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Physicists attacked for endangering the planet, for being less alarmist than the climate change cranks

Tommaso Dorigo of CMS discusses a new bizarre proposal to establish a U.S. commission that would evaluate the risks that the RHIC experiment will destroy our blue, not green planet:

New U.S. Science Commission Should Look At Experiment’s Risk Of Destroying The Earth

One of the two authors of the proposal in International Business Times above (a news outlet that is being cited by TRF positively in a vast majority of cases, but not this one!) is a law professor and the other one is an emeritus law professor. Recall that the destruction of the Earth by an accelerator "will" look like this:



Dorigo mentions several other scenarios by which the mad scientists called "physicists" plan to destroy the Earth and every molecule of it.




The production of a hungry black hole that swallows the Earth is the most popular scenario. But at New Island's RHIC experiment, people prefer to talk about the strangelets. A strangelet is a hypothetical macroscopically large nucleus that doesn't contain just up-quarks and down-quarks as the usual nuclei do (it's the two quarks in the protons and neutrons); about 1/3 of its mass is composed of the strange-quarks.

This mutated composition may make it energetically favorable for the strangelets to grow indefinitely and eat the surrounding atoms along the way (the hadrons containing strange-quarks are clearly not favored if the hadrons are small enough: a strange-quark adds something like \(150\MeV\) to the rest energy). The final product wouldn't differ from the Earth-mass black hole mass as far as the practical implications go.




Like in other cases, there exist numerous arguments indicating that the threat is de facto non-existent. I recommend you e.g. the 2000 analysis of the RHIC cataclysms written by 4 authors including my Twitter follower and Nobel prize winner Frank Wilczek.

The "we are safe" arguments are diverse and exist at many levels. Much like in the black hole case, the arguments that are most comprehensible and least dependent on "impenetrably deep theory" are arguments that de facto say that "it would have already happened if it could happen now" and that promote this proposition to some quantitative, empirically rooted reasoning. If strangelets could be created by such "not so unusual" collisions, we would already be observing strangelets around us, like one that would have eaten the Moon, and so on. Because the celestial bodies haven't been eaten yet, despite the collisions with the high-energy cosmic rays, it either means that the strangelets are not created at all; or they are created and stop growing once they reach a particular, macroscopic size (the maximum size has to be large enough to pose a threat for the Earth; but small enough not to contradict the observations – i.e. smaller than the Moon). The latter assumption is fine-tuned, unnatural, and therefore unlikely.

It's a very interesting theoretical question whether strangelets exist or may exist somewhere in the Universe – whether the nuclear matter energetically prefers this setup with many strange quarks. If it does, the strangelets may exist in the Universe. They may even be responsible for some dark matter or all dark matter. The evidence is mixed on that question; Edward Witten and Arnold Bodmer would present some initial evidence supporting the answer "Yes" while Robert Jaffe and Ed Farhi coined the "strangelet" trademark. However, the question about the "in principle" existence of a strangelet is an entirely different question from the question whether strangelets may be produced in collisions on man-made accelerators which would pose a threat for the life on Earth.

The previous sentence about the difference is completely analogous to the difference between the claim "the greenhouse effect exists as a matter of physics principle" and the claim "emissions of greenhouse gases represent a threat for the Earth". The probabilities of the "more ambitious", dangerous statements are lower than the probabilities of the first statements by many orders of magnitude (perhaps dozens of orders of magnitude). The laymen – and even some people who shouldn't belong among the laymen but they do – are often extremely sloppy when they hear a buzzword, like a "black hole" or a "strangelet" or the "greenhouse effect" and they are intrigued by the "potential dangerous real-life implications" of the concept which completely prevents them from seeing that the concept itself is a neutral concept in science that is almost certainly safe for us even if it exists.

Indeed, the probability that a strangelet will consume the nuclei on Earth is as ludicrously tiny as the probability that the CO2 emissions will lead to the extinction of life on Earth before 2100. Someone could say that the probability of the "strangelet Armageddon" is even tinier, perhaps much tinier, but I don't really agree. Both probabilities are tiny. In the strangelet case, we are talking about a "more extreme kind of destruction" which makes it less likely but we are also actually playing with some more extreme and potentially "less tested" forms of matter when we collide nuclei at high energies which adds "some" uncertainty. In the case of the climate, we know very well that a warming by several degrees, even if it were caused by the CO2 emissions, wouldn't threaten the life because those things have occurred many times in the Earth's history.

(By the way, do you know that the mankind went nearly extinct 100,000 years ago? Only about 5,000-10,000 people were alive on Earth; they could be comfortably seated in the Shayba Arena in Sochi. You could think that the cold weather during the ice age was the reason. Or drought. But the likely reason was a sequence of pandemics that destroyed almost all humans except for a few mutated ones whose new gene didn't allow Escherichia coli and Streptococcus type B to bind to sugars that the extinct humans were producing – causing bad diarrhea and children's meningitis. Due to the near extinction, the mankind lost the ability to synthetize these sugars on the surface of cells but we gained the survival. I wouldn't be surprised if I were possessing the extinct gene again. Infections are still vastly more likely to kill the mankind than any other threat that has become popular.)

Now, when it comes to similar "wars about the panic", people may obviously err in both directions. They may waste lots of resources due to silly, unjustified fears; in principle, they may also underestimate real threats and pay dearly. Needless to say, these two classes of errors are often linked to each other; when you overestimate some threat, you are likely to overlook many threats that are more real and more important. There is no universal recipe to avoid such errors. Democracy isn't a universal cure that would produce flawless policies. Mindless listening to a group of experts or a commission or a single anointed expert isn't a flawless solution, either. No individual is infallible; no group is infallible, either. Quite generally, it is true that the more stupid the people in charge are, the more stupid the policies codified by them will be in average. When it comes to the physics of strange-quarks, the two lawyers are clearly dumb as a doorknob, perhaps more so than your janitor.

The guys who propose the new "RHIC cataclysm commission" conjecture that the physicists are in a clash of interest:

But after public concerns subsided, critics emerged, assailing the risk-assessment method as flawed. Dr. Rees wrote that theorists “seemed to have aimed to reassure the public … rather than to make an objective analysis.”

...

Richard Posner noted [...] that the scientists on the Brookhaven risk-assessment team were either planning to participate in RHIC experiments or had a deep interest in the RHIC’s data.

Their point is that one can't believe the RHIC physicists' testimony because these physicists are among the people for whom the production of new RHIC data is more important than the secondary question whether the Earth is destroyed or not. ;-)

That could sound as a joke but we may check whether this assumption about particle physicists' thinking is realistic by investigating the views of a particular particle physicist. What about Tommaso Dorigo himself? Does he care whether the Earth is destroyed or not?

One last thought: regardless of the evidently significant disappointment of losing our entire planet, mankind, and our artistic heritage (where else in the Universe is there a Chopin, or a Mozart ? Alas, I fear we will never know, strangelets or not), I fail to be seized by the fear of dying a much premature death by being turned into strange matter, as I know that I would be going down with absolutely everybody and everything else. Am I the only one feeling unconcerned?

He's not concerned at all so the lawyers' worries seem to be fully justified.

Tommaso Dorigo is unconcerned for the very same reason that we would discuss just a few hours ago. I wrote that left-wingers want to make the Earth a sh*ttier place to live. SteveBrooklineMA has corrected me. What they really like about it is that the world will be an equally sh*tty place for everyone, and that's a good thing because equality is the most precious value they struggle to achieve.

