, the person closer to Stalin is always a better person than the person closer to Hitler, relatively speaking". In many individual situations, the moral evaluation could have been the opposite one even in 1941-1945. And it's particularly the case in 2022, some 8 decades later, when "Russia" and "Nazi symbols" stand for very different events and attitudes than they used to during the Second World War. At any rate, whoever swallows this Russian (or SJWs') propaganda that "being labeled a Nazi is enough for him to be canceled" is an evil braindead pile of šit.<br><br><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Azov regiment destroyed a major-general of occupation troops in Mariupol. "Whoever comes to us with a sword will die by the sword!" - they wrote in the Azov account. <a href="https://t.co/kOSpLNOo5B">pic.twitter.com/kOSpLNOo5B</a></p>— Artur Petruk (@artur_petruk) <a href="https://twitter.com/artur_petruk/status/1503893378999767042?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br>Of course the Azov Batallion are the good guys now, relatively speaking. And while a founder of the Azov Batallion has been killed, they achieved many things in their main town, Mariupol (which is being treated this terribly especially because the "denazification" fights with the Azov Batallion heroes are taking place there). For example, this Russian major general, Mr Oleg Mityayev, wanted to meet the Azov Batallion members although he wasn't actually invited to Ukraine at all! That is a big mistake, Mr Oleg.<br><br>Like Hitler during the Second World War, Putin is simply a more urgent threat for all people outside his inner circle (and maybe even for that circle!) than all the other threats we discussed just a month ago. It's common sense that people and nations outside Russia have teamed up and try to neutralize this threat, ideally in a safe way – but at the end, it is not possible to do it in a completely safe way. I am proud that my country's PM is the only leader previously considered a babbling opportunist "pro-EU empty suit" who came to the dangerous trip with the – already demonstrably courageous and spineful – politicians. He and his counterparts showed the world that the friendly relationships between countries don't end just because a bunch of barbaric terrorists are terrorizing one of them. And it's good to see that the giant new shadow over Europe was enough to make e.g. some recent Czech-Polish skirmishes (the Turów coal mine) completely invisible and forgotten.<br><br><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="cs" dir="ltr">Šéf. Blížíme se domu! <a href="https://t.co/cL3M5Z6QYh">pic.twitter.com/cL3M5Z6QYh</a></p>— Václav Smolka (@SmolkaVa) <a href="https://twitter.com/SmolkaVa/status/1503990019173851138?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br><br><em>A normal prime minister's night. If they kill him now, at least it will already be March 16th, not 15th. Update: Around 10 am Prague Winter Time, on Wednesday, they were safely in Poland.</em>Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-54187032978008809872022-03-15T06:39:00.002+01:002022-03-15T06:43:04.215+01:00CMS: a new excess indicating a novel \(2.9\TeV\) boson<span class="isolimg"><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/CMS_logo.JPG/640px-CMS_logo.JPG" width=144 align="left"></span>This is a super short text about a fresh CMS paper at the LHC, <blockquote><b><a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/2803845/files/B2G-20-009-pas.pdf">Search for new heavy resonances decaying to \(WW\), \(WZ\), \(ZZ\), \(WH\), or \(ZH\) boson pairs in the all-jets final state in proton-proton collisions at \(\sqrt{s} = 13\TeV\)</a></b></blockquote>which found some excesses for the masses of the new boson around \(2.1\TeV\) and \(2.9\TeV\), respectively. Each of them is quantified to be a respectable 3.6 sigma locally and 2.3 sigma globally. See e.g. Figure 3 on page 9 (11 of 19 in the PDF) for some charts.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />What is cool is that in January, I reported another <a href="https://motls.blogspot.com/2022/01/cms-another-bump-at-29tev.html?m=1">excess at \(2.9\TeV\)</a> and pointed out that I had known about 2-3 previous ones, too.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />This concentration of evidence near this mass is rather interesting although it is not enough to be classified as a discovery yet (which would still be rather likely to be a spuriour discovery for a while, before the evidence gets really strong).<br><br>Aside from <a href="https://motls.blogspot.com/2022/03/vertex-algebra-of-one-free-boson.html?m=1">an excess two blog posts ago</a>, I saw another paper with some interesting deviations in the package of about 20 LHC preprints that I quick-reviewed in the recent week. I am mentioning this fact because "the high number of papers I have looked at" means that you do expect some of them to have a "relatively high global significance" just by chance because the word "global" in the previous quotes isn't quite global – it is not "globalized" with respect to all possible channels or papers yet.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-27121923401252972942022-03-14T13:50:00.013+01:002022-03-15T08:21:44.871+01:00Genealogy: instead of Ukrainian, my German percentage jumpedThe amount of data and (usually heartbreaking) news to follow in recent weeks was high and the war in Ukraine has also allowed me to learn something new about the maternal side of my ancestors. That was relevant because for decades, I have known that my maternal grandmother was born in... Kiev... although she moved to Czechia as a kid.<br><br>So am I really 1/4-Ukrainian, I have been asking again? For years, the answer – mostly from my mother – was a resounding No. And after some extra details, this answer seems valid to me, assuming some biological identity. But the percentage of my German DNA went up.<br><br>OK, my parents are M.M. and J.M., née Ko. My father's father (paternal grandfather) was František M., a worker in Škoda Works. His wife, my grandma whom I remember well, had the name Jiřina M. but what is more impressive was her maiden name. She was born as Miss Führer (Führerová with the Czech feminine suffix). How many of you can brag about this name? Everyone has always considered her Czech but she had to get the impressive surname in some way, right? Was her father, my great grandfather, already fully German or 1/2-German? Or something else?<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />My maternal side is more accessible to me today. My grandfather (my 1/4) was František Ko., of course I remember him well, an academic painter and a high school teacher. His father (my great grandfather whom I never met) worked in the railways, I believe.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />It's my mother's mother's (my 1/4) line that got much more detailed hours ago. Helena Ko. was born in Kiev as Helena Glos[ová]. That name Glos doesn't sound too Czech but <a href="https://forebears.io/surnames/glos">the map</a> indicates that Czechia is actually a top spot where it can be found. Is it "other Slavic" or "Germanic"? It can be both. In German, Glos may be a variation of Klaus. In Polish, however, Glos may arise independently as the Polish word for "voice" ("hlas" in Czech). For some reason, Germany, Poland, and Czechia are accompanied by Jordan where Glos is widespread, probably for other reasons.<br><br>My mother's mother's father (my 1/8) was called Josef Glos (*1874 Lipník Upon Bečva) and he traded flour. His brothers Anton and Jan were a judge and a bureaucrat, respectively. Josef (and Anton's, Jan's) Glos' father was also called Josef Glos (my 1/16). Josef Glos Jr (my 1/8) got married with Theresia Schorcht (*1881, my 1/8). Now, Theresia Schorcht doesn't quite contribute 1/8 to my German fraction. Her father (my 1/16) was Richard Schorcht, a decorative smith (old Czech: "cizelér") who moved from Germany to Austria's Czechia (German genes); but he married Miss Lapáčková from Komárov near Hořovice (my 1/16) which sounds as Czech as you can get.<br><br>My great grandfather worked in a bank (not sure whether that job overlapped with the flour trading) and was sent to its Kiev subsidiary around 1909-1917 when the 3 kids were born, Yasha, Helena, and Věra. Yasha is the only male one. It sounds totally East Slavic but it may really be just a Ukrainian-Russian variation of Joachim (CZ: Jáchym); update: he had just "Josef" in his documents, was always called Jáša, and later in his life, by someone, Jožka. Helena was my grandma. Ironically, between 1917-1920, right after the Bolshevik Coup, my great grandfather worked in... Moscow as a... sales representative. The very fact that Lenin allowed sales representatives sounds surprising to me. ;-) Theresia died in 1954, her husband Josef Glos in 1964 in Prague.<br><br>My great grandfather Josef Glos also had an illegitimate son Rudolf in Prague's Lesser Town (Rudolf's mother's identity is a mystery) whose lifestyle looks cool, and my great grandfather Josef Glos apparently maintained a lover in Moscow whom he regularly visited.<br><br>OK, that maternal side looks like an upper society, more than what I thought. While my paternal grandparents were a worker and a maid, respectively (the first occupations), I can actually find some nontrivial landlords there, too. You can see that Theresia Schorcht (my 1/8) was 1/2-German, after her father, so this contributes 1/16 to my German fraction. I suspect that roughly 1/16 is also added by both Glos and Führer (which would make me roughly 3/16 German) but I will probably remain ignorant about all these details.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-52250962627742557482022-03-12T12:09:00.004+01:002022-03-12T19:58:30.955+01:00Vertex algebra of one free boson<blockquote> <b>LHC excesses</b>: <a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/2803669/files/EXO-21-010-pas.pdf?version=1">this new CMS paper</a> studied four-jet final states (I looked at 5-10 other papers in recent days). There are two events at \(8\TeV\) as the (very high) four-jet invariant mass, producing a 3.9/1.6 sigma local/global excess. The dijet mass has a peak at \(950\GeV\), just like in this <a href="https://motls.blogspot.com/2016/03/lhc-some-new-weak-deviations-from.html?m=1">ATLAS search</a>, and the local/global excess (see Figure 11) is 3.6/2.5 sigma! </blockquote>Before <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/EdwinSteiner/videos">his channel</a> is going to return to his series about the foundations of quantum mechanics, Edwin Steiner posted a new video on the vertex algebra of one free boson two days ago.<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uukBDltkDz0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br>It should be fun to watch.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />He announces to cover:<br><br>0:00 Introduction<br>1:40 Bosonic field<br>4:00 Preview of topics<br>9:56 What is a field?<br>16:50 Periodic compactification of space<br>21:44 The action<br>27:14 The principle of stationary action<br>30:15 Equation of motion<br>38:36 Conclusion<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Of course, there are the standard issues of "free field theory on a spacetime" – the action or the Lagrangian, the Hamiltonian, the equivalence of free fields to an infinite-dimensional harmonic oscillators, the spectrum, commutators of fields, Green's functions, some subsets.<br><br>But then there are all the special things that are relevant (not only) for string theory: the conformal transformations to the cylinder, the equivalence of the path integral on a punctured plane and that of a cylinder, the state-operator correspondence and the construction of vertex operators for given states and vice versa, changing the boundary conditions, twist fields, the calculation of the ground state energy (the sum of integers is -1/12), the calculation of the dimension of the twist field operator, T-duality and Buscher duality (electromagnetic duality on the world sheet, a chiral part of the spacetime reflection), the partition sum on a torus, modular invariance, open strings, Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions, their T-duality, D-branes, and so on.<br><br>Of course, with this list, the length of the video would get way beyond the 39 minutes of Edwin's video. After all, a significant fraction of perturbative string theory – which I still consider a significant portion of the reliable machinery of string theory – is rather close to special topics involving a free boson.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-88036120179055146762022-03-12T07:15:00.017+01:002022-03-12T19:19:04.611+01:00Russia is destroying capitalism just like it's 1917The murderous behavior of the Russian government on the Ukrainian territory is the most heartbreaking aspect of the new rogue state's behavior since February 24th. But the internal changes in Russia are rapid and brutal, too. People have lost their basic freedoms, like the freedom to prefer peace over war (and many men's freedom not to fight in a useless war may be even worse), and the military dictatorship threatens everyone – and for something like one-half of the Russians, the threats are damn real.<br><br><img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRwFWrX9D0hBmF3KMx17a--Ubxr7Fq94edV-Q&usqp=CAU"><br><br>On top of that, capitalism is ceasing to exist and Russia is switching back to a variation of communism.<br><br>First, on Saturday, February 26th, the third day of the war, the Moscow stock exchange decided not to open on the following Monday (during the first two days of the war, the dollar-based <a href="https://www.investing.com/indices/rtsi">RTS index</a> dropped from 1200 to 900; the ruble-based <a href="https://www.investing.com/equities/moskovskaya-birzha-oao">MOEX index</a> dropped from 125 to 95). Two weeks later, the Russian stocks still cannot be traded. The probability is increasing that this situation will be permanent. Just the very fact that the even in the ruble basis, the index drops over 50% (?) on the first open day, would probably be so damaging to the public opinion that the authoritarian rulers will prefer to keep the stock exchange closed permanently (various global indices have written the Russian stocks off, as having zero or near-zero value). The central bank announced that the market won't open before March 21st, they are already delaying things by whole weeks.<br><br>Try to imagine that you are a normal pro-capitalist Russian dude who assumed that Russia was basically a capitalist country like others and who naturally owns a lot of Russian stocks (and if I were Russian, I would probably belong to this set).<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Hundreds of foreign companies completely stopped their business in Russia (which affects imports to Russia, including components; exports from Russia; and production and services in Russia) and this boycott had to be expected. I think that the planners of the war worked inside a simple mental picture. Sure, there would be a new iron curtain but Russia can do without the West and its companies – Medvedev said it explicitly days before the full-fledged war started. After all, Russia may rely on China, the reasoning goes, which produces almost everything these days.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />But is it really this simple? Needless to say, I think that this is a reasoning of a financially illiterate communist moron and one of my disappointments was to see how many of these communist morons operate in Russia, including the Russian government.<br><br>First of all, even the "Chinese loophole" is seriously flawed. Even if China could replace the West in "everything", which it cannot, it was still guaranteed that the ruble would weaken even relatively to the Chinese jüan. And indeed, the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=ruble+in+chinese+juan&oq=ruble+in+chinese+juan&aqs=edge..69i57.3134j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">ruble dropped from 0.084 to 0.047 renmimbi</a> in the recent month. So for Russians, it is massively more difficult to buy the Chinese phones and cars, too! A great majority of the Russian people who had just prepared barely enough money simply cannot buy what they have planned. I think that lots of the "capitalism and the West aren't needed" morons weren't capable of figuring even this simple point – the point that Russia won't be in the same situation as China because China isn't being boycotted (the Chinese subjects doing trade with Russia should be, that could make a really big difference).<br><br>Because the Western and similar companies stopped their operations, Russia immediately lost some products and services, components, and some millions of jobs have disappeared, too. Because the economy is interconnected and lots of companies require every single company in a list of suppliers to remain operational, this breakdown of the economic activity is going to spread further to the economy like a domino. The Kremlin is nearly silent about this ongoing economic catastrophe and when it is not, what is the solution? Let us just nationalize (i.e. steal) the foreign-owned companies which don't "work" now.<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7aoPnN74iLs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br><em>Two Russian women, by Ivan Mládek</em><br><br>Great. The Russian Federation has already turned into the most brutal criminal organization in the world. For example, its armed thugs came to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, one in Energodar, and shot at it (obviously, this violates the Geneva Convention, it is a war crime). Roughly yesterday, when the Russian control seemed complete, the employees were told that the power plant now belonged to Rosatom (instead of the Ukrainian Energoatom). Cool! Why didn't they say that the 6 GW power plant suddenly belongs to Putin's daughter? (This nuclear power plant could cost about $50 billion to be built now, a nice theft, indeed.) With this kind of a thief's spirit, it is common sense that under its current or similar "leaders", Russia faces absolutely no moral obstacles before it steals any foreign assets it can steal, using an arbitrarily violent, criminal, or inhumane method. (I am pretty sure that if this insanity survives for months or years, it will have to be allowed outside Russia to shoot Russians without any repercussions, just like if they were any other overpopulated vermin in the forests. It is not clear to me how these criminals who are ready to do literally anything could still enjoy the civil rights as if they were human beings like us. They are clearly not. The probability that Russians will be useful instead of lethally dangerous for mankind is infinitesimal; they have already violated almost everything and can be trusted in nothing. I think it is clear that officially or unofficially, people will appreciate these facts and the only question will be about the safest and optimal method to clean the Earth from them.)<br><br>So it is reasonably likely that the criminal Russian "government" will steal all these foreign assets on the Russian territory and they will try to restore the "work" (when a bunch of thieves calls itself a "nation", they often use the word "nationalization" for their theft). People who want to "work" have the right to steal stuff from those who don't want to "work", the Russian "government" says (at least Putin could call himself a Caliph, like al-Baghdadi did). Needless to say, this way of talking is already taken straight from the Bolshevik 1917 playbooks. In the economy that works, it is not "just some work for its own sake" that matters. It is the damn profit and it is almost always a good thing. The companies sensibly interrupted their activities because they figured out that it was the less costly solution for them, it was the lesser evil. At this moment, their "work" would be loss-making, due to their crippled image in the larger markets that matter more, and due to the extra expenses needed to move the personnel or stuff between Russia and the world, and the increased expenses for the protection of their employees, plus the risk that what they will earn will be stolen by the petty criminals in the Kremlin, anyway. Also, the taxes they would pay in Russia would be largely used for destructive activities, possibly against themselves (or they could be held responsible for this funding of the Russian "government").<br><br>With their unmasked Bolshevik thinking, the Russian "leaders" don't seem to understand any of these basic things. They think that the "work for its own sake" is a good thing. But that is a difference between capitalism and communism. Capitalism encourages the cooperative work that normally brings benefits to both sides of a transaction, and therefore to the whole. Communism encourages "work" that a clueless, authoritarian, naive, corrupt, self-serving ruler (just one third party that shouldn't participate in the decisions at all) decides to be "the right thing" for naive ideological reasons. Capitalism has adjusted lots of the mechanisms in the economy which often produce just a small but positive profit margin and it works; lots of the competing companies and mechanisms that failed to make the profit had to stop the business, and this "creative destruction" was a good thing, too. <br><br>When a tiny elephant enters the room that is full of china, like Putin, all these fine balances are ruined. Even if they could emulate the fine economic flows that the profitable companies maintained a month ago, this ability won't last because there won't be a real market that constantly self-adjusts. The "government" doesn't actually know how to manage all these companies with their thousands of degrees of freedom in a changing world to "keep the whole thing useful". A communist government doesn't allow the "creative destruction". A communist government has to subsidize a huge fraction of the economic subjects and once the subjects find out that they can get something without the work, as a subsidy that the Kremlin decides is needed to "save the national economy", they are bound to abuse it. Communism is completely corrupt, rotten to the core. It just doesn't work and whoever hasn't gotten this elementary point is a financially illiterate moron stuck at the level of a retarded kid in the kindergarten.<br><br>In 1917 and even 1948, when various communist systems were taking over, the economy was simpler, it had much less structured chains of suppliers, a big portion of it were commodities (including the agricultural ones) and several standardized simple products, and these things were described by a relatively small number of degrees of freedom that could have been reasonably centrally planned. Communist countries didn't really give any "major innovation" to the world but they could partly emulate "what the capitalists were doing" so that the capitalism was only 5-20 years ahead. However, the agriculture has dropped to a small fraction of the GDP and the rest got extremely complex and sensitive (and demanding very good managers – selected after some nontrivial contests and achievements, not through ideological work – who are sometimes rightfully paid huge salaries). You just cannot easily transfer all these activities to central planners who couldn't even predict that even the Chinese products would become much more expensive for the Russians.<br><br>On top of that, the modern economy has much more effective methods to create imbalances. People know how to short sell things and although these capitalist activities are gradually banned in Russia as Russia is brutally quickly destroying its capitalist system, they can still be emulated in some informal ways. Also, the availability of mass communication makes it easier to spark panic buying and similar phenomena. In Kamchatka (in the Far East where lots of products are only brought by airplanes), people are stockpiling food and limits have already been established for the purchase of flour and some other things.<br><br>In a system that manipulates profits as well as prices, like the nightmare that the Russian "government" wants to build now, the automatic adjustments of prices and behaviors that prevent shortages are basically canceled, so shortages are bound to happen, just like they did during communism. That is also why the panic buying may be very rational in very many situations. But it is not just rational. Because these rumors act as self-fulfilling prophesies, the panic buying also has the effect of producing the shortages earlier, and producing more brutal shortages.<br><br>But in a modern economy including the pre-war Russian economy, the food is just a small portion of the GDP. The rest of the economy is almost impossible to govern centrally (especially not by the people who couldn't even see that 150,000 Russian soldiers couldn't have been enough for a Blitzkrieg in Ukraine), is also vulnerable towards stockpiling, and the stockpiling has an even more destructive effect because a typical complex product or service depends on many components or their suppliers. (Some of the shortages are guaranteed to cause problems globally, e.g. 2 Ukrainian companies produce 50% of the world's neon, and that is needed for chips, but the market economies still have ways to circumvent and adapt to these problems.) In effect, I find it extremely likely that after the hypothetical theft of all the foreign "means of production", Russia will only be capable of producing a very limited spectrum of products.<br><br>The expected 20% drop in the GDP in 2022 may be bad but it is not the worst thing. It is the medium- and long-term expectation for the GDP growth rate, it is the trend, that is more damning for Russia's future. Unless Russia restores the capitalist relationships in the bulk of its economy, including the protection of the ownership rights (and the rights of owners to do what they find appropriate with the assets, including the suspension of the activity when it doesn't add up), most of the pre-war Russian economy will be erased because most of the pre-war Russian economy sensitively depends on the fine capitalist self-adjusting mechanisms that are being bombarded these days, along with Ukraine. We may expect negative growth rates for many years.<br><br>Communism and dictatorship are terrible things because they allow the completely wrong people – clueless people, evil people, or both – to control things that they shouldn't be influencing at all if the system were optimized to increase the satisfaction of the people. Russia is in the process of destroying its "brotherly" Ukraine and these pictures make us sick to our stomachs very directly. But somewhat less directly and less spectacularly, Russia is also destroying itself. Because of its aggressive invasion, we often compare Russia to the Third Reich but it won't be too accurate internally because Nazi Germany still worked as a "mostly capitalist economy with a somewhat inflated role played by the capitalists' personal relationships to the top Nazis". Internally, Russia is transforming into a hybrid of the Islamic State and North Korea and the more self-evident it will be that this is an extremely bad idea to elaborate upon, the more aggressive the evil and clueless people will be in harassing or expelling the Russians who have the ability to make Russia's future bright but they won't be given the opportunity to do so.<br><br>If the rest of the world accepts this self-destruction of Russia, it should also invent some ideas to absorb, exploit, and reward the Russians who are both skillful and ethically clean. The West has used lots of "soft sticks" but it simply needs to use some highly targeted "carrots", too.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-63376118834203402022022-03-10T18:45:00.010+01:002022-03-10T19:27:06.357+01:00Comparing real UA refugees to the fake Muslim onesEspecially in 2015, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel shocked all sensible people in the West with her "we can do that" – meaning "we can just screw Europe by inviting and importing millions of Muslims into Europe, in order to give everyone a hard time". Virtually all these people were economic migrants, they have affected the societies largely negatively because most of them never had the intent to integrate (and the sometimes spectacular extra terrorist attacks were just a tip of an iceberg!), and there has been a huge campaign to force all EU member countries to swallow their fraction of the migrants.<br><br><a href="https://brnenska.drbna.cz/zpravy/spolecnost/23720-ukrajinske-deti-nasly-v-brne-zajmove-krouzky-i-pomoc-s-cestinou.html"><img src="https://brnenska.drbna.cz/files/drbna/images/page/2022/03/09/size4-16468277234898-60-brnane-pomahaji-ukrajincum-s-cestinou-i-hlidanim-deti.jpg" width=407></a><br><br><em>These are supercute and apparently curious and eager to do useful things and it's not always like that but it may be more often than we think. Ukrainian TV stations started to broadcast in Czechia, some regions created special Ukrainian classrooms, others integrated the kids, and there are afternoon clubs for the kids and other things.</em><br><br>The 2015 migration wave was huge and 1.3 million people requested the asylum in our continent. We were afraid of additional years like that, or even more brutal ones, but those worries didn't materialize. Fast forward to 2022. The new migration wave was started by Vladimir Putin, not Angela Merkel, whose quirky acts are even further beyond our control than Merkel's used to be. Just in the two weeks, some 2.5 million Ukrainians fled the country (twice the number of the refugees in the whole famous 2015 wave) and they are damn real refugees. Ukrainian cities are being bombarded by murderous savages from an upsized copy of the Islamic State (in particular, from the Zombie Soviet Union), most of the businesses and trade don't work, there is a serious risk that inhabitants in sieged cities run out of water, electricity, food (those things are already happening in Mariupol and elsewhere), or they lose the ability to escape. I won't discuss the terrible things that are taking place in Ukraine. Whoever hasn't noticed these almost unprecedetend heartbreaking stories will think that those are just some analogies of his dumb conspiracy theories and pre-2022 talking points – and I have already seen that quite a lot of TRF readers whom I have considered decent humans have nothing to do with decent humans.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />In 2015 and in the years after that, the EU national governments were pressured by the EU apparatchiks and many Western European leaders to take their tens of thousands of Muslims (or more) and it was clear that the actual goal of this was not to help but for everyone to signal their obedience to the SJWs of the world, including George Soros personally. You can see that things work very differently when the refugees are real and they actually need some help.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />The first difference is that these people are actually saving their skin so they are not planning where they want to go. The fake Muslim "refugees" were "saving their lives" by sharing the belief that the only good destination is "true Germany" somewhere in North Rhine-Westphalia and by carefully moving up to this destination. ;-) On the other hand, the Ukrainian refugees are real ones, they are saving their skin, and they naturally go to the first country outside the invaded one, usually by trains or cars. What are these countries?<br><br>It's primarily Poland, with some 1.4 million new refugees. Even as a percentage, that approaches 4% of the population. Hungary, a neighbor of Ukraine, got over 200,000, and so did my Czech homeland (about 2%). Slovakia got some 150,000 (3%), Romania 85,000 (0.5%) and Moldoova 85,000 (3%). Russia got just 100,000 (0.07% of Russia's population), Belarus 765 (0.02%), and the median of Western European countries is something like 10,000 (0.1% or so).<br><br>As you can see, the percentages are vastly non-uniform. But there is another difference here. Unlike Germany after 2015, the countries that are absorbing these real refugees aren't whining and demanding pan-European quotas, either. It is almost unavoidable that in similar real emergencies that produce real refugees, the percentages are bound to be totally non-uniform. Anything that leads to uniform results isn't an emergency; it is a carefully designed social engineering plan to harm European countries whose masterminds like Mr Soros deserve roughly the same punishment as Mr Putin.<br><br>The third major difference is that unlike almost all the Muslims, many of the Ukrainian women actively say that they do want to fit in and sort of assimilate because that's what good refugees simply should try. As a package, the whole "lifestyle" and values in Ukraine+Russia sort of failed, and it's a good opportunity to try something else.<br><br>The Ukrainian refugees may choose the country to some extent. It may be attractive for some to go to a much richer countries (all EU countries are obviously richer than Ukraine, on the per capita basis, but some are vastly richer) but it may be a wrong idea because the very rich countries may treat the Ukrainians worse than garbage (which is what the Britons were said by many Ukrainian refugees to be doing).<br><br>One day ago, I saw the regional center that accepts the refugees in Pilsen (near the old socialist monstrous Prior mall). Over 700 new refugees go through this facility and there are roughly 15 such centers in Czechia. They have to wait for as much as 12 hours in Pilsen although the time was said to be just 3 hours a few days ago. One-quarter of the Ukrainians in Czechia go through the Prague facility, in the Congress Palace.<br><br>A day or two days ago, the government was self-confident that "we can manage that", especially when it comes to the housing capacities. Things already look a less certain now. The Ukrainians keep on arriving, the hotels already look too expensive for the regional governments (because it seems clear that our guests will be here for much more than a week), and some private volunteers are canceling their offers (and an even smaller number tries to get rid of the refugees who have already lived in their real estate: be sure that the co-existence is more likely to produce some tension than the co-existence of two random Czechs). On the other hand, the Czech economy – with the unemployment rate around 3.5%, lowest in Europe – is absolutely thirsty for new workers and (unlike the Muslim migrants) many of the Ukrainians want to work. In Ukraine, many were working for $200 and in Prague, some of them may get $2,000 per month. The Czech numbers belong to another league and surely many people feel some excitement.<br><br>The "older" group of 100,000 Ukrainians in Czechia were basically guest workers or economic migrants. Now they're enriched by the extra 200,000 refugees and the community should better feel as a single one because the last thing we need is some internal tension in between migrants of the same ethnic group.<br><br>While this task is an extensive one and the number of refugees may triple according to some estimates, many people who organize it still feel that "this is the kind of task that we can still solve" and we don't really need to "get rid" of our Ukrainian guests and send them somewhere to Western Europe where they could be badly treated. In Czechia, it helps that they speak a Slavic language. In particular, it may be easier for the Ukrainian kids to learn Czech although I find it obvious that at least for months if not a year, we need to make things work – so Ukrainian speakers and texts must be everywhere. No one should be expected to speak Czech in a week, not even a few months, although I am pretty sure that many of these Ukrainian folks actually get capable of communicating in Czech after some months. The schools should not only allow Ukrainian but the Czech principals should learn the Ukrainian system, adapt to it, and take it as their starting point (although I believe that they may improve many things "locally"). The guest kids must be exposed to a minimum amount of chaos. And I think that the Czechs officials agree. They respect the 11-year mandatory schooling in Ukraine (instead of our 8-year-long elementary schools), the Ukrainian composition of subjects, and other things. It is the Czechs responsible for such things who must mainly learn and work hard, not 100,000 kids!<br><br>Note that in Czechia, over 50% of the refugees (100,000) are children, and 75% of the adults are female (75,000); yes, the rest, 25% (25,000), are male. The adult female-male gap is 50,000 people. So these 50,000 corresponding men may be somewhere in Ukraine, potentially preparing to join the conflict. The total number of refugees from Ukraine is about 10 times those in Czechia, so it is plausible that 500,000 Ukrainian men are in Ukraine, while the women and kids have left, and quite some fraction of these 500,000 men may have chosen a more risky residence than the women because they do plan to fight.<br><br>The other EU countries don't need to get any big fraction of the refugees. Sometimes, money is just enough and even these needs may be limited because most of the adult Ukrainians may very well be employed within a week and they won't really need any subsidies. Everyone who is doing some useful things – especially people who can build or invent some temporary housing (I mean something cheaper than fancy villas but better than the floor of the Kiev subway!) – should try to make an offer to the countries with the large number of refugees, and make their government pay for it. Aside from the housing, we may face shortages of some other things, things are evolving wildly.<br><br>Aside from the Covid hysteria, global warming hysteria, and some other overhyped or utterly non-existent problems, the war may have ended the stupid games to deliberately Islamize Europe. We really can't afford such artificial self-inflicted injuries now. The countries which take the largest numbers of the Ukrainian refugees – and not accidentally, the Visegrád Group (PL+HU+CZ+SK) is pretty much exactly the leading group – should get some financial support from the EU plus the assurances that we're working hard on our real refugee homework exercise – and we won't be bothered with homework exercises involving fake refugees in the future.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-80979711140529229972022-03-10T04:16:00.011+01:002022-03-10T05:51:34.357+01:00Has Putin rid us of covid?<b><a href="https://www.klaus.cz/clanky/4882">By Czech ex-president Václav Klaus</a></b><br><br><a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/world/russia-central-asia/article/3081155/coronavirus-pandemic-puts-russias-strongman-putin" rel="nofollow"><img src="https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1098,format=auto/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2020/04/23/62edc8a6-8484-11ea-8863-2139a14b0dea_image_hires_114317.jpg?itok=6u-1iBN5&v=1587613409" width=407></a><br><br>It is impossible to joke about Putin's insane war in Ukraine. However, the ironic line running around the internet that Putin deserves the Nobel Prize in Medicine because he has rid us of covid is not entirely off the mark. Of course, he has not rid us of covid, but he has rid us of the constant reports of covid, the constant shots of vaccinations and testing. He has caused us to do what we have long demanded – to treat covid as a normal disease to be treated normally. <a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />It is embarrassing that it was Putin's aggression that caused this, not the arguments of many rational people. It should have been obvious to any thinking person long ago. Only our "great" epidemiologists and virologists – and the politicians who exploit their conclusions – did not make it clear. Yet they still make us wear face masks and keep the required "distance". That many of our epidemiologists claimed that blanket measures do not work and that they recommended that vulnerable groups of people should be targeted was ostentatiously ignored. They wanted to look like heroes of blanket measures, measures that are ineffective and extremely costly.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Putin's aggression has covered up the problem of covid in our country to some extent, but America has gotten ahead of us. On the day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, America's key institution on these matters, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), announced that it was changing the way it evaluates and monitors Covid-19. Its director, Rochelle Paula Walenski, unexpectedly announced that "given the high immunity of the public ... we need to focus our efforts on high-risk groups," which is very reminiscent of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, which we discussed in our book "Reason Against the Covid Scare" (published in February 2021).<br><br>The CDC has decided to take into account "three types of information – new hospitalizations with covid, the number of hospital beds with covid patients, and new cases of covid" when assessing the covid situation as of February 25, 2022. This is, of course, not revolutionary. But they have not yet used hospitalizations with covid and covid bed occupancy in their calculations and assessments of the situation in the US. As a result, the epidemic map of America has completely changed – from the dominance of the red color of each part of the US (high danger) to the green color (low danger).<br><br>There was no change in the number of cases of covid, but only and exclusively in the calculation methodology followed by this US government agency (it is a US federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services) in the previous two years. We, too, have experienced various changes in the calculation methodology (anyone else remember PES, our DOG?), and no one in our country has apologized for that either. Covid is behaving according to itself and not according to the formulas we use to talk about its epidemic. Reason – as opposed to covid panic – should finally start winning out.<br><br><a href="https://neviditelnypes.lidovky.cz/politika/politika-zbavil-nas-putin-covidu.A220309_100332_p_politika_wag">Václav Klaus</a>, Právo, 9 March 2022 <hr><br><em>Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)</em><hr><br><b>Covid news by LM:</b> <a href="https://www.czso.cz/csu/czso/obypz_cr">Fresh numbers</a> (which were updated for the first time in 5 weeks) show that in both weeks 3-4 (January 17-30) of 2022 (bright blue curve), the total number of deaths in Czechia was below the 2015-2019 average once again! From the beginning of 2022 or so, the total number of deaths is about what it should be (and the excess was already tolerable in the second part of December; the peak of deaths was week 48 of 2021, Nov 29-Dec 5) but we're still tortured with the anti-some Covid policies in mid March. From Monday, March 14th, we will get rid of the face masks in shops but the face masks in mass transportation (and, perhaps more reasonably, in hospitals) will continue for additional weeks. Thankfully, there hasn't been any testing or vaccination duty in restaurants etc. for a month or so - and basically no one has dared to defend vaccination mandates in that recent month.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-14080455777048899182022-03-09T12:54:00.002+01:002022-03-09T12:54:15.026+01:00Post-war Ukraine should be divided to duchies co-governed by European countriesUkraine has been offered some kind of a candidate status in the EU but it seems clear to me that most of this gestures are just about the virtue signalling and the opposition would be huge. There are many good reasons why Europeans might not want to have the heroic nation in the same union. First, if there were unresolved territorial disputes with Russia, they could threaten the EU existentially. Second, Ukraine is a poor country and it could easily become a black hole sucking lots of money. Third, Ukrainians may have lots of bad habits that they could also impose on the EU which could lead to bad decisions in other countries, too. In quite some fraction of these decisions, I think that Ukraine would actually be right but that is another story.<br><br><iframe style="border:none" src="https://en.frame.mapy.cz/s/lenutolaku" width="400" height="280" frameborder="0"></iframe><br><br>The governments in European countries are bad and the EU is much worse. But the Ukrainians saw clearly that there exists another alternative way to manage their country that is worse than the EU by orders of magnitude: the Russian management. We are using the official term "fraternal help" for the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia as a joke of a sort because everyone knows that it has greatly harmed my homeland. However, compared to what the Russians did to their really close brothers in Ukraine, the 1968 invasion was a fraternal help, indeed.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Great. I think that most Ukrainians would like some association with the EU but the straight membership will probably be vetoed. Also, the EU is incapable of managing a country of this size (or a single water closet, for that matter). Ukraine should be divided to regions (unions of current Oblast) and those should adopt all domestic laws of their supervising EU country.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Here you have the regions (Oblasts) of Ukraine:<br><br><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305677308/figure/fig2/AS:388803714928642@1469709437775/Average-monthly-wage-euros-in-PPP-in-Ukrainian-regions-in-2014-Source-authorsown.png" rel="nofollow"><img src="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305677308/figure/fig2/AS:388803714928642@1469709437775/Average-monthly-wage-euros-in-PPP-in-Ukrainian-regions-in-2014-Source-authorsown.png" width=407></a><br><br>Czechia will obviously take the Transcarpathian Ukraine, the Czechoslovak management in 1918-1938 was the golden time of the region (Subcarpathian Ruthenia) so far. Now, Poland will take the Lvov and Volyn regions. Ivano-Frankivsk will be Bulgarian because they could like "Ivan", Ternopil goes to Romania because it sounds Romanian to me, Chernivstsi is Greek, Vinnytsya Spanish, Odessa Italian, Rivne+Zhytomyr+Kiev+Kiev_City will be administered by Germany. The remaining regions in the East will go to Scandinavian and a few other countries and France will have a band near the Russian border in the East because Macron is a Putin's pal (we don't know whether Ukraine will keep a part of the Donetsk and Luhansk Region, no part, or all of them; Crimea is likely to be confirmed as a Russian territory).<br><br>These regions will be called duchies (Герцогство, gertsogstvo), governed by a governor called Herzog who will be elected. The abbreviations will be UA-CZ, UA-PL, UA-DE etc. All defense, international affairs, and technical questions about the police will be administered in Kiev, by a standard national government of Ukraine. All economy-related and peacetime matters will be administered by the partner country. Ukrainian citizens with the residence chosen in UA-CZ will be given the status of the "associated citizen of Czechia" which will be almost the same as a citizen, with some exceptions.<br><br>The herzog/duke – elected as a party leader in the separate duchy elections – and a few colleagues in his or her council will be allowed to participate in the meetings of the governments of the partner EU country. The duchies will adopt the currency of the partner country. The partner country will administer all things like the land register, the directory of all companies, and all related administrative issues. The data from existing Ukrainian databases will be converted.<br><br>This rearrangement should allow companies to be built in Ukraine in a way that will be basically as straightforward as their creation in the EU. The so far cheap labor of Ukraine would be exploited almost immediately. Starting from January 2026, the least happy duchies would be transferred to some more successful ones. From January 2030, Ukraine should get reunified under some laws that approximate the most successful duchies, it should be reunified, and divided to more ordinary regions that will no longer be governed from abroad at all.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-18780951510461197092022-03-09T06:41:00.024+01:002022-03-10T06:05:57.918+01:00Czech hedgehogs and the power of symmetrySome experts claim that Russia – ignoring and overcoming the humiliation caused by the stuck convoy and other painful signs of incompetence, amateurism, and general inferiority of the Russian people and their organization – is preparing for an attack against Kiev in coming days. <br><br>Its population was 2.9 million before the war. Some people have fled. But yes, some people came to Kiev instead. The capital has turned into a kind of fortress and there may be half a million well-motivated defenders who want to send Russian invaders back to hell. Of course, some massive bombs may kill a big fraction of the people in the city – which could mean the murder of millions of people.