We are now back to the US randomly bombing Iran again, even hitting a wedding, and Iran retaliating.

Iranian media said that the wedding ceremony was being held in a home in the city of Kuhestak, Hormozgan province, late on Tuesday when a US missile struck, with shrapnel and debris from the strike killing and injuring people.

Among the dead was a four-year-old child, Amir-Ali Karimi, and a 16-year-old, Mohammad Mollahi.
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A video of the aftermath shows colourful wedding streamers and decorations strewn across the ground, and shoes abandoned in the rush to escape the attack.

“You wicked people have attacked people’s homes and turned their wedding ceremony into a funeral,” said a man filming the aftermath of the strike, shared by Fars news agency.
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Iran responded by launching drones and missiles on US bases across the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE. Iran’s military spokesperson, Lt Col Ebrahim Zolfaghari, vowed “heavier, broader, and more crushing and devestating” retaliation.
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In February, a strike on an elementary school killed at least 156 people, including more than 120 schoolchildren. Independent investigations concluded that the US likely carried out the strike with the assistance of AI, though the US government said the incident remained under investigation.

The resumption seems to have no good reason except that Trump needs something to drive attention away from the news that he is deeply unpopular with the American public, prices remain high, Canada is hitting back sharply against his bullying, and the Pentagon is shedding people from its upper ranks.

Dan Driscoll broke his silence late Tuesday, announcing that his last full day as Army secretary will be Wednesday.
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Apart from the turf war Driscoll has been embroiled in with Hegseth, the Defense secretary has ousted several senior Army leaders with whom the Army secretary has worked o modernize the service branch’s warfighting efforts. 

The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. James Mingus, retired without explanation in October. Hegseth then fired the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, and in June Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, retired. 

Meanwhile Trump’s Folly, his vanity project of Lincoln pool painting, is going nowhere. Trump’s claim two days ago that it “is almost completely fixed” can be immediately checked, at least in day time, by the live cam video feed. I just did so and what do you know, the pool is filled with water again, when just yesterday it was empty with a gash in the lining running all the way down the middle. Oh wait, that is because a thunderstorm just drenched Washington DC, which means that the repainting, which requires a perfectly dry surface, is once again messed up. Oh, those pesky vandals. They now even control the weather.

Apart from the tremendous human costs that the war has inflicted, there is also mounting concern about the mounting financial costs. John Cassidy tries to estimate it.

With no end in sight, the costs of Trump’s war are mounting. Some of them can’t be expressed in dollars and cents. According to the Pentagon, eighteen U.S. service members have been killed and more than seven hundred and fifty wounded. The Iranian death toll is in the thousands, including more than two hundred children, according to estimates from UNICEF and the Iranian government. The war has spilled over into other countries, causing hundreds more deaths—thousands, if you include Israel’s assault on Lebanon.
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One issue with tallying [the direct cost of military expenditures] is that the Pentagon has been less than forthright about many aspects of the conflict. In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the conflict had cost roughly $37.5 billion, but he didn’t provide much in the way of detail. Shortly before Hegseth’s appearance, NBC News reported that internal Pentagon estimates put the true figure, including military-base reconstruction costs, at somewhere between eighty billion and a hundred billion dollars. 

In air wars, the biggest single expense is often munitions, and that is true in this conflict. The Pentagon has made extensive use of precision missiles, such as Tomahawks, which cost $2.6 million each, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (C.S.I.S.), and advanced air-defense systems, such as Patriot-missile batteries, which cost $4.9 million. A C.S.I.S. analysis of the war’s cost, published earlier this summer, said that the Pentagon has used more than a thousand Tomahawks and as many as fourteen hundred Patriots, in addition to roughly ten thousand unguided “dumb” bombs. This dramatic rundown in munitions accounts for $26.1 billion of a total military cost of about forty billion dollars, the analysis said.

It identified the second-largest cost item as damage to U.S. bases in places such as Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which it estimated at up to $9.2 billion. Although the Pentagon has tried to play down the effectiveness of Iran’s attacks, they appear to have destroyed, wholly or partially, hundreds of structures, including aircraft hangars, fuel depots, radar facilities, warehouses, and barracks—delivering a blow to U.S. military infrastructure without precedent in recent times. “You’d have to go back to the Second World War to see something like that,” Mark Cancian, a former Marine colonel and White House budget official who co-authored the C.S.I.S. study, told me. When the conflict ends, Cancian went on, the Pentagon will have to think seriously about whether to rebuild or abandon the damaged facilities, given their vulnerability to future attacks.

When one combines the costs due to rising energy and fertilizer prices and the rise in inflation rates from 2.4% to 3.4%, “Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, put the total cost of the war for the typical American household at a thousand dollars—a figure he described as conservative. That was at the end of June. More recently, Zandi has raised his estimate to more than twelve hundred dollars.”

It should be no surprise that Trump’s approval rating is now at 33%, ewith just 24% approving of his handling of Iran.

But not to worry! Trump (or his best friend Natalie Harp) will put out some stupid social media message (“We are going to rename all the oceans of the world to ‘Trump ocean’, since they are all connected together and thus just one ocean really”) to distract people from his disastrous policies.