Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 18, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische moggies: Sunday, February 18, 2024, and National Drink Wine Day. I’ll be having a dry Yalumba viognier from Australia with Costco roast chicken (and trimmings).

It’s also Crab-stuffed Flounder Day (I’ll take my crustaceans sans fish, please), Pluto Day (a PLANET), Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast Day (I’ll have cake, and cold pizza beats ice cream as a breakfast food), and, in Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish Students Union Day.

For the Kurdish cause, here’s a picture of Hitchens I took the only time I encountered him, at a meeting in Puebla, Mexico on November 8, 2009. In his lapel, along with a poppy (believe Poppy Day is Nov. 11), he’s wearing the Kurdish flag, which looks like this:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Bad news in the war in Ukraine, which just lost a city to the Russians. I worry a lot about that country since the only help we or their allies can give them is money and ammunition, when they need fighters, and fighters in planes.

Ukraine is engaged in a desperate fight to hold back the Russian onslaught.

Russian forces captured the longtime Ukrainian stronghold of Avdiivka before dawn on Saturday, Moscow’s first major battlefield gain since it took Bakhmut last May.

But across the entire 600-mile long front, Ukraine is short on ammunition without renewed American military assistance, and it is struggling to replenish its own depleted forces after two years of brutal fighting.

Russia’s assault has split into five major lines of attack, spanning towns and cities across much of the front in eastern and southern Ukraine. Here is the status of Russia’s offensive in five critical battles:

The now-destroyed city of Avdiivka covers only some 12 square miles. But for the better part of a decade it carved a bulge in the front line that undermined critical Russian logistical operations. It sits only a few miles from the city of Donetsk, which Russia has occupied since 2014.

In recent weeks, Russian forces have breached a critical supply line and threatened to encircle Ukrainian soldiers. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the head of Ukraine’s forces in the south, said that Ukraine had no choice but to withdraw.

“In a situation where the enemy is advancing on the corpses of their own soldiers with a 10-to-1 shell advantage, under constant bombardment, this is the only correct solution,” he said in a statement.

It’s not clear how far the Russians might be able to push this fight beyond Avdiivka, or how well the Ukrainians have constructed their next lines of defense. But the next major population centers, home to tens of thousands of civilians, are only about 35 miles to the west.

I’m amazed Ukraine has held out this long, but now, if I had to bet, I’d put my money on the war ending with either much or all of Ukraine in Russian hands. And there’s precious little we can do about it save give dosh and weapons.

*After a public figure dies in America under mysterious circumstances, like George Floyd, the autopsy is always conducted by government officials.  Sadly, that’s also true in Russia, so that the autopsy of Alexei Navalny will be conducted by Russia, and it seems highly probable to me that it was Russia which killed him. Now the Russians are tussling with Navalny’s family and lawyer over his remains.

A spokeswoman for Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died suddenly in an Arctic prison, demanded on Saturday that authorities hand over his body, as his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and lawyers struggled fruitlessly with officials to reclaim his remains.

Russia’s Investigative Committee refused a lawyer’s demand to surrender the body until an official medical investigation was complete, according to the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh.

“We demand that Alexei Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately,” Yarmysh wrote in a statement on Saturday.

Navalnaya, who had visited her son just on Monday in the harsh prison camp known as “Polar Wolf” in Kharp, a town in the far north region of Yamalo-Nenets, returned there Saturday morning with Navalny’s lawyer and was given documentation showing his death occurred at 2:17 p.m. local time on Friday.

Navalnaya, 69, faced a grueling and absurd ordeal after she flew into the town of Salekhard early Saturday and drove 33 miles to the Kharp prison, where she was kept waiting two hours before prison officials told her that Navalny died of “sudden death syndrome,” according to Yarmysh. They told Navalnaya that her son’s body was taken to the morgue in Salekhard, assuring her the facility was open and operating, Yarmysh said.

But when Navalnaya and a lawyer arrived, the morgue was closed.

They phoned a number on the door, only to be told his body was not there, Yarmysh said.

