Thursday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Thursday, July 9, 2026 and National Dimples Day. Here’s one of the most famous celebrities in history who had dimples,  Shirley Temple:

Holidays are thin on the ground today, as the only other one of note is National Sugar Cookie Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Footy News: There was no footy yesteday, but France plays Morocco this afternoon. If you like soccer, though, you might be maddened by the new Quillette article, “Why soccer is boring.” Author Robert Lynch, identified as

 “. . . . a bio-cultural anthropologist, specialising in how biology, the environment, and culture come together to shape human behaviour, social mobility, and outcomes in life.”

gives a passel of reasons, but they did not affect my love of the game. Here are a few:

The better team loses almost half the time

One of the best ways to determine how much luck is involved in a sport is to measure how often the worse team beats the better one. If the favourite wins 80 per cent of the time, that’s a high-skill sport: the better side reliably prevails, and the remaining 20 per cent is luck. If the favourite wins 55 per cent of the time, you’re watching something closer to a coin flip.

By this measure soccer is the most random major sport there is. The favourite fails to win 45 per cent of the time. That’s higher than baseball (44.1 per cent), hockey (41.4 per cent), basketball (36.5 per cent), and football (36.4 per cent). Compare that to tennis, where over five sets the favourite loses only about 21 per cent of the time. In other words, play long enough and skill wins out. In an average ninety-minute soccer match, the better team is only slightly more likely to win than the better player is in a single hand of poker. Both are basically coin flips.

The main thing that drives the randomness is low event count

It bans the one thing humans are good at

The most basic problem with soccer is even simpler than the fact that it’s mostly luck. The sport’s founding rule is that you can use every part of your body except the one humans are best at. Homo sapiens are tool users. Using our hands is one of the basic traits that separate us from the other apes. We’re extraordinarily good at it, and our entire hunting strategy once depended on it. Our primary evolutionary edge is throwing things. No other animal can hurl a rock or spear with anything like our speed and accuracy. Our legs and feet evolved mainly for running. Soccer takes away the single greatest advantage of an ape that stood up on two legs partly to free its hands. It would be a great sport for a species that hunted by kicking rocks at its prey.

Soccer is all middle

All good sports are stories. They’re built out of discrete units, at-bats, downs, points, possessions, each with a beginning and an end. Something is attempted, something is resolved, and then you get another. The historian Michael Oriard, an NFL lineman before he was an academic, put it simply: American sports have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Soccer just drones on—pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again—for ninety minutes, and almost nothing ever finishes. It’s all middle.

It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.

Methinks the beautiful game doth protest too much

The more a sport has to be intellectualised, the more boring it is to watch. And with the exception of baseball, the world’s second most boring sport, no sport is intellectualised like soccer. Tell a soccer fan how bored you are at 0-0 with five minutes left and you’ll be told you don’t understand the buildup, the spacing, the shape, the press, the movement off the ball. Sometimes that’s real. Sometimes the spacing is genuinely impressive. But most of the time it means nothing happened and you’re being asked to admire it anyway. It’s a status move: the less obvious the entertainment, the more refined you get to feel for claiming to see it. It’s wine culture applied to sports: the fewer the pleasures available to the ordinary senses, the more elaborate the vocabulary required to appreciate them.

Well, to each their own.  I love the game because of many of these features. Scoring is hard because you can’t use your hands (though if you were allowed to throw the ball into the net, the scores wouldn’t be much higher). To me, the unpredictability of the outcome enhances it. If a good team is having a bad day, the underdogs can win.  And I don’t intellectualize the sport at all, I just watch it and am absorbed by it.  I get caught up in the games, and, unlike football or basketball or baseball, the games are short with predefined breaks, so they aren’t laden with commercials.

I sent the article to Matthew and he had the same reaction, especially when reading Lynch’s quote, “The more a sport leaves to chance, the more boring it is to watch, because the whole pleasure of sports is watching effort and skill get rewarded.”  Matthew said this about the piece:

“It’s a piece of clickbait contrarianism, but his central argument is mistaken. Sport is about engagement and if the result is predordained (don’t start) it really would be boring!”

By “don’t start”, he was telling me not to go off in determinism. But I’m not. The result is predestined but we’ll never know how.  I just enjoy watching the game, and passes are, to me, like chess: a board full of running men making spontaneous moves towards a checkmate.  But I’m intellectualizing; I just enjoy it! It’s telling that it’s an anthropologist who tries to tell us why something we enjoy really isn’t enjoyable.

