LEO WHO?:

The story of the Iceland fans' famous thunderclap ❄️ pic.twitter.com/9XEC51cFjj

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) June 16, 2018

THE PROBLEM IS NOT WHAT IT DOES TO SCORING...:

Laurent Dubois devotes around 10 pages of The Language of the Game to describing how soccer's offside rule has changed over the decades. "Negotiating the offside rule is one of the most complex and absorbing features of the game both for strikers and defenders, an intricate dance that involves positioning and timing of the most nuanced kind," he writes. "To appreciate and understand this dance is, on a basic level, to appreciate and understand soccer." If anything, Dubois understates the case. The offside rule is the very heart and soul of what we aficionados, in exalted moods, call "the beautiful game." Please bear with me as I explain this.

The true fan delights in players who have not just the physical gifts but also the imagination to circumvent the rules that seem designed specifically to prevent scoring.

At the risk of oversimplification: The offside rule decrees that a player may not pass the ball to a teammate unless, at the moment of the pass, two members of the opposing side are closer to the goal than that teammate. Imagine that you are a soccer player with the ball. You look up and see a teammate all by himself, no defender anywhere around him, 30 yards from the goal. All you have to do is loft the ball in his general direction and he'll be playing one-on-one against the goalkeeper. But you can't. Instead of rejoicing in a scoring opportunity you're annoyed with your teammate for being so far out of position.

Almost all of the wonderful patterns and geometries of soccer are generated by this one rule, which also generates something that many non-fans greatly dislike: a paucity of goals. But soccer fans get exasperated when goals flow too freely. Scoring should not be easy, and, as with gold and diamonds, there's a link between rarity and value. The true fan delights in players who have not just the physical gifts but also the imagination to circumvent the rules that seem designed specifically to prevent scoring.

JOBS WHITE PEOPLE WON'T DO:

Foreign construction workers like Hoang are becoming a familiar sight in Japan. Like other industries in a rapidly aging Japan, the construction business is desperate for labor. A third of the country's construction workers are 55 or older, with those aged 29 or younger totaling just 11%. As baby boomers retire, the labor shortage -- in construction and in the wider economy -- is bound to become more acute.

The demand for construction workers is intensifying before the 2020 Olympics, and Hoang is one of the 274,000 foreign workers in Japan on a government-backed trainee program that has become a back door for foreign unskilled workers who would otherwise not be allowed in. Started in 1993, the program has boomed in recent years -- and is one reason that the number of foreign workers in Japan has nearly quadrupled over the last decade.

Led by an influx of workers from China, Vietnam and the Philippines, Japan is in the midst of a quiet revolution when it comes to immigrant workers. Though the total number of foreign workers in Japan is small compared to the more than 3 million in the U.K. and Germany, it is catching up rapidly -- a remarkable shift for a nation famous for resistance to immigration.

Without fanfare, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has steadily loosened Japan's once tightly controlled visa policy, resulting in an almost doubling of the number of foreign workers in Japan to 1.28 million over the last five years. In its latest move, Abe's government is expected to create a new class of  five-year work permits for unskilled workers in hopes of attracting more than 500,000 new overseas workers by 2025. The new guidelines, to be finalized in June, will ease language requirements for foreign workers in construction, agriculture, elderly care and other sectors that are suffering the most serious labor shortages. It will also be possible for trainees to extend their stay for up to 10 years.

SHRINKING THE PARTY:

data point #1: in our latest NBC/WSJ poll, white men without college degrees approve Trump by 68%-29% margin. the rest of the country disapproves by 60%-38%. https://t.co/b3GrSoIQcL

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) June 16, 2018

UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES:

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a prominent Catholic leader in the United States, said Friday there is no biblical defense for separating families, condemning the practice as "unjust" and "un-American."

"If they want to take a baby from the arms of his mother and separate the two, that's wrong. I don't care where you're at, what time and condition, that just goes against -- you don't have to read the Bible for that. That goes against human decency. That goes against human dignity. It goes against what's most sacred in the human person," Dolan told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "Cuomo Prime Time" Friday.

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that at least 2,000 children had been separated from their parents since the implementation of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy.

YOU CAN EITHER BE A CHRISTIAN OR A NATIVIST:

 In a Friday statement slamming the policy as "a shocking violation of the spirit of the Gospel," the United Methodist Church registered its dissent to Sessions' use of the Bible to defend the separations:

Jesus is our way, our truth, our life. The Christ we follow would have no part in ripping children from their mothers' arms or shunning those fleeing violence. It is unimaginable that faith leaders even have to say that these policies are antithetical to the teachings of Christ.

Christian sacred texts should never be used to justify policies that oppress or harm children and families. [United Methodist Church]

Music legend Matt Murphy has died https://t.co/HsSv6zNpCT

— The Sun (@TheSun) June 16, 2018

Matt "Guitar" Murphy Dies: Blues Brothers Guitarist And Noted Sideman Was 88 https://t.co/QgQLKOD7Yt pic.twitter.com/XuAc9qTLy1

— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) June 16, 2018

VLADONALD:

WHICH IS WHAT W SHOULD HAVE DONE:

Iranian hardliners oppose a Trump summit. They argue that U.S. can't be trusted since it reneged on its last deal.

But some Iranians are demanding equal Trump time.

"We are a country with municipal, parliamentary and presidential elections, our 80-million-strong society is open and dynamic, we share borders" with many countries, Masoud Daneshmand, a member of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce, told The New York Times. "Iran is a much more advanced and open society, compared with North Korea. So why wouldn't Iran and America be able to sit down and have direct talks?"

Trump says he's open to a meeting to negotiate a "real deal" with Iran over its nuclear program.

JOBS WHITE PEOPLE WON'T DO:

Young Norwegians are so spoilt that most no longer consider jobs in cafés or restaurants now staffed largely by Swedes, the head of Norway's national business lobby group has complained.

"We have started to see it as quite natural that there are Swedes serving beer and food our restaurants and Eastern Europeans painting our houses and picking the strawberries we eat," Stein Lier-Hansen, chief executive of the Federation of Norwegian Industries, told the Verdens Gang newspaper. 

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE (profanity alert):

BRUSH UP ON YOUR VIKING CLAP:

Reykjavik, Iceland -- To prepare for his job of keeping Lionel Messi quiet in Iceland's opening game of the World Cup, defender Birkir Saevarsson worked as a salt-packer at a warehouse in an industrial zone of Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital. Not because the 33-year-old seasoned soccer pro needs the money, but because the monotony of factory work, the graft, the need to cover his neat hair with an unsightly net all helped keep him real.

"This is normal for an Icelander, you know? More normal than going to the World Cup," Saevarsson said during a recent shift before he flew to Russia with the Iceland squad, talking to The Associated Press as he fed jars into a machine that slapped them with labels marked: "Hand Harvested Lava Salt."

Playing soccer professionally is "the best job you can have, but it's not the real life," Saevarsson added. So he works because "I can't really sit on my (butt) the whole day and do nothing. It's boring and you just get lazy. I didn't want to get lazy before the World Cup."

Go Iceland! In a sport of excess, the fiery volcanic island of 350,000 people is keeping its feet firmly on the ground. From a soccer perspective, there is nothing not to love about the least populous nation ever to play in a World Cup. [...]

 Watch Iceland, and you are essentially watching a group of buddies. Because the pool of players is so small, Iceland doesn't chop and change its squads as much as countries with more abundant talent, where competition for places is fiercer.

Two-thirds of Iceland's World Cup squad is unchanged from the 2016 European Championship, where the team advanced unbeaten from the group stage and sensationally beat England, 2-1, before succumbing, 5-2, in the quarterfinals to France, the eventual tournament runner-up.

The upside of squad stability is that Iceland's players have been playing together for years. Of the 23 in Russia, eight were part of the Icelandic youth team that made an impression at the European Under-21 tournament in Denmark in 2011. Those long-standing bonds foster trust and make the players more willing to work for each other, says Saevarsson, who has 79 appearances for Iceland, more than any other member of the squad.

"When the group meets, it's not like a football team is meeting, it's like a group of friends," he told the AP. "It couldn't be a better group to play football with.

"When you are that close to someone, it's easier to put demands on each other and not take it personally," he said. "If one of your friends shouts at you to do something better you don't take it badly or personally. You just decide to do it, because it's your friend."

He described it as "complete trust" and added, "It's easier to play football like that than with some people you don't like or don't know."

 With so few people and with most of them concentrated in and around Reykjavik, Iceland's players can't hide after a bad game. Chances are high they'll bump into a friend or a relative and have to explain themselves. That's a powerful motivator, Saevarsson said.

THE NOSE ON YOUR FACE:

In an interview for the Yahoo News podcast "Skullduggery," Clapper told Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff and Editor in Chief Daniel Klaidman that intelligence officials were "pretty confident" that they had identified the conduit for the hacked emails to WikiLeaks by the time he left office in January 2017. He declined, however, to provide any details about the suspect's identity.

"We had a suspect," said Clapper. "I don't know whether the suspicions we had at the time were conveyed [to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller] or whether they were validated." U.S. intelligence officials were "pretty confident at the time but not sufficient enough to publicize it," he said. [...]

[C]lapper told "Skullduggery" that the WikiLeaks transfer "cut-out" was selected by the Russians for a reason -- so that Assange could tell the world he did not get the DNC emails from Russian intelligence. "The real point was it was an attempt to ensure [Assange] plausible deniability," Clapper said.

Clapper was responding to questions about a little-noticed passage in his new book, "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence." In the book, Clapper recounts how the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian leadership had publicly dumped the DNC emails after they decided in March 2016 that "it was worth the risk of diplomatic blowback if they were caught" hacking the DNC. This gave the green light to Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, to go "on the offense, exfiltrating emails and large volumes of data."

Then, Clapper added: "In April, Russia used a third party 'cut-out' to send more than 19,000 DNC emails and more than 8,000 documents to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, attempting to cover its tracks and to give WikiLeaks some degree of deniability in knowing the source of the leaks."

SO VALERIE JARRETT IS DR. ZAIUS:

A HELPFUL CONCESSION THAT...:

The plan was to enroll 7,800 people ages 50 and up who did not have diabetes. Some of them would be randomly assigned to consume about 15 grams of alcohol per day. The others would be asked to abstain from drinking.

Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, along with colleagues in the United States, Nigeria, Denmark and the Netherlands, would then follow these volunteers for about six years to see whether the moderate drinkers developed fewer cases of cardiovascular disease and diabetes compared to their teetotaling counterparts.

The MACH trial began enrolling participants in February, and the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health, intended to spend $20 million on the study over 10 years.

Instead, the NIH announced on Friday it would shut down the study over concerns about the way officials solicited funding for the study from companies that sell alcoholic beverages. These "process irregularities" had "undermined the integrity of the research process," the agency said in a statement.

WHERE'S TOM WOLFE WHEN WE NEED HIM?

Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it's unclear how to make progress or where you'd even begin.

Then just, like, see what happens.

The cover of the program for the Science of Consciousness conference, held recently in Tucson, shows a human brain getting sucked into (or perhaps rising from?) a black hole. That seems about right: After a week of listening to eye-crossingly detailed descriptions of teeny-tiny cell structures known as microtubules, along with a lecture about building a soundproof booth in order to chat with the whispery spirit world, you too would feel as if your neurons had been siphoned from your skull and launched deep into space.

Oh, by the way, attendees could also take a gong bath, during which you're bathed in the musical vibrations of a gong being struck. Or lie down in a curiously unsupervised and unstable-looking sensory-deprivation chamber. Or take a black-light yoga class, which involves -- as the name suggests -- doing yoga in a room illuminated by black light accompanied by a DJ pumping out frenetic techno beats. Meanwhile, a company offered demos of a brain-stimulation device that had to be inserted way too far up one nostril. And an enthusiastic fellow demonstrated his Spontaneous Postural Alignment technique, in which a misaligned subject's elbow is tapped with a gold medallion while the healer intones, "boy-yoi-yoing."

Please note: This is a bona fide academic conference, put on by the University of Arizona under the aegis of its Center for Consciousness Studies. There were plenaries, concurrent talks, a keynote, lanyards, bag lunches, a sense of initial giddiness that gives way to acute information overload resulting in a desire never to leave your hotel room again. I took copious notes. I nodded thoughtfully. I pocketed the complimentary tea bags. I witnessed adults with terminal degrees utterly defeated by Microsoft PowerPoint.

So, in that sense, it was a normal conference. [...]

There's something about the topic of consciousness that, unlike other scientific fields of inquiry, inspires an unearned feeling of expertise. If you don't know much about, say, the life cycle of a protozoan, you probably wouldn't pretend you did at parties. But because you are conscious, you might feel as if you can say something significant about the profoundly complex phenomenon of consciousness. You might even wish to write down what you feel, laminate it, and thumbtack it to a free-standing bulletin board for all to see. (In which case, I know just the conference.)

NOT AMERICAN: