World Cup - Late, Painful Realization

I finally got around to seeing who the U.S. could face if they make it out of the first round of this summer's World Cup. Reviewing the television schedule, I see that the teams who make it out of Group E (our group) face the teams who come out of Group F. So, who's in Group F?

Brazil, Japan, Croatia, and Australia.

Shit.

So, consider that the winner of Group E meets the runner-up in Group F and vice-versa. Then consider that Brazil - the absolute pig-lovin' kings of cushy draws - will, failing a highly localized pandemic, top group. Obviously, we'd be better off topping this group, so it's time to focus the mind.

But, assuming we get Brazil in Round 2, it's hard to be optimistic.... ¶ 3:33 AM 0 comments

Notes - 5/9

I'm going to stop pretending there's any point to an Open Thread on a low-traffic blog such as this one (for the record, my "lay-low" strategy is working well; I get about 16 visits a day and I'm half of them). So I'm killing it.

If I've got something off-topic or personal to throw out here, I'll just put it under "Notes" and move on.

Today, for instance, I was going to mention that I finally read Blinded by the Right, David Brock's memoir about his time inside the right-wing's ideological goon squads. I'd recommend the book to anyone, not only because it provides evidence of the GOP's cart-before-the-horse hatred of Bill Clinton - that's a convoluted way of arguing that the hatred of Clinton came well before the justification for it...and even then it was stunningly irrational and hypocritical - but for how it demostrates the continuity within the GOP political apparatus. It's instructive to count the characters involved in the Clinton witch-hunts who now reappear in the Bush White House and on the Hill.

It's not the best book, but it's an easy read. There's the question of the extent to which Brock can be trusted, but, a few cheap-shots aside, I didn't catch anything in there that was glaringly false or unsupported....which doesn't mean that they're not there.

I'm now starting another book - Conspiracy: Why the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From, by Daniel Pipes - and finally digging into fictional conspiracies, as opposed to the very real one that nearly bagged Clinton. In the first pages, I came across an American conspiracy that was totally new to me:

"The activist Dick Gregory, a comedian who long ago gave up laughs for conspiracy theories, also blames [Martin Luther] King's death on a government plot, as he does the mysterious murder of twenty-eight blacks in Atlanta in 1979-1981 (which he ascribes to government scientists' taking the tips of their penises to use in a serum for countering cancer)."

No...can't say I'd heard that one. I have yet to find the correct combination of words to find this one on the Internet. And, as one who flatters himself into thinking he's got some knowledge of the conspiracy world, I find this one's obscurity somewhat relieving. ¶ 3:32 AM 0 comments