*Graham Platner finally abandoned his campaign for a Senate seat in Maine; the rape accusation against him was the last straw (article archived here).

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine and a onetime star of the progressive movement, suspended his campaign on Wednesday under intense pressure from all corners of his party after a woman accused him of rape.

His departure upends one of this year’s most important Senate races and creates enormous uncertainty about his party’s outlook in Maine, where Democrats believe that defeating Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, is crucial to their efforts to reclaim a Senate majority.

The Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention to choose a new nominee by July 27, the state-mandated deadline. An array of Maine politicians, including several who ran in primaries for other offices this year and lost, have expressed interest in running.

In a video posted on social media on Wednesday night, Mr. Platner said that the allegations against him were false but that he was suspending his campaign and would file paperwork to withdraw.

“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me,” Mr. Platner said. “We are suspending campaign operations. This is incredibly difficult, because I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We’re not doing it because of the allegations, we’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”

And the Free Press observes that “Graham Platner is not going quietly.” He made an angry video from his boat:

“The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us,” he said with a steady anger. “Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.” Specifically that meant the “ability to fundraise,” and his campaign’s access to voter data. Without these basic tools, no modern campaign can function.

. . .Platner, though, is spinning a very different tale, casting himself as the victim of the ruling class.

“We went toe to toe with one of the most entrenched political systems in the history of the world, and we won,” he said. “We beat them on June 9 in overwhelming numbers. We did it the right way. We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together, and we did it the way we were told we are supposed to make change. And we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me.”

In other words, Platner’s own scandalous history is not to blame for his political predicament. Rather, it was the weaponization of those scandals by the Democratic Party that brought him low. That is, of course, a self-serving rationalization that conveniently blames a “they” for the candidate’s own poor judgment and moral failings.

So be it. Can any replacement candidate inspire enthusiasm the way Platner did with his blue-collar Oysterman background? CNN names five candidates, but I don’t know any of them (Mainers would). Blame who you want (I blame Platner duping credulous Democrats), but the seat is crucial if Democrats want to control the Senate come November.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal dissects what Trump intends when he declared the Memorandum of Understanding “dead.”

It’s Wednesday, July 8, and it seems we’ll have to slip a page and a half into Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s coffin on its funeral procession, after Trump declared in a press conference this morning that, in his opinion, “the memorandum of understanding…is dead.” RIP. It was only 21 days old.

The causes of death of the two are the same: Iranian hubris. The supreme leader believed the Israeli and American threats were empty and was buried, and his successor believed the U.S. was so desperate that the MoU could survive Iran’s numerous violations. Until they pushed too far.

The fatal sequence began on Monday, when Iranian missiles struck two tankers—one carrying Qatari gas off the Omani coast, the other a Saudi-flagged oil carrier inside the Strait of Hormuz itself. On Tuesday, a drone went after a third. The vessels’ offense: transiting the strait without Tehran’s blessing. The U.S. answered last night, first revoking the waiver that allowed Iranian oil to be sold around the world, then striking more than 70 military targets around the strait. By this morning, Iran’s armed forces claimed to have hit 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait.

Despite the dramatic declaration, don’t expect the status quo to change significantly. The midterms have not been rescheduled, the global economy has not outgrown the strait, and Trump does not believe returning to war will net him the results he wants in the time he wants it.

The statement was less a policy shift than a confirmation that the contemporary Middle East is defined by a single word: uncertainty.

. . .As far as I’m concerned, this is a return to April’s status quo: no peace and no war. For Israel, that is the second-favorite position on the board—the favorite, a war actively grinding the regime down, is over for now. But a pause is not a rewind. With the oil waiver revoked and the sanctions back on, Tehran is frozen in its beaten position, with no hope of unfrozen assets bridging its fatal liquidity gap. Jerusalem can wait, hoping the regime buckles under its own internal pressures. And while it waits, it can keep dismembering the proxies, whose patron is in no condition to come to their aid.

As for the strait, during the war, Iran set up a toll booth. In response, the Gulf states and the Americans quietly paved a bypass, routing traffic along the Omani side of the waterway and slipping millions of barrels of oil past the barrier. If the diplomacy is dead, expect the U.S. to double down on the Omani lane—and Iran to do everything it can to force traffic back through the booth.

