Hili dialogue – Why Evolution Is True

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Welcome to: CaturSaturday February 17, 2024, and today is shabbos for Jewish cats, who can’t turn on electrical appliances until sundown. Foodwise, it’s National Cafe au Lait day, and I suppose my morning cappuccino will serve as well. Here it is, with a sprinkling of cinnamon on top:

It’s also National Indian Pudding Day (one of my very favorite desserts), World Whale Day, National Cabbage Day, and World Pangolin Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*(see next story) First, the death of Aleksei Navalny, who was reported by Russia to have dropped dead Friday in an Arctic penal colony, has been confirmed. The weird circumstances of his death (he was okay the day before, filmed joking with his guards) demand an autopsy, as it sounds like either poison or, less neafariously, a heart attack.

Aleksei A. Navalny’s political allies on Saturday confirmed his death, saying that his mother had received an official notification of it.

Kira Yarmysh, Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, said in a statement on X that Russian investigators had transferred Mr. Navalny’s body from a penal colony in the Arctic to the nearby town of Salekhard, where it is being examined.

*This news hit me hard: Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny died in prison, or rather in the Arctic gulag. He was just 47. And remember, he’d already been nearly poisoned to death by Putin’s agents. Nevertheless, this brave man returned to Russia and his inevitable imprisonment. Death was nearly a certainty given his opposition to Putin.

President Biden said that there was “no doubt” that President Vladimir V. Putin’s government was behind the death of Aleksei A. Navalny, the outspoken dissident who Russian authorities said had died at a remote Arctic prison on Friday.

“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” Mr. Biden said at a White House news conference, while acknowledging that the United States still did not know details of what happened. “What has happened to Navalny is even more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled.”

Mr. Navalny’s death would leave the country without its most prominent opposition voice at a time when Mr. Putin has amassed near-total power, invaded neighboring Ukraine and drawn the sharpest divisions with U.S.-led Western allies since the end of the Cold War.

Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement that Mr. Navalny, 47, had lost consciousness and died after taking a walk on Friday in the Arctic prison where he was moved late last year. “All necessary resuscitation measures were taken, which did not lead to positive results,” the statement said.

The news shocked world leaders, although Western officials and many of Mr. Navalny’s supporters expressed skepticism about the Russian authorities’ statements. Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said in a live broadcast that his team could not immediately confirm his death but believed in all likelihood he was dead.

. . .Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple prison sentences — on what supporters said were fabricated charges — that would likely have kept him locked up until at least 2031. In December, he disappeared for three weeks as the Russian authorities transferred him to a remote penal colony in the Arctic. He was last seen publicly on Thursday, when he appeared via video link in a court hearing.

This is one of the bravest men I know, and he could have done a much better job than Putin. I agree with Biden that Putin’s government, and probably Putin, who I see as a serial murderer, is behind Navalny’s death. Even if they didn’t kill him directly, they put him in conditions that, given his poor post-poisoning health, would kill him.

*I wonder whether Navalny could have done more to reform Russia if he’d never returned. Malgorzata thinks that Russian dissidents always cause more reform when they’re martyrs, like Navalny, than if they operate outside of Russia. The Washington Post tells us why Navalny’s life and death were important.

Navalny was Russia’s best-known opposition leader — he had publicly criticized the Russian president and his government and called for political change.

Navalny had a large political network and led massive street protests in Russia. He was also able to harness social media to keep pressure on Putin and his allies, exposing alleged corruption in widely viewed YouTube videos. Putin still largely refuses to say his name, in a show of disdain.

Navalny won various international human rights awards, and for many years he faced court trials and house arrest, while Russian authorities seized his bank accounts. He was barred from running against Putin in presidential elections but continually found creative ways to resist Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule.

Navalny studied law and finance in Russian universities and entered politics in 1999, just as Putin first took up national leadership. He joined the liberal opposition party Yabloko before being expelled in 2007. He later formed a group known as the Anti-Corruption Foundation to open investigations that increasingly struck at the heart of the Kremlin elite.

In 2013, Navalny surprised many analysts when he won 27 percent of the vote against a key Kremlin ally in the Moscow mayoral election. He became an international figurehead of dissent against Putin when he was poisoned by the banned nerve agent Novichok while on a flight from Siberia, making global headlines in 2020.

Amid the poisoning incident in 2020, the airplane pilot made an emergency landing in the city of Omsk, where Navalny was rushed to a hospital and placed on a ventilator. He was evacuated to Germany to recover. He later blamed Russian security forces for the poisoning, as did the State Department and European authorities. Russian officials denied any role.

Last year, lawyers and associates of Navalny said he feared that Russian authorities may be slowly poisoning him in prison after he suffered acute stomach pains and seizures and lost significant weight.

*As always, I’m stealing three items from Nellie Bowles’s snarky but absorbing summary of the week’s news in The Free Press, this week called “TGIF: Mother Russia, Father Time.”

→ Trump struggles with the concept of military service: At a rally this week, Trump did some wondering about Nikki Haley’s husband. “Where’s her husband? Oh, he’s away. He’s away! What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband! Where is he? He’s gone.” He sounds like a gossipy country club lady. Right. So. Michael Haley is a commissioned officer deployed in Africa with the South Carolina National Guard. It’s a strange concept to Bone Spur Trumpo, but to maintain American security, we have a military, and we send soldiers to do things, often with guns, frequently in shitholes. Then, in exchange for their bravery and selflessness, we as a society give them respect. No, we do not imply their wives are suspect because of their service. Someone get the spray bottle.

→ Petty little protests all over town this week: Pro-Palestine protesters (PPP) in Toronto decided to target a hospital because it is called Mount Sinai and Jewish donors’ names are featured on the front. Don’t be hysterical, it’s just anti-Zionism they say. The protesters climbed the rafters, banged on windows, called for Intifada, and flew a Palestinian flag from the second floor. A Jewish doctor was driving through, and they circled her car demanding she honk, not letting her drive until she did. Nearby cops refused to help her. In New York, protesters took over the Museum of Modern Art to protest that Jewish members of the board have various connections to Israel (index funds count, don’t think they don’t). And Students for Justice in Palestine were very clear this week that they don’t want any Jews left in the Middle East, chanting: “We don’t want two states—we want all of it.”

The Irish women’s basketball team refused to shake hands with Israel’s team, and there’s a movement to block Israel from competing in Eurovision. And Broadway Cares, the charity supposedly for theater workers, sent $400,000 to charities in Gaza, where the cash most assuredly is funneled to Hamas. Honestly, a pretty slow week.

→ Oh, that foreign aid doesn’t count: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Jake Tapper she will absolutely not support the $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza. Why? Because of restrictions on UNRWA and “the complete lack of humanitarian aid” for Palestinians in the bill. Tapper corrects her: the bill would include $10 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza. AOC doesn’t flinch: foreign aid to Gaza only counts if it’s given through UNRWA. Now why would that be?

Here: see the box of rocks for yourself:

→ Medical school’s getting a little odd, no? The prestigious medical school at University of California, San Francisco invited local equity leader Dante King to speak to medical students in a lecture called “Diagnosing Whiteness and Anti-Blackness.” This needs little more from me, so Dante, take it away: “Whites are psychopaths, and their behavior represents an underlying biologically transmitted proclivity with roots deep in their evolutionary history. How many of you could see the proclivity that evolved deep within the evolutionary history of whiteness? By show of hands, how many of you could see it? Some people are sitting here, ‘oh, no, I don’t want to raise my hand.’ That’s called denial.”

*From Jez vis the Guardian: appalling new anti-Semitism stats at UK schools.  I have no idea why antisemitism seems to be increasing so rapidly in the UK compared to, say, the U.S. (where it’s also increasing):

The anonymous letter that landed on the desk of a headteacher of a Jewish school in Hertfordshire in November did not pull its punches.

“Beware,” it began. “Jihadi is being fought and you are going to have your throat slit by us.” Among the reasons it listed were “we see you like music which is unIslamic”; “you wear a tie and are western” and “you are a Jew lover”. It ended with the words: “From the river to the see [sic] we shall be free, you Zionist.”

The letter was sent a few weeks after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October that left about 1,200 dead, triggered the war in Gaza – and unleashed a surge of anti-Jewish hatred in the UK. Incidents of antisemitism rose sharply after 7 October, the Community Security Trust (CST) reported this week – up by 589% compared with the same period in 2022.

Jewish pupils and teachers were among those targeted. The CST recorded 325 incidents in the schools sector in 2023, an increase of 232% on the year before. The vast majority of incidents, 70%, took place after 7 October.

Most involved abusive behaviour, but there were also 32 cases of assault and 10 of damage or desecration to property. Twenty-four of the incidents took place in mainstream (non-Jewish) primary schools.

