Science

This longish diatribe against “progressives” (i.e., left-wing extremists who aren’t Communists) appeared in my weekly Substack recommendations. Intrigued by the title, I printed it out and read it (I can’t read on screens.) Que’s thesis is one you’ve often seen me advance: “progressives” have gone so far that they’ve alienated much of the Left, and must acknowledge this honestly before Democrats get a decent chance of winning substantial power.

Que’s indictment is on the mark, but his proposed solutions (see below) seem unworkable—something Que realizes. In other words, he thinks that wokeness will hang on tenaciously until its advocates apologize and work with moderates to “center-ize” the Left, but that this is highly unlikely.

Click below for a free read, but subscribe if you like the content of “Edokwin Editorial”. Que is described as “a prolific storyteller and journalist. A lover of (micro-)blogging, Que’s primary areas of interest are arts, entertainment, philosophy, and politics.”

Que’s thesis starts with a laundry list of “progressive” sins, though it’s ironic to use “sins” for calling out a movement based on moral certainty (see below). I’ve bolded one sentence.

Rationalized bigotry and identitarianism. Political violence and terrorist apologia. Mass migration madness. Cancel culture. Overreaches around BLM, COVID, trans issues, and so much more. The 21st century progressive movement’s mistakes turned outright malfeasance make it one of the most totalizing failures of activism, public policy, global governance, and general wellbeing. It is a global phenomenon, with far reaching and overwhelmingly negative implications.

Keir Starmer’s approval rating sits at 18 percent. His government—barely a year old—polls at 19 percent. A far right party that didn’t exist two years ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform, has surged to 31 percent support, nearly matching Labour and the Conservatives combined. This pattern repeats across the Western world. Trump’s return in America. Wilders in the Netherlands. Le Pen’s surging support in France. Germany’s AfD. The far right isn’t ascendant despite progressive politics & policies. It’s ascendant because of progressivism.

The only hope for this movement, which has been the vanguard of leftism for most of my adult life, is to moderate and make massive mea culpas. I am not optimistic on either front however. The only thing worse than its terrible track record is the constant gaslighting about it.

Before singling out six areas in which, says Que, “progressives” have alienated the rest of America, he points out one specimen of what he calls “craven complicity”: columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein.  To Que, Klein epitomizes the problems afflicting “progressives” called out on their nonsense. Klein, like others of his ilk, “adjust their language just enough to avoid total campaigning disasters and PR implosions, but they never question the core conviction that animates everything they do: We are the moral vanguard, and opposition to our program stems from bigotry, ignorance, or malice.”

And that, Que argues, is the main reason why progressivism has failed, and failed largely because Americans can’t stomach it. It is “progressives'” air of moral certainty. so that they see no point engaging in introspection about their views, nor arguing about them.  They are, they believe, morally right, even when they’re tactically wrong. And it is this smug air of moral rectitude that regular Americans—however dumb “progressives think they are”—can see right through, and reject. A summary:

Here’s what people like Harris, and also Andrew Sullivan, understand that most progressive critics miss: The problem isn’t just that progressives got specific policies wrong. It’s that they’ve constructed an entire worldview in which very basic things most human beings take for granted are deemed “fundamentally and morally wrong.”

That foreigners are not citizens, and citizens’ interests come first. That children are not adults capable of consenting to irreversible medical procedures. That rapid demographic transformation of neighborhoods affects quality of life. That borders serve legitimate functions. That merit matters. That parents have primary authority over their children’s education and upbringing. And that the wrongness of racism & sexism leave no space for social justice carveouts; racism against Asians, Europeans, and Jews is still racism, sexism against men (misandry) is still sexism, and so forth.

These aren’t fringe positions held by extremists. They’re baseline assumptions held by overwhelming majorities across every Western, liberal democracy. And progressives have spent fifteen years treating people who hold these views as moral monsters. They are a political movement that has played footsie with far left extremism for ages, and which believes radical, revolutionary social change is not only permissible but necessary, even against the wishes of the voting public.

Que then singles out six areas in which “progressives” went too far (characterizations are mine, and bolding within quotes is Que’s).  Que’s quotes are either indented or in quotation marks, and my comments are flush left.

a.) Cancel culture and the suppression of discourse, something that Americans see as an extreme form of “mob justice”). Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating disagreement as a moral emergency and for wielding social ostracism as a political weapon.

b.) The Covid-19 pandemic.  Que thinks, and many agree, that “progressives” over-enforced things like masking and closing schools, to the detriment of American well-being. He’s not saying that precautions needn’t have be taken, but that they went too far, and were mandatory rather than voluntary. He argues that, especially in blue states, responses involved not using available evidence but “suppressing legitimate scientific debate.”

Que is right to some extent, especially in light of Fauci’s and Collin’s recently-revealed attempt to suppress investigation of the origin of the virus, but at the time it wasn’t clear what the scientific evidence was, as there was no time to accumulate it. To a large extent, health departments and the government acted on their best guess, and they sometimes got it wrong. And some were certainly wrong in suggesting (and implementing, in Vermont and New York), the idea that minorities get prioritized at the expense of other people more susceptible to infection and death.  Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating emergency powers as a blank check, for suppressing legitimate scientific debate, and for the generational harm inflicted on children who lost years of education and socialization to policies that didn’t work.”

c.) Hamas’s attack on Israel. I’ll quote Que here:

Nothing has more starkly revealed progressive moral bankruptcy than the response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.

Within hours of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—an orgy of rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping that killed over 1,200 people and harmed thousands more—segments of the progressive left were…celebrating. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter posted an image of a Hamas paraglider. Democratic Socialists of America rallied in support of Palestinian “resistance.” Harvard student organizations issued statements blaming Israel for its own massacre.

The reaction stunned even moderate progressives themselves. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote: “for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i’d like to just state that i was totally wrong.” CNN’s Jake Tapper described the aftermath as “a real eye-opening period in terms of antisemitism on the left.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul spoke of a “category five hurricane of left-wing antisemitism.”

The pattern was unmistakable: progressivism’s oppressor/oppressed binary had trained a generation to see Jews—successful, often “white”-presenting—as oppressors whose suffering didn’t count. When Hamas terrorists raped and murdered Israeli women, the feminists of #TimesUp, #BelieveWomen, and the #MeToo movement stayed silent. When progressive university professors failed to condemn celebrations of the massacre, they revealed that their commitment to “social justice” was conditional on the identity of the victims.

This is absolutely true. The condemnation of Israel began before it even went into Gaza, and a lot of antisemitism that had lain latent before October 7 was quickly revealed.  Jews became “Zios,” a euphemism confected by anti-Zionists, who are the same as antisemites.  Many NGOs, as well as the UN, were arrantly favoring Hamas over Israel: Doctors without Borders, for example, repeatedly condemned Israel for perpetuating “genocide” without (or only rarely) condemning Hamas. Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize to Jews for creating an intellectual and moral environment where celebrating the mass murder of Jewish civilians became acceptable in progressive spaces, and where opposition to that celebration gets you called a hater yourself.”  Harvard has sort of done that, but “progressives” in general? Naah.

d.) Trans issues. “Progerssive” moral certainty has gone so far here that even if you think that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports and generally shouldn’t be put in women’s prisons, you are tarred as a transphobe. But most American’s aren’t afraid of or hate trans people; like me, they believe that trans people should have the same dignity and respect as anyone else, but also that “trans rights” sometimes clash with other rights (as in sport, which has men’s and women’s divisions for a reason), and those clashes must be discussed and resolved.

Que:

Few issues better demonstrate progressive detachment from reality than transgender policy—and few reveal more starkly the gap between progressive rhetoric and progressive belief.

Let’s be clear about what Americans actually think. Large majorities support allowing trans adults to transition to the gender they want. Large majorities support banning discrimination against trans people. These are not controversial positions. They represent basic decency.

But Americans also believe, by even larger majorities, that: genetic human sex is real and determined by biology, not subjective feelings; children should not undergo irreversible medical transitions, especially without parental consent; male sex athletes should not compete in women’s sports; women deserve single-sex spaces for privacy and safety.

According to Ezra Klein, these majority positions are “fundamentally and morally wrong.” Not mistaken. Not worthy of debate. Fundamentally and morally wrong.

This is the progressive tell.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for sacrificing children’s health to ideological purity, for eliminating women’s spaces and sports, for calling majority opinion immoral, and for making reasonable discussion of transgender policy impossible.”  I agree, but again, this ain’t gonna happen. One thing I’ve learned, from my own “cancellation” for the views expressed above, is that ideologues will never broach questioning of their views.

e. The DEI “debacle.  Que has written about it here. Originally well-meaning (and still held as “morally right” by its advocates), DEI, promoted mostly by progressives and those who are relatively well off, became by 2020:

. . . . a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of administrators, consultants, and training programs. Universities created massive bureaucracies dedicated to DEI, often with more administrators than faculty in some departments. Corporations mandated unconscious bias training despite no evidence it reduced bias. Hiring and promotion decisions were made with explicit racial preferences defended as “equity.”

The contradictions were glaring. Progressives who claimed to oppose essentialism reduced people to their demographic categories. They claimed to empower minorities while treating them as fragile victims requiring constant protection. They denounced discrimination while implementing explicit racial discrimination in admissions and hiring.

Most perversely, DEI’s benefits accrued primarily to affluent, educated minorities who needed help least, while working-class minorities—and working-class people of all races—were left behind. As a Tablet Magazine analysis noted, progressivism has always been an elite movement with “class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes” at its core.

Que’s solution: “progressives must apologize for reducing equality to a spoils system, for treating minorities as political clients rather than individuals, and for poisoning the well of genuine anti-discrimination efforts.”  I should add here that, lest Que be accused of racism, he is black.  Finally, we have:

f. “Migration madness.” Although now Trump and his flunkies are going overboard with their seizures and deportations, I well remember when everyone, including many Democrats, were calling for migration reform to stem the tide of people entering America illegally. (This also goes for Europe, which has suffered greatly from a policy of lax enforcement, leading to the rise of the far right in European politics.) Que:

This is the tell. Progressives will finally admit, under electoral duress, that maybe they got immigration a bit wrong. But they cannot stop believing that mass immigration remains a moral signifier, a virtue, an elevating repudiation of “whiteness.” They feel they have to adjust because Trump is dangerous and the country is full of racists, but they still believe their critics on immigration are “on the wrong side of history” and almost all bigots.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for treating immigration as a morality play rather than a policy challenge requiring trade-offs, and for abandoning working-class concerns as beneath consideration while calling basic immigration enforcement “immoral.”

You’ve already seen the problem with this critique: solutions don’t seem workable. At the end of his piece, Que recommends three actions:

1. “Apologize, Genuinely and Specifically”
2. “Reform Institutions and Methods.”
3.  “Work with Moderates to Combat Real Extremism”

For each of these Que describes what must be done specifically.

But, ridden with moral certainty, “progressives” simply won’t be able to apologize, for apologies constitute one of the hardest things for anyone to tender. I can envision #2 and #3 happening, but only if we get a centrist liberal President and Congress, and those aren’t in the offing. Even Que admits that this seems unworkable:

Will they do it? Based on the evidence at the moment, my current prediction is: “no.” The moral supremacy is too intoxicating. The institutional capture is too complete. The social rewards for performing wokeness are too powerful.

And he leaves the choice in the hands of progressives. That’s like leaving a lion the choice between eating an antelope or eating cabbage.  Kudos for Que to distill the problem of “progressivism” into a bit-sized hunk, but, as John McWhorter and Sam Harris argued yesterday, wokeness (the manifestation of progressivism) seems here to stay.

A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor

Thanks to the people who sent in photos when our tank was almost empty. (I could use more, though. . . )

One of them was reader Ephraim Heller, who sends in part 11 of his installment “Brazil virtual safari.”  Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them:

Here are my photos, please don’t shoot the cute duck!

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of birds in the tyrant flycatcher family as well as a few miscellaneous birds.

In Brazil, “flycatchers” and “tyrants” refer to the same family – Tyrannidae. It is the world’s largest family of birds, with more than 400 species in North and South America, including 28 species in Brazil. Tyrannidae belong to the suborder Tyranni (suboscines), a primitive passerine lineage that lacks the complex vocal learning abilities of songbirds.  This places them in an entirely different major evolutionary branch from that yielding the Old World flycatchers (Muscicapidae), which are oscines (advanced songbirds).

Boat-billed Flycatcher (Megarynchus pitangua):

Fork-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus savana). The elaborate tail serves both aerodynamic and display functions:

Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus obscurus). A real beauty:

White Monjita (Xolmis irupero):

White-headed Marsh Tyrant (Arundinicola leucocephala):

Black-tailed Tityra (Tityra cayana). Tityras were formerly in the tyrant flycatcher family, but have been split into their own family:

Now for some miscellaneous birds:

Black-capped Donacobius (Donacobius atricapilla). This pair kept up their singing as I photographed them:

Chotoy Spinetail (Schoeniophylax phryganophilus):

Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus). Argentina’s national bird, famous for constructing elaborate clay nests resembling traditional mud ovens, with complex internal chambers and entrance tunnels. This master builder creates new nests annually, with old nests often used by other bird species. The clay construction provides excellent thermal insulation and protection.

A standard industrial knitting machine has been modified to produce fabrics from tungsten wire coated in gold, which are used to form the dish on the CarbSAR satellite

Scientists in South Korea have discovered a way to make all-solid-state batteries safer and more powerful using inexpensive materials. Instead of adding costly metals, they redesigned the battery’s internal structure to help lithium ions move faster. This simple structural tweak boosted performance by up to four times. The work points to cheaper, safer batteries for phones, electric vehicles, and beyond.

Can a pharma shill doctor call other doctors pharma shills?

The post Dr. Marty Makary Was Paid $130,357 By Pharma.  Is His “Undue Influence” Affecting the FDA? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Stanford researchers have developed an AI that can predict future disease risk using data from just one night of sleep. The system analyzes detailed physiological signals, looking for hidden patterns across the brain, heart, and breathing. It successfully forecast risks for conditions like cancer, dementia, and heart disease. The results suggest sleep contains early health warnings doctors have largely overlooked.

A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By electroplating thorium onto steel, they achieved the same results as years of work with delicate crystals — but far more efficiently. These clocks could be vastly more precise than current atomic clocks and work where GPS fails, from deep space to underwater submarines. The advance could transform navigation, communications, and fundamental physics research.

A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By electroplating thorium onto steel, they achieved the same results as years of work with delicate crystals — but far more efficiently. These clocks could be vastly more precise than current atomic clocks and work where GPS fails, from deep space to underwater submarines. The advance could transform navigation, communications, and fundamental physics research.

But we’re not going for one thing or another, are we? We’re here to explore ideas – that’s most of the fun anyway. And there’s one more aspect of physics that takes part in the free will discussion, and that’s the concept of emergence.

Using NASA’s IXPE, astronomers captured an unprecedented view of a white dwarf star actively feeding on material from a companion. The data revealed giant columns of ultra-hot gas shaped by the star’s magnetic field and glowing in intense X-rays. These features are far too small to image directly, but X-ray polarization allowed scientists to map them with surprising precision. The results open new doors for understanding extreme binary star systems.

Mars has a curious past. Rovers have shown unequivocal evidence that liquid water existed on its surface, for probably at least 100 years. But climate models haven’t come up with how exactly that happened with what we currently understand about what the Martian climate was like back then. A new paper, published in the journal AGU Advances by Eleanor Moreland, a graduate student at Rice University, and her co-authors, has a potential explanation for what might have happened - liquid lakes on the Red Planet would have hid under small, seasonal ice sheets similar to the way they do in Antarctica on Earth.

Tree bark has a total surface area similar to all of the land area on Earth. It is home to a wide range of microbial species unknown to science, and they can either take up or emit gases that have a warming effect on the climate

A preliminary analysis suggests that industrially useful quantum computers designs come with a broad spectrum of energy footprints, including some larger than the most powerful existing supercomputers

This year's funding for the Mars Sample Return mission has been cut. It seems unlikely that the mission will be revived in the coming years, barring some unforeseen development. This isn't a surprising development, so maybe NASA has some contingency plans.

I haven’t had a look at Da Roolz (the commenting rules) for a while, and, having a gander, made one modification in them, as well as a change in the instructions aboout “How to send me wildlife photos“.  Both of these instructional posts are on the left sidebar of the site, and look like this. You can click on them to read them.

The main change in the Roolz affects #12, which now reads like this:

Be judicious about posting videos and very long comments.  I like good discussion, but essays are not on, particularly if you have your own website where you can post it.  Embedded videos are okay, but please think before posting: do they add to the discussion? If your comment is longer than, say, 400 words, it is probably too long. If you want to write stuff longer than that, please get your own website!

I’ve decided that 600 words was too long for any comments, and thus ask readers to limit them to 400 words. I’m not going to quibble if you go a few words over that, but I am asking for comments and not essays. I will enforce this limit.

I continue to urge readers not to overcomment, with the guideline being about 10% of the comments in a given post. If you’re writing more than that, please ratchet back.  In the interests of, yes, comment diversity, I do not want to see a few people making most of the comments.

As for wildlife photos, they come in huge variety of formats, and it sometimes takes me a long time to get them into a properly formatted post. To make this easier, I’m asking readers to zip their photos if they can, number them, and then enclose a Word document describing the caption for each numbered photo. Be sure to give the common name plus the Latin binomial. What I’m trying to avoid is having to cut and paste words from a document into WordPress, which sometimes is wonky. And if you really want to please me, use the Times or Times New Roman typeface.

If you are a new reader and haven’t read Da Roolz, please do so before you post again. And if you want to send me photos, the link for that should give you all the information you need, including the address where you should send them.

Finally, if you have any questions, you are welcome reach PCC(E) at the email address you all know (it’s also at the “wildlife photos” link).

Thanks!

In this shortish (23-minute) video, Sam Harris and John McWhorter discuss whether wokeness is finally dead.  The short answer is “nope.”  It may have lain down, but it refuses to die.

The YouTube notes (there’s a transcript you can see as well):

Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about language, ideology, and moral certainty. They discuss the rise and persistence of “wokeness” and DEI, the legacy of George Floyd’s death, the role of social media in amplifying moral panic, how identity shapes perceptions of Israel-Palestine, the linguistics of Donald Trump, the rise of casual speech, conspiracy thinking, positions McWhorter has reconsidered, and other topics.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University and writes a column for the New York Times. He earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and is the author of several books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Word on the Street, and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is also the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley.

When asked whether the damage of wokeness is unfixable, McWhorter (who wrote Woke Racism ) notes that academics continue to pass on wokeness—not mainly to undergraduates but to graduate students. This ensures, he thinks, that woke ideology will be perpetuated because in that way it gets imbued in future professors as well as in academia as a whole. McWhorter cannot imagine anything will change this pathway. Asked by Harris whether Trump isn’t uprooting DEI from schools, McWhorter suggests that DEI isn’t really disappearing, but simply going underground, branded with a new name. (I agree; that is happening everywhere, including my own school.)

