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.

Italy abandons nuclear energy

A two-day referendum in Italy has just ended. Silvio Berlusconi has encouraged people not to vote.



Italy has its Greenpeace whackos, too

The referendum will be valid because almost 60 percent of the voters participated. They were asked to answer four questions. About 94% of the voters mindlessly said Yes to all of them. All the "Yes" answers mean "scr*w Berlusconi". One of them also scr*ws nuclear energy as a side-effect.




Italy stopped being a nuclear country in 1987, one year after the Chernobyl tragedy. It hasn't built anything for decades. Last year, strong nuclear proponent Berlusconi codified a plan to revive nuclear energy in Italy. Those plans seem to be dead in the wake of the referendum.



Poor Silvio will have to rely on biological sources of renewable energy again...

Well, I am not surprised. The recent news about their trial against seismologists who couldn't save lives by predicting an earthquake and who may spend 12 years in prison for their not being supernatural witches has reinforced my so-far subleading impression that Italians are weird emotional Southern savages so it would be shocking if they endorsed nuclear energy or any other marginally controversial achievement of modern science and technology, for that matter.

I guess that Fermi had to be an extraterrestrial alien. ;-)

Porcelain Unicorn

A genuinely touching mini-movie.




This story has won a 2010 short film award. The dialogue, "What is that? It's a unicorn. I've never seen one up close before. Beautiful. Get away, get away. I'm sorry," was pre-determined for all 600 contestants.

The people's runner up was Baby Time which is somewhat less serious. ;-)

Thanks to Gene, porcelainunicorn.com

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.

Is Iran two months away from a nuclear bomb?

Iran is going to install centrifuges into its heavily fortified Fordo facility inside the mountains near Qom, it announced today.

The ultimate purpose of this move is to triple the enrichment capacity. They also say that they could eventually abolish the Natanz side which doesn't have to be the case.




Meanwhile, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency believes that the country is working on a bomb. The project is almost complete, IAEA suggests. The statement seems to be in a remarkable agreement with the RAND corporation, a think tank, that claims that Iran may be 8 weeks away from the nuclear bomb.

Those guesses may and may not be true. It may be counterproductive and unethical to attack Iran if she doesn't deserve it. And on the contrary, it could be much more troublesome not to attack Iran if she is actually completing the bomb. It's questionable whether it's too late already.

Would it be difficult to neutralize the Fordo facility by a nuclear strike and, if it is not enough, by an H-bomb? If the information about the location of the key facilities were safe enough, the facilities could be the only thing that matters. In principle, the Iranian people and officials could be informed about the neutralization of those places in advance so that everyone can relocate and there would have to be no casualties at all. ;-)

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.

Climate Progress becomes a directory on a far left website

I want to applaud Joseph Romm. Kind of.

He has abolished the ClimateProgress.org domain and redirected all traffic to a directory hosted by the server called ThinkProgress.org owned by a radical far left political organization, The Center for American Progress.

Because of that change, he had to temporarily delete all the comments that had ever been posted to ClimateProgress.ORG.




It's much better when he admits that what actually drives him are his fanatical political beliefs and that his blog is a propaganda mouthpiece that has nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific evidence and its impartial evaluation - and that can only be read, without existential threats to the personal health, by other radical leftists.

I hope that RealClimate.org and others will follow Mr Romm and will finally change the status of their pathetic propagandist blogs to subdirectories on George Soros' personal web page, too. And I hope that Mr Mann will quickly be moved from the Penn State to the State Pen, as Tim Ball has cleverly recommended. ;-)

Just to be sure, Joseph Romm openly admits that he has always been paid by the Center for American Progress to spread all the predetermined lies. So it's likely that the decision to change the URL wasn't made by Romm himself - much like the content of his idiotic rants is probably not determined by himself. It's probably up to his owners.

How not only Spanish bureaucracy works

Spanish filmmakers have finally shot a documentary movie accurately showing how the bureaucrats operate:



Holy cow, I totally identify myself with the blonde entrepreneur. That's exactly how I approach bureaucratic offices most of the time and the bureaucrats' behavior is exactly what I usually get in return.

My emotions for the bureaucrats and their apologists have often been so intense that I have played this scene of Mafia I about 50 times in my life, imagining that the people whom I "interact" with are state employees, the kind of creatures who support - for obvious reasons - the expansion of the government and pseudo-government bodies whose main purpose is to make living for similar folks who are "working" on similar things. The kind of people who constantly harass those who actually pay for their living.




Whenever I played the game, I was loving the people. I was mostly loving them with the Thompson 1928 submachine gun whenever it was available. Needless to say, if Al Qaeda had chosen the headquarters of IRS, INS, or one of numerous other criminal organizations that have been treating me in a similar way as the Gentlemen in the video, I wouldn't object to Al Qaeda's act for a second.

Thanks to Jiří Wagner

---

Bio-cucumbers kill in Germany

When we talk about Spain, there have been 7 deaths and 1,000 hospitalizations in Germany caused by the deadly O104 serotype of Escherichia coli (E coli). It's been quickly found that the germ comes out of cucumbers.

But they're not ordinary cucumbers. They're Spanish cucumbers. But they're not ordinary Spanish cucumbers. They're organic cucumbers - we call them bio-cucumbers - for salads. 100 pieces of them were also sold by Country Life Co., a company promoting healthy life style :-), in the Czech Republic.

The message is that if you want to eat literally shit, destroy your kidneys, and die, eat organic food. If you want to suffer from plague and the same other nasty diseases as our ancestors in the Middle Ages, eat the same unrefined medieval food. In the modern language, the medieval food is called organic food.

Obama's betrayal of Israel

While Barack Obama looks like a moderate guy in many respects, and his successful execution of Osama bin Laden is a recent example, there are also situations in which he turns out to be a largely uncontrollable threat for the democratic civilization.

He wants Israel to return to pre-1967 borders.



Between June 5 and June 10th, 1967 (the Six-Day War which was both pre-emptive and helpful for Israel), the yellow Israel on the map manage to win the Golan Heights (still controlled by Israel but the population is just 40,000; international deniers of reality consider it a part of Syria), Judea (South) and Samaria (North; in combination Judea and Samaria are known as the West Bank, currently under military control of Israel but administered by the moderate Fatah's Palestinian Authority), Gaza Strip (currently controlled by the Hamas terror group, but still somewhat unofficially supervised by Israel), and the Sinai Peninsula (peacefully returned to Egypt shortly after the 1967 war).




Just try to impartially ask the question: is the yellow region defensible? I find it totally silly. To return to pre-1967 borders means to probably return to pre-1949 borders - i.e. to eliminate Israel off the map - within another decade. It's crazy that someone may propose something of the sort while calling himself an ally of Israel. In this sense, the difference between Obama and Ahmadinejad may be just a few years. Make no doubts: the democratic consensus among the "Palestinians" is that the Jews should be pushed to the Mediter. sea. Obama clearly agrees.

As Bibi Netanyahu correctly said, Obama doesn't understand reality.

Obama's proposals will either quickly die, showing that Obama is just a loser and crazy kibitzer who is disconnected from reality and whose big words don't mean anything; or they will not quickly die and Obama will work to realize them. In that case, I would find it pretty natural for Israel to try to assassinate Obama and any other future U.S. president who will threaten Israel's existence in a similar way.

And that Israel's existence is clearly what is at stake is completely obvious. Golan Heights, currently controlled by Israel, would become mountains from which you can easily get to the Galilee - the adjacent part of Israel. Or shoot at them. It's crazy. This is something that the Czechs know a lot about. The loss of the Sudetenland - the mountains naturally bounding the Czech kingdom for centuries - has made the smaller Czech lands (the "Second Republic", as the castrated territory is known to us) indefensible and, indeed, Hitler took the rest of the Czech lands within half a year, too.

Now look at the yellow strip on the Western side of Judea. It's about 20 kilometers thick in the thinnest parts. Tel Aviv, the formal international capital of Israel, is somewhere in this thin strip. You gotta be kidding, right? If forces that are hostile to Israel are allowed to thrive in Judea and Samaria, and allowed to exchange "goods" with other hostile Muslim countries, Israel (or maybe I should call it just "rae") is going to be destroyed soon.

The situation is even crazier in the case of Jerusalem. This de facto capital of Israel is located in the Western "hole" in the West Bank - it separated Judea from Samaria; look at the map. It's almost completely surrounded by the "Palestine" and if you run 3 miles on the West side of Jerusalem, you will encircle it completely. The same easy Palestinian access exists in the case of the local airports etc., too. That makes a siege about 1,000 times easier than the Siege of Leningrad.

It's just crazy.

Now, would the small indefensible Israel be protected by the U.S. in the case of trouble? I don't think so. What's happening today is enough to predict how the U.S. led by someone like Obama would react to a "purification" of the region by some Muslim powers. When Obama came to power, America ceased to be an ally of Israel and it may be pretty correct to say that it became an enemy yesterday.

Obama's plans represent the most threatening plan by a top global politician for the existential interests of the Jewish people since the 1940s. Needless to say, Israel haters across Europe - not only Angela Merkel - have endorsed Obama's idiocy, too. But that's not unexpected; after all, Germany has been the birth place of some worse plans how to treat the Jews and Merkel is much less anti-Semitic than some of her most famous predecessors. But America used to be an Israel's ally. As socialism spreads over America, so do anti-Israeli policies.

New IMF headquarters

I have a message from the boss to all the world financiers and politicians who read TRF. The International Monetary Fund has relocated its headquarters to a neat island in New York:



See more videos about the facility.

Out of the 14,000 inmates (maximum capacity is 17,000), 92% are black or Hispanic and 90% have not graduated high school. A nice place.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has graduated high school but he decided to relocate after an unpleasant experience in a hotel near the Times Square. It turned out that a 32-year-old 6-feet-tall :-) black maid called Ms Nafissatou Diallo wasn't included in the USD 3,000 fee for one night.




Moreover, he wasn't in the hotel at all - instead, he was having a dinner with his daughter and his cell phone has quantum tunneled to the hotel room. But the chief of the IMF fund doesn't really need a cell phone so he simply left the restaurant for the airport.

Well, more seriously, I can't be any certain whether he is innocent. My guess is that he is not; given some known data, his alibi sounds awkward, indeed. If the DNA tests have indeed shown that pieces of his p*nis ended on the Guinean maid's lips and an*s, it sounds more convincing a piece of evidence by a few orders of magnitude.

And there may have been other cases in which he was not innocent. Of course, if he is proven guilty, he should spend some time in a prison, and of course, it's a good news that a top socialist leader of a big country and the leading 2012 presidential candidate in the same country - the kind of guys who can get away with anything - may be punished like that.



About this large...

Still, I think that 15-20 years for an act that hasn't really substantially hurt anyone is excessive. This isn't really equivalent to a murder, is it? I think that some other activities of the IMF have been much more hurtful. According to the Czech president's speech in October 2010, the IMF is a barbaric relic of the Keynesian era that should be abolished as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, it's not difficult for the French leftists to replace Strauss-Kahn by a morally cleaner person. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a co-chairman of a leftist group in the European Parliament, is just a pedophile. ;-)

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. ;-)

U.S. Air Force consecrated a witchcraft altar

The U.S. Air Force is a very tolerant organization.



In January 2010, the Air Force Academy decided to add a worship area for followers of Earth-centered religions. It's all about respect. Almost no one has noticed it until this week.




Sgt Brandon Longcrier became one of the most powerful people in the U.S. Air Force - he is also an official high priest who covers all druids, wiccans, New Age religious believers, and witches in general. The U.S. Air Force has added a pagan altar to its chapel so that the followers of witchcraft may practice their holy art on a regular fashion in front of all friends and they are no longer ostracized. ;-)



Sgt Brandon Longcrier consecrates a Pagan worship area just after sunrise on the winter solstice on December 21st, 2009.

The bosses of the U.S. Air Force have explained that the U.S. Constitution makes the construction of a pagan altar mandatory. So on Tuesday, they built some additional stones around the altar: Daily Mail, The Washington Times, and five other sources.



If you own a company or if you are a director or a principal, you are obliged to add a similar worship area for your employees and students who are Witch Americans. (About 1-1.5 percent of the U.S. citizens are Wiccans. If true, this actually matches Islam and Judaism, and beats Hinduism and Buddhism.) If you wonder what the shape means, the structure above is the ground floor of a future wicker man.

If you don't know, wiccans are members of a modern witchcraft religion born in the 1950s and the 1960s. On the other hand, druids were high priests of a pagan religion in the Celtic lands during the Iron Age (1200 BC - 400 AD or so). They enjoyed human sacrifice - which was not a big deal for them because they also believed reincarnation. Their beliefs were only being transmitted orally and the tradition system was largely eliminated during the era of the Roman Empire. It's back! Sgr Brandon Longcrier hasn't clarified whether he enjoys human sacrifice, too. But be careful! Weather-related petitionary prayer could cause environmental catastrophes, scientists warn.

A Texas pagan high priest has already said that this would only be possible in America. I kind of think that he is right. ;-)

CIA and the Pentagon have previously opened a new worship area for the AGW believers right in the middle of the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

The Washington Times also mention that the U.S. military has also started to use a new green ammo M855A1 which has the advantage that if you use it often, you will ultimately reduce the CO2 emissions. ;-)

(No, the real reason is that there's no lead in the projectile.)

Hat tip: Marc Morano

CBS: Katie Couric replaced by AGW crusader Scott Pelley

Most of us wouldn't count CBS as one of those, well, fair and balanced TV stations. But CBS isn't far from the standardized average and Katie Couric has surely brought a human face to CBS, hasn't she? Look e.g. at this 44-minute interview with Glenn Beck:



However, Katie Couric decided to leave and, possibly, look for a higher-dimensional format of storytelling because she is not one of the crackpots who doubt string/M-theory in 10 or 11 dimensions and 3 (2+1) is really too much smaller than 10 or 11.

What will happen to CBS?




She is going to be replaced by Scott Pelley who recently presented a report on global warming in "60 minutes" in which he completely denied the very existence of global warming skeptics.

CBS News asked him why he did so. He answered that by this point, striving for balance in journalism has become irresponsible because it's equivalent to the invitation of the Holocaust deniers. Well, it's equivalent to inviting a Jew to the newsroom, too. Something that a politically correct macho of Pelley's caliber would never do.

Well, I just found out that the "Holocaust" show occurred in 2006 or so...

Given his being a climate skeptic, Glenn Beck may probably forget about another appearance on CBS. ;-)

Pelley considers Ahmadinejad to be a moral role model. So you can see that the climate deniers are not quite the same as Holocaust deniers for Pelley: Holocaust deniers such as Ahmadinejad are OK. Well, more than OK, they're his idols.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Obama kills Osama

I learned about the news because 1/3 of the TRF traffic this morning was directed to articles about Osama bin Laden.



Although many Obama's voters would prefer if this were how Osama should be treated, it wasn't the case. The clear order was to kill him, and once they killed him, they threw him to the sea - to agree with an Islamic counterpart of cremation - no country wanted to host the grave. It wasn't specified whether 72 American virgins were swimming in that sea.

Almost ten years ago, on 9/11/2001 at 9:30 am, I was defending my PhD in New Jersey.




Almost ten years later, the world's most famous terrorist was paradoxically killed by the most pro-Muslim president in the U.S. history. Well, at least he took the credit for the work of the U.S. troops and Pakistani intelligence.



Osama's mansion - seen in this video shot by neighbors - wasn't excessively luxurious. Compare with al-Gore's villa in Santa Barbara.

Well, Obama didn't fail to mention that Osama was not only a Muslim leader but also a "mass murderer of Muslims". Holy cow. I listened to the speech and Obama actually said that Osama was not a Muslim leader. Surely he was. The most influential one. Because of this influence, the freshly and happily dead terrorist has also been the world's most wanted climate jihadist.

Congratulations, America. And rest in hell, Osama.

As people on Twitter say, Obama killing Osama is a sign of a weakly broken supersymmetry in Nature. We have found Osama - and now let's also find the Higgs boson bastard.

The Google Earth or Google Maps coordinates and picture of Osama's mansion are available at other blogs, much like the history of this successful search. What about the consequences? The stock market rally has largely evaporated. Taliban has promised to revenge for the death; meanwhile, Hamid Karzai told his Taliban countrymates that they're ludicrous. And many Muslim bigots don't want to believe that their hero is gone.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (CEO of 9/11) has told the U.S. investigators (and to us, via WikiLeaks) that if America hurts his boss, he has a prepared nuclear bomb in Europe that will be destroyed. That's nice and fair! And I am afraid that much of America could say Help yourself. ;-)

Just to be sure, a message for the Islamists: you shouldn't choose the Czech Republic because the defending ice-hockey champion just hammered Denmark, the country of heretics who draw Mohammed, 6-to-0. Four of the goals were scored within three minutes. ;-)

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In remotely related news, today, the 20th annual March of the Living - from Auschwitz to Birkenau (a few miles) - is taking place. International Jewish students are brought to learn something about the Holocaust.



IDF soldiers are not missing

Of course, the acronym of March of the Living is MOTL (as in motl.org) - and there used to be times when March of the Living was ahead of your humble correspondent when you were searching for "motl". ;-) After some time, only the Magic Online Trading League could compete a little bit...

Monarchies and republics

Prince William and Kate Middleton have become Duke and Duchess of Cambridge after they married, congratulations. The British imperial taxpayer has happily paid $40 million for the wedding, enough money to feed dozens of people throughout their lives.



I suppose you haven't watched it. Neither have I. It's great and lovely. Kate Middleton, a daughter of flight attendants, found something that many girls dream to find, namely her prince. And the courageous prince whom I consider an utterly positive character has found a pretty babe, too.




Some nations remain monarchies, some nations became republics after they abandoned all the artifacts of feudalism. We did so in 1918 when Czechoslovakia was created. After a millennium of the Czech Kingdom, which had been a part of dominantly German-speaking empires for most of the time, a key to independence from the German-speaking masters were allies in the U.S. and France, so it was pretty much guaranteed that we would reproduce much of their republican systems and abolish monarchy, too.

Does it make a difference? Which system is better?

First of all, it doesn't really matter much. The main difference resulting from a monarchy is the existence of one additional family of celebrities who are celebrities just because they belong to a particular family. Capitalism and democracy in the U.S. and the U.K. don't differ much. Neither do the legal systems.

Let me admit to the U.S. readers that throughout the 10 years I spent in America and despite my great and gradually increasing admiration for the U.S. founding fathers, I had no strong opinion about whether the independence - or the loss of a major British colony - was such a great event. The crazy king wanted you to pay taxes, didn't he? Well, the non-aristocratic leaders including Barack Obama often insist on the same thing. You had smaller capacities to influence the British politics? Well, that's because you lived in a province used as a storage for prisoners etc. It was different than today but it did work, too. And even today, with the U.S. democracy, it's still true that people's wealth does depend on the place of birth - even though the change of the functional dependence since 1776 may be viewed as being beneficial for the U.S. territory. ;-)

In the case of Czechoslovakia, to pick an example where I know details, the kingdom was formally abolished but the president has literally inherited much of the perceived status that used to belong to the king. So he (and maybe in the future, she) enjoys an immensely high approval rate and everyone finds it appropriate that he is using the Prague Castle, a highly representative place formerly associated with the kingdom, as a place to work and show his appearances.

The first Czechoslovak president Dr Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was a "daddie" of the Czechoslovak nation and he was almost universally loved. His successor, Dr Edvard Beneš, a bright man largely chosen as the successor by Dr Masaryk himself, was viewed as the political and intellectual elite of the nation - and he also became the mirror of the hopeless situation of the democratic nation when it faced Nazism as well as communism.

The approval rates of all the communist presidents were between 100 and 105 percent. It's not just the communist fabrication that was playing a role. I think that even largely anticommunist ordinary people would have some respect e.g. for Mr Gustáv Husák, the last (Slovak) communist president of Czechoslovakia. Mr Husák fought against the Nazis and was later, in the 1950s, given a life in prison by (other) communists. His predecessor Mr Ludvík Svoboda - the president who unfortunately became a tool to legitimize the "normalization" regime after the Soviet destruction of the 1968 Prague Spring - was a top general leading a group of Czechoslovak soldiers who came from the USSR and helped the Soviets to liberate our territory.

In all cases, including the era of late communism since the 1960s, the president has been chosen so that he (or she?) is awarded for some of the life-long achievements and courage. In this sense, he's analogous to a king. The approval rate of President Klaus fluctuates around 70 percent despite the fact that he used to be controversial as a prime minister, with the approval rate often slipping below 30 percent. He may still be controversial in some circles but he has become a representative of a large majority of the nation, anyway.

This figure of 70 percent is impressive given the obsession of the Czechs to complain about everything. It is much closer to the 80 percent approval of Queen Elizabeth than to 47 percent approval rate of Barack Obama or the 20 percent approval rate of Nicolas Sarkozy, the current leaders of republics that inspired the republican character of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Our president, much like the Queen, is a person who is allowed to be so much above everyone else that he doesn't really participate in the confrontations that people consider to be divisive. He is paid enough so that the people don't have to think about the ways how he steals things. (And when it is about a pen, everyone knows that it is just some fun.)

