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Hili dialogue – Why Evolution Is True

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Good morning on Monday, May 22, 2023, and National Vanilla Pudding Day (tapioca’s better).

It’s also Harvey Milk Day, as the murdered gay rights activist was born on this day in 1930, International Day for Biological Diversity,Sherlock Holmes Day (Arthur Conan Doyle was born on this day in 1859), United States National Maritime Day, and World Goth Day. If you’re a goth (are there any left?), you can find a list of today’s Goth Day events here. And here are photos from Wikipedia of a male and female Goth:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 22 Wikipedia page.

And there’s a Google Doodle today; if you click on it below, you’ll find that it celebrates the 69th birthday of Barbara May Cameron (1954-2002), described on Wikipedia as “a Native American photographer, poet, writer, and human rights activist in the fields of lesbian/gay rights, women’s rights and Native American rights.” You can’t get more intersectional than that.

Here’s a photo:

Da Nooz:

*Ukraine’s repeated claims that it still held onto the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and was making gains, have been muted lately. And now it looks as if that silence denotes the dismal fact that the city has been pretty much taken over by the Russians.

Ukrainian forces have lost effective control of the eastern city of Bakhmut, Ukraine’s top commander in the region said, as Moscow declared its first significant conquest since last summer after months of relentless fighting that has cost thousands of lives and obliterated the city.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy said Ukrainian forces were clinging to a tiny part of Bakhmut and advancing around its flanks, but acknowledged that the city was largely under Russian control.

The city’s capture would mark the only significant success of a monthslong Russian offensive that has severely depleted its military.

The question of who really won the battle of Bakhmut, military strategists say, will be decided not by control over the shattered city but by the next phase of the war. Kyiv fought street by street and at great cost to grind down Russian forces and prepare its forces for its own offensive aimed at seizing back territory occupied by Russia. Fighting has also cut into Ukrainian forces after Kyiv committed additional units to its defense.

And a quote from President Zelensky:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that Bakhmut was “only in our hearts,” hours after Russia’s defense ministry reported that forces of the Wagner private army, with the support of Russian troops, had seized the city in eastern Ukraine.

Speaking alongside U.S. President Joe Biden at the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, Zelenskyy said the Russians had destroyed “everything.” “You have to understand that there is nothing,” he said.

“For today, Bakhmut is only in our hearts,” he said. “There is nothing in this place.”

How many Ukrainian cities will turn into “nothing”?

*Ezra Klein at the NYT explains why “Liberals are persuading themselves of a debt ceiling plan that won’t work.” Although he thinks the whole idea of a debt ceiling is nonsense, he also argues that two solutions limned by the Democrats are equally dumb:

Now two more unconventional tactics are proving particularly popular in the liberal imagination.

In one, President Biden simply declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional, pointing to the 14th Amendment, which holds that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” Five Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are circulating a letter calling on Biden to do just that. On Friday, 66 progressive congressional Democrats sent the president their own letter making a similar case.

In the other, the Treasury Department uses a loophole in a 1997 law to mint a platinum coin of any value it chooses — a trillion dollars, say — and uses the new money to keep paying the government’s debts.

In remarks after a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Biden said he was “considering” the argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. The problem, he continued, is that “it would have to be litigated.” And that’s the problem with all these ideas and why, in the end, it’s doubtful that Biden — or any Democrat — will try them.

The legality of the debt ceiling or a trillion-dollar platinum coin doesn’t depend on how liberals read the Constitution or the Coinage Act. It depends on how three conservatives read it: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who are the closest the Supreme Court now comes to having swing justices.

. . . My point is not that more conservative readings of these laws are right in some absolute sense. It’s that no such absolute sense matters. We just watched this Supreme Court wipe out decades of precedent to overrule Roe. It has repeatedly entertained cases that even conservative legal scholars thought farcical just a few years earlier. I still remember Orin Kerr, a law professor who clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, telling me at the beginning of the Obamacare case that there was “a less than 1 percent chance that the courts would invalidate the individual mandate,” only to update that to a “50-50 chance” as the court prepared to rule.

The Supreme Court does what it wants to do. Does it want to let the Biden administration dissolve the debt ceiling using a novel legal theory?

As he notes, Biden making a move that might be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court is a dumb move. His ending: “Republicans are the ones threatening default if their demands are not met. They are pulling the pin on this grenade, in full view of the American people. Biden should think carefully before taking the risk of snatching it out of their hands and holding it himself.”  But I’m wondering if it would do nearly as much damage if Biden refused to compromise and we defaulted then. Remember, he promised during his campaign to reach across the aisle and bring the country together. Or has everyone forgotten that?

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*If you’ve visited Tikal in Guatemala (I have twice, and you must if you’re ever in the country), you’ll be stunned at the site of a huge Mayan city rising out of rain forest: green as far as you can see. It was a major city for fifteen centuries, but we know that others are buried in the forest, which quickly covers up ruins.  But there are many of these—as the Washington Post reports, at least 417 are being mapped by archaeologists.

Beneath 1,350 square miles of dense jungle in northern Guatemala, scientists have discovered 417 cities that date back to circa 1000 B.C. and that are connected by nearly 110 miles of “superhighways” — a network of what researchers called “the first freeway system in the world.”

Scientists say this extensive road-and-city network, along with sophisticated ceremonial complexes, hydraulic systems and agricultural infrastructure, suggests that the ancient Maya civilization, which stretched through what is now Central America, was far more advanced than previously thought.

Mapping the area since 2015 using lidar technology — an advanced type of radar that reveals things hidden by dense vegetation and the tree canopy — researchers have found what they say is evidence of a well-organized economic, political and social system operating some two millennia ago.

The discovery is sparking a rethinking of the accepted idea that the people of the mid- to late-Preclassic Maya civilization (1000 B.C. to A.D. 250) would have been only hunter-gatherers,“roving bands of nomads, planting corn,” says Richard Hansen, the lead author of a study about the finding that was published in January and an affiliate research professor of archaeology at the University of Idaho.

. . .Before the lidar study, archaeologists, biologists and historians had identified about 50 sites of importance in a decade. “Now there are more than 900 [settlements]. … We [couldn’t] seethat before. It was impossible.” Hernández says.

Among the multistory temples, buildings and roads, images of Balamnal, one of the Preclassic civilization’s crucial hubs, were revealed for the first time. It dates back to 1,000 or possibly 2,000 years before the most famous, and well-excavated, Maya site of Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which was constructed in the early A.D. 400s.

Excavations around Balamnal in 2009 “failed to recognize the incredible sophistication and size of the city, all of which was immediately evident with lidar technology,” Hansen says. Lidar showed the site to be among the largest in El Mirador, with causeways “radiating to other smaller sites suggest[ing] its administrative, economic and political importance in the Preclassic periods.”

The only way into the region is by helicopter or a 40-mile hike through the jungle, so for now tourists are few. Here’s a photo from the article with the WaPo caption:

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(from WaPo): The La Danta pyramid in northern Guatemala. Deep in the jungle, researchers have found evidence of a well-organized system of hundreds of ancient Mayan cities. The discovery suggests the ancient civilization was far more advanced than previously thought. ( Andres Turcios and Mirciny Moliviatis/FARES)

*Okay, here’s a new movie you’ll have to see when it comes out in October: “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Di Niro: a team that’s worked together seven times before. As CNN reports,

Their latest project, true-crime drama “Killers of The Flower Moon” starring DiCaprio and De Niro, premiered at the swanky Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and the post-screening reception was instantly impressive with a minuteslong standing ovation.

A video posted to the Cannes Film Festival’s YouTube channel shows the audience inside the Grande Theatre Lumiere exuberantly applauding the movie for at least seven minutes, with more applause coming after director Scorsese thanked the audience.

“Thank you to the Osage,” Scorese said, adding “everyone connected with the picture – my old pals Bob, Leo, all of us together” and described filming the movie as a “very alive” experience.

. . .The cheers and applause grew louder for DiCaprio, De Niro and Lily Gladstone, who were all in attendance at the premiere. Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion also star in “Killers.”

Based on the bestseller by David Grann, the film is a true-crime story “set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror.”

The three and a half hour film marks Scorsese’s first-ever foray into the Western genre and premiered out of competition at Cannes. It has so far received positive reviews.

It’s based on a true story: that of the “Osage Indian Murders” from 1910 to the 1930s. I had no idea about this! The Osage discovered oil on their lands, many got rich, but Congress decreed that each Osage have a white guardian to manage their finances. You can imagine what that led to!  Here’s a trailer about the movie (Robbie Robertson composed the music), which is based on an eponymous book:

And here’s a half-hour video documentary about the real incidents:

*Here’s some juicy gossip, and I’ll be brief, as you can read the story for itself. Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein!

Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use his knowledge to threaten one of the world’s richest men, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Microsoft co-founder met the woman around 2010, when she was in her 20s. Epstein met her in 2013 and later paid for her to attend software coding school. In 2017, Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The email came after the convicted sex offender had struggled and failed to persuade Gates to participate in a multibillion-dollar charitable fund that Epstein tried to establish with JPMorgan Chase. The implication behind the message, according to people who have viewed it, was that Epstein could reveal the affair if Gates didn’t keep up an association between the two men.

“Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” said a spokeswoman for Gates.

. . . The new details about Epstein and Gates reveal a layer of complexity to their relationship, and shed new light on how Epstein operated. In the years between his 2008 conviction and death, Epstein packed his days meeting with politicians, businessmen, academics and celebrities. He provided favors and sought to use the connections for his own purposes. And when the relationships soured, he could turn against people.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I believe Hili is dissing either his editors or the other family cats:

A: Do you like to sit here?

Hili: Yes, this is the best place to throw pearls before swine.

In Polish:

Ja: Lubisz tu siedzieć?

Hili: Tak, to jest najlepsze miejsce do rzucania pereł przed wieprze.

And a picture of the affectionate Szaron, taken by Paulina:

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And here is Mishka, Anna Krylov’s lovely British shorthair. Look at those eyes—they are the color of honey.

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

From reader David:

From Facebook:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Masih: Iranian protestors protesting the execution of protestors:

I found this one (read more about the Torch Lady here).

. . . I found this one, too. (I discovered a way to find some good tweets without following anyone):

From Gravelinspector, a lovely Egyptian carving:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a nine-year-old boy gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who had a rough time in Heathrow this morning. Always check your order before you press the “pay” button!

Independent only seconds after birth (there’s no parental care, as I recall):

Kitties supervising the construction of their own cat-hole:

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