McWhorter teaches music appreciation at Columbia, and discusses a claim by Philip Ewell that music theory is inherently racist, a view that McWhorter considers absurd, and yet Ewell is greatly lionized. In response, Harris muses about whether the defeat of the woke Kamala Harris was the “high water mark” of the ideology.  McWhorter responds that while “high woke” has indeed has peaked (McWhorter means by that “an eternal and punitive battle against whiteness”), the same fury and lack of reason has shifted, and can be seen in the pervasive support for Hamas among progressives as well as in “trans issues, especially surgery and sports”. Ergo, the old woke ideology is being applied to new issues, but with the same concentration on power issues.

How to solve it? McWhorter’s own solution is simply to call attention to this stuff over and over again, but in writing rather than via podcasts—though he finds that tedious given the variety of his interests.

At the end, Harris asks McWhorter what the elites, the intelligentsia, and the MSM “got wrong” in response to the tsunami of emotion and ideology that followed the death of George Floyd.  I’ll let you hear his answer in the last five minutes.  Thrown in at the end is a description of a rupture that McWhorter had with his erstwhile podcast pal, Glenn Loury.

McWhorter and Harris pretty much agree that, for the nonce, wokeness is here to stay. Though it may manifest itself in new ways, the underlying ideology (derived from postmodernism) of power differentials and “personal truths”, most notably in emphasizing inequities between blacks and whites, shows no signs of disappearing.

So it goes.

h/t: Bat

Satellite photos show meltwater on the surface of iceberg A23a collecting in an unusual way, which may be a sign that the huge berg is about to break apart

It’s been a while since we had some photo from evolutionary ecologist Bruce Lyon at UC Santa Cruz, but he came through yesterday with some lovely photos of DUCKS! Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. It comes in the form of a letter to me:

Dear Dr Coyne

Please step away from the duck. Don’t hurt the duck. I have a friend who is a doctor and who can help you (PhD and he studies ducks). He can help your duck syndrome (yes there is such a thing).

While you are waiting for help to arrive, here are some photos to calm your frayed nerves and stop the incessant paddling.

The photos were taken at Neary Lagoon, a city park near my home. It is the best place to see wood ducks (Aix sponsa) locally. They hang out in the wetlands in the park and often fly over to feed on settling ponds at the nearby sewage treatment facility. Delicious! The park also has lots mallards (Anas platyrhynchos).

The wood ducks are often hidden from view—they perch on branches in dense vegetation at the edge of the lagoon. But sometimes they come out and paddle around, giving nice views. Ducks pair up earlier than many other birds and many birds are in pairs but some are courting.

Darwin famously said that peacocks made him feel ill—”The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” (expressed in a letter to his friend Asa Gray). The peacock’s ornamentation is so crazy complex that Darwin found it hard to explain. Sure, sexual selection explains why animals are ornamented, but this is just crazy. I feel the same way about male wood ducks, but I feel awe instead of nausea:

This male was courting a female that was perched above him out of frame. He would do head tilts while puffing out part of his plumage:

The courting male photographed mid head tilt. Note his fanned out buffy flanks with the nice black and white edging. Clearly, fanning out a specific part of the plumage like this suggests that is an important part of the display:

A lovely female wood duck but not the object of the above male’s desire:

In fact, the above male, who was courting a female perched out of sight above him, often pecked at the female that was sitting right next to him. Perhaps she was interested in him, but the attraction was not mutual:

A male wood duck on the water:

Not far away, mallards provided great opportunities for getting flight shots. I like this one because the out-of-focus males in the background add a pleasing element:

Flight shots can be challenging but these mallards made it easy. They wanted to roost on the floating walkway in the marsh and would swim up close to the walkway and bob their head rapidly up and down a few seconds before launching into flight. Made it easy. Here is a female mallard approaching the railing:

Nearly everything in the universe is made of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, yet we can’t see either of them directly. Scientists are developing detectors so sensitive they can spot particle interactions that might occur once in years or even decades. These experiments aim to uncover what shapes galaxies and fuels cosmic expansion. Cracking this mystery could transform our understanding of the laws of nature.