Strikers should be fired

A general strike is crippling Greece today.

In principle, strike may be a legitimate tool of the employees to show or try to show that their work is more important and valuable than what the employer seems to indicate by her behavior. This claim may turn out to be right. However, this claim may also turn out to be wrong. Only if the strikers bear some responsibility for their decisions and behavior and if they are at risk of losing advantages because of their decisions, strikes may turn out to be a tool that improves the life of the society.



Once a nation enters the mode of thinking in which the employees are always right - because the government and the employers who are in charge are just reflections of the same striking employees - the nation is just destined to drop to the bottom of the sea. Glub glub glub. Such a nation is going to give ever greater advantages to the employees for ever smaller amount of work.

Tomorrow, there will be a strike in the Czech Republic. Trains and various cities' public transportation systems will be among the sectors that will make many consumers upset. Of course, the strike won't occur in as dramatic conditions as Greece but it's still annoying.




While I don't claim that my homeland is perfect, I see a striking difference between the atmosphere in Czechia and the atmosphere in Greece. In Czechia, most of the population realizes that the striking unionists are lazy assholes who just protect their own interests. Facebook is flooded with groups claiming that the "unionists don't speak on behalf of me". General population realizes that it has nothing to do with them. More importantly, it really has nothing to do with them.

Czech President Václav Klaus has urged the Czech government to hire private bus companies to do the job previously done by the unionists, and tell the strikers "good-bye". That means to fire them. I think that most people who are not directly involved in the strikes agree with our president. Some people will surely disagree. Some hardcore communist and/or socialist voters will always support lazy unionists, regardless of the context, as a matter of principle - but they're fortunately a small minority.

The situation in Greece looks very different. As far as I can say, the political confrontation in Greece is about a disagreement between lazy parasites and even lazier and more parasitic parasites. It's a battle between socialists, hardcore socialists, and communists. I am not sure whether there is any top politician in Greece who dares to say that as many of the strikers should be fired as possible. It's a job for any sensible employer to minimize the expenses and an employee who doesn't work much but who would surely love to be getting lots of money is not such a positive contribution to a company, or the mankind, for that matter.

Even if Greece were forgiven the USD 0.4 trillion debt, what's really wrong about the country - which already has the lowest Standard and Poor's rating among all countries in the world (and don't forget that some of them are really screwed!) - the main problem is that the citizens have lost their sanity. Their way of thinking is incompatible with the creation of wealth. It's not just the case that a majority of the Greeks have lost their sanity. It seems that almost no one who realizes that what they're doing is really intolerable is able to survive in that country. I think that everyone who would loudly say that the strikers have to be fired and replaced would be harassed or beaten in Greece.



Business as usual in Athens. Sara Firth of Russia Today is offering us a pretty peaceful, relaxed report. :-) Good idea to send them EUR 100 billion to have more money for Molotov cocktails and yogurts to throw at the cops. See two more minutes of some drama. The Telegraph can only shoot such things from a safe distance. ;-)

Greece is totally captured by insane conspiracy theories claiming that their debt is not real and that their unsustainable fiscal situation is just a numerical trick perpetrated by the evil global banks and others. It is just totally crazy. It is a country that is importing about 3 times more stuff than it is exporting. It is a country where people eat 3 times more than what they produce. How can these shocking and comprehensible coefficients be hand waved away by references to big foreign banks?

Obviously, a solution has to be radical if there's any hope for Greece to get back on the track. All government employees should see their salaries and pensions drop by something like 50 percent because it's really the government employees who are the source of the problem. That wouldn't reduce the living standards by 50 percent; it would only reduce them by about 30% because there would be a corresponding 20% drop in the prices as the bogus wealth of the people is erased and brought closer to the reality. But a radical change of this magnitude is necessary.

Slovakia has agreed to participate in the second wave of the likely waste of money but they have several conditions:

1. the Greek government should make more savings
2. it must start privatization and the opposition has to promise to continue in the privatization as well
3. the loan should be guaranteed by the state Greek property
4. the private sector should agree with delaying the maturity of the bonds by seven years

I have some doubts about the ability of Slovakia to assure that its viewpoint will be adopted but they're still perfectly sensible demands. The budget cuts have clearly been extremely far from being sufficient so far.

Privatization is needed. Together with that, Greece has to liquidate pretty much all of its "achievements" giving special rights to all the employees who are pretty much guaranteed by the law to be un-firable and to have salaries that are much higher than the work that they actually do. The business environment in Greece is suffocating because of the anti-employer and anti-prosperity socialist garbage regulations that so many Greeks still have the chutzpah to defend.

No wonder that the unemployment has increased from 11.6 to 16.2 percent in the last year and the unemployment between less-than-25-year-old folks, around 40%, resembles countries like Zimbabwe. Who would like to employ people under such conditions? The strikers pretend not to realize that the very demands they're defending during their strikes are the source of the high unemployment and the misery (which will inevitably get worse).

Because it's otherwise way too likely that all additional loans will be thrown to the trash bin, they should be actually backed up by some actual assets such as islands and the remaining state companies that have some value.

Finally, the private sector must share a burden because the taxpayers in the countries of creditors - and even in countries that have nothing to do with Greece (except for having entered the same currency union) - shouldn't be the only ones who suffer and who lose their money. Obviously, the rating agencies will have to decide whether such a forced collaboration means a "default". If I were working for a rating agency, obviously, I would think that it does. But the default of Greece is really unavoidable. All these extra ideas are just ideas how to make it more organized, following some predictable rules, and to give Greece chance that it will start to function as a proper country again in the near future. They're not ideas how to avoid any default because this would be an impossible goal.

If I were not personally able to see a Greek political party which is supported by dozens of percent of the population and which loudly emphasizes that the way of life that Greece was choosing in the recent decades was unacceptable, unsustainable, and has to be abandoned, and that it was unforgivable for the Greeks to repeatedly vote for pernicious left-wing populist parties such as PASOK, I wouldn't pay a penny to that country. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case. It is a nation brainwashed by idiotic utopias about a paradise where employees may have all advantages without doing the corresponding work. Such a nation has no future and shouldn't have any future.

It sounds very unpopular and I know that many people won't like it but I am convinced that at this moment, Greece vitally needs someone like Pinochet to take over, save the country and send it in the essentially right direction.

Lidice anniversary: Klaus vs Sudetenland nuts

In May 1942, the Czechoslovak government in London decided that the "blonde beast" and one of the main architects of the holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, has committed too many crimes.

Even though he had never run in any elections, he was behaving as a kind of dictator on our territory, calling himself the "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia. Thousands of Czech people became the victims of his terror.




So much like in the case of Osama bin Laden, the government decided that the beast should be executed and from its London office, it sent a couple of paratroopers who simply executed him. The Czechoslovak government knew that every sensible German would agree, within a couple of years, with this decision.

However, at that time, many Germans failed to be sensible.

So in June 1942, the Nazis decided to revenge for the death of the beast. They irrationally misinterpreted a love letter addressed to someone in Lidice, or something like that, and decided that the village had to be destroyed. Sixty-nine years ago, on June 10th, 1942, they sent a couple of trained Nazi troops to the village, just Northwest of Prague. (Another village, Ležáky, was destroyed two weeks later.)



Lidice's children who were murdered. Memorial by Ms Marie Uchytilová who is also the author of the history's most famous Czechoslovak 1-crown coin with a woman seeding a plant. Click to zoom in.

I don't want to give you all the details. At any rate, all 190+ men were shot on the place and the kids and women were sent to concentration camps (with a few exception of newborn babies who could have been converted to Nordic Germans). Most of the kids were killed by gas, bringing the total casualties to 340+. All the trees and buildings were flattened. The village was, of course, revived after the war.

At the end of the war, it was clear that Czechoslovakia was incompatible with the Sudetenland Germans' past attitudes. The Nazis among them had previously demanded to become a part of the German federation. After the war, this desire was permanently fulfilled and the Sudetenland Nazis and their collaborators were expelled to Germany. Those Germans who could have proved their anti-Nazi resistance could stay but I assure you that it was just a tiny minority. Needless to say, the expulsion wasn't perfectly smooth and couldn't have been perfectly smooth.

Because of the communism that would start in Czechoslovakia just 3 years later, the Germans who were moved away really benefited economically but that's already a different chapter of the history. At any rate, I think it's obvious that after those years of Nazi terror that was almost universally supported by the German-speaking population, the emotions were inevitably high. I may get a bit upset even 69 years later, even though I had nothing to do with that history.



