Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, August 18, 2026, and it’s National Bad Poetry Day. Finding horrible verse is a hobby of mine, but two names stand out; William McGonagall and Julia A. Moore, the former a Brit and the latter American. Here in its entirety is Moore’s “Little Libbie” Moore was sometimes called “The Sweet Singer of Michigan”:
Little Libbie
Julia A. Moore
One more little spirit to Heaven has flown,
To dwell in that mansion above,
Where dear little angels, together roam,
In God’s everlasting love.
One little flower has withered and died,
A bud near ready to bloom,
Its life on earth is marked with pride;
Oh, sad it should die so soon.
Sweet little Libbie, that precious flower
Was a pride in her parents’ home,
They miss their little girl every hour,
Those friends that are left to mourn.
Her sweet silvery voice no more is heard
In the home where she once roamed;
Her place is vacant around the hearth,
Where her friends are mourning lone.
They are mourning the loss of a little girl,
With black eyes and auburn hair,
She was a treasure to them in this world,
This beautiful child so fair.
One morning in April, a short time ago,
Libbie was active and gay;
Her Saviour called her, she had to go,
E’re the close of that pleasant day.
While eating dinner, this dear little child
Was choked on a piece of beef.
Doctors came, tried their skill awhile,
But none could give relief.
She was ten years of age, I am told,
And in school stood very high.
Her little form now the earth enfolds,
In her embrace it must ever lie.
Her friends and schoolmates will not forget
Little Libbie that is no more;
She is waiting on the shining step,
To welcome home friends once more.
It’s also Helium Discovery Day; as the site notes:
In 1868, French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen went to Guntoor, India, to watch an eclipse in hopes of studying the sun’s composition. On August 18, using a prism, he found a yellow light that appeared to be sodium, but found out that it didn’t have the same wavelength as that element. It turns out what he had discovered was helium!
Finally, it’s National Fajita Day, National Ice Cream Pie Day, and Pinot Noir Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 18 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Well, the 60-day deadline the U.S. and Iran agreed to for settling the cease-fire agreement has come and gone—sans agreement (article archived here).
The United States and Iran on Monday missed their 60-day deadline to reach a deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program under the terms of the cease-fire they agreed to in June, underlining the breakdown of a truce that President Trump promised would end the war.
Mr. Trump had announced the so-called memorandum of understanding between the two countries with great fanfare two months ago. But the short-lived agreement failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively blockaded after Israel and the United States attacked in late February, or end a conflict that has entered its sixth month.
The expiration of the deadline is largely symbolic, as both Mr. Trump and Iran’s leaders have said in recent weeks that the deal is basically dead. The original deal also provided for the 60-day period to be extended if necessary, which would have been likely given the sensitive and complex nature of the negotiations.
But the milestone nonetheless shows how Mr. Trump has struggled to achieve his war aims — like forcing Iran to curtail its nuclear ambitions — and how emboldened the Iranian government feels, with the two countries at risk of further military conflict.
The president said on Monday that preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was still his main objective. “The number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon,” he said on social media.
Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, had told reporters earlier that the negotiations on the nuclear deal “never began,” adding that the 60-day period was “fundamentally no longer relevant.”
There have been no publicly reported U.S. strikes on Iranian targets since late July. But the United States and Iran appear to be gearing up for a protracted campaign of economic attrition that could easily tip over into renewed warfare, analysts said. Iran is wielding its control of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for oil and gas shipping, to choke global energy markets, raising pressure on Mr. Trump to reach a deal.
It has, then, become an economic war and, as Amit Segal prophesied, the war will be about who blinks first, economics-wise.
*Speaking of that agreement, the WSJ reports that even as it was signed, Iran had a secret plan to escalate the war, and is carrying it out.
After President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran in mid-June, administration officials fanned out to build support for an agreement they hoped would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and start winding down the war.
Iran’s hard-line leaders huddled in Tehran and came up with a different plan, according to Iranian and Arab officials. In their view the pact was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight.
Their efforts include giving the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more control of the country’s regular army, appointing hardened veterans of the war with Iraq and past internal crackdowns to key posts, expanding domestic counterintelligence operations and ramping up production of missiles and drones. The leadership quickly seized the initiative, attacking ships to tighten Iran’s grip on Hormuz and expanding the battlefield to the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia has used to get around Iran’s chokehold on the Persian Gulf.
