Category: video

Andrew Doyle’s video retrospective of wokeness

March 4, 2026 • 10:00 am

Andrew Doyle, the creator of both Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath (both of whom some people still take seriously), has taken out after wokeness in the article below from his own site (free to access).  It contains 20 short but inadvertently funny videos documenting the “woke era”—an era that Doyle sees as circling the drain. (I wish!). Here’s his intro:

There is little doubt that historians of the future are going to look back on the ‘woke’ era with utter bafflement. How is it that intelligent people were suddenly caught up in this identity-obsessed hysteria? Why did they forget that free speech mattered? Or that human beings cannot change sex? Or that judging people by the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character was a bad thing?

The lunacy was so intense that these same historians will probably have to be persuaded that any of it happened at all. So I thought it would be helpful to compile some of the more ludicrous and shocking video clips from this recent culture war. A kind of digital time capsule, if you will, for the sceptics of the future.

Woke may not have ended, but with any luck we are over the worst of it. With that in mind, here are my top twenty snapshots of this bonkers period of our history. Enjoy!

Here are the 20 topics; I’ve put asterisks next to my favorites. Some of the topics include more than one video.  Do watch them all; it’s a good summary of how crazy things have gotten.

  1.  The homophobic horses
  2.  The no-no square*
  3.  Gay conversion therapy goes mainstream
  4.  The abolition of history
  5. The alphabet soup (starring Justin Trudeau)
  6. Queers for Palestine*
  7. Problematic allies
  8. “Progressive” racism
  9. Pronoun lunacy, starring Kamala Harris and Jeremy Corbyn*
  10. Student meltdown (the Christakis incident at Yale about the Halloween-costume fracas. It’s worth finding the whole thing on YouTube.)*
  11.  You ain’t black
  12.  Humza Yousef’s own goal
  13.  Childhood indoctrination
  14. Male breastfeeding*
  15. Politicans forget about biology
  16.  Thought police*
  17.  Misogyny becomes “progressive”
  18. Everyone is a Nazi*
  19. Osama bin Laden gets some new fans (his “Letter to the American people” that the young wokesters so admired was removed from the Guardian, but can be seen here (and read about it here).
  20.  The sancification of drag

I suppose my overall favorite is #2: the “no-no square”, described this way:

In Finland, Oulu city council established a €2.5 million project to address the rising cases of sexual assaults by migrants. It was called ‘Safe Oulu’, and this was the official dance.

This performative “dance” is supposed to reduce sexual assault, as if people don’t already know where are the parts that shouldn’t be touched.

 

Reader’s wildlife videos

February 19, 2026 • 8:15 am

Praise Ceiling Cat, fleas be upon him: we have received a couple of submissions to tide us over. Today biologist and artist Lou Jost, who works at Ecuador’s Ecominga Foundation, has contributed some lovely hummingbird videos.  Lou’s captions are indented, and you know how to enlarge YouTube videos:

The Americas are currently the only continents that have hummingbirds, though the oldest hummingbird-like fossils are actually from Europe. In today’s world the centers of hummingbird diversity are the mountains of Costa Rica and Panama, and the northern Andes of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Ecuador alone has 137 species of hummingbirds, compared to only 15-17 hummingbird species regularly found in the US. I recently visited an Ecuadorian birding lodge (Sachatamia) in northwest Ecuador, with many hummingbird feeders. The chaotic swarm of hummingbirds surrounding these feeders gives a good impression of this diversity. Here are some phone videos I took over the course of a few minutes.

