ODS

So our great president VK wants to leave the party ODS (which he founded more than 10 years ago). Well, when he does that, I will join, or at least think seriously about doing so. Not that this is going to happen anytime soon. He is hoping that the party will consider his threat credible. I don't consider it a threat, it's a great opportunity. Not just for the party, for this country, too.

Religion in Czech Republic

I don't link to blog posts in Czech, but I will make an exception this time. Patrick Zandl talks about religion in general, but with some connection to Czech Republic.

First, let me give you some background. US Department of State writes about Czech Republic

the vast majority of the citizens do not identify themselves as members of any organized religion. In a 2001 opinion poll, 38 percent of respondents claimed to believe in God, while 52 percent identified themselves as atheists.

This makes Czech Republic one of the least religious country in the world, something most of us are proud of. The reason is not, however, 40 years of communism (as USDoS claims), but the whole history of Czech people.

One of the most influential events was a protestant movement in early fifteen century. The movement was started by Jan Hus, who is now considered a national hero. Why? He was promised him a peaceful negotiation in Kostnice and then burned by catholics alive. Then the "Czech Kingdom" was conquered and population forced to catholicism. We have been oppressed for a few hundred years, catholic church hand in hand with royalty.

Czech National Revival and the first World War put an end to it. Czech Nation was free for about 20 years before Hitler came. Don't even ask what was the official policy of the church. You probably should not even ask where current pope was at that time. After the WWII, we were free for about 3 years and than the communism came. Unsurprisingly, they were no friends of the Church either.

So after the turmoil where Czech people believe in something, were punished for it, were forced into something, then were betrayed and prohibited from doing something, their lack of enthusiasm is understandable. Well, the story did not end there. Till today, Catholic church is negotiating with Czech government how much property they will get back (including schools, hospitals, houses, farms etc.). To a laymen it seems that they care more about their political power and wealth than about anything else. Churches are empty and rotting.

Somewhat surprisingly, many people have religious believes and most of them believe that there is something beyond our lives. Many people believe in God. They just don't believe that any church represents him. Priests and especially higher level officials are so far away from our lives that when they speak, most people think that they are just crazy. Czech society is naturally liberal and mostly cynical. Czech kids drink beer from 15, if not earlier and they have sex from about the same time. They are not being forbidden, but they are taught about condoms, diseases. They know about the dangers of interruption (physical, not moral) and surprise, surprise, the number of interruptions in Czech Republic declined from 100,000 in 1990 to less than 25500. (Numbers reflect artificial (induced) interruption, not naturally occurring one).

When "church" occasionally tries to propose rules that would forbid interruptions (they probably have to do it by order from Rome, because it really does not have any chance in Czech Republic), they try to force their own believes on other people, who don't share their views. It's hardly a reasonable way how gain the trust.

The best sentence of the day

Czech politics edition. A mistress of current prime minister* has some bodyguards and a car with a driver, paid by Czech taxpayers. She does not have a right to have them, so it has a special category. When asked why she has these benefit when she does not deserve them, a boss of security at the Government (Bureau of G?) replied

"Jde o prevenci. Lidé by ji na ulici pořád obtěžovali s různými otázkami," řekl MF DNES ředitel ochranné služby policie Lubomír Kvíčala.

which could probably be translated to

"It's a measure for prevention (precautionary). People would bother her with questions on the streets." told MF DNES a boss ...

Yeah baby, if you are a politician, people might ask you something on the street. Surely this is the reason why we pay a couple of thousand dollars a months to protect you.

P.S. A mistress adds to your political weight in Czech Republic, so at some point, president, prime minister and the boss of main opposition party had one. It did not help much.

There are things...

... you certainly did not know about Czech republic:

Institutional stability

President of the Czech Republic has a rather weak position - we do not have a presidential system like USA. Some of his decisions have to be approved by the Senate (like new judges for Constitutional court), but some don't. The prime example is Czech National Bank, which board he names himself alone.
CNB had a good start - previous president did not have any idea about economics and he knew it, but he was rather lucky in choosing his advisors. They have chosen the right candidates and he appointed them (no, really). The CNB gained some reputation.
Current and future president does not know much about economics, but he thinks he does. Because of that he chooses new board members himself. There are some obvious criteria one has to fulfill to be a candidate. You have to present at VK's funclub (CEP), you have to say what he wants to hear (ideally, you should mention that the whole idea about global warming is a plot to enslave free world, that number of species is growing due to the human presence on the earth), be opposed to euro and some other things (people say it does not hurt to be a young, charming guy, but I don't know anything about that)
This brings me back to my original though. What happens if you appoint complete morons to the top of well established institution? How long does it take before it rots? How long before public will learn that? These questions are particularly funny because VK promoted to vice-director (chairman?) a guy, who wrote such unbelievable articles to the newspapers (and insisted on their publication) and signed them as a member of the CNB board that he has to have all his future publication in the name of CNB approved by the CNB. I guess he will now be his own supervisor, so we are in for a number of funny, surprising, yet somewhat sad, articles.

I have asked this question myself repeatedly. When a new student organization is founded, how do you make it stable - able to attract enough people to keep going? When Academic Senate happens to be composed of people smart enough to elect a good rector, how do you make sure that it will happen next time? If you are a chair of national student organization (I never was!), what do you need to do to make sure that there will be a good candidate to take your place?
I don't know. Right now, I dream that CR will have euro soon, but this is unlikely to happen. So these "friends" of VK have a chance to screw CR once again. That's the main reason why JS would have been a better president. Probably.