<br><br><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Odessa ready for any Russians who make the mistake of entering their city. <a href="https://t.co/A88gzdVnVt">pic.twitter.com/A88gzdVnVt</a></p>— 🇺🇦 Ukrainian Glory Forever 🇺🇦 (@r_netsec) <a href="https://twitter.com/r_netsec/status/1500620031939342336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 6, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br>Like in Odessa and other cities, Kiev is decorated by thousands of <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_hedgehog">Czech hedgehogs</a></b>. I may have known the trivia in the past but I forgot. Only days ago, I learned once again that (only outside Czechia!) this anti-tank hedgehog-like obstacle is called "Czech" because the inventor was Czech. <a href="https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franti%C5%A1ek_Ka%C5%A1%C3%ADk">František Kašík</a> (<a href="https://www.denik.cz/galerie/rozsochac-alias-cesky-jezek-alias-zelezny-protitankovy-zataras.html?back=4143371223-36-1&photo=2">photo</a>) was a Czech Legionnaire who participated in the Russian Civil War (against the Bolshevik scum) and in the 1918 Russian Anabasis (transportation of tons of our troops to Siberia which we largely conquered but the primary goal was for all Czechoslovaks to get home ASAP, maybe these priorities were a bit myopic).<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Kašík's nice invention only came in the 1930s, however. His hedgehog was first used during the mobilization – after Germany announced it was planning to annex the Sudetenland which it later temporarily did. His design was actually chosen after a nontrivial Czechoslovak government-run contest of alternatives which included real experiments. Note that in Fall 1938 when we were betrayed by our ally France and its ally the U.K. (and pißed upon by Italy and of course Germany), the Czechoslovak Army was mobilized and lots of people were thrilled to fight against the Third Reich. But the orders to shoot never came because at most levels, the desire not to go to a likely loss, and the desire to preserve Czech lives and cities (for a while, at least), prevailed. Our Sudetenland gadgets (and, in March 1939, all military gadgets) were stolen by Germany. That included the hedgehogs and Germany found them helpful soon.<br><br>But the hedgehogs were also used as a visible part of our planned defense against Germany. Like our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=barrel+polka">Beer Barrel Polka</a> (the composer Jaromír Vejvoda earned a few dollars for this global megahit!), the catchy meme quickly became popular on both sides of the Second World War and used as a part of the defense in the urban combat. Russians used it to defend Russian (and Ukrainian!) cities; Germans have also used them against the Yankees in Normandy (much of the material was stolen by the U.S. and cleverly reshaped into U.S. tanks!). The history has returned, the Russian leaders brought us mentally back to 1943 or so, and it's time for Czech hedgehogs once again.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Before Kašík's invention, defenders were already trying to use some obstacles, of course. Most of them may be called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheval_de_frise">Cheval de Frise</a> (French for "Frisian horse") although a somewhat newer variation of it is the "Spanish rider", click for more details.<br><br><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/Cheval_de_frise_petersburg_civil_war_02598.jpg/400px-Cheval_de_frise_petersburg_civil_war_02598.jpg"><br><br><em>This is the Frisian horse used by the Confederate defenders during the Siege of Petersburg.</em><br><br>You can see that these Frisian or Spanish horses or riders are just chaotic unions of connected sticks that may stop the aggressor's vehicles under some circumstances, for some period of time. A clear disadvantage is that they only work "maximally" if they are rotated in a certain way. If you turn them around the vertical axis by 90 degrees, they become narrower and easier to bypass. They become even easier to bypass if these long obstacles are "standing tall". The power of muscles or a nearby explosion almost certainly rotates the obstacles to non-optimal orientations.<br><br><img src="https://www.super-hobby.cz/zdjecia/4/7/6/1852_35708_00.jpg" width=407><br><br>This Czech hedgehog may also look chaotic but look carefully. It is really just three sticks welded together. All of them are pairwise orthogonal to each other. The direction of the six half-limbs coincide with the directions from the center of a cube to the centers of the six sides. A funny consequence is that when the Czech hedgehog rotates, it looks the same. It always stands on the three legs which approximately define the vertices of an equilateral triangle on the street. They look the same. So there is pretty much no point in trying to perturb the hedgehog a little bit. Of course, you can send some Russian soldiers to remove it from the road altogether if you don't care that these Russian soldiers may be more easily shot dead (Putin doesn't care much, however, and their families get about $50,000 per corpse so maybe they don't care, either; the human life is not considered very valuable in Russia).<br><br>Note that the symmetry of the cube is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedral_symmetry">octahedral symmetry</a>. It is a somwhat ambiguous term. It may refer to the group of the 24 orientation-preserving transformations of the cube; or the 48 transformations including the "mirroring" ones. A fascinating fact about the orientation-preserving group is that it is isomorphic to \(S_4\), a simple group of all permutations of 4 elements. Why is it so? It is because every orientation-preserving rotation of the cube may be described as a particular permutation of the 4 diagonals (through the body) of the cube. The cube has 4 diagonals because they start from either of the 4 vertices at the bottom. If you want to get all 48 transformations, you allow this group to be directly multiplied with a simple parity, \((x,y,z)\to(-x,-y,-z)\). Because three is an odd dimensionality, this simple parity (which commutes with all other \(O(3)\) transformations) maps orientation-preserving to orientation-flipping transformations and vice versa.<br><br><a href="https://media.istockphoto.com/vectors/platonic-solids-vector-id1282934858?k=20&m=1282934858&s=612x612&w=0&h=EmUtTNq_DpRC7wPexQPlpjpCHtk6EgZnYfx-1WOZqlk="><img src="https://media.istockphoto.com/vectors/platonic-solids-vector-id1282934858?k=20&m=1282934858&s=612x612&w=0&h=EmUtTNq_DpRC7wPexQPlpjpCHtk6EgZnYfx-1WOZqlk=" width=407></a><br><br>Now, the group is called "octahedral" because it is also the symmetry of the octahedron. Note that the two Platonic polyhedra, the cube and the octahedron, are "dual" to one another. If you pick a "new vertex" in the middle of a polyhedron and take the convex envelope of all these "new vertices", you get a "dual polyhedron". In this procedure, the roles of the vertices and sides are interchanged (and therefore their numbers are simply flipped by the duality; a cube has 6 sides and 8 vertices, an octahedron has 8 sides and 6 vertices). The 1-dimensional edges get interchanged with the same number of dual edges (both have 12 edges).<br><br>The tetrahedron is dual to itself (self-dual) under this duality (4 faces and 4 vertices, 6 edges); the dodecahedron and icosahedron are dual to one another (12/20 faces/vertices or vice versa, 30 edges). The Czech hedgehog could have siblings, like the Slovak hedgehog (based on the tetrahedron) but that is probably impractical because the tetrahedron doesn't have the paired vertices on the opposite side so it would be less resilient after welding (maybe this experiment was actually made in Czechoslovakia in 1938 but I am not sure); or the Polish hedgehog (I made the adjectives) which would be based on the dodecahedron or icosahedron but that would already have too many sticks in it, I think. But maybe the Polish hedgehogs could be more effective at breaking the tanks. It should be experimentally tried in a battle. Another country of Russia's size should commit suicide to measure the effectiveness of Polish hedgehogs.<br><br>The non-Abelian discrete (octahedral) symmetry of the hedgehog is good because the hedgehog remains effective after a perturbation of the direction, or after a nearby explosion that changes the orientation. In this case, the robustness under transformations is desirable practically. I think that a similar virtue exists for <a href="https://www.google.cz/search?q=virus+platonic+solid&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1317&bih=708" rel="nofollow">viruses that look like Platonic solids</a>, typically an icosahedron. Nature managed to produce them and due to the symmetry, only a small portion of the surface has to be remembered, the rest is made out of copies. Also, I think that such Platonic solids are also useful for the virus' defense against the immune systems exactly because the amount of "distinct fingerprints" (antigens) on the surface is smaller. Only a small part of the icosahedral surface looks "original" so the surface is almost stealth, covered only by a small part of the "space of possible shape patterns on the surface".<br><br><em>The most famous Czech hedgehog to former Czech kids, now 45-60, is this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgBMXI1WKWg">friend of the Little Mole</a>. Of course, the series is mainly about the Little Mole who has been bought by the Chinese a few years ago and forced to become a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=krtek+a+panda" rel="nofollow">friend of a Chinese panda</a>. But the granddaughter of the creator of the Little Mole got paid handsomely so why wouldn't she sell the mole to the panda?</em><br><br>I still think that there is some deep rule in quantum gravity that allows the amount of discrete symmetries of a vacuum to change but something else must change in the opposite direction. The most extreme non-Abelian, self-intertwined finite group is the monster group, and that is the symmetry group of a minimal-radius \(AdS_3\) vacuum. The holographic duality due to Witten makes the "monstrous moonshine" self-evident. I think that this staggeringly high degree of discrete symmetries is unavoidably linked to the absence of massless states although I still don't know how to formulate the precise quantitative relationship. But a justification of such a rule is that non-Abelian symmetries may be broken but then you get Coulomb forces and new photon-like massless particles. There should exist an extension of this mechanism for purely discrete symmetries as well and the monster group is apparently capable of banning all massless particles (the Leech lattice doesn't have any length-squared-equal-to-two lattice sites even though it has tons of those whose squared length is 4 or 6 or 8 or any higher even integer).<br><br>The transition from the Frisian horse to the Czech hedgehog is a classic example of a "simply clever" heureka moment in which some useless parts of an object are thrown away and the object is identified as "something in the vicinity of a much more symmetric one" (in the space of shapes or ideas), and the more symmetric simplification may be seen to be superior. Of course, you may only make things as simple as possible but not simpler. But in complex enough designs, there often is a room for such a simplification.<br><br>Search <a href="https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&btnmeta_news_search=1&q=czech+hedgehog#q=czech+hedgehog&hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&tbm=nws&source=lnt&tbs=sbd:1&sa=X&biw=925&bih=775&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.&cad=b" rel="nofollow">Google News</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=Czech%20hedgehog&src=typd&f=live">Twitter</a> for Czech hedgehogs.<br><br>P.S.: The official Czech name of the structure isn't a hedgehog (CZ: ježek), it is "rozsocháč". It seems that the word has been used for a related structure used to hunt the bears (the usage hasn't changed much because Russia is a bear, too). The prefix roz- indicates some outward motion, tearing, or decay to many pieces (rozpad is the decay, including the radioactive one, for example, as in outward_prefix-fall; rozvíjet is to develop, like wind or wrap things outward; rozjímat is to contemplate, like pull perceptions apart; rozbít is to break, like beat to things that go outwards, and so on). Socháč is something while -áč is a standard masculine ending (e.g. rváč is is a rowdy or brawler, sráč is a [cowardly] šitter) but I simply cannot tell you what the root -soch- actually means here. Yes, socha is a statue or sculpture but why would it be a cognate? Maybe the Czech hedgehog is a "rozsocháč" because it deconstructs a "statue" (of a bear or a tank) to parts?<br><br>Update: A commenter helpfully revealed that "<a href="https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=rozsochaty">rozsochatý</a>" is synonymous with "rozkošatělý" ([grown to be] patulous) and the root "<a href="https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=pa&text=branch&op=translate)">sakha</a>" means "branch" in the Punjab language, an example of some ancient Indo-European tongue (CZ word "sochor", a pry bar, is also related because it looks like a branch). Fascinating.<br><br>P.S. 2: Hedgehogs are funny low-tech things. But I think that if the war-like tension with Russia survives, the West must develop a massive hi-tech advantage. For example, I believe it is nearly straightforward to make sure that in the case of a hypothetical occupation by Russians, most of these Russians get killed by some automatic weapons that will wait at many places of our cities and offices for the takeover. They should have already been in Kiev but it will become possible in a few years. In an office, there will be a gun with some AI that will point at an object that speaks Russian after the "need to terminate the Russian invaders" is activated. We need AI-controlled drones and robots and self-driving cars that will wait for the invaders to eliminate them even when the people escape. There are lots of similar things that look straightforward and cheap with the current technology...Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-59022194721757553272022-03-08T05:20:00.004+01:002022-03-08T05:35:22.484+01:00History as story<b><a href="https://neviditelnypes.lidovky.cz/zahranici/evropa-dejiny-jako-pribeh.A220306_173525_p_zahranici_wag">By Ondřej Neff</a> (Aston), a sci-fi writer and a newspaper boss</b><br><br><b><em>The markers and lines of three quarters of a century old have peeled away. New ones will emerge</em></b><br><br>Since the beginning of the week before last, we have been experiencing what has been called the upheaval of history. My friend, the writer Francis "Walrus" Novotný, reminded me yesterday that he is experiencing it for the fifth time. He is a year older than I am, and I missed his first coup d'état in May 1945 in a pram. But even four coups is quite enough for one human life, I don't feel deprived. History then, but how about the story?<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />An observation from a radio gloss by the writer Iva Pekárková stuck in my head. The overwhelming and pervasive interest in World War II stems from the fact that it offers a story. Its anti-hero is the villain, and against him are the colourful figures of the Allies. The villain wins at first; it would be a flat story if the villain took a beating in the first act. All must be nearly lost and then the twist comes, the villain perishes miserably by his own hand and the villains are hanged from the gallows.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />The story of World War II has dominated the stage for decades. It painted lines on them, too, and could also be likened to Spartakiad [mass communist exercises with attractive choreography] markers: you stand here and you stand there again, and you move as instructed. It's amazing how long that worked.<br><br>The Russians, politely called the Soviets, first invaded Hungary with their tanks in 1956. The Hungarians asked for help then too, nobody lifted a finger. Twelve years later, nobody in Czechoslovakia thought of asking for help. Legend has it that the American president [LBJ] postponed reading the evening report on the westward movement of the half-million strong army until the morning after he had slept. Why should he go to the chopping block until later? It was all done on signs painted around the concept agreed at Yalta.<br><br><b>The concept of a clear-cut villain</b><br><br>Strangely enough, the concept of the unequivocal villain and the unequivocal victory of good over evil was never repeated. In the 1950s, Kim I, with Stalin's blessing, invaded South Korea. He could not be defeated in such a way that he had to be shot and his minions had to be hanged. Nothing happened to him, and today Kim III sits on the throne, without peer the most evil creature of modern times. The wars in Indochina, then Vietnam, ended in a totally obscure slap in the face. The mantle of 'the bad guy' was even thrown over America's shoulders, and to this day it still repents for it. Hussein and Gaddafi, they were bad guys too, and they were defeated. They also met an ignominious end, but what really happened in their countries afterwards does not resemble anything that could be described as a victory of good over evil. The Great Victory Over Evil, with its all-encompassing psychological impact, was never repeated.<br><br>Perhaps I feel this way as a member of a generation affected by five or at least four historical upheavals. That is why I am pleasantly surprised by the free world's unequivocal reaction to Putin's aggression in Ukraine. This time, the US President did not delay the news until after breakfast; on the contrary, he gave timely warnings. Ukraine is not crying out for help into dead silence; on the contrary, help is pouring in. Yet one basis has remained unchanged: the order for aggression in 1956 and 1968 came in 2022 from the same Kremlin, which has more or less the same nuclear weapons. The difference is in the mentality. There is a different generation at the helm of power in the West. It is no longer as fundamentally affected by the story of the Second World War as its predecessors. The markers and lines of three quarters of a century ago have peeled away. New ones will be painted.<br><br>In retrospect, I perceive that in the old world that no longer exists, we mostly saw the old ones as a necessity. That's just the way it was, some people resisted, some people sought their own living space, but it was clear that it couldn't realistically be changed. A similar political – and especially psychological – situation is unlikely to arise again.<br><br><b>The temporary unity of the West</b><br><br>One can already guess where they will lead and what they will look like. They will not be suggested by someone's particular will, but by objective necessity. One is already taking shape, or so it seems. It began with a pandemic, and though it continues to this day, Putin's aggression has pushed it out of the public eye. It is now clear how dangerous it is to rely on permanent ties with the outside world. The relocation of production from Europe and the US to Asia has had devastating consequences. Energy dependence on Russia is having the same unfortunate effect. Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, this lesson will not be forgotten. We can imagine all sorts of scenarios, but I would most like to see a coup and the indictment of Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov for war crimes at the Hague. But even if this unthinkable reversal were to occur, we will not return to the blissful belief that diligent Chinese hands will produce everything we need and we will warm ourselves with cheap Russian gas.<br><br>It won't happen immediately. Also, the current unbreakable unity of the West will crack and it may be sooner than anyone would have thought. But the trend is set. As Professor Bárta teaches us, evolutionary leaps are the result of crises. No one invents them, let alone plans for them. They just happen, and crises are usually caused by villains. The current one is Vladimir Putin, and his actions are prompting brands and lines to be drawn differently and more rationally than they were before.<br><br>LN, 5th March 2022<br><br>Read more articles, reflections and short stories on Ondrej Neff's personal page. There are also interviews, photos and talk about science fiction.<br>Neff.cz<br><br>Ondřej Neff<hr><br><em>Translated with DeepL.com (free)</em><hr><hr><br><h3>Warring with hysteria</h3><em>What an attack on a nuclear power plant means</em><br><br><b><a href="https://neviditelnypes.lidovky.cz/zahranici/glosa-valcit-hysterii.A220306_173733_p_zahranici_wag">By Zdeněk Petráček</a></b><br><br>Even when you think nothing will surprise you, unexpected news comes. In the Ukrainian war, it is the Russian attack on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant [in Energodar, Southern Ukraine, 6x 1 GW]. That's never happened before. Until now, the only country with a nuclear power plant that has experienced war on its territory was Slovenia in 1991. But that was an operetta war compared to today, and the attack on the Krško NPP was beyond imagination. As was the attack on the Zaporozhye NPP until Thursday.<br><br>What is Moscow up to? The Zaporozhye NPP is so robust (it was designed to crash a fighter jet) that a nuclear accident – let alone a nuclear explosion – is not imminent. But "the rest" is enough. Moscow has demonstrated that it is capable of cutting off a good part of Ukraine from electricity. That it is capable of panicking Western societies cultivating a cult of fear. After all, after the Fukushima disaster ten thousand kilometres away (triggered by a tsunami, which is out of the question in central Europe), Germany was so frightened that it conclusively "got out of the atom". What will an attack on a power station only 1500 kilometres away do to it? We'll see in the test tube. Last but not least, Moscow has shown that it is no stranger to unconventional methods. What else will they come up with? That is for the Ukrainians and the West to ponder. [LM: Aside from several NPPs, Moscow has also bombarded two physics institutes with research nuclear reactors in Kharkov. It may suck to be a nuclear physicist in Ukraine now.]<br><br>The attack on the Zaporozhye NPP is unprecedented. Regardless of the motivations of the perpetrators and the real threat, it may cause hysteria in many quarters. And this is an environment in which the Kremlin moves like a fish in water. Note that almost everything Moscow has accused the West of doing as a manifestation of anti-Russian hysteria has actually happened sooner or later. When the West warned about the concentration of Russian troops near the border with Ukraine, it heard that it was hysterical and nothing was at risk. When it warned of a Russian invasion, Moscow was heard to be hysterical and lying. Yet then it really came. What's next?<br><br>Moscow and President Putin have been complaining for a good fifteen years that the West doesn't take them seriously. Now that Moscow has brutally attacked Ukraine, the West is taking Russia seriously, perhaps hysterically seriously after the attack on the nuclear power plant. Yes, hysteria is at play, but Moscow has brought it in with its policies, its aggression, its arrogance and its perpetual lying.<br><br>LN, 5th March, 2022<br>Author: Zbyněk Petráček<hr><br><em>Translated with DeepL.com (free version)</em>Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-28195714461936894382022-03-07T15:25:00.012+01:002022-03-07T17:02:52.553+01:00A fair peace treaty simply cannot be the same as 11 days ago<b>How much the reparations should be?</b><br><br>On Saturday, February 26th which was the 3rd day of the Third World Special Operation, I wrote down an <a href="https://motls.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-trf-peace-treaty.html?m=1">idealist treaty</a>. By that time, Russia had already shocked many of us by the recognition of the breakaway republics (Monday), and especially by the Blitzkrieg (Thursday). For some reasons, I still found it appropriate to try to be "nice" to Russia. Some commenters meaningfully mentioned that my idealist proposals did not differ from the Minsk Accords much. Indeed, those were so reasonable, relatively to everything we saw in the recent 11 days.<br><br>I still believe that there was a seed of truth in some Russia's demands. The real problem is that all the old grievances have been dwarfed by what happened in since February 24th, especially in recent days (because the intensity of evil was escalating almost every day). Today, after claiming that Ukraine will have to lose its "statehood" if it dares to defend itself against the invasion, and similar insane threats, we also heard some rather modest demands by Moscow again. The recognition of Crimea and Donbas and neutrality. Those were controversial but marginally sensible before February 24th. Are they sensible now?<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />First, the neutrality. I don't think that Ukraine may afford to be neutral. Neutrality is a status of a country that is only reasonable if the country is sufficiently capable of defending itself against the nearby possible aggressors; or if the nearby blocs are naturally friendly even without the membership; and/or if a balance of the non-neutral blocs is created in which each bloc discourages others from taking the neutral country. The war has shown that neutrality – and Ukraine has been neutral so far – just didn't work. It was aggressively attacked. Ukraine and not e.g. the Baltic States was attacked first exactly because it was neutral. So it's common sense that Ukraine should better be a member of an alliance and which alliance do you think that its voters would pick given the recent experience?<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Before the war, Crimea and Donbas looked like "naturally pro-Russian" regions. But you know, even this assumption must be re-assessed because we simply do not live in the same world and people do not have the same views about Russia and the West as they had before February 24th. So I think that a referendum controlled by some international groups – and one in which recent refugees from the area may vote abroad – should be organized, especially in the Donbas republics, but maybe also Crimea, to check whether they still want to be regions controlled by Russia's peacemakers and Russian special operators.<br><br>So the case for neutrality as well as the annexation of Crimea and Donbas has obviously changed but most of the damage has actually been done in the rest of Ukraine and Russia should compensate it. How much is it? I am convinced that in real terms, the world GDP decreased by some 10% (i.e. by $10 trillion) as a result of the special operation. The corresponding capitalization of the companies that was subtracted is of order $10-$100 trillion. Obviously, Russia doesn't have the resources to compensate the economic damage across the world. So let's generously say that we will have to overlook this $100 trillion worth of damages done across the world. It's just some collateral damage that the Russian planners weren't able to foresee (because most planners are incapable of foreseeing things, that is why they are planners and not e.g. capitalist managers).<br><br>But the damages to Ukraine were direct and they just couldn't have overlooked them in their planning. Perhaps some 10,000 Ukrainian, mostly soldiers (and fewer than 1,000 civilians, it's said so far), were killed so far (the number may grow significantly if the war continues or escalates). Multiply it by a million dollars or a few million dollars per life, you will still get just tens of billion dollars, a relatively small amount.<br><br>But lots of buildings, infrastructure etc. were destroyed. This will be hundreds of billions of dollars. But let's look at the refugees. Some 2 million Ukrainians had to escape Ukraine so far. What is the total damage done to them? Most of them can't really live back in Ukraine any longer. They had to pay for transportation and other countries will have to take care of them for an extended period of time, even assuming that they will be capable of returning to Ukraine. I find it rather obvious that $100,000 per refugee is a rock-solid lower bound on the damages. It's some fraction of the houses that were destroyed and have to rebuilt somewhere, plus some forced inability to earn money from their proper jobs for a year or two, and so on. I think that the actual damage per refugee could be much higher.<br><br>Multiply it by 2 million and you already get $200 billion. Now, the remaining average Ukrainian citizen was caused damages comparable to $10,000 per capita. There are 40+ million of those, so we need to add some additional $400 billion. As you can see, I deliberately fine-tuned some arguments so that my lower bound on the compensations or reparations directly for Ukraine or the people who take care of the refugees is $600 billion, close to the frozen Russian reserves. So the whole Russian reserves need to be used to compensate the Ukrainians and/or various governments and charities that are taking care of the Ukrainians – Ukrainians that had to suffer through some "inconvenience" (this is meant to be black humor, an understatement of the recent 75 years). And I really think that these estimates are just an insanely undervalued lower bound, any fairer calculation has to end up with much higher numbers. Just the legitimate defense-related resources that were destroyed were huge, too. Ukraine spent $6 billion on defense in 2020 and that was destroyed. You also get $100 billion or so in some relevant 15-year-long period.<br><br>I find it more meaningful for Russia to actually pay a part of the compensation in its commitment of cheap fossil fuels for the future; plus territory. So after the recent events, it just makes much more sense to reunify whole Donetsk and Lugansk Regions with Ukraine (because yes, I believe that this is what the bulk of the population of the regions would want now, too). Also, Ukraine should be getting free oil and gas from Russia in the next 20-50 years, at annual rates that match the average Ukrainian consumption in previous 5 years.<br><br>A subtle thing of post-war arrangements is that the winner may dictate the conditions and Russia can't really be the full-fledged winner. Even though NATO and pals do not fight Russia directly, they are dissatisfied with Russia and want to continue some kind of isolation that is hardly compatible with the survival of the Russian economy. Although NATO and pals aren't direct winners of the hot war – because even de facto, its men haven't really fought in Ukraine – they must still be looked at because Russia has failed to defeat them and they just don't like what has happened since February 24th. Even if Russia were capable of controlling big cities of Ukraine in some military way, which looks extremely uncertain by itself, it just wouldn't be the "winner of the war" in any meaningful sense, for many reasons (another reason is that the control over the cities would simply not be sustainable due to the continuing guerilla war).<br><br>Taking the catastrophic damage done to Ukraine into account, it's hard to imagine how anyone could justify a fair settlement that would be <em>better</em> for Russia than the conditions before February 24th. What happened were insane and inhumane acts and any fair evaluation of the grievances and damages must conclude that Russia will be smaller and/or much poorer than it was before the invasion. Because e.g. the ruble is falling some 10+ percent a day, the average lifetime of the Russian economy might be something like a week. Much of the world suffers greatly (although an Australian reader has totally shocked me with something like "you are surely doing well and prosperous now!", no, I really really am not), Ukraine suffers more than anyone else, but under the decoration of Nazi-style celebrations, Russia obviously suffers just a little bit less than Ukraine. Russia needs to stop it.<br><br>A part of the new deal is the West's offer to transform the CNN to a company that will produce English-language news saying "Putin has basically won the war, anyway" so that he may serve this conclusion as the international consensus to the excited Russian voters. They have been producing news of similar quality and trustworthiness for a decade or so which is why the change won't be substantial for the CNN.<br><br>Incidentally, the dollar stood above 151 rubles today, over 20% up in a day and 50% up in a month. Some ruble policies make the default of the Russian Federation 80% likely now, according to the CDS swaps market. I think that China should save Russia from the default and enslave the Russians a little bit as a compensation.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-35450155122609653832022-03-07T08:42:00.002+01:002022-03-07T08:42:38.596+01:00NATO must not be provoked<b><a href="https://neviditelnypes.lidovky.cz/zahranici/valka-nato-se-nesmi-nechat-vyprovokovat.A220305_211609_p_zahranici_wag">Opinion by Francis "Walrus" Novotný</a>, The Invisible Dog, today</b><br><br>Russia's invasion of Ukraine is growing in intensity and therefore brutality. One can surmise, and nothing else makes sense, that the Kremlin did indeed plan the invasion of Ukraine as a special military operation and that Putin believed such an action. By way of explanation, the Russian generals, including the head of the Kremlin, imagine by the term war an overwhelming offensive by hundreds of tanks after artillery preparation from thousands of barrels and with the participation of hundreds of combat aircraft, today also using tactical nuclear weapons, i.e. a firestorm that sweeps everything before it, regardless of civilian lives.