Wait - what ?

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“People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.” ~ Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 198, Marilynne Robinson

Winter night, Connemara Coast, Ciarán Clear (1920 - 2000) - Oil on Board -

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Rebecca Solnit 

Thirty-one years ago, as antinuclear organizations commemorated the 50th anniversary of bombing Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), a Japanese woman who had been a young girl in Nagasaki spoke of her experiences. She spoke so slowly I was able to write down her words. I've been sharing them ever since. They speak to what atomic weapons and civilian bombing do. I'll be going to a vigil in Santa Fe later this year.

And in 2012 I visited Hiroshima and met these two survivors, who are shown here telling their stories on a map of the impact zone of the bomb in the museum preserving memory of the bombing. Both had been in their early teens when the bombs landed; both were so traumatized they never spoke of it until they were very old and realized they didn't want their stories to die with them.

This is why I love Substack. I’ve got a place to write when something earthshattering happens, like Ross Douthat putting a period on his 17 years as New York Times op-ed columnist before he makes his way uptown to the studios of CBS, where he will bring his talents to the sure-to-be dwindling audience of its former flagship news show, “60 Minutes.”

Dear readers, Douthat actually wrote this in the second sentence of his column: “The columnist’s job contains multitudes.” Man, when the New York Times adds up the ledger on Douthat, they are bound to find his employment deeply in the black. I mean, that’s why you read the op-ed page of the Times, isn’t it? For that level of sagacity? You wait for the pay-off of such an introductory clause, and sure enough, Douthat is there for you. He tells us that as a columnist, “it is useful to have a primary antagonist,” which for him has been “the elite consensus of the early Obama era.”

And why is that, exactly, Ross? Well, writing at the end of a week that saw a blizzard of stories on how many millions of children will be left wanting by the Trump administration’s destruction of such programs such as Head Start, food stamps, and school lunch programs, Douthat tells us that the “elite consensus” and its “expert-driven policies…took social liberalism so far that it left vulnerable people adrift or abandoned to their vices.”

That would be all those five-year-olds who used to line up for elite consensus lunches at school and learn to read at Head Start programs who won’t have to feel “adrift” anymore, because the Trump administration, with the blessing of Ross Douthat, has given them the opportunity of providing for themselves the way conservatives have wanted them to do since the beginning of the New Deal.

Douthat goes on to blame the rise of “populism” on the “elite consensus’s failures.” There’s a sentence that’s carrying one hell of a shitload of weight. How the hell is it the fault of the libs that the rednecks fell victim to populism? Well, Ross whines that while “populism” was the “vessel for the hopes” of him and his conservative brethren, it has been dashed on the rocky shores of Trump’s second term, which engaged in cronyism and foreign wars and corruption. But Ross assures us that even as liberals clutch their pearls about the dangers of populism, thank God that “Trumpism…hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents.”

Whew. At least we dodged that bullet.

Douthat tells us that having survived the disappointment of the failures of populism, even worse was the “years of peak woke” he had to endure by being forced to “live with the blue-state governance that doctrinaire progressivism encouraged, and it yielded civic and educational collapse.” During those terrible years, Douthat was employed by the Times and earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 a year, not including the lucrative speaking engagements that come with the stature of being a columnist for the New York Times.

He describes his travails as a Times columnist as “a McCarthyite experience.” Douthat endured all his torture under the yoke of “peak woke” in New Haven, Connecticut, folks, where he was born and raised and now lives with his wife and five children. Somehow, Douthat dodged the terrible effects of educational collapse by attending a private school called Hamden Hall and Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Towards the end of his valedictory column, Douthat takes a couple of pokes in the direction of artificial intelligence, which he has exactly zero understanding of, not to mention opinions about. Douthat laments that the “unpopular populists,” from which he neatly exempts himself, and “the flailing establishment [and] the rising left are displaying their vices in the shadow of the artificial intelligence revolution, which is creating new zones of power in which the friend-enemy distinction is almost impossible for me to parse.”

Well thank goodness for “60 Minutes!” Douthat won’t have to worry about figuring out who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy at “60 Minutes.” The world’s premier anti-woke unpopular populist Bari Weiss hired him away from the New York Times because Douthat arrives having written this sentence: “The liberal establishment is putting the West in the hands of Wokeness 2.0, Hasan Piker Thought and Democratic Socialists of America energy — social progressivism with socialist characteristics.”

There you go, folks. You now know what to expect from “60 Minutes,” at least until its numbers fall so far that its costs will outstrip its profits and the Ellison-Weiss cultural juggernaut shuts it down, which has doubtlessly been the plan all along.

André Steiner. Lisa Fonssagrives, c. 1936. Silver bromide-gelatin print. © Nicole Bajolet-Steiner

* * * * The vessel traverses horizontally yet is meant to think vertically. — Ahmed Salman

Louise Bourgeois  :: 1911-2010 :: Together, 2004 

Soft-ground etching with extensive hand-coloring in watercolor, gouache and colored pencil, with additions in graphite, on handmade paper   27 ¾ x 19 7/8 in. | 70.5 x 50.6 cm.

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Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a springboard for rapid evolution. In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone. We all float on the collective level of consciousness of mankind so that any increment we add comes back to us. We all add to our common buoyancy by our efforts to benefit life. What we do to benefit life automatically benefits all of us because we are all included in that which is life. — Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by David R. Hawkins

The US didn't drop those two atomic bombs on August 6 and 9 to defeat Japan. Japan was already defeated. They dropped them for geopolitical reasons going forward, including making sure Japan surrendered to the US and not the USSR, which had just joined the war there.

Essay: At a time when Americans are reassessing so many painful aspects of our nation’s past, it is an opportune moment to have an honest national conversation about our use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities in August 1945. The fateful decision to inaugurate the nuclear age fundamentally changed the course of modern history, and it continues to threaten our survival. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock warns us, the world is now closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since 1947.

The accepted wisdom in the United States for the last 75 years has been that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later was the only way to end the World War II without an invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American and perhaps millions of Japanese lives. Not only did the bombs end the war, the logic goes, they did so in the most humane way possible.

However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.

The allied demand for unconditional surrender led the Japanese to fear that the emperor, who many considered a deity, would be tried as a war criminal and executed. A study by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command compared the emperor’s execution to “the crucifixion of Christ to us.”

“Unconditional Surrender is the only obstacle to peace,” Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired Ambassador Naotake Sato, who was in Moscow on July 12, 1945, trying to enlist the Soviet Union to mediate acceptable surrender terms on Japan’s behalf.

But the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on Aug. 8 changed everything for Japan’s leaders, who privately acknowledged the need to surrender promptly.

Allied intelligence had been reporting for months that Soviet entry would force the Japanese to capitulate. As early as April 11, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Intelligence Staff had predicted: “If at any time the USSR should enter the war, all Japanese will realize that absolute defeat is inevitable.”

Truman knew that the Japanese were searching for a way to end the war; he had referred to Togo’s intercepted July 12 cable as the “telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.”

Truman also knew that the Soviet invasion would knock Japan out of the war. At the summit in Potsdam, Germany, on July 17, following Stalin’s assurance that the Soviets were coming in on schedule, Truman wrote in his diary, “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about.” The next day, he assured his wife, “We’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed!”

The Soviets invaded Japanese-held Manchuria at midnight on Aug. 8 and quickly destroyed the vaunted Kwantung Army. As predicted, the attack traumatized Japan’s leaders. They could not fight a two-front war, and the threat of a communist takeover of Japanese territory was their worst nightmare.

Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki explained on Aug. 13 that Japan had to surrender quickly because “the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.”

While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.” But online the wording has been modified to put the atomic bombings in a more positive light — once again showing how myths can overwhelm historical evidence.

Seven of the United States’ eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy’s vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.

No one was more impassioned in his condemnation than Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff. He wrote in his memoir “that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …. In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

MacArthur thought the use of atomic bombs was inexcusable. He later wrote to former President Hoover that if Truman had followed Hoover’s “wise and statesmanlike” advice to modify its surrender terms and tell the Japanese they could keep their emperor, “the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt.”

Before the bombings, Eisenhower had urged at Potsdam, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Alex Knepper 

I don't know what these cloistered mandarins think happens to countries that lose wars.

It is always humiliating to lose a war. There is no euphemism you can use or speech you can give that can conceal the material realities of defeat. It's especially humiliating to lose a war you chose to start, and in which you have had to re-define 'victory' as merely returning to where you were before you picked the fight -- at best.

The U.S. currently looks manic, capricious, untrustworthy, cruel, and delusional in the eyes of the rest of the world. Only our criminal conman clown in chief could make the Iranian regime look rational by comparison. At least the Iranians take part in coherent goal-directed activity. We don't even get the luxuries of coherence, or having goals.

If any other country pursued a deal with Iran in 2015, only to unilaterally trash in 2018 that very deal it sought even while Iran was in compliance with it, then under a decade later took out its head of state unprovoked -- and then insisted that it's the Iranians who are the crazy, fundamentally untrustworthy ones -- I don't think anyone would fail to see what was going on.

[...]

So, yes: just like the last few wars we started with no attempt to think about what victory would look like, this too will be humiliating. That's what happens when you elect a guy who in a different life would be a Idi Amin figure, adorning his suit with 50,000 shiny medals and declaring himself emperor of all space and time.

