Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 31, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday,  shabbos for Jewish cats, and we’re nearly into June. as it’s May 31, 2025.  It’s National Macaroon Day, and don’t mistake the American brand—soft, chewy, and tasty coconut cookies—for the frou-frou French macarons, which are overpriced and not that great.

Here are the real ones:

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

And the overpriced macarons, which seem to have become a culinary fad.

Nicolas Halftermeyer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also World Parrot Day and National Meditation Day

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 31 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*According to the Times of Israel, Hamas and Israel may be close to reaching an accord that will be accompanied by a cease-fire.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told hostages’ families that he principally approves of US special envoy Steve Witkoff’s latest proposal for a temporary ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, media outlets reported Thursday, while two sources told The Times of Israel that Hamas is leaning toward accepting the deal, with some reservations.

Accordingly, the deal is not yet final, and negotiations are likely to drag out for at least several more days, the sources said.

According to a copy of Witkoff’s latest proposal, the authenticity of which was confirmed to The Times of Israel by two sources familiar with the negotiations, Hamas would release 10 living Israeli hostages held in Gaza and return the bodies of 18 deceased hostages during a 60-day ceasefire.

In return, Israel would release 125 Palestinian terror convicts serving life sentences, 1,111 Gazans detained since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, and 180 bodies of Palestinians currently held by Israel.

The IDF would also pull back from some areas where troops are currently deployed; the parameters of the pullback would be finalized “during proximity negotiations.”

Netanyahu told hostages’ families during a meeting on Thursday that he was prepared to move forward with the proposal, the Axios news site reported, while Channel 12 reported that he told the families he “principally accepts” the document. However, the TV report also quoted him saying he was “not ready to end the war without eliminating Hamas.”

Meanwhile, right-wing ministers and some hawkish hostage families came out in opposition to the proposed deal, arguing that Hamas was weakened and that now was the time to pile pressure on the terrorist organization to surrender. A decision to accept the proposal would have to be approved by the Israeli cabinet.

This is a lousy deal, as all Israel gets is ten living hostages out of the estimated 20-30 left, plus dead bodies. Hamas gets lots of murderous terrorists released from Israeli prisons, and Israel has to leave part of Gaza. This will still leave Hamas in charge of the territory, and I thought that eliminating Hamas was Israel’s main aim.  Is it still? Remember, Hamas will still have around ten hostages if any ceasefire ends, so there would have to be another deal. All the while the world turns more and more against Israel. I have to say that Hamas played its cards well (taking hostages was very smart of them), but I agree that there can be no peace in Gaza so long as Hamas does not surrender itself as well as all of its hostages. A two-state solution? Not in the offing now.

*We learn from The Free Press that the Democratic Socialists of America are split about whether to condemn the murder of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, gunned down in cold blood by a pro-Palestinian radical in front of Washington, D.C.’s Jewish Museum (see Nellie’s comment about one caucus of the DSA below).

Last Wednesday, a 31-year-old progressive activist allegedly shot and killed two employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in cold blood. As one of them, Sarah Milgrim, a 26-year-old Jew from Kansas, tried to crawl away, the gunman continued shooting at her.

“Free, free Palestine,” he shouted as police took him into custody.

You would think that this would be easy to condemn. Yet when the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America said in a statement released last Thursday that they “reject the violence of last night’s fatal shooting,” some members of the political organization revolted.

Almost immediately, a debate broke out in the national DSA’s internal message board for dues-paying members over how to respond to the killings outside the Capital Jewish Museum.

“Is it good to condemn violence against a genocidal apartheid state?” a DSA member with the username “SebastianFG” said in a post. Other members responded to the post with emojis of a heart and applause.

Other DSA members called the statement “horrific,” “hurtful,” and “irresponsible.”

