Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 66. Sunrise is 5:46 and sunset is 7:57 for 14 hours 11 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1715, a total solar eclipse is visible across northern Europe and northern Asia, as predicted by Edmond Halley to within four-minute accuracy.
One reads today that Mr. Trump offers a new selling point for his latest war:
As the conflict continues, Donald Trump has encouraged Americans to keep things “in perspective,” citing the long wars in Vietnam and Iraq to suggest that U.S. involvement in Iran is “not very long at all.”
See Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Trump Faces the Complicated Reality of a Costly, Unpopular War in Iran (‘President Trump’s predictions of a relatively short-term conflict with minimal economic consequences appear to be crumbling’), New York Times, May 3, 2026.
Kanno-Youngs’s reporting places Trump’s statement in perspective:
Two months into the war in Iran, President Trump is confronting the complicated reality of a conflict that has proved costly, deeply unpopular and lacks a clear endgame.
Energy markets are in turmoil. The Pentagon has given its first public estimate of the war’s cost: $25 billion so far. Key Republicans in Congress are growing impatient. And Mr. Trump is lashing out at foreign allies, like Germany, who have shown no interest in joining the fight.
[…]Just three weeks ago, Mr. Trump said Iran had agreed to all of his demands and he suggested a breakthrough was near. Iran would work with the United States to remove its enriched uranium, energy prices would drop and a growing global crisis with potential severe political ramifications would subside.
None of that happened.
No, none of it.
A better approach for a better world would be free trade in capital, labor, and goods.
We have tariffs and war instead.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Particular Species of Democrat, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, ‘What Ails, What Heals’ Reviewed, and Outcome Driven Argumentation.
Trump jokes that U.S. Navy will take on Cuba on the way home from Iran: