Month: February 2026

College essays change for the worse, rendered ineffectual by both how universities use them and how students can cheat using AI

February 24, 2026 • 11:03 am

Today’s article, by Liza Libes, was published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In its decision of the two cases Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court strongly limited the role of race in college admissions.  Using race as a prima facie criterion for admission was declared unconstitutional, but race could still be considered in admissions in a limited way. As the decision of the Harvard case said on page 8 (both were decided together)

At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. 

Everyone immediately speculated that, because many colleges are determined to continue using race as a criterion for admission, they would try to circumvent the Court’s decision by asking students, in their admissions essays, to describe how they overcame hardships or would contribute to the university community, realizing that students would slip in race or ethnicity in these essays to lubricate their admission. As Libes describes in her piece (click screenshot below to read), that’s exactly what was done in North Carolina.

Libes also stresses the importance of real writing—as opposed to AI—as a skill that will help students in their later lives, for of course one can get AI to write essays along the lines of the themes above. I did that for one admissions essay (see below).

First, why students should learn to write well with their own brains and hands, and why colleges should ask for more than boilerplate essays designed to foster racial diversity or assess students’ ideologies. Libes’s extracts are indented:

Despite what our schools may have students believe about the relative uselessness of writing, strong writers achieve disproportionate professional success because good writing is a proxy for creative thinking—and creative thinkers become society’s visionaries. Take Steve Jobs, who was a storyteller before he was a programmer, or Thurgood Marshall, who reshaped American law not only through legal mastery but through powerful rhetoric. These mavericks have gone down in history not necessarily for their technical proficiency but for their aptitude for creativity.

Writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.Writing is the best tool we have to showcase creative thought.

. . . A good writer is therefore a strong thinker—and this distinction transcends academic disciplines. In my counseling practice, for instance, I routinely observe smart STEM students producing more insightful essays than average humanities students, because good writing is not so much a measure of technical ability as it is a proxy for the capacity to express ideas. Because creative thinking is invaluable in any walk of life, writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.

I suppose that part of Libes’s job is to prepare students for college admissions, as she’s not on a faculty.  But I’m heartened by her observation that STEM students write better essays than humanities students.  I have no experience of whether that’s true, as I never taught humanities students.

According to Libes, the changing of the college admissions essay, which began as a way to keep Jews out of elite colleges by looking for “Protestant values,” started after the banning of racial quotas in the Bakke case (1978):

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, however, with many universities forced to drop their racial quotas, the college essay evolved into a tool for admissions officers to gain a glimpse of applicants’ “backgrounds and perspectives.” Soon, the college essay became less about the discriminatory idea of “fit” and more about the ideas that students could bring to the intellectual table.

Around the same time, the revamped college essay shifted admissions practices towards a more holistic evaluative model that relied less on grades and test scores than on the applicant’s intellectual potential as a whole. In one sense, this model is still in use today: I have students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores who not only fail to secure admission to “elite” colleges but who are also destined to land in menial professional roles—not because they aren’t smart but because they have never learned to effectively express their ideas. In theory, the college essay should be an effective tool to separate “smart but dull” from “smart and interesting” students. Though many college-consulting professionals have expressed doubts about the viability of the college essay in the face of generative AI, so-called large language models will only ever fall into the category of “smart but dull,” giving truly visionary students a chance to shine by demonstrating their capacity for original thinking.

These changes, then, apparently occurred between the early Sixties and the Bakke decision in 1978:

For a brief moment in time—the halcyon decades following the Civil Rights era—the college essay did indeed allow strong writers and thinkers to rise to the top of our society. In his book On Writing the College Application Essay, for instance, former Columbia admissions officer Harry Bauld wrote that the college essay “shows you at your alive and thinking best.” That was 1987. Today, colleges seem to be doing everything they can to move the college essay away from the model of “thinking” prowess towards the infamous doctrine of “fit.”

And so college essays have degenerated into exercises that allow admissions offices to judge both the rcial and ideological “fit” of students to a given school. Libes uses as examples schools on  in North Carolina. Get a load of this:

Of the five most competitive colleges in North Carolina—Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State—three ask the ubiquitous “fit” question, prompting students to identify their reasons for wishing to attend these universities in a short-answer statement. [JAC: as you see below, the University of Chicago also asks a “fit” question.] Duke explicitly uses the language of “values” in its prompt, suggesting that the university cares less about academic preparation than it does about the morals of each individual applicant. Share the wrong moral values—conservatism, religious traditionalism, or moral absolutism, among others—and risk facing a rejection letter in your inbox the coming spring.

The “fit” question is not the only way these colleges screen for values. UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest both insist that students demonstrate their readiness to make contributions to their “community,” thereby favoring students with a natural bent towards communal rather than individualistic values. Wake Forest, in fact, has no reservations about framing its “community” prompt in terms of social justice:

Dr. Maya Angelou, renowned author, poet, civil-rights activist, and former Wake Forest University Reynolds Professor of American Studies, inspired others to celebrate their identities and to honor each person’s dignity. Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?

Similarly, Wake Forest asks students to identify their top-five favorite books. While this might seem an innocuous and even intellectually worthy question, there is no doubt that a student who includes Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will fare better in the admissions process than a student who dares to list Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Oy gewalt: that Wake Forest question seems to be there to weed out students who don’t have the correct “progressive” ideology! And does Wake Forest also give a selection of Maya Angelou quotes, or does it assume that students already know her books? If they don’t, they’ll be scurrying like termites to read them ASAP.

And Duke, which I’ve realized is woker than I knew, raises the issue of the goodness of diversity, and explicitly incorporates that in a question. You know the students are going to go full Kendi with this one:

Adapting to the rise of wokeness in 2014, for instance, Duke added the following college-essay prompt:

Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.

But with the rise of Trumpism and the suppression of DEI and wokeness in universities, Libes notes that essay questions are now concentrating on the value of viewpoint diversity, which Libes says is “this year’s new ‘it’ essay.” She concludes by once again emphasizing real essays that inspire independent thought rather than ticking off presumed boxes about race and ideology:

If colleges wish to remain institutions devoted to intellectual excellence rather than moral choreography, they must abandon their obsession with “fit” and return to the college essay’s original purpose: to identify students most capable of independent thought.

It is precisely those students who go on to shape ideas, build institutions, and sustain our free, pluralistic society.

Libes doesn’t deal with AI so much (see below), but her essay is well worth reading, and inspired me to look up the University of Chicago’s admissions essays. My school is famous for asking unusual and sometimes off-the-wall questions aimed at demonstrating a student’s ability to think. And commercial sources publicize them during the admissions cycle, to let students see what they’re in for and to offer students “help” by producing company-written answers for a fee (I consider this unethical). You can see the list of admissions questions for 2025-2026 at the commerical site here (“we can help you draft in time for submission”). Sadly, the only required question is of the anodyne type seen above:

Question 1 (Required)

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

A big yawn for that one! It’s a “fit” question like the ones in North Carolina.  HOWEVER, we offer seven other essays that are far more interesting as gauges of creativity, and applicants must choose to answer just one of these in addition to Question 1. I’ll show you just three:

Essay Option 1

In an ideal world where inter-species telepathic communication exists, which species would you choose to have a conversation with, and what would you want to learn from them? Would you ask beavers for architectural advice? Octopuses about cognition? Pigeons about navigation? Ants about governance? Make your case—both for the species and the question.

Essay Option 2

If you could uninvent one thing, what would it be — and what would unravel as a result?

Essay Option 6

Statistically speaking, ice cream doesn’t cause shark attacks, pet spending doesn’t drive the number of lawyers in California, and margarine consumption isn’t responsible for Maine’s divorce rate—at least, not according to conventional wisdom. But what if the statisticians got it wrong? Choose your favorite spurious correlation and make the case for why it might actually reveal a deeper, causative truth.

Now THOSE are questions worth offering, and do you really need the required question to assess a student’s ability?

But there is one big problem: AI can answer all of these questions, and better than most students. As an example, I chose the Option 1 question, about telepathy, and sent it to Luana to put into her paid AI bot. I will put the bot’s answer below the fold. But do read it because it’s amazingly good and, to me at least, indistinguishable from a human answer. In fact, it’s much better than I think many high-school students could write. THAT is why they use AI, and why Luana thinks that AI spells the death of humanities in liberal-arts schools.

In the end, then, given the existence of AI and its ubiquitous use by students, is there really any point to asking essay questions? I doubt it, especially because you can “guide” the AI bot by asking for specific things to appear.  After due cogitation, I decided that universities should require only four things for admission, none of them essays:

  1. High-school grades
  2. SATs or ACT standardized test scores. Sadly, these are optional at the University of Chicago, and 80% of American colleges and universities either do not require test scores or forbid submitting test scores. (Grok says 90-93% don’t require them, though in 2015 60-65% of them did.) Doing away with test requirements is a big mistake.  There is no downside to using such scores; they were banned or made optional solely as a way to increase ethnic diversity, even though an article in the NYT shows that using standardized tests does not hurt diversity.and is also the best predictor of success in college, success in getting into graduate school, and success in the workplace in later life.
  3. Letters of recommendation. (These are not great, as students won’t ask for letters unless they know they’ll get good ones. In fact, I’ve been asked by students requesting letters from me to assure them that I’d write a good one.)
  4. Personal interviews.  You can tell a lot about a person from a 20-minute interview. Unfortunately, those have been used, as at Harvard, as a tool to weed out students—in their case Asian students, who were deemed from interviews to not be as “personable” as other students. That this was a bogus way to reduce the percentage of Asians admitted came from data showing that the difference appeared only when Harvard staff did the interviews, not when alumni were recruited to do interviews.

Some schools, like those concentrating on music, art, or fashion design, require submitting samples of your work, which cannot (as of yet) be faked by AI.

The four criteria above should suffice to properly assess students.  And standardized tests should always be required.  I’m hoping for the day when the University of Chicago realizes that.

Click “continue reading” to see the AI answer to the essay option 1 (on telepathy) below. We didn’t specify a word limit, though both essays that Grok produced were close to 500 words (I show just one response).  Thanks  to Luana for interacting with the bot.

Continue reading “College essays change for the worse, rendered ineffectual by both how universities use them and how students can cheat using AI” →

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 24, 2026 • 8:15 am

We have a timely contribution, and a bit of duck-related drama in New Jersey, from Jan Malik, whose captions and story are indented below. (The duck was, in the end, unharmed.) You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is a short series of pictures from Barnegat Light that I took about twelve years ago. I was sitting on the rock jetty one February day, scanning for any passing seabirds, when something in the corner of my eye caught my attention: a commotion farther out in the inlet channel. A duck was being attacked by a large gull.

Trigger warning and spoiler alert: the gull went hungry— the duck escaped that morning.

The prey: Long‑tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis)

This isn’t the actual bird that was attacked; I think I photographed this one later that day. But like the victim, it was probably an immature male. Long‑tailed Ducks form large flocks outside the breeding season, wintering offshore from the Arctic Ocean, Norway, Greenland, and Canada, and reaching New Jersey when the weather turns especially cold. Unfortunately, their IUCN status is Vulnerable, and based on my very unscientific observations over twenty years of winter trips to the Jersey shore, their numbers seem to be declining.

The drama begins: the duck is caught by a Great Black‑backed Gull (Larus marinus).

These gulls—the largest species in the family Laridae—are powerful scavengers and opportunistic predators. I don’t see them often at Barnegat Light or other exposed coastal areas; they seem to prefer city dumps and places with more edible refuse than the clean, wind‑swept inlet.

Each bird pulls in a different direction.  The duck tries to dive, while the gull attempts to lift its prey and carry it to land, where it can kill it properly by violent shaking.

Given the size difference, the duck can’t fight back All it can do is try to slip free:

A second gull arrives The possibility of a meal attracts another gull, which immediately tries to steal the catch. This actually helps the duck—when raptors (if we can stretch the term to include gulls) quarrel over prey, they often drop it:

The gull’s grip is weak.  Here it’s clear that not all is lost for the duck. The gull’s smooth, non‑serrated bill has only a tenuous hold on the duck’s feathers, and it’s far from securing a proper grip:

The gull’s feet offer no help. Like other gulls, Great Black‑backed Gulls have webbed feet built for paddling, not grasping. Their only real weapon is the bill, and in this case it wasn’t placed well enough to subdue the duck:

The hunt ends unsuccessfully.  The duck breaks free and immediately dives. Long‑tailed Ducks can dive 100–200 feet (30–60 m) and swim underwater using both their feet and wings, much like penguins:

Another Long‑tailed Duck in flight.  I include this photo to show why the species is called “long‑tailed,” although this individual doesn’t have the longest tail I’ve seen. These ducks were once called “Oldsquaw” in the United States and “Old Wife” in parts of England, but in the early 2000s the name was changed because it was considered offensive. I agree with the change, though I sometimes wonder whether it marked the beginning of the slippery slope that later led to Audubon being “canceled” and many other biological names being flagged as candidates for revision.

JAC:  All’s well that ends well.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 24, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, February 24, 2026, and it’s National Tortilla Chip Day. Better with guacamole than with salsa, this comestible, the backbone of nachos, was popularized, if not invented, in America:

Ignacio Anaya used triangles of fried tortilla for the nachos he created in 1943.

The triangle-shaped tortilla chip was popularized by Rebecca Webb Carranza in the 1940s as a way to make use of misshapen tortillas rejected from the automated tortilla manufacturing machine that she and her husband used at their Mexican delicatessen and tortilla factory in southwest Los Angeles. Carranza found that the discarded tortillas, cut into triangles and fried, were a popular snack, and she sold them for a dime a bag at the El Zarape Tortilla Factory. In 1994, Carranza received the Golden Tortilla award for her contribution to the Mexican food industry

It’s also World Bartender Day and World Spay Day.

Tonight Trump delivers the State of the Union address before the Congress and members of The Supreme Court.  Will there be protests from Democrats?  The NYT has a column (archived here) in which three op-ed writers discuss, “After a big loss, what to expect from Trump at the State of the Union.”  The “loss” refers to the Supreme Court decision rejecting Trump’s tariffs, which he’s now trying to circumvent.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*NYT staff writer Jeneen Interlandi describes in a longish op-ed “The human cost of Trump’s war on science” (article archived here).

Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And, along the way, trust has been broken between scientists, the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.

It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it: central air conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world, and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.

The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all-encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.

Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.

The bulk of the article concerns the Trump-induced tribulations of Kathryn Macapagal, identified as a “clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who lost four grants and a quarter of her salary in the first flurry of Trump cuts in NIH and NSF funding. But her grants and salary have been restored. The article also concentrates heavily on funding for LGBTQ initiatives, but the cuts affect more than that:

In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broke the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch, and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.

Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country), and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicine those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.

What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one where science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled (as a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political). But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.

The title of the article is a bit misleading about its contents, which concentrate on a single researcher and on diseases prevalent in the LGBTQ community.  All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not doing research any longer.

*A new poll by ABC, the Washington Post, and IPSOS shows that Trump’s approval rating (just before the State of the Union address) has dropped, to only 39%, but the authors say that Democrats shouldn’t necessarily be ready to see their party winning a lot of elections.

As President Donald Trump prepares to address the nation Tuesday evening, Americans remain generally sour about his performance, with majorities disapproving of his handling of priority initiatives while saying he has overreached the authority of his office, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.

The president’s approval rating stands at 39 percent positive and 60 percent negative, including 47 percent who say they strongly disapprove. The last time Trump’s disapproval touched 60 percent was shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among registered voters, Trump’s approval is 41 percent and his disapproval is 58 percent.

Here’s a graph from the Post, though note that the Y-axis is between 40 and 60%. The upper line is the disapproval rating. which has gone up 7% in a year.

Dissatisfaction with Trump applies to specific issues, as well, with significant majorities saying they disapprove of how he is handling the economy, tariffs, inflation and relations with other countries. His worst rating is on inflation — 32 percent approve of how he has dealt with the issue. On the question of his handling of the economy overall, 41 percent approve, but while he still gets low ratings on this, the gap between negative and positive assessments has narrowed from 25 points negative in October to negative 16 this month.

For Democrats, Trump’s relatively low standing provides opportunities for the upcoming midterm elections, but the party out of power has made little headway in persuading Americans that they have better ideas or policies to offer and are seen as no more in touch with the concerns of the average person.

Asked whether they trust Trump or Democrats in Congress to handle major issues, 33 percent cite the president, 31 percent say Democrats, 4 percent say both equally and a crucial 31 percent say neither. In April, Trump led by 37 percent-30 percent on this question.

Trump will deliver the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress after a disruptive first year that has produced some successes but more controversies.

Though his approval rating has sagged from the early months of 2025, it is not statistically changed from 41 percent in October. That highlights the degree to which opinions about Trump remain firm and largely fixed among both his supporters and the far larger group of detractors. In the new poll, 85 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s job performance while 94 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of independents disapprove. Those numbers are almost identical to the partisan breakdown in a Post-ABC-Ipsos poll in October.

I voted this morning (by mail) in the local and Illinois primaries, but of course this is a Democratic state and so things will remain Democratic, and that’s fine with me. We’re also replacing a Senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, and there were lots of primary candidates for his position. I chose what whom I think is the best candidate, but all are untested.  Still, I try not to think too much about how the Democrats are doing, not only because the news isn’t good, but also because it’s early in the election cycle and I have a life to live; all I can do is give my opinions and vote. The midterms will be telling.

*Mexico’s most powerful drug kingpin, “El Mencho,” was killed by national security forces, something that doesn’t happen often (article archived here). In retribution, though the cartel is torching cars and businesses, as well as blocking roads in Guadalajara and other places in the state of Jalisco. The drug boss was apparently found by tracking his girlfriend, though we don’t know how that was done.

Mexico’s most powerful drug kingpin, the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, was killed by Mexican security forces on Sunday, Mexican defense officials said.

The killing of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” represents a major show of force by the country’s military as President Donald Trump continues to pressure the United States’ southern neighbor to do more to fight its drug trafficking organizations.

The cartel leader’s killing set off a wave of violence in areas controlled by the cartel, with reports of burning cars blocking roads. In Guadalajara, the capital city of the western state of Jalisco and one of the host cities of the upcoming World Cup, businesses were shut down, sirens and helicopters could be heard in the city center, and residents were warned to stay inside.

The U.S. Embassy warned U.S. citizens in Jalisco and Tamaulipas states, and parts of three other states, to shelter in place because of security operations and related road blockages and criminal activity.

