“No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.16 (trans. George Long, 1862), text

The plan is not the strait. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told reporters at the United Nations that Tehran has handed Washington a proposal with a timetable: over the first four or five days, lift the naval blockade on Iran’s oil ports, restore the waiver that lifted sanctions on Iranian oil exports, end the war on all fronts including Lebanon, and permit the release of some frozen assets. On the sixth day the Strait of Hormuz would reopen to shipping through a route designated by Oman and Iran. On the seventh day, nuclear talks would begin, accelerating what the June memorandum had scheduled for sixty days. He called the preconditions nothing new, contained in the Islamabad memorandum the president himself signed, and said he was not in a hurry. Traffic through the strait had fallen to nine vessel transits. The advantage of the offer is speed. Its defect is that the water is still closed (The Guardian, 2026; CNBC, 2026).

The Court acted. On Friday the Supreme Court granted the government’s application for a stay in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters, in an unsigned per curiam, six to three, with Justice Jackson dissenting and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan joining her. The order lifts a district court’s June block on the modified SAVE program, which now checks Social Security records and lets state and local officials run bulk searches against voter rolls. The majority reasoned that 8 U.S.C. §1373 likely supersedes the confidentiality provisions on which the lower court relied. It also noted that federal law bars systematic voter removal within ninety days of a federal election, which limits the program’s immediate reach; Jackson answered that the blocked order had also covered individualized checks, which the law permits in that window, and that the harm to even a few lawful voters outweighs the government’s (Supreme Court, 2026; SCOTUSblog, 2026).

The credentials came back. The White House banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from its grounds on September 18. On Thursday Judge Timothy Kelly of the District Court in Washington granted a fourteen-day restraining order, directing the government to return, reinstate, and restore the hard-pass credentials of the three outlets and their reporters, on a one-dollar bond. He found the outlets likely to succeed on a Fifth Amendment due-process claim, and he wrote that on this record he was skeptical that safeguarding national security was the actual motivation for the revocation. On Friday morning the network video pool ran again for the first time since the ban (Court order, 2026; CNN, 2026; PBS News, 2026).

Where a distant war reaches a household. Diesel is the fuel that carries everything else, and this week it carried the bill. The European Commission’s own weekly bulletin put the weighted average across the European Union at €2.23 a liter, an all-time high. In the United States the national average reached $6.52 a gallon against $3.69 a year earlier (European Commission, 2026; PBS News, 2026). The cause is not crude alone: Russia’s war-damaged refineries and the Middle East crisis together have removed about a fifth of the world’s diesel supply (The Guardian, 2026). The president has said he backs a ban on American diesel exports, which have supplied about half of Europe’s imports this year, and the European Commission answered that any disruption would hurt both sides (The Guardian, 2026).

The vote that changed nothing yet. Germany’s far right finished first in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sunday with 38.2 percent and took 32 of the state parliament’s 71 seats. The Social Democrats took 35.5 percent, and with the Left and the Greens they hold a majority that excludes the AfD entirely. The Christian Democrats took 4.9 percent, their worst showing in the party’s eighty-one years, and fell below the five percent threshold that would have won them any seats at all. In Berlin, where voters went to the polls the same day, the Left finished first with 25.7 percent. The chancellor said he would stay (Al Jazeera, 2026; The Guardian, 2026). That is the shape of the German year so far: the far right finishes first in one state after another, and the firewall that keeps it out of government holds every time. Both of those are true, and only one of them is good news.

Here is the honest reading of the week. A plan was announced and not executed. A court lifted a block on a program that will be used, or not, by states that choose to use it, thirty-nine days before an election. A judge returned credentials that should never have been taken. A fuel crossed a record price on two continents because two wars had already removed a fifth of it. And a party with the most votes in a German state will not govern it.

The thread is the shortest instruction Marcus gives, and the one that requires no argument to accept and no courage to repeat. Everyone knows the shape of the good man. The description is easy, pleasant, and free, and writing it costs nothing, which is why so much of public life this week was description rather than action: a plan offered on conditions nobody has accepted, a summit whose own press called it spectacle over substance, a promise to do something later about the price of fuel. Marcus does not ask you to improve the description. He asks you to stop writing it. The plan is not the strait, and the sentence about what you would do is not the deed.

The weekly reports

This letter now has company on the calendar, and you should know what arrives when.

The Senate Race Report publishes Sundays at seven in the morning Central, through the first of November, and covers all thirty-five races of this cycle: the polls, the forecasters, the money, and the arithmetic of the majority.

The Docket Report begins Saturday, October 3. It follows the three federal cases this site watches, which are the Kennedy Center litigation, the Epstein Files Transparency Act case, and the appeal of that case, and it is written from the filings rather than from the coverage, which is not the same account of the same week.

The Ninety-Days Report arrives on the first of each month in two installments, one on the bond market and one on the S&P 500, each projecting the following ninety days on the assumption that the war in Iran does not improve.

The Chiefs Report publishes every Tuesday at six thirty in the evening Central, in season. It is the only piece on this site written and published without my reading it first, which is a reason to hold it to a higher standard rather than a lower one.

The Repair Plan is revised each quarter. It is a working document for a future administration rather than a letter to you.

Three more jobs run on Mondays and never publish anything: a crawl of the site for broken links and policy drift, an audit of the reference wiki behind this letter, and an online sweep that rechecks every link and every quotation in the archive. You will never see those, and that is the point of them.

The Practice

Pick one thing this week that you have described rather than done. Not the largest thing in your life, which is usually a way of avoiding the exercise, but a small one you have been clear about for a while: the call, the apology, the number you meant to run, the habit you have explained to someone. Write down what you intend, in one sentence, and then do the smallest real version of it inside the next twenty-four hours. Not the whole thing. The first actual move. Then notice how much of the previous weeks went into the description.

See you next Saturday. — Phil

Sourced from the Guardian’s reporting on Iran’s Hormuz proposal, on the global diesel shortage, on the European Union’s response to a proposed American export ban, and on the German state elections; CNBC and Al Jazeera on the oil market and the seven-day plan; the Supreme Court’s own order in No. 26A308 and SCOTUSblog’s analysis of it; the temporary restraining order in Cable News Network, Inc. v. Trump and CNN’s and PBS News’s reporting on the restoration of press credentials; the European Commission’s Weekly Oil Bulletin; and PBS News on diesel prices in the United States.

Sources

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman