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:
That was until the moment the G.O.P. chose to delete its conscience by becoming the party of Donald Trump. A similar moment may soon be upon Democrats if they aren’t careful.
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:
— 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/
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
The description of the anthropologist —
“… It’s telling that it’s an anthropologist who tries to tell us why something we enjoy really isn’t enjoyable.”
— reminded me of :
“Puritanism —The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
-H. L. Mencken
A Mencken Chrestomathy
section “Arcana Coelestia”
But for that quote, see also :
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/06/25/puritanism/
(“Puritan” is not in Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary)
I have, on occasion, tried to watch soccer both here and in Europe and have consistently found it only slightly less boring than watching cement harden. Not clear whether that speaks more about me or to the world’s low standards.
Ever heard of cricket, Saul? It is a torment the British used to bore the world with. That’s some empire building dullness.
Come to the cricket, you’ll be begging to go to the soccer after only a few DAYS! of play!
D.A.
NYC 🗽
How about golf!!!
A nice walk, ruined.
I developed a better appreciation of soccer when I learned to think of it as hockey without sticks.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of politics is that party realignment occurs every 30-40 years in the states.
The last round got highjacked by rallies that occurred in both parties so we are well past due.
I suspect that is why current the current climate has become so disorienting.
Dillos! Seems that they’ve established themselves in central TN over the last 30yrs, and I’ve heard of them turning up in SW VA, too, thought to have hitched rides on semis coming up I-81.
They’re apparently not well-received. Question is whether they’re worse than groundhogs.
I had the two critters cohabitating under an old wash house for over a decade, but given the length of time, I’m sure they passed the property down to their heirs. The worst the old woodchuck ever did was stand upright, lean on the wash house porch with one arm, and survey his kingdom. The armadillo left lovely cone-shaped holes in the lawn nearly every night. Some nights I would find three or four foraging in the yard at a time. The moles are worse than either. I just consider it labor-free aeration.
I haven’t seen either the woodchuck or the armadillo in over a year. I take it the old fella died and the armadillo headed to Tennessee. That, or he’s shacking up now with the cuties in my woods.
Arsenal won the Premier League this year. It played 38 games and won 26. That is a percentage of 68.
But for some of those matches, they were not the favourites.
It’s all a nonsense of course. The favourite is a crowd sourced opinion based on people making bets. The favourite is not necessarily the better team, and on the day, many factors can affect the result. If we knew in advance who was going to win, it would definitely be boring.
Football (aka “soccer”) would indeed be improved if it were higher scoring. The easiest way to do that is to make the goals bigger and/or reduce the number of players by one or two.
With more goals, tedious 0–0 draws, or teams just defending to hang on to a 1–0 lead, would be rarer. Also, controversial penalty calls or VAR interventions would matter less since they’d be less likely to decide the outcome.
There is a balance to be struck here, but if a typical score were, say, 5–3, rather than 1–0, then it would be a better game.
“Football (aka “soccer”) would indeed be improved if it were higher scoring. The easiest way to do that is to make the goals bigger and/or reduce the number of players by one or two.”
Hi Coel. If you do get any takers for your new version of football, please could you make sure the name is distinct? Something like SOCCERBALL!!!
That will just ensure those of us who are pretty happy with the fairly popular current version can easily avoid yours.
And yes, I am far too sensitive about criticism of football.
After watching a game, which do you come away having enjoyed more? A 5–3 game (the sort commentators describe as a “thriller”) or a 1–0 game?
That would depend on the game. The score line doesn’t necessarily reflect the excitement. As an example, one of the most exciting matches in the group stage was a 0-0 draw between Spain – one of the favourites – and Cape Verde – widely regarded as having no chance.
Whimsical:
Editorial: The even more beautiful game. The Economist, June 6, 2026
How to make football more exciting
The World Cup is wonderful. It could be even better
https://archive.ph/rTjGl
Serious:
By Invitation | Pass, pass, cross, yawn
Why the World Cup produces an ugly version of the beautiful game.The Economist, June 6, 2026
FIFA could emulate other sports by tweaking rules to generate more excitement, writes James Tozer
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/06/03/why-the-world-cup-produces-an-ugly-version-of-the-beautiful-game
James Tozer is a co-founder of Prospect, a sports analytics firm that works with governing bodies, teams, coaches and others. He was a data journalist with The Economist from 2014 to 2022.
I have a temporary access problem with the site Archive.Today – so I can’t look up the archived version of the article by Tozer.
With baseball, there’s barely any foreplay either.
As for intellectualizing a game? I don’t know how baseball can be topped, since it lends itself so well to statistical slicing and dicing. G*d almighty, some men (and it’s always men) do drone on and on.
But the fact that people like baseball can hardly be attributed to intellectualizing sophisticates who want to show off their cultural refinement, since most baseball fans come from the class that prefers Bud Light to Chateau Margaux. The same goes for cricket, which, so far as I can see, has all the worst features of baseball and soccer combined, and yet it has a huge and rabid fandom.
Baseball is boring? From what I gather MLB games are well attended by people who manage to stay awake for most of it.
Cricket is different of course. There are plenty of instances of people caught sleeping at cricket matches.
Had he played more, the former England batsman Bill Athey might have displaced Geoff Boycott as the most boring batsman in the history of the game. That he had so many umpiring decisions go his way was attributed to sleeping umpires. When the desperate appeals from the bowler jerked the umpire awake, he would decide in favour of Athey because the laws of the game said that any doubt should favour the batsman, even if they bat like Bill.
On a tour of Sri Lanka with the England A team he tortoised his way to a hundred runs against a local side. Remarkably, the sparse crowd that endured the torture cried ‘Athey! Athey!’ much to the delight of Athey who had never been cheered for his batting. Then someone explained that ‘Athey’, in the local language, meant ‘enough’.
I like attending baseball games–especially night games. With all the lights and people and the ample beer, there’s plenty to entertain you, even if the game itself is a yawner. But when I’m at home, I can’t endure parking myself in the front of the TV for an entire game, at least not in the regular season. I’ll just watch the recaps.
But I still count myself as a fan of the game, despite considering it boring overall. In fact, and it’s almost embarrassing to admit, but I’d count a couple of baseball games among my peak life moments. There is NOTHING like your team coming from behind in the 9th inning of the 7th game to win a championship.
On Hormuz. Amit’s analysis is excellent as usual.
The Omanis are very solid “neutral” allies, trustworthy, sane. It is a weird country, unlike its neighbors and even its version of Islam is unique. They’ve been helpful to us for decades and their last, their main Sultan was… probably gay. Unusual there.
Their help is essential. Why we picked the Pakistanis to “mediate” and not them is beyond me.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Your comment led me to consult Wiki’s account of the “Omani Renaissance”. It looks like in the late 20th century Oman was pushed from above into modernity by Sultan Qaboos. Is this the Arab/Islamic world’s only way out of the medieval mentality? Presumably it is what Crown Prince Bin Salman has in mind for Saudia.
Yes. I’m disappointed at Rahm Emanuel. I’m not sure that he believes all that he is saying. It is true that the left doesn’t like a strong Israel, so the left may be lost forever. But I’ve been thinking. (Horror of horrors!) How many powerful countries are actually liked? Is the U.S. liked? Maybe the fact that Israel isn’t liked just goes with the territory of being strong. For a nation, it’s better to be strong than liked.
Iran? If you have your boot on the neck of the enemy, you should crush the neck. Alas, we haven’t done that. Nonetheless, I do think that we’re going the right direction. Iran is weakening, if only by a thousand cuts.
I found and watched Rahm Emanuel’s speech and now have a different impression than I got reading the Free Press excerpts cited above. I strongly recommend watching the speech in its entirety: https://www.youtube.com/live/aCJPA4EN7VU?is=pkGf2x7f_G_kcwSI.
My impressions?
Rahm Emanuel is a friend of Israel. He did not bash Israel in the speech. He was speaking as one would speak to a brother. He seems sincerely to want Israel to succeed and he is providing some advice from an American perspective.