Yarmysh said a second Navalny lawyer visited the Investigative Committee in Salekhard, where officials had a different story: that Navalny’s body was undergoing a medical investigation to establish the cause of death. They refused to hand over the body until the official investigation is carried out, stating that the results would be released next week, she said.

This behavior is, to say the least, suspicious.  One can only hope that if he was poisoned, the “official investigators” are powerless to remove its traces. I’m wondering if they will ever release the body. If they won’t, then you have every right to assume that Navalny was murdered by the Russians.

*Speaking of how dictatorial Putin is, the Russians are also arresting those who pay tribute to Navalny, even with such innocent gestures as laying flowers at memorials to him:

Meanwhile, arrests continued Saturday as Russians came to lay flowers in Navalny’s honor at memorials to the victims of Soviet-era purges. OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia, said Saturday that more than 359 people had been detained since Navalny’s death.

His team said it would pay the fines of anyone arrested while paying tribute to the late opposition leader.

Memorial items laid Friday were removed overnight, but people continued trickling in with flowers on Saturday. In Moscow, a large group of people chanted “shame” as police dragged a screaming woman from the crowd, video shared on social media showed.

More than 10 people were detained at a memorial in St. Petersburg, including a priest who came to conduct a service for Navalny.

In other cities across the country, police cordoned off some of the memorials and officers were taking pictures of those who came and writing down their personal data in a clear intimidation attempt.

. . . U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Saturday that Britain “will be taking action” against the Russians responsible for Navalny’s death.

. . .Hours after Navalny’s death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at the Munich conference.

She said she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.”

Can you imagine the degree of repression? required to arrest those simply paying tribute to a government aopponent. Here’s a photo from the AP with its caption:

A man lays flowers paying the last respect to Alexei Navalny at the monument, a large boulder from the Solovetsky islands, where the first camp of the Gulag political prison system was established, with the historical the Federal Security Service (FSB, Soviet KGB successor) building in the background, in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday morning, Feb. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

*Reader Terry sent this item, noting “I thought you might be interested in what’s happening in British Columbia, where the left-of-centre New Democratic Party government has ousted its minister of advanced education — and forced her to take “anti-Islamophobia training” for speaking the truth about the founding of Israel. It’s a sad story and a fate undeserved for a rare politician of principle.” From the National Post:

Neither her two grovelling apologies for having said nothing wrong in the first place nor her masochistic submission to “anti-Islamophobia training” were humiliations sufficient to save Selina Robinson, the British Columbia minister for advanced education ousted by B.C. Premier David Eby last week.

. . .To understand Robinson’s political lynching the first thing you need to notice was the noose that first appeared around her neck months earlier. Being a “progressive” Jew of “woke” sensibility and only the mildest Zionist inclination served only to tighten the rope as the howling from antisemitic and “anti-Zionist” voices in Canada grew louder and louder following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7.

The backstory to Robinson’s defenestration goes back years, and just one part of it involves the “activism” of a creepy groupuscule that purports to speak for Canada’s Jews that calls itself Independent Jewish Voices. They’ve been lurking at the uglier margins of Robinson’s own New Democratic Party for more than a decade, and besides, IJV has always had it in for B’nai Brith, the long-standing Jewish human rights organization that hosted the Jan. 30 panel discussion where Robinson committed her heresy.

According to Shimon Koffler Fogel of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, anyone who affords IJV any credibility “must be understood as doing so to justify their own anti-Israel political agendas.” This would seem to reflect quite poorly on quite a few journalists who have gone out of their way to burnish IJV’s credentials lately, notably by platforming IJV’s denunciations of Robinson.

The chapter of the long and sordid story that opens with Robinson on the gallows came well before that “controversial” Jan. 30 B’nai Brith panel discussion. It goes back to the evening of Oct. 30 last year, when the success of Robinson’s appeals for mandatory Holocaust education in B.C.’s schools was confirmed by Premier Eby in his announcement at a bipartisan event at Vancouver’s Jewish Community Centre that gathered together several of the city’s Jewish organizations along with Holocaust survivors and their families.

