Libya’s Dar al-Ifta has ruled that Muslims shouldn’t buy, sell or wear anything with the Nike swoosh. The reasoning is tidy. Nike is the Greek goddess of victory, the logo is her wing, and wearing a wing is promoting polytheism. The BBC notes in passing that Libya is home to Cyrene, an ancient Greek city with a statue of that very goddess standing in the ruins. So the country has a Nike, in marble, and nobody is issuing rulings about her.

I don’t want to be glib. The ruling also rests on a boycott logic about Israel, which is the more ordinary engine here, and the goddess argument reads like the theological paperwork that makes a boycott feel like a principle. Still, I like how far a chain of plausible steps can travel from a pair of running shoes.

Compare the phrase from the other lead story. US officials told CBS that strikes on Qeshm Island were “limited and defensive,” a response to the IRGC firing on an American aircraft. Iran says it shot down three drones. Each side is describing a tidy cause and effect, and what’s actually happening is that two militaries are trading fire in a strait, on the day Americans vote, while Qatari mediators try to keep the thing from becoming a proper war afterward. “Limited” is carrying a lot of weight there, and it only has to hold until Wednesday.

Meanwhile the freezer attacks have reached ten countries. Nobody has ruled on whether defrosting is polytheism.

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