harveycmd

Someone asked me how I use the dogs. I use em to hunt. You gotta know dogs and how to train them. Walker for tracking and calling in the others. Border Collie for circling and holding to move in. American Bulldog for hitting and chomping if the hog is too frisky with the other two. Mr. Ruger does the rest.

Taking the dogs to go feral hog hunting with my Ruger Redhawk in .45 Colt (high pressure) in about an hour. They'll be running and rooting like crazy after all the rain yesterday. Line me up some pork for the smoking pit.

Popovich waited about ten years too late to retire. On Jokic: Gerry talked about him being a great player. There's no question he plays great. He wouldn't have started as a 4 or 5 in the NBA twenty-five years ago because he wouldn't have been able to defend the post in the pre-zone era. He wouldn't have been anything close to the offensive player or rebounder he is now because he would have literally been muscled constantly off the ball, keeping him from getting the position he wanted. This is a prime example of why attendance and market share are down in the NBA.

I think my friend's dad graduated from Arkansas in about 1960. Men didn't talk much back then.

I went to a double header between Arkansas and Baylor on a Saturday in April 1986 when I was 13 with my best friend. His dad was an Arkansas alumni. I think they split the double header. We ate at Whataburger in Waco between the double header. We ate at Braum's in Corsicana on the way back. I don't remember my friend's dad saying a word during the hole thing.

All former Alabama players need to reject Saban, Man clearly doesn't give a damn about how hard they worked. He thinks he deserved 10 mil while they deserved nothing. He literally lied to the Dolphins and then took the Alabama job. Then he complains about NIL? Who believes this crap? Idiots, that who.

I literally can't believe this. The man is rich beyond belief, but he thinks the guys who made him rich should have to shut up and be limited by some illegal executive order? Send this man straight to purgatory. Who does he think he is? I guess he thinks he's a god.

I'm thinking Saban is worse than Satan.

I don't think there's eve been a "man" who made so much money on the free market and then complained about others making money. Obviously he's not a real man. He's a pansy. Why does he care that people make money? We can't take this nonsense.

He's a damn communist.

Saban made over 100 million by lying to LSU, the Dolphins and Alabama. He talks to chump and now we gotta bow down hypocrisy?

Saban whining about NIL is like the Russians whining about the US having technological superiority in 1990.

Trump's a communist. Texas must defeat communism. https://sports.yahoo.com/college-football/breaking-news/article/president-trump-reportedly-considering-executive-order-limiting-nil-after-meeting-with-nick-saban-012129625.html

Unlike Luka, none of these guys are fat white boys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbm6GXllBiw

First paper I published was on the connection between New Jack Swing and Nietzsche when I was 20. I wrote it for an old female professor from Germany who escaped the Holocaust. She interrupted to tell me I shouldn't try to discuss Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in connection with a pop star like Bobby Brown. I said that might be true, but it didn't mean there wasn't a connection. That's why we aren't the criminal sooners or Aggies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q39E_DgfHqs

Someone asked me what I'm talking about. Balled on a low level with some great athletes here in east Texas, but enough to hang. Then quickly transitioned to world class intellectual competition while studying at Texas. Took that beyond the limit by reading Kant and Hegel every day for about ten hours. Literally. I'd go to the library after work and read until I fell asleep about 1 am in the library. Wake up at 5 and read a couple of hours until the time to go to class at 8. Classes until noon. Go to work for about six hours. Start it all over again.

horns96, Did you get the link to my published essays on McCarthy? I'm kinda proud of that. I got stuff on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Heidegger, Strauss, and my own teacher Stanley Rosen. Easiest to understand is the McCarthy popular stuff. Lotta zingers in there. Had fun razzing the lefty nutjobs over McCarthy.

This isn't really a rant topic, but I think it's worth considering. Who is the greatest one on one player in NBA history? I'm a Kobe guy, but I think you gotta give this to Michael. I think Kobe is second. Couldn't stand Bird when he played, but truth is you can't deny he couldn't hardly be stopped one on one. I don't think any of the current players even make the top five. LeBron doesn't have the overall skill of those guys. His deal is the combination of power and speed, not one on one skill. I don't think there's any question that Kobe was the most fundamentally sound and skilled. He didn't have the athleticism and huge hands of Jordan.

This is what competition does. In this case the competition is economic. Think about a real estate analogy. When the prices increase in a particular market, it reduces the number of potential buyers.

Another twist of fate here is that the term "xenophobia" is etymologically contradictory. Xenophon, the famous figure from Classical Greece, whose name means "stranger," wasn't a person who feared or otherwise avoided strange things. That doesn't mean he embraced it for its own sake either. As a student of Socrates, Xenophon was a "stranger" in the world of human social and political needs. Like his teacher, he had none. He was free in the sense that Socrates taught him to live beyond the constraints of time, place, culture, etc. That's what made him a "stranger." This is actually one of the dreams of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, attaining such a hyperborean point was considered to be a principle that could not be applied along egalitarian lines because of innate differences in individual intellect.

I will also say that it's extremely difficult to parcel the sports/politics connection in our current situation. I mentioned the conservative wave during the late 70s and 80s in the US that coincided with an increase the popularity of basketball. One could counter that may be true, but the "tenor" of politics now is not traditionally conservative. This is true. The problem is that there isn't an actual tradition of conservatism in the US. Our principles of individual and economic freedom come straight from the tradition of European Enlightenment liberalism, but those principles are now considered conservative since the nineteenth century socialist reaction to the economic and individual liberalism of the eighteenth century. That takes me back to my statement that it's hard to correlate this with sports. The more obvious connection with social movements and sports is actually with nineteenth century socialism and nationalism. That's actually when "team" sports began to ascend. That's also when and where you get popular appeals to what many think of as xenophobic policies, which we might now call identity based principles. This means the entire rise of team sports required what we would now call the rise of economic and social xenophobia, which is quite contrary to economic and individual political freedom. This is also why people can say its unamerican to deny a person who plays sports their "freedom," while at the same time others say such freedom is detrimental to the "sport."

It's true baseball's decline has been steeper. Baseball's decline began in the late 70s and early 80s, which was the same time the popularity of the NBA dramatically increased during the Bird and Magic era. There was a conservative wave in politics at the same time. In any event, the problem for the NBA isn't MLB; it's their overall market share in professional sports over the last fifteen years. As indicated by the previous rise in NBA popularity, it doesn't likely correlate with politics. Differently stated, it's not a coincidence that structural changes in the NBA accompanied an increase in fan apathy.

Two structural changes have really hurt NBA basketball: the three point shot and the elimination of the requirement to play man defense. It was the second change that made the first a real problem. As soon as you didn't have to play man, it drastically curtailed post play and the mid-range game. Since then, "efficiency" numbers say it's better to shoot threes and avoid big guys who can dominate one on one in the post but they're too slow to contest threes. The numbers the analytics idiots need to look at are attendance and viewership. What they call "efficiency" may be up, but fan interest is down. Turns out it's boring to watch a 2.5 hour three point fest about a hundred times a year.

NBA viewership and overall market share within major professional sports has been declining for years. That has more to do with the product on the court than coaches and players talking.

Let's hope Johntay does well. Might be his last chance. Part of the reason we're interested in sports is because it allows people to work and prove themselves.