All posts by pan Psax

Czech Cardinal Dominic Duka has responded to the latest developments in the case of the accusations against Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who has been accused of neglecting to investigate four cases of sexual harassment of minors by the clergy while he was Archbishop of Munich.
Such a reaction is not surprising, since Duka himself was the subject of a criminal complaint for abetting the perpetrators of sexual violence in the Dominican Order, which Duka led at the time.
He called his defence of the Pope “Munich Betrayal for the Second Time”, which for some unfathomable reason equates the Munich Agreement with a cover-up of sexual abuse. Duka wants to call the Archbishop of Munich, his curia and the President of the German Bishops’ Conference “to account for the defamation and tarnishing of the reputation of Pope Benedict XVI”. Such a call for accountability at a time when Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his letter, expresses his regret for the pain of victims of sexual abuse in the Church is downright chutzpah from a man with Duke’s past.

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Recently there have been articles in the media about the fact that in the “atheistic” Czech Republic there are fewer believers who profess to belong to specific churches. This is based on the results of the 2021 census.

While in 1991 more than four and a half million people identified themselves as believers, twenty years later not even half of them were believers. The number of Czech citizens who claim to belong to a particular church is slightly lower than in the last census eleven years ago, but the number of those who identify themselves as believers but do not consider themselves part of a religious organization has increased by about a quarter of a million. Last year, over 1.3 million people subscribed to a faith, but of those 960,000 did not subscribe to any church.

Sociologist of religion Zdeněk R. Nešpor quite rightly points out that the methodology of the census has been different each time.
“We are comparing numbers that look the same but are not the same. The old censuses, and even the censuses from the 1990s, are different from those from last year.”

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Czech folk singer Hana Horká (57) from popular folk band Asonance died after catching COVID-19 on purpose in order to start having a “free life “. Catching the virus (as she believed) would allow her to avoid needing the vaccine, leading to her celebration upon learning she had contracted the virus.
It should be noted that Horká did not fall for any conspiracy theories, she did not believe that there are nanochips in vaccines and similar nonsense which is spreading on the internet. She just thought that the Omikron mutation is not dangerous and it is more “natural” to have the disease and get the antibodies this way than to be vaccinated.

Her son, musician Jan Rek, blames her death on the stars of the Czech antivax scene – namely actor and self-proclaimed shaman Jaroslav Dušek (winner of the Erratic Boulder Award from the Czech Skeptics Club Sisyfos for “good shamanic advice for every day”) and molecular geneticist Soňa Peková (also winner of the Erratic Boulder Award, who claimed in October 2020 that “Covid-19 will really disappear by Christmas” and who collaborated with the political far right and disinformation media). Hana Horká has frequently shared Facebook posts by these two personalities.

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The information channels of the Zdravé fórum (Healthy Forum) show typical characteristics of a disinformation spreader. These characteristics are in particular:

1) Sharing disinformation and problematic websites.
Zdravé fórum intensively shares the content of the following disinformation or highly problematic media.

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New Year’s Eve, an excellent opportunity to test our paranormal abilities and, like many other skeptics, peek behind the curtain of time and tell us some kind of future. Our focus was on the year ahead and we had visions as bright as the sun of the New Year, completely apolitical and, unfortunately, without any sign of the pandemic.

Mr. Psax, after a series of shamanistic rituals, learned that:

• there would be an United Federation of Skeptical Podcasts¹
• Russia will shoot down another satellite
• Czech Skeptics Club Sisyphos, in cooperation with other skeptical entities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, will begin publishing a skeptical journal quarterly, the Czechoslovak version of the Skeptical Inquirer on coated paper.

For the occasion, El Léñas even spent the night in a pyramid fortified with crystals of the four elements and learned in a lucid dream that:

• Jiří Grygar would stop believing in God.
• NASA finally admits that the Earth is flat.
• Ota Nepilý gets the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

A year from now, we’ll talk…

Notes:

The ESP, episode #250

At first – quick numbers: 8275 confirmed cases, 5058 recovered and 290 dead in Czech Republic.

“SARS-CoV-2-CZ-Preval” Study shows that the degree of immunization of the Czech population is very low. In the most affected localities does not reach the value of 4% – 5%. 27000 tested people revealed 107 positive cases.
The big news is that “Scientists from the Czech Republic top institutes have joined forces to create the new vaccine”. As Czech Health Minister Adam Vojtěch (ANO) said 4.5.2020.

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Homeopathy is not a medical service, there is no scientific evidence, the court ruled this month.

At the beginning there was a fine of almost €2.000 imposed by the Regional Council of the Zlín Region on a woman who provided homeopathy counseling.

The fine was confirmed by the Ministry of Health. Both administrative bodies assume that homeopathic services meet the definition of health care under the Health Services Act and can therefore only be provided by the holder of the authorization to provide health services issued by the Regional Council.

But the Regional Court in Brno annulled the decision of the Ministry of Health, and it filed a cassation complaint with the Supreme Administrative Court.

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Minister of Health of the Czech Republic cautiously opposes the TCM and fails to fight homeopathy.

Even worse, he advocates it.

Let’s take a quick look into modern history of homeopathy in the Czech Republic:

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