Month: October 2025

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

October 28, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, October 28, 2025, but at least it’s National Chocolate Day. Here’s a good 3½-minute movie on how chocolate pods are converted into chocolate bars. It ain’t easy!

It’s also Honoring the Nation’s First Responders Day, Separation of Church and State Day (on this day in 1963 the Supreme Court ruled against school-sponsored prayers and Bible reading),  Wild Foods Day, and Plush Animal Lover’s Day (I happen to be the one lover implied by the apostrophe). Here’s my “plush” teddy bear, as old as I am, and neither of us are so plush any more. Do you remember my teddy’s name?

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I once was absolutely sure that Trump couldn’t run for a third term as President because it’s prohibited by the Constitution. I still think that, but now wonder if his pack of devious legal advisers is going to find a way around that prohibition.  And now he’s making noises about running for President again, while assuring the public that his recent MRI scan (why he got one was not sure) was “PERFECT”. Oy vey!

President Trump said that he underwent magnetic resonance imaging earlier this month, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that the results had been “perfect” but declining to say why his doctors had ordered the scan.

Mr. Trump also reiterated that he was interested in serving a third term, saying that he “would love to do it” because of his popularity with his supporters. Mr. Trump, who spoke to journalists for about 30 minutes on a flight to Tokyo from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during his almost weeklong trip to Asia, seemed intent on presenting himself as fit to lead, if not run for the presidency again.

The Constitution sets a two-term limit for presidents, but Mr. Trump and his supporters have increasingly floated the possibility of finding a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, which states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice,” regardless of whether the terms are consecutive.

In discussing his health, Mr. Trump offered a small new detail about the tests that the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, said the president had received during a recent visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump said, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician. The summary did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and had few details on what testing the president had undergone. When asked why he had undergone an M.R.I., the president said, “you could ask the doctors.” Magnetic resonance imaging, a noninvasive technology that creates detailed images of the inside of the body, is often used for disease detection and monitoring, or to detect bone or joint abnormalities.

The doctors, of course, will not tell us. I suppose that, as President, he could get an MRI scan as a bonus preventive measure during his annual physical, but we don’t know. Also, he’s questioning the IQs (or intelligence) of some Democrats in Congress:

Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, said at the time that his visit to Walter Reed earlier this month was part of a routine annual checkup, though he had already undergone a physical in April. Shortly after his latest visit, he traveled to the Middle East.

As he fielded questions on Monday, Mr. Trump seemed intent on presenting himself as the picture of physical and mental health, claiming, without evidence, that two Democratic lawmakers, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Jasmine Crockett of Texas, would not “pass” the cognitive health exams he has taken at Walter Reed. He did not say whether he took those exams during his last visit.

Here’s AOC’s response on X.  Trump clearly confused a dementia test with an IQ test!

Lots of mysteries here!

*Spare a thought for all the people of Jamaica, because they’re about to experience the biggest hurricane in their recorded history. In some parts of the island, winds are predicted to be over 100 miles per hour.

Hurricane Melissa strengthened into a Category 5 storm Monday as it drew closer to Jamaica, where forecasters said it would unleash catastrophic flooding, landslides and widespread damage. It would be the strongest hurricane to hit the island since record-keeping began in 1851.

Melissa, blamed for six deaths in the northern Caribbean as it headed toward the island, was on track to make landfall Tuesday in Jamaica before coming ashore in Cuba later in the day and then heading toward the Bahamas. It was not expected to affect the United States.

Hanna Mcleod, a 23-year-old hotel receptionist in the Jamaican capital of Kingston, said she boarded up the windows at her home, where her husband and brother are staying. She stocked up on canned corned beef and mackerel and left candles and flashlights throughout the house.

“I just told them to keep the door closed,” she said. “I am definitely worried. This is actually the first time I’ll be experiencing this type of hurricane.”

In an AP interview, National Hurricane Center specialist Larry Kelly says everyone in Jamaica needs to be hunkered down now.

Category 5 is the highest on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with sustained winds exceeding 157 mph (250 kph). Melissa would be the strongest hurricane in recorded history to directly hit the small Caribbean nation, said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather.

“This can become a true humanitarian crisis very quickly, and there is likely going to be the need for a lot of international support,” Porter said in a phone interview.

On Monday morning, Melissa was centered about 145 miles (230 kilometers) southwest of Kingston and about 330 miles (530 kilometers) southwest of Guantánamo, Cuba, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

The hurricane had maximum sustained winds of 165 mph (270 kph) and was moving west at 3 mph (5 kph), the center said.

Some areas in eastern Jamaica could see up to 40 inches (1 meter) of rain while western Haiti could get 16 inches (40 centimeters), according to the hurricane center. “Catastrophic flash flooding and numerous landslides are likely,” it warned.

Mandatory evacuations were ordered in seven flood-prone communities in Jamaica, with buses ferrying people to safe shelter.

But some insisted on staying.

I sure wouldn’t stay. Here’s a video posted late yesterday morning:

Here’s the predicted path of the storm from the AP site. Melissa is also going to make a direct hit on Cuba, but nobody seems to be worrying about that. They should; Cubans will need aid, too, but I guess the U.S. is prohibited from giving any.

*I hear from various female friends that wokeness is largely promoted by women, and that as groups and scientific societies get a higher proportion of women, they get more woke, which means more self-policing and performative. I don’t know if I believe that, but Megan McArdle in the Washington Post sure does, and advances this theory in an op-ed called “Toxic femininity and the rise of cancel culture.” An excerpt:

The social science literature on men and women suggests that on average we differ psychologically and physically. There are tall, disputatious women (I’m one of them) and short, empathic men, but on average women are still shorter than men. We’re also more empathetic, more averse to risk and conflict, and more likely to prioritize feelings and relationships over abstract rules.

It would be surprising if that didn’t make for some fireworks as women flooded into male-dominated institutions. In her recent essay for Compact magazine, Andrews argues this culture clash is perhaps the conflict of our time, explaining the excesses of the “Great Awokening” and the intensity of its cancel culture. “Cancel culture,” she writes, “is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”

Andrews views all this rather apocalyptically, suggesting the feminine style threatens civilization itself because female modes of interaction, however excellent in their own way, “are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” She fears courts will abandon the rule of law in favor of nurturing everyone’s feelings, that journalism and academia will strive to conceal unpleasant truths and that business will lose its “swashbuckling spirit.”

. . This has, predictably, triggered pushback. David French took it on in the New York Times, and Cathy Young took it apart at the Bulwark. I agree with many of their criticisms, and yet I also have to admit that this hypothesis seems … not entirely wrong?

Cancel culture, for example, does feel like female-style aggression — one might even call it “toxic femininity.” (My phrase, not hers.) Since that phrase will probably raise some hackles, let me explain: an all-out reputational attack that seems to come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. It’s a dynamic that will be familiar to anyone who has attended an all-girls camp.

As Joyce Benenson notes in her book, “Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes,” female aggression tends to be indirect and covert, compared with the openly belligerent male kind — think gossip rather than a fistfight.

. . . These passive aggressive tactics aren’t the sole province of women, but they’re more common in groups of women than groups of men. Women lean more left than men, which might explain why they have proliferated in progressive spaces. Other explanations include the left’s growing insistence on the primacy of subjective feelings and “lived experience,” and its elevation of microaggressions into major causes of action.

I have no dog in this fight, nor do I want to.  But one of my female colleagues has suggested that scientific societies, as they get more woke, are largely run by women. Now that’s a correlation that doesn’t show causation, but I’ll present the theory above for your perusal.

*You may remember that Anna Krylov refused to review a paper for Nature because of its DEI-ish publication policies. Now both the Torygraph  and the Times of London have reported on Anna’s refusal.  First, the Torygraph

Prof Anna Krylov, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California, shared an open letter online encouraging fellow scientists to boycott Nature until it “recommits to scientific excellence”.

 

She said: “The Nature group has abandoned its mission in favour of advancing a social justice agenda.”

She accused it of trying to play identity politics and promote specific demographics instead of focusing on science, which is supposed to be “guided by a commitment to finding objective truth”.

The letter was backed by Prof Richard Dawkins, an expert in evolutionary biology, who said on X: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journal. Now it’s one of many accused of favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science.”

Nature’s response:

A spokesman for Springer Nature, which published the journals, said: “A citation diversity statement is an optional section that authors may choose to include in their article, review, or book chapter.

“Whether the author opts to include one does not affect the evaluation of the content itself.

“We believe this option is valuable because it encourages authors to engage with a wider spectrum of relevant research from a broad range of scholars, disciplines, and perspectives; and that this can contribute to a more informed foundation for scholarly work.”

The Times got exactly the same response from Nature.

But if course citation diversity was only one issue that Anna brought up in her Heterodox STEM essay.  Here are her main points

Three representative examples illustrate this decline [of scientific rigor in Nature’s journals]:

1. Institutionalized social engineering
The Springer Nature Diversity Commitment (Skipper & Inchcoombe, 2019), which you quoted in your invitation letter, openly pledges to “take action to improve diversity and inclusion in the conferences we organise, and in our commissioned content, the peer review population and editorial boards.” Editors are “asked to intentionally and proactively reach out to women researchers” and authors are instructed to suggest reviewers “with diversity in mind.” In other words, editorial choices and peer review are to be guided not solely by competence but by demographic attributes. I cannot stop but wondering — was I asked to review the manuscript because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs?

2. Ideological subversion of literature citations
Nature Reviews Psychology (Unsigned, 2025) now encourages authors to practice “citation justice” — that is, to social-engineer their manuscript’s bibliography to promote members of favored identity groups, even if their works lack the requisite merit or relevance. “Citation justice” is particularly harmful because it undermines the rigor and reliability of published research. When references are chosen not for their scientific relevance or quality but to promote the work of preferred identity groups, the integrity of science itself is compromised (Shaw, 2025; Coyne, 2025).

3. Institutionalized censorship
Nature Human Behavior has published a censorship manifesto (Unsigned, 2022) — now widely criticized (see, for example, Rauch, 2022; Winegard, 2022; Krylov & Tanzman, 2023) — in which they openly declare their intent to censor legitimate research findings that they deem potentially “harmful” to certain groups. Not only is it arrogant for editors to presume they have the expertise to make such judgments, the practice is antithetical to the production of knowledge.

Note that Nature didn’t respond to points #1 and #3!

*The right-leaning WSJ Editorial Board has a group editorial on tariffs, and it takes the side of Reagan and not Trump.  Anybody with two neurons to rub together knows that Trump’s tariffs are not only going to launch wider trade wars, but will hurt the average American, whose support he needs.

The MAGA crowd likes to dismiss Ronald Reagan as irrelevant today, but apparently he still matters to President Trump. How else to explain Mr. Trump’s tantrum against Canada after the province of Ontario invoked the Gipper on trade in a television ad?

The Ontario government had the temerity to buy ad time to run clips of Reagan’s 1987 remarks warning about the dangers of protectionism. Mr. Trump pitched a social-media fit in response late Thursday, claiming Ontario “fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs.”

The President said the ad was intended to interfere with the Supreme Court as it considers the legality of his claim that he can levy tariffs on anything he wants, for any amount he wants, whenever he wants. He immediately declared an end to trade talks with Canada.

Ontario then said it would pull the ad, but when it still ran during sporting events on the weekend, Mr. Trump escalated with an additional 10% tariff on Canadian goods on top of the taxes he has already imposed.

The Supreme Court isn’t likely to be influenced by anything other than the law, but Mr. Trump’s Canada eruption is a good argument for the Justices to rein in his tariff power. The President gets angry at a TV ad and imposes on a whim a 10% tax on Americans who buy goods from their northern neighbor. Mr. Trump claims he’s not “a king,” but on tariffs he is acting like one, and without a proper delegation from Congress as the Constitution requires.

It’s striking that Mr. Trump is so worried about a TV spot featuring a President who left the White House nearly 37 years ago. Don’t you know what time it is, as your apologists like to say, Mr. President? Perhaps Mr. Trump fears he’s going to lose the tariff case, and maybe he also knows his tariffs are unpopular.

I have repeated many times how my father, an economist, drilled into me as a kid the idea that tariffs are never the solution to anything.  And I still have not heard a good argument for them. Now you can say that Trump is only using tariffs to get what he wants from other countries, and he won’t really impose them, but I don’t believe that. They are in fact, already in play. And how can higher taxes on imported goods not hurt the American consumer, or cause loss of jobs? Perhaps someone smarter than I can explain.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I think Hili is dissenting rather than individually concurring.

Hili: I’m issuing a votum separatum.
Me: On what matter?
Hili: I need to think about that.

In Polish:

Hili: Zgłaszam votum separatum.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Muszę się nad tym zastanowić.

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

We have three cat memes today. To wit:

From Science Humor via Merilee:

From CinEmma:

. . . and from Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

Masih is quiet, posting only about the sentencing of her would-be Iranian assassins in NYT on Wednesday. So here’s her stand-in. Rowling’s riposte is on point.

From Luana, who’s no fan of Mamdani:

From Simon, who’s no fan of Trump:

From Jay, two kinds of cats (one is a variety of Ceiling Cat):

From Malcolm; a nice man and a good catch:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

28 October 1938 | A Dutch Jewish girl of Polish origin, Iza Wajnkowski, was born in Heerlen.In September 1943 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.—The ruins of gas chamber and crematorium III: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ipQmBPAlJQ8

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-10-28T00:00:11.306914219Z

And two from Dr. Cobb.  Matthew calls this first one a “beautiful thing”:

The Gold-ringed cat snake floating and swimming along a forest stream in Singapore. Beautiful and hypnotic

— David (@incnaturalist.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T10:31:49.145Z

From the Stephen King, a diehard Democrat:

Holy shit! That motherfucker TORE DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE!

— Stephen King (@stephenking.bsky.social) 2025-10-23T19:33:02.323Z

Māori council gets right of approval for releasing genetically modified native organisms in New Zealand

October 27, 2025 • 11:30 am

For the last thirty years, New Zealand has had strict regulations about the release of genetically modified organisms, including humans.  This means that gene therapy is strictly regulated (more so than in the U.S.) and release of genetically modified organisms, which has occurred in other places (mosquitoes, crops, etc.), or has great potential (e.g., golden rice) is not on in New Zealand. And gene therapy for diseases like Parkinson’s and hemophilia has great promise in our own species.

That changed last year when three New Zealand parties agreed to make it more possible to release genetically modified native species, and to use gene therapy in humans,.  Except for one thing, and you can guess what that might be.  The bill also allows for an advisory council of the indigenous Māori people to nix gene therapy based on more-or-less spiritual relationship with native organisms. There is no scientific basis for this save for the superstition embodied in Mātauranga Māori: the melange of superstition, indigenous knowledge, ideology, and code of conduct (tikanga) that is said to constitute another “way of knowing”.

Only Ceiling Cat knows why the bill was approved by parties that aren’t keen on the concept of “co-governance”.  Surely people should realize what is gong to happen: Māori, which supposedly have an advisory capacity only, but in reality can nix any release of GMOs in native species, can bargain with the supplicants, perhaps even getting money to give permission, as Graham Adams writes in this article on the N.Z. site Point of Order. I’ll give some excerpts from the article but do realize that I don’t know a great deal about the new bill save what the article says.

Click the headline to read the piece:

I’ll just give quotes, and perhaps a bit of commentary. I’ve bolded parts that I see as more significant. Note that the text is messed up, and I don’t know how to fix it.

In August 2024, the then-Minister of Science, Innovation, and Technology, Judith Collins, announced legislation to end New Zealand’s nearly 30-year ban on gene technology outside the lab. She described the move as “a major milestone in modernising gene technology laws.”

In her Beehive media release, she said, “The changes we’re announcing today will allow researchers and companies to further develop and commercialise their innovative products. Importantly, it will help New Zealanders to better access treatments such as CAR T-cell therapy, which has been clinically proven to effectively treat some cancers. It can also help our farmers and growers mitigate emissions and increase productivity, all of which benefits our economy.”

It sounded encouragingly far-sighted, but the Gene Technology Bill she introduced to Parliament last December — declaring it to be “a great day for science” that would bring New Zealand’s “regulations for gene technology into the 21st century” — included major elements that are decidedly unscientific and distinctly backward looking.

Alongside a Technical Advisory Committee staffed by scientists, the legislation sets up a Māori Advisory Committee whose members are required to have “knowledge of mātauranga Māori (Māori traditional knowledge), tikanga Māori (Māori protocol and culture), te ao Māori (the Māori world), and taonga species.”

Anyone who wants approval for work involving native species (or affecting relationships Māori claim to have with those species) must engage with the Māori Advisory Committee, which will advise on cultural, spiritual, historical, customary, and ecological values.

Somehow, the National-led government — in charge of a country that, by its own admission, is struggling to keep up with scientific advances in gene technology in the 21st century — is willing to appoint a bevy of spiritual and cultural advisers whose advice is to be officially assessed in a similar manner to that presented by scientists.

Opposition from the conservative (in the NZ sense) ACT party:

ACT’s “differing view” in the select committee report states this (ACT will not, however, oppose the bill):

“For gene technology to succeed and be trusted, it should be based on modern science, not cultural concepts that will make it difficult for the Regulator or applicants to navigate. The [Māori Advisory] committee is entirely reliant on the concept of ‘tikanga’… ACT does not believe it has a place in scientific legislation. Tikanga is not a fixed or universal concept; it varies between iwi and hapū and lacks consistent content or application, making it unsuitable as a legal standard… The inclusion of a Technical Advisory Committee ensures that the Regulator receives robust scientific and technical input… Adding a parallel cultural advisory process risks diluting this focus and undermining confidence in the regulatory regime’s neutrality and predictability.”

And the indigenous approval can apply not just to indigenous species, but to any species with which Māori have a special relationship that got to the island before 1769::

The bill grants the right to any iwi, hapū, Māori entity or Māori individual to assert they have “a kaitiaki [guardianship] relationship with an indigenous species that would be, or has been, used as a host organism.”

A kaitiaki relationship is defined as “the relationship that any kaitiaki has, or Māori in general have, as guardian, trustee, or caretaker of an indigenous species, in accordance with tikanga.”

The Health select committee report further recommends the bill should be expanded to include relationships with “non-indigenous species of significance” to Māori that are “believed to have been brought to New Zealand before 1769 [when Cook arrived] on waka migrating from other parts of the Pacific region.”

Now “native” species aren’t necessarily indigenous: they could have arrived in NZ a long time ago from elsewhere, and also be present in other places.  And remember, too, that both Māori and European descendents are both colonists of the islands, separated by about 600 years.  It’s not clear to me why the earlier immigrants have the right to nix genetic studies of native organisms, particularly when conservation of native species is a serious issue in New Zealand. It’s entirely possible that conservation of native species might some day involve genetic modification, and why should bogus claims of “spiritual connection” have any say in conservation decisions?

Charles Murray finds God, loses rationality, gets criticized by Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer

October 27, 2025 • 9:30 am

About two weeks ago I called attention to a new book by Charles Murray, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, famous (or infamous) for his book coauthored with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (1994).  Murray apparently had long neglected the god-shaped hole in his being, but eventually found God (implying the Christian God), and wrote a book about his conversion to belief, Taking Religion Seriously (click on book cover below to go to its publisher):

Murray followed with an excerpt in the Free Press called “I thought I didn’t need God. I was wrong.”  As I mentioned in my piece about the FP article, Murray relied heavily on God-of-the-gaps arguments, finally filling his “God-sized hole” (yes, he uses those words), by encountering difficult questions whose answers, he averred, pointed toward the existence of divinity. These questions are familiar: they include “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and what accounts for “the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena—most famously E = mc2″?

Murray finally settled on a Quaker-ish god:

Quaker teachings are also helpful in de-anthropomorphizing God. They emphasize that God is not a being with a location. He is everywhere—not just watching from everywhere but permeating the universe and our world.

But if God is everywhere, the god-shaped hole must be pretty damn big!  Of course of all the gods in all the world’s religions, Murray settled on the one for which there can be no evidence. (As Victor Stenger pointed out, most gods can be investigated empirically.)

Well, so be it. Murray is free to adopt his superstition, so long as he doesn’t bother anybody else with it. Unfortunately, he has: not only issuing a book, but also the Free Press excerpt above and now an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.  Here he adduces adduces another hard question—consciousness—as evidence for a human “soul”, ergo God.

Click below to read it if you subscribe to the WSJ, or find Murray’s misguided piece archived for free here.

Of course Murray is not the first person to use the phenomenon of consciousness as evidence for a “soul”—something he actually never defines. But for evidence beyond consciousness he gloms onto the supposed phenomena of near-death experiences and “terminal lucidity”, defined below.

A few excerpt from Murray’s piece, which he starts by saying he used to be a materialist. And then. . . .

I’ve been back-pedaling. Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. I read C.S. Lewis, who raised questions I couldn’t answer. I scrutinized New Testament scholarship and was more impressed by the evidence supporting it than that discrediting it.

I’m curious what that evidence is, since there are no contemporary accounts—and there should be—of Jesus’s miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection. (This, by the way, makes me think that Murray is a secret Christian.) And then he pulls out his “evidence” for God.

Example: A central tenet of materialism is that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain. I first encountered claims to the contrary in the extensive literature on near-death experiences that grew out of Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life” (1975). The evidence now consists of dozens of books, hundreds of technical articles and thousands of cases. I read about Ian Stevenson’s cross-national studies of childhood memories of previous lives. He assembled a database of more than 3,000 cases, and more has been accumulating in the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

The evidence for both near-death experiences and childhood memories of previous lives is persuasive in terms of the credibility of the sources and verified facts, but much of it is strongly suggestive instead of dispositive. It doesn’t reach the standard of proof Carl Sagan popularized: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This led me to seek a subset of cases that exclude all conceivable explanations except that consciousness can exist independent of the brain.

But Murray is most impressed by “terminal lucidity”:

Certain near-death experiences approach that level, but the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.

Terminal lucidity can last from a few minutes to a few hours. In the most dramatic cases, people who have been unable to communicate or even recognize their spouses or children for years suddenly become alert and exhibit their former personalities, complete with reminiscences and incisive questions. It is almost always followed by complete mental relapse and death within a day or two.

The phenomenon didn’t have a name until 2009, but case studies reach back to detailed clinical descriptions from the 19th century. Hospices, palliative-care centers, and long-term care wards for dementia patients continued to observe the condition during the 20th century but usually treated it as a curious episode that didn’t warrant a write-up. With the advent of social media, reports began to accumulate. We now have a growing technical literature and a large, systematic sample compiled by Austrian psychologist Alexander Batthyány.