Now, of course, there is a striking difference. The status of a king or queen is hereditary. This has consequences. While the first feudals had to be exceptional people, or they have at least done some exceptional things which earned them their titles, nothing can guarantee that the same description applies to their arbitrarily distant descendants. But does it?

I don't know. I think that the royal families across the world are OK but in some sense, they're no longer "genetically" exceptional. (Let me avoid comments about their inbreeding that doesn't seem to be too frequent and far-reaching today, anyway.) Most of their special skills may be reduced to social effects, especially to the wealth given to them by the people of their kingdoms. With a lot of money and with some traditions, it's not shocking that you may become much better with the horses and in golf. The young members of royal families may also be trained to speak many languages, and so on.

But are they better, for example, in science? I think that it used to be the case. While the background of top scientists used to be diverse, and parents of great scientists could have been both superpoor as well as hyperwealthy, I think that the wealthy people were overrepresented - and not only because of their families' better access to education.

I am not sure it is still the case. In particular, I am not aware of any member of an aristocratic family who is extremely good in theoretical or particle physics. (Of course, most of the explanation is that the Jewish nation doesn't have too many aristocratic families.) Even if I have forgotten about someone, or if I am unaware of someone, I think it is fair to say that these folks are not surely overrepresented in the top physics community. ;-)

Instead, the royal families are largely what the tabloid press makes out of them: celebrities analogous to actors and singers who are being watched on every step. They're trained in skills that can be appreciated by the most average citizens. When a prince tries to act as an intellectual who struggles for far-reaching and long-term results, his being an average thinker usually badly manifests itself - and William's father is one of the most obvious forbidding examples. If a few more people targeted by the tabloid press and the hereditary character of the ruler are the only major differences between a kingdom and a republic, I don't think we're losing much by not having a monarchy anymore.

The other differences are infinitesimal and I don't think that they're terribly harmful for the monarchies, either. Of course, I am talking about some constitutional monarchies only. An aristocratic dictatorship makes it way too easy for the ruler to prevent progress for long decades which is a bad disadvantage in the modern world. Democracy is hugely imperfect but its ability to self-regulate still makes it a better system than the previous ones.

However, when some special people - who differ by their financial security throughout their life - just influence the society in some way, I don't think it's bad at all. Hunger is a good cook but a bad adviser, a Czech proverb says. Because ordinary people's chances of becoming a king or queen - and Kate Middleton and her colleagues are the only exceptions - are essentially zero, the jealousy aspect evaporates, too. Monarchies can work but they're not necessary.

Gallup in 111 countries: most people don't see a serious AGW threat

Last week, Gallup has released the results of an AGW poll taken in 111 countries:

Fewer Americans, Europeans View Global Warming as a Threat

Only 42% of the people in the world view global warming as a "somewhat serious" or "very serious" threat. In Western Europe and the U.S., this figure has decreased from 2007-2008 by 10 percentage points, to 56% and 53%, respectively.




It's very entertaining to look at the nations where the fear of global warming is most widespread and least widespread.

Somaliland - an unrecognized piece of Somalia whose capital Mogadishu has the annual mean temperature about 27 °C or 80 °F - is the country with the lowest influence of climate fearmongering - only 10% of the people buy that there is a threat.

The Czech Republic is 20 °C cooler in average. So we know that if our temperatures managed to increase by 20 °C, our fears of global warming would still decrease by a factor of three or so. ;-) The percentage of Czechs who have been brainwashed to think that there is a global warming threat is 28% in 2010, down from 39% three years ago. Czechia is the most skeptical country but it is no fluke: for example, the alarmed fraction is just 32% in Denmark.

China is about the 6th least brainwashed country, with 21% of the people endorsing the notion of an AGW threat.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the country with the highest fears of global warming is Greece - where the "somewhat serious" plus "very serious" figure stands at shocking 87% (see CNSnews or page 2 of the Gallup source above) - which is facing national bankruptcy and a credible risk of conversion of the nation into slaves or pork to pay for their horrendous debt. But the people prefer to be afraid of global warming. ;-)

It surely sounds profoundly ironic, and almost comical, but it is no coincidence. The socialist dynasties of Greece have used global warming as one of the key ideological pillars to spread socialism and irresponsible fiscal policies. The world is gonna end, anyway. So why shouldn't we eat for the money of our fellow German AGW believers? The Greeks have largely been grown in a rabbit hutch that is disconnected from the real world and that is threatened by artificially fabricated threats optimized by the socialist government to a maximum fattening rate.