One piece of advice is to end the “fantasy” (his word) of expanding into the West Bank with the goal of creating a “Greater Israel.” He tells the seemingly appreciative crowd (probably left-leaning at Tel Aviv University) that doing so will only isolate Israel further from Europe, the U.S., and its own neighbors.
A second piece of advice is to demand a government that doesn’t look to military force as the only tool they have, to rekindle alliances with their neighbors and the west, and to restore the “Startup Nation” creativity that was the envy of the world. Emanuel was clearly expressing frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and seemed to be calling for new leadership. (I’m sympathetic to Netanyahu’s proclivity to lean toward military action as a first resort—after all, October 7 took place on his watch. But maybe Emanuel has a point in implying that the time for Netanyahu policies has passed.)
The third piece of advice is to work toward strategic and economic partnerships with the other 26 states in Israel’s neighborhood who have shared interests. This would provide for a stable Middle East that would isolate the real evil in the region: Iran.
Overall, after watching the speech carefully, I’d like to rescind my earlier statement of disappointment. If the speech at Tel Aviv University represents Emanuel’s current thinking, I would not deem his position on Israel as in any way disqualifying. His speech provides a lot to think about.
Israel certainly needs to forget the fantasy of ruling then West Bank. the demographics will cause catastrophe in security and economic terms. For one thing, if Israel annexes the West Bank, we would be responsible for healthcare of the Palestinian population, which would strain our system beyond the breaking point. Mind you, Bibi himself is not an annexation hawk, and never has been. He just goes where the politics lead him, meaning that he is a political coward.
Re Bibi: I have been involved with Israeli security for many decades. He is not a security hawk, or dove. If I had the space, I could given you many examples of security waffling. The defense establishment despises him. He has caused serious long-term security disasters. And in fact, those in the know can tell a story or two about his own military service. (That one I know only second-hand—it was before my time of service.) Bibi’s priorities are Bibi first, second and last. If he is so security-minded, what have his sons not joined the reserves in this war? they have not been called up, but many people who have not been called up volunteer in one capacity or another. I don’t know about his younger son, who lives a quiet life. /but his older son has spent the war making posts against his father’s political enemies and attacking the security services, including the IDF.
The current Democratic Party has no narrative to tell voters. People voted for Trump and MAGA because Trump gave them a narrative on why things are bad or at least feel bad, and most importantly, who to blame. The DSA is doing the same, which is why they are currently popular.
If centrist Democrats want to take control of their party and defeat Republicans, they need a narrative. People care far more about having an out-group to blame everything on than they do about their economic situation, to the degree that there are plenty of people who will suffer if the out-group suffers just a little bit more.
I’m wondering whether the fact that the higher ranked team wins in football only 55% of the time means that the rankings don’t mean that much to begin with.
That said, I also wonder whether this is explained because goalkeepers can have a disproportionate effect on the outcome. One team can be clearly better and yet fail to score because the keeper has an outstanding match. If this is (part of) the reason, making the goals larger might change that’s- not that I am in favour of changing the goals.
I like basketball but often only watch the final quarter of a game. I find a certain monotony to teams going back and forth, scoring most of the time.
I also wonder why sports have such a disproportionate hold on our emotions. Our desperation for our team to win is out of all proportion to any effect it really has on our lives. And almost everyone in the country is offering confident and often under-informed opinions on Balogun’s red card.
I reckon the enthusiastic crowds at all those World Cup watch parties would be surprised to discover they’re actually bored out of their minds. Go figure.
Like you, Jerry, much of what I love about the sport are the very factors that Lynch complains about, especially the fact that in a league like the English Premier League no results can be taken for granted, even when the reigning champions take on a team facing relegation.
In any case, explanations are kind of beside the point: most human beings just seem to love soccer, no matter how much it annoys the curmudgeons.
I was surprised by the claim in the Quillete article that the best team wins only 55% of the time, so I looked at the current World Cup. I think one of the problems with that stat is that soccer has draws, which the other sports don’t have.