Both Eby and Robinson noted that a study commissioned by the “Liberation 75” advocacy organization in 2022 found that a third of North American students had been somehow persuaded that the Holocaust was either exaggerated or invented. It should tell you something that in the embargoed press release from the premier’s office about the Oct. 30 announcement, reporters were asked not to publicize the timing or the location of the event due to security concerns.

At the Vancouver event, Robinson drew attention to the bloodcurdling speeches at a rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery only a couple of days earlier. The rally was one in a series co-organized by a number of groups that openly celebrated the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, notably the Palestinian Youth Movement and Samidoun, a Vancouver-headquartered organization listed as a terror group in Israel whose leaders are banned from entering Europe. Samidoun is intimately associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the most vicious terror groups in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At that Oct. 28 rally, Langara College instructor Natalie Knight praised Hamas for its “amazing and brilliant” slaughter of nearly 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 surprise attack in Southern Israel, the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust.

“I was horrified that any human being would somehow think that there was glory in what we witnessed,” Robinson said, “what Hamas perpetrated against people, against babies, against old people, against people who were dancing in the desert.”

And so Robinson was defenestrated for saying this:

This is what Robinson said: “We have a whole generation of 18- to 34-year-olds that have no idea about the Holocaust, they don’t even think it happened. They don’t understand that Israel was offered to the Jews who were displaced. So they have no connection to how it started. They don’t understand that it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it. There were several hundred thousand people, but other than that it didn’t produce an economy; it couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it.”

O Canada!

*My colleague Brian Leiter reports on his website that some Yale faculty “are in favor of Yale being a university.”  (h/t Greg Mayer). A “Faculty for Yale” site calls for this:

Faculty for Yale:

  • insist on the primacy of teaching, learning, and research as distinct from advocacy and activism, and on the centrality of the faculty to these core activities; 
  • confirm Yale’s commitment to robust free expression, including affirmative efforts to foster more open campus and classroom discourse, coupled with institutional neutrality; 
  • affirm the university’s commitment to the pursuit of excellence; critical thinking applied to all points of view; and a tolerant and broad-minded campus ethos and culture; 
  • urge greater administrative transparency and increased faculty oversight of all pedagogic and academic activities.

One important corollary is that Yale as an institution should not prescribe any moral or political positions as institutional orthodoxy or treat the failure to endorse such a position as grounds for sanction or exclusion, whether formal or informal.  Doing so thins our collective knowledge and experience and diminishes the truth-seeking enterprise in which we are all engaged.

You can see the signers here. Note that the last bit calls for institution of Chicago’s Kalven report (institutional neutrality), which for some reason has become controversial (only five American universities subscribe to it).

Brian also gives a link to a “rejoinder petition” for Yale faculty (111 have signed so far), which is pretty woke and makes fun of institutional neutrality. Leiter adds this:

Law professor Paul Horwitz writes with an apt observation:   “What I find striking (but not terribly surprising) about them [authors of response petition] is that while there are plenty of signatories in the ‘rejoinder’ from area studies departments and public health, there are no area studies or public health signatories to the ‘be a university’ letter.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again concerned with the parlous state of the world.

Hili: The world is standing on its head.
A: If there is any head you may be right.
In Polish:
Hili: Świat stoi na głowie.
Ja: Jeśli jest jakaś głowa, to możesz mieć rację.

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

 

A duck pun from Pati:

From The Darwin Awards 2024:

From Seth, a mean trick:

Masih introduces to a government official an Iranian woman (only 24) who lost her eye in a protest, as is wont to happen to Iranian protestors.

American colleges have lost their perspectives and priorities:

From Amy: Nala the Railway Cat and Jerry the de Havilland cat.  Read more about Nala here. 

From Malcolm. Do Canadians really dislike Trudeau that much?

A definition from Jez:

This is an easy fix!

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a ten-year-old French girl, gassed upon arrival:

A tweet from Matthew who says this of Darren Naish (who writes Tetrapod Zoology), ”

“I think it’s a rule Darren has that he writes a new post when there are 23 comments on the previous post, though I’m not sure.”

25 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Hili’s quip is parallel to Marx having declared to have stood Hegel on his head – I’d have to get the exact quote…

    As above, so below
    – Hermes Trismegistus

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  2. This is why your daily news summary is so valuable, Jerry: I had not come across the sad tale of the BC education minister in national Canadian media.

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    1. I don’t mean to contradict our host, but that story about Selina Robinson is incomplete.

      First about Natalie Knight. She has horrible views about Hamas, decolonization, and Israel. At that rally in October she celebrated the killing and rape of Jews by Hamas. Knight got her PhD at my university, and won a prestigious university-wide award for her dissertation and in particular for her contributions to public discourse. Many of us at my university argued for rescinding that award, but we favour free speech and we didn’t argue for her firing from her job at Langara College. Knight’s speech is odious and anti-semitic, but she should have the right to say horrible things.

      [edited to add: My university wouldn’t do anything to rescind Knight’s gold medal for her dissertation, but they stealth deleted the headline-making story about that award

      https://www.sfu.ca/gradstudies/life-community/people-research/profiles/fass/medals/natalie-knight.html

      which now returns a 404 page-not-found error. My university is staffed by clowns.]

      Selina Robinson was the minister responsible for universities and colleges in BC. The BC law called the University Act specifically says that the government must butt out of the administration of our universities. Robinson broke that basic ministerial responsibility about political non-interference, and she was fired for that.

      I share Robinson’s political views about Hamas and Israel, but I think it was correct to fire her as minister.

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    2. I was hoping it was just trying to catch it’s breath after being caught (slowly strangled) for so long. Really wished the video showed a more positive outcome. Or that the person would have righted the swan. Or maybe they put the phone down and did so. I hate not knowing!

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    1. According to Mr. Google, Hitch was 5′ 9″. It looks like the photographers camera was held at about eye height. Perhaps the photographer was about the same height and shot through the viewfinder at eye height. This means the camera lens is much closer to the head than the tail and thus produces the wide angle distortion.

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  6. Oops, late today – we invited my mother over for lunch.

    On this day:
    1735 – The ballad opera called Flora, or Hob in the Well went down in history as the first opera of any kind to be produced in North America (Charleston, S.C.)

    1885 – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is published in the United States.

    1911 – The first official flight with airmail takes place from Allahabad, United Provinces, British India (now India), when Henri Pequet, a 23-year-old pilot, delivers 6,500 letters to Naini, about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) away.

    1930 – While studying photographs taken in January, Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto.

    1930 – Elm Farm Ollie becomes the first cow to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft and also the first cow to be milked in an aircraft.

    1943 – World War II: The Nazis arrest the members of the White Rose movement.

    1954 – The first Church of Scientology is established in Los Angeles.

    1957 – Kenyan rebel leader Dedan Kimathi is executed by the British colonial government.

    1957 – Walter James Bolton becomes the last person legally executed in New Zealand.

    1970 – The Chicago Seven are found not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

    1972 – The California Supreme Court in the case of People v. Anderson, (6 Cal.3d 628) invalidates the state’s death penalty and commutes the sentences of all death row inmates to life imprisonment.

    1977 – The Xinjiang 61st Regiment Farm fire started during Chinese New Year when a firecracker ignited the wreaths of late Mao Zedong, killing 694 personnel. It remains the deadliest fireworks accidents in the world.

    1977 – The Space Shuttle Enterprise test vehicle is carried on its maiden “flight” on top of a Boeing 747.

    1983 – Thirteen people die and one is seriously injured in the Wah Mee massacre in Seattle. It is said to be the largest robbery-motivated mass-murder in U.S. history.

    1991 – The IRA explodes bombs in the early morning at Paddington station and Victoria station in London.

    2001 – FBI agent Robert Hanssen is arrested for spying for the Soviet Union. He is ultimately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

    2003 – 192 people die when an arsonist sets fire to a subway train in Daegu, South Korea.

    2010 – WikiLeaks publishes the first of hundreds of thousands of classified documents disclosed by the soldier now known as Chelsea Manning. [On Wednesday, Julian Assange’s appeal against his extradition to the US will be held. If he loses, he could be on a flight soon.]

