It’s the time of year when I get to reflect and think about the years immediately behind and ahead of me. I like to try to make some predictions to myself; not for clickbait or blog views, but so I can try to avoid being in a state of surprise and reaction as the year unfolds.

This year, I don’t have to do that. Thanks to the election of Donald Trump, I can simply look at my Facebook feed and see what everyone believes will happen. Between my friends and the media, 2017 has already been decided. So according to Facebook, here are some things the consensus has agreed upon will absolutely happen.

1. We’re all going to become Russians: Apparently we already are Russian, we just didn’t know it. Russia controls our elections and our President. The policies that will be implemented in 2017 will be strictly designed to benefit Vladimir Putin.
2. The KKK will reign supreme: According to my Facebook feed, a Trump Presidency means that it will be gosh darn near socially unacceptable for me to associate with members of different races. It stinks that I suddenly won’t be allowed to hang out with my friends who aren’t white.
3. The Supreme Court will have 3 new members who believe Hitler was too liberal: It seems to be widely agreed upon that a Trump Presidency will surely lead to a new Supreme Court makeup in which 2 older Democrats and an empty seat will be filled by people who hate freedom and promote persecuting personal freedoms. That is certainly disappointing.
4. No one who makes less than $120,000 a year will have Health Care: From what I’ve read on Facebook, with the repeal of ObamaCare almost everyone will lose their Health Insurance, even people who have other types of Health Insurance.
5. Nuclear war with China is imminent: Now this scares me a lot, but makes the rest of the list pretty irrelevant. I live on the west coast near a Navy base. We must be high on the early target list. So, I guess the other things won’t matter since I’ll be part of a giant mushroom cloud.

This all nets out to a pretty depressing look into 2017. But I like to be more optimistic than this. So I think my resolution in 2017 is to ignore Facebook and watch channels like Bloomberg instead.

The Sounders play their 1st game of the MLS season on March 6. But today is February 23 and they have a home game that matters against a Mexican team called Club America. For you non-soccer fans, I will attempt to explain in the fewest words possible.

1) In 2014, while the regular season was being played, the Sounders won a different tournament called the U.S. Open Cup. That made them one of 4 American teams to qualify for yet another DIFFERENT 24 team tournament in 2015 called the Concacaf Champions League (Concacaf = Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football.)

2) In 2015, they played the “Group Stage,” where the 24 teams were split into 8 groups of 3, with the winner of each advancing to the next round. So the Sounders played 2 games against a team from Canada and 2 games against a team from Honduras. They won their Group, thus advancing to the final round of 8.

3) HOWEVER, due to the weird schedules of U.S. and Mexican leagues, you can’t actually play the quarterfinals, semi-finals and finals of the 2015 tournament in 2015. So these rounds are being played in February, March and April of 2016. In each round, the teams will play two games against their opponent, one at home, one on the road a week later. Most goals after two games wins.

4) Out of the 24 teams that qualified for the tournament originally, 4 were from the Mexican League and 4 were from the U.S. The other 16 came from all over Central America; Honduras, Trinidad, Guatemala, etc… All 4 teams from Mexico and all 4 teams from the U.S. advanced to the final round of 8. So if you are a math wizard, you are able to quickly see than ZERO of the 16 teams from the other countries made it past the U.S. and Mexican teams. In fact, when you look at the overall records in the Group Stage, U.S. teams were 10-5-1 and Mexican teams 10-4-2. Yes, in 32 games, U.S. and Mexican teams lost a total of 3 times.

Now, you might ask the question, “Well if the U.S. and Mexican teams are the only ones to make it through the Group Stage anyway, why do they play meaningless games in 2015 and delay the Knockout rounds until a full 2 seasons after the teams qualified? Why not skip the Group Stage and just have an 8 team Knockout in the right year?”

That’s a question I don’t really have a better answer for than, “Well, it’s soccer.”

Adding to the lunacy of the whole thing, because each group has 3 teams, by mathematical definition all the teams in the groups can’t play in the same 24 hours, like every other tournament in the world would schedule games. So in a quirk of fate, last year the Sounders won their group BEFORE the other two teams in their group had played their final game. Thus, Vancouver had to fly to Honduras in the middle of the week to play a game that didn’t matter, wasn’t on TV and no one wanted to go to. I think they sent like 13 of their youngsters and were in and out in 24 hours.

So that’s why the Sounders are playing tonight.