Two features of the best-documented cases combine to meet Sagan’s standard: The subjects suffered from medically verified disorders that made their brains incapable of organized mental activity; and multiple observers, including medical personnel, recorded the lucidity.

A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.

Given the complexity of the brain, is it surprising that we don’t fully understand what it’s capable of? Murray assumes that we do, and so has abandoned a materialistic explanation of consciousness. He ends by adducing the divine once again:

We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.

The implications are momentous. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow observed that for a scientist trying to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory “ends like a bad dream”: “As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Neuroscientists who have been trying to explain consciousness may have to face their own bad dream: coming to terms with evidence for the human soul.

“MUST eventually lead to a paradigm shift”?  Murray is pretty damn sure that our ignorance of the brain and its capabilities will lead us to a pantheistic God (or a Christian one; it’s not clear)! And what on earth does Murray mean by “a soul”? Is it this undefined “soul” that somehow permeates the brain, making us conscious and sometimes producing terminal lucidity. He doesn’t say, and I don’t feel like reading his book to find out. After all, if he’s advancing an argument for God, the Free Press and Wall Street Journal article should suffice to summarize Murray’s arguments.

A few of us, including Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer, were discussing Murray’s conversion and his “evidence”.  Steve emailed a short rebuttal of Murray’s thesis, which he allowed me to publish here. It’s a good attack on the “soul of the gaps” argument:

Pinker (I put in one link):

Let’s assume for the moment that the reports of terminal lucidity are factually accurate. At best Murray would be making a “soul of the gaps” argument: There’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it. But when it comes to the brain and its states of awareness, there’s lots we don’t understand. (Why do you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason? Why can’t you fall asleep even when you’re exhausted?)

The brain is an intricate, probabilistic, nonlinear dynamic system with redundancies, positive and negative feedback loops, and multiple states of transient stability. If circuit A inhibits circuit B, and if A deteriorates faster than B, then B can rebound. If A and B each excites itself while inhibiting the other, they can oscillate unpredictably. Now multiply these and other networks by several billion. Should we be surprised if uneven deterioration in the brain results in some quiescent circuit popping back into activity?

Contra Murray, these dynamics are nowhere near being understood by neuroscientists, since they may be the most complex phenomena in the universe. Yet we can be sure that with 86 billion neurons and a trillion synapses, the brain has enough physical complexity to challenge us with puzzles and surprises, none of them requiring a ghost in the machine. A graduate student in computational neuroscience with a free afternoon could easily program an artificial neural network which, when unevenly disabled, exhibited spontaneous recovery or unpredictable phase transitions.

All this assumes there is a phenomenon to explain in the first place. Claims of “terminal lucidity” consist of subjective recollections by loved ones and caregivers. But we know that people are extraordinarily credulous about the cognitive abilities of entities they interact with, readily overinterpreting simple responses as signs of nonexistent cogitation. The first primitive chatbot, Eliza, simulated a therapist in the 1960s using a few dozen canned responses (e.g., “I had an argument with my mother” → “Tell me more about your mother”), yet people poured their hearts out to it. With so-called Facilitated Communication, therapists and patients were convinced they were liberating the trapped thoughts of profoundly autistic children with the use of a keyboard, oblivious to the fact that they were manipulating the children’s hands. When there’s desperation to commune with a loved one, any glimmer of responsiveness can be interpreted as lucidity, exaggerated with each recall and retelling. What Murray did not report was any objective indicator of coherence or lucidity, like an IQ test, or a standard bedside neurological battery, or a quiz of autobiographical memory with verifiable details.

A great irony in the attempt to use rigorous scientific reasoning to support some theory of an immaterial soul is that the theory itself (inevitably left unspecified) is utterly incoherent.  If a dybbuk can re-enter a ravaged brain as a gift to loved ones longing for a last goodbye, why are just a few people blessed with this miracle, rather than everyone? Why did the soul leave in the first place, sentencing the loved ones to years of agony? Why can’t the soul just stay put, making everyone immortal? What about when the deterioration is gradual, as when my disoriented grandmother thought she was lost and searching for her parents in the country she had left sixty years before, bursting into tears every time we told her her parents were dead? Was she missing a soul? Was the God who blessed others with a last lucid goodbye punishing her (and us) for some grievous sin?

The theory that the mind consists of activity in the brain, that the brain has a complexity we don’t yet understand (though we understand why we don’t understand it), and that the brain, like any complex entity, is vulnerable to damage and deterioration, has none of these problems.

Michael Shermer is also skeptical, as he evinced on his podcast below with Murray about the book. In the podcast Shermer also cites this post on terminal lucidity by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, which is doubtful about the phenomenon but says it needs to be studies neurologically, along with other phenomena associated with death. In the interim, Zeleznikow-Johnston mentions observer bias (a “will to believe”) and ignorance as materialistic explanations of terminal lucidity.

Murray and Shermer’s discussion of terminal lucidity, in which Shermer offers a naturalistic explanation, begins 1 hour 24 minutes in the podcast below.

And I’ll leave it at that, but will add a quote from a letter by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis:

. . . . Weizsäcker’s book on the world view of physics is still keeping me busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know;. . . . .

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 27, 2025 • 8:15 am

It’s been a long time since evolutionary ecologist Bruce Lyon, now retired from UC Santa Cruz but still working, has sent us photos. But today he’s back with some great bird shots: an interaction between an owl and a thieving hawk. Bruce’s captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

My office on the Coastal Campus of the University of California in Santa Cruz is set in lovely coastal chaparral habitat and is loaded with birds. A former student recently told the she was frequently seeing one or two American barn owls (Tyto alba) hunting the Coastal Campus around sunset so I went out that evening to look for an owl.