Oseguera, one of the most wanted fugitives in Mexico, was a founder of the New Generation cartel, which has grown to become one of the most powerful and violent organizations in Mexico, trafficking large quantities of fentanyl, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine into the U.S.

. . .U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, in a post on X, described Oseguera as “one of the bloodiest and most ruthless drug kingpins” and said his killing was a “great development for Mexico, the U.S., Latin America, and the world.”

In a hotel in Guadalajara, tourists on Sunday morning had no way to get to the airport, with taxis and public transit paralyzed. Hotel staff worked a double shift because employees had no way to get to work. A woman made a sign of the cross as she stepped outside the hotel.

Although Trump once floated a U.S. invasion of Mexico to stop drugs, this seems unlikely, and we’ll see how Mexico’s new President, Claudia Sheinbaum—the country’s first woman Preisdent and its first Jewish President (the U.S. hasn’t had either)—will do with her promise to clamp down on drugs.  Clearly the cartels are enormously powerful in Mexico, rivaling the government. Imagine if this situation obtained in the U.S., and when a big drug-seller was taken down, huge areas of the country become nonfunctional, to the point where people must stay indoors.

*Reader Peter from Australia reports that a group of lesbians are fighting in court to keep trans-identified men out of their events.

A long-running legal battle over whether a lesbian group can exclude transgender women from its events has made its way to the Federal Court.

The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) is appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission, which ruled it could not legally exclude transgender women.

The case, described as a “clash of rights”, will determine whether the rights of cisgender lesbians come at the expense of trans lesbians.

The Victorian-based LAG says it subscribes to the philosophy of lesbian feminism and does not believe humans can change sex.

It wishes to hold public political and social events exclusively for “lesbian-born females” that would exclude all males irrespective of whether they identify as women.

The group requires an exemption to do this in order to avoid breaching the Sex Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to exclude someone on the basis of gender identity.

The LAG was denied a five-year exemption in 2023, when it applied to the Human Rights Commission.

It then lodged an appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal, which found “overt acts of discrimination” should not be allowed and the exemption could have a detrimental impact on trans women.

The group has now appealed to the Federal Court after running a crowdfunding campaign that raised close to $40,000, with donations made by people from around the world.

Today the LAG’s lawyers told the court the group had the freedom to associate in a way that catered to their own needs.

Counsel Leigh Howard said there was “no human right to be invited to the party” and that the exemption should be granted on the same basis that female-only gyms were given exemptions.

This wouldn’t fly in the UK where they have legalized a definition of “woman” based on biology.  In Australia your sex is apparently defined solely by your “gender identification”, whether or not you’ve had transitioning treatments like hormones or surgery. I can understand the anger of lesbians, who presume that a lesbian must be a woman, not a trans-identified man. This may be an additional example of a clash of rights between groups with biological women (lesbians in this case) are entitled to their own “space.”

*Mark Gustafson’s WSJ column is called “The diminishing risk of an Iran attack,” but by that he means that the risk of Iran attacking other countries is lower, not that the risk of a U.S. attack on Iran is lessening. Gustafson is identified as “White House chief of intelligence (2021-22) and head of the Situation Room (2022-25).” It’s clear he thinks that the risk of U.S. action is smaller than it was during the Biden administration, though there are palpable dangers, like creating chaos in the Middle East.

A lot has changed in two years. The risk of regional war has greatly diminished. Several factors have put the regime on its heels:

• Iran’s regional strength has weakened. Sustained Israeli and U.S. strikes have significantly degraded its proxy network of Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iraqi Shiite militias, the backbone of Tehran’s deterrence strategy. Iran has struggled to resupply them, limiting its ability to mount coordinated retaliation.

• The regime faces profound domestic strain. The economy is in free fall. The rial has lost more than 90% of its value since 2018. Inflation has hovered near 50% annually. Corruption has drained the revolutionary fervor that sustained the state’s legitimacy. Last month the regime killed thousands of protesters in a few days.

• U.S. military capabilities have advanced significantly. Precision strike systems, cyber tools, missile defenses and offensive drones can impose costs without a ground invasion. In Venezuela last month, new tools to disable the electric grid, destroy missile-defense systems, and facilitate cyberattacks helped ensure a successful operation.

• Iran’s leadership is fractured. Last year, Israeli operations killed many of Ali Khamenei’s most loyal security officials, leaving behind tenuous alliances and a supreme leader who is almost 87.

• Iran’s military capabilities are hamstrung. Last year, Israel destroyed most of Iran’s long-range missile infrastructure, advanced air defenses, ammunition depots and radar sites.

• Tehran’s response to Israeli and U.S. attacks last year was tepid. It could muster only a missile barrage against a well-defended U.S. base in Qatar. This time around, the U.S. has deployed more-advanced air defenses to protect its bases and almost doubled the naval and air assets it deployed last year.

For the Trump administration, the upside of acting at a moment of Iranian vulnerability is plainly alluring. It could further erode proxy networks, blunt the nuclear threat, and help tip the global balance of power in America’s favor.

Meamwhile, the U.S. continues to amass troops and weapons around Iran, at the same time that many Iranians, according to the Washington Post’s morning report, are fearful, defiant, exasperated, and divided in their feelings about a possible U.S. attack, but “joyful” or “hopeful” are not words that were used.

Our armaments and troops around Iran:

From the WaPo: Note: Some U.S. ship locations are approximate. Source: New York Times reporting and analysis of satellite imagery, ship- and flight-tracking data. The New York Times

Will the U.S. attack? I still think so, but it’s not so clear now, for if we really want regime change, I don’t think we can get this without U.S. boots on the ground. And that means a real war, and that in turn means that Congress should really declare it—though Trump’s ignored that Constitutional stipulation over and over.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s asking, “Where’s the beef?”. And her photo is especially cute today:

Hili: All is lost.
Andrzej: What happened?
Hili: Today we ate the last piece of tenderloin.

Look how sad she is!

In Polish:

Hili: Wszystko stracone.
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Zjedliśmy dziś ostatni kawałek polędwicy.

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

From Things with Faces, two houses conversing:

From Now That’s Wild, a new phylum:

From CinEmma:

From Masih, who in this tweet answers a challenge from an Iranian official. This is very moving:

From Luana. If this is real (what he said appears genuine), Newsom is a condescending twit. How could he say such guff?  There is a community note that he wasn’t addressing blacks (the audience was mixed), and that may well be true, but it doesn’t matter: what he’s telling people is “I understand you because I’m as dumb as you are.”