    2021 – Perseverance, a Mars rover designed to explore Jezero crater on Mars, as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, lands successfully.

    Births:
    1642 – Marie Champmeslé, French actress (d. 1698).

    1745 – Alessandro Volta, Italian physicist, invented the battery (d. 1827).

    1838 – Ernst Mach, Austrian physicist and philosopher (d. 1916).

    1906 – Hans Asperger, Austrian pediatrician and academic (d. 1980).

    1914 – Pee Wee King, American singer-songwriter and fiddler (d. 2000).

    1919 – Jack Palance, American boxer and actor (d. 2006).

    1922 – Helen Gurley Brown, American journalist and author (d. 2012).

    1929 – Len Deighton, English historian and author.

    1931 – Johnny Hart, American cartoonist, co-created The Wizard of Id (d. 2007).

    1931 – Toni Morrison, American novelist and editor, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2019).

    1933 – Yoko Ono, Japanese-American multimedia artist and musician.

    1933 – Bobby Robson, English international footballer and international manager (d. 2009).

    1934 – Audre Lorde, American writer and activist (d. 1992).

    1946 – Michael Buerk, English journalist.

    1950 – John Hughes, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2009).

    1950 – Cybill Shepherd, American actress.

    1952 – Randy Crawford, American jazz and R&B singer.

    1954 – John Travolta, American actor, singer and producer.

    1960 – Greta Scacchi, Italian-Australian actress.

    1965 – Dr. Dre, American rapper, record producer, and entrepreneur.

    1968 – Molly Ringwald, American actress.

    I always write about war, love, death, and injustice. There’s plenty of that around, so I never run out of ideas. (Lemmy):
    1294 – Kublai Khan, Mongol emperor (b. 1215).

    1546 – Martin Luther, German priest and theologian, leader of the Protestant Reformation (b. 1483).

    1564 – Michelangelo, Italian sculptor and painter (b. 1475).

    1654 – Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, French author (b. 1594).

    1880 – Nikolay Zinin, Russian organic chemist (b. 1812). [A private teacher of chemistry to the young Alfred Nobel, in St. Petersburg, he is known for the so-called Zinin reaction or Zinin reduction in which nitro aromates like nitrobenzene are converted to amines by reduction with ammonium sulfides. In 1842 Zinin played an important role in identifying aniline.]

    1902 – Charles Lewis Tiffany, American businessman, founded Tiffany & Co. (b. 1812).

    1910 – Lucy Stanton, American activist (b. 1831). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1967 – J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist and academic (b. 1904).

    1982 – Ngaio Marsh, New Zealand author (b. 1895).

    2001 – Dale Earnhardt, American racer and NASCAR seven times champion (b. 1951).

    2014 – Mavis Gallant, Canadian-French author and playwright (b. 1922).

    2014 – Maria Franziska von Trapp, Austrian-American singer (b. 1914). [Portrayed by Heather Menzies as the character “Louisa” in The Sound of Music. She died at age 99, and was the last surviving sibling portrayed in the film.]

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    1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Lucy Stanton Day Sessions (October 16, 1831, died on this day in 1910) was an American abolitionist and feminist figure, notable for being the first African-American woman to complete a four-year course of a study at a college or university. She completed a Ladies Literary Course from Oberlin College in 1850.

      Day’s life was a testament to the many strong, resilient, and radical women that participated in the first wave of American feminism. Her passionate commitment to abolition especially connected her to her radical female predecessors, such as Angelina E. Grimké, who, as early as 1836, linked the abolition of slavery to the Christian duty of women.

      Lucy Stanton was born free, the only child of Margaret and Samuel Stanton, on October 16, 1831. When her biological father Samuel, a barber, died when she was only 18 months old, Stanton’s mother married John Brown, an abolitionist famous around Cleveland, Ohio, for his participation in the Underground Railroad. Stanton is noted as saying that John Brown would harbor as many as 13 runaway slaves in their house at any given time.

      In addition to his work as an abolitionist, John Brown was also an advocate for African-American education. Stanton attended the Cleveland Free School that Brown formed for African-American children.