This year, on the very Lidice anniversary, the Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft, an organization of those Germans whose ancestors used to live in the Sudetenland and who would still love to rewrite the causal relationship between the different episodes above, demanded that the Czech president Dr Václav Klaus would apologize (again) for the imperfections that took place during the expulsion. This demand was articulated by Franz Pany.

Well, you may guess what the result has been. President Klaus said:

Apology has always made sense as a beautiful human individual gesture a person makes as one's own decision. [...]

Disputes over responsibility for World War Two and associated events cannot be resolved by apologies and certainly not by us, who live today, which means 66 years later. [...]

Some in Germany do not want to hear all previous apologising statements by the Czech side. [...]

Besides, demanding an apology on the day of the anniversary of the Lidice horrendous tragedy is a sign of extreme human insensitivity and inability to draw lessons.

Well, very true.

A typical Czech man in the pub probably calls the Sudetenland leader Mr Berndt Posselt (on the picture above) "a bloated Sudeten pig". However, former nominally social democratic Czech prime minister Dr Miloš Zeman was more creative when he referred to Mr Posselt as "a Hitler returned from a fattening station".

At any rate, Mr Posselt has already complained that this kind of a declaration could have been heard before 1989. Well, that's right, before 1989, after 1989, and after 2089 as well. (The Landsmannschaft talks like the Sudeten Germans before 1945, by the way.) Mr Posselt has also claimed that he has visited Lidice and put a wreath over there. Well, maybe he has confused who has killed whom over there!



A new big movie, Lidice, just got into the Czech movie theaters.

Quite generally, the idea that the guilt for the inhuman acts that took place in the 1940s was "uniformly distributed" is fundamentally untrue and pernicious. Just because Czechoslovakia couldn't organize the punishment of the Sudetenland Nazis in a totally organized way doesn't mean that it was on par with the Nazi Germany.

Meanwhile, don't expect that Klaus's approval rate will drop because of this. Quite on the contrary! The Czechs are constantly being assured that no significant political force in Germany wants to revive the imperial desires of the Third Reich - which could threaten the ownership rights in the Czech borderland, among other things. At the same moment, with quite some regularity, the Czechs are being reminded that they must remain cautious and they should never become too certain about it.

Rewriting of the history is something that some people continue to do. As we're getting further from the 1940s, people are forgetting what the history actually was and it is actually becoming easier to rewrite the history.

Klaus: Germany's giving up is irrational, populist

On the picture, Czech President Václav Klaus is unveiling a giant Czech-made bucket wheel excavator KK1300; click the picture to zoom in. The Czech ministry of trade has decided to help Czech companies to secure strategic raw materials by helping them to buy up the mines in Germany, Poland, and perhaps Ukraine, and to overtake the rest of Europe a week or two later. ;-)

Today, he gave a talk (target URL in German language) at the Czech-German economic forum in Hamburg, Germany. He praised the economic relationships, didn't forget to mention that Czechia's exports to Germany exceed the imports, and perhaps also appreciated tasty bean sprouts they have in Hamburg. ;-)

Before it was determined that the Spanish cucumbers were not the culprit, Klaus criticized the hysterical speculations that Spanish cucumbers were the source of the illness. Even your humble correspondent failed to realize that this claim could have been bogus.




However, he has also been asked about the recent German anti-nuclear decision. At the opening of the forum, he said:

This decision is completely irrational.
...

Germans are normally rational people but I do not understand this.
...

I consider this as a completely irrational, populist step from the German side. This is a sort of political helplessness and it annoys me a lot.
...

I admire some of our economists and politicians who know exactly how the stop to nuclear energy will influence the price in the Czech Republic ten years from now. I as an economist am fascinated, these are geniuses. :-)

As you can see, Klaus has a clear attitude even when it comes to prophesies of our top politicians who have "calculated" that the stopping of the German nuclear power plants will make the electricity exactly 30 percent more expensive. ;-)

AGW: brainwashed Australian politicians eager to start a diplomatic cold war with Czechia

Czech president Václav Klaus will celebrate his 70th birthday in two weeks. If you need some contacts to the Prague Castle where he works, for example because you wanted to send a gift, here they are.

(The photograph is genuine, not edited. Klaus wanted to provide the people with some data to decide whether he and Santa Claus are the same person.)

Our leader, a well-known climate skeptic, has previously recommended Australian prime minister Julia Gillard to listen to the true climate change experts who live in her country, e.g. Bob Carter in particular.

The Australian and Monsters and Critics have already figured out what her reaction will be. Dear Australian readers, your prime minister won't meet our president after he completes his 16,000-kilometer flight! Her obsession with the global warming hoax is so intense that she is going to put the Australian-Czech relationships at risk.

(But calculate how many pounds of CO2 will be emitted by the aircraft - and no results!)




And she is not the only one in the land of kangaroos. Even though, with all due respect, Australia probably doesn't have any politician of Klaus' caliber, they will obey what the group think requires. And when it comes to questions such as the hypothetical global warming threat, the group think is controlling much of the Australian nation. Gold Coast Mail have reported that global warming skeptics are an endangered species in Australia, perhaps more so than the polar bears (in Australia). ;-)

Unlike polar bears, the global warming skeptics won't make the Australian politically correct activists abandon their wealth and jobs in order to save the species a from extinction: after all, it's just a human species so why should they care? Humans are just a waste so their species may go extinct, right? Only brave Australian citizens may openly admit the obvious - that they would like to meet Klaus themselves.

The article in the Australian above has also quoted your humble correspondent's translation of a noted statement by Klaus (from a 2007 interview) in which he explains why politicians are afraid to say what they really think about the global warming: it's because the whip of political correctness strangles their voices. Well, some of them have already become genuine global warming proponents because the whip of political correctness has stopped the inflow of fresh blood into their brains.

Andrew Bolt explains why he thinks that Gillard is terrified by the idea that she would meet Klaus.

Things are very different in Czechia where only 28 percent of the population think that global warming is a problem worth talking about. While President Klaus is special - and deviates from the average - in many respects, usually in the direction that may be interpreted as "up" :-), basic attitudes such as the global warming skepticism are actually echoed by the bulk of our society.

But should one admit that people have different opinions that should be confronted before the direction of the society and the conditions of the citizens' co-existence is re-adjusted? I think that Klaus himself would never create tension with another problem-free country just because he disagrees with their leader about something. After all, if it were the case, he would probably never meet (almost) any foreign politician. ;-) But of course, Klaus enjoys meetings with Obama and many others who can't exactly be classified as Klaus' natural ideological soulmates. Because almost all of my countrymates think that he is doing a great job in these "formal" parts of his job, but also because of other reasons, his approval rate remains high.

What the Australian politicians are doing is wrong, wrong, and wrong, and it constitutes some indirect evidence that Australia is gradually ceasing to be a free democratic society. It is a society where politicians and citizens are expected to pay lip service to any myth that becomes fashionable at a given moment, otherwise they face troubles that makes their lives measurably constrained and they are being threatened with extinction. In this sense, I think that the unpopular comparison with Germany of the mid 1930s is completely legitimate and important. Climate non-conformist recalls some other brutal stories about "how they don't really like us".

The speech codes are being imposed publicly. In anonymous polls, things are less obvious. For example, 3/4 of the Australians realize that Gillard's carbon tax would reduce their living standards. However, a slight majority thinks that the Australian carbon tax would have some impact on the environment. Well, about a few millidegrees of cooling per century - while it's unclear whether it's a good or bad thing even in Australia.

Interview: Is climate change caused by solar inertial motion?

The questions were asked by Mr Vítězslav Kremlík M.A., a historian and a blogger at klimaskeptik.cz; see original URL

An interview with Ing. Ivanka Charvátová, CSc. from the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague). The story of one politically incorrect scientific discovery.

(Translation of the original Czech interview published at Osel.cz in May 2011 - link - also by V. Kremlík)



Motion of the barycenter of solar system relative to the Sun.

Your field of study in the Geophysical Institute is solar inertial motion (SIM). Could you explain what it is?

It is a movement of the Sun around the barycentre (centre of gravity) of our solar system. This motion is due to the varying position of the planets, especially the giant planets.