Now that Iran no longer has to pretend to abide by the MoU, expect no more empty overtures toward joint management. Expect declarations to the effect that sailing the strait will be like driving through Tehran: on Iranian roads, under Iranian rules.

The U.S. will respond to this morning’s attacks, but Iran priced that in the moment it launched. This isn’t brinkmanship built on a bet that Washington won’t shoot back. It’s Tehran’s strategy from the war: pit America’s economic tolerance against Iran’s pain tolerance, and wait for Washington to conclude that paying the toll is cheaper than the drama of collecting it. To Tehran’s credit, that bet has paid off before, but this time they may have overplayed their hand.

We’ll see. All this depends on Trump’s tolerance for conflict, slipping ratings, and rising oil prices. Still, how can Iran prevent ships from going through Omani esyrtdz/

*Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff under Obama, three-term Congressman, and then Mayor of Chicago, is hungry to get the Democratic nomination for President in 2028. But these days, you have to diss Israel to do so, for that’s the modern Democratic Party. And diss it he will in a speech in Israel yesterday. The Free Press notes what is at stake in “Rahm Emanuel bows to the Left on Israel.” (This headline would have been unthinkable four years ago,) Note that Emanuel is a Jew

Rahm Emanuel, in his quest to become president of the United States, is in Israel to deliver a withering speech Wednesday on the future of U.S.-Israeli relations—and, more importantly, to communicate to progressives in America that he’s the kind of Jew they can trust.

“I flew here from Chicago to tell you directly where things need to head if we are going to maintain the historic alliance that binds our two democracies,” Emanuel is set to say at Tel Aviv University, according to an advance copy of the speech provided by Emanuel’s spokeswoman. “Without question, the alliance is at a crossroads. It cannot stand or survive as it has been. To maintain the strength of our ties, we need significant changes and a new direction.”

One of the changes, I bet, will be that Israel won’t be allowed to defend itself. But wait–there’s more!

The message Emanuel will deliver is that Israel can no longer count on America’s support. If it wants our love, it had better stop with the needless war-making, the decimation of Palestinian lives. It had better rejoin the international community and find a new prime minister, one who does not think Emanuel is a “self-hating Jew.” Emanuel loves to remind voters that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in 2009—called him a self-hating Jew (which may be the only kind of Jew that American progressives will stomach in 2028). He does so in the advance copy of his Tel Aviv speech, and he did so—twice—when we spoke Tuesday.

“A lot of other people never went toe to toe with the prime minister,” Emanuel told me by phone. He was in a car heading from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. “I did it 18 years ago, and I didn’t need a war to do it. And I’m going to do it right here.”

The speech Emanuel will give is draped in anecdotes and diplomatic niceties, and it reminds one of the speeches American presidents and would-be presidents used to give:

This is pandering, and Emanuel’s volte-face angers me, almost to the point of calling him a self-hating Jew (well, at least a Jew-hating Jew).  He has a long history of supporting Israel, including working with the IDF during the Gulf War, but he’s also very smart, and knows which way the wind is blowing.  His tune on Israel has been changing over the last year, and culminated yesterday with an attack on the lion in the lion’s den. But I’m guessing that he won’t be the Democratic candidate for President.

*I look forward to Bret Stephens’s columns these days, and yesterday’s is a good one: “Democratic Socialists are on the Rise. We’ve seen this movie before” (archived here). he starts by lauding some “decent” center-right Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney, and then starts in on the Democrats:

Barring a political miracle, the party will next year have a new member of Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who, the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, celebrated the event in Times Square. Another probable future representative, Claire Valdez, vowed on July 4 to “fight for liberation from Palestine to Puerto Rico.” A would-be U.S. senator, the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, offered an alternative take on Michelle Obama’s famous line about going high when your opponent goes low: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” he said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.” (El-Sayed is a doctor.) In Wisconsin, a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, is the polling favorite in the race for the Democratic nominee for governor; in 2021 she said that “police exist to uphold white supremacy” and should be abolished; more recently, she has said her “perfect world would be a world without prisons.”