Left to right: three Andean Emeralds, (Uranomitra franciae; white throats, light blue crown iridescence), the aptly named White-necked Jacobin (Florisuga mellivora), another Andean Emerald (head down) and a Rufous-tailed Hummingbird (Amazilia tzacatl, pink beak and iridescent green throat), also initially head down). Then more Rufous-tailed Hummingbirds and a brief Brown Violetear (Colibri delphinae):

Booted Raquet-tail (Ocreatus underwoodii) and Andean Emerald:

Purple-bibbed Whitetip (Urosticte benjamini, white spot behind eye and in tail, iridescent purple throat), Booted Raquet-tail, second Purple-bibbed White tip. Then something else obscured by feeder:

Female Empress Brilliant (Heliodoxa imperatrix)?, female Violet-crowned Woodnymph (Thalurania colombica, blue shoulders), displaced by male Green-crowned Woodnymph (iridescent green throat and purple body) in turn displaced by Empress Brilliant, photobombed at end by tiny beelike woodstar species:

Green-crowned Woodnymph front, Fawn-breasted Brilliant  (Heliodoxa rubinoides, fawn breast, pink chest/throat patch) at rear, displaced by male Empress Brilliant,  cameos by White-necked Jacobin, Andean Emerald, and others.

Velvet-purple Coronet (Boissonneaua jardini):

Brown Violetear, Empress Brilliant, a woodstar species, and Andean Emerald:

A panel of authors from the anthology “The War on Science”

October 8, 2025 • 11:45 am

As I’ve mentioned, the anthology The War on Science, edited by Lawrence Krauss, has gotten some flak from “progressives”. These critics argue that it really should have been a book about how Trump and the Republicans are attacking science rather than a book about how the Left is damaging science. I’m not going to go after that whataboutery again, as I’ve done it before. No one side is immune from criticism, and there are a gazillion people noting, correctly, that Trump is doing rather serious damage to scientific funding right now. But how many people are showing how the leftist ideology is injuring science? QED. (Full disclosure: Luana Maroja and I have a chapter in this book, one that’s a slight revision of one we wrote for The Skeptical Inquirer.)

At any rate, there is now a longish video, featuring Krauss and three authors, with moderator Joshua Katz.  Everyone on the panel is listed below in bold.  It was based on a discussion held by the American Enterprise Institute, and if you want to damn it because the AEI is a generally conservative venue, damn away, but you’ll be outing yourself as narrow minded.  Here are the AEI notes for the discussion that I’ve put below.

On October 2, AEI’s Joshua T. Katz hosted an event to discuss The War on Science, a new volume to which he and several other AEI fellows contributed chapters.

After brief opening remarks from AEI’s M. Anthony Mills, the Origins Project Foundation’s Lawrence M. Krauss, the volume’s editor, delivered a presentation offering historical context for the book and detailing some notable instances of the imposition of ideology on scholarly practices. Each panelist then gave brief overviews of their respective chapters: AEI’s Sally Satel discussed her chapter “Social Justice, MD—Medicine Under Threat”; AEI’s Carole Hooven discussed her chapter “Why I Left Harvard”; and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s Solveig Lucia Gold discussed “An Apology for Philology,” a chapter she coauthored with Dr. Katz.

Following these remarks, the panelists engaged in a discussion moderated by Dr. Katz, and the event concluded with a Q&A, wherein panelists fielded questions from the audience.

Event description

Among assaults on merit-based hiring, the policing of language, the denial of empirical data in medicine and science, and the replacement of well-established standards with ideological mantras, rigorous scholarship is under threat throughout Western institutions. To make matters worse, many who have spoken up against this threat have faced professional consequences, creating a climate of fear that undermines the very foundation of modern research. In The War on Science, the Origins Project Foundation’s Lawrence M. Krauss assembles a group of prominent scholars from wide-ranging disciplines to detail ongoing efforts to impose ideological restrictions on scholarship—and issue a clarion call for change.

Solveig Lucia Gold, Senior Fellow in Education and Society, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
Carole Hooven, Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Lawrence M. Krauss, President, Origins Project Foundation
Sally Satel, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Moderator:
Joshua T. Katz, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Now I haven’t yet listened to the whole thing, as I cannot abide long podcasts and videos, so I’m going through it person by person.  So far I’ve heard Krauss’s nice opening (31 min.), which spares no science-warping ideologue from the Left, giving lots of cringeworthy examples.  If you have the patience to listen to a 1.5-hour long discussion all the way through, knock yourself out and comment below.