See Greek PM and General Secretary of the Socialist International George Papandreou (video) who explains, in a very good English (no surprise, he was born in Minnesota and grew up in California), how he turns this global warming "crisis" into an opportunity and socialism. ;-)

Bill McKibben's sermon at Power Shift

Bill McKibben gave a 16-minute speech in front of the most fanatical and brainwashed children of the English-speaking world.



I find it pretty amazing. Power Shift is an annual conference at which thousands of deluded young climate bigots engineer their chaotic plans to overtake the world. And of course, it's not the young people themselves who are the ultimate master minds. The true leaders are much older - and McKibben is one of them.




You may listen to him - his speech is similar to some of the most emotional speeches by Adolf Hitler. The most important activity, people, and place is what those folks are doing over there, now. After having licked their buttocks, he repeats his own pseudoscientific ideas about the need to reduce CO2 to 350 ppm.

The priest decides that science is the easiest part of the story so he doesn't dedicate a single word to it in his talk. (It's interesting: if the science is so easy, why is the combined mass of these thousands of brains incapable to understand even 1% of the basics of climate science?)

McKibben blasts the White House because even Obama's administration failed to stop the U.S. economy. And aside from "pollution" by CO2 that they have in China, America suffers from one form of pollution that is even worse - "pollution" by money. It's easy to fight against this kind of pollution. Why don't all these young people just press a few keys and send the content of their bank accounts to ours? Why don't they make this most obvious contribution to clean the planet?

Most of the public has already understood that the global warming fears have been a fraudulent scheme. For example, protestant pastors have just been measured to be vastly more skeptical than they were two years ago. Only 25% of Britons consider global warming to be the top #1 environmental issue. Mr Joe Public of the U.S. has deferred Warmageddon, too.

However, there are still lots of brainwashed people - and children - who don't seem to be stopping and who are doing their best to enhance the degree of their fanaticism to Islamic proportions and beyond. I am afraid that many of the kids in that hall will have to be shot as dangerous terrorists in a couple of years. It seems to me that they're dreaming about this way to invest their lives. I urge their parents to spank their offspring really properly, in an attempt to save their lives.

Haha, McKibben just told the kids that they were "not the radicals". The true radicals are those who are "fundamentally" changing the composition of the atmosphere. You know, for example, by contributing 0.2 part per billion of the mankind's efforts that increase the concentration of a harmless (and beneficial) traceless gas in the atmosphere by 2 parts per million every year. This is the true radicalism! ;-)

But radicalism is something else. Radicalism has traditionally been linked to names such as Charles Manson. Charles Manson, a serial killer, has just joined Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, James Hansen, Bill McKibben and other people of the same kind and published a hysterical warning about "global warming". Manson seems vastly less fanatical than McKibben but he has already killed many people, much like another verbally moderate member of the AGW movement, bin Laden.

Via Climate Progress (transcript)

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U.S. Supreme Court and CO2

The U.S. Supreme Court seems ready to rule that the federal judges don't have the right to set CO2 emissions limits. Thank God.

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. :-)

Václav Klaus visited glaciers in Patagonia

Last week, Czech President Václav Klaus visited Argentina. Here is a translation of an interview in Lidovky, a leading Czech daily.



Klaus standing by glaciers: Nature can treat us the way She likes

BUENOS AIRES (from an Argentinian LN correspondent) - President Václav Klaus is learning about the beauties of Argentina during his official visit to South America. He also sailed to see the glaciers of Patagonia. "The idea that the man could command the wind and rain, or the temperature and the climate in general, it is a genuine human dream," he told Czech journalists.




Last Wednesday, Czech President Václav Klaus arrived to Latin America, for his more than one-week-long visit of Argentina and Chile. What are his impressions? Is Czechia known among the Latin Americans?

How did you like yesterday's (Saturday) visit of a typical Patagonian farm, the so-called estanci?

Patagonia is a marvelous place and it is certainly one of the most unique places in the world that I have had the pleasure to see so far, so it is a very valuable experience to be here.

The farm was a somewhat tourist farm but it could still offer visitors like us a glimpse of the meaning of the words such as Argentina, sheep, pampas, lakes, and glaciers.

You have said that you were going to perform an inspection of the glaciers, so what is the outcome, Mr inspector?

The inspection has certainly ended with good results. Yes, the idea that Man may command the wind and rain, or the temperature and the climate in general, is a genuine human dream of someone. When we're here, we can see that Nature treats us the way She finds appropriate.



Your visit to Argentina will end soon. Could you please evaluate it?

One aspect of the question is to judge Argentina but I think it is not our task here - even though some things may be instructive or inspiring in good or bad sense of the word. Another aspect of the question is whether our visit is fulfilling its role which is undoubtedly to make the Czech Republic more visible and to produce some new momentum in our relations at various levels. And I hope that this goal has surely been accomplished.

Argentina is a country which is in the state of motion, which is dynamical, which has overcome the giant staggering it has experienced a decade ago, and it is no stagnating country of the type we know from Europe.

Read also: Klaus opened the door. Argentinians are interested in Czech weapons.

You had the opportunity to talk to Czech compatriots in Argentina who have literally encircled you at the embassy because they wanted to talk to you. What did they say?

The siege was nearly dramatic because when the temperature outside is 85 °F and you're being squeezed by 50 people, the effective temperature increases to 125 °F.

I don't know. On one hand, those compatriots are a certain form of representatives that keeps the Czech Republic brand in the state of motion.



Whether all these people are happy over here and how they evaluate their decision in the distant past to stay here - I wouldn't try to offer an oversimplified answer. I am not quite sure whether the positive sign is completely prevalent.

What do the local people think about the Czech Republic as a brand, how is it being perceived?

It is surprising that they do know the Czech Republic - it's a fact that has to be articulated clearly. It's another question whether there are many people who live here but who have visited Prague and who can remember one corner or another. My third point is that certain events in our history are familiar to them. My fourth observation is that they know something about our culture.

It's a fact that everyone talks about Kafka here and they want to organize conferences about him, among other things. In my opinion, it can't be a bad thing.

North and South America is mostly dominated by presidential systems while parliamentary systems prevail in Europe. Do you think that the dynamics and self-sufficiency in countries such as Argentina may have something to do with this difference?

A certain kind of duality between the president and the prime minister which is known in many European countries is unknown in Latin America. Over here, the president is the dominant person and he is not only a head of the government but a full-fledged president with all attributes we may think of.

From the viewpoint of political science, it is interesting to appreciate how old the local constitutions are. They are a century older than ours. I will never forget about my visit to one of these countries in which the chief of the Supreme Court proudly told me that their constitution had been unchanged since 1812.



Read also: In the Pink House, Klaus was fascinated by the female president of Argentina.

And I was saying: but during those long years, you have tasted dictatorships, coups, and diverse regimes - which may imply that the constitution is ready to shield everyone and it is not such an important protection of democracy.

In my opinion, it is another interesting thing. Even though they have used constitutions of the U.S. type for 200 years, it is not obvious whether this historical fact has substantially affected the reality.



The whole Latin America is drifting to a rather left-wing direction. Do you view it as a problem?

Well, I can't see a problem in it. Instead, I would ask whether this trend is the best possible one for those countries and I would think it is not. But their left-wing politics is one of a curious type: it combines populism, a certain social dimension or sociability, and some nationalism. This mixture gives presidents of those systems far more power than any European president or prime minister may have.

Read also: Klaus: I will fight against the enemies of the nuclei.

Those are strange systems. For example, the Argentine Peronist system is just one of its type and I think that those systems bring problems for those countries. But whether they would be better off if they virtually moved to a completely different economic or social continent and whether it would mean a quantum leap forward? I don't dare to speculate.

This possible separation between the laws and the reality could teach us a lesson about our current attitudes towards Northern Africa. We may be inclined to think that if those peoples managed to be sensible and clever enough to adopt our system overnight, they would live in a paradise on Earth from the following morning. The problem is that they wouldn't.

Questions by Ms Tereza Šupová, translated by L.M.

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On April 6th, President Klaus and his wife also visited the Paranal Observatory in Argentina, the site of a planned E-ELT of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) which will be the world's largest optical and near-infrared telescope when it's ready around 2020.