You may notice that Tommaso Dorigo's thinking exactly agrees with Steve's template. Tommaso doesn't care whether the Earth is gonna be destroyed because everyone and everything would be going down with him, in a nicely egalitarian way! (I have actually heard an almost identical answer from Nathan Seiberg during a formal theoretical seminar where he was asked whether SUSY would be doomed. He answered something like this: "If SUSY is shown inconsistent, I will go down but I will take many people with me!" Equality seems to be really important for the left-wingers.)

So it seems that Yes, you must create a commission asking "are these mad scientists going to destroy the Earth" for every experiment whose team is composed of mad left-wingers like Tommaso Dorigo. But I would still like to inform the lawyers who wrote the idiotic article in The International Business Times that several sane, competent, conservative members of an experiment who consider the cataclysm scares to be silly and who can present the evidence are pretty much enough to eliminate worries.

Conservative physicists generally care whether the Earth is going to be destroyed – its destruction would be a bad thing whether or not it would be done in a nice, egalitarian way! And we are generally not too impressed by the argument that the strangeletization of the Earth would be painless; there's nothing wrong with pain because pain is just a useful signal that sometimes helps us to avoid some real threats. So just investigate whether there are at least some conservative physicists at RHIC and if the answer is Yes, just splash your weird proposal for the cataclysm commission into the toilet where it belongs. Thank you very much.

3,000 renounced their U.S. citizenship in 2013

I have filed 10 U.S. tax returns in my life. Well, in fact, it was 11 – including the "less than 180 days" at the beginning.

Well before I began to be harassed by professional "discriminated" feminists, professional "discriminated" blacks, and similar atrocious scum sometime in 2005, I hated that experience. The tax returns had to be combined with almost annual exercises needed to get new visas, prolong them, get new stamps for them, and so on. As you know, it's not just about the federal tax returns. One must also file the tax returns for a state – sometimes two states (California, New Jersey). The very doubling (federal, state tax returns) represent a staggering inefficiency in the system. Couldn't the federal IRS or the states' offices just collect taxes at both levels and use one form?



In average, I would spend about 3 weeks – 3 weeks subtracted from anything else I could do – with this terrible stuff (INS+IRS) every year, although the 3 weeks would take the form of a "part time job" spread to something like 5 weeks. The procedure would get faster whenever it would be "mostly repetitive" but new subtleties and changes of the status would emerge almost every year so the reduction was mostly compensated by something else. I could do these things more quickly but the knowledge of the uselessness of these activities just sucked most of the energy from me. Professional tax aides could have helped as well but one would have to pay some additional 10% of the income to these parasites and I always decided that things just can't be that bad yet.

When I would be playing the episode of the Mafia PC game, I would be imagining that the shooting took place in the building of the IRS.




Despite the huge time spent with the monstrosity known as the tax returns, I often couldn't figure out basic things – like whether I should pay any taxes at all, whether some interest from the bank is already taxed or must be reported again, and so forth. I got audited twice in the 10-year period, and had to pay some extra money – above $100 and above $1,500, respectively. With so much mess in the laws, it seems impossible to do things "quite right".

Yes, of course that I think that at least the Massachusetts tax office audit had something to do with Deval Patrick and his friends behind the scenes. The evidence isn't quite 5-sigma but it is close to a safe claim that I have been mistreated by the tax bureaucrats in similar ways as the Tea Party groups in recent years.




And things are not getting any better. CNN Money has informed us that 3,000 Americans splashed their U.S. passports into the toilet in 2013: enough is enough. That's almost a doubled number relatively to the previous record, around 1,800, in 2011, and 3 times higher than in 2012.

CNN claims that the main reason of the emigration is The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act approved by the doubly Democrat-Party-dominated Congress in 2010 whose goal is to harass and rob not only Americans with savings in foreign financial institutions but these financial institutions themselves, too. Some new policies described in the law came to force in 2013.

I find the whole concept flabbergasting. We're told that "penalties may be high" for foreign banks that incorrectly report the on the accounts held by U.S. citizens (which is why many foreign banks prefer to kick the U.S. clients!). What I don't understand is how it is possible that there can be any penalties at all paid by financial institutions away from the U.S. (e.g. those in Switzerland which should be the ultimate "neutral country" protected from interventions by foreign powers) to the government of the United States of America. It contradicts my understanding of the basic national sovereignty of other countries. If Obama or the IRS wanted a Swiss bank to pay a fine even though the bank hasn't had any business with the U.S. government, the bank should just remind Obama that he is nothing else than a kitschy foreign souvenir on the Swiss territory, shouldn't it?

The root of the special insanities of the U.S. tax system is that unlike the citizens of other countries, the U.S. citizens have to pay taxes from their global income. This rule shows that the IRS is more intrusive and arrogant than other countries' financial offices but even if we agreed that the rule is tolerable, it doesn't give the IRS the moral right to harass companies operating in other countries. If the law can't be enforced, it just can't be enforced. It is a stupid law.

All these problems show how irresponsible it is to allow left-wing ideologues to mess with the tax system. They don't care about the efficiency of the system. They don't care about the total revenue – which will not really be increased substantially (those who really dodge the taxes will find another way to do so; this is clearly just an extra burden for the honest folks like your humble correspondent who may spend 4 weeks with this junk and not 3 weeks as I did). They don't care about people's happiness. They want to harass the wealthy people, the people who are just perceived as healthy, and their ideological enemies. They want to prove to their jealous, hateful electorate – the losers – that they're doing something against the "classes" that these losers hate. Left-wingers' very goal is to turn the world into a shittier place than it is which is why the treatment presented in the video at the top is a much cleaner method to deal with them.



Before you criticize the singing above, realize that it's sung by yesterday's Olympic biathlon silver medal winner, Ms Gabriela Soukalová, a #samiCZE. Czechia got another, bronze medal today – fourth for biathlon, sixth overall. The number 6 is already matching the country's records from Sarajevo and Vancouver. Still awaiting Ms Martina Sáblíková trademark 5 km speed skating race – and less realistically, praying for the ice-hockey team.

An MIT- and Harvard-trained venture capitalist has proposed a system in which the votes are proportional to the wealth, more precisely to the total income taxes you paid last time:

Tom Perkins' big idea: The rich should get more votes

By the way, a month ago, this pundit compared the war on rich that is taking place in the U.S. to the Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews.

I've been thinking about similar types of "weighting" for 25 years but when I ceased to be a teenager, my excitement about them went down, a little bit.



Well, I've been also thinking about stronger votes for voters with a higher education, but this is a particularly problematic twist because not all schools are created equal. Education (and especially IQ) is hard to measure; it is too controversial.

I was discouraged by the apparent lack of support for the weighting but the main reason behind my decreasing excitement about these proposals was the observation (one that was probably surprising to me – but I have gotten used to it) that rich and formally educated people may do and believe some very stupid things – sometimes it looks like they are more brainwashed, more gullible, and so on.

As Richard Lindzen sometimes says in the context of the global warming gullibility, ordinary people have sense but academics don't. Sometimes it seems that the most stupid, atrocious concepts arise in the heads of the most educated and wealthiest people (like the Hollywood "celebrities"). It may be ironic but there's surely some anecdotal evidence that this is the case.




So let me return to the wealth-dependence of the strength of votes. It's a more defensible proposal, I think.




And yes, personal wealth by itself isn't necessarily something that the society has to reward. It's really the amount of money that the individual pays to the state. And it's really the total income tax that is easiest to be measured.

Perkins proposes a direct proportionality. It could be a little bit extreme and the new system could create some discontinuity in the results. However, even opponents of the idea should be able to see that Perkins has a point. The government is doing services to the citizens and those who pay more taxes should "own" and "influence" a greater fraction of the government much like stockholders with many stocks.