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />So if on the night of the 24th. February 2022, the Russian army undertook a fire raid with missiles on military point targets (and if a civilian object was hit, it was indeed by mistake or missile failure), and then relatively few columns of light vehicles penetrated Ukrainian territory, supplemented by air drops, which were also not extensive, there is no other name for this operation in Russian military terminology than "special military operation" and Putin is angry that the world did not understand his "humanitarianism".<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />However, this special military operation has failed because its two main assumptions have fallen: that President Zelensky, the 'comedian', will flee and that ethnic Russians will happily side with the occupying forces. The opposite has become true, Zelensky has grown into a world icon of heroic resistance, and ethnic Russians are fighting the invaders as resolutely as ethnic Ukrainians. Otherwise, it would not be possible for the Russian incursion, for example, to still be resisted by the predominantly Russian city of Kharkiv.<br><br>The Russian generals have also underestimated the external intelligence support that the Ukrainians are receiving and the shock that the Russian incursion via social media has caused in hitherto pacifist Western Europe. We are literally experiencing a reversal of history, with only the last few Euro-EU strongmen failing to recognise that it was their 'green' policies and the EU's policy of economic interdependence with Russia that prompted Putin to invade. It could be said that the construction of the Nord Stream pipelines was a direct incentive, as it was intended to allow Russia to sell gas to Europe even if Putin turned Ukraine into a desert. It is not without interest that Putin launched the invasion not only after the Winter Olympics were over, but also after he had made sure that Nord Stream 2 would not be put into operation immediately, so it was pointless to wait any longer.<br><br>But that is now over and we are now seeing a change in Russian strategy - a special military operation is being replaced by a real war in the Kremlin's terms. Putin seems to have realised, after world public opinion has united against Russia (Putin's allies like North Korea, Cuba and Syria are irrelevant) and even after virtually the whole world has agreed on economic sanctions, that he has burned all bridges behind him and that his life, his bare life, is now on the line.<br><br>I don't believe that Putin can be stopped by Russian oligarchs, but the Russian generals are something else. Notice the look on the faces of Russian generals when their faces sometimes flash in the news. Not cheerful, more like desperate. I have no illusions that they are peacemakers or some kind of humanitarians, but they are professionals who can paint a realistic picture, and the moment they assess that Putin's actions are counterproductive, that he is burying the Russian empire instead of founding it, they will remove him. This practice stretches throughout Russian history; for example, of the 12 tsars of the Romanov dynasty (in which Putin looks back), half of them were assassinated.<br><br>But this "self-cleansing" may be a long and bloody and cruel road for Ukraine. Russian forces are clearly moving from tactics of strikes on military targets to tactics of large-scale destruction. Raids will intensify, with ever more fighter-bombers, massed artillery and salvo rocket launchers being deployed. Surface attacks will be used to terrorise besieged cities, and such targets as nuclear power stations have already become the object of Russian attacks - with the justified belief that they will not be defended because of the risk of radioactive leakage. By seizing such a source, the Russians will not only deprive the Ukrainians of electricity, but they can start releasing disinformation to the world that the Ukrainians were planning an improvised dirty bomb production there.<br><br>I hope that the Ukrainians can withstand even this transformation from a special military operation into an all-out Stalin-style anti-Ukrainian war, but there may be further escalations to come. This is not pleasant to write, but Russia has a large number of tactical missiles with small-caliber nuclear warheads. And nuclear artillery munitions. Watching the news spots, I have several times spotted a self-propelled heavy cannon on a tracked chassis in Russian columns, its long barrel piercing the vehicle both front and rear. These guns are then capable of firing not only conventional ammunition but also nuclear ammunition.<br><br>Given the way Putin has behaved so far, it remains an open question whether he will resort to tactical nuclear means after all if he fails to overwhelm the Ukrainian defences, knowing that in the ruins of the cities Ukrainian tankers will turn his tanks one by one into burnt-out wrecks. Although there are strong military arguments against it, because the affected areas would be closed to the Russian army as well, and Putin would become an arch-villain, the world's greatest criminal, even more hated than Hitler. Apparently the Chinese would also have a problem with the use of tactical nuclear weapons and would take their hands off Putin. And he would then have a hard time hiding such a fact even from his own people, since he would have witnesses in the thousands of Russian soldiers.<br><br>As I write this, hundreds of analysts in the Pentagon and in NATO command structures are continuously analysing these possibilities, with the benefit of not only satellite imagery, intelligence reports and social media videos, but also reports from observers on the battlefield, as I have no doubt that such observers are present in the Ukrainian army units. They are aware that Putin, who is at an impasse, has only one way out - and that is to drag NATO into the conflict.<br><br>What would he gain by doing so? Let us remember that for more than 20 years his propaganda has portrayed NATO as a fascist, aggressive organisation that is only too eager to destroy peaceful Russia. It is about a year since I saw a documentary about life in the Russian town of Yelnya. It featured a schoolgirl who was just preparing to join the Junarmia (Young Army) organisation. It is easy to say, and yet apt, that it is the exact equivalent of the Hitler Youth, again with trumpets, drums, flags and military training. When asked what she thought of Western Europe, this schoolgirl replied that they were all fascists. So those readers who accuse me of brandishing weapons from the comfort of my couch should realize that in the eyes of Russian youth they are fascists like me.<br><br>So, if Putin were able to drag NATO into the war, his world view would gain credibility. He could say, look, I was right, they have now attacked us. And he might even split the now unified world public opinion and that informal anti-Putin coalition would fall apart. Putin would also save himself from his generals because he would also prove them right.<br><br>NATO must therefore not be dragged into the war, because it would take Black Peter out of Putin's hands and escalate the conflict to a world war, probably a nuclear one. NATO must therefore not heed the call for a no-fly zone, because such a thing cannot be bureaucratically imposed, but only enforced by force, that is to say, by a direct clash between the air forces of Russia and NATO.<br><br>I am convinced that Putin is so cornered that he wants this confrontation and the associated escalation of the conflict, and the fundamental strategic lesson is that you must not do anything that your adversary wants. This makes me all the more puzzled by the stupidity of journalists, both domestic and foreign, who constantly ask about the no-fly zone at press conferences when, as professionals, they should have known what it would mean. And if the Ukrainian President asks for it, he does so for propaganda reasons, to maintain morale, because it must be clear to him where it would lead. It is obviously a premeditated pressure to get the post-communist states of the Alliance to send him as many Russian-origin aircraft as possible, as soon as possible, from their arsenals.<br><br>The only NATO strategy that can succeed and prevent a global nuclear war is to wage a proxy war as the Alliance states are doing - to create a safe haven for Ukrainian women and children and to send their husbands, sons and fathers all the military aid they can. Just not, for God's sake, rusty Strela missiles with leaking batteries, as the Germans have done.<hr><br><em>Translated by DeepL.com (free version)</em>Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-65709618318537074162022-03-06T06:22:00.009+01:002022-03-06T08:30:10.858+01:00Has the war killed green, woke, other pathological leftist movements?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?<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VVe8bPQX4Z0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br>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.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />"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.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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: <blockquote><a href="https://www.irinsider.org/environment-1/2022/3/5/europe-sacrifices-green-efforts-due-to-war-in-ukraine">Europe Sacrifices Green Efforts Due to War in Ukraine</a>. </blockquote>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>And that's the memo.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-69335360366740505892022-03-05T08:23:00.019+01:002022-03-05T12:10:12.716+01:00Aspects of Russians' faith in the Kremlin's unhinged propagandaThe ongoing war is the most serious and most dangerous conflict in Europe since 1945, the daily war crimes can only be compared to those committed by the likes of Hitler and Stalin. The international public wants a happy end – which apparently requires the death of the deranged dwarf – but there are many reasons to think that even this optimistic scenario wouldn't fix Russia. Maybe it wouldn't even end the war. It's because Putin isn't the "creator" of these crimes. The ugly short botoxed psychopath is just a symbol, a product of his times and the evolution that the attitudes of the bulk of Russians made very likely given the external circumstances. Neither Hitler nor Putin were any ingenious manipulators or strategists; they sucked at logistics and other things. But they had so much power exactly because they perfectly personified the grievances, hatred, and elementary misunderstandings of a huge number of losers in their nations.<br><br>Almost all famous enough Western companies have stopped their business in Russia (which is not just a matter of "forced sanctions" let alone "virtue signaling"; Russia has really become dangerous for anyone with at least some human decency); the woke Coke is a truly disgusting counterexample. The Russian bonds' rating fell deep into the junk territory. The Russian central bank lost its access to most of its reserves (which should be used as reparations to Ukraine!) so it cannot prevent the currency from collapsing. So far, the rouble fell from 75 per US dollar a month ago to <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=usd+to+rub&oq=usd+&aqs=edge.0.69i59l2j0i131i433i512l3j69i57j0i131i433i512j69i60l2.1576j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">124 per dollar</a> now. I think that even this substantial drop understates the unusability of Russia and its economy. The factor of 1.65 isn't a sufficient quantification of how much Russia is doomed. Russia isn't on par with China now because the Chinese may actually use all the Western services and buy the Western products, Russians can't. They can't buy most parts into their own production and other things.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />In recent 12 hours or so, Russia completely banned the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Western media companies stopped operating there. While the primary reason is obviously the decision to start the war, the elimination of any meaningful media and social networks in Russia microscopically results from decisions on both sides. The Kremlin doesn't want the truth to be heard by anyone in Russia; and those who are supposed to inform the people don't want to be harassed by the new military dictatorship and they don't want to be seen as allies of the Kremlin which they would unavoidably (at least partly) become after some blackmail.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />The deterioration has been abrupt when it comes to the full-blown bans on any truth in Russia. The amount of freedom of speech may be shrinking by something like 50% every day these days. People who state elementary facts – such as the fact that Russia has initiated a full-blown war againt 40+ million Ukrainians, with sometimes unprecedented war crimes on a daily basis – face 15 years in prison. This law to murder the truth was approved by the lawmakers unanimously. Some of them may be afraid of existential destruction, others may believe it. At any rate, we are seeing a mass psychosis and while they should be absolutely frustrated by the destroyed future prospects of theirs, most Russians seem to be in some kind of genocidal ecstasy. It is exactly the same ecstasy that some German Nazis had to feel when they were murdering the Jews by thousands. In 1941, did the Nazis believe that they would get away with this for the rest of their lives? Did they care? And what about the Russian war criminals. Do they believe they will get away with it? Will they? Do they care about the outcome at all?<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bJ_DwFOZ55g" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br><em>These answers by Russians to the question "What they think about the events in Ukraine" look hopeless, indeed. Basically all of them say the war is great because they are beating the Nazis there.</em><br><br>OK, all the non-negligible social networks, media etc. are banned now (even Telegram which is Russian is heavily restricted and you can't search for the dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine, among other things), the words "war" and "invasion" are banned, and all other things needed to share the information about the war are banned, too. On the other hand, nonsensical statements such as "Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis" are mandatory. What's remarkable is the difference: just 10 days ago, Russians had basically the same access to the information websites, social networks etc. as most Westerners have. How is it possible that they ended up being OK with this absolutely insane military dictatorship that produces nothing else than lies, death, and misery?<br><br>Even when they had access to almost everything on the Internet, most Russians – especially the older generations – were (and remain) just mindless moronic sheep who consumed everything that the State TV was serving to them. Russians are a TV nation. Russia was always great and the West sucked at everything, was unnecessary, supported Nazis, and so on. The working capitalism is unnecessary as well, of course. While Putin allowed capitalism to work much better than it did in Russia of the 1990s, he has absolutely no relationship to it and is eager to return Russians to the communist misery. But we can keep on asking: Why did the bulk of the older Russian cohorts become mindless sheep like that? We should have a discussion about "nature vs nurture". They have surely been "educated" by the Soviet and some Russian governments to behave in this way, so it has a "nurture" part.<br><br>But I think that a sad truth is that most of this tiny value of most Russians as humans – true humans should have some compassion and empathy; and they should also be more capable of manipulating with information than parrots – is due to "nature" instead. And it is because the "nature" has been shaped by a rather drastic selection, especially since the 1917 Bolshevik Coup. Only some 500,000 Soviet citizens have emigrated during the Cold War. The number is so small because it was really hard to escape. Note that 300,000 Czechoslovaks emigrated in 1948-1989 and just in the 9 days, 1.2 million Ukrainians already left their homeland. However, tens of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union have been killed.