Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to Thursday, April 23, 2026 and World Table Tennis Day. It’s a good day to watch the excellent but not world-class movie “Marty Supreme“, about the sport and a down-at-the-heels master of it.
Here’s a video of one person’s top ten table tennis players, with each getting about a minute. The caliber of play is amazing, and doubles competitions look quite hard!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*From this morning’s report at It’s Noon in Israel. (There’s more, too–about a rift in Iran’s leadership):
It’s Thursday, April 23, and the war with Iran is no longer about oil or gas; it is a battle over a single resource: time. The question that will determine the fate of the Middle East is who controls the clock, who can afford to wait, and who is simply out of time?
Currently, the Ayatollahs boast that their dictatorial regime will allow them to hold out indefinitely, while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz imposes an expiration date on U.S. aggression. Meanwhile, Trump claims to be in an equally comfortable position: Iranian ports are blockaded, some commercial ships are still navigating the strait despite the closure, and fresh U.S. military assets are on their way.
The question is, who’s bluffing?
The reality is both. But Iran’s position is significantly weaker.
Every American president sits on a ticking clock, and with the midterm elections approaching, Trump has less time than most. But Iran is bleeding an estimated $400 million a day to the blockade. It’s true that the U.S. is also sustaining high costs to forward-deploy its forces, alongside the strategic opportunity cost of their absence in other theaters. The difference is that Washington can afford it: the Iranian annual budget sits around $56 billion; the U.S. budget is over $6 trillion.
It all comes down to the blockade. Rather than risk casualties to seize Kharg Island or force immediate results through an aerial campaign, the U.S. military can cruise safely out of range in the Arabian Sea, intercept the occasional breakout vessel, and simply wait for economic isolation to do its work.
While Washington holds the front door closed, Tehran’s most crucial ally is starting to push them harder from behind. Xi Jinping is fighting a clock of his own as China’s oil reserves rapidly dry up. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Iran accepted the Pakistani-mediated ceasefire following a last-minute intervention by China, which asked Iran “to show flexibility and defuse tensions.” But that was the rhetoric of a China that had an extra half-month of oil reserves compared to today. I doubt their words will be as soft now.
The Iranians certainly believe the blockade is effective. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf recently compared the strategy to the bombing campaign and demanded its cessation as a precondition for continuing the talks in Islamabad.
Tehran has another, separate crisis draining its time reserves. As a senior Pakistani source recently confirmed to the U.S., a significant rift has paralyzed the regime. On one side are the Revolutionary Guards and the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, representing the uncompromising extreme; on the other is the civil-political echelon led by Ghalibaf. Presiding above this fracture is the severely injured Mojtaba Khamenei, whom both sides defer to as the final authority. Because of his grievous wounds and the constant threat of Israeli assassination, simply communicating with the supreme leader has become a lengthy, complex logistical nightmare.
Pakistan had hoped for another windfall of global good will as it prepared to host a new round of peace talks between the U.S. and Iran this week, locking down its capital for the second time in a month in the hope that the warring sides could make a deal. But this time, after the principal players were no-shows, disappointment has set in and businesses are counting their losses.
. . . Pakistani officials say they remain hopeful both sides could agree to de-escalate and meet again. An advanced U.S. security team sent to protect a senior American delegation remains on the ground, said people familiar with the matter.
. . .“Both countries are back on the brink, there is no getting away from that,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistan diplomat who was twice the country’s ambassador to the U.S. “The question is how to get them to step back from the brink.”
Pakistani officials are still speaking with both sides and pushing for flexibility. “They haven’t given up by any stretch of the imagination,” she said.
. . .There were glimmers of that again this week. Trump said he had unilaterally extended the cease-fire, which was supposed to end Wednesday, at the request of Munir and Sharif, and the American president has continued to heap praise on Pakistan for its mediation efforts; Iran has said it isn’t bound by Trump’s announcement, with officials saying the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports means the cease-fire had already lapsed.
Yet the prevailing feeling in the Pakistani capital is that it is a city stuck in limbo. Authorities have maintained security measures for now, given the logistical challenges—and expense—of withdrawing the security net and having to reimpose it should talks suddenly materialize.
I have stopped trying to make useful comments about this war. The two sides are far apart, and Trump is chaotic. All I can say is that there should be no moratorium on Iran’s attempt to make nuclear weapons: there should be a blanket prohibition forever. And one of my most fervent wishes—that the Iranian people could somehow take control of their government and eliminate the theocracy—seems to have dropped off Trump’s agenda after he deluded himself (or us) that there has been “real regime change.”
*Speaking of “regime change,” the NYT describes how IRGC generals have replaced the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei (the son of the late Ayatollah) as the figures running Iran (article archived here). But they imply that Mojtaba is still calling the shots.
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son, is an elusive figure who has not been seen and whose voice has not been heard since he was appointed in March. Instead, a battle-hardened collective of commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and those aligned with them are the key decision makers on matters of security, war and diplomacy.
“Mojtaba is managing the country as though he is the director of the board,” said Abdolreza Davari, a politician who served as senior adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was president and knows Mr. Khamenei.
“He relies heavily on the advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions,” Mr. Davari said in a phone interview from Tehran. “The generals are the board members.”
. . . Mr. Khamenei, who was selected by a council of senior clerics as the new supreme leader, has been in hiding since American and Israeli forces bombed his father’s compound on Feb. 28, where he also lived with his family. His father, wife and son were all killed. Access to him is extremely difficult and limited now. He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes.
Senior commanders of the Guards and senior government officials do not visit him, fearing that Israel may trace them to him and kill him. President Masoud Pezeshkian, who is also a heart surgeon, and the minister of health have both been involved in his care.
Though Mr. Khamenei was gravely wounded, he is mentally sharp and engaged, according to four senior Iranian officials familiar with his health. One leg was operated on three times, and he is awaiting a prosthetic. He had surgery on one hand and is slowly regaining function. His face and lips have been burned severely, making it difficult for him to speak, the officials said, adding that, eventually, he will need plastic surgery.
. . . The combination of concern for his safety, his injuries and the sheer challenge of reaching him has resulted in Mr. Khamenei’s delegating decision making to the generals, at least for now. Reformist factions, as well as ultra-hard-liners, are still involved in political discussions. But analysts say that Mr. Khamenei’s close ties to the generals, whom he grew up with when he volunteered to fight in the Iran-Iraq war as a teenager, have made them the dominant force.
Generals, schmenerals Whether they run the country or whether the theocrats run the country, it’s still hard-line authoritarians. That is the “regime change” that Trump says he’s effected.
Of course the sources, “senior Iranian officials” would say that he’s still “managing the country.”
*One of the most amazingly persistent bis of “fake news” is the Canadian fixation on the unsubstantiated claim that 215 indigenous (“First Nations”) children were killed (or dued) and were secretly buried at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Jonathan Kay recounts the story at Quillette, which speaks very poorly about Canadian journalism and its “search for truth” (h/t Luana). You won’t see this story in the American MSM. Tha article is archived free here.
As just about every Liberal in the Palais des congrès audience would have known (or at the very least, should have known), those “215 kids” risen from the dead in Kamloops are fictional characters. They never existed “in flesh,” even if their “spirit” once felt very real to Canadians, thanks to a nationwide social panic that spread in mid-2021 following falseclaimsthat215 “unmarked graves” had been found on the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in the aforementioned city of Kamloops.
The original 27 May 2021 announcement convulsed Canadian society for many weeks. The Canadian Press called it the “Story of the Year.” Justin Trudeau lowered flags on federal buildings for almost six months, and had himself photographed bowing his head and taking a knee, BLM-style. He also authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Indigenous groups—including $12.1-million to the Kamloops First Nation alone—so they could find, exhume, and identify the children whose bodies (we were told) had been tossed anonymously into the earth by murderous white teachers and administrators.
In the four years and eleven months that have passed since then, not a single actual grave (let alone human remains) have been found at any of the identified sites. It turns out that back in 2021, no one—not the Kamloops band leadership, not Canadian journalists, not Justin Trudeau—had bothered to educate themselves about the limits of the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology that had been the basis of the unmarked-graves claims.
GPR technology doesn’t provide X-ray-type images of what lies beneath the earth’s surface, as Canadians had been led to believe. Rather, it identifies sub-surface soil dislocations. Such dislocations can signify graves, but also many other things—including pipes, irrigation networks, rocks, and tree roots.
It so happens that the area in question had formerly been used as an orchard when the Kamloops residential school was operating—a place where trees were planted in neat rows, much like graves. And one might think that would provide a more likely explanation than—oh, say—the hitherto unreported slaughter of 215 unidentified children.
. . . One might also think that the people who’d spread this misinformation would now be humbled, abashed, and perhaps even contrite. If so, one would be wrong. While the CBC belatedly admitted that no “unmarked graves” have been found in Kamloops, most media outlets and politicians have simply gone silent on the issue altogether, hoping that history will forget their role in signal-boosting fake news.
and here’s the kicker:
Moreover, Deer’s gauzy language about the invisible “spirits” of those 215 (non-existent) children captured one of the fallback claims that public figures have been making in recent days: that it doesn’t actually matter if there are real bodies under the ground—because what we should truly focus on is the “symbolic” idea that such graves would represent.
When the facts don’t support your ideology, simply say that the facts don’t matter: what matters is that there was (or is) still oppression.
Canada should be ashamed at how its politicians and media have quietly dropped the story when they couldn’t substantiate it, but won’t even mention the lack of evidence. Now, it’s possible that there may be graves, but until they find them (and they’re not looking), people should, as Archie Bunker told Edith, “stifle themselves.”
Harvard’s graduate student union began its second day on strike Wednesday morning, with roughly 20 picketers gathering at the Science Center as the walkout continued.
Around 8:30 a.m., demonstrators assembled in the Science Center plaza, where they set up a tent and began circling outside the building’s main entrance.
The strike centers on disputes over pay, workplace protections, and benefits. Union leaders have said some graduate workers earn as little as $26,300 annually and are calling for a $55,000 base pay floor, along with raises tied to inflation. They are also seeking stronger protections for international students, an independent process for handling harassment and discrimination complaints, and the restoration of benefits that expired with the previous contract in June 2025. (Harvard, however, has pushed back on the union’s characterization of compensation, saying that Ph.D. students receive at least $425,000 in total benefits over a minimum of five years.)
Benefits not mentioned above include restoring child care and medical expenses that were in the contract that expired last June.
Union members – including teaching fellows, course assistants, and graduate research assistants – have paused teaching and research duties as the strike continues.
Harvard has not scheduled additional bargaining sessions beyond April 28. Union leaders said Tuesday that Harvard has yet to reengage with the union since the walkout began.
Given that the median income for all Americans is about $63,000, and many Americans get neither childcare nor medical insurance with their jobs, these seem like extraordinarily high demands for work that is not only not full time, but also is part of their education as academics. Not to mention that while getting a Harard Ph.D., students already receive over $400,000 along with their prestigious degree. It’s not like they’re making cars or anything.
The president of the John Templeton Foundation, Timothy Dalrymple, said: “What makes Conway Morris abundantly deserving of the Templeton Prize are his groundbreaking advancements on the theoretical foundations of evolutionary theory alongside his commitment to addressing the philosophical implications of that work for humankind.”
. . . Professor Conway Morris said: “As somebody once said — ‘Be careful when you step on to the unending road.’ A Ph.D. on fossil worms might logically lead to fieldwork in Greenland, but to an absorption with evolutionary convergence and thence the Fermi Paradox? And still the road stretches on, now to the question of human uniqueness and, I suspect, way beyond.”
As I’ve noted, Conway Morris sees evolutionary convergence (the arriving of different animal and plant groups at similar phenotypic “solutions” to environmental challenges) as signs of a divine hand behind evolution. He is a theistic evolutionist.
A professing Christian, Professor Conway Morris is highly critical of materialism and reductionism, and has participated in many public debates on religion and science. His study of the patterns and processes of life on earth has, in recent years, led to a keen interest in astrobiology — “the study of things that do not exist”, as he says.
His criticality of materialism and reductionism is only because he sees a divine hand behind evolution. Earlier in his career, Conway Morris made big contributions to paleontology, particularly in early life around the time of the Cambrian Explosion. But he went off the rails and his recent books have been osculations of God as a dab hand in evolution.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron have an arcane discussion:
Hili: What color was Sisyphus’s stone? Szaron: Blue, the gods do not value gray.
In Polish:
Hili: Jaki kolor miał kamień Syzyfa?
Szaron: Błękitny, bogowie nie cenią szarości.
From Luana, who hopes that many people see this (you can read the article here):
Hamas terrorists are gang-raping displaced widows in tents in Gaza. But when it gets reported up the chain, leadership orders silence. The media has largely ignored it too.
From Barry, who adds this: “But can it be a ‘pet’? I don’t understand why it’s in someone’s home. And as someone commented, ‘How long until it starts chewing off the stairway railings for wood supply?’“
This beaver was orphaned and rescued as a newborn. See the incredible instinct to build a dam, even though no parent has ever passed this information to it. [📹 hmuraco]Original post
And two from Dr. Cobb. LOOK AT THIS SQUIRREL! It’s a thread and I’ve put in two posts:
The Tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis) is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in floof.Let's start with the *FLOOF* & talk about why they're called "VAMPIRE SQUIRRELS" last.They have the largest tail: body size ratio of any mammal on Earth: the tail is *130%* the size the body.
They're only found on the island of Borneo, which is why they're an enigma. They have many properties SHARED with squirrels from Europe & America (baculum, grooved teeth), but almost none of the characteristics of Asian squirrels.Their closest living relatives are in South America.
There’s an awful lot of confusing info emanating from both erratic leaderships on either side of the Hormuz mess.
Let’s not overestimate the coherence of the Iranian side either, I think they are in indecisive disarray and utterly opaque. Anybody guessing what’s going on in Tehran is a fraud.
An aside: I note Pakistan is such a ruined country that in order to have a high level meeting (not even between heads of state!) it has to totally lock down Islamabad, twice. Anybody who studies the M.E. knows what a lame, failed state it is, bankrupt without Saudi welfare and desperate by all metrics. (And deeply religious, of course).
We have a close friend who’s sadly suffering from Parkinson’s, and as part of his therapy he plays ping pong. Apparently the eye-hand coordination aspect is an important part of slowing down the progression of the disease (along with boxing, which he also does). It’s amazing watching him play, he’s become really good at it and beats the rest of us regularly.
I had no idea that Simon Conway Morris had gone over to the dark side. When I left the professoriate in 1996, he was widely regarded as the formost expert on the Cambrian Explosion. Hard to believe that he sees convergence—which comfortably lies under the purview of natural selection—as evidence of something else, something unseen, something unsubstantiated, and something unscientific.
Oh, and regarding culinary horrors, if the map had covered more territory to the east it would have encountered Israel and gefilte fish: ground fish bits suspended in goo. (It probably originated in Europe, but is endemic to Ashkenazy Jewish households around the world.) It’s actually not that bad, except for the goo.
There is an Israeli movie about a poor Sephardic, Moroccan fella trying to date the middle-class Ashkenazi girl with the snobbish parents. She invites him to their home for a meal, and he is served gefilte fish. He looks at his plate in horror, and the movie spends several minutes on him sneaking the fish to the household cat.
Many Ashkenazim can tell horror stories of the goo, which is actually gelled broth (the fish is served cold). It sits there on your plate, quivering like something from a 1950s horror movie.
(I expect haggis would be a horror to to many gefilte fish eaters. Different strokes.)
And speaking of strokes, deep fried pizza tastes pretty good even to non-Glaswegians, if you can ignore the fact that too much of it is death on a crust. Fish and chips, anyone?
I guess the table tennis players’ reflexes must be considerably faster than the average human’s. To follow and predict the ball’s trajectory, move the body/hand/bat to return the shot, aim it properly, execute the shot and have it land on the play-area, at the speed these guys are playing, is just stunningly masterful. Of course, there are several sports where fast reaction times are essential, eg baseball, tennis, cricket, etc. But this is at a different level!
The cameras, by necessity, are pretty far away from the players, who can get 20 feet back from the table when they are bashing it. That requires telephoto lenses, which compress the apparent distance between the players.
And the equipment used by pros makes the game easier than what the general public uses. The rubber on the rackets imparts way more spin, and the balls themselves are made of thicker plastic and are heavier, so they spend more time being influenced by the rubber, and fly a bit more true, albeit a tad faster and with more momentum.
All of this means that while the players do have fantastic reflexes, they have more time to react then the video suggests.
We are all aware of physics envy, a condition sometimes found in the non-STEM regions of academia. The exciting BLM craze in the US evidently set off in Canada a wave of outrage envy, resulting in the Kamloops “residential school graves” hoax and its publicity. A familiar pattern.
That’s a great point, Jon, I’d never thought it. Makes a LOT of sense, if moral panics can spread between individuals, surely also between countries – with local cultural versions. In both places the “victims” were of the most sensitive minorities.
No one—not the Kamloops band leadership, . . . had bothered to educate themselves about the limits of the (GPR) technology . . . [from the embedded Quillette article]
This gives too much benefit of the doubt by half to the band leadership. They contracted with Sarah Beaulieu, a professional archeologist on the faculty of the University of the Fraser Valley. The band ought surely to have ascertained as part of its due diligence in giving Prof. Beaulieu its money what GPR could do and what it couldn’t do. Its very ambiguity turned out to be its selling point: instead of accurately depicting tree roots and irrigation tiles in the old orchard and ruling out coffins and skeletons, it produced vague images that could convince the true believers that they were graves, even of children and their approximate ages! (In her press release at the time, the band chief described “having a knowing” and then finding these “remains” [sic] of 215 children, “some as young as three.” The residential schools functioned as impromptu orphanages in those pioneer days when the Mounties had to apprehend pre-school-age children from abusive and neglectful parents and there was nowhere else to shelter them.)
A few days after this “discovery”, Manitoba MP Leah Gazan (she of the much-mocked “MMWIG2SLGBTQQIA+ Genocide” video) introduced a resolution into Canada’s Parliament characterizing the Residential Schools program as genocide. These discoveries, you see, constituted the proof whose absence had forced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to pull its punches and call it “cultural genocide” which is nowhere defined in any United Nations document.
That resolution failed to pass. A “mostly peaceful” (aside from arson) propaganda campaign continued all the next year, culminating in The Pope being scrummed into blurting out on his way home from a Papal visit that this really was genocide (after he restrained himself from so saying during his formal appearances on Canadian soil.) Ms Gazan introduced it again in Oct 2022 and this time it passed with unanimous assent, thus sparing the Conservatives from being smeared as the racist party by voting against it.
Canada’s unforced error in calling itself a genocidal state is immensely important in the long game of delegitimizing Canada and returning sovereignty to the racially identified descendants of the people who were here at Contact. The graves hoax wasn’t just mischief born of ignorance. It was calculated.
Regarding the table tennis, I can’t imaging having reflexes like that.
I wonder if they are similar to great hitters in baseball, who apparently rely more on excellent vision to see subtle movements in the pitcher’s delivery that indicate where the ball will be thrown, rather than relying on pure reflexes. Maybe the table tennis players are, in addition to being super fast, also incredibly good at anticipation.
« while getting a Harard Ph.D., students already receive over $400,000 along with their prestigious degree. It’s not like they’re making cars or anything.»
Could someone explain this to me (I am french)? Thanks.
There’s an awful lot of confusing info emanating from both erratic leaderships on either side of the Hormuz mess.
Let’s not overestimate the coherence of the Iranian side either, I think they are in indecisive disarray and utterly opaque. Anybody guessing what’s going on in Tehran is a fraud.
An aside: I note Pakistan is such a ruined country that in order to have a high level meeting (not even between heads of state!) it has to totally lock down Islamabad, twice. Anybody who studies the M.E. knows what a lame, failed state it is, bankrupt without Saudi welfare and desperate by all metrics. (And deeply religious, of course).
D.A.
NYC 🗽
We have a close friend who’s sadly suffering from Parkinson’s, and as part of his therapy he plays ping pong. Apparently the eye-hand coordination aspect is an important part of slowing down the progression of the disease (along with boxing, which he also does). It’s amazing watching him play, he’s become really good at it and beats the rest of us regularly.
To paraphrase Phil Dunphy, We’re too busy apologizing for things we did to aplogize for things we didn’t do.
I had no idea that Simon Conway Morris had gone over to the dark side. When I left the professoriate in 1996, he was widely regarded as the formost expert on the Cambrian Explosion. Hard to believe that he sees convergence—which comfortably lies under the purview of natural selection—as evidence of something else, something unseen, something unsubstantiated, and something unscientific.
Oh, and regarding culinary horrors, if the map had covered more territory to the east it would have encountered Israel and gefilte fish: ground fish bits suspended in goo. (It probably originated in Europe, but is endemic to Ashkenazy Jewish households around the world.) It’s actually not that bad, except for the goo.
There is an Israeli movie about a poor Sephardic, Moroccan fella trying to date the middle-class Ashkenazi girl with the snobbish parents. She invites him to their home for a meal, and he is served gefilte fish. He looks at his plate in horror, and the movie spends several minutes on him sneaking the fish to the household cat.
Many Ashkenazim can tell horror stories of the goo, which is actually gelled broth (the fish is served cold). It sits there on your plate, quivering like something from a 1950s horror movie.