I got lucky. A couple of minutes after I arrived, a barn owl started patrolling an open meadow in front of me with its typical slow moth-like flight. It suddenly plummeted to the ground and stayed on the ground for a minute. Eventually it took off with a vole or some similar rodent in its talons. Some species of owls kill their vole victims by repeatedly lacerating them on the ground with their talons—perhaps this is why the owl spent a minute on the ground before taking off.

Alternatively, perhaps before taking off the owl was scanning for other predators or scavengers that might steal its prey (kleptoparasitism). If this were the case, however, the barn owl did not look carefully enough because as soon as it took off a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) gave chase. After 100 meters (yards) the hawk caught up to the owl, grabbed it by the talons and tried to steal the vole. The owl held on tight and flew away from the encounter with its vole. Hunter 1, Kleptoparasite 0!

As I was writing these notes, I first wrote ‘barn owl’ instead of ‘American barn owl’. I had forgotten that what was formerly considered a single species (the barn owl) was recently split into three species: American, eastern and western barn owls.

The owl takes off with its vole:

The red-tailed hawk just as it caught up with the owl:

The hawk grabbed the owl’s talons in an attempt to steal the vole:

The owl escaped and the red-tail continued pursuit:

My favorite of the photos. I love the mood and the way the light picks up the hawk’s tail and the owl’s wings and tail:

Eventually the owl outmaneuvered the hawk and the hawk gave up:

Monday: Hili dialogue

October 27, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the beginning of the “work” week: Monday, October 27, 2025, and National American Beer Day. I’m trying to think of an American beer I like, but every craft beer seems to be overhopped these days. How about this one? You don’t need a man bun to drink it!

It’s also National Black Cat Day in the UK, National Parmigiano Reggiano Day, National Potato Day, and Sylvia Plath Day (the poet was born on this day in 1932, and killed herself at age 30.  Here she is (her greatest poem is here):

Rayless, public domain

And to celebrate UK Black Cat Day, here’s a photo from reader Laurie, who happens to live in London:

For National Black Cat Day, her uncle’s namesake, Miss Alcestis Jerry, wishes to pay homage.  

And a photo from Dublin taken by Christina Purcell. Their specialty: finch and chips. (Just kidding!)]

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 27Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: June Lockhart, famous for her roles in the t.v. show “Lassie” as well as “Lost in Space” (I watched a lot of the former, but never saw the latter), has died at 100.

June Lockhart, the soft-spoken actress who exuded earnest maternal wisdom and wistful contentment in two very different mid-20th-century television roles, on the heartwarming children’s series “Lassie” and the futuristic “Lost in Space,” died on Thursday at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 100.

Her death was announced by a spokesman, Harlan Boll.

Ms. Lockhart replaced Cloris Leachman in the role of Ruth Martin, a farm wife and the foster mother of Jon Provost’s character and his courageous collie, Lassie, in 1958, at the beginning of the show’s fifth season. After six years of dispensing homespun wisdom, Ms. Lockhart was herself replaced, along with her human co-stars, in favor of a forest-ranger character (Robert Bray) who would guide the show’s canine heroine through her further adventures.

In 1965, Ms. Lockhart returned to series television, playing a wife, mother and interplanetary explorer turned castaway on “Lost in Space.” Her television family included a robot who seemed to announce “Danger, Will Robinson,” alerting the show’s boy hero (Bill Mumy) to extraterrestrial menace, as often as Lassie’s sensitive ears and nose alerted her to earthly emergencies. The series, which combined an over-the-top villain (Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith) with low-budget production values, became something of a camp classic, acquiring a devoted following years after its original run.

Here’s an episode of “Lassie, which takes me right back to my youth.  Lockhart appears at 1:27.  I had no idea that Cloris Leachman played Ruth Martin before Lockhart!

*Les flics have made some arrests in the Louvre jewel heist., in which four men took more than $100 million in royal jewelry.

The police have made arrests in the brazen jewelry heist last week at the Louvre Museum in Paris, French authorities said on Sunday, without saying how many people had been taken into custody.

The robbery was carried out by four people. Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that the arrests were made on Saturday evening and that one man was arrested at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport as he was trying to leave the country.

It was not immediately clear whether the police had recovered any of the stolen jewelry, worth more than $100 million, which included gem-studded royal tiaras, necklaces and earrings.

The arrests were a major breakthrough in the case. They came one week after the daylight robbery at the Louvre, which put an uncomfortable spotlight on security lapses at the world’s most visited museum.

The arrests were first reported by French news media citing anonymous sources, apparently catching the authorities by surprise.

“I deeply regret the hasty disclosure of this information,” Ms. Beccuau said in her statement. She said that the leaked information would hinder “the 100 or so investigators who mobilized in the search for both the stolen jewelry and for all of the criminals.”

Ms. Beccuau said it was too early to provide further details, adding that she would provide more information after the police finish questioning the suspects.

They used DNA evidence!

Ms. Beccuau said that she would provide more information only after the police finished questioning the suspects.

In a recent interview with Ouest-France newspaper, Ms. Beccuau said that investigators had collected more than 150 forensic samples. That included DNA traces and fingerprints at the crime scene and on objects that the thieves left behind, including power tools, gloves and a motorcycle helmet.

Ms. Beccuau also said that investigators had analyzed video surveillance footage to track the thieves’ escape, although she did not provide details on the route they took.

“The amount of media coverage this organized robbery has received gives me a glimmer of hope that the perpetrators won’t dare to move the jewelry too far,” Ms. Beccuau told the newspaper. “And that we’ll be able to find it if we act quickly.”

Now we don’t know if the jewels were hidden, had the gems removed, or were sold already to some rich miscreant. It’s possible the criminals (if they ARE the criminals) could have hidden the loot and then recover it after they get out of jail. I suspect it will be long sentences after any conviction. And the fact that DNA evidence helped with the case suggests that at least one of the perps has been arrested before, for in France they take DNA from all suspects and criminals and put it in a national database. (UPDATE: The evening news last night said that at least one suspect had a criminal record.)

The French have 4 days after arrest to either release the suspects or charge them.

*Shoot me now department: Kamala Harris has intimated that she might run for President in the next election, proclaiming that she’s devoted her life to public service.

Former vice president Kamala Harris said in an interview that she “possibly” will run for president, adding an early twist to what is already likely to be a hard-fought and complicated race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

Speaking to the BBC for a segment that will air Sunday, Harris said she has not yet decided whether to seek the White House for a third time.

But when she was asked if her nieces would see a woman president, Harris said, “In their lifetime, for sure,” and then asked if it might be her, she added, “Possibly.”

“I am not done,” Harris said in the interview, part of a tour she is conducting in conjunction with the publication of her book, “107 Days,” about her lightning-fast campaign for the presidency last year after President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign.

“I have lived my entire career a life of service, and it’s in my bones … There are many ways to serve. I have not decided yet what I will do in the future beyond what I am doing right now.”

Harris appeared to bristle when the interviewer, BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, suggested that Harris has not performed well in early polls for the 2028 Democratic primary race.

“I think there are all kinds of polls that will tell you a variety of things,” the former vice president said. “I never listen to polls. If I had listened to polls, I never would have run for my first office or my second office, and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here in this interview.”

While many Democrats insist they will not focus on the 2028 race until after next year’s congressional elections, party leaders are privately engaged in intense conversations over what kind of image and message they should present to voters after last year’s devastating second loss to Donald Trump.

Among those considered potential candidates are several prominent governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’ JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Maryland’s Wes Moore and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear. Other figures — including former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Rep. Ro Khanna of California — are also said to be considering running.

The race promises to be a fight between a variety of figures with vastly different ideas on how the Democratic Party can recover from the Trump era. It will feature an unusually blunt debate over what the party should be in the years to come, given the broad rejection of the Democrats by large majorities of rural voters and those without college degrees. In the meantime, the party has been slow to complete a thorough autopsy of what went wrong in 2024.

Against that backdrop, Harris presents a complex figure for Democrats. She is appreciated by many in the party as the first woman to serve as vice president, and the first Black and Asian American person to fill that role.

Enough of this identity stuff: we need a candidate who can win! Among those mentioned above, I’d much prefer Buttigieg, Booker, and Pritzker (not mentioned).  But not Harris, whom I’ve always disliked (though not as much as Trump!). Do you think I just fell out of a coconut tree? The “joy” bit touted by the Dems in the last election was cringeworthy.

*Man, we’re really kicking Canada in the tuchas!  Trump has raised tariffs on Canadian goods by another 10% because an Ontario station ran an ad showing Ronald Reagan opposing tariffs.

The U.S. will impose an additional 10% tariff on Canada, President Trump said on Saturday, a punitive measure in response to an ad campaign that he said misrepresented comments by former President Ronald Reagan.

“Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Saturday.

The ad campaign, released by the Canadian province of Ontario, uses audio from a 1987 radio address delivered by Reagan, in which he explains that despite putting tariffs on Japanese semiconductors that year, he was committed to free-trade policies. While tariffs can look patriotic, Reagan said, “over the long run such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” lead to “fierce trade wars” and result in lost jobs.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” called the ad “a kind of propaganda against U.S. citizens.”

“What was the purpose of that other than to sway public opinion?” he asked.

Trump had threatened to cut off trade talks with Canada on Thursday over the ad, claiming it misrepresents Reagan’s comments, and was being used to influence the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of a hearing on the administration’s tariffs next month. In response, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said that he would call off the campaign, effective Monday. But the ad still ran on Friday night during the first game of the World Series—a fact Trump noted in his Saturday post, saying that the ad “was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY.”

The ad ran again Saturday night during the second game of the World Series.

From the Guardian:

The dispute comes as both countries face critical deadlines in the next few weeks. Next week marks the cutoff for public comments on the scheduled review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which faces its mandatory six-year assessment in July 2026. The following day, 4 November, Carney, will deliver a federal budget expected to focus on reducing reliance on US markets.

Here’s the ad, and I don’t see much distortion of what Reagan said, nor did Trump specify what was wrong.  But Trump is ticked off that Reagan’s being used against him. Right now, tariffs on goods from Canada range from 35% to 50%, but some goods are excempt because of North American trade agreements. What my dad told me when I was a kid aligns perfectly with what Reagan says (my dad was an economist with the government after he left the Army).

*Dinosaur mummies, with fossilized skin and scales rather than just bones, are very rare, but two more have been found in Wyoming.  And they give us a good idea of what the dinos looked like in real life.

During a 1908 dig in Wyoming, the fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg made an unfathomable find: a dinosaur skeleton covered in scaly skin.

The duck-billed Edmontosaurus specimen ended up at the American Museum of Natural History. When it was unveiled in 1909, The New York Times proclaimed the find “was not only a skeleton, but a genuine mummy.”

A year later, in the same part of Wyoming, Mr. Sternberg and his sons discovered a second Edmontosaurus mummy, which they shipped to a museum in Germany.

Nearly a century later, a team of paleontologists returned to Wyoming’s “mummy zone” and unearthed two more Edmontosaurus mummies that preserve an array of rarely fossilized features, including the first example of dinosaur hooves. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers describe the fossils and propose a mummification process that involved microbes and took place more than 66 million years ago.