      In 1846, Stanton enrolled in Oberlin College, completing a Literary degree in the “Ladies’ Literary Course” of study in 1849. This degree differed from the B.A. offered to men in that it did not require foreign languages or higher mathematics. At Oberlin College, Stanton was very active in the Ladies’ Literary Society and was invited to give (and presented) a speech at her graduation entitled “A Plea for the Oppressed” which expressed her abolitionist sentiments. This speech, in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which was about to take effect, urged the audience, particularly women, to put themselves in the place of the enslaved, to join the abolitionist cause, and to ultimately end slavery in the United States. Her speech was immensely well-received, and reprinted in publications like The Oberlin Evangelist, the Oberlin College school newspaper, and “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered”.

      Fresh out of school, Lucy Stanton began working as a principal at another free school in Cleveland. On November 25, 1852, Stanton married William H. Day, also an Oberlin College graduate. Stanton worked as a librarian and assisted her husband as editor for the first of Cleveland’s African-American newspapers, The Aliened American. In the first issue dated, April 9, 1853, Stanton became the first African-American woman to publish a work of fiction entitled “Charles and Clara Hays. She was a member of the Chatham Vigilance Committee which was organized to prevent people from being sold or returned to slavery.

      Stanton and Day had a daughter, Florence Day, born in 1858. Shortly after her birth, Day abandoned his wife and child, leaving for England. Stanton successfully received a divorce from Day in 1872. Following Day’s abandonment, Stanton worked as a seamstress in Cleveland while continuing her activism. Her affiliation with the Cleveland Freedmen’s Aid Society led to her being sent first to Georgia in 1866 and then to Mississippi, both to teach newly freed slaves. While in Mississippi, Stanton met, and then in 1878 married, Levi Sessions. The couple moved to Tennessee where Stanton continued to be a supporter of women’s and African Americans’ rights by working with organizations such as the Women’s Relief Corps, the Order of Eastern Star, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

      After the death of her mother in 1900, Stanton moved to Los Angeles. In 1904, with the assistance of black church and club women, she established the Sojourner Truth Industrial Club as a “safe refuge” for the hundreds of black working women migrating to the city. The club sought to promote the guidance and development of young African-American women. Stanton died in Los Angeles, California, on February 18, 1910 at the age of 78 and was buried in Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Stanton_(abolitionist)

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  8. After anyone, public figure or not, dies in mysterious circumstances, not clearly due to natural disease under a doctor’s care, or due to any cause while in official custody, some sort of official process must be observed. The mechanism varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction—coroner vs. medical examiner are the two systems in wide use in North America. I would be very surprised if the investigation of Mr. Nalvany’s death so far does not closely resemble how a sudden, unexpected death in a state penitentiary exercise yard would be investigated in Illinois. (The misinformation to the family about the body’s whereabouts is quintessentially Soviet, though, eh?)

    For the integrity of what could be a crime scene, the family can’t have access to the body until the authorities have finished examining it. The difference in Russia is that many assume that Putin killed Mr. Nalvany and that Putin will try to whitewash the evidence and “discover” that he had a heart attack or had lethal amounts of self-administered drugs in his system. Fair enough suspicion. But so far there is nothing improper in how the Russian medical examiners are proceeding. What they are told to find might be another matter.

    When someone dies suddenly, the pathologist might find a fresh clot in a chronically partially obstructed coronary artery indicating with confidence the heart attack that felled him. But that’s not common. Sometimes a person dies an hour or so into a heart attack, which can be “silent” up to the moment of death, which will have left subtle visible signs in the heart tissue before death stops the body’s response to the injury. More often, a heart attack will be imputed if a person has sub-total obstructions in all three coronary arteries with old scarring from previous heart attacks. This would indicate the person was at high risk of having a sudden cardiac arrest that would leave no trace for the pathologist to find. We typically see this in 80-year-old cigarette smokers who drop dead in casinos. Forty-seven is not young in Russia for a sudden fatal heart attack as coronary artery disease is highly prevalent. If his coronary arteries are no worse than George Floyd’s were with no signs of a fresh infarction, the examiner will be no more able to blame heart attack for Mr. Nalvany’s death than the Hennepin County examiner was for Mr. Floyd’s. (I can’t think of a poison that causes truly sudden death other than by concentrated inhalation but maybe the FSB has a few on inventory. One hopes the pathologist does not overlook the knife wound in the aorta.)