The Democratic Socialists of America is not just a fringe activist organization. Its national membership has skyrocketed in recent years to more than 90,000, riding the wave of Bernie Sanders’s nearly successful primary challenge of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The political organization has since boasted major electoral success with politicians in Congress’s progressive “Squad,” including Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and New York City’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The far-left group unendorsed Ocasio-Cortez last year after the congresswoman voted in favor of a resolution affirming Israel’s “right to exist.”

The radical group is deeply fractured over how to respond to last week’s killings of Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky. (The alleged shooter, Elias Rodriguez, was charged with murder of foreign officials, first-degree murder, and other crimes.)

On one side of the fight within the DSA is the group’s so-called “right wing,” as its critics call it, which believes that the DSA should avoid any association with violence—and either condemn the act or not speak of it at all. This camp includes members who described themselves as a 69-year-old “radical,” a union member from Virginia, and a travel writer based in Louisiana, according to messages reviewed by The Free Press.

Then there are the DSA extremists, some of whom argue violence is necessary for revolution and others who openly celebrate it.

Well, AOC got booted out of the DSA because she wasn’t hard enough on Israel. Note, though, that Rashida Tlaib, who’s beyond redemption, is still a member, and Bernie Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, has been endorsed by the DSA.  Regardless, given this behavior, both should resign from that organization. For crying out loud, nobody deserves to be murdered because they work for the Israeli embassy in Washington!

*And at Quillette, Graham Deseler reviews Ross Douthat’s new book, tendentiously called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (it was issued by a religious publisher).

. . . religion has been making something of a comeback lately. According to a recent Pew survey, the number of people who identify as Christians—a figure that had been declining for decades—appears to have levelled off, at least for the moment. It hovered around 63 percent in 2019, and that’s approximately where it stands now. In England, church attendance has actually increased among Generation Z. Rather than turning to the Church of England, younger congregants have been joining showier denominations like Catholicism and Pentecostalism. The rise of wokeness and the cult of personality that sprang up around Donald Trump have led some people to speculate that there’s a “God-shaped hole” in contemporary culture. “As religion has receded from people’s lives,” sociologist Jonathan Haidt has explained, “they’re hungrier. As I see it, politics has really taken the place [of religion].”

One of the loudest cheerleaders for the current religious revival is opinion columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative and a Catholic, who for years has used his perch at the New York Times to sing the praises of faith. Douthat has a new bestseller out titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, in which he argues that belief in God is not only socially beneficial and emotionally fulfilling—as Thompson, Rauch, and Ali contend—but also scientifically sound. “It is the religious perspective that grounds both intellectual rigor and moral idealism,” he writes. “And more important, it is the religious perspective that has the better case by far for being true.”

Douthat is an intelligent man, and he’s written several well-reasoned books—on the Republican Party, on the decadence of modern society, and on his own harrowing battle with Lyme disease. This is not one of them. He blows past entire branches of science and philosophy in just a few paragraphs, behaving as if he’s solved puzzles that, in fact, he’s barely touched. For instance, the question of why a benevolent personal God would allow good people to suffer has been perplexing thinkers since the Book of Job. But Douthat believes he has that problem licked:

After recounting what he sees as Douthat’s strongest argument (“fine-tuning”, which isn’t that strong), Deseler takes apart more of Douthat’s evidence for God:

Douthat also wonders about consciousness. Scientists have learned an enormous amount about the workings of the brain, he writes, but they are no closer to explaining how consciousness emerges: “Redescribe as you will, reduce as you may, nobody has any idea how or why the physical inputs that go into conscious experience, the stimuli from particular chemicals or light waves or exchanges between neurons, yield the actual experiences themselves.” On top of this mystery, Douthat layers others: “How,” he asks, “can light be both a wave and a particle? How can particles remain somehow ‘entangled’ even when separated by a great distance? And above all—how can human observation be the only thing that transforms quantum contingency into definite reality, wave into particle, probability into certainty?” Douthat’s answer to these rhetorical questions is that mind and matter are entwined because mind precedes matter.

It doesn’t take a degree in either neuroscience or quantum physics to see that Douthat is simply swapping one mystery for another. The hard problem of consciousness has stumped scientists for years, but invoking a divine creator does not provide a satisfactory answer. Douthat could just as well use the word magic to explain the emergence of consciousness. That, at least, would provide a more parsimonious explanation of cause and effect. After all, if conscious minds need a conscious creator, the next obvious question is who created the creator? The same goes for wave-particle duality. Saying the existence of God explains how light can be either a particle or a wave, depending on how it’s observed, is simply a way of dumping the conundrum on the Almighty. Douthat, in short, is postulating a “God of the gaps,” squeezing Him into the crevices that scientific knowledge has yet to fill. In the past, religious apologists have generally been wary of resorting to such arguments because they recognise that the gaps have been shrinking over time as we learn more about material reality. A God of the gaps is, by definition, a God of diminishing importance.

And you may remember this fatuous claim of Douthat:

Midway through the book, he states that the world’s religions are not incompatible with one another. Human history is filled with episodes of religious conflict and bloodshed precisely because they aren’t compatible. The New Testament, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon can’t all be the final revelation. If Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are real, Allah can’t be the one and only God. To pretend otherwise is not an empirical position, based on evidence. Nor is it a rational one, based on logic. It’s an act of faith.

Indeed, but Douthat would likely say that it’s better to have any faith rather than none. The man is delusional, making a post facto case to justify what he wants to believe, and it’s embarrassing that he’s allowed to publish this stuff in the New York Times.

*The National Spelling Bee was won with a tough French word (the article is archived here). I bet you can’t spell that word!

After coming in as runner-up during last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee and bungling an earlier chance to win on Thursday night, Faizan Zaki was given a word that, if spelled correctly, would let him finally win it all: “éclaircissement.”

He smiled and, without hesitation, stated each letter easily, then collapsed on the floor amid a shower of confetti. The 13-year-old of Plano, Texas, didn’t even need to ask for the word’s meaning, “a clearing up of something obscure.”

The stunning win capped a surprising run that took down six finalists and momentarily left the bee’s winner in doubt.

Here are five takeaways from the competition.

The nine finalists were unflappable

Sarv stole the spotlight

The competition almost ended in the eighth round

Mary Brooks had the hardest job of the night [a judge, she had to ring the bell when a contestant misspelled a word]

Faizan finally gets his win [he finished second last year]

Here’s a video of the winning moment.  If you look at the photo in the NYT piece, you’ll see that all the contestants but one appear to be East Asian, which I think is the usual situation.

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly snark-and-news column in the Free Press, called this week: “TGIF: Scammander in Chief.”

→ The continued reckoning: A postmortem on Kamala Harris’s campaign cited a “perception gap” as one of the reasons she lost, saying voters believed she held positions that she didn’t. “Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%), mandatory electric vehicles by 2035 (82%), decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).” But Harris had, in fact, supported all of these positions. Like, she is on record supporting each of those positions (here, here, here, and here). So it’s not really a perception problem so much as a reception problem, like these ideas are not popular even though I support them. There’s a sense among Dems that people should simply ignore the things that are unpopular and that referencing them is fake news. Like, how dare you talk about the surge of migrants coming through our new open borders thanks to swift changes from the Biden admin. Yes, it’s technically true, but it’s disinformation-coded.

→ Leave Bruce alone: A bar in New Jersey canceled a performance by a Bruce Springsteen tribute band after the real Springsteen called Trump “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” while on tour in England. Citing the bar’s MAGA clientele, the bar owner said that a Springsteen cover band would be “too risky at the moment.” And: “Whenever the national anthem plays, my bar stands and is in total silence, that’s our clientele. Toms River is red and won’t stand for his bull—.”

My conclusion: All political groups can be snowflake babies. All men yearn to see blood in the streets. See, I absolutely love Bruce Springsteen, and sure, I find his photo shoots and podcasts with Obama to be a little cringe, as the kids say, but I also don’t care. Politics shouldn’t get in the way of enjoying “Tunnel of Love,” a goddamn masterpiece. I take my neutrality seriously. We’re blasting the new Ye banger in our house right now. Art knows no borders! (Weird, I have no idea why the preschool teachers just requested an urgent meeting.)

→ Things that are not antisemitism: The Democratic Socialists of America “Liberation Caucus” has announced its support for Elias Rodriguez, the suspect arrested for slaughtering two Israeli Embassy staffers outside D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum last week. Here’s the statement signed by the DSA Liberation folks and a bunch of others: “As imperialism has made the entire world its battlefield, it is justified to fight it, by any means necessary, without regard for geography.” And: “[T]here must be consequences for genocidal [Z]ionist imperialism, and those consequences are righteous.” Chants of resistance is justified are the new cool thing in Chicago. And the major anti-Zionist protest group Unity of Fields is officially transitioning into “A MILITANT FRONT AGAINST THE US-NATO-ZIONIST AXIS OF IMPERIALISM.” Militant means their plan is to kill more. So, anyone who has ever said the Passover prayer that ends with Next year in Jerusalem, well, we’re all fair game. The killings are anti-Zionism, though, not antisemitism, write mainstream lefty thinkers. It just happens to be that Judaism keeps bringing up Israel. Have you considered not saying prayers? And a leader of the Palestine Writes festival is posting about how there is no such thing as the Jewish people. You learn new things every day.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is tired of being Editor-in-Chief of Listy and would rather rest:

Hili: We have to make a careful plan.
A; What plan?
Hili: How to break away from work.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy to starannie zaplanować.
Ja: Co zaplanować?
Hili: Jak się oderwać od pracy.

And a photo of Szaron:

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

Frim CinEmma:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Meow:

Masih is still quiet, but JKR is reliably vocal. Here she points out the phenomenon of lesbians who are demonized for not wanting to hook up with transwomen who say they are lesbians:

From Michael: BIG CAT HUG!

From Jez: a Jewish MIT grad offended by a blatantly anti-Jewish graduation speech (this moronic speaker doesn’t seem to realize that Hamas is the truly genocidal organization). The kids can’t help themselves!

And here’s the offensive speech. The speaker certainly helped Gaza (LOL)!

From Malcolm, a pensive cat (sound up):

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz, this Dutch girl was only seven.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-31T09:46:03.709Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. About the first one he simply says, “True”:

The only thing flat earthers fear is sphere itself!🌎 😆🤙

— Photography by Douglas 🍁 (@darkwaterphotos.bsky.social) 2025-05-29T12:21:31.494Z

The article notes that these are a white-fronted goose and a Canada goose, which have mated and produced eggs.  There were six eggs, two of which hatched, but no goslings could be found. The other four were duds.

“These are two totally different species of goose. But for some reason, they paired up – and they even produced eggs.”

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2025-05-30T04:06:10.013Z

 

32 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. There’s a big difference between macaroons and les macarons apart from appearance. The former are made with coconut, and the latter with ground almonds.

  2. TWiV (This Week in Virology) episode #1222, Clinical Update with Dr Dan Griffin, out this morning, addresses the latest shenanigans on rfk’s trumpization of public health in America. After their usual banter for the first three minutes, Dr Dan and Vincent spend the next fifteen minutes in a discussion which mirrors much of what Paul Offit said in his Beyond the Noise substack one-pager this week: An apparently unilateral decision by the Secretary to discourage Covid vaccinations by removing them from a list which drives payment for them by insurance. They discuss the cynicism of the administration’s essentially devaluing the life of children who do die from Covid and the risk to many more of long-covid (post acute sequelae). They also discuss the ignorant nyt take on this announcement, which accepts several rfk predicates much like it accepts hamas fatality estimates and passes them on to a gullible public. A link to Dr. Offit’s piece is given in the shownotes and episode 1222 should be at url https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/.
    I write this in great despair, but am offered hope in knowing that much of the WEIT audience will be interested.

    1. Thanks for commenting on this.
      This was a horrifying decision from our vastly under qualified Secretary of Health and Human Services. I recall that early in his appointment he’d said something to the effect that if people wanted to get vaccinated, that they would be able to. But he has flaked out on his word, imo. If insurance companies respond by withdrawing coverage of the Covid vaccine for those outside of the narrow high risk group, then many ( I suspect most) people who would keep up with the vaccine will choose to not do it. Of course there are people who need to make these choices in the face of paying their bills. So more hospitalizations, deaths, and long Covid.
      It’s only been 5 months ….

  3. Sounds like DSA is about to have a Bolsevik/Menshevik split over the use of violence.

  4. I’m not so sure that adorable little kitty is overthinking it, looks more like indigestion. Anyone see the little burp?

    And apropos sex and gender issues, I just read that World Boxing has now introducted mandatory sex testing, so that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, who both won gold at the Paris Olympics despite doubts about their sex, will now be subject to such tests.

    I was wondering what texts and what criteria would be employed, then I read that “all athletes over the age of 18” who wish to participate in competitions it owns or sanctions will “need to undergo a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) genetic test to determine their sex at birth and their eligibility to compete.” (BBC article)

    1. Yes, great news that World Boxing have (finally) introduced sex screening for all competitors. Imane Khelif was scheduled to take part in the Eindhoven Box Cup from 5 June but won’t be able to unless a suitable test result is confirmed.

      1. I wonder how many professional geneticists and evolutionary biologists follow World Boxing closely enough to judge that this is “great” news. I was not even aware that these was such a thing as World Boxing. But good on them.

    2. Probably a test for the SRY gene. For all intents and purposes a traditional karyotype looking visually for a Y chromosome gives identical results but is more cumbersome technically to do. Women with CAIS will be SRY+ (and will have a Y chromosome) but androgen insensitivity, while rare, is well known in the sporting world. On appeal it can be ruled in with the diagnostic genetic test and a waiver granted. A woman who already had the diagnosis made in adolescence would, in principle, not need to be tested at all. She would just present her medical documentation when she registered with the governing body. The only issue is the androgen insensitivity has to be complete. The less common incomplete form is a DQ. That is the policy that World Athletics uses for track and field.

      2. For sure, Leslie. The sheer rareness of these conditions are lost in the whole debate.
        Activists speak as if these vanishingly uncommon situations and disorders are somehow as commonplace as the mythical “Third Gender” requiring we restructure architecture, public spaces and our society.

        I think part of putting society right is to educate people as to the tiny, tiny scale of the “problem”. And most of the people who have these disorders don’t seem to be the vocal ones at all.

        People like Anne Fausto-Sterling and idiotic A. Fuentez ARE the loudmouths and they constantly hide the ball and lie.
        cheers Leslie,

        D.A.
        NYC

        1. While it’s true that DSDs like 5ARD are rare, they’re not actually THAT rare in elite women’s sports.

          In the 2016 Olympics, all three medalists in the women’s 800 meter race were males with DSDs.

          There are unethical promoters who actively look for and recruit these men.

    5. Other good news on a much less grand scale. In California the state high school athletics org CIF allows males “trans” athletes to compete in the girls’ category. But they have proposed to start awarding medals to all of the top female competitors alongside any “trans” male who also qualified to compete, so that no female competitor is excluded by a mediocre male who wins a medal.

      https://x.com/LeorSapir/status/1928542019321729086

      Emma Hilton points out that this is in effect running a separate competitive category for male “trans” athletes, it just happens to run at the same time and in the same place as the girls’ competition. And she notes there are many flaws in the proposal including the question why this parallel competition for male “trans” athletes isn’t run alongside the boys’ competition.

      https://x.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1928751660177969514

      Twitter commenters note that in a place like California these kind of baby steps might be the best one can hope for, but it is at least tacit acknowledgment from CIF that “transwomen” are not female.