I don’t do predictions. But I like to read other people’s predictions. And based on what I accomplished in 2015 and what other people are saying is coming, here’s what I’m looking forward to in the year ahead.
1) Travel: In 2015, I made it to Spain, France and Italy. I also enjoyed a fantastic 2 week road trip through Southern California and the Central Coast, and an annual trip to Arizona. In 2016, I’d love to get to France for a Euro 2016 match, Cuba, and Orlando to see the Sounders play.
2) More medical technology: This isn’t really my field, but I’m fascinated how devices are becoming available that can help people with preventative medicine. From heart trackers, to cholesterol monitors to simple devices that measure stress, I’v never been more interested in health products.
3) 3D Printing: It’s still years away from being practical in every home. But there was also a day when mobile phones were useless devices that weighed 8 pounds and had to be plugged into a cigarette lighter. Keep you eye on this and notice the baby steps the industry makes.
4) Really bad political drama: Oh lord, this year’s Presidential election is going to be a disaster. If you were a company that needed to fly under the radar, this campaign is going to give you plenty of air cover.
5) The Mariners: Last year I was skeptical. I believe in Mariners 2017, and that Mariners 2016 will at least be interesting to watch as it’s being built.

That’s today’s top 5. More later in the week.

Thanks for listening. You did the right thing.
http://www.sbisoccer.com/2015/03/players-season-schedule.html

Only 32 teams are invited to the World Cup finals that you are watching now. How did the 190 or so teams get whittled down to these? Well, there are 3 years of intra-continent tournaments that deliver a few finalists. Here’s how the allocations break out:
1 Host Country
13 European Countries
5 South American Countries
5 African Countries
4 North American / Central American Countries
4 Asian Countries

So, is Europe deserving of 13 spots? Is Africa worthy of 5? Let’s look at the first round of games. (For this comparison, we’re putting the host Brazil with the other 5 South American teams)

North/Central America (4): 3 wins, 1 loss. Vs Africa 2-0-0. Vs South America 1-0-0. Vs Europe 0-1-0.
South America (6): 4 wins, 2 losses, 0 ties. Vs Europe: 3-1-0. Vs Asia 1-0-0. Vs North America 0-1-0.
Europe (13): Total record: 6-6-1. Record vs non-European teams 3-3-1: Vs South America: 1-3-0. Vs NA: 1-0-0. Vs Africa 1-0-0. Vs Asia: 0-0-1
Africa (5): 1 win, 3 losses and 1 tie. Vs North America: 0-2-0. Vs Europe: 0-1-0. Vs Asia 1-0-1.
Asia (4): 0 wins, 2 losses, 2 ties. Vs Africa 0-1-1. Vs Europe 0-0-1. Vs South America 0-1-0.

So what does this tell us?
– The only African or Asian team to get a point against a non Asian or African team is South Korea, with a tie against Russia.
– South America has been as good as advertised, other than Uruguay.
– North America has been pleasantly surprising.
– Europe could not be more neutral.

Clearly the African and Asian teams are struggling, while Sweden and Ukraine are sitting at home. Maybe we should be allocating some of their spots to Europe.

This is pretty much purely my speculation…

Fact: Out of 16 people on the Seattle City and King County Councils, Richard Conlin was one of 2 people to oppose the proposed arena. From Wikipedia:

On October 15, 2012, both the King County Council and Seattle City Council approved a financing plan for a $490 million sports arena in the Seattle’s Sodo neighborhood, backed by venture capitalist Chris Hansen. The King County Council vote was 9-0, while the City Council vote was 7-2, with Conlin and Nick Licata as the only opposition.^[16] The new arena was intended to host the NBASeattle SuperSonics professional basketball team as well as a potential NHL ice hockey team.

Opinion: I voted against Conlin solely because of this.  Didn’t even look to see who the opposition was. (Of course, the joke’s on me – the opposition is a Socialist and I’m stuck with THAT for 4 years, but anyway.)

Conlin’s only colleague in his failed anti-arena effort was Nick Licata, who keeps getting elected under the same Seattle-specific psuedo-common sense that says people should wear socks with birkenstocks, refuse to use umbrellas in the rain and improve traffic by getting rid of car lanes for bike lanes. It appears Licata was at least lucky enough to be able to wait for the election to be over before having to launch his failed initiative to derail $151,000 from funding a more formalized Seattle Startup Initiative. I breathe a little thanks that Licata has lost enough pull that he can’t completely derail common sense in the Council anymore. Still, I can’t help think that as a city, we get what we deserve as long as we continue to elect that crackpot. But it’s worth noting that he waited until his paycheck for the next 4 years was secure before trying his latest effort to hold Seattle back.

But back to the point of the story. Richard Conlin is forced out of his job of guiding a city, and headed back to a job of writing policy for non-profits, thanks in part to his refusing to help bring a privately-funded arena to life.  He could have used common sense and kept his job. But he didn’t. And by refusing, he forced voters to go against common sense and elect a Socialist. All in all a wash for the voters, and a loss for him.