The tournament is rapidly approaching the quarterfinal knockout stage and the rankings in each group are firming up enabling fairly specific speculations about the likely match ups in the knockout rounds. (Brackets are from this Wikipedia article.)
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One of the benefits of religion, if you want to think of it that way, is that it enables one to shift responsibility to god if things go wrong. A new study by my friend and colleague Julie Exline and her graduate student Joshua Grubbs, who are in the department of religious studies at my university, finds that “people are likelier to blame God for their bad moral behavior when they believe they were born to act that way.”
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If there was ever an example of the psychological state known as projection (where one attributes to another one’s own state of mind) applied to nations, it is how the US describes Venezuela. Just yesterday, president Obama declared that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to US national security and used that to impose further sanctions on that country.
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Via Jonathan Turley I came across this video of a crazy driver of a car speeding through Los Angeles recently, where a news helicopter followed the car as it wove through busy streets and intersections, going the wrong way, with the driver not seeming to care in the least that he was damaging other vehicles and putting people’s lives at risk, even taking over a new car when his was involved in an accident.
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Has there ever been an occasion when members of Congress have written to the leaders of a foreign nation not to strike a deal with the US president? Because this is quite amazing to me:
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Bangladesh finally put an end to England’s misery in this World Cup by defeating them in an exciting game that ended this morning (my time). England won the toss and sent Bangladesh in and did well to restrict them to 275/7 off their 50 overs. As we have seen, a first innings score of 300 has become the minimum target, with 350 preferred on these batting-friendly pitches. Bangladesh had scored only 197/4 at the 40-over mark, and while a century by Mahmudullah and 89 by Mushfiqur Rahim pushed the score up, they could not step on the gas enough in the last ten overs as the England bowlers restricted them to just 78 more runs even though they had wickets in hand.
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I have long felt that the appeal of religion lies more with the promise of life after death, the idea that people will live on forever, than on having a belief in god. The idea that we will never be forgotten and that our lives matter and that one day be reunited with those we love is a much more appealing prospect than hanging out with a god whom one does not know. The appeal of a belief in god seems more like a fear-driven negative one, whose purpose is to stave off the chance of being in hell for eternity.
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I grew up in Sri Lanka where there was none of this business of changing clocks twice a year because being close to the equator, the days were pretty much the same length the whole year round. It is only countries that are far from the equator that do this and even then not all do so. So it took me a while to get used to this practice.
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Yesterday’s game between Australia and Sri Lanka was another high scoring one with Australia batting first and scoring 376/9 off their 50 overs, not the highest in the tournament but a very formidable one nonetheless. Given that teams batting second have chased down scores of 300 several times already, the bar for the team batting first has been raised to around 350 and Australia met it comfortably the standard way, scoring around 150 in the first 30 overs without losing more than a couple of wickets, and then piling on for the last 20 overs. Steven Smith and captain Michael Clarke did the first part and Glenn Maxwell and Shane Watson were the architects of the second part, with Maxwell being ruthless and scoring the second fastest century in World Cup history off just 51 balls.
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Bill Maher had a good segment on the deep strain of jingosim in America that demands that one should never say anything negative about its past or present actions. The problem with such a stance should be obvious. If you think that your country can do no wrong and has never done anything wrong, then you are going to continue doing those wrong things. Politicians of the major parties relentlessly pander to this way of thinking, making it worse. Obama panders a lot too but not enough for some people because he has the audacity to say that maybe not everything was always great.
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