<br><br>And those weren't random people. Most of the murders were done by Stalin (although Lenin could have been more brutal, he just didn't have Stalin's powerful toolkits yet) and it was the people who could use their brains who were the subject of this liquidation campaign. By this selection, a nation greatly dominated by brainless sheep has been created. National characters may be called "stereotypes" but it doesn't change much about the fact that most such stereotypes are damn true, very important, and they usually have some explanation, too. The distributions of various traits are not identical in all nations, not even white nations. The differences are huge and largely follow from the different selection mechanisms in the history.<br><br>The Czech nation has also been heavily selected. Since 1620 and then because of events around 1938-1945, 1968, and some others, Czechs were trained by the "overlords" to be a productive, highly flexible (or "always cooperating") nation that doesn't fight. In some respects, it is similar to the selection in Russia. In others, it's different. In the recent century, the selection was more due to emigration than mass murders (only hundreds of people were murdered by the Czechoslovak communists for political reasons) and the Czech nation is a rare example of a nation that was mainly losing the elites (typical emigrants from most other nations are dissatisfied, unsuccessful losers; but in Czechia, it's the successful that often became inconvenient to the "ultimate" rulers because the Czech elites haven't really been in charge for most of the time since 1620). The degree of obedience was much less bloody and this selection and suppression still allowed the Czechs to remain critical thinkers and "rebels" although most of the rebellion has been composed of whining in the pub. But the Czechs are dissatisfied and even the ordinary ones see obviously bad things in front of them; Russians don't complain in the pub and they arguably don't see even the most visible bad things done by the government.<br><br>But back to Russia. As you can read, and we could even hear it from some Russian commenters (who were rather quickly turning into former commenters: I banned any repeated promotion of war crimes), it's normal (and, indeed, mandatory) to deny the existence of the war, the fact that tens of millions of civilians are brutally affected by it, that a million is fleeing Ukraine each week, that schools and kindergartens and other civilian objects are shelled, that the Ukrainian brave defense is motivated by a totally legitimate patriotism as well as survival instinct, that the Ukrainians are very successful in the defense and thousands of Russian troops' blood was already absorbed by the Ukrainian soil (the only part of Ukraine that welcomes the Russians, as someone quipped), that most Russian troops feel that they have been duped and deceived etc. And it takes to watch a minute of apocalyptic videos from destroyed Ukrainian towns, or a hundred of photographs, to be sure that what's happening is a monstrosity or a sequence of monstrosities. Even if the targets want to be military targets, there is a lot of collateral damage and even the destroyed "military" objects are objects that the Ukrainians built and paid for, have mostly legitimate purposes (and the ability to defend a country against bloody wars such as the ongoing one is undoubtedly a legitimate purpose), and are integrated into the Ukrainian society.<br><br>Instead, the official propaganda constantly repeats – and the brainless consumers parrot it – that it is a continuation of the heroic 1941-1945 war on Nazism and some last Nazis who were terrorizing the millions of good civilians in Ukraine are finally being defeated in 2022, and it will surely end with a clear Russian victory (which it simply cannot). The degree of detachment from reality is staggering, also because it's just incredibly childish to think that some people in 2022 are "the same people" as the Nazis who operated up to 1945. These people look like believing that their army is still fighting Rommel near Kiev while Putin just defeated Asterix and Obelix in judo. Needless to say, this fast labeling of any political opponent as a "Nazi" is something that the woke extreme left also did all the time but the woke brigade "cancelled" some 10 professional affiliations of heretics a day, instead of murdering hundreds, pushing 100,000+ to emigration, and flattening several towns per day.<br><br>The BBC published a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60600487">story about Olexandra</a> last night. She lives in Kharkov and her houses were being shelled for a week. She is hiding in the bathroom. You would expect that her mother could be worried about Olexandra. But you would be wrong. The mother believes the military dictatorship's TV instead of her own daughter so she is not afraid of her daughter at all. In fact, she speaks very casually. (Surely a part of the reasons is that Russians just don't think that an individual life is very valuable in general, not even the life of a close relative, as <a href="https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavl%C3%ADk_Morozov">Pavlik Morozov</a> could explain to you; the <a href="https://motls.blogspot.com/2022/02/we-must-understand-peoples-fanatical.html?m=1">Soviet Hydra</a> is more important, as I discussed at the beginning of the war.) I think that Olexandra understates how her mother speaks. I think that her mother, like many apologists for the war that I have interacted with, are thrilled and they experience an ecstasy. A genocidal ecstasy. They actually know what is happening and they have actually been dreaming about dozens of Ukrainian towns that are flattened every day. Whether they really believe that this razing only targets "Nazis" is a more difficult question. If a "Nazi" is everyone who is in Ukraine and angered by the ongoing war, then an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians – including ethnic Russians in Ukraine – are Nazis! How could someone fail to figure this simple point out? Are these Russians like Olexandra's mother (and other examples are in the BBC text) really so incredibly dumb, or do they just pretend to be incredibly dumb because this idiotic "nothing to see" support for the war crimes is the ultimate virtue signalling now? I think that even though it is not given much time in the media, they subconsciously know that Russia is causing lots of damage in Ukraine and hurting millions of Ukrainian civilians. But they have been trained to celebrate this destruction as a great and necessary process. If some civilians die, it's an accident and it's a part of the reasons to think that "it is working", and I think that Olexandra's mother would apply this logic even to the death of her own daughters. In this sense, Russians – like other relatively primitive societies – aren't fully human in the Western sense, either.<br><br>So the Russian majority has been shaped to be a very low-quality (and currently bloodthirsty) herd by nurture as well as by nature (while the nature was heavily statistically modified especially by Stalin's murders of tens of millions of usually more brainful inhabitants). So the majority had the tendency to say what is mandatory now; and it was "only" made mandatory for everyone once Russia became a military dictatorship. Over 100 million Russians are arguably happy about the ongoing war crimes because they feel important (and they have been programmed to feel important) for 15 minutes (it may be 15 days or 15 weeks this time but Russia could really run out of resources and ability to sustain this insanity for much longer). They are incapable of empathy; and they are incapable of seeing what it means for their future and the future of the hypothetical future generations of Russians.<br><br>The decline of Russians towards this lousy herd didn't start on February 24th, 2022. It didn't even start in 2014 let alone 1991. And after all, I didn't quite start in 1917 although that year was very important. This bad evolution of Russia as a herd shows that it is very bad for an individual (or a clique) to get the power to murder tens of millions of people because it is extremely likely that it is the higher-quality and more helpful part that is eliminated while the rubbish and near-rubbish is left (because the people with this incredible power to murder millions always prefer human survivors who resemble domesticated animals). And it is extremely wrong to allow brute force to restrict peaceful information sources because the path towards the military dictatorship that makes absolutely insane lies mandatory is very straightforward, and the lies shaped by the brute force ultimately persuade most of the inhabitants, especially if the inhabitants have the statistical distribution resembling the domesticated animals.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-8087058958650638692022-03-04T15:11:00.009+01:002022-03-04T15:46:32.641+01:00Europe needs to preserve not only its existence but also its humane characterMore than one million Ukrainians have already fled Ukraine since February 24th, the beginning of the hot war. Most of them are crossing the Polish border but others choose other EU borders, the short Slovak one, Romanian one, and more. It is possible that due to the staggering totalitarian terror that is being imposed in Russia – Russians may be sent to jail for 15 years as soon as they mention that Russia is waging a war (a forbidden word!) and similar elementary facts – and because of the looming or expected economic collapse in Russia, many Russians will try to leave, too.<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZALtzTmPz-E" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br>Lots of charities in Europe started to work really intensely and the work is obviously meaningful and not just some kind of virtue signalling. Some brave Ukrainian men left Czechia for fights in Ukraine. In the opposite direction, we've gotten about 40,000 new refugees, the rate is roughly 10,000 per day.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Both Ukrainians and Russians live here and so far they have lived in peace. In the early 1990s, we had slightly Wild West conditions and talked about the Russian-speaking mafia which often included Ukrainians, too. I think that they didn't care about their difference in those times. Police was only partly enforcing justice in this community because it was too dangerous and the problem was sort of isolated from the truly Czech society that the police is primarily protecting. Nevertheless, the crime dropped to tiny values and things have looked peaceful for a decade or two.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />Ukrainians work hard. For some reasons, the Russians in Czechia seem rich and are mostly registered as entrepreneurs or at least self-employed people. The hatred between Ukrainians and Russians – and, naturally, especially the new totally understandable hatred of Ukrainians towards Russians – will probably be rather extreme. I think that both groups should understand as quickly as possible that Czechia or other EU member states is not a part of the battlefront (yet) and they are expected to embrace at least the basic rules of decent co-existence.<br><br><iframe width="407" height="277" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bYMaDh-bFI0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br><em>A scene from the Oscar-winning Czech movie "Kolya". Mr Svěrák is explaining to the Russian boy that we used to hang out both flags because of our gratitude but now the Russian flag is there only due to pressures. Russians are stealing suitcases and territories. But you won't be like that, Kolya, once she gets better, you will go to your aunt. ;-)</em><br><br>So someone's being Russian or Ukrainian is not a reason for an immediate punishment, especially not a punishment by individual people who live on the Czech territory, Czechs, Ukrainians, Russians, or otherwise. Our ombudsman warned against the hostile approach to people according to their nationality; I think it is at least superficially a consensus here. Possible tensions may only be settled according to some laws and these laws apply approximately equally, regardless of the nationality. The advantages that the Ukrainians enjoy right now are humanitarian in its justification.<br><br>No EU country has joined the war in any official way although it is not settled yet whether this reticence will turn out to be a wise approach. But this peace and preservation of the basic values, including the right to live and the basic freedom to speech that is also used to discuss these sensitive matters, is a great value and they are among the main reasons why the European civilization needs to be protected. If the European civilization started to resemble Russia where the Parliament unanimously (!) voted to existentially terrorize all people who are against the war (or who point out, using some names that they find, that lots of the Russian blood is being welcomed by the Ukrainian soil), there would be no real point of defending Europe. Europe is only worth defending exactly because it is not another tyranny. If a tyrannical Europe were good enough, we could simply invite the Russian troops to invade all of us.<br><br>There have always been various laws that are on the edge of restricting the freedom of speech. I think that treason can't really be legitimately used against people for their statements, especially not when we're out of the war (so far?), but various types of an actual help to an enemy (which might include "talking", but it is not about academic talking, in the sense of the sharing of opinions, it is about "launching some action") might be treason. We have also had the crime of "promoting movements that want to suppress basic human rights" which was a formulation meant to cover proponents of the totalitarian Nazism and communism. In practice, (virtually?) no communist has ever been punished by these laws and the number of Nazis (usually simple skinheads) who were punished for being Nazis was limited and it wasn't existential for them, as far as I know. But aside from these truly political crimes, we have a crime of "approving some other crimes". Maybe I left one or two laws that could be used.<br><br>A communist lawmaker who has been notorious for being a young cop with batons beating the students in November 1989 has expressed his surprise that (approximately) his Russian comrades haven't liquidated the fascist scum (Ukranians) much earlier. Police is going after him or investigating him or something like that. It is a borderline suppression suppression of the freedom of speech but it is also clear that he is on the boundary of violating the laws that have some justification. I don't know whether there are other examples.<br><br>The media landscape is otherwise vibrant and people offer rather convincing as well as diverse theories about the reasons why this happened, the culprits, what happened in the planning, what is happening on the ground, what is the end game, and what the world will actually look like, along with various interpretations of the national characters of both nations in the war. You must understand that these things aren't really forbidden or restricted because, like the rest of the EU, we are a third party (now). We don't have any formal alliance with either Ukraine or Russia and almost all the asymmetry in the individual Czechs' approach boils down to moral attitudes to the Russian invasion and the Ukrainian defense against it (and of course to some prehistory but the recent 9 days have dramatically made almost all the prehistory irrelevant). While most Czechs thought to be closer to Ukraine before the war, the majority wasn't overwhelming – it almost certainly is overwhelming now – and the war is still an "academic topic". Nevertheless, the war is already affecting us totally profoundly in many ways.<br><br>In 2015, we were being led to welcome "refugees" who weren't real refugees, at least a huge majority wasn't. They were economic migrants. And Czechs, like others, really disliked the idea of dramatically changing the racial or religious structure of Czechia. This situation is totally different now. All Ukrainian citizens may be said to be refugees who are genuinely saving their lives or the ability to live under the roof etc. And I think that even the anti-war Russians may be said to be full-blown refugees who are existentially threatened. The new laws in Russia guarantee that.<br><br>On our side, both groups are not only genuine refugees but they are pretty much welcome refugees, especially if they want to work. Our companies have pretty much run out of labor force and the unemployment stands at a technical zero and is the lowest in the EU. When they dress and behave a little bit like us, almost all Ukrainians and Russians are considered "people just like us" (I was actually impressed by the nice clothes and other things of the people even in Ukraine... and Russia). The Slavic language family makes the cultural integration much easier.<br><br>People who are moving to Europe should understand that they are moving from a part of Eurasia that has seriously broken down; and they are moving to a place where things are still reasonably good or pretty good. This should stop them from trying to impose their ideas about politics and lifestyle on the European societies like ours. Chances are high that your very different opinions about "what is right" are a part of the traits that have caused the deep problems in the lands of the Eastern Slavs.<br><br>Even in the most optimistic situation – a de facto Russian surrender during the weekend or an anti-war "regime change" in Moscow, followed by a rather safe return of most Ukrainians to their homes (some of them are gone) – we are entering a rather frustrating and dangerous period of the history. I am afraid that in recent 9 days, Russians as a group have damaged the world by more than their integrated positive contributions to mankind throughout their existence. The task of all good people should be to prove me wrong. Lots of people, not only employees of professional charities, are already doing a lot. Who can pray should pray. God bless Europe, sláva Ukrajině.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8666091.post-13203087052575429332022-03-04T08:53:00.023+01:002022-03-04T20:36:21.134+01:00We need to think how to win the Third World War<b>Allowing Russia to make the first strike against NATO may be a big mistake</b><br><br>According to some seemingly official documents, the invasion of Ukraine was approved on <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=january+18+approved+ukraine&oq=janu&aqs=edge.0.69i59j0i131i433i512j69i57j0i433i512j0i512l3j69i60j69i61.847j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">January 18th</a>, should have started on February 20th, and ended on March 6th. I think that it would prove that the increased shooting in Donbas which came after the approval was fake, a false flag operation, much like the German false flag operations (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Himmler">Operation Himmler</a>) that preceded the September 1939 attack on Poland. Even if the date "January 18th" were fake, it is pretty clear that this massive war against the country with Europe's 2nd largest country wasn't written down overnight – despite the fact that the omnipresent amateurism may indicate exactly that. Roughly from 1991, Putin wanted something like that and some details may have been added since 2014. I actually thought that the shelling in Donbas was fake well before the war on Ukraine began. It was just too strangely correlated with some strategic mysterious comments by Russian officials. But I didn't want to invent accusations without sufficient evidence. Update: a <a href="https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/russian-mp-says-ukraine-invasion-was-planned-a-year-ago-report-122030301120_1.html">Russian MP</a> said on TV that the invasion was planned a year ago.<br><br>The events were coming extremely quickly from February 24th and people's moods and attitudes were correspondingly quickly changing, too. On Saturday, I still published a peace treaty, apparently thinking that something like that was possible or desirable. I found that naive roughly from Monday, I don't know the exact moment. The Kremlin doesn't want peace or deescalation and couldn't be trusted to guarantee it, anyway.<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block; text-align:center;" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="4218709518"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />A further escalation seems increasingly likely. Macron said just that as the main summary of his phone call with Putin. Putin's unchecked power leads to a further escalation much like any unchecked power. When things clearly don't work, the unchecked dictator's attitude is always to double down. Their regime has no checks and balances, tools to reverse or fix mistakes. Any mistake is always interpreted as a success within the error margin, by doubling the stakes and therefore the error margin. Sometimes I think that he really suffers from a terminal illness and wants to take mankind with him. On the other hand, I have encountered numerous Russians that seem to agree with the insane ongoing war crimes.<br><br><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script><ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8768832575723394" data-ad-slot="0363397257"></ins><script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script><br /><br />During the night, Europe's largest nuclear power plant in <a href="https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=34.6271735&y=47.5120989&z=12&q=Enerhodar&source=osm&id=9579&ds=2">Enerhodar</a> (next to a reservoir at the Dnieper River) which is named "Zaporozhskaya" (an adjective) after a region whose capital Zaporozhya is some 40 km away, was shot at by the Russians. It produces 6x 0.95 GW (from 6x 3 GW thermal capacity), an impressive 3 times either Czech nuclear power plant (the reactors were turned off, you may imagine the shortage of electricity now). There was a fire of tyres started by the defenders, another fire in a technical or training building started by the Russians, firemen were finally allowed by the Russians to get there, and the fire was extinguished. Some hours later, Russia announced to have taken over the power plant. The Ukrainian staff is allegedly still working there. But the walls of the nuclear power plants were found to be a great spot for the Russian Grad missile launchers. The insanity of all these acts trumps most of the similar movies about ultra-villains. I don't have to explain to you that an attack on a nuclear power plant violates the Geneva Convention without exceptions. It is an act of state terrorism.<br><br>Putin has said very clearly that he is ready to do anything to achieve his goals (no one really knows what they are because what he's doing exceeds his modest stated goals roughly by 3 orders of magnitude at this moment) and by now, it seems likely to me. In fact, any Russian military action since February 24th was much more than most of us expected, it was never milder (and even the recognition on February 21st was much more than most of us expected). I think that this escalation which is causing increasing damages will only stop when someone really stops it by effective means and the boycott of Russian cats at an exhibition is not effective enough. Putin doesn't care about the destroyed Russian civilization and his citizens are sheeply and manipulated enough not to be able to do something against this global problem – my great admiration goes to the exceptions such as a boss of RT, Maria Baronova (an ex-dissident who surprisingly could get high in the RT; and a trained chemist), that just resigned for exactly the right reasons. This is not what her ancestors fought for and the Russophobes were largely proven right, she was proven wrong.<br><br>So we may have already missed the moment but the evidence just wasn't sufficient that the Western civilization would have to more actively defend itself. The situation seems similar to the beginning of the Second World War. I have written numerous analyses e.g. on Quora concluding that it would have been way better if France and the U.K. and perhaps some allies respected the alliances and fought Nazi Germany in Fall 1938 when Hitler was about to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. The annexation of the Sudetenland gave him a huge extra power which was subtracted from Czechoslovakia, and it also made the rest of Czechia indefensible and that homeland of mine was captured in March 1939 (well, the Slovak side was semi-captured), making Hitler even stronger and the democratic world even weaker. It seems spectacularly clear that the appeasement was wrong and every month of waiting was making things worse. Germany should have been defeated much earlier, perhaps in late 1938. We would have history textbooks with a "Second World War" that would have killed a million people. People would still think it was terrible and no one would know for sure that a much greater number of lives was actually saved. But that statement would be true in this alternative history.<br><br>Now, despite the truly crippling sanctions and the shocking underperformance of the Russian infantry, Putin is also getting stronger every day, according to the new rules that he is defining (and which I have predicted many times: it is in the interest of savages who aren't good at the "newest contests" to return the contests in the world to the distant past where they did better). From Monday, it seems reasonable to me to think that a further escalation may be unavoidable and at some moment, the West will have to say "enough" because it will be existentially threatened, too. No one knows who is most threatened in the West: Finland? Sweden? Poland? Turkey? Czechia? Like in 1938, it could be wise to say "enough" as soon as possible. And it may mean to attack Russia before Russia attacks NATO.<br><br>Some nuclear warheads would be flying and some of them could explode. The Hiroshima bomb destroyed a disk of radius of 2 km from the explosion, and semi-destroyed 3 km away from the explosion. Today's bombs are larger and the distances are roughly tripled (the energy grows with a higher power of the distance, of course). So when a typical bomb lands somewhere, think where it could be if Russia has 6,000 warheads to beat roughly 1 or 2 billion of people, you first get blinded if you look into the insane explosion. The blinding affects people in the radius of 80 km or so and is usually temporary. Heat is generated and there are very annoying temperatures in the radius of 20 km or so. The heat produces a high air pressure that spreads much more slowly and structures in the radius of 6 km or so are completely destroyed. And on top of that, you will get some radioactive dust and sickness for a longer period of time. But note that the next season, plants were growing in Hiroshima just fine, defying cataclysmic predictions, and the area of Chernobyl was recently thriving with wildlife. The animals don't measure the radiation level and they ignore it. They ignore human warnings, too, because they don't understand it. And collectively, they did great! We have to learn something from the boars of Chernobyl if the radiation becomes widespread; it was no rocket science for them to collectively survive. Much of our caution has surely been excessive, by many orders of magnitude. Just 9 days ago, we were obsessed with lowering the Omicron Common Cold infections by 1% by respirators and millions of people were obsessed with even tinier "terrifying problems".<br><br>A nuclear exchange is not quite the end of the world although we have been assuming that the two phrases are equivalent for decades. Out of the 6,000+ Russian warheads, many could be eliminated by some targeted bombardment and/or sabotage, some of them would fail because they are Russian products, some of them would be intercepted. So there would probably be fewer than 1,000 blasts. Much of the countryside could survive, along with many people who would hide in the subways etc.<br><br>Unlike the weekend, I think that further indications of weakness make it more likely that Putin will escalate things so our declaration – ideally a credible declaration – that we may start to bombard Russia is more likely to deescalate things. But I can't quite guarantee such a things. Not even psychologists can because psychology is far from a controllable let alone deterministic natural science.<br><br>Note that this is such a bad outcome that you should forget about the recipes "what to do". There is obviously no algorithm to be completely safe once you expect nuclear bombs near your home. Experts and "experts" still disagree whether, if you see a nuclear mushroom, you should hide to the nearest building or basement; or, as some fancy researchers say, you should run away from the blast as quickly as you can for 30 minutes. I think that it should be left to your immediate decision at that terrible moment. The distance of 7 km from the blast and 10 km from the blast is probably a huge difference when it comes to the doses and other things. You want to be inside and isolated but you prefer hiding places that are further from the blast.<br><br>Let me also mention that if a Chernobyl-like catastrophe were launched (by the Chechens? Are they really Chechen savages shooting near this equipment?) in Energodar (and Putin may use the power plant as a weapon or tool of blackmail, he already uses its walls to host the Grad missile launchers), it wouldn't mean the end of Europe. I would expect a Chernobyl times ten. And despite the anti-nuclear propaganda, Chernobyl was largely a "trace effect" for almost all places in Europe. These are terrible things to consider but not the end of the world. I think it is obvious that Western Europeans shouldn't try to evacuate the continent en masse in such a scenario. After all, after some weeks, the radioactive dust would be spread all over the Earth, anyway.<br><br>Of course, if it were possible to eliminate the heads behind the ongoing war crimes; and the bulk of Russia's nuclear stockpile by some conventional weapons, it would be vastly preferred over nuclear strikes against Russia. But unless we see sufficiently quickly that someone in Russia wants to stop it and has the capabilities to stop it, it seems increasingly clear to me that if there is any Western civilization left at all, we will have to do it at one moment, anyway. While the current Russian president may be a psychopath, I am afraid that if someone like Shoigu or Medvedev continued to lead the Kremlin after Putin, it wouldn't be much better although there would be a chance.<br><br>The Russian Federation is becoming an upsized sibling of the Islamic State – which wasn't too difficult to neutralize, despite the omnipresence of the ISIS in the news for a few years. If you imagine that the Islamic State controlled both Syria (17 million people) and Iraq (40 million), which isn't quite true but it's an OK estimate, it was in charge of 57 million people many of whom really supported it, too. OK, Russia is less than 3 times larger. The Russian Federation is becoming the Islamic State with one e-folding. It has a much better technology than the Islamic State savages but as we are seeing, it is not sensational and it doesn't have many high-quality professionals to work with the technology.<br><br>A psychopath that takes over the country with the largest territory and the most extensive nuclear stockpile in the world and starts Hell on Earth is clearly the ultimate black swan event which I didn't expect to live through and neither did most of the people. But the probability was never tiny, especially with the pathologically concentrated power in Russia – which is, just like in the case of Hitler and the humiliation of Germany and Austria after 1918, partly caused by the Soviet loss in the Cold War and the following not-so-prestigious status that Russia has had in the world. The people behind the excessive humiliation of Russia are co-responsible for the ongoing monstrosities but this is not a time to blame someone in the West. So relax, it has been just my consistent opinions for years. Who is the main villain is obvious. The Russophobes have helped to create the monster so they also have a special moral duty to help to terminate it. We may also say that the Russophobes have been proven correct in statements that seem more essential now – and I was wrong about those because I just didn't expect Russia to get this insane.<br><br>In the optimistic scenario, the Russian nuclear stockpile has to be overtaken by some Western/international folks. I think it could be a good idea to shrink Russia's territory, expel Russians from some border regions, cut the remaining Russia to several pieces, treat them as occupation zones governed by various countries, and restrict the Russian people's sovereignty over things that are potentially dangerous for other countries or for West-like citizens of Russia. The reparations that will have to be paid by these successors of Russia will obviously be huge.Luboš Motlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17487263983247488359noreply@blogger.com0