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"According to the Journal, citing U.S. officials, Trump has been privately floating to his senior aides the idea of declaring victory against Iran without achieving a nuclear deal. The reporting indicates that if the United States can keep Iran's nuclear program in check and shipping resumes through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump would extend the ceasefire indefinitely and walk away. He has privately told aides that Tehran is "likely unable to revive its nuclear work" after Operation Midnight Hammer caused heavy damage to Iran's three main nuclear facilities in June 2025. A White House official told the Journal that the United States has "completed all of its military objectives against Iran" and that the president's focus is now on "securing the flow of the world's energy through the Strait of Hormuz."

In a separate interview with Axios today, Trump did not even try to hide his change of direction. "We are only semi-negotiating with them," he said. "We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money."

Trump is showing us he has no strategy and is hoping the problem resolves itself before anyone makes too big of an issue that the whole reason we went to war is now being quietly abandoned. The master negotiator, the dealmaker who was going to bring peace through strength, is now publicly admitting he is standing on the sideline and waiting. This is not a victory or a successful exit. This is another Trump failure.

Donald Trump ran on no new wars. He promised the American people he would keep them out of conflict. Then he launched multiple military actions, started a war against the warnings of allies, and against the counsel of military advisors who told him what would happen if the United States went in without a plan for what comes after. He ignored every lesson the last half century of Middle Eastern conflict has tried to teach us. And now he wants to call it a win and walk away, leaving the region worse than before he started the war.

It’s not just a destabilized region. At least 18 American service members are dead, and hundreds more have been wounded. The United States has depleted munitions that defense officials have warned could leave us exposed in a future crisis. Yet another dangerous byproduct is that before this war, Iran never fully recognized the Strait of Hormuz as a strategic weapon, but now understands exactly how powerful that leverage is. They now have proof that they can choke off one-fifth of the world's commercial oil supply and demand payment for safe passage. They can hold the global economy at ransom. We taught them that. This war taught them that. And they will not forget it.

The people we bombed have not forgotten either. Iran's current leaders rose through the wreckage we created. They carry personal grief alongside political ambition. They lost family members in our strikes. They came to power not in spite of this war but because of it. And they are not interested in giving Trump a quiet exit. On Saturday, Tehran laid out its most ambitious demands yet for reopening the Strait. They now want billions of dollars in compensation, the return of frozen assets, the full withdrawal of American forces from the region, and an end to the U.S. naval blockade. Trump wanted a way out, and he practically gave Iran the opportunity to set their own price and terms.

This morning, his own party sent a signal that even they understand how badly this has gone. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana appeared on Face the Nation and said that the president needs to speak forcefully and directly to the American people about the path forward. Cassidy noted that Vice President Vance had attended a Senate GOP lunch and "did a good job of explaining the perspective as to how to go forward." But someone else at that lunch told Vance that it is the president, not the vice president, who needs to deliver that message to the public. What they are saying is that they know he has no plan, and they know it could cost them the midterms.

This is the pattern of authoritarian leaders throughout history. They start wars to project strength, discover they cannot control what they have unleashed, and then try to rebrand retreat as triumph. Argentina's military junta invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982 to rally nationalist fervor and distract from economic collapse at home. The war lasted just over two months. They lost. The junta fell. The Soviet Union spent a decade in Afghanistan trying to project dominance across Central Asia. They withdrew in 1989 with nothing to show for it but devastation, a broken economy, and a radicalized population that would haunt the region for a generation. Wars started by men like Trump are never about the stated objective. It is always about the leader's need to appear invincible. And when the illusion breaks, it is the people who bear the cost. Not the leader."

 Twyla Tharp at the 1990 Scripps/ADF Award ceremony at Duke University'. After brief remarks, the Durham community participated in a square dance (Tharp's idea). "Among the participants was Ms. Tharp, who had changed into blue jeans from the dress she had worn during the ceremony. A vigorous dancer, she was especially forceful in the swing-your-partner sequences." —New York Times. Ms.Tharp is bottom right, white shirt, facing the camera. ‪‬ Photo by Jay Anderson.

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exhaled-spirals

« Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. […] The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance?

The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling. […] There was a time when educators became famous for providing reasons for learning; now they become famous for inventing a method. [… But] without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. »

Jacek Yerka (Polish, b. 1952) :: At the edge of space , 2007 :: acrylic on canvas

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“The trickster comes to life in the complex terrain of polytheism. His function in an archaic society or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted.” — Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (via metaconscious) [4th soul]

Sometimes people imagine that spiritual maturity means appearing calm and untouched by suffering, a performance of equanimity. But true equanimity is not emotional anesthesia. Equanimity is the capacity to include everything into our experience without being hijacked by what we are encountering. Equanimity allows us to feel grief, fear, and anger without being suffocated by their grip. It lets us respond instead of react. And it is true, equanimity does not erase suffering, but it gives us the strength to come alongside it.

Trump’s new Iran war strategy: Pretend that it never happened.

August 10, 2026

Robert B. Hubbell

Over the weekend, there was a major shift in Iran’s negotiating position for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Iran had previously issued a set of preconditions for a nuclear deal; over the weekend, Iran attached those preconditions to reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The demands were issued by the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and likely reflect the ascendance of a more reactionary faction within Iran as unconfirmed rumors of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei’s impending death circulate. See Iran Wire, Exclusive: Iranian Leaders are Concerned About Mojtaba Khamenei’s Worsening Health

The demands include

Payment of billions of dollars in reparations to Iran for damage caused by the US air war against Iran.

The release of all Iranian assets frozen by the US and its allies.

The cessation of insulting or threatening language from the US government toward Iran.

The cessation of the US naval blockade of Iran.

The withdrawal of US troops from the region.

The cessation of US military operations directed against Iran’s allies in the region.

See WSJ, Trump Thought Opening the Strait of Hormuz Was Imminent. Iran Had Other Plans. (Gift link.)

After the demands were issued, Trump held a phone interview with his favorite reporter at Axios to discuss the change in Iran’s demands. Amazingly, Trump seemed detached and dismissive, saying the US would “low-key it” in response to the demands. See Axios, Trump to Axios: “We are low keying it” with Iran.

Trump told Axios that Iran’s economic situation was dire and that the US would effectively wait it out—a strategy that sounds a lot like surrender (by the US). Per Axios, Trump said,

We are low-keying it. We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.

But Trump’s “wait and see” strategy is likely the result of depleted US military missiles and anti-missile weapons. Trump had been hoping to destroy Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure with a massive missile strike two weeks ago, but called off the strike when General Caine warned that doing so would degrade US military readiness in other parts of the world. In short, Trump grievously miscalculated the difficulty of bombing Iran into submission. So, Trump now wants to pretend the whole thing never happened.

Indeed, as the WSJ news analysis (linked above) notes,

For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said. But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things.

Notably, per the WSJ, Trump is now willing to walk away without a nuclear deal while Iran walks away with joint control over the Strait of Hormuz (with Oman). In the Trumpian revisionist history of his war against Iran, securing a nuclear deal was the main objective of his costly, futile war. Walking away now without a nuclear deal would be a humiliating defeat for Trump and a blow to the perceived strength of the US military.

Per the WSJ, the new criterion for victory is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, regardless of Iran’s control over the strait. To state the obvious, reopening the strait under Iran’s control is a materially worse scenario than existed before the war. As I say, Trump wants to find a pretext to walk away and pretend that the war never happened.

In his Axios interview, Trump touted the fact that oil prices were lower—an artifact of the administration’s misleading claims that a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was imminent. The AAA gas price tracker explicitly notes that “[c]rude oil prices are down in the $70 per barrel range amid optimism that the Strait of Hormuz will resume normal operations.” Whatever hopes the markets entertained of a quick resolution were dashed over the weekend by Iran’s toughening stance.

Still, even with the slightly lower prices due to Trump’s manipulation of the oil market, gasoline prices in the US are still 35% to 39% higher today than when Trump started his war against Iran on February 28, 2026. See AAA Fuel Prices (August 06, 2026)

So, here’s the point: The war against Iran is going far worse than Trump or most of the press is willing to admit. But the American people are finely attuned to the economic effects of the war, so Trump’s strategy of “pretend that it never happened” is a losing one. The pain of high gas prices will linger long after they return to pre-war levels. Trump’s broken campaign promise of keeping the US out of foreign wars has shaken his base. And every price increase at the grocery store is blamed on Trump’s insane tariff wars against our major trading partners.

We cannot rely on Republicans to defeat themselves. But we should recognize that Trump has made multiple historic blunders in the six months leading to the midterms: the war, tariffs, Epstein files, self-dealing and corruption, cutting Medicare drug subsidies, and lavish but failed construction projects in D.C.—and many more.

Trump’s blunders should allow us to outperform expectations by pollsters who are modeling the future based on a past that did not include Trump’s historic blunders. I say that not to suggest that anyone can relent, but instead to make the point that we should not listen to pundits and pollsters who refuse to acknowledge that we live in an alternate reality that cannot be mapped onto the past.

If ever there was a time to step outside our comfort zone and swing for the fences, this is it. We can make history in 90 days so long as we do not surrender to the voices telling us what is not possible or too difficult. We cannot tarry in deciding whether the Democratic Party is in disarray and, if so, whose fault it is. Beat Republicans in November by capitalizing on Trump’s historic blunders. We can resolve intra-party disputes once we control Congress.

And, as an extra incentive, by increasing the margin of our victories in November, we minimize the risk that Trump or Republicans will resort to cheating, force, or the Supreme Court to overturn the will of the people. Close elections are vulnerable; blowouts are not. We learned that lesson in November 2025 when Trump stopped claiming the elections were rigged when he saw the margins of Democratic victories.