    I’m going through this just because it is quite possible that the post-mortem may not find a clear, satisfying “natural cause” — a medical term — of death and is likely to raise as many questions as it answers, just as with Mr. Floyd’s death examination. A lot will depend on what various observers think is the prior probability of foul play and the likelihood of tampering with the results themselves.

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  9. The woman and the moose are standing outside of a Canadian Tire store, just in case you think that this is not Canadian enough.

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    1. Here in America we do much of the same. We yell at our pets if they start eating the groceries before we’re even out of the parking lot. 😉

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  10. Navalny’s path, from his poisoning, to his exile, to his return to Russia, to his imprisonment, to his internal exile to a prison camp in Siberia, always had his death as the final destination. Even if his death in the Siberian prison camp was not helped along through poisoning—and it may have been—there’s no doubt that Putin’s regime was at fault. The proximal cause of death—as with everyone—is failure to maintain homeostasis, but the ultimate cause was Putin.

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  11. Can you imagine the degree of repression? required to arrest those simply paying tribute to a government opponent.

    And yet we have an ex-President running for re-election, popular media pundits like Tucker Carlson, hundreds of elected GOP officials who are sycophants of said ex-President and multitudes of MAGA cult followers who support such a dictator and such a regime. MAGA must be crushed in 2024, Ceiling Cat be willing.

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  12. When you take a hostage and they die on your watch, that’s your responsibility, regardless of the instant mechanism.
    Something the Russian government and terrorists in Gaza should note.

    D.A.
    NYC

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  13. With the Russian elections looming who can blame Putin for knocking off any form of opposition. His MO is so transparent, his paranoia so complete, he had no other choice, especially if your f**king c**t.
    One could bet their boots isolating Nalvany was never going to be enough.

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  14. Selina Robinson: “They don’t understand that Israel was offered to the Jews who were displaced.”
    I don’t know about BC students of other backgrounds, but all Arab/Muslim students know that perfectly well, as it’s a central part of their illegitimization of Israel. They think that the area that became Israel should not have been the the Europeans’ to offer without consent from the previous majority owners, and they also think that there is no reason whatsoever to make Arabs pay for what Europeans did to Jews.

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    1. Sure, but (dis)agreement on these issues is not the reason Robinson was in the news. Natalie Knight, an anti-semitic instructor at Langara College, was suspended in October after she led a rally praising the October 7 massacre and kidnappings by Hamas. Knight was then reinstated in January under condition that she avoid public pronouncements in her capacity as a Langara College member that could be construed as anti-semitic. Knight immediately violated those conditions. Robinson then spoke directly to the Langara leadership, who promptly fired Knight. Robinson’s actions were correctly understood to have interfered in Langara’s relationship with its faculty members, and interfered with Knight’s academic freedom. Robinson was fired from her ministerial job because her ministry directly oversees and funds Langara College, and the minister and the ministry are supposed to stay out of the college-faculty relationship. Whatever one thinks of Knight’s opinions (I think they’re awful and I can’t imagine having to share an academic department with her), she should have the academic freedom to say odious things in her capacity as a social scientist and commentator on political and cultural issues like the conflict between Hamas and Israel.

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      1. Thanks for the details. I know Robinson was not in the news for her musings about holocaust education, but wanted to comment nevertheless, because the sentence I cited is frequently heard in the West, including from the mouth of prominent German politicians who seem to think that Palestinian second generation immigrants who chant “Khaybar, Khaybar ya yahud” (Hey, Jews, [remember Mohammad’s army routing you at] Khaybar!”) in the streets of Berlin on Al Quds day will immediately agree to Israel’s full right of existence when they are informed that Israel had to be given to the Jews because of what the Germans did to them. I have argued Israel with many a Arab, and you are utterly lost from the beginning when you offer them one of their own major talking points on a silver platter.

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