      1. That’s pretty big news coming from California. Definitely a compromise headed in the right direction.

        Add: I said I wasn’t going to follow any more trans stories. I lied.

    1. Then surely some kind of punishment is in order (does she have her degree yet? Can it be withheld?) in light of this obvious fraud.

      Maybe social media will ensure future employers know they’ll be looking at the resume of a liar and terrorism simp here.

      In our day (I’m 55) youthful idiocy was memory holed but today the internet can be for life. The upside is their fame, the downside of that fame is accountability

      D.A.
      NYC

    2. I’m glad to hear it. That had to have been painful for Jewish students who haven’t been duped by the hamas supporters.

    1. How perfect that you happened to author an article that answers all the questions raised by this goose couple! I read/scanned it and found it very interesting. Also, Fig. 2 is cute!

      1. Yes, it never ceases to amaze me how informed WEIT readers are on such a vast array of subjects!

  7. Douthat: “how can human observation be the only thing that transforms quantum contingency into definite reality, wave into particle, probability into certainty?”

    Human observation has nothing to do with it. It was a serious mistake for scientists to use the term “observe” to describe the decoherence occurring in the two slit experiment. Decoherence occurs as the result of the interaction with the measurement device only. Using the term “observation” has created all manner of quantum woo which has become very difficult to tamp down.

    1. Yes; and “fine tuning” is just putting a scientific veneer on Douglas Adams’s “puddle” argument, and about as meaningful.

  8. According to the Jerusalem Post (https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-856137):

    “Hamas will express opposition to the lack of clear guarantees for ending the war, according to Al-Arabiya, while also reporting that the terrorist organization will warn in its response that it will not allow Israel “freedom of action to renew the war,” and will demand US guarantees for the implementation of the clauses in any agreement with Israel. The report also said that Hamas will request, as part of the proposal, that Palestinian prisoners should not be handed over in just two days, as stated in Witkoff’s proposal, but rather in batches over the 60-day truce.”

    This implies that the Witkoff proposal—which Israel has reportedly accepted—does not call for the end of the war. Israel, of course, should not agree to end the war until all hostages and hostage remains are released and until Hamas is removed as the governmental entity in Gaza. Any agreement that leaves Hamas in power will enable another October 7. It’s the Israeli government’s job #1 to protect the safety and security of its residents.

    1. I agree with Norman’s clear statement. And as much as I dislike Netanyahu the politician, I remain hopeful that Netanyahu the defender of Israel has the same clear objectives in view.

      am yisrael chai.

  9. I must have brain damage because I find it damn near impossible to follow Jerry quoting Graham who quotes Douthat who uses double negatives. Boy, was that a brain twister. No thanks. I think we can safely say that Douthat’s pleas for religiosity have been resolutely rejected here.

  10. Bringing this fact to WEIT and the editor in advance:
    Greta Doomgoblin Thunburg is travelling to Gaza as part of their latest terrorist propaganda flotilla. It will get a lot of attention soon so have the air-sickness bag you lifted from your last plane trip (“Might be handy one day..”) at hand.
    best,

    D.A.
    NYC

  11. I used to look forward to the spelling bee for months. One year, after it moved to an obscure cable channel that did not receive, I rented a hotel room just so I could watch it. But rule changes in recent years have dumbed it down. Results are partly determined by a vocabulary test. And ties are resolved by who can spell as many words as possible from a prepared list in 90 seconds.

  12. ”*The National Spelling Bee was won with a tough French word (the article is archived here). I bet you can’t spell that word!“

    I once took part when I was in 5th or 6th grade. I came in third in the competition among private and parochial schools, losing on a French word, contretemps.

Comments are closed.