Tuesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, July 7, 2026 and National Day of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which means of course that we should celebrate the most influential rock group of all time. I don’t need to tell you who it is, but here’s one example:

It’s also Chocolate Day, National Dive Bar Day, National Macaroni Day, and National Strawberry Sundae Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Footy news: After Trump had America’s best soccer striker reinstated on the U.S. team after he was expelled for this game with a red card, FIFA canceled the red card and so Folarin Balogun played against Belgium. It didn’t help: Belgium defeated the U.S. 4-0, and so our lads are coming home. In the other game, Spain beat Portugal 1-0. Today’s games are Argentina (my favorite) versus Egypt and Switzerland vs. Columbia. From ESPN about the US/Belgium game.

After days of anticipation and debate surrounding the USA’s Round of 16 matchup against Belgium – and a frantic past 24 hours as FIFA controversially ruled that American striker Folarin Balogun could play despite receiving a red card in USA’s Round of 32 game – the Red Devils proved to be the dominant force on the pitch.

From the opening kickoff, Belgium had the Americans on the back foot, and only a fabulous save from USA goalkeeper Matt Freese kept Belgium from going ahead in the first minute of the game. The respite proved to be short-lived as Belgium continued its onslaught and eventually found the net in the 9th minute off the foot of Charles De Ketelaere after the US defense failed to clear the ball out of the box.

. . .As the clock became the US’ fiercest enemy, Balogun, who has spent the past few days under the microscope, had a moment to shine as he brought down a long pass on the run and found himself in a 1 v. 1 with Belgian goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois. Balogun struck the ball well with his left foot, but Courtois was able to get enough of the ball to push it away and stymie another US scoring attempt.

The Red Devils put an exclamation point on a decisive win in second half stoppage time as Lukaku powered the ball past a diving Freese to the far post for Belgium’s fourth goal of the night, cementing a 4-1 win and a date with European powerhouse Spain in the quarterfinals on Friday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.

Here are the highlights. The goal-scoring plays on the video are at 2:51, 4:17 (U.S. score on free kick), 5:30, 9:04, and 12:59.

*Breaking news, ripped from the headlines: Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, and a man with a checkered past, has now been accused of rape. I suspect that will make him leave the race, and if he does a substitute must be found in six days or his name stays on the ballot. (Article archived here.)

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate from Maine, said he was taking time to “reflect” on his political path forward as his support swiftly eroded after a woman accused him of rape.

In a video posted on social media, Mr. Platner called the account “false” even as he acknowledged the threat it posed to his candidacy in a tight race that could determine control of the Senate in November.

“Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward,” he said.

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Platner intended to continue his campaign against Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. He has until July 13 to withdraw from the race, and if he does the state Democratic Party has until July 27 to replace him on the ticket, according to Maine state law. The leadership of the state party urged him to withdraw.

Both parties see Maine as key to the battle for control of the Senate, and prominent Democrats withdrew their endorsements of him after the allegations surfaced.

. . . The Senate Democratic campaign arm, which had opposed Mr. Platner in the primary, called for him to quit the race. “Graham Platner needs to immediately withdraw as the Democratic nominee for Senate and allow Maine Democrats the opportunity to choose a new candidate who can defeat Susan Collins,” a statement from Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said. “The D.S.C.C. will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.”

There goes his campaign funding. I’m betting Platner will drop out, but will the Democrats have a viable Senate candidate in his absence? Remember, this is an accusation, though I heard on the news it’s somewhat butressed by accuser had old emails with her therapist. Everyone is presumed innocent until found guilty, but accusations are enough these days to stop someone’s candidacy in his tracks. I’m betteing it will.

*Speaking of footy, it appears that Trump helped the U.S. soccer team by calling the President of FIFA to get an American player’s one-game suspension (he got a red card) in the World Cup removed.  (Trump finally admitted the intercession.) That player happens to be the U.S.’s top scorer. The whole thing smells fishy. (Archived article here.)

President Trump called Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, in the hours after the United States men’s soccer team played Wednesday and asked him to review the suspension of the team’s top goal scorer in the World Cup, Folarin Balogun, after he was given a red card, according to fourpeople familiar with the conversation.

On Sunday, FIFA reversed the suspension, announcing that Mr. Balogun would be eligible to play Monday against Belgium.

The reversal is highly unusual and is the first time since 1962 that FIFA has allowed a player to appear in a game when they would have been suspended after being sent off in the World Cup. Mr. Infantino has spent years trying to curry favor with Mr. Trump. Last year, FIFA created and gave Mr. Trump the FIFA Peace Prize amid the president’s public, but failed, campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Shortly after Mr. Balogun’s red card, senior Trump administration officials, including Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Andrew Giuliani, the executive director of the White House task force on the World Cup, engaged lawyers to help the U.S. Soccer Federation try to appeal, despite FIFA’s rules against such appeals, according to two of the people familiar with the call.

U.S. Soccer officials argued the red card was improperly given to Mr. Balogun because the officials should not have used slow-motion video replay in determining the penalty, the people said. Use of video replays is common practice, and players have frequently been ejected after reviews.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Balogun episode gives at least the appearance of political influence. While the appearance of influence/favoritism is a quaint/naive notion in 2026, the reversal was sure to cause a fury, and did.

The rest of the planet doesn’t know our country freaks out like this all the time, especially in college football season when an opportunity to play in the Pop Tart Bowl is on the line. Belgium is seething, ready to announce the chocolate, frites and cyclocross sanctions. Its soccer coach thought the whole thing was a prank.

“I didn’t know that at the World Cup, the 5th of July is actually the first of April–April Fools’,” said a baffled Rudi Garcia.

From The Washington Post:

Without him, the U.S. might have tapped Ricardo Pepi, a striker who has played all four matches (and started two) at the World Cup. The 23-year-old Texan has stepped up over the years with some big goals in World Cup-qualifying and Concacaf Nations League matches. This past club season, he netted a career-best 19 goals for Dutch champion PSV. But he hasn’t scored for the U.S. since 2024. Haji Wright, a 28-year-old who scored against the Netherlands in the 2022 World Cup round of 16, could be an option, too.

*At Noon in Israel, Amit Segal claims that the Iran/U.S./Israel war, being a war of optics, misled people into thinking that Iran had won after the MoU. Segal disagrees.

There is something very strange about modern wars. One day you bomb the enemy, and on the second day he calls you on WhatsApp after getting the internet working again. We tend to look at the absurdity of senior American administration officials conducting friendly conversations with the heads of the terror regime. But it is safe to assume that for the Iranians it is harder. They need to talk with the people who killed their admired leader and caused their economy hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

In the first two weeks after the signing of the agreement, there was an almost absolute consensus that Iran had won. This feeling of catastrophe was caused by a rare coalition of the regime’s mouthpieces in Tehran, the establishment media in America and the hard feelings in Israel and within the Republican Party.

If things are so good for Iran, why did they fire at the beginning of the week in the Strait of Hormuz? The accepted approach is that the regime is simply taunting Trump out of hubris and an absolute conviction that he will not dare to attack back. But a senior American official offers an additional possibility: “The Iranians are shooting because it turned out that they are losing: they thought they would open the strait from their side immediately, and in parallel slow down access for Western vessels. In practice, the opposite happened. We have safe passage under ‘Project Liberty,’ without them controlling it at all. Meanwhile, despite the temporary suspension of the sanctions, it became clear to them that no bank in the West is willing to do business with them for two months. They are offering steep discounts, but have not sold even one barrel of oil. In addition, no asset was unfrozen. The Gulf states have no desire to lift a finger for them.”

And yet not everything is measured in oil, but also in optics. The Americans believe that what they did in the agreement is to give the moderate wing there an incentive against the extreme side, and to see what will come out of the clash between them. They see the power struggles at the top as one of the achievements of the war and believe that something good can still come out of the skirmishes.

Give us credit, the Americans ask again and again. Just as you did not believe that Hamas would give up the hostages, you also do not believe that Iran will give up its nuclear program. Force solves many things, but contrary to what the Israeli government and its leader think, it does not solve everything. The war has reached a stage in which the marginal utility of using it is steadily decreasing. We are not naive as you think, nor are we “Innocents Abroad,” like the title of Mark Twain’s book about his journey to Palestine in the 19th century. In Hebrew, by the way, the book is called by the somewhat cynical name “A Pleasure Trip to the Holy Land.”

Segal is always more optimistic than I. If the fighting is done, what is the upside for the U.S.?  There is still no final agreement and the Strait of Hormuz is pretty much still closed.

*Over at the Free Press, Arthur Brooks discusses what’s reported to be an extremely complex pre-nup between Taylor Swift (a billionaire) and Travis Kelce (a multimillionaire) and notes that prenups appear to help terminate marriages rather than to preserve them.

In 2026 America, even fairy-tale romances are lawyered up. The massively publicized wedding of pop star Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce this past weekend was accompanied by what is thought to be the “most sophisticated” prenuptial legal agreement in history. This was to protect their respective fortunes—which is obviously less about Kelce’s $70–$90 million than Swift’s $2 billion—in the unfortunate case that the union goes south in the coming years.

The newlyweds are a famous example of an exploding trend. Whereas in 2010 only about 3 percent of Americans said they had a prenup, by 2023, 47 percent of millennials and 41 percent of Gen Zers who were engaged or married had these agreements in place. In a similar trend, married couples are increasingly likely to keep separate bank accounts—up from about a sixth to almost a quarter since 1996, according to the Census Bureau.

Those who advocate for prenups and separate finances have four basic arguments for doing so. First, it helps couples not to fight about money if they happen to have very different approaches to home economics. Second, it forces both partners as individuals to acquire and maintain saving habits and financial skills. Third, each person can prioritize specific, tailored financial goals. Fourth, and most obviously, not merging finances creates a layer of clarity and security if the couple splits and one spouse demands some of what the other brought to the marriage.

However, as many would point out, the odds of love fading—or failing to develop properly—might rise precisely because of these financial insurance policies put in place. And that is exactly what the research tells us. A 2026 study in the journal Family Relations found that for couples with average-quality communication—let’s just call these people “newlyweds learning to live together”—prenups degraded relationship satisfaction. At best, prenups were an insignificant factor among couples who were already very good communicators (something my wife and I certainly were not during the first few years of our marriage).

Meanwhile, in a 2023 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers showed that couples who commingled their money in joint bank accounts enjoyed greater harmony than those who didn’t, and reported better goal alignment. Indeed, the correlation between financial trust and good interpersonal skills was underlined still further in a similar study last year, which revealed that couples with high financial interdependence had more frequent and higher-quality communication than those who didn’t. Scholars writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluded that couples pooling all their money is excellent for overall relationship satisfaction.

Well, this is hardly earthshaking news, but of course a gazillion people are interested in—and many invested in—this relationship. I go back and forth on whether it will last. On one hand, Swift has never had a sustained romantic relationship, perhaps because that doesn’t suit her, or perhaps because she’s hard to live with. On the other hand, she may have been waiting fgor the right man, and Kelce may be it, so perhaps it will last.  But I’m hoping it does, both for their sakes and because I don’t want to hear any more Swift songs about bad romances.

*I didn’t know that Dave Barry had a Substack, but he does, and, ironically, it’s called “Dave Barry’s Substack.”  It’s hilarious (I’d forgotten how funny Barry is), and you can access the pieces for free. The latest post, “America“, is about how great our country is, and I’ll give a few excerpts.

Tomorrow is July 4, 2026, and if you’re a student of American history, you know what that means: It means I’ll be trying to recover from celebrating my 79th birthday, which is today.

But it also means that tomorrow the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday, the anniversary of that fateful day in 1776 when the Founding Fathers adopted the Declaration of Independence, an act for which they could have been hanged. Imagine being that brave. Granted, you and I routinely accept “Terms of Service” agreements that, for all we know, give Google and Microsoft the right to harvest our kidneys with unsterilized toenail clippers. But that’s not us being brave; that’s just us being stupid. The Founding Fathers knew what they were risking, and they did it anyway, and that’s why today we live in the greatest nation on Earth by almost every meaningful statistical measure. To cite just one: [JAC: It’s labeled “Source: The Central Intelligence Agency”]

Canada needs some Waffle Houses! But there’s more:

Yes, we have a lot to celebrate, and tomorrow there will be festivities from sea to shining sea. The most spectacular celebration, of course, will be in Washington. D.C., where a huge crowd is expected to gather for the lighting of the Official Semiquincentennial Sparkler, which, at 150 feet tall, is believed to be the largest sparkler ever made. Here it is being installed by workers on the National Mall:

What makes America great?

But what I would have written, if I hadn’t been distracted, is, in brief, this: What makes America great — prepare for a searing insight — is Americans. I don’t mean American politicians; I mean everyday, hardworking, generous, friendly, decent Americans, who I believe greatly outnumber the idiots. I mean the people who hold the door for you, and say “thank you” when you hold the door for them, and buy Girl Scout cookies even though they already have some at home, and never butt in line, and will lend you their jumper cables, and will take the trouble to lower a log gently to the ground instead of dropping it because there might be critters inside, and will take time out from bottle-feeding a dozen baby raccoons to schlep 50 miles in the rain so they can take custody of three baby woodpeckers, and all the other millions of small but good things that millions of Americans do every day. Which is not to say we can’t be better. But I sincerely believe — and I’m a professionally cynical old guy of 79 — that we’re pretty good.

So happy birthday to us.

OK, I’m getting sappy, so it’s time to turn things over to — speaking of greatness — you paying subscribers. Today we have three scientific polls.

Here’s one of the polls:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron has some good advice, but neither cat can open the window:

Hili: There’s a strange smell.
Szaron: Then maybe it’s better to close the window.

In Polish:

Hili: Jakiś dziwny zapach.
Szaron: To może lepiej zamknąć okno.

*******************

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group:

From Masih. There’s another reason why North Koreans cry when one of their Dear Leaders dies: somebody is watching them, and if they don’t cry they’ll be arrested and imprisoned.

Surprised that some Iranians cried for Khamenei? Watch how North Koreans cried for Kim too.

The same playbook, When a regime controls every school, every mosque, every TV channel for 45 years, yes, some people will cry. That’s the result of decades of psychological… pic.twitter.com/6Mgs7EXAxB

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) July 5, 2026

A cool plot found by Luana, who would never make a good Democratic Socialist:

“capitalism is evil” pic.twitter.com/ugvqNaxIgp

— HotSotin 🇫🇮🇺🇦🇪🇺△ (@HotSotin) July 5, 2026

From Jeff Maurer:

I’ve been complaining and complaining about how corrupt the Trump administration is but there’s a non-zero chance that living in a kakistocracy just paid off big-time. https://t.co/Egfdn0aBEq

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) July 5, 2026

From the Number Ten Cat. I asked Matthew to explain, and he said, “They notoriously put out loads of local leaflets with this kind of crappy graph on, supposedly showing that only they can (say) beat the. Tories.”

If the @LibDems leaflet team did weather forecasts: https://t.co/zfS60PE4Cu

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) July 6, 2026

Two from my feed. I wonder if this first one is real:

An the academy award goes to pic.twitter.com/D8m4HmLKjP

— KJW (@Hawkesbay69) July 5, 2026

I hope that this one is real, too (sound up):

Groundhogs having their nails trimmed: watch the reactions of his buddy. pic.twitter.com/8ynJ77uen9

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 5, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Hungarian Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was almost ten years old. https://t.co/iwetxmN6of

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) July 7, 2026

 

And one from Dr. Cobb showing a gorgeous moth. Can any reader identifty it? (I can’t.)

A modest catch last night in my little suburban garden, but did get this absolute beauty. Other highlights included common and scarce footman, Mother of Pearl, small fan-footed wave, single-dotted wave, rosy tabby (Endotricha flammealis), large yellow underwing, & willow beauty #teammoth #ukmoths

— Matt Smith (@aeromattsmith.bsky.social) 2026-07-04T11:39:01.485Z