But one could start with the rule that a person has \(N\) votes where \(N\) is equal to \[

N = {\rm Floor}[\log_{10}(T)]

\] where \(T\) is the income tax paid according to the latest annual federal tax form or $1,000, whatever is bigger. So non-payers and tiny payers would have 3 votes, those who pay at least $10,000 and more would have 4 votes, those who pay $100,000 or more would have 5 votes, and so on.

The logarithm above is an extremely slowly increasing function and the dependence on the income could be accelerated if people liked it.

One question is whether the U.S. Congress or another parliament could ever approve such a proposal.

Another question is what the impact of the modified rules would be on the political landscape. Generally, I think that it would suppress parties that make living out of a fashionable kind of theft known as redistribution – which is a highly desirable outcome. But I am not quite sure. What do you think?

U.K. Green Party's plan for absolute power

BBC (Via Marc Morano) brought us an incredibly sounding story.

A particular extremist party in the United Kingdom, the Green Party of England and Wales (which boasts 1 deputy among 573 in the House of Commons), is planning an imminent coup in the monarchy similar to Hitler's or the communists' acts that gave them absolute power. The chairwoman calls for the dismissal of every single minister, deputy, or government agency's boss who realizes that climate alarmism is a pile of crap, so that extremist alarmist whackos who should normally be kept in psychiatric asylums may be substituted everywhere.

Fraudulent alarmist Wikipedia editor William Connolley is an apparatchik in this extremist political party.

Many of us have warned that the basic character of the climate alarmists' reasoning is structurally analogous to the Nazis' and Stalinists' reasoning but this is one of the most explicit, most political piece of evidence that they really want to get far. I am offended, angry, slightly worried, but also confident that this is just a silly publicity stunt. Natalie Bennett is an unlikable scold who may share the ambitions with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin but she is lacking their charisma.

Some more sensible politicians in the U.K. pointed out that Bennett's is a quasi-fascist policy.

The BBC article also mentions some outrageous statements by David Cameron. Guys like this one really fill me with fear because despite his bizarre identification as a conservative, he might actually be able to start to fire ministers or deputies etc. because of this utter insanity. He's a brainwashed green lunatic analogous to Natalie Bennett herself.

Maoist comrade Barroso is celebrating another victory in his Blitzkrieg against freedom in Europe.



In 1977, a creamery in Liberec, North Bohemia began to produce the traditional butter spread known as "pomazánkové máslo" which became an instant hit with the Czechoslovak consumers (although the legend wouldn't ever spread abroad). Other dairies joined and began to produce it. The popular product survived the fall of communism, of course.

Let me mention that in the Czech language, "pomazánkové" is an adjective derived from the noun "pomazánka", a "spread"; "pomazánka" itself is derived from "pomazat", the verb "spread" (or "grease/lubricate [a surface of something, as indicated by the prefix "po-"; "maz" is the root for lubrication and related things; "-at" is just a widespread ending for an infinitive that gets totally changed when the verb is conjugated]).

"Máslo" is "butter", a solid-state milk product that melts at 33 °C or so and that is often spread on bakery products to lubricate them in the esophagus (have you heard this definition of a butter before). The Czech legislation has defined some standards for "pomazánkové máslo". It isn't really one of the no-fat substitutes. "Pomazánkové máslo" has to contain at least 31 percent of fats and 42 percent of dry matter and avoid vegetable fats. Of course, the Czech legislation was crafted sensitively not to damage products that "work" both for producers and consumers.




As you must have heard, the EU apparatchiks have designed their own definition of a banana, one that restricts the curvature invariants and size and that isn't passed by the would-be bananas from the Americas. The legislation about the Eurobananas became legendary.




But it's not just one anomaly. The EU is obsessed with this kind of regulation. In particular, it wants to impose their own definition of a "butter" on all the Europeans. A butter has to contain at least 80% of milk fat, they want us to believe. For a decade, this has been a subject of controversy between the EU and the Czech Republic. See e.g. this combative EU press release from 2010.