. . .Arab intelligence officials have picked up evidence—including communications between Iran and militia allies in countries such as Yemen and Iraq—of a strategic shift inside the country’s hard-line leadership to get their forces ready to widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S., officials familiar with the findings say. Alarming weaker Gulf countries like Kuwait, Iran’s leaders are increasingly talking about offensive operations on enemy territory.
Their overriding goal is to inflict enough pain to ensure the kind of attacks Iran has endured with the 12-day war last year and the continuing conflict aren’t repeated.
“There is also a widespread view in Iran that the main war has not yet begun,” said Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash, a Tehran-based defense analyst close to the Iranian government. “What we have seen so far is increasingly interpreted through the lens of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics—limited, incremental escalation designed to weaken capabilities before a larger confrontation.”
The Iranian preparations point to an enormous gulf between how Washington and Tehran are perceiving this stage of the war. The divergence has driven a hard-line negotiating stance and reluctance to close deals by Iran’s leaders that has persistently flummoxed Trump, who has called them crazy and accused them of lying.
. . . Iran’s readiness to fight also highlights a deep lack of trust that is likely to keep the two sides from reaching a durable deal to end the conflict any time soon.
. . .People close to Iran’s top negotiators have warned peace talks could be just an interlude before more conflict. Mehdi Mohammadi, a strategic adviser to chief Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, described the current stalemate Tuesday as the calm before the storm.
In an earlier social-media post, Mohammadi said the drivers of continued conflict include a “generational project for blood vengeance” for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba’s father, in the opening strikes of the war.
“The Iranian nation still has much unfinished business with Trump,” said Mohammadi, who is also a member of Iran’s negotiating team. “Iran is prepared for the great confrontation.”
If all this is true, it looks as if the war is going to go on for a long time, or at least until we have a new administration. If Democrats win the Presidency, we can expect an American pullout tout suite.
*In these days of consumer-oriented college, when students are loath to read even a single book in a course, Matt. Dinan, identified as “the director of the Great Books program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada” and author of the newsletter Prefaces, tells professors how to get their students to actually love learning. Dinan begins by saying that, mirabile dictu, he got his students to not only read the 1000-page Brothers Karamazov, but also to love it. How did he do that? For one thing, Dinan lost interest in his “devices” in the face of Dostoevsky’s genius. And then the prof added passion to his teaching:
. . . When I’d enter our seminar room, I’d hear my students chattering excitedly about Dmitry Karamazov’s wild love life and self-destructive partying as if he lived in the dorm with them; there were debates — wrongheaded, in my view, but sincere — about which books might help the obdurate intellectual brother, Ivan, overcome his despair.
That my students — regular 20-somethings at a public college in one of Canada’s poorest provinces — fell in love with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s strange little town might look like a miracle from the outside, but as the narrator of “The Brothers Karamazov” puts it: “Miracles never bother a realist.” To be a realist about higher education is to acknowledge that the challenge of our moment is not primarily intellectual, but sentimental — spiritual, if you will. In the algorithmic age, effective teaching is affective teaching.
Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention, but attention is an anemic way to understand what allows education to transform people. We’re really talking about passion, inconvenient and unfashionable as that is to acknowledge. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency that is the antidote to the feckless, superficial distraction of the algorithmic age. Lots of us pay very close attention to our phones, but what we lack is the sustaining passion that endures difficulty and shapes a life.
. . .When I asked my students why they thought Dostoyevsky was such a hit, they routinely said two things. First, they were moved by the passions of the characters in the novel. As one student put it to me, the characters in “The Brothers Karamazov”approach life “head first, heels last”; they dash to extremity, grab what’s there, and bring it back to this otherwise insignificant village, where it explodes into fierce little human dramas that take on cosmic significance. The novel is an extravagant convergence of form and content in this sense: It shows us what real, life-shaping passion looks like, but also awakens something similar in its readers.
Second, the students explained that my own enthusiasm helped stoke theirs. When I asked how they were managing to keep up with the brisk pace of the reading assignments, one of them candidly said: “Well, it really helps that you’re so into it.” Since Alan knew much more about the novel than I did and mostly led discussions, I had the pleasure of becoming a student myself, proposing thrilling but wildly unscholarly theories about the ultimate fate of Father Zosima, or the motivations of the novel’s mysterious narrator.
And the secret:
Over the course of last semester, I became convinced there is a way out of this moribund strategy: We teachers must remain students — and model what we want to see. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.
I have three responses. First, based on my own experience, he’s right. The classes I learned the most from were the ones with passionate professors. Since William and Mary was a teaching school, not one in which professors were expected to do a ton of research, they were hired and retained largely on teaching ability. And I still remember the professors who most inspired me: Garnett Brooks and Bruce Grant (biology), Charles Davidson (English, Old English), Alan Fuchs (philosophy), Lew Leadbeater (classics), and so on. Their passion inspired me. Second, the passion has to be internalized at some point so that you continue to learn and want to learn after you leave school. Third: the prescription is easier given than ingested! As I learned, it’s hard to inspire students who don’t want to learn, like those pre-meds required to take evolution but who thought the subject was irrelevant to a medical career.
*Several sources (this one’s the New Republic) note Donald Trump’s recent and very foolish overtures to North Korea, exemplified in this message he posted on Truth Social:
President Trump on Sunday said he ordered the Pentagon to “significantly” reduce the amount of joint military exercises with South Korea, due to his “very good relationship” with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
His statement:
Oy gewalt! There’s something wrong with anybody who wants to have a good relationship with the brutal dictator and criminal Kim Jong Un. But. there’s more. Trump is punishing South Korea, as you can see for the next-to-last sentence. More:
Nonetheless, Trump is spiting South Korea, a longtime ally, for not helping bail him out in Iran while also making a clear overture to the one country it has the most hostile and adversarial relationship with.
“Trump’s description of the D.P.R.K. as ‘unthreatening and respectful’ is alarming to allies, who have watched the regime steadily improve its missile and nuclear capabilities, while also gaining an additional patron in Russia for its support in the war on Ukraine,” Asia Society Policy Institute Deputy Director Emma Chanlett-Avery told The New York Times.
This is just the latest example of the deteriorating U.S.-South Korea relationship under Trump. South Korea has been hit by U.S. tariffs, had hundreds of its citizens (with valid work visas) detained in an immigration raid, and now has lost access to joint military exercizes—all while Trump praises Kim Jong Un and North Korea continues to expand its military capabilities.
. . .“For 70 years, America has held these joint exercises to train AND reassure its Asia-Pacific allies. Furthermore, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is NOT respectful of the USA, now or ever. In the past few months, he has blatantly said NoKo is and always will be a nuclear power, specifically to ward off any hostile action, like America and Israel’s war on Iran,” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour mused Monday on X.
“He already has dozens of nukes, and in June, called for an ‘exponential’ expansion of Pyongyang’s arsenal. They’d already ramped up dramatically since Trump’s failed Hanoi summit with Kim in 2019, which I covered,” she continued. “Since then, Kim has ramped up missile testing, while his soldiers now have real battlefield experience since fighting for Russia against Ukraine. Respectful?”
How dumb can a President be? Wait—don’t answer that.
*AOC announced publicly (with videos) that she was freezing her eggs. I don’t care whether or not she does, but I did look up egg freezing and discovered that it’s both expensive and not covered by many health insurance plans.
So-called elective egg freezing has become more common as women delay motherhood to focus on their education and careers, studies show. Ocasio-Cortez, who is 36, recently said on ABC’s “This Week” that she hasn’t ruled out a future presidential and U.S. Senate campaign.
However, the expense of egg freezing — compounded by a widespread lack of insurance coverage — remains an obstacle for many women.
“A single egg freezing cycle in the United States typically costs $10,000 to $20,000,” said Dr. Stephanie Kuku, a former gynecologist and senior adviser to the World Health Organization. The total tab can be much higher if multiple cycles are needed, and after factoring in additional costs such as storage and implantation.
Kuku, who also has worked with several tech firms on projects related to IVF accessibility, has found in her new research that reducing fertility treatment costs increases birth rates.
For comparison, in France, elective egg freezing is fully covered by the country’s public health insurance.
Egg freezing is framed mostly as a technology that gives women “more reproductive choice,” said Natalie Lampert, the author of “The Big Freeze.”
“But that choice is still disproportionately available to people who can afford it or have good fertility benefits,” Lampert said.
It gets more expensive, as “many women need to undergo multiple cycles to get their desired egg count, said Dr. Marcelle Cedars, a professor and director at the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Reproductive Health. Ideally, women under the age of 35 will freeze at least 20 eggs, Cedars said. Women over that age typically need a higher number.”
Here’s an estimate for the procedure in NYC at different ages from CNBC:
Indeed, health insurance coverage for elective egg freezing is still the exception rather than the rule, Melfi said. Though she added: “Where we are seeing meaningful growth is through workplace benefits.”
Around 22% of employers with 500 or more workers provided coverage for elective egg freezing in 2025, up from 5% in 2015, according to Mercer. Among companies with over 5,000 employees, 40% offered the benefit last year, compared with only 8% a decade earlier.
Even among companies that cover egg freezing, a maximum lifetime benefit of around $20,000 is common, Mercer found.
Finally, you can add another $2000-$5000 to store the eggs for five years. I’m not sure whether medical insurance should cover it. If you are doing it to put fertility on hold for your career, that seems to be a “luxury” decision. On the other hand, there are times when storing eggs is medically necessary, as with a woman who will undergo chemotherapy or a hysterectomy and wants to have children afterwards (remember, frozen eggs can be inseminated and then carried in a surrogate mother; they will still have the genes of the biological mother.) In the latter cases, egg-freezing should be covered for sure.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is becoming a Stoic:
Hili: Everything’s changed around here.
Andrzej: We have to accept it.
In Polish:
Hili: Wszystko się tu pozmieniało.
Ja: Trzeba się z tym pogodzić.
*******************
From Cinemma:
From Things With Faces:
From The Foundation for Homeless Cats:
From Masih. If this report from Iran is true, it’s heinous. Putting someone in jail for feeding stray dogs?!
Speaking of AOC, here’s Jeff Maurer touting 20 minutes of a longer podcast (here) called “The environmental movement was a casualty of Woke 1”
This appears to be true, and while it may be a stunt, it will indeed test the WNBA’s policies. This is supported by Caitlyn Jenner, who, trans herself, wants to keep trans-identified men out of women’s sports.
Caitlyn Jenner is having her say in the ongoing transgender athlete conversations that have been flooding the WNBA as of late.
The 76-year-old, who transitioned in 2015 and is a former Olympic gold medalist, has thrown her support behind the two former NBA players — Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White — who have both claimed to be interested in entering the WNBA draft in 2027 in an effort to test the league’s policies.
“They’re showing the hypocrisy of what’s going on out there in the WNBA,” Jenner told Fox News of Kanter and White. “The WNBA had their meetings on this issue and Cathy (Engelbert), the head, says, ‘We talked about the trans issue but we just haven’t come up with a conclusion at this point. We will continue the conversation.’ Cathy, XX, you’re in. XY you’re out. It’s that simple.
“And both these guys, I think, are doing a good job just to show the WNBA the hypocrisy that’s going on here. We have to protect women’s sports … I want to protect women’s sports. Title IX was one of the greatest legislations for women’s equality – that happened to be in sports.”
From Malcolm: a cat argument. Sound up!
One from my feed. You can read about Elissa Zakaria Khoury here.
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
From Matthew. Translation: “It is a well-known fact that if you cut all the stamens of a red tulip before they release their dust, and that you powder the stigmas of this plant with the stamens of a white tulip, the seeds of the red tulip produce some plants with red flowers, others with white, and others again white and red.”
Way before Mendel, too! As for genetics of tulip color, well, it’s complicated.
Here's a riddle for you, or rather for the French horticulturalist Jean-Paul d’Ardène in his 1760 book Traité des tulipes. Translation and source in alt. He couldn't figure it out, and neither could anyone else for a century.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-08-17T10:49:06.649Z
A cat guarding cheese!
This cat guarding the cheeses in Paris in 1918 (BnF)🗃️
— Briony Neilson (@brionyneilson.bsky.social) 2026-08-17T04:42:19.216Z
