And let's add one more act of mockery to cement our brand-new New Year's tradition. Chad Orzel mocks Lubos Motl for his appalling website design, his obnoxious political views, and his string-theorist contempt for experimental physics:

Uncertain Principles : I've managed to leave string theory alone for a while, but... Lubos Motl points to... Dave Pritchard's group used their cyclotron mass spectrometry technique to measure the change in mass of a nucleus after emitting a photon.... Motl dismisses this.... To Motl, it's inconceivable that the theory could work out any other way, so it's hardly worth bothering to do the experiment. To my mind, the fact that any other theory would be inconceivable is that whole reason to do the experiment in the first place.... A few disclaimers: In general, I have very little use for Lubos Motl: he combines the worst sort of string-theorist attitude with political views that I find obnoxious, and a website design that I find appalling....

But I prefer to mock Motl for his--unique--claims that the Iraqi economy is doing wonderfully:

Lubos Motl's reference frame: 52.3 percent growth : What if I tell you that a particular country had the GDP growth of 52.3 percent in 2004? Moreover, it is a country that is usually described as such a failure that the president of another country who more or less caused all these developments, including the number 52.3.... The country has not only a terrific growth potential but also a big potential to become an extremely civilized territory, just like it was thousands of years ago when Europe was their barbarian borderland.... And also the people from other places in the world, especially America. Who do you think is a better human? Someone [like George W. Bush] who tries to support positive developments in the world, including the country above, or [Bush's critics]? I, for one, think that the members of the second group are immoral bastards... [who] will spend the eternity at the dumping ground of history, unlike [George W. Bush] who will be written down as an important U.S. president in the future history textbooks. All those critics [of George W. Bush] who still retain at least a flavor of some moral values: please stop your sabotage as soon as possible. Even if you achieve what you want - a failure - it will be clear to everyone that the failure is not Bush's fault but your fault.

And to mock him for his bizarre views about the history of science:

Lubos Motl's reference frame : Einstein... deduced both special relativity as well as general relativity more or less by pure thought, using only very general and rudimentary features of Nature known partially from the experiments.... If an undereducated person finds this fact about the real world "arrogant", it is his personal psychological problem.... Einstein only needed a very elementary input from the experiments - namely the invariance of physical laws under uniform motion; and the constancy of speed of light - which naturally follows from Maxwell's equations and Einstein was sure that the constancy was right long before the experiments showed that.... The observation that the world is based on more concise and unified principles than what the crackpots and laymen would generally expect is an experimentally verified fact. These two observations are called the postulates of special relativity, and the whole structure of special relativity with all of its far-reaching consequences such as the equivalence of matter and energy follows logically....

The "rudimentary" feature of nature on top of which Einstein developed his special theory of relativity? It was the result of experiments. Lots of experiments. Physicists had found that it did not matter whether you held a magnet steady and moved a wire near it or held a wire steady and moved a magnet near it--exactly the same electrical current was generated in each case. This is a mysterious and wonderful experimental fact. It is not "rudimentary" at all. It is not something that one can deduce "more or less by pure thought" at all. Where Einstein's true genius showed itself was in his decision to take this experimental fact as something important to be theorized about. "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" begins:

It is known that Maxwell's electrodynamics--as usually understood at the present time--when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion. For if the magnet is in motion and the conductor at rest, there arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an electric field with a certain definite energy, producing a current at the places where parts of the conductor are situated. But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an electromotive force, to which in itself there is no corresponding energy, but which gives rise--assuming equality of relative motion in the two cases discussed--to electric currents of the same path and intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the former case. Examples of this sort... suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the "Principle of Relativity") to the status of a postulate...

Let's hope for his sake that Lubos Motl's contributions to high-energy physics theory are less wacka-wacka than his politics, his view of experimental physics, or his knowledge of the history of science.