At any rate, in October 2012, a European court ordered Czechia to stop selling "butter spread" (along with our "marmelade") and Czechia agreed.

Today, they produced the last package of "pomazánkové máslo" anywhere in the country. Now it will be called "tradiční pomazánkové" ("traditional spread [one]" where the word for "spread" is still an adjective). Without Klaus at the Prague Castle, the Czechs are apparently ready to lick Barroso's buttocks if necessary (although, I must say, Klaus considers the butter spread naming dispute to be a non-event). The shortened name without "butter" is completely analogous to the "domestic [one]" for our "domestic rum". The EU has been trying to force Czechs to forget that they are drinking rum – while directly subsidizing our Carribean competition.

The butter spread producers hope that the controversy has been sufficiently publicized so that they won't lose too many buyers.

Quite generally, I am amazed by the apparatchiks' arrogance with which they believe to be able to improve the Czech language, something they don't have the slightest clue about. It's simply a fact of linguistics that numerous words in different languages don't "quite" correspond to their equivalents in other languages. A word AB in one language may mean CD but sometimes also EF in another language. Languages are evolving as a consensus among some speakers. The European Commission isn't composed of Czech speakers so they are not a party to this evolution of the Czech language. Or at least, they should not be.

Someone is concerned that "consumers could be misled" if a product with 31% of fat has the word "butter" in its name. The assumption here is that Czech consumers (who have been calling this product with the term containing "butter" for almost 40 years) are complete idiots; and that fat is the most wonderful part of our diet. Well, I am much more concerned about the word "European" in the term "European Commission". Some people could get confused and think that this group of people has something to do with Europe or European values.

What about renaming your band from the "European Commission" to a much more accurate "Soviet Planning Commission", comrade Barroso? A true European commission should contain at least 80% of members with a basic respect to the free markets and national sovereignty and at most 5% of the Maoists.

Some comments related to Russia and Ukraine.

First, Madonna introduced the two freed Pussy Riot members in Brooklyn. She said that thanks to them, "pussy" became a sayable word in her household. Her 8-year-old kids are learning to speak and they are already saying "pussy" all the time, making their mom proud.



Madonna's behavior is an example of the pure cluelessness of the mass culture's "celebrities" about politics. Hours after the concert, the two Russian women were finally freed. More precisely, they were fired by Pussy Riot, i.e. by its remaining members (Cat, Garage, Headlamp, Goal, Seraphim, and Schumacher). The reason is that the two babes have talked about the prison rather than about feminism and the separatist resistance that really matters (not to mention that Madonna isn't a p*ssy but rather a c*nt for the group).

Well, the other members may be trying to preserve a part of the trademark and the fame. They have annnounced that the famous babes are not only fired but the group has "lost two friends" while the world has earned two interesting activists.




The Olympic games in Sochi are getting started – without visible problems, despite all the vigorous anti-Russian propaganda. The opening ceremony looks cool (still watching) despite one continent's circle failing (Australia shouldn't be expected to win big, anyway LOL). The previous sentences were written before a would-be terrorist in Turkey tried to divert an aircraft to Sochi.




Now, someone hacked the phone conversation between two top U.S. diplomats who were talking about rather fine details of the Ukrainian opposition. (Some forces in Russia may be linked to the hacking and surely to the leak – the Russian subtitles were added from the beginning.)



Ms Victoria Nuland is the top U.S. diplomat in Europe; Geoffrey Pyatt is the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. They were deciding what the composition of the Ukrainian government after the expected removal of Yanukovitch (by them) should look like. Klitschko shouldn't be allowed, they say. Whether a boxer is right or wrong for a government post, this is nothing to be decided by me or by these two U.S. diplomats. This should be decided by the political process in which the Ukrainian people participate.

For most media (i.e. media written by idiots and for idiots), the most interesting moment was at 3:03 when Nuland argued that the U.N. should be used to glue it, and not the EU. You know what: [have a coitus with] the EU. The male ambassador replies: "Exactly!" The diplomats effectively agreed that the EU is "not doing much", whatever is their idea about what the EU should be doing. Angela Merkel responded that it is unacceptable for the U.S. to [have a coitus with] the EU.

(Merkel has also praised Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign minister of a sort. The EU socialists have nominated the latter lady for the Peace Nobel Prize along with Ivica Dacic, an inconsequential new socialist prime minister of Serbia, and along with war criminal and the boss of several Mafias specializing in drug trafficking and organ trafficking, Hashim Thaci. Thankfully, not only conservative folks but even the Czech social-democratic MEP "Daddy" Falbr, the former boss of the labor unions, was stunned by this nomination.)

If those exchanges are authentic, we at least learn that the U.S. and the EU are not coordinating their interventions in Ukraine much – which may be good news.

I think that it is primarily the American diplomats who are showing their disconnectedness from the reality. They won't be able to control the detailed composition of the Ukrainian government, at least not repeatedly. If they made a bet on a particular puppet, the puppet would be unlikely to repeatedly win elections. If they placed too many agents in the Ukrainian politics, it would become obvious. And the U.S. just can't afford to occupy this large country.

America has interests in Ukraine but it just can't control the Ukrainian life microscopically. I have argued that Ukraine belongs to the East but even if we adopt lots of wishful thinking that Ukraine could soon become a Western-style country, it will still be a country in Eastern Europe. It will not be a country in North America. (I may have often said that I would have preferred Czechoslovakia or Czechia to join the U.S. and not the EU and similar things. But I have always realized that when it comes to substantial things about our life and economy, it would mostly be a formality – or a joke.)

So whether American diplomats and politicians like it or not and whether they realize it or not, they're really not a major player in the Ukrainian events – events 5,000 miles from their homes. If they direct the evolution of Ukraine in some way, they may at most direct it towards the EU or towards Russia. There is no other "third way". All the anti-government rallies were organized by people who wanted the president to sign a pro-EU treaty and the deals offered by Russia are the only real "competition". No major political group in Ukraine wants something else than a closer friendship with the EU or a convergence with Russia. No big group of demonstrators wants Ukraine to join China or North Korea or the U.S. as the 51st state or NAFTA or to be controlled by the U.N. troops like parts of Yugoslavia were.

Moreover, the American diplomats' identification of the U.S. with the U.N. is bizarre. In the past, we would understand that the U.S. often promoted the interests of the free world against the U.N., an organization that gives lots of space to numerous jerks and dictators of mostly failed countries etc. This difference between the U.N. and the U.S. used to be self-evident in various disputes over the Middle East, for example. Now, Obama may have adopted a new doctrine to "dilute the U.S. in the U.N. like a sugar cube in a coffee" but he still apparently misunderstands what the U.N. stands for. Russia is a member of the U.N., and a pretty important one. Because the internal tension in Ukraine is a local reflection of some tension between Russia and the EU and because the EU and Russia may find comparably strong groups of allies in the U.N., the U.N. won't really solve anything.

The U.N. may treat Ukraine as a failed state and send new observers who will watch some new early elections. But that changes nothing about the problem whatsoever. The last elections that brought Yanukovitch to power were totally legitimate. Even after the next legitimate elections in Ukraine, there may be semi-violent rallies against the government, whoever will be in it. Not to mention the fact that those who would consider the current removal of the democratically elected Yanukovitch to be an unacceptable coup would be right – and would probably show their dissatisfaction in many ways. The problem won't go away. The same tension we see in Ukraine exists in the U.N., too; it's just not manifesting violently because the U.N. is largely a fictitious castle made of hot air.

And if the U.S. is thinking about more radical changes, like the split of the country, then it is indeed a very bad idea for its diplomats to [have a coitus with] the EU because the European (which means, in most cases, EU) countries will have to deal with the consequences of these radical changes because of the geographic proximity. The folks in Brussels may look passive to the American diplomats but the fact is that individual European countries care even less about Ukraine. Russia does care a lot and the EU as a would-be empire cares "comparably" – but no one else does: Ukraine is just not that important for European countries. For example, for Czechia, Ukraine mostly matters as an abstract original homeland of the 20,000 (official) or 100,000 (estimated) Ukrainians (largely from West Ukraine) on our territory who are mostly doing good work these days.

So the diplomats' usage of the expletives is really the smallest symptom of their cluelessness. They're clueless because they don't understand the actual options – and the non-existence of others. They don't understand the issues and forces that are pushing Ukraine in the two main directions. They don't understand that microscopic politics is hard. They don't understand that microscopic politics is never going to copy their desires or expectations.

Planet X: when pranks stop amuse you

A different topic. When I was a Rutgers grad student, I created a UFO page as a prank (I haven't been able to erase the page since 2001). It claims that I am an extraterrestrial alien with a Chinese name who learned Czech and who has some unusual chemical composition etc. It pandered to the theories of various groups of Czech crackpots as well as individual whackos etc. I thought it was funny to humiliate them in this way.

However, I have received dozens of e-mails from many people who have dreamed about meeting an extraterrestrial alien for years. Finally, they had found me, and so on. Of course, even when I tried to assure them that they bought a cheap and silly prank, they still continued that their basic belief was correct. My joy about the prank was replaced by the sorrow for the unlimited human stupidity.

A week ago, astronomer Kyle Kaplan announced the discovery of Niburu, the hypothetical new trans-Uranian planet that is also said to be a deadly brown dwarf, from the Macdonald observatory in Texas. Despite his low age, he presented himself as Prof Kyle Kaplan. He listed the coordinates of Nibiru and recorded the way how we was neutralized by some agents or whatever it was. The video got lots of attention because he had real professional telescopes and the right jargon but he was still saying the same things as the Niburu whackos. Concerning the latter, check e.g. the Summer 2013 video that claimed that the (non-event) comet ISON is nothing else than Niburu that was going to kill us. The video is a sequence of nonsensical claims from the beginning to the end but it still earned about 750,000 views. (If you ask what they do now when comet ISON is safely gone, well, the official interpretation is that NASA has forced the filmmakers to create the video in order to discredit Niburu watchers.)

Needless to say, Kyle Kaplan's discovery was a prank by Mr Kyle Kaplan who is easily found to be a grad student over there. See the 20-minute video explaining why he did it, how one could easily find out that the story wasn't real (the e-mail from his bosses was actually seen to be an e-mail from himself to himself; he was chuckling at the most dramatic points, and so on), and why we're sure that no such new planet is out there. (Some serious enough people took Kaplan's original video too seriously so they posted serious rebuttals, too.)

So the guy who believes in Niburu and who originally sent me the new "proof" of Niburu initially changed his opinion to the opinion that Kaplan was just forced to say it was a prank by the conspiracy. When I showed him the places in the original video that show it was a prank from scratch, this guy would change his interpretation once again: Kaplan was hired by the conspiracy to debunk Niburu. (Yes, it's the same "waterproof" and universally usable interpretation as one applied to the Niburu-ISON conspiracy above.) Why can't this e-mail correspondent of mine accept the most natural explanation, namely that Kaplan was just making fun of these weirdos and pretending that he became one as well? Because this e-mail correspondent never wants to admit to himself that he has done or believed something really stupid; not even that he looks like a whacko to others. But admitting mistakes and silliness when there's overwhelming and growing evidence they were mistakes or silliness is needed for one to learn, to make intellectual progress.

Well, if someone is preferring an ever weirder conspiracy theory over the sensible, highly likely if not virtually guaranteed-to-be-right explanations, he is likely to end up as a clueless believer in the most insane conspiracy theories and know nothing about the ways in which the real world actually operates.