In most gambling, as in the casinos or in betting on the outcome of sporting events where there is no doubt as to what the result is, there is usually a clear way of deciding whether you won or lost the bet. But the new betting markets like Kalshi and Polymarket allow you to bet on events where the outcome may not be that clear-cut. Hence there has to be some standard associated with the bet that tells you how the outcome is to be judged.

So, for example, take the bet that the US and Iran will agree to a permanent peace deal by a specific date, where the options for dates are April 22, April 30, May 31, and June 30. How would one judge that? The rules state it as follows.
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Despite using all the levers of power to tilt the election in his favor, MAGA favorite Victor Orbán has been kicked out as prime minister after being in power for 16 years, with his Fidesz party getting roundly defeated.

With 98.74% of the vote counted, [Péter] Magyar’s Tisza party was projected to have won 138 of the 199 seats in the country’s parliament, giving them a super-majority capable of amending the constitution and key laws, suggesting they would be able to reverse some of the changes made by Orbán and Fidesz, and potentially unlock EU funds.

Fidesz won 55 seats, while the extreme-right Mi Hazánk party won six.
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The election was being closely watched around the world as a test of the resilience of the Maga movement and the global far right, many of whom have long looked to Orbán as an inspiration and sought to follow his playbook.

Days before the election, JD Vance had travelled to Budapest, with the US vice-president saying that he had come to “help” Orbán. Donald Trump had also repeatedly endorsed Orbán, most recently on Friday when he vowed to bring US “economic might” to the country if Orbán was re-elected.
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In recent months, Orbán, 62, had also been endorsed by rightwing and far-right leaders ranging from France’s Marine Le Pen to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Amid all the speculation about why Melania Trump made her extraordinary statement to the press on Thursday, one seems to have more substance than the rest, and that is that it was a preemptive attempt to get ahead of a damaging story that would come out soon. And now we have a plausible candidate for that theory. (Thanks to anat and jenorafeuer in the comments to yesterday’s post for sending me down this rabbit hole!)

It concerns a Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro who had been friends with Melania for over two decades, and a man named Paolo Zampolli, a close friend of the Trumps who was appointed by him as an ambassador and who claims that he was the one who introduced the Trumps to each other,

Ungaro, meanwhile, told the Times that she was a 17-year-old model when she arrived in New York in 2002 after flying on Epstein’s plane from Paris with her French agent. She never saw Epstein again but met Zampolli later that year and began a two-decade romantic relationship with him beginning when she was 19, Zampolli told the Times.

In 2023, after Zampolli made headlines for explicit text messages he allegedly sent to a sex worker, Ungaro ended the relationship, moved to Florida and married a doctor from Brazil. The former couple then became mired in a custody battle for their 15-year-old son before Ungaro and her husband were arrested in June.

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It should be obvious to anyone by now that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a monster. His ongoing genocide in Gaza, his brutal suppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and condoning of settler violence, his attacks on Iranian civilians, and now his indiscriminate and widespread bombing of Lebanon that have killed a huge number of civilians and left many others homeless and otherwise destitute reveals a man who has absolutely no conscience.

Israel’s devastating bombardment of Lebanon in the hours after a US-Iranian ceasefire was announced has been widely condemned amid global efforts to salvage the truce.

More than 200 people were killed by Israeli bombing, including strikes with heavy munitions on densely populated areas, which drew outrage from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international humanitarian organisations.

In Trump, he has finally found a US president who was willing to remove even the mildest restraints that former presidents placed on Israel and so his murderous impulses are now unchecked and revealed for all the world to see.

That he is a war criminal goes without saying. The amount of blood he has on his hands would give a normal person nightmares.
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And so Trump has backed off from his deranged genocidal threats against Iran that would and should surely constitute war crimes that alarmed even some of his supporters. He, as usual, claims success that he got a ceasefire but it is not at all clear what he got. Iran has issued a 10-point plan for a ceasefire not only contains many things that the US had rejected previously, but demands new ones.

Danny Citrinowicz, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, has offered a sobering assessment of the outcome of America’s five week war, saying the conflict was launched with “sweeping promises: regime change in Iran, the dismantling of its missile and nuclear programs, and preventing it from threatening the Strait of Hormuz.”
“And where are we now?” he asks.
The regime is still firmly in power.
Its missile capabilities are damaged still intact
It still holds roughly 440 kg of uranium enriched to 60%.
And in return?
A ‘controlled’ reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, something that wasn’t even truly closed to begin with.
Let’s be honest: this is not a strategic victory.”

Observers are suggesting that Trump was desperate for an exit ramp after his blustering painted him into a corner and so seized on this as a way out, until the next time he feels like issuing an apocalyptic threat.

So how and why did Trump blunder into this war. The New York Times had a long article detailing how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed Trump into attacking Iran during a meeting at the White House on February 11, assuring him that it would be easy to topple the Iranian leadership and replace it with one friendly to the US,
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Back in the days of the Vietnam war, there came to be something known as the Five O’Clock Follies, a term derisively used by reporters attending the daily briefings by the military where they would be told how wonderfully everything was going and how the enemy was bring crushed, when the reporters knew full well that the US was bogged down in a never-ending war that was causing many US casualties. That hiding of the truth recurred during the Iraq war as well and is surfacing now with Iran. It seems to be an inevitable consequence when wars drag on much longer than anticipated and casualties mount.

American presidents, especially in their second terms when things are not going well for therm, love to go to war. It his usually a sure-fire way of shoring up public support and wrapping themselves up with patriotic fervor. But that only works if the wars are short-lived or they do not have many casualties. People seem to be willing to accept massive death and destruction of ordinary people at the receiving end of US weaponry, however unjustified, but get upset when US troops start experiencing casualties. So nowadays presidents use aerial warfare with bombing campaigns and drone strikes, forfeiting the need to put in ground troops with all its risks.

In the current war against Iran, we mainly hear reports of what the US has done to Iran and very little about the retaliation. Given that we are now entering the sixth week and also given how much Trump lies about everything, it should be no surprise that The Intercept reports that the administration is hiding the true number of casualties.
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