Already Sir Isaac Newton in his PRINCIPIA (1687) intuitively came to the following conclusion: “… since that centre of gravity (centre of mass of the solar system) is continually at rest, the Sun, according to the various positions of the planets, must continually move every day, but will never recede far from that centre.” This effect is not insignificant. The Sun moves across an area the size of 4.3 solar radiuses, i.e. 0.02 AU or 3.106 km. As a coincidence, the average solar speed is around 50 km/hr. Just like the speed of a car driving downtown. The first study about SIM was written by P.D. Jose in year 1965.

You are the author of quite a breakthrough in this field of study. What is it?

First I studied the SIM periodicity and in 1987 I came to survey the geometry of this motion. I discovered the solar motion can be classified into two elementary types. Motion along a trefoil-like trajectory governed by the Jupiter-Saturn order. And another motion type which is chaotic. This gave us a precise homogeneous basis, upon which it became possible to study the solar-terrestrial and climatic variability. You may find it comforting that no matter how the Sun wiggles, every 179 years it comes back to a regular trefoil path. It is important to note, that the periods of chaotic motion coincide with the long-term minima in solar activity such as the Wolf Minimum (1270-1350), Spörer Minimum (~1430-1520), Maunder Minimum (~1620-1710) or Dalton Minimum (~1790-1840). During the trefoil periods the ST-phenomena are stable – the sunspot cycles are 10 years long, volcanic activity is muted and in the middle of the trefoil period there is a temperature maximum down here on Earth.




Later I discovered also a 2402 year long cycle of solar motion. After the lapse of this period the Sun always enters a segment, when for almost 370 years it moves continuously along the trefoil trajectory. This is when the natural conditions are stable, there is a long-term thermal maximum. The latest symmetry of the motion trefoils was around 25 AD. The NASA scientists called this 2402 yr cycle as “Charvatova Cycle”. The prospective solar motion can be calculated in advance (celestial mechanics), which gave us brand new solar-predictive capabilities. So far our predictions exploit the observation that the same solar motion trajectory tends to generate similar phenomena. (I was the only one in the whole world who got the 23rd sunspot cycle prediction right). The physical mechanism is not known yet.



Figure 1: The trajectory of the Sun centre divided into two basic motion types: trefoil trajectory according to JS-ordering (top) and disordered (chaotic) (bottom). The Sun returns to a trefoil trajectory, which always lasts for 50 years, once every 179 years. The chaotic segments correspond to long-term minima of solar activity (see above). The dark yellow circles in the top images represent the Sun.

What made you study solar motion?

In the 1980s the director of our institute was academic Václav Bucha. At some conference abroad he met the renowned American geologist and climatologist Rhodes W. Fairbridge, who was currently studying solar motion along with J.H. Shirley from JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), NASA, Pasadena. Mr. Bucha could smell important topics miles away, so we decided to research this too.

Did the world notice your discovery?

Even before my major discovery came, Prof R.W.Fairbridge contacted me after I published an article about SIM periodicity in Paris. It was published under my former name Jakubcová. He and J.H.Shirley published an article in Solar Physics at the very same time. R.W.Fairbridge wrote me a very friendly letter of praise. There was a communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in that time, so any post coming from the Capitalist West was inspected by censorship. Surely you can imagine what a fuss there was about this letter. Not only it had NASA on the envelope, but on top of that Prof Fairbridge mentioned in the letter, that he knew Prague because he had been here in 1968 during the Prague Spring at some Geology Conference. And he mentioned to have seen the “eastern visitors”, the tanks of the occupants invading Czechoslovakia. He and Jim Shirley were so excited at my trefoils that when they edited the Encyclopaedia of Planetary Sciences in the early 1990s they invited me to write the main article on “Solar Motion” there. I was the only author from the whole Eastern Block in that very Encyclopaedia. And I was the most cited one.

Did you two meet in person?

No, we did not. But we maintained very lively correspondence. He used to send me articles that were not available in my country. He also invited me to write an article to the Proceedings published on the occasion of his 80th birthday anniversary (published in the Journal of Coastal Research.)

Another well known researcher who studied solar motion is Theodor Landscheidt. Do you know each other?

We do not and I believe he is not alive any more. We agree that in the first half of the 21st century the solar activity might be lower and even the temperatures might go down. But he does not cite me and I cite only one of his studies.

Apparently there are lots of scientists who explain climate change by other factors, not merely by CO2. However in the Czech Republic, where you live, most people know only one climate sceptic. Your president Václav Klaus.

Oh my. I would rather not comment on that. I only browsed through his book “Blue Planet in Green Chains” in the bookshop.

There are many climate sceptics in the world, they have their organisations, especially at the American or Canadian universities. Many professors of theirs have contacted me. For instance Prof. O. Manuel, the former chief researcher of the Apollo project. They even published a book “Slying the Sky Dragon“, where they document the scandals of the climate change research and thus also the uncertainties in the temperature measurements of the last 40 years or so.

The UN climate panel (IPCC), which is so harshly criticised by your president Klaus, has had lots of scandals lately. Have you heard about Climategate?

Of course. The director of CRU (Climatic Research Unit) P.D. Jones had to step down.

What does the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4 2007) say about solar motion?

Nothing at all. They are allergic to SIM. Their whole research fails to consider the solar-terrestrial phenomena (solar, geomagnetic, volcanic activity etc.) and they take into account only temperatures since 1860. However in Europe we have a number of continuous instrumental temperature data sets dating back to mid 18th century. The Jesuits started the measurements. With my colleague we processed these data and we showed their relation to solar motion and published an article on it in the Climatic Change journal, Stanford University. In mid 18th century the temperature was as high as in 1940 (both in the middle of a trefoil). But was there any industry, air pollution? No. They even fail to take into account the climate reconstructions (temperatures, proxy data) derived from tree-ring width 18O or 10Be isotopes in ice cores etc., though they are already available for periods deep in the past and are of good quality at least for the Holocene period.

But how do they explain why every 180 years there is a long-term temperature maximum? How do they explain the significant temperature maximum around 1000 AD, when even Greenland was settled? How do they explain the long-term minima?


They don’t. They pretend it did not happen.

Explaining climate change by other factors, not only by greenhouse gases, it is almost a heresy in our times. Were you aware of this when you discovered the trefoils of yours?

In 1987 when I realised there are trefoils in the solar motion (note: there are trefoil symbols in the gothic cathedrals too), I shivered. I realised immediately, that it is connected with almost everything, that nobody was going to do the work unless I do and that I would have to face unbelievable enmities. I raised my hands to the sky and I almost cried: “Why me?!” On top of that, it was exactly 300 years after Sir Isaac Newton, in his PRINCIPIA, formulated his intuitive conclusion about solar motion.

You are from a Christian family. Did you face any persecution under the communist regime?

My maiden name is Kryšpínová. The brother of my grandfather, a school headmaster, was a famous constructor of steam locomotives and he even became a director of the ČKD company. Unfortunately, we lived in the same house as the family of powerful communist bureaucrats. The mother of Vasil Mohorita was an influential Communist Party secretary in Prague 7. When I was finishing my elementary school, she rang a bell in our place and she yelled at me that a relative of the bourgeoisie ČKD director would never be allowed to study at any secondary school! Times changed, today my uncle Vojta is in the textbooks of the Transport Faculty of the Prague Technical University (ČVUT) as a constructor of world fame. He even has a street named after him, he has his stamps etc.

How did you solve it?

My uncle Vojta advised my parents to send me to the other grandparents to Jilemnice, at the foot of the Krkonoše Mountains. My grandfather was an engraver who printed cloths, almost worker class, so we though this might be acceptable to the communists. It worked, I even had the support of the grammar school headmaster in advance. It was a fine school. It had great teachers, including some scientists who were expelled there from universities for political reasons. This school was established as early as in 1909 when my country was part of the Austrian Empire and it was one of the few secondary schools where lectures were in the Czech language. Many Czech artists studied there such as the song writer Jiří Šlitr, actor Stanislav Zindulka, photograph Zdenko Fejfar or the director Karel Palouš. It is unbelievable, that now some madman wants to close this great school. Only Hitler was so insolent to do that. There are protests, demonstrations, so far in vain.

Yet the communist regime let you study at a university

I went to ČVUT (Czech Technical College), the Faculty of Civil Engineering, since my father was a civil engineer. The communists did not censor technical fields so much. I did not enjoy the first grades much, meliorations, road construction, surveyor work, but in the higher grades we could specialise – higher maths, (early) computers, cartography and others. I chose astronomy. In the building of the old Technical College at Karlovo Square, the magnificent Prof. Emil Buchar chaired the “Institute for Astronomy and Elementary Geophysics”. He always took only a couple of students. I was the first woman among them. This autumn it is the 110th anniversary of his birth.

You work at the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. How did you get here?

The end of my studies was coming soon, when suddenly one day, late at night, the telephone rang. Prof Buchar called that the next day I was to go to the Geophysical Institute at 9 AM for an interview. He informed me he had already registered me. So I went there and I passed. I have been working here ever since.

Aren’t you sorry that after 20 years SIM is still not in the elementary school textbooks? That climate changes are still explained only by CO2, as if climate was influenced by no other factors whatsoever?

Publishing of my (our) articles has always been a bad dream. Some editors rejected our article without review, saying their readers would surely not be interested. Another editor told me, that they would not allow having anything about SIM published in their magazine! I even received a “peer review” consisting of a single sentence: “All articles about solar motion should be banned!” In spite of all these enmities, we succeeded to have articles about SIM and ST-relationship published in renowned world journals with high impact factor (e.g. New Astronomy (Harvard University, IF 2.2), Surveys in Geophysics (IF 3.1) or Climatic Change (Stanford University, IF 4.)

And my results are in the prestigious textbook of physics for American universities – “Fundamentals of Physics“.

What welcome did solar motion research get among the scientists in your country?

The enlightened ones, and they are many, support it and help me a lot. The others use this topic for target practice. I was sorry to hear dr. Grygar, Czech astronomer and member of the Czech branch of CSI, compares SIM to some astrology. I wonder when he will grow tired of doing that. And our climatologists? I represent our institute in the Czech National Climate Programme. These people “research” only greenhouse effect vs temperatures. I call them “heaters”. Sometimes I feel like a lone Hussite warrior – myself against all. They deny the existence of solar influence on climate let alone the influence of the whole solar system. Most of them refuse to talk to me, most of them even do not say hello, when we meet. Even now when many world journals publish articles about the influence of the Sun on climate. Probably this requires more time. Many discoveries had to wait, some very long. I do not waste my time fighting windmills. God will sort it out when the right time comes.

And what about the Czech media? What is their attitude to solar motion? Has there been any documentaries on TV about this?

Some two years ago people from the ČT2 television channel came to me and we filmed a half an hour interview for some TV magazine. I was sceptical. Will you really broadcast it? Sure, it’s already in the TV Guide. And then, some 2 hours before the broadcast, some powerful person called them and banned the broadcast.

My only media “presentation” was when I was invited to an entertainment TV contest on the PRIMA TV channel (The “Guess Who I Am” programme). It was fun and I used the opportunity to sneak a short description of the trefoils and solar motion into my speech.

But your work is known and cited abroad

It is. I am very cited in both Americas, Canada, I am cited by the Germans, Italians, Australians, Scandinavians, recently even by the Chinese. I am cited even in other fields of study, for instance in the journals Nuclear Physics, Neutron Repulsion Journal ... In 2009 as part of the European Geophysical Union congress there was a Great Panel on Sun and Climate. I had an invited talk there. And I had another invited talk at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Brazil 2010.

I hear you are cited also by the scientists who study exoplanets? How is it related?

Yes, I am cited by the Germans, the astronomers from the Heidelberg University. I suggested that we might expect barycentric motion in the stars, which manifest variable irradiance. Which means such stars probably have planets. I wrote this for CTS (Centre of Theoretical Studies) in year 1995, when no exoplanet was known yet. Now we know over 400 of them.



Figure 2 No, these are not jewel designs. These are four examples of barycentric path of stars with exoplanets (from Perryman and Schulze-Hartung, Astronomy& Astrophysics 525, A65, 2011).

Is there any message you would like to send to the readers?

When you fight for a good cause, you must never give up. I am from a family of keen followers of the Scouting traditions. My father was a founding member of the 5th Group of Water Scouts in my country. As a Boy Scout he had the honour to welcome our first president, the founder of the first independent Czechoslovak Republic, when T.G. Masaryk was returning from emigration. Thanks to his resilience my father succeeded with many things in spite of the communists. And I have a personal example too. To keep sane during the communist era I privately translated the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. My translations could be published only after the end of the communist regime, on the 100th anniversary of her birth (Modrý večer, ODEON, 1990, translated by Ivanka Jakubcová). Ms Anna had a difficult life. In the Stalinist era she was persecuted, she could not publish her poetry for decades, her son was imprisoned in Gulag for almost 20 years. But look now - her poetry is read by the whole world.

Interviewed by
Mgr. Vítězslav Kremlík, the founder of the Czech Climate Skeptic website www.klimaskeptik.cz

(The Czech text was authorised by ICH)

Profile:

born 3. 12. 1941 in Jilemnice, Czechoslovakia

education: ČVUT, Faculty of Civil Engineering, subject: geodetic astronomy and geophysics               

doctorate: CSc. 1991

current position: Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences since 1963 (Institute website - link)

List of publications
(note: some of the publications are downloadable from Klimaskeptik.cz - link)

Bucha, V., Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M. 1985 Resonance frequencies in the Sun’s motion, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 29, 107-111.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986a The planetary system and solar-terrestrial phenomena, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 224-235.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986b Is there any relation between the Sun´s motion and global seismic activity? Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 148-152.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M.: 1987 Correlation between solar motion, earthquakes and other geophysical phenomena, Annales Geophysicae, B, 135-142.

Charvátová-Jakubcová, I., Křivský, L. and Střeštík, J., 1988 The periodicity of aurorae in the years 1001-1900, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 32, 70-77.

Charvátová, I., 1988 The solar motion and the variability of solar activity, Adv. Space Res., 8, 7, 147-150.

Charvátová, I. 1989 On the relation between solar motion and the long term variability of solar activity, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 33, 230-241.

Charvátová, I., 1990a The relations between solar motion and solar variability, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 56-59.

Charvátová, I., 1990b On the relation between solar motion and solar activity in the years 1730-1780 and 1910-60, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 200-204.

Charvátová, I., 1995a Solar-terrestrial and climatic variability during the last several millennia in relation to solar inertial motion, J. Coastal Res., 17, 343-354.

Charvátová, I., 1995b Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-04, March 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1995c Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-08, 2nd Edition, November 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1997a Solar-terrestrial and climatic phenomena in relation to solar inertial motion, Surveys in Geophys., 18, 131-146.

Charvátová, I., 1997b Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Chapman & Hall, New York, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2006 Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Springer, Berlin, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2000 Can origin of the 2400-year cycle of solar activity be caused by solar inertial motion?, Annales Geophysicae, 18, 399-405.

Charvátová, I., 2000 The cycle of 2402 years in solar motion and its response in proxy records, Geolines, 11, 12-14.

Charvátová, I., 2007 The prominent 1.6-year periodicity in solar motion due to the inner planets, Annales Geophysicae, 25, 1-6.

Charvátová, I., 2009 Long-trm predictive assessments of solar and geomagnetic activities made on the basis of the close similarity between the solar inertial motions in the intervals 1840-1905 and 1980-2045, New Astronomy 14, 25-30, doi: 10.1016/j.newast.2008.04.005.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1991 Solar variability as a manifestation of the Sun’s motion, J. Atmos.Terr. Phys., 53, 1019-1025.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1995 Long-term changes of the surface air temperature in relation to solar inertial motion, Climatic Change, 29, 333-352.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2004 Periodicities between 6 and 16 years in surface air temperature in possible relation to solar inertial motion, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 66, 219-227

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2007 Relations between the solar inertial motion, solar activity and geomagnetic index aa since the year 1844, Adv. Space Res., 40, 7, 1026-1031, doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2007.05.086.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2000 Is the solar activity cycle synchronized with the solar inertial motion?, Int. J. Bifurcation and Chaos, 10, 2519-2526.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Seehafer, N., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2007 The solar activity cycle is weakly synchronized with the solar inertial motion, Physics Letters A, 365, 421-428, doi: 10.1016/j.physleta.2007.01.039.

Charvátová, I., Klokočník, J., Kolmaš, J. and Kostelecký, J., 2011 Chinese tombs oriented by a compass: evidence from paleomagnetic changes versus the age of tombs, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 55, 159-174.

The New York Times invites you to Pilsen

The New York Times just published an invitation to an unlikely tourist destination,

In Pilsen, Beer’s Not the Only Thing on Tap

my hometown of Pilsen, the 2015 European Capital of Culture.




That's quite an unexpected promotion given the fact that only 1/40,000 of the world population - or 170,000 - live in Pilsen. And not even municipal patriots such as your humble correspondent would include the city among the three prettiest places in Czechia. ;-)

The NYT article mentions some of the unsurprising places to visit - the large gothic cathedral on the main square, our renaissance city hall, the third or fourth largest synagogue in the world, the Techmania science museum, a puppet museum, our Patton Memorial, and various breweries, restaurants, and hotels.



Of course, there are other things to visit, including a decent zoo with dinopark (a local Jurassic park where dinosaurs were resuscitated), a famous law school of the local university where gangsters' friends and relatives get a degree in a few months :-), an insufficient soccer stadium where the team became the winner of the top Czech league a week ago, an ice-hockey stadium where the team owned by Marty Straka won the presidential trophy a year ago, and Czechia's most famous prison where Havel has spent quite some time. Pilsen also has an interesting and nontrivial historical underground.

The city was established as an industrial town according to a modern, technologically up-to-date project, in 1295. ;-) There was a nearby village with a similar name centuries earlier, too. But you know, those events already took place some years ago so despite the constant "working character" of the city throughout the centuries, it has become "somewhat" historical, too. In 1295, our American friends were scalping each other and waiting to learn how to ride stolen horses from the Spaniards 200 years later. ;-)

Pilsen used to be very dirty - not only because of the Škoda Holding factory (amusingly called "Factories of V. I. Lenin" during communism) - but after the fall of communism, it has become much prettier. The facades of both historical buildings and the concrete blocks are just one major manifestation of the change. Much cleaner air is another. Lots of malls and effective (usually German-owned, such as the newly opened largest Hornbach in Czechia) large stores is a third example.

See Google images to check some random pictures from Pilsen.

Obama in Poland

Barack Obama is visiting Poland and he also met Václav Klaus. Well, Klaus is always ready to meet the people. Lech Walesa refused to meet Obama because of the latter man's ass-licking of Russia and the cancellation of the Czech-Polish U.S. missile defense system unit.



During the dinner last night, Obama compared the recent Arab "revolutions" with the fall of communism.

Of course, Czech President Václav Klaus behaved diplomatically and didn't scream at his American friend that such a comparison is insulting. But he still made his point, explaining to Obama that Northern Africa and the Middle East are not ready to the kind of changes that the Central and Eastern Europe underwent in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Obama replied to Klaus that Klaus is too pessimistic. Well, Klaus is primarily a realist but whether his prediction is a pessimistic or optimistic one could be a matter of perspective, too, I add.

Generally, the visit is meant to be just a symbolic gesture showing that Obama hasn't forgotten that there exists something like the former socialist Irope, or Yourope, or Herope or more likely Sherope, or what was the exact name of the continent next to Asia. ;-)

Czechia fifth most peaceful country in the world

Some people think that your humble correspondent is combative - just because he wants thousands of Shmoity crackpots and alarmist jerks to be shot into their heads. But according to an objective survey, they're as wrong as you can get.

Czechia is the fifth most peaceful country in the world. And it should clearly occupy the #1 spot because ahead of the Czech Republic, you find Iceland whose volcanoes are aggressively attacking the whole Europe; New Zealand with the dangerous kiwi bird that can peck meat out of your palm; Japan with its tsunami, not to speak about its harmless power plants that some people consider dangerous; and Denmark that has nearly caused the clash of civilizations with its nice pictures of Mohammed. ;-)

Iranian Fat Cats invent Internet

Comrade Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have achieved the same thing as Al Gore did years ago - they inventetd the Internet. They will build a totally new structure that will rival the global Internet so that they will be able to disconnect the dirty global Internet. However, unlike the global Internet, it will be totally halal. If you don't know what "halal" means, it's just like "kosher", except that aside from pigs, it also bans the Jews. They have also declared a "soft war" against the Western culture.

The Czech mole in space

The mole (krtek), a Czech astronaut, is finally in space where he's installing the AMS to detect antimatter in cosmic rays:



The astronaut is smiling but he's also asking: what the hell did grow out of my buttocks?

A week ago, Pope Benedict 2^4 called the international space station by phone. He is usually speaking to other Fat Cats in the heavens but the holy father decided to change the gears at least once.

He wanted to to know whether the Earth was really round. The mole astronaut told him that the AMS is supposed to be observing antimatter. Benedict didn't like it because if matter was created by God, antimatter had to be created by the Devil. It didn't help when they revealed that the gadget could also see the dark matter - because it's Lucifer's handiwork.

Micronesia escalates sea level lawsuits against a faraway power plant

As I wrote in December 2009, January 2010, and March 2010, the chieftains of Micronesia decided to start lawsuits against the Czech coal power plant in Prunéřov because, according to the wildest predictions, this facility may contribute up to whopping 42 micrometers to the sea level rise in the next 50 years. Eco Tretas summarized some graphs indicating that the sea level in the region isn't measurably changing at all.



The executive board of the Micronesian Academy of Sciences

This insanity, predicted in "The State of Fear" by Michael Crichton, was started by my childhood friend Mr Jan Rovenský who suffered from a severe brain damage a few years later and who became a top Czech Greenpeace apparatchik. His organization has sent letters to all top politicians in island countries of the world, attempting to undermine the Czech industry. They expected to receive no answers. However, Micronesia did say Yes and things began to get out of control.

Well, it's also possible that Mr Jan Rovenský has simply read the "The State of Fear" and he said "Why not", so Crichton's contribution wasn't just a prophesy - it was an actual guide for the terrorists. ;-)




In early 2010, the green Czech minister of environment named Mr John Nitrogen (Jan Dusík in Czech) resigned because his plan was actually to join Greenpeace and the Micronesian bosses - but he found out that the rest of the government considered him to be insane. He was replaced by Ms Rut Bízková who has enough technical education to know that the contemporary environmentalism is a pile of garbage. Both environment ministers who followed her after the latest elections may be classified as climate skeptics. In April 2011, the expansion of the power plant got a green light.

However, things didn't stop at the global level.

Columbia University, one of America's most notorious training camps for Marxists and other left-wing radicals (recall James Hansen; liquidation of the talk by a guy from Minute Man; Peter Shmoit; and similar scary beacons of combative leftist terrorism associated with the place), is just organizing a conference about Threatened Island Nations between Monday May 23rd and Wednesday May 25th (today).



Coal power plant Prunéřov

Needless to say, the multi-dimensional lawsuit against the expansion of the Czech power plant is the most spectacular part of this otherwise forgettable gathering. Greenpeace boasts in an article with an excited title,

Threatened Pacific Island Nation makes legal history by challenging European carbon emitter

Nice, indeed. Of course, this press release was copied at various other places. See also reports in Mother Jones, UPI, and Mongabay. The Telegraph (reprinted in Montreal Gazette) fortunately doesn't fail to notice that the allegedly "harmful" power plant is located 7,000 miles from the archipelago. But don't expect Ms Bonnie Malkin to be too sensible: she thinks that the lawsuit is a David vs Goliath battle.

Oh, really? She has probably failed to notice that the "David" is being supported by an overwhelming majority of corrupt and idiotic politicians in most of the Western countries today, not to speak about the Marxists who have overtook various formerly scientific institutions, the media including the self-described right-wing ones, and many other things.

I am amazed by this breathtaking opportunism, hypocrisy, and double face of the defenders of the climate insanity. Sometimes, they would say that everyone agrees, they're very powerful, and the sensible people who know that there's no climate crisis have become a negligible fringe minority. But just a minute later, when they find it more convenient, they describe the green lobby as a "David" who fights against a "Goliath". You can't have it both ways, can you?

At any rate, this David or Al or whatever this pathological creature is should be finally kicked into his buttocks so that it decays into many fragments.

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Bonus: Iraq is rebuilding jets



If you want 20 of these smooth and melodic L-159 Advanced Light Combat Aircraft (ALCA) from Aero Vodochody Co. - that couldn't have been sold for some time - you will have to speed up right now. The Iraqi government has vowed to buy these excess aircraft from the Czech military so that it could show its teeth to any Socialist Republic of Obamaland (SRO - funny, s.r.o. means LLC or Ltd. in Czech) that would dare to attack Iraq again. ;-)

Funny comments about Obama notwithstanding, the Czech politicians actually want Obama to help to secure the deal. I am not quite sure why exactly Obama is needed for such a thing. ;-)

Hospoda: food arrives to starving New York

It's hard to believe that literally millions of inhabitants of the New York City could have survived decades without a decent restaurant. Food has been nearly unavailable - unless you count the third-world cuisines and freedom fries.