Against this tide, the position of many mainstream Democrats is to dodge the ideological fight with the left while warning that, outside of deep-blue districts like those in New York City, democratic socialism is an electoral loser that only provides Trump with political ammunition. In Michigan, Haley Stevens, El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic primary, is campaigning on the argument that “no one wants Abdul to win more than the Republicans” — that is, that Republicans see him as the more beatable opponent come November.

What mainstream Republicans like me missed then is what I fear mainstream Democrats miss now: that ideas older voters know have long been discredited (“America first” among conservatives; socialism among progressives) can seem fresh and appealing to younger voters; that even middle-of-the-road voters still often prefer the most extreme or uncouth candidate on their side to the most moderate candidate on the other; and that policy positions ultimately count for less than sheer charisma, the aura of being a “fighter,” even if you accomplish little of substance.

All this is especially true when the more ideologically extreme candidates are energetic, unstuffy, authentic, and able to stir up an audience. Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor, is emblematic of the type; so was Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat, at least until allegations about his past behavior finally caught up with him.

What all this means for mainstream Democrats is that they resemble a national army under attack from an insurgency: They offer order and predictability when they need to be shocking and surprising; they seek to win by delivering incremental victories while their guerrilla opponents promise political transcendence. Unless something changes, those dynamics tend to set the army up for disaster.

What could change the dynamics? It would help if a Democratic leader stood up to make the case that democratic socialists are neither liberals nor progressives, at least in any honest sense of those words. They are atavists, blasts from a discredited and discarded past.

. . . . Democracy requires a clearly defined citizenry, an idea that becomes meaningless if a country pursues a lax or open-border policy of the kind advocated by democratic socialists. The brainstorms of the far left, like the billionaire surtax on the ballot in California, have failed repeatedly wherever they’ve been tried (including in France). And “justice for Palestine” surely can’t mean taking sides with the killers and rapists of Hamas while insisting that the only nation-state on earth with no right to exist is the Jewish one. The word for that is antisemitism, the politics of the double standard toward Jews, which is yet another terrible idea from a terrible past.

Is there a rising Democrat who will give this speech — the one that says that Democrats stand for freedom and fairness, not radicalism and self-righteousness; the one that never disdains tradition even if it seeks to improve it; the one that knows that utopianism is no substitute for pragmatism, and that purity is not superior to compromise?

That Democrat needs to stand up now, before his party gets swept away by the flood it vainly believes will soon recede.

Sadly, it looks as if Stephens himself can’t think of a way to glue the Democratic party back together, either.  There is no Democrat who would give a speech like that save John Fetterman, whose days in Congress are numbered.  And Democrats like me will be loath to vote for a candidate who says Israel can’t defend itself. Being in Illinois, where the Democrats are going to win the electoral vote, I might have to write someone in.  Right now I have no political home.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the boys are depressed:

Hili: Things aren’t good.
Andrzej: That’s nothing new.

In Polish:

Hili: Nie jest dobrze.
Ja: To nic nowego.

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

From CinEmma:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Stacy:

From Masih; this Iranian woman has sat in a jail sail for four months. Her crime: dancing. And there’s no end to this yet.

Maarten Boudry points out a stupid but very common political argument. Read the whole tweet.

This is my vote for the stupidest political argument of the century. Its general form goes like this:

“The backlash against the excesses of Our Party is the fault of those within the Party who drew attention to those excesses, thus empowering Our Party’s enemies.”

Here’s an… pic.twitter.com/Isc6ee1dEw

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) July 7, 2026

From Jeff Maurer:

https://t.co/So4u2JhPEd

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) July 8, 2026

Two from my feed. First, interspecies love (sound up):

The donkey comes to its owner every morning to hug him pic.twitter.com/gVEjZVnrZW

— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) July 8, 2026

. . . and there’s no sign that this is AI so far:

Snow leopards are highly acrobatic predators capable of jumping up to 50 feet (15 meters) in a single leap pic.twitter.com/3WRfp3ok4H

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 8, 2026

One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old and would have been 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/FUHJGwMHwD

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) July 9, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. The first one is footy related:

Offsidexkcd.com/3268/

— Randall Munroe (@xkcd.com) 2026-07-08T18:24:27.925Z

Armadillos in Tennessee! Are they playing or mating?

In the woods near Nashville this morning:

— Jeremy Goldkorn (@goldkorn.bsky.social) 2026-07-08T12:32:53.636Z