“For the first time, I think that we’ve got Edmontosaurus’s look completely down,” said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist from the University of Chicago and lead author of the paper. “Based on our drawings, you can put it in a Hollywood movie and it’s going to be accurate head to toe.”

Here’s the paper in Science; click screenshot to read for free. The first author, Paul Sereno, is an evolutionary paleontologist here at Chicago, and has made a number of striking finds:

The abstract:

Two “mummies” of the end-Cretaceous, duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens preserve a fleshy crest over the neck and trunk, an interdigitating spike row over the hips and tail, and hooves capping the toes of the hind feet. A battery of tests shows that all the fossilized integument (skin, spike, hoof) are preserved as a thin (< 1mm) clay template that formed on the surface of a buried carcass during decay prior to loss of all soft tissues and organic compounds. Unlike the underlying permineralized skeletal bone, the integument renderings of these “dinosaur mummies” are preserved as a thin external clay mask, a templating process documented previously only in anoxic marine settings.

Here’s a picture of one mummified duck-bill, used with permission by Sereno and Keillor, and photo taken by Tyler Keillor at the new Fossil Lab. It’s pretty amazing.

And several of the reconstructions in the paper, showing feet, head and body. Click photos to enlarge:

Fig. 3. Pedal hooves, digital pads and fleshy profile in E. annectens. See paper for full caption.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili does not want to move:

Andrzej: Hili, have mercy, I’m trying to find something in this book.
Hili: Try looking for it in another one.

In Polish:

Ja: Hili, litości, ja czegoś szukam w tej książce.
Hili: Poszukaj tego w innej.

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

From Facebook: a cat movie

From Merilee; I can’t vouch for its accuracy!

From The Language Nerds; good advice for everything. Here’s another protip: if somebody asks you a question that you’ve answered earlier, don’t remind them of that: just answer the question again. Reminding them that they asked the question before is a form of shaming, and nothing’s to be gained by doing that.

From Masih, a woman blinded by the Iranian regime (there are so many of them!) speaks out. Sound up, and there are English captions. Masih’s would-be assassins will, as the blinded woman notes, be sentenced this coming Wednesday.

From me via Maarten Boudry:

Richard Dawkins tweets about Anna Krylov’s refusal to do any reviewing for Nature, and gives the Heterodocx STEM link.

One from Malcolm. The U.S. needs more of these!

From Luana, satire of Greta, probably the most-satirized person in Scandinavia:

One from my feed; the hijabis get what they deserve.

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

27 October 1938 | A Dutch Jewish girl, Beppy Abrahamson, was born in Amsterdam.She was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. —Children at AuschwitzLesson: https://lekcja.auschwitz.org/dzieci_EN/Podcast: https://youtu.be/aYKx_zpLSqA

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T03:00:06.626768853Z

And one from Matthew. I can’t embed the first one, but click on the screenshot to see the short video:

Teslas and virtue flaunting

October 26, 2025 • 2:41 pm

I have been waiting for several weeks for this first car—a Tesla sedan (or whatever you call it)—to show up on my block again. It finally did, as I wanted to photograph it.

First, the back (license plate number redacted):

And, just to the left of the plate is this sticker:

For zero emissions AND against fascism. How could you ask for more virtue?  It reminds me of Greta! But what is that sticker for? It could be saying either or both of two things:

1.)  I recognize that Elon Musk is insane.

or

2.)  Please do not scratch up or key my car.

It could mean both, of course, as they are connected.  The second alternative is okay as it is just there to protect the car, but the first rubs me the wrong way  I am no fan of Elon, but I do not go parading that “virtue” all over town. Plus the term “fascist”, like “Nazi”, is being thrown around so widely that it has lost all its meaning.

And think of the poor owner of this vehicle parked right across the street: a $100,000+ Tesla Cybertruck. Is it doomed? I am keeping an eye on the unstickered truck, which is often there, just to see what happens to it.  If nothing, then alternative 2) becomes less plausible.

Bill Maher’s latest “New Rule”

October 26, 2025 • 9:30 am

Bill Maher’s latest comedy/politics skit on Real Time is called “New Rule: Crazy in Gov”. In it, he takes the Republicans to the woodshed, which should dispel the stupid rumors that Maher is a right-winger because he found Trump a genial host during a dinner at the White House. (Those who go after Maher for this always omit the fact that he questioned Trump sharply during that dinner.)

The monologue begins with a general damnation of Trump, followed by a quote from Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s deranged press secretary: “The Democratic Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”  That statement more or less refutes itself.

Maher adds that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called the “No Kings” demonstrations the “Hate America Rally”, composed of “Marxists, the socialists, the Antifa advocates, the the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing.” Finally, he mentions  the pro-Hitler texts of a bunch of Young Republicans.

Maher admits that “each side has its crazies,” but the Republican crazies have found their place in “elected government.” He adds,  “It should not be the case that the White House press spokesman sounds like worst Karen at Dollar General–but she does.”

After spanking conservatives like Scott Adams and Mike Cernovich, Maher adds some unhinged Republican quotes, and, as the bit ends, he finally gets up to speed:

“This insane caricature of the left as ruthless Communists about to force you into gulags, where you’ll sew our Lululemon yoga pants by forced labor—this has got to stop. . . . There’s no great replacement theory; and that 75 million that voted Democrat: they can’t all be drag queens. And one more thing—Democrats sometimes do things without George Soros telling us to.”

He stays away from the wokness of Democrats, though Maher does mentions that near the end. Didn’t didn’t Maher say that this wokeness might cost Democrats the last Presidential election?

It’s not one of his better bits, but it does get good at the end.

The guests are Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Democratic political advisor Kate Bedingfield, and Republican political advisor and commentator Michael Steele.