The following data is based on the FIFA rankings at the start of the tournament.
There were 72 group stage matches. The higher-ranked team won 44; the lower ranked team won 8 and there were 20 draws. Even with draws, the best team wins 61% of the time. If you assume that a penalty shootout to resolve a draw would be random, the best team wins 75% of the time.
In the knock out stages, there have currently been 24 matches played. The better team has won 21; the worse team has won 3. Four of those matches were decided on penalties: the better team won twice; the worse team won twice. The better team has won 88% of the time.
Why do people call Plattner a “blue-collar” guy? He comes from an upper-class socioeconomic family. He went to an expensive private school for awhile. He did not lack opportunity, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
The fact that Democrats have to find a poser like this to relate to the working class shows precisely that they cannot do so. Nor do I think that a Bernie Sanders is what it takes to relate to Jews. What matters is policy, but if you want to claim a background, you better know how to walk the walk. As for me, I’ll take a Nikki Haley over a Rahm Emanuel any day, no matter how many horas the latter has danced.
Regarding Iran, all I can say is that we in Israel will not be surprised to hear sirens again. If and when we do, well, missiles etc go in both directions. We will always be more limited than Iran, however, as we will always have hopes that the Iranians will want to live in peace with us—some of us remember the days before the mullahs. See the pictures of Iran in the 70s. The Iranian government, however, is happy and willing to kill all of us. This alone shows who the real warmongers are.
” …Democrats have to find a poser like this to relate to the working class…” A familiar story, in its way. Recall such hot-dog, revolutionary heroes of the working class as Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara.
If equally skilled, fitness wins out if you play long enough I think.
Not sure people from the land of the NFL should be criticising other sports for being boring.
Just sayin.
Haha – I was afraid to say that to America.
As no one has mentioned hockey in the statements of a sport being boring or not, I think hockey is the least boring of all. The players put in as much exertion and face as much danger as NFL guys, but sometimes backwards and on skates.
I am paraphrasing whoever made that statement, but it did make me laugh when I read it. Buzzing around on skates is hard work! Fast paced and exciting a lot of the time.
Having said that, I only watch hockey during the playoffs, and especially if the Canadiens are in it. A Montrealer by birth, the Habs are my team. My second favourite is Boston. When I was a kid, there were only 5 teams in the NHL and the only hockey for us to watch was “Hockey Night in Canada” on CBC, Saturday nights. It was a family affair, just like Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights. Now, sports have exploded in every which way, and I find myself less and less interested.
Oil prices are trending down. It looks like the oil market rejects Iran’s claim to control the Strait of Hormuz.
Rahm Emanuel thought he would be the first Jewish president of the US. He would go from Mayor of Chicago to Governor of Illinois to the White House. He was wrong (in my opinion). He was not a successful Mayor (in my opinion).
Platner is gone. In time to defeat Susan Collins? Not so clear.
I am very anti-Soccer for a reason (fixable). Soccer allow ‘heading’ which causes concussions. I knew a girl who was kicked off her high school Soccer team because of concussions. She was very (very) good.
The number of incidents of Traumatic Brain Injury caused by soccer is probably quite small compared to those caused by American football.. Especially as the severity of injury greatly increases with the shortening of the intervals between injury. Since these injuries are not always noticed as they happen in American football, the risk of TBI is greatly increased. And TBI is a strong risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases.
The absolute number of TBI’s from American football appears to be higher than soccer. It is not clear if the rate per hour is higher. Some of literature suggests that girls playing soccer are particularly at risk.
I helped a lady go to the US Air Force academy to play soccer. The bad news is that she tore her MCL after a few months (and could not play soccer). The good news is that the Air Force trained her as a doctor. She is is practicing MD now.
Re famous dimpled celebs, don’t forget Kirk Douglas and his chin dimple.
That’s an evolutionary advantage: a bottle-opener on the chin.
The advantage was lost when twist-off caps appeared.
It’s also a useful overflow storage for belly-button lint.