And for the ground fish bits. 🙂
(I expect haggis would be a horror to to many gefilte fish eaters. Different strokes.)
And speaking of strokes, deep fried pizza tastes pretty good even to non-Glaswegians, if you can ignore the fact that too much of it is death on a crust. Fish and chips, anyone?
I guess the table tennis players’ reflexes must be considerably faster than the average human’s. To follow and predict the ball’s trajectory, move the body/hand/bat to return the shot, aim it properly, execute the shot and have it land on the play-area, at the speed these guys are playing, is just stunningly masterful. Of course, there are several sports where fast reaction times are essential, eg baseball, tennis, cricket, etc. But this is at a different level!
Wow! What an amazing little squirrel!
Sad news for Table Tennis Day: https://web.archive.org/web/20260423061433/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/22/ai-powered-robot-beats-elite-table-tennis-players-milestone-robotics
The cameras, by necessity, are pretty far away from the players, who can get 20 feet back from the table when they are bashing it. That requires telephoto lenses, which compress the apparent distance between the players.
And the equipment used by pros makes the game easier than what the general public uses. The rubber on the rackets imparts way more spin, and the balls themselves are made of thicker plastic and are heavier, so they spend more time being influenced by the rubber, and fly a bit more true, albeit a tad faster and with more momentum.
All of this means that while the players do have fantastic reflexes, they have more time to react then the video suggests.
We are all aware of physics envy, a condition sometimes found in the non-STEM regions of academia. The exciting BLM craze in the US evidently set off in Canada a wave of outrage envy, resulting in the Kamloops “residential school graves” hoax and its publicity. A familiar pattern.
That’s a great point, Jon, I’d never thought it. Makes a LOT of sense, if moral panics can spread between individuals, surely also between countries – with local cultural versions. In both places the “victims” were of the most sensitive minorities.
D.A.
NYC
This gives too much benefit of the doubt by half to the band leadership. They contracted with Sarah Beaulieu, a professional archeologist on the faculty of the University of the Fraser Valley. The band ought surely to have ascertained as part of its due diligence in giving Prof. Beaulieu its money what GPR could do and what it couldn’t do. Its very ambiguity turned out to be its selling point: instead of accurately depicting tree roots and irrigation tiles in the old orchard and ruling out coffins and skeletons, it produced vague images that could convince the true believers that they were graves, even of children and their approximate ages! (In her press release at the time, the band chief described “having a knowing” and then finding these “remains” [sic] of 215 children, “some as young as three.” The residential schools functioned as impromptu orphanages in those pioneer days when the Mounties had to apprehend pre-school-age children from abusive and neglectful parents and there was nowhere else to shelter them.)
A few days after this “discovery”, Manitoba MP Leah Gazan (she of the much-mocked “MMWIG2SLGBTQQIA+ Genocide” video) introduced a resolution into Canada’s Parliament characterizing the Residential Schools program as genocide. These discoveries, you see, constituted the proof whose absence had forced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to pull its punches and call it “cultural genocide” which is nowhere defined in any United Nations document.
That resolution failed to pass. A “mostly peaceful” (aside from arson) propaganda campaign continued all the next year, culminating in The Pope being scrummed into blurting out on his way home from a Papal visit that this really was genocide (after he restrained himself from so saying during his formal appearances on Canadian soil.) Ms Gazan introduced it again in Oct 2022 and this time it passed with unanimous assent, thus sparing the Conservatives from being smeared as the racist party by voting against it.
Canada’s unforced error in calling itself a genocidal state is immensely important in the long game of delegitimizing Canada and returning sovereignty to the racially identified descendants of the people who were here at Contact. The graves hoax wasn’t just mischief born of ignorance. It was calculated.
I read about such a beaver a long time ago. It left me wondering how many of us were like beavers damming corridors in houses 🙂
But beavers don’t do it just because they won’t throw anything away. 🙂
Regarding the table tennis, I can’t imaging having reflexes like that.
I wonder if they are similar to great hitters in baseball, who apparently rely more on excellent vision to see subtle movements in the pitcher’s delivery that indicate where the ball will be thrown, rather than relying on pure reflexes. Maybe the table tennis players are, in addition to being super fast, also incredibly good at anticipation.
« while getting a Harard Ph.D., students already receive over $400,000 along with their prestigious degree. It’s not like they’re making cars or anything.»
Could someone explain this to me (I am french)? Thanks.