Question of the day

Q: What four Czechs that meet on Sunday in LA have in common?

A: They all want to go back to Czech Republic.

P.S. Four is not enough for law of large numbers, so I don;t think this is necessarily general perception. It also should not suggest that life in the US is bad - it is probably better than in most countries. But it might suggests that young, probably middle-class, educated people find living at Czech Republic more appealing than being (possibly) rich (wealthy) elsewhere. Well, no surprise there - money can buy only so much.

Why Czech Blogs suck 2 - an answer

I asked the question why so many well-known Czech Blogs suck (IMHO), especially in contrast to English language blogs.I did not have an answer that time, but I think I might now. It came to me while reading this post.
Some background first. The author is one of the IT businessman in Czech Republic. He did not create anything really interesting, but he was first to enter the market with IT literature, created couple of magazines (see, for example Zive.cz ) and probably made a fortune on that. It does not matter that the quality of products is not appalling (I was working in his firm for a short time, so I have pretty much good idea why). Anyway, the point is that he is a guy who knows IT and made some money.
So he thinks he is smart and understands everything. And he is arrogant (maybe this is necessary for the success, who knows?). In some cases, he is right, his posts are informed (and informative) - when he write about IT. Since he worked in that area for long time, he is likely to know much more than his readers. This is the good part.
The bad part is that he (and other Czech bloggers) think that they understand much more than just IT. Take the post I referred to above. For example, he claims that the governmental revenues are fixed. He clearly has no idea how volatile governmental revenues are, he most likely never saw any statistics. Probably from the fact that taxes are known and fixed, it somewhat magically follows that revenues are fixed, while in fact, they are not. I'm not sure how recent losses at Citi and other banks fit into his mental model - they probably were expected (haha).
Moreover, he criticizes contract he never read. He confuses one-shot bonus for a mutli-year contract with yearly bonuses. I could go on...
The point is not that he makes mistakes - we all do. The point is that he writes arrogantly about something he has no idea about. The reason probably is that most Czech bloggers are coming from IT field. Their advantage is probable longer presence on the "market", which allowed them to establish reputation others have yet to reach (see, for example, usually much better informed blog from Pavel Kohout, unfortunately not working anymore). I hope that in the future, one will have a choice from blogs written by experts (or at least informed enthusiasts in the field), not by random guys who offer interesting insight into their field mixed with pure nonsense.

Why Czech Blogs sucks?

I have been reading more than 20 blogs, approximately half of them in Czech and the rest in English. I have stop reading most of the Czech blogs, because they suck. It puzzles me - what so different? Why most of the Czech bloggers are offensive, aggressive and often wrong?
Maybe I know only those blogs in English who are very successful and thus passed the "test by audience" that Czech blogs do not have to pass to be known, simply because there is not that many Czech readers.
I don't think this is the whole story. I suspect that there is something about our culture and schooling that makes us unable to discuss (I'm not that much different, probably - it's a matter of culture, not a language).
The list of blogs I have been reading but stopped:
Pooh.cz
Pixy.cz(and clones at respekt.cz),
Ivo Lukacovic Blog
Jiri Pallas

and many other I do not remember anymore...
The "best" blog I have never read (Radek Hulan's Ego, aka the one who shall not be named), because you have to be brain dead to do so.

The Czech Story

I believe Czechs are a very special, unique nation. Not necessarily in a good way. We have been conquered several times and had our share of collaborators. Only very few people have survived without a peck of dust on their soul (or reputation).
One movie says it all. In "Musime si pomahat", there is no positive (good) Czech character. The story goes like this:
Czech family (Marie and Josef Cizkovi) agrees to hide a Jew during second world war. Josef is pretty nasty towards him (jealous and mean). Their "friend" Horst is a collaborator with Germans and convinces Josef to work with him for Germans. Local "good guy", a member of the revolutionary guard who after the war decides who was a collaborator (to shoot them, not to give them a trial), won't help the Jew and is willing to scarify his life in exchange for an illusion of safety for his family. The Capitan of Czech legion is willing to shoot an innocent men based on a single witness, without any evidence or trial.
There are only two positive characters - Marie (she is Slovak) and possibly the Jew (German). Everyone else collaborates in one way or the other. All of them can be viewed as "good" people - they want to help others, but not at a too great risk for themselves. The good nature usually wins at the end, but the fight is difficult and the behavior is often morally suspicious to an external observant.
I can imagine that other nations like Americans (or any other nation who was never occupied for a significant period of time) can hardly understand the problem. Since we had to deal with it many times throughout our history (last, but not least during 40 years of Russia's influence during communism ), it defines us and our behavior. It makes us unique, aware of the parts of soul other nations never saw.
I hope it will help us in the future. We are not any worse (or better) than nations. We just know what we are.

P.S. This post is dedicated to my grand-mother, who was born in the year when the Czechoslovakia was established (1918), witnessed the First World War as a very little baby, survived the Second as a 20+ year old, and 40 years of occupation by Soviets. She had 4 children, 7 grandchildren and 3 grand-grandchildren. She died today.