The most recent decent addition to the market occurred exactly fifty years ago, in 1961, when Ray Kroc - whose father was born in Břasy near Pilsen, 15 miles away from my home - bought some restaurants from the McDonald brothers for USD 2.7 million and made the company just a little bit bigger. ;-)




But as the New York Times blogs and the Wall Street Journal - among others - noticed, some humanitarian aid is finally coming to the City. ;-) On Monday, they are opening a new restaurant in the Bohemian National Hall, a building owned by the Czech Republic, on 321 East 73rd Street, (212) 861-1038.



They had to invent some witty but professional enough name. So they were waiting for inspiring telephone calls, decided to ignore ideas by anyone who hasn't collected at least two Oscars as a film director. Finally, Mr Miloš Forman called them and told them that the restaurant should be called "Hospoda" which is the most common Czech word for a pub. In Czechia, a hospoda is a building where many men are going every day to drink beer and to complain about everything. ;-)

So the website is HospodaNYC.COM.

The name sounds sufficiently easy to be pronounced and it happens to have no non-English characters. They should cook traditional but fancy enough Czech cuisine - and cuisine of nearby pseudo-Czech provinces, Austria and Bavaria (ABC when you combine them, funny). Well, the menu looks a bit exotic to me but it may be partly because they omitted the Czech names.



Well, the duck breast with red cabbage, apples, and potato dumplings sounds familiar enough and I would probably pick it, to be sure. The prices are just half an order of magnitude above what we pay for similar things in Pilsen but I guess that it will also be better. ;-)



This is called beer.

Of course, Pilsner Urquell is the main beverage over there but it's been reported that the Yankees will be educated it to drink it with the foam. :-) So if you're in the City, you may try it.

By the way, if you know how to counterfeit Pilsner beer at home, you may enter the Pilsner Urquell Master Home Brewer Competition - in August, NYC, DC, and Chicago. In 1842, dissatisfied Pilsner citizens and beer consumers hired the best guy they could - a young emerging Bavarian brewing big shot and boor Mr Josef Groll. He combined the Bavarian experience, his fresh ideas, and the unbelievably soft Pilsner water to the new classic.

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Pilsen overtakes Czech soccer!

If you were asked to enumerate at least one Czech soccer team, chances are that you would say "Sparta Prague". But that would be dumb! ;-) Sparta Prague is just a Buzerant Gang - although it doesn't rhyme in English :-) - and Prague is an irrelevant village.

FC Viktoria Pilsen celebrates 100th anniversary this year - 1911-2011 - which was an excellent opportunity to become the winner of the 2010-2011 Czech Gambrinus Soccer Extra League! We've been waiting since the Big Bang, for one century, and now it's here. Given the fact that the sponsor, Gambrinus, is a beer from Pilsen, it would be silly if someone else than Pilsen would win.



The Fall 2010 was excellent and the Pilsner team had built such an advantage over Sparta behind us that we couldn't lose it. Today, one round before the end, we have already secured the trophy. In fact, the people had to feel so certain that we would beat Ostrava today - it was 3-to-1, even though the score began at 0-to-1 after five minutes - that celebrations of the trophy were organized for tonight! ;-)

And the plans worked out perfectly. Semi-hardcore Pilsner fans such as your humble correspondent :-) watched the second period on a large screen on the Square of the Republic, the indisputable center of the city. And the players plus couch came there to celebrate, too. Add beer for free and fireworks - it was fun.

The Pilsner soccer deserved the victory. The team hasn't lost at home since August 2009. Also, it won both matches against Sparta this year. It was the only team that was playing a genuinely offensive game. Fans have been attracted and become almost as faithful and supportive as the Pilsner ice-hockey fans. Perhaps most importantly, it was a team with some chemistry that bound it together.

You know, I was in Great Boston when the cursed Red Sox won the baseball league after those long decades. Fortunately I had ear plugs so that I could sleep when the obnoxious drivers with their horns were trying to make the night unsleepable. You know, I admire Boston, it's an American classic, but I still had no special emotional attachment to it as a fan, and I have no idea about baseball. The soccer team in the town where I was born is different...

Czech PM: tests of power plants are guides for terrorists

It's somewhat paradoxical that the nuclear forum is taking place in Prague because the Czech Republic effectively rejects the idea of new tests of the nuclear power plants.



Dukovany, the older of the two Czech nuclear power plants

Our top politicians - including the president and the prime minister - have rejected Merkel's and others' recent attacks against nuclear energy as irrational and cheap populism. Everyone seems to agree that there's no reason to perform new tests. And even if there were reasons, the tests must be done by nuclear experts and not politicians. It's preposterous for politicians to pretend that it's them who is the safety assurance for those power plants.




Czech PM Mr Petr Nečas who has an RNDr degree (doctor of natural sciences) in plasma physics has also announced that our country will complete the extension of the newer nuclear power plant in Temelín while he dismissed alternative sources of energy because they're unstable. Some intensification of the nuclear collaboration between Czechia and France has been negotiated.

By the way, Iran claims that its first nuclear power plant in Bushehr has reached criticality and is producing energy now. Fine. If it were about the power plant only, and if it could be guaranteed that it would be about it in the future, I would have no complaints. Obviously, there are good doubts whether the energy is the goal, and even if you had no such doubts, such doubts may emerge at any moment of the future as the Iranian politics changes.

The nuclear forum in Prague has discussed the proposed tests but there was one special test that deserves a special discussion: resiliency against a terror attack. Is that a good idea to perform tests of it? Of course, military aircrafts are waiting to attack any possible terrorist and so on. There are some policies to fight this remote threat.

The Czech Republic opposes this proposal even more stubbornly than the other tests and restrictions. Mr Nečas made a point that looks good - but also kind of original - to me. He said:

The idea of public and transparent evaluations of anti-terror precautions at one or another important industrial facility, including nuclear power plants, when completed in their full glory, could directly become a guide for the terrorists how to make the attack.

I agree with that even though I didn't fully realize this notion. It's kind of important that generic people don't really know what the potential terrorists may expect to face - because terrorists could learn it, too.

In the real world, the terrorists are not the most hi-tech people in the world. Osama bin Laden could just write some e-mails, watch porn, and dream about the destruction of a few trains on 9/11/2011. He didn't even have the technological know-how to lock a 6ft Guinean maid in his bedroom.

However, the terrorists are surely sufficiently intelligent and organized to learn about some precautions that are known to pretty much every informed citizen of a Western country - which is exactly why those things shouldn't become public. And I think that if a whole committee in the Parliament knew about all the precautions - and especially those that failed the test - it would already be dangerous.

Czech Republic 4 - 0 U.S.

On Friday 13th, Czechia lost in the semifinals to Sweden - the first loss - so much of the optimistic and self-confident tone below has been rendered obsolete. ;-)

But let's get back.

Much like most Czechs, I am watching all matches of our team on the 2011 World Ice-hockey Championship in Slovakia.



The final score may indicate otherwise but this quarter final match was extremely dramatic.




The Czech team - one that defends the gold medals - won the first six matches of the tournament - it didn't lose a point against Latvia, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Russia, and Germany.

Russia had to experience a defeat on their Victory Day, May 8th, while this historical irregularity was partly fixed on the anniversary of the liberation of Prague, May 9th, when the Germans were beaten again (5-2). ;-)

But those six matches didn't play any role whatsoever in the quarter final.

In the play-off system, you lose once and you go home. Moreover, America was full of energy. The U.S. team is, in average, 4 years younger than the Czech team. Their simple game patterns and the ability to constantly attack and threaten our players has been scary throughout the first period.

Could they sustain this amazing speed?

Fortunately, the answer turned out to be No. ;-) Already during the first period, Jaromír Jágr scored a goal, 1-0. Jágr is 39-year-old and he's finally getting a little bit mature and experienced. I guess that in 10 or 15 more years, he may become a pretty good player. One sign that he is already an adult player is that he prays after each match and he eats a lot of Tatranka and Mignonka chocolate bars. He also insists on having simple black hockey sticks, not to speak about his legendary number 68.

But, as the climate articles on this blog have occasionally mentioned, you can't just linearly extrapolate the data into the future, can you? If you could, you would also predict that Jágr would score another goal in the second period, and a third goal in the third period. In that way, you would boldly predict a hattrick. You would have to claim that hats will start to land on the ice.