Nicholas Christakis interviewed about attacks on science

August 4, 2025 • 11:30 am

Lawerence Krauss has conducted 20 interviews with people who contributed to the recent book he edited, The War on Science (Luana Maroja and I coauthored chapter, a reworking of an earlier publication).  I’ve listened to some but not all of the interviews, and many are good (you can find the collection here).  But today I want to highlight Krauss’s interview with Yale physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis for one reason: it rebuts some critics’ accusation that the book, which deals largely with “progressive” Leftist attacks on science, is deficient because it neglects a bigger threat to science: the one from the Right conducted by Trump and his minions. In fact, some benighted people have even claimed that our book was outmoded before it appeared on July 29.  None of these critics, by the way, have read the book (see one example here).

I’ve responded to this criticism by making several of the points articulated by both Krauss and Christakis in the video below. First, they agree, along with me, that yes, Trump’s depredations on science right now are indeed a more serious threat to science than are the attacks from the Left.  But so what? Most of us have criticized what Trump has done: I, for one, have called it out almost daily on my Hili posts.  But for several reasons that does not mean that we should completely neglect attacks on science from the Left. One I’ve mentioned already: attacks from the Left come largely from within science, and are likely to persist for decades as students are propagandized by “progressive” faculty. (Trump, on the other hand, will be gone in 3.5 years, and one hopes that what he’s doing to science will be reversed, which it easily can be.)  Plenty of people are in fact going after Trump for his right-wing blackmail, but who is going after the Left?

Second, the book was conceived and assembled before the Trump Mafia decided to use science funding as a blackmail to bend universities to its will. But the book didn’t change when Trump started the blackmail, and I think that’s okay, but the point of the book was simply to show from where in science the attacks on science are coming from.

Third, Leftist attacks on science are largely worldwide, while the attack on science from the Right is largely limited to the U.S.

Finally, Christakis points out at 7:20, there are attacks on science from both Right and Left, and the attack from the Right is more serious. Yet, as they both add beginning at 9:05, the attack on science by the Right was motivated in part by the behavior of “progressive” scientists from the Left!  As Christakis says, “We made ourselves into political actors and so therefore became political targets. And we are an easy target because we have been hypocritical, we have been self-serving. . . . we definitely played a role in this. But I think a political commentator in the United States said that ‘Trump is the wrong answer to the right question’. . . . There’s a kernel there, as you and Niall [Ferguson] were talking about, where we did make ourselves into targets.  And this is why, in my judgement, many of the authors of the book volume you edited—The War on Science-—have the credibility to push back against the right—because they also push back against the Left.”  Christakis then explains why criticisms of the book outlined above are misguided.

In fact, I know many of the book’s authors, and all of them whose politics I know are on the Left side of the political spectrum (I can’t vouch for those I don’t know), and also think that what Trump is doing to science is execrable. We are not, as some imply, a pack of alt-right Nazi sympathizers!

All in all, I don’t take seriously the criticism that our book is either trivial or outdated. I find criticisms like those of Jonathan Howard at Science-Based Medicine (another person who didn’t read the book) both amusing and uninformed.

Those who want to address the book’s arguments should read the damn thing and actually deal with its contentions. So far, nobody has.

At any rate, I’ve always admired Christakis ever since he dealt so calmly with the unhinged Yale students enraged by the infamous Yale Halloween letter.  Here he shows the pernicious effects that ideology can have on science, whether that ideology comes from either the Right or the Left.  I haven’t yet read Christakis’s piece in the book, but look forward to it.

Ze Frank: True facts about parasitoid wasps

November 6, 2024 • 12:15 pm

Matthew sent in this latest “True Facts” video from Ze Frank; it’s about some of the most amazing and nefarious insects around: parasitoid wasps. (There’s an ad in the middle.)

There are a lot of questions and “I don’t know” answers here. The gall wasps are especially fascinating from an evolutionary viewpoint, as they somehow modify a plant’s gene expression to make the plant grow a gall that can house the wasp.