. . . Since coming to the school three years ago, Dalziel – who is not Jewish – has been aware of a “background of antisemitic comments and gestures” directed at children, for example at sporting fixtures with other schools. It got significantly worse after 7 October, he said.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s atrocity and Israel’s military response, attendance at many Jewish schools dropped dramatically as parents kept their children at home for fear of attacks. Jewish children were advised to remove yarmulkes and Star of David jewellery on their way to and from school. Security stepped up, with increased patrols and reinforced barriers. Some schools received death threats, or threats to bomb their buildings.

. . . .“Among all the staggering statistics about the rise in anti-Jewish hatred last year, the fact that incidents in schools tripled to a record high is perhaps the most alarming,” said a CST spokesperson.

“It is profoundly troubling that some Jewish children are being bullied and socially ostracised, often in the context of simplistic and divisive political activism related to the Middle East that should have no place in schools.”

*In his new Weekly Dish column, “Neoracism, finally on defense,” Andrew Sullivan highlights the King-ian message of Coleman Hughes’s brand-new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. An excerpt:

The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964. “Color-blindness” is not the best description of this, because of course we continue to see others’ race, just as we will always see someone’s sex. No, as Hughes explains: “To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives.”

That’s a principle the vast majority of Americans, black and white and everything else, support. It was the core principle for Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bayard Rustin. “If I have advocated the cause of the colored people, it is not because I am a negro, but because I am a man,” insisted Douglass. Henry Highland Garnet — the first African-American to speak in Congress after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — even apologized for speaking of various different races, “when in fact there is but one race, as there was but one Adam.”

Fast forward to 2015, when the University of California called the phrase “There is only one race, the human race” a “micro-aggression”; or 2020, when the phrase “All Lives Matter” was deemed evidence of “anti-blackness”. The 21st Century, the brief era of color-blindness behind us, reached back to the 19th to insist that race defines us at our core, can never be overcome, and marks us all either an oppressor or a victim. The left, including the Democratic Party, has now adopted this worldview, along with a legal regime to actively discriminate against some races and not others: “equity”. That’s why Hughes cuts to the chase and calls these reactionaries in progressive clothing “neoracists”. They are. What else would one call them?

They are race-obsessed. They view any human interaction as a racial power-struggle, and compound it with any number of further “intersectional” power-struggles. They do not see two unique individuals with unique life experiences interacting in a free society. They see group identity as determinative everywhere; and therefore want to intervene everywhere, to discriminate against whites and successful non-whites in favor of unsuccessful non-whites. Individual rights? They come second to group identity.

. . . But the implosion of bad ideas is not the same as the resuscitation of good ones. What Hughes has done in this book is remind us what we already knew: that racism and neoracism are two sides of the same collectivist coin, and that treating everyone regardless of race is the only feasible way forward for a multiracial America, just as it is the only morally defensible regime that can actually counter and erode racial hatred. The proof is in our past progress. But the potential for multi-racial individualism is as unknowable as it is exhilarating.

Good writing. And Coleman is a man to watch.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is worried about Szaron’s proxmity

Hili: Take away that paw.

Szaron: How does it disturb you?

Hili: Just the knowledge that it’s there.

In Polish:

Hili: Zabierz tę łapę.

Szaron: Co ci przeszkadza?

Hili: Świadomość, że tam jest.

*******************

Some different stuff today. First, videos made entirely from AI descriptions (I don’t know how this is done.). h/t Thomas.

Then Israeli actress and now activist Noa Tishby decries the pro-Palestinian invasion of the Mount Sinai Hospital (a Jewish hospital) in Toronto. This shows that it’s not the Israeli government that these people are after, but simply Jews!:

And from  reader Ant:

Masih retweeted this, and she and Kasparov are deeply shocked (but not that surprised) by Navalny’s death:

And great news! UNC Charlotte has followed UNC Chapel Hill in adopting institutional neutrality. That makes a total of five schools (mine, UNC Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, and, perhaps, Columbia University)

From Gravelinspector:

From reader Craig: applying for a ceasefire:

Two from my feed: a cat helps make a pot:

A star is born! Note how it instinctively and immediately goes up for air!

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a Catholic priest was arrested on this day in 1941, and later died after volunteering to take the place of another prisoner sentenced to death by starvation. After several prisoners died, Kolbe was executed by an injection of carbolic acid. Read more about this self-sacrificing man here.

A tweet from Dr. Cobb, who’s finally back home in Manchester.  The village is pissed, and rightly so!



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