Deal This

Never trust the Vikings in an important game. Never. Mrs. Stroock's Eagles will be facing the Rams next week whom they've already beaten this year. The Eagles should be favored. 

So during the Eagles game wide receiver AJ Brown was filmed reading a book while on the bench. The camera zoomed in and revealed the book to be Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy. 'Oh wow,' we said to Mrs. Stroock. 'Inner Excellence is going to sell like crazy.' And so it did. As of this morning Inner Excellence is ranked #1 in all of its Amazon categories. We mentioned it to fellow indy auhtor who said, 'We saw and it's #1' Should we send a copy of A Line Through the Desert to AJ Brown?

By the way, reader(s) will recall that we often call a winning football team 'big, strong and tough'. We thought that we were plagiarizing, or borrowing anyway, the phrase from a 1999 column by famed WaPo columnist and ESPN television host Michael Wilbon. Seriously we remember driving home from work when Wilbon was talking about the column on the radio. Out of curiosity we tracked the column down (2 November 1999). Turns out Wilbon wrote, 'It has been a long time since the words "big," "deep" and "tough" characterized Washington's NBA franchise...' So 'Big, strong, and tough' is all our own.

Israel and Hamas have a hostage/ceasefire deal, they say. Details here. We've no major problems with what we see. At worst this deal is 3.6 Roentgen. At worst. We are also intrigued by Tony Blinken's plan for a post war, post Hamas Gaza. If that plan is implemented, then Israel has won a crushing victory. Best part, 'Some State Department officials were concerned the plan would serve Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's interests and marginalize marginalize [sic] the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas.'  All the right people are worried. It's almost as if the Israelis are winning. 

This is more or less the deal that was on the table at this time last year. Since then the Israelis have destroyed every one of Hamas's field battalions, gutted Rafah, killed Hamas' leaders, etc etc. When was the last time Hamas launched rocket at Israel? We see a lot of howling and screaming on Twitter this morning. Let us introduce you people to the concept of diminishing returns. There's only so much the IDF can do in Gaza. How long do you want to stay there? Some of these people are acting as if Israeli troops patrolling the streets of Gaza is a good thing. Also, Netanyahu has been negotiating rings around Hamas and the Biden Regime for over a year. Do you think he suddenly turned stupid? No, this is the time for this deal. 

Don't get us wrong. We'll see some grueling scenes in the coming weeks. Arabs don't understand the difference between victory and defeat. Seriously, the average Egyptian thinks they won the Yom Kippur War. They'll take to the streets like ululating retards. Arabs are dumb.  

After 15 months of war Hamas gets what exactly? Some locked up terrorists?** Partial Israeli withdrawal from parts of Gaza the Israelis were never going to keep anyway? Hamas' army, missiles and infrastructure are gone. Large swaths of Gaza look like Berlin after the Red Army went through. In the end Hamas has lost a generation's worth of work. And by the way, Hamas can't just magically rearm and rebuild - whatever happens to the Philadelphi Corridor. It'll take another generation for Hamas to be where it was on 10/7.

Final thought: Israel is in a far better strategic situation than it was on October 7th. Oh, and Donald Trump will be president in 6 days. Take the W.*

Yesterday we read through War Night's Lexington chapter, and came away thinking, 'Meh. There's not much more we can do.' On to the Arkansas nuclear missile silo story. We read plenty on the IRA and the troubles yesterday and will read plenty more today. Wish us luck. We were struck by the photos of grizzled old IRA hands in one of the books. These men gave their lives to the cause, 40 years of war to achieve what? Was it worth it boyos?

*What are the odds that the deal goes kaput and some point during the process? High we think. High.  

**True, the Israelis have to release some terrorists at roughly a 30-1 ratio, which is the comparative worth of a Gazan or West Bank Person to an Israeli. Remember, the Israelis had to release a thousand terrorists to get back Gilad Shalit. So rates are coming down. In the long run it doesn't matter. There's always another Arab terrorist.