We don’t know how they do this, but even the gall wasps inside their houses can themselves be parasitized by other species of gall wasps (Again, we don’t know how these “hyperparasitoids” detect and find a larval host inside a gall). Finally, we don’t understand how natural selection has modified a parasitoid wasp so that it injects stuff into its host that modifies the host’s behavior, making iot a “zombie host.”

The photography is amazing; it seems to get better with every one of ZeFrank’s videos.

Do watch this; you’ll learn some natural history and, I hope, be amazed at the achievements of natural selection.

Readers’ wildlife photos and videos (adorable Arctic fox cubs)

July 18, 2024 • 8:15 am

After a long break doing field work, Bruce Lyon of UC Santa Cruz, now in Alaska working on birds, sent some photos of bonus mammals: cute Arctic foxed with added VIDEOS. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. His intro:

Since foxes are honorary cats on WEIT, I thought people would enjoy some photos and videos of an arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) family on St Paul Island, Alaska, where I have spent the summer studying birds. There is a fox den in the boulders next to the beach near my lodging and the pair has a whopping nine pups! The other day all nine adorable fuzzballs were playing out in the open on the beach and I was able to watch and photograph their antics. There were lots of playfights, chases and pounces, tossing bits of dried fish into the air, chewing and attacking a piece of driftwood on the beach, and leaping up and pirouetting in the air.

Arctic foxes are native to St Paul Island and virtually all individuals are blue morph rather than white morph foxes. Occasionally, white morph individuals do get here by crossing the winter sea ice. The morphs are apparently produced by a single Mendelian gene (the MC1R gene). However, three of the pups have white feet, so perhaps the coat color is mostly but not entirely determined by the MC1R gene.

JAC: Here’s the location of St. Paul Island in the Priblofs (from Wikipedia):

A video best shows how adorable these fuzzballs are. Seven of the nine pups are in view:

Another video—the pups having fun with their driftwood toy:

One last video—a sibling’s tail makes for a great toy:

The fox playground. The pup on the right is in pounce mode and pounced on its sib just after I took the photograph:

A pup inspects a fish head. Someone from the local fish processing plant may have dumped a bunch of fish on the beach for the foxes but it is also possible that the parents dragged the fish here from wherever the fish scraps are dumped:

A chase:

These guys took a break from playfighting but then the one on the right batted its sib and in the process lost its balance and toppled over (the following photo):

Next few photos: Mom’s home!  The adult female showed up and the pups mobbed her. They were so excited to see her—lots of bouncing and tail-wagging. She nursed them for a bit (I think they had to take turns; too many to fit at one time) but she soon decided she had had enough and nipped at the kids to chase them off:

A pup checks me out:

ZeFrank on plants with explosive dispersal

July 1, 2024 • 12:20 pm

There’s a trigger warning on ZeFrank’s recent video: “True Facts is not appropriate for children, nor for adults who don’t act like children.” But in fact this 11+ minute video is perfectly appropriate for kids. (There’s a commercial from 3:15 to 4:22).

It’s about plants that disperse their seeds, spores, or pollen explosively, including liverworts, dogwoods, mosses, witch hazel, oats, and sundry others.

Not only do the explosions disperse the seeds (clearly an adaptive trait; you want your genes to be away from your plot, where they compete with you), but in some cases the explosion has evolved to give the dispersing seeds an orientation that makes them go further.  And some of the spores, as in horsetails, have little arms that curl with changes in humidity that allow them to “walk” along the ground! (Oat seeds can do the same thing, hopping with their “awns” and then twisting themselves into the ground.) As usual, the photography is amazing, so don’t miss this one. The extensive research is documented by a list of references at the end.

In this video ZeFrank doesn’t mention evolution or natural selection, but of course it’s implicit in these amazing and diverse adaptations for dispersal. I, for one, hardly knew anything about these features, and was delighted to see all these complicated results of natural selection, which of course is cleverer than you are.  Seeds that plant themselves by screwing themselves into the dirt!

h/t: Mary