Shot At Without Effect

Tremendous content here in the Cool Zone

Somewhere Churchill wrote to the effect that there is nothing in life so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect. He was probably crazy. I can assure you that being shot at without affect is stressful and scary.

It is also tremendous content.

Churchill, to his credit, knew that too.

The photo for this newsletter is still from a video I took of interceptors being launched at inbound Iranian missiles. You could see them going up. You could see the flash as they hit. You could hear the thump as they exploded. The house shook a little bit. It was surprising, even if you expected there to be an attack today, which for the past 30 minutes everybody had.

Life, however, goes on even in the middle of all this, I remember thinking when I was a young boy about a marketplace that was bombed during the Yugo Lodge, Civil War, and how it was that people were walking around in a marketplace during a civil war well here I am in the middle of international conflict and I took the video while the grocery delivery men were giving me my groceries.

I have come to accept that actually Thomas Fridman has had illuminating conversations with taxi drivers around the world, I asked the delivery man whether he would be able to call his headquarters to go back and be safe.

He shook his head no. If I don’t work, he said, then I can’t send money back to my home country and if I can’t send money back to my home country, then none of the systems will work.

Doha is and hopefully will remain an incredibly cosmopolitan city I have had conversations here with shakes. I have had conversations here with frontier tribesmen from Afghanistan and the northwest province of Pakistan. I have talked to people from villages in Nepal were running water is a recent memory, I have talked to people who have more money than I will have in my lifetime.

All of us tonight are in the same city watching the skies. Nothing is quite so cosmopolitan as danger.

To be sure. We do not face it under the same circumstances; I am safe at home, the delivery man is still making his rounds. But that matters little to ballistic trajectories.

Some are saying this is a scripted dance. All of us have been underestimating the danger, so I have low confidence in that assessment. But these crises have a logic of their own. We shall see.

(Apologies for any typos. The Internet is squirrelly here tonight and so I am mostly dictating this to my phone Substack app.)