And damn, you would be right! ;-) At least in this case, the flawed extrapolation algorithm worked. Jágr scored in the 2nd period for the second time, and in the 3rd period for the third time. Another goal in the 3rd period was added by Plekanec.

Again, those 7 pretty much safe victories won't mean anything in the semifinals where Czechia will face the winner of the Sweden-Germany quarter finals. If it's Sweden, we can't be sure yet that it's trivial to beat them because we haven't tried. The winner and loser of this semifinal game will play the final and the bronze medal game against two teams from the Canada-Russia, Finland-Norway list.

Well, I admit that the advantage of the home-like environment is significantly helping the Czech team. In fact, the Slovak capital of Bratislava may feel more like home than the Czech cities - a similar effect, to a lesser extent, exists in Germany and Austria as well. But in the Slovak case, it's more pronounced especially because most Slovaks, after the elimination of their team, became fans of the Czech team, too. Thousands of visibly Slovak fans on the streets of Bratislava wear both flags, among other symbols.

It's an authentic emotional relationship that's not being promoted by any centralized political power. After 18 years, they finally began to realize that they're damn close to their Czech brothers and it is kind of unrealistic to try to grow everything at the level of their village or even Slovakia which is still unnecessarily small for many purposes.

Still, Slovakia has managed to win the championship in 2002, too. Since its birth in 1993, the Czech Republic has won the gold medal 7 times, when I count the Nagano Olympics (and if I don't count the ongoing tournament yet, of course haha). Together, Czechia, Slovakia, and Czechoslovakia won 47 medals from the World Championships which beats Canada with 46, Sweden with 42, and Russia/Soviets with 41.

Klaus' aide Hájek: Osama was just a fairy-tale for adults

Two years ago, I wrote an essay for Czech magazine Reflex called Is Darwin's Theory Gibberish? (full) that politely but unambiguously disagreed with the creationist opinions about the origin of species held by Czech President Václav Klaus' top aide, Mr Petr Hájek. Mr Hájek has actually summarized some arguments in favor of creation - which I found interesting enough to deserve a serious reply.

Of course, Reflex had included some funny pictures I didn't authorize but whose amusement value I can confirm (see the link above) such as this one, including the caption below:



Václav Klaus as the ultimate culmination of the evolution of the human species. (Caption by Reflex)

However, Mr Hájek is a neverending source of inspiration and amusement. On Monday, he has clarified everything you need to know about Osama bin Laden. Mr Hájek wrote:

"Bin Laden is a media fiction. He has died in the same way he emerged, under strange, almost mystical circumstances. It is a modern fairy-tale for adults - good and evil. Let´s believe, if we want," Hajek told the server.

It is like in the U.S. film Wag the Dog: the given information must be true as they reported it on TV, Hajek said.

Needless to say, President Klaus himself disagreed with his aide and criticized him - and he praised the successful operation as an event that will bring some peace and increased prosperity. Also, a top Czech social democrat Mr Lubomír Zaorálek wiped Mr Hájek when he pointed out that Mr Bin Laden couldn't have been a fairy-tale hero because Mr Zaorálek has personally attended wild parties with Osama's family, some of the socialist politician's best friends. ;-)

However, you may still see that the Czech Republic doesn't operate in the same way as most PC Western countries would.




I personally think that President Klaus respects Mr Hájek as an aide because Mr Hájek is a genuine carrier of some "conservative values and attitudes" that may be ideologically stronger than those of our president. In this way, his aide helps to protect Dr Klaus from his libertarianism's degeneration into some liberalism in the left-wing sense which could possibly be induced by the environment.

Also, I obviously think that Mr Hájek's beliefs about 9/11 - he is also a truther - are kind of insane conspiracy theories.

However, in most Western countries, such an aide would be instantly forced to resign. Everyone has his right for any opinions - but some opinions prevent you from showing up in the public. Political correctness has made most Western countries very intolerant and, if I exaggerate just a little bit, it has transformed genuine political freedom to something that largely exists on paper only.



Petr Hájek, Czech Republic's most high-profile truther

It is one of the special features of the contemporary Czech Republic that I am grateful for. Mr Hájek isn't being forced to resign. And he won't. He has certain opinions that are crazy but that are supported by some other logic. And while he's almost certainly totally wrong about this particular bin Laden story, he is still right about some more general points - the ability of the Western media to create a virtual reality that people often uncritically buy. No doubt about it, I agree with him about this wider point. President Klaus said the same thing.

Some top Czech politicians, including Foreign Minister Karl von Schwarzenberg, were first laughing but then they were worried what our allies would think. Well, some people who hear the story may be offended by Mr Hájek's opinions. But at the very end, with all my respect to Mr Hájek, I think that with the exception of one WSJ blog, no one gives a damn about him.

But I may be wrong. Today, IHNED.CZ, a counterpart of WSJ, has claimed that the U.S. administration demands an official apology from the Czech government. This is silly, of course. No top politician besides Mr Hájek, who is not really a politician, is a truther here and - while everyone may say that we're sorry that Mr Hájek has said something silly and irritating - it's still true that Mr Hájek's opinions are his personal opinions that are protected by the Czech constitution.

So the Czech Republic as a country has been and remains one of America's most faithful allies in the war on terror and similar enterprises. However, if the question is whether the Czech Republic has sacrificed the freedoms of its citizens - bakers, writers, and aides - in order to amplify and purify its status of an ally, the answer is a resounding No. The Czech foreign ministry and our ambassador to the U.S. have already declared that President Klaus's own statement concerning the destruction of bin Laden must be enough for the White House and they won't get anything else.

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Anniversary of liberation by the U.S. army

I won't write a separate article about the liberation festival again. However, we're celebrating the anniversary of the end of the war, too. And this article about Czech-American relations could be an appropriate place to post it. There are lots of Americans in Pilsen these days - and lots of military vehicles.



M4 Sherman, a huge tank that was liberating my hometown in 1945, was added as a new animal to Pilsen's zoo. ;-) It's pointing at a bunker where last hardcore German soldiers were hiding, unless I have confused some details.

However, I wonder whether some of the last veterans who come here hate Germans. I guess that most of them don't look at it from the nationalist perspective. But if they do, they must be shocked by the new construction over here.



Pilsen has just opened the largest Hornbach - a German counterpart of Home Depot - in the Czech Republic. It used to be an uncultivated region with bushes near the railway station - and now it's a beautiful U.S.-style mall with its computer shop, McDonald's, and especially Hornbach. It's half a mile from my home. You move by 200 meters and there is Baumax, not to mention Kaufland, Billa, Norma, Lidl, Albert, and all the other German chains you may think of. ;-)

Václav Klaus and pen in Chile

I am a great Klaus fan but let me admit that this video - that became a hit in the Czech Republic after it attracted 4 million views in a few days and overshadowed the "Public Affairs"-driven government crisis - has made me laugh out loud.



There even exists a version for those who believe that the macroscopic phenomena are reversible.

The story says that during his official visit to Chile, Czech President Václav Klaus liked the pen. Clever like a fox, he acted as a typical Czech and "borrowed" the pen. He demonstrated what the "golden Czech hands" mean, completed the privatization - and people have added all typical funny stereotypes associated with Klaus, too. At 0:52, he used his fingers to signal a "victory". Hilarious.




Of course, the reality is less entertaining. A diplomatic pen with the state symbols is a standard gift for leaders and members of their delegations. Visitors to the Prague Castle whose visits have a business part always receive a Czech pen, for example. I received my pens during my recent visit to a top privatet university in Belgrade; and during my talk to Czech pharmacy students, funded by Czech Big Pharma company called Zentiva.

So one of such official Chilean peans has been given to President Klaus and he had to pretend how impressed he has been by the pen. In particular, he had to visually appreciate the symbols of the Chilean state on the pen - something that Klaus inherently probably doesn't care about - and express his friendship to the amigos with a similar flag (as pointed out by the Chilean president Sebastian Pinera) by various other gestures.

When one is unaware of the context and diplomatic traditions, all those things get interpreted totally differently and the result is very shocking or entertaining. The semi-satirical "168 hours" program on Czech public TV, hosted by Ms Nora Fridrichová, has made an excellent job although it wasn't too hard in this case.

This is not the first funny story about Dr Klaus and a pen. So far, Klaus has been a net donor of pens. In 2003, when he was elected the Czech president for the first time, the official pen with which he should have signed his oath and new job contract refused to work. The legend says that the defective pen has been seeded by his predecessor, Václav Havel. ;-)

However, Klaus was one move ahead of Havel. He picked his private pen from his pocket, signed the document, and became the second Czech president. :-)

Talk by top Czech nuclear safety watchdog

Your humble correspondent has just returned from a talk by Dr Dana Drábová who came to Pilsen - the Mother of Cities - to explain lasting as well as current issues surrounding nuclear energy. She is the chair of the Czech State Nuclear Safety Authority. And I was extremely impressed.

I have always known that she was immensely competent - a few sentences on TV are actually enough.

But a nearly two-hour talk including a segment with questions and answers is needed to see how much competent she really is. The impression becomes particularly striking if you compare her e.g. to Bc Jill Hoggan who is the EU climate tax czar (something that is being planned to become a bigger industry than nuclear energy itself) and who wasn't able to answer a single basic question about her "sector" during an interview in Australia, especially not the quantitative ones (e.g. how much it costs and what brings us).




Dr Drábová is a very different kind of chair. When you listen to her, you will have no doubts that she deserved her nuclear energy PhD.

She began with pictures and graphs showing how important electricity is for the living standards of a modern society. A 2003 blackout on the U.S. map looked like Gulf of Mexico II around the New York City. When you don't have electricity, clean water, cheap food, and many other things have to go, too.

The human development index (HDI) is a dramatically increasing function of the energy consumption per capita as long as the latter is small enough. When it's large, the HDI becomes somewhat constant, indicating some potential for savings.

She argued that in the next 20 years, the energy consumption is guaranteed to increase because of the increasing world population. At the same moment, renewable energy sources are very likely to remain a negligible fraction. Lots of graphs, numbers, and tables followed. She was comparing various parameters, indicating how cheap various sources of energy are, how much space they need, how much time they need to produce the energy invested during the production of the power plant, how many people they kill, and so on.

Needless to say, the numbers were showing that nuclear energy was the winner. But unlike your humble correspondent, she wouldn't be screaming. She was expecting that the audience is able to extract the message from the tables - the number spoke a clear language. Still, she was open-minded about the possibility that some other sources, especially fossil fuels, are superior from some viewpoints.

Obviously, the number of fatalities caused by nuclear energy is negligible. While natural causes kill 10,000 people per million every year, and various kinds of common accidents add hundreds or thousands, nuclear energy kills 0.1 person or so (one part per ten million). The table also contained some CO2 emissions fatalities - about 1-3 per million. Well, I think that any positive value of this number is very problematic but still, the number is tiny.

But her strength was most obvious when she discussed the reactor technologies and details about the accidents. My feeling is that she is familiar with the technical details of the 400+ reactors that are running in the world - and especially with the safety measures around them. So in the questions-and-asnwers segment, she could also crisply and comprehensibly describe the generations of the reactors, their relationships, and many other things.

Quite generally, she was able to answer any question.

Nuclear accidents were ordered on the INES scale. She presented the basic rules of nuclear safety - 1) turn it off when you have any problems, 2) continue to cool it (residual heat etc.), 3) preserve the isolation of the radioactive material by the barriers.

The Three Miles Island accident was described as an example of an incident that worked as it should have. However, much more time was dedicated to Chernobyl, its design flaws, and especially the errors of the operators which were most painful. Many maps of radioactive fallout appeared on the screen.

In particular, we learned that despite the greater distance, the Austrians received about 3 times higher doses in May 1986 than Czechoslovakia did - because the higher elevation contributed in the undesirable way. A part of the Austrian farmers' modern anti-nuclear sentiment may be explained by the damage that Chernobyl caused to their economic cycle "meadows - purple cows called Milka - chocolate".

A similar amount of detailed data were showed for Fukushima. The first photograph looked like a nice picture of the plant how it looked one month ago. Well, not really, she noticed, it was no longer this nice at this time of the day. She corrected "one month" to "one month and six hours". :-)

Some discussion was dedicated to the public opinion, the nuclear renaissance that is remaining on the paper, and lots of other things. In her talk - and also after some question - she discussed the German decision to stop their 7 nuclear power plants built before 1981. This decision has further energized the Austrian anti-nuclear farmers.

Someone asked her whether she knows how Germany plans to deal with the missing energy. A man in the audience claimed that the Germans are so rational, aren't they? She answered exactly as I expected and as I would answer: Germans are clearly not behaving too rationally right now, according to the available data. In her talk, she already showed that before they stopped the 7 plants, the country was a clear energy exporter. After the shutdown, Germany became a relatively clear energy importer. There's clearly no realistic long-term policy in place.

By watching her face expressions, I would bet that at the beginning, she was afraid that the bulk of the audience would be anti-nuclear warriors - and that's why there were so many people. Because of the hundreds of extra people that the organizers didn't expect, the room had to be changed and the talk began 10 minutes later which was good for me because I came 7 minutes late (because of an underestimate of the walking distance of the university campus).

I would have guessed correctly that even 1 month after the Fukushima hassles began, the audience would be largely pro-nuclear. And my expectations were totally confirmed. Most of the positive pro-nuclear attitude is due to the rational arguments - but even when they're scarce, it's just "not cool" in the Czech academic circles to be anti-nuclear.

There was one young guy who asked a question with some potentially anti-nuclear subtext. We learned that he has heard that the older among the two Czech nuclear plants, namely Dukovany, doesn't have any container or something like that. Her face expression changed abruptly in a way that ignited a giant laughter in the room - and indicated that her calm, unemotional attitude to "nuclear energy yes or no" may be a partly artificial image.

If she were Ronald Reagan, she would have said "there you go again." At any rate, she immediately knew the best way to answer the question. She took one of the slides in her PowerPoint presentation - one with a scheme of the Fukushima plant - and she said that despite a different internal technology, the outer containers are pretty much analogous.

She was able to perfectly answer all of the dozens of question - even though one of the answers to a prophetic question was "I don't know" - and people with some physics, hard science, or engineering background who take their background seriously couldn't have any doubt that she is one of them.

A tiny bug

As you may expect, I was trying to catch some technical imperfections, but it was hard. When she was talking about the March 11th Japanese earthquake, she would say: "I apologize for this trivality that most of you may know but the Richter scale is a log scale [so far so good], so the difference between an 8.0 and a 9.0 quake is a factor of 10 in the impacts."

Well, it is a log scale but the factor of 10 only applies to the amplitude of the seismometer; the actual energy released by the quake goes like the amplitude to the 3/2-th power, so 8.0 and 9.0 release energies that differ by a factor of 10^{3/2} = sqrt(10) x 10 = 31.62. But that's clearly just a detail and chances are that she is familiar with the Gutenberg-Richter relation, too.

Bonus: a king crab and SUV will destroy cancer research

University of Alabama at Birmingham has made an important discovery about the shocking impact of your SUV:

Invading king crab threatens cancer fighting species from uabnews on Vimeo.

It is a fresh discovery that just appeared on the uab.edu website but there is already a scientific consensus about it. The story is that your SUV produced CO2 emissions that heated up Earth. Mr Sven Thatje, Ph.D. saw one crab, Mr Crab Crabowitch Crabow, as it climbed a slope in Antarctica. Mr Thatje has observed Mr Crabow's ancestors for 40 million years and they have never climbed the same rock.

The evidence is clear: the crab was climbing the slope in Antarctica because of your SUV emissions. Both events have occurred, so it is clear that the SUV must be the cause. The debate is over. Also, the climate models make it very clear what it will lead to.

Mr Crab Crabowitch Crabow and its grand cousin will eat other animals such as sea squirts that cures skin cancer and other species that would surely lead to the discovery of a universal cure for cancer in April 2018. However, all climate models agree that Mr Crab Crabowitch Crabow who was climbing the slope will make this discovery impossible. And all of it was caused by your SUV.

The professors of biology argue that the CO2 emissions have brought havoc to Nature: animals suddenly became cruel and some of them have even started to eat other animals instead of being the same liberal vegetarians they have always been. In fact, another endowed biology professor has observed a cat eating a bird in Alabama. Even more seriously, the ecosystems could change and the organisms could be forced to adapt or evolve. This is also unprecedented: since the birth of the Earth, animals have never changed their habitats, habits, and properties, as proved by Radwin's No Evolution Theory.

You see that this is like in a science-fiction movie: the mankind has totally changed Nature; Nature began to change, something it would have never dared to do because any such evolution would have offended the face of God.