Weekly-Digest

“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) The reflection The week’s public business was almost entirely announcement, and the announcements were unusually good at being announcements. A sanctions statute that Congress passed and the President signed in September, aimed at Russian oil and the banks that move it, was set aside by executive order on a Friday night, two days before it was to take effect. On Wednesday of this week the machinery appeared again, in an order that raised duties on Russian goods by five hundred percent and then waived most of what it had just authorized, leaving the threat standing and the trade flowing. In between, a diesel waiver was announced that would put more than three hundred thousand tonnes of Russian product into world markets, while Ukrainian drones struck the oil terminals that pay for the war next door. None of this is incoherent. Read as a single instrument, it is a government that has learned it can keep the threat and spend nothing, and that a waiver is easier to defend than a policy. ...

“Have I done something for the general interest? Well then, I have had my reward.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.4 (trans. George Long, 1862) The reflection This week produced a great deal of evidence and almost no verdict, and the gap between those two things is the whole difficulty of living in a moment like this one. The V-Dem institute measured the damage and found the country has fallen to its 1965 level; a political scientist at Harvard named the regime and said it is reversible; an essay I published on Thursday assembled the record and then, because a record is not a plan, listed what a citizen might actually do about it. Every one of those items is an act of description. Not one of them, by itself, changes anything. So the week raises the question the epigraph answers: if the work is not rewarded with the outcome you want, what is the reward? ...

“He often acts unjustly who does not do a certain thing; not only he who does a certain thing.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.5 (trans. George Long, 1862) The reflection Corruption in a republic rarely announces itself with an envelope. It arrives instead as a normal process: a routine register entry, a cost that nobody totalled, a duty nobody performed. That ordinariness is what protects it, because betraying the public trust is not a decision anyone has to make. A handful of people only have to decide, one at a time, that this particular thing is not theirs to do. The apology belongs to someone else. The measurement belongs to someone else. The room belongs to someone else. A republic does not fall in a single act. It is maintained, or neglected, one omitted duty at a time. ...

“There is no occasion to give this notice. It will soon show itself by acts.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.15 (trans. George Long, 1862) The answer, and the shells. On Saturday the president rejected Iran’s seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m rejecting their deal,” he said, and called it unacceptable (BBC News, 2026). That looked like an ending. It was not one. Within days Qatar had carried an official American response to Tehran, and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, brought it into a cabinet meeting and laid it before the president of Iran (ABC News, 2026). Officials briefed on the exchange describe the two sides as agreeing on the components and differing only on their order (CGTN, 2026). All of that was diplomacy. In the same waterway, the Revolutionary Guard confirmed for the first time that it strikes shipping in the strait every twenty-four hours, and a Kuwait-flagged tanker was set alight on Thursday (The New York Times, 2026; Seatrade Maritime, 2026). Washington answered the proposal and sent a third carrier group, with roughly nine thousand sailors and Marines (Fortune, 2026). ...

“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) 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). ...

“If any one can convince or shew me that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. It is truth that I seek; and truth never yet hurt any man. What does hurt is persistence in error or in ignorance.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.21, a modern paraphrase. The sourced Long rendering reads: “If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth, by which no man was ever injured.” (trans. George Long, 1862) ...

“When you are going to take in hand any act remind yourself what kind of an act it is. If you are going to bathe, place before yourself what happens in the bath; some splashing the water, others pushing against one another, others abusing one another, and some stealing; and thus with more safety you will undertake the matter, if you say to yourself, I now intend to bathe, and to maintain my will in a manner conformable to nature.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion 4 (trans. George Long, 1862) ...

“First say to yourself, what you would be; and then do, what you have to do.” — Epictetus, Discourses 3.23 (trans. Elizabeth Carter, 1758) Net interest on the federal debt is set to cross $1 trillion this fiscal year, more than the Pentagon’s entire budget, and it holds there every year through 2035 on the Congressional Budget Office’s own numbers (CBO, 2025). On the CBO’s calm, no-crisis baseline, debt held by the public breaks the record set finishing World War II by fiscal year 2030 (CBO, 2026). That’s about four years out. Treasury’s response this month was to double its debt buyback program, a move I wrote about this week in Treasury Buybacks: A Colossal Failure in the Making: a few billion dollars a month against a $32 trillion market, a rounding error dressed up as a fix. ...

“So long as he may allow you, take care of it as a thing which belongs to another, as travellers do with their inn.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion 11 (trans. George Long, 1862) On October 20, 2025, demolition crews began tearing down the White House East Wing, the 1902 addition that had housed the East Garden Room, the Family Theater, and generations of First Ladies’ offices. (NPR) It was coming down to make room for a 90,000-square-foot state ballroom, which the White House said in July 2025 would cost about $200 million, fully covered by Trump himself and other “patriot donors,” at no cost to taxpayers. (PBS) By December the estimate had climbed to $400 million. This week, CNBC reported the figure has reached roughly $900 million, and that it will now be “covered primarily by taxpayers.” (CNBC) ...

“For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion 17 (trans. George Long, 1862) Early this morning, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States, 50 to 49. Every Democrat voted no. So did two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. (NPR) Blanche spent most of his career on the advocate’s side of a courtroom: a decade as a federal prosecutor in New York’s violent crimes unit, then years defending white-collar clients in private practice. In 2023 he took on a single, high-profile assignment: representing Donald Trump personally, in the hush money trial, the classified documents case, and the election obstruction case. (Wikipedia) That’s not a dishonorable job on its own. The system depends on lawyers willing to argue a client’s case as hard as it can honestly be argued, whether the client is popular or not, guilty or not. ...