From The Pinkah; I haven’t read the article yet, but Sally is good, and this is worth a look:

Titania has as a new (sarcastic) article in The Critic inspired by Mayor Mamdani. It’s about the need for communism and why Islamic countries are not homophobic (she says this: “Some bigots have argued that homosexuality is incompatible with the Islamic faith. But in fact, homophobia is extremely rare in Muslim-majority countries. This is why there isn’t a single LGBT+ community centre in the whole of Afghanistan. Everyone is so tolerant that there is simply no need for them.”

One from my feed, showing again how awesome corvids are:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. His great niece just won a world championship in bicycling. That’s some sprint she puts on at the end!

My great niece, Erin Boothman, just became UK Women’s Champion in the Elimination track race (in Elimination 18-odd riders whizz round the track, then, every other lap, the last rider is eliminated until there are just two left.). She is only 19, beat some of the best in the world. Hooray!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-02-22T17:17:43.545Z

Here are the last few minutes of the race. She’s in purple.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-02-22T20:29:05.453Z

The subspecies of “progressives” and how they’re mutually reinforcing

February 23, 2026 • 10:45 am

I’m not sure who Frederick Alexander is, but he’s written an intriguing article at The Gadfly (click below to read for free)

Alexander lists five types of “progressives”, and although their characteristics are distinct, he avers that their natures interlock to reinforce “progressivism”, which he sees, as most of us do, as performative wokeness that serves as a form of virtue signaling.  And yes, two of the subspecies really believe the ideology. I’ll give the five types (indented), but it’s fun to try to think of examples of each one.  I have omitted some of the descriptions in the interest of space.

The True Believers are the rarest and most dangerous type. Usually found in university admin or HR, they genuinely think that questioning any aspect of progressive orthodoxy constitutes harm. The moment they make eye contact with reality, their pupils dilate, and they assume a glazed, faraway look like someone’s talking to them through an earpiece only they can hear.

It’s the Tavistock clinician who dismissed parents’ concerns about rushing children into transition as “transphobia”. It’s the university administrator who considers “women” a radioactive word and the niqab an expression of female empowerment. It’s the civil servant who enforces unisex toilets because questions of “dignity” matter more than safeguarding.

The Careerists know it’s all nonsense but have mortgages. They privately roll their eyes at the latest pronoun updates but champion them in the board meeting with the enthusiasm of a North Korean newsreader.

Examples include the BBC editor who knows “pregnant people” is absurd but issues the apology on behalf of the female presenter who corrected the autocue to “women”. It’s the museum curator who rewrites exhibition labels to acknowledge “problematic legacies” to satisfy the demands of the True Believer, who controls the money.

The Cowards are everywhere. They know exactly what’s happening, hate it, but will never say so out loud. They’re the sort who’ll text you “100% agree!” after you’ve been fired but somehow missed every opportunity to back you up before the True Believer called you in about your unconscious bias.

When Kathleen Stock was hounded out of Sussex University, the Coward thought it was outrageous right up to the moment they realised they could be next. Then they recalibrated the events in their mind and took a different view.

. . .The Opportunists don’t care either way but have spotted the angles. Young, ambitious, and morally vacant, they add a dozen causes to their personal website and say things like “centring marginalised voices” without meaning a word of it.

The Opportunist will launch a DEI consultancy today and charge an HR True Believer ten grand tomorrow to tell a roomful of Careerists they’re racists. Or they’ll be the author who went from wellness influencer to decolonisation expert in 18 months and set up a podcast in between. It’s the academic who discovered that adding “queer theory” to their research proposal tripled their funding chances.

. . .The Fanatics think they’re True Believers except they dial it up to eleven. Pronouns and watermelon emojis in the bio, sure. But they also believe in decolonising logic and think the world is going to end tomorrow if we don’t do what they tell us. Every cause connects to every other cause, and all causes connect back to the same enemy.

It’s the student activist who screams at a Jewish classmate for three hours about Zionism, then files a complaint claiming she felt unsafe. It’s the protester who glues himself to a motorway, causes an ambulance delay, then calls the criticism “ableist”. The Fanatic cannot maintain eye contact except when talking about Palestine, at which point his eyes fix unblinkingly on yours, daring you to push back on his claims of genocide.

I could name a specimen of each of these, but will refrain on the grounds that you wouldn’t know most of them. Fanatics, though, include Robin DiAngelo, and True Believers the many biologists who assert that sex is a spectrum. (Some of the latter could be “careerists” as well, knowing that they can sell books and write articles, advancing themselves, by supporting nonsense.

Then, in an analysis that I like a lot, Alexander explains why these types are self-reinforcing, advancing “progressivism” as a whole (I hate calling it that; how about “wokeness”?):

Identifying these types isn’t an exact science, and they overlap to various degrees. The crucial thing to understand is that they need each other.

True Believers provide the moral authority, write the policies, and enforce the rules with genuine conviction. They absorb the ideology and give it form. Without them, it would all feel like a game of pretend (which it is).

Careerists provide the manpower. They actually implement the nonsense without stopping to think much about what any of it means.

Cowards provide the silence and the illusion of consensus, allowing the system to expand unopposed.

The Opportunists provide the raw energy, finding new ways to monetise moral exhibitionism because they see progressive orthodoxy as a business opportunity. Celebrity activists – indeed the whole entertainment industry – fall into this category.

Fanatics provide the threat. They’re the enforcers who make the Careerists think twice about cracking a joke since every joke has a victim. The Coward looks at them and thinks at least I’m not that person in an effort to assuage the sense of disgust at their own lack of integrity.

The system rewards all of them. True Believers get authority. Careerists get promotions. Cowards keep their heads down and Opportunists get book deals. Fanatics get the attention they crave, which is why we’re forever seeing clips of them in our social feeds waving Palestinian flags or throwing soup at Van Gogh.

What they all get – every single one – is protection from consequences.

Why? Because progressive orthodoxy is sustained by particular incentives. It’s got nothing to do with the strength of the ideas, most of which are obviously terrible when examined under daylight. It’s about the incentives that come with compliance and the costs that come with dissent.

In the end, Alexander still thinks the ideology is doomed to disappear:

The good news is that every protection racket collapses eventually – and progressivism will be no exception. The lawsuits will become too expensive, the backlash too loud to ignore. Those politicians who told us that men can be women will explain with a frown that these were “challenging times” rather than a gruesome display of moral cowardice. Pronouns in bios will become so mortifyingly embarrassing that those who had them will pretend, even to themselves, that they never dreamt of anything so silly.

Well, I’m not so sure he’s right here, but one can hope. The Democratic Party has been influenced too long by “progressivism,” and that shows no signs of disappearing. Indeed, it’s growing, to the point where Nate Silver lists Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the two top Democratic candidates for President. (Remember, though, that it’s early days.) AOC is clearly a progressive, a combination of Fanatic and Careerist, while Gavin Newsom used to be progressive but, starting to realize he can’t win the Presidency that way, has been moving towards the center. He’s clearly a combination of Careerist and Opportunist.

In the meantime, have fun by listing below individuals falling into the five classes given above.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 23, 2026 • 8:50 am

This is the last full batch of photos I have. 🙁

But today we have a glorious selection of water birds (starring DUCKS) from New Zealand, where reader David Riddell lives. His commentary and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Be sure to read the notes; you’ll see that several of these species are endangered.

Knowing how much our host likes ducks, I thought I’d put together a few images of water birds from around New Zealand.  Most of these are from the North Island, where I live, but there are a couple of South Islanders in here as well.

The blue duck (Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos) is one of only two duck species in the world that are mountain stream specialists, the other being the torrent duck (Merganetta armata) of South America. Males have a breathy whistle, which gives them their Maori name, whio, while the female call is a harsh, growling croak.  Like many New Zealand birds they’ve been badly impacted by introduced mammalian predators, but with management they’re holding their own and even expanding in some areas, such as the Volcanic Plateau in the central North Island.  For Tolkien fans, this pair was just below Tawhai Falls in Tongariro National Park, which doubled as the Forbidden Pool where Gollum was captured by Faramir’s men in The Two Towers:

Brown teal (Anas chlorotis) used to be the most abundant waterfowl in the country, but again have declined markedly, although numbers have increased in recent years in a few places. They occupied a wide range of habitats, not all of them aquatic.  This pair (male on the right) is part of a population introduced to Tawharanui Regional Park north of Auckland, which has a predator-proof fence across the base of a peninsula, protecting a 588 ha park from rats, cats, possums, mustelids and other exotic predators:

New Zealand scaup (Aythya novaeseelandiae) is a diving duck with a cute, “rubber duckie” profile. They mostly live in deep, clear waters where they feed on submerged water weeds, though this one was on a eutrophic (nutrient-enriched) lake in the small town of Cambridge:

Pacific black duck (Anas superciliosa) can cope quite well with introduced mammalian predators, but is perhaps now the country’s most endangered duck, as it is being genetically swamped by mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), with which it readily hybridises. This one, on the shore of a remote lake on the Volcanic Plateau, has the typically stripy face, and the green speculum with no white band on its upper margin, but the slight smudging of the facial stripes and orange tinge to the legs suggests that even this one has some mallard ancestry.  Fortunately they are still widespread elsewhere in the Pacific:

Mallards have also been in the news here lately as a few individuals on a high country lake in the South Island recently started preying on the chicks of Australasian crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus australis) and had to be “euthanised” as the local media euphemistically put it. The concern was that, being such adaptable creatures, other ducks would learn the habit and it would spread.  The grebes (a subspecies of the great crested grebe, from which it differs mainly by not having a distinct non-breeding plumage) are considered threatened, although their numbers have increased from a couple of hundred in the 1980s to perhaps a thousand today, with more in Australia.  Once almost entirely confined to the high country they are now well established on many lowland lakes, though they have not yet repopulated the North Island, from which they disappeared in the 19th century.  In 2023 the bird’s international profile was lifted dramatically when it was crowned New Zealand’s Bird of the Century after being championed by comedian John Oliver. “After all, this is what democracy is all about,” he said on his show, “America interfering in foreign elections.”  This one was photographed from the footbridge over the outlet of Lake Tekapo – the lake is fed by glacial meltwater, hence the pale blue colour:

While the crested grebe retreated to the South Island, another grebe, the New Zealand dabchick (Poliocephalus rufopectus) went the other way, becoming restricted to the North Island from the 1940s. More recently it’s been expanding again, and recolonised the South Island in 2012.  This is a pair engaging in a courtship dance:

And another dabchick:

Another small grebe, the Australasian grebe (Tachybaptus novaehollandiae) has been colonising New Zealand since the 1970s, though numbers nationwide are still low. Adults have a prominent yellow spot at the base of the bill that looks almost like a second eye, though the colour hasn’t fully developed on this juvenile:

Pied shags (Phalacrocorax varius) are one of 13 currently recognised New Zealand species of shags and cormorants (all usually called shags in New Zealand), making the country a centre of diversity for the family. The same species in Australia is generally a freshwater bird, although in this country they’re most commonly found on the coast.  This one however was nesting alongside the Karamea River in the north-west of the South Island:

Here are two other shag species, at a small lake near my home in the Waikato region of the North Island. On the left is a black shag (Phalacrocorax carbo novaehollandiae), the local subspecies of the widespread great cormorant, while on the right is a little pied cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos).  This is a highly variable species; juveniles are entirely black, while adults can range from a white-throated form through to completely pied.  This individual has a rather unusual motley appearance – I suspect it’s an older juvenile moulting into adult plumage:

American readers may be wondering why I’ve put in a picture of such a common species as a laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) – and one in scruffy non-breeding plumage at that. But this was the first individual of the species ever seen in New Zealand, which my wife, daughter and I found two days before Christmas in 2016, when we stopped for a picnic lunch at a beachside reserve near the small east coast town of Opotiki.  It created huge interest among the local birding community, hanging around for several weeks and allowing many people to see it, eventually moulting into its much more handsome breeding colours, with black head and white-ringed eye.  It eventually moved southwards down the coast as far as Cape Kidnappers in Hawkes Bay, and was reported intermittently until October 2018:

Here’s another shot of it, next to a red-billed gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae scopulinus), which is the species you would expect to see in such a place:

Black-billed gulls (Chroicocephalus bulleri) are our only endemic gull (the southern black-backed or kelp gull, Larus dominicanus, also occurs here). Until recently they were classified as critically endangered due to rapid declines at some of their main breeding colonies on South Island river beds, but they’re holding their own elsewhere, and establishing new colonies in the North Island.  These ones are roosting on an old wharf at the southern end of Lake Taupo, the large lake in the centre of the North Island:

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 23, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the last Monday of the month: it’s Monday, February 23, 2026. In a week it will be March, the Month of Ducks Arrival. It’s also National Tootsie Roll Day, the candy that looks like dung. Here’s a mini:

By Evan-Amos – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,

Here’s an ad for the candy in 1918, when the boys, who fought for America, return and get their rewards:

Self-scanned, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The candy was invented by an Austrian Jewish immigrant. From Wikipedia:

The first candy that Hirschfield created was Bromangelon Jelly Powder. He completed the invention of Tootsie Rolls in 1907 after patenting a technique to give them their unique texture. He named the candy after his daughter Clara, whose nickname was “Tootsie.”  The first Tootsie Rolls were marketed commercially in September 1908. Hirschfeld became vice-president of the company, which changed its name to Sweets Company of America in 1917, around the time of the retirement of founders Stern and Saalberg. Hirschfield resigned or was fired in 1920 and subsequently started Mells Candy. On January 13, 1922, in his room at the Monterey Hotel in Manhattan, he shot and killed himself, leaving a note saying that he was “sorry, but could not help it.”

I don’t like them. Bromagelon was the first commercial dessert made of gelatin, preceding Jello-O by several years but driven out of business by it.

It’s also Curling is Cool Day, International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day, National Banana Bread Day (good with cream cheese), and National Rationalization Day (see a later post today).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First, the U.S. men’s ice hockey team won Olympic gold by defeating Canada in overtime by a score of 2-1. One player got his front tooth knocked out, and kept playing as blood dribbled on the ice.

But all told, another miracle on ice!  Here is a video of the highlights (watch the first goal: it’s amazing):

*As predicted, Trump isn’t going to accept the Supreme Court’s erasure of most of his tariffs. He is, instead, raising global tariffs to 15%.

President Trump said on Saturday that he would raise his new, global tariff to 15 percent, a day after he took steps to replicate some of the punishing duties that had been struck down by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Trump announced the sudden change in a post on social media, and said the policy would take effect immediately, as he signaled that he would press ahead with his aggressive trade strategy despite suffering a major legal setback.

For some countries, such as Britain and Australia, Mr. Trump’s new 15 percent tariff will actually be higher than the rates that previously applied to their exports to the United States. For others, like China, Vietnam, India and Brazil, the new rate will be significantly lower. The previous set of duties were invalidated on Friday, after a majority of the court’s justices found that the president did not have the authority to issue them.

Mr. Trump had initially set his replacement global rate at 10 percent, using a provision in a law — never before invoked by a president — that allows him to impose an across-the-board tariff for 150 days unless Congress agrees to extend it. In the directive, he indicated it would take effect after midnight on February 24.

The statute caps the rate at 15 percent, limiting the president’s ability to lift it again, though Mr. Trump has signaled he plans to use other trade powers in the coming months to add further taxes on imports.

Here are the old a new tariff rates now from the NYT (click to enlarge):

(from the NYT): Notes: Rates shown are a comparison between the emergency tariffs invalidated by the Supreme Court and the president’s new 15 percent baseline. For Canada and Mexico, the tariffs do not apply to goods subject to a trade deal with the United States. Other tariffs, like sectoral Section 232 tariff and China-specific Section 302 tariffs, are not shown here. The new global tariff does not apply to all goods; some are exempt, and others are subject to certain other duties.

Look, all tariffs are BAD. Period.  But Trump uses his usual caps when he touts his new decision, which may not stand up to court rulings:

“I, as President of the United States of America, will be, effective immediately, raising the 10% Worldwide Tariff on Countries, many of which have been “ripping” the U.S. off for decades, without retribution (until I came along!), to the fully allowed, and legally tested, 15% level,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

“During the next short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of Making America Great Again — GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!” he continued.

*The Washington Post reports that the Secret Service shot and killed an armed man who entered the secure perimeter of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

U.S. Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a man who entered the secure perimeter of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate early Sunday morning, the Secret Service said in a statement.

Trump was not at Mar-a-Lago this weekend.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told reporters Sunday morning that the individual, identified as 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin of Cameron, North Carolina, was carrying a gas canister and a shotgun. Bradshaw confirmed the identification of Martin after initially withholding it until officials could notify his family.

According to Bradshaw, the officers confrontedMartin, who was White, around 1:30 a.m. and orderedhim to put down the gas canister and the gun. He put down the canister and “raised the shotgun to a shooting position,” Bradshaw said.

“At that point in time, the deputy and the two Secret Service agents fired their weapons” and shot and killed the man, who died at the scene, Bradshaw said.

Bradshaw said the incident happened “just inside the inner perimeter” of Mar-a-Lago, near the estate’s north gate.

What is this–the third attempt on his life? You’d think that an assassin would at least check to see that the President was at home before trying to kill him.  I’m sure there are people saying, “Damn, they failed again!”, but, much as I detest Trump and his actions, I will not say I want him killed. Hard as it is to believe, I’m sure there are people who love him, and Trump surely loves himself.  Besides, do you think Vance would be an improvement? I favor waiting it out for the end of his term, promoting good Democratic candidates, and hoping Trump continues to scupper his own approval rating.

*Pictures taken from above reveal a lot of American war planes parked at an airbase in Jordan. You know what that means.

New satellite imagery and flight tracking data show a base in central Jordan has become a key hub for the U.S. military’s planning for possible strikes on Iran.

Imagery captured on Friday shows more than 60 attack aircraft parked at the base, known as Muwaffaq Salti, roughly tripling the number of jets that are normally there. And at least 68 cargo planes have landed at the base since Sunday, according to flight tracking data. More fighter jets could be parked under shelters.

The satellite images also show more modern aircraft, including F-35 stealth jets, compared to the aircraft normally seen there. Several drones and helicopters are also seen.

Soldiers also installed new air defenses to protect the base from incoming Iranian missiles.

Jordanian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said that the American planes and equipment are deployed there as part of a defense agreement with the United States.

The changes at the base in Jordan are part of a large U.S. military buildup across the region, which comes amid negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. On Friday, President Trump told reporters he was considering a limited military strike to pressure Iran into a deal.

The Jordanian officials said they hoped negotiations between the United States and Iran lead to an agreement that would prevent war in the region. Over the past month, officials from Jordan — as well as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — praised the talks and said they barred attacks on Iran from their soil.

If Jordan bars attacks on Iran from their soil, where will the U.S. planes take off from if they attack Iran? Also, it doesn’t seem so great for the press to tell Iran where the planes are, allowing Iran to attack them with missiles. But of course the MSM is largely on Iran’s side in all this.

Here’s a tweet with some of the photos:

*Speaking of Iran, the WSJ says that the Islamic Republic isn’t getting a lot of help from its so-called allies.

Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.

Russia and Iran conducted small-scale joint naval training in the Gulf of Oman this past week, a show of force dwarfed by the U.S. firepower assembled in the region at sea and on land. An exercise involving ships from China, as well as Russia and Iran, is planned to take place soon in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian state media.

Iran has also sought to rebuild its missile stockpile, air defenses and other capabilities with help from both China and Russia, according to analysts, after those elements of its military power were battered in a 12-day war against Israel and the U.S. in June.

But Beijing and Moscow have shown little willingness to provide direct military assistance if President Trump does order an attack on Iran, analysts said.

“They’re not going to sacrifice their own interests for the Iranian regime,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence official and now a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “They are hoping the regime will not be toppled, but they are definitely not going to counter the U.S. militarily.”

For Beijing, aligning too openly with Tehran risks damaging a critical relationship with Trump, who is scheduled to travel to China in March for a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

China is Iran’s biggest oil customer and an important market preventing its heavily sanctioned economy from collapsing. Beijing shares with Tehran a desire to counter U.S. power but fears that aligning too closely with the Islamic Republic could jeopardize its relations in the Persian Gulf region, according to analysts.

For Moscow, the calculation is similar but even more urgent: Not alienating Trump and driving him close to Ukraine takes precedence over helping Tehran.

It’s not clear whether our expensive positioning of ships and planes in the Middle East is preparatory to an attack, or is a giant bluff to get Iran to give up its nuclear program, but once again I repeat that they never will, and if they say they will they are lying.  Perhaps a Big Bluff could work to do that, but I doubt it.

*Oy! The skeleton of St. Francis of Assisi is going on display in the town for which he’s named. There are photos at the Guardian site as well as in this tweet from Matthew:

We have come such a long way since the Bronze Age veneration of the dead.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-02-22T11:11:19.897Z

From the Guardian:

Saint Francis of Assisi’s skeleton is going on full public display from Sunday for the first time, in a move that is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Inside a nitrogen-filled case with the Latin inscription “Corpus Sancti Francisci” (the body of Saint Francis), the remains are being shown in the Italian hillside town’s Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.

St Francis, who died on 3 October 1226, founded the Franciscan order after renouncing his wealth and devoting his life to the poor.

Giulio Cesareo, the director of communications for the Franciscan convent in Assisi, said he hoped the display could be “a meaningful experience” for believers and non-believers alike.

Cesareo, a Franciscan friar, said the “damaged” and “consumed” state of the bones showed that St Francis “gave himself completely” to his life’s work.

His remains, which will be on display until 22 March, were transferred to the basilica built in the saint’s honour in 1230. But it was only in 1818, after excavations carried out in utmost secrecy, that his tomb was rediscovered.

Apart from previous exhumations for inspection and scientific examination, the bones of Saint Francis have only been displayed once, in 1978, to a very limited audience and for only one day.

Usually hidden from view, the transparent case containing the relics since 1978 was brought out on Saturday from the metal coffer in which it is kept inside his stone tomb in the crypt of the basilica. The case is itself inside another bulletproof and anti-burglary glass case.

I’m willing to accept that St. Francis was real—there’s certainly enough evidence for that!—but not that he performed miracles (e.g., preaching to the birds, healing the sick, and getting stigmata), nor that there were later miracles in his name that led to his canonization. And they don’t even mention that he’s the patron saint of animals!

Here’s Jan van Eyck’s painting (ca. 1430) of St. Francis receiving the stigmata (yes, he’s said to have them, but they may have been from disease, and probably not in the right places unless self-inflicted.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is sick to death of winter, just as she always is:

Hili: It’s time for a change in the weather at last.
Andrzej: I feel the same way.

In Polish:

Hili: Najwyższy czas na zmianę pogody.
Ja: Też tak sądzę.

And I found two nice photos from yore. First, Andrzej and Malgorzata taking a break on their front steps with Cyrus and Hili:

And Hili and the late d*g Cyrus, leading us on our daily walk to the Vistula:

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

From Ariane, an English lesson:

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Now That’s Wild:

Screenshot

Masih has a video of people protesting the arrest of a teacher for his political views. And the degree of the protests got him freed from jail! Perhaps the Iranians are scared

From Stacy.  The explanation doesn’t make sense, as Israel has far more LGBT people than does Palestine. If Allah hates gays, then Hamas should have won:

From Simon; Greenland helps the U.S., and Trump responds with his usual lack of grace and absence of gratitude:

From Ginger K.:

One from my feed; Science Girl has great tweets:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, amazing videos of blue whales (the largest creature known to have ever lived) eating krill.  They say it took seven years to make this short video:

This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen

— Steve Mullis (@stevemullis.net) 2026-02-22T08:55:24.356Z

This was a real LOL; I audibly chortled when I saw this:

someone waited their ENTIRE LIFE to write that headline…

— PAL (@paladin42.bsky.social) 2026-02-21T20:26:58.765Z

Bill Maher’s new rule: The King’s speech

February 22, 2026 • 11:30 am

Bill Maher’s latest “Real Time” clip argues that we should get rid of the State of the Union Address (coming up Tuesday), at least under Trump. That’s because to Maher it’s ludicrous that Trump keeps appropriating the powers of Congress for himself, violating our Constitutional separation of powers. The speech has become, says Maher, not a summary of how we’re doing, but a series of future Diktats. Congress seems to have become superfluous: a “supporting actor.” In fact, Jefferson didn’t even favor the President speaking to Congress in this way.

Look at these guests: U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Texas State Representative James Talarico (D-TX). Boebert looks like she’s been spending some time in a tanning bed.

As Maher says, the real state of the Union is “hopelessly divided.”