As the 79F water needed for the care and feeding of hurricanes, even without weather engineering, is reputedly unusually deep at this time (around 250 feet of the top of the ocean around Carribean to Florida), gotta recommend evacuation...if not too late. 250 feet of water is a lot for a hurricane to blow off upwell some water cool enough to sap Irma. Exit stage north and west. Its times like these that the affluent with private airplanes have a HUGE advantage. Maybe we all better get our flying licenses and at least some kind of little Cessna.
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
I've still got a little piss'n vinegar left! 😀
I strongly oppose HOF admissions until their careers end, but if anyone deserves premature admission, its Bill Self.
Hey, why didn't we hang Josh Jackson's jersey in AFH last January?
If early admission of coaches helps their recruiting, I reckon early hanging of player jersies would too!!!
What the hell?
Tyler's going to replace Bill, after Tyler gets his CV built at San Antonio. Let's see if he can be selected for BHOF now based on what he will do later. It will help his recruiting a lot, if he starts out in the BHOF, right?
Where does this promotional BS end?
Maybe we could admit the zygote of a HOF coach's son?
Imagine KU recruiting with BHOF Bill, BHOF Tyler and BHOF Zygote Self all at once!!!!!!
Surely that would get us an OAD 5.
adidas = soccer and track in Europe, Africa and Latin America
If adidas were to have EVER let Nike in that action in a big way, Nike would probably not have played rough in North American basketball, or so it appears in retrospect.
So: how tall is de Sousa?
Is he considered a 5 star, or an OAD?
Has Self finally broken through and signed an OAD 5?
Don't know the specific answers yet, but this question is a marvelous one. When I don't know an answer like this, I try to define the context, economy and trading system of the time some, before digging in. It helps me know what I don't know.
From its location on the north ATLANTIC, new USA was trying to transition from thirteen 200-year old resource colonies feeding tobacco, some cotton, naval stores, salted fish and whale oil illuminant to England's heavily defended-and-financed, elaborate, global maritime trading system into a small new nation state trading, defending and financing a triangle trade and hoping to expand to all kinds of trade. It had friends that wanted to stick Britain, but little clout, needed many things, and little domestic production beyond tobacco, cotton, illuminant, naval stores and domestic ports to trade. And tobacco soil was losing fertility, whaling was shifting to the Pacific, and cotton had a HUGE supply competitor in Egypt, Middle East and probably India. Further, USA was not yet a gold producer, so it had serious liquidity problems, and so dependent on the currencies of strangers.
Maritime trade requires having goods to carry along a series of stops that can be sold/swapped at a profit over shipping cost at most stops. The series of stops must form a circuit that starts and ends at a home port. Friendly ports must be established. Passages without cargo must be minimized. Cargo and shipping must be financed to bridge shipping time before payment. Cargo and ships require insurance. Security must be feasible to project on the circuit, but also wherever the traders and pirates reside to stop piracy and enforce contracts. Thus you must establish and maintain not only business ties, but diplomatic, naval and piracy ties to flourish. You must make more friends than enemies and if a link in the system breaks you must at the limit be willing and able to kill the enemies threatening the link or preventing reconnection. The trading circuit requires cargo. You may not like to carry some things, but you may have to carry such things to make the trading system feasible. Once you start carrying something, you may accrue sunk costs and the system's profitability may require you to keep carrying it. You may have to join associations, alliances and secret societies you don't want to join to stay solvent and make profit. Because you are operating in the anarchic realm between governments much of the time, there is no higher legal system to resort to to compel compliance. You learn that in most cases excess profits here are the only cushion against theft and gouging there. Finally, once you become a trading state there is no alternative to the above. Its trade, or perish. So if you seek your individual freedom through revolution and independent, constituted government, your freedom depends on trading because your Constitution and government depends on it for its funding. You may not like carrying slaves and opium, but you carry them until there is something else with sufficient margins to equal the profits and cover the sunk costs to carry instead. No ifs. No ands. No buts. You don't teach much about the Barbary Pirates in Tripoli, because it gets into a lot of stuff you didn't really want to carry in the first place and not just slaves.
You tie your constitutional freedom to the revenues of maritime trade, then you have to trade. And you have to watch that the trading doesn't trade away interests in your country, or you will not only be compromising your morals part of the time for trade to keep the trading system solvent, but you will also lose your freedom. Freedom isn't free. Nothing is. Freedom often isn't pretty in it's necessary compromises, or in its unnecessary, corrupt ones. Freedom isn't free. It comes at a great price both in the winning and in the keeping. Americans must keep being educated to this. Freedom based on trading isn't free for all until all are trading. The questions always are who pays, who benefits, does it save our freedom, does it expand anyone ele's freedom, and are we taking the least awful path to save our freedom? Are we being the lepper with the most fingers, or are we ruthlessly and unnecessarily exploiting human suffering for a gold dabloom, when we could be earning the dabloom another, less onerous way? Could we become vegetarians and stop killing sheep cattle and pigs, or can we eat at least some more vegetables and kill a few less of god's creatures.
More to come later.
.
"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."--Frank Herbert
Thx 4 the assist!
Help Houston!
Remember New Orleans.
But...
Getting natural disaster fatigue.
Getting a little tired of the tragedy of flood and wild fire reality theater.
Floods happen.
Insurance encourages persons to buy where floods happen.
Why can't insurance be written that requires stilts in flood zones?
Or requires houses that float up on moorings.
Battery back ups anyone? Generators?
Dingies for every house?
And drinking water purifiers?
And some MRATS?
All stored on roofs.
How about everyone has to have one serviceable boat car with a full tank of gas to live in a flood zone? Everyone loves boat cars!
And repurpose these staffed FEMA COG concentration camps for homeless flood victims instead of mass imprisonments. Plant flowers and turn them into RV camps to help pay for themselves between NDs (natural disasters).
Wild Fires happen, too.
In predictable regions.
Insurance should require houses that don't burn. It's called concrete. Or even just fire proof fabric on steel frames. Marines make uniforms out of the stuff. Baby swaddling cloths should be FROG MARPAT. Kinky bustiers out of FROG MULTI-CAM.
Not. Rocket. Science.
NDs could become safe and fun.
Let's learn from the past.
But then what would the economies of these regions do without every 5-10 year MASSIVE infusions of capital from the non fire and non flood prone regions?
God keeps repeating his "acts of."
He wants us to learn.
P.S.: I care. I have been in floods and fires and been terrified. Help now. But learn now, too.
Squandered opps are sad, but...
Bragg had great potential according to Self.
It remains unless he has a back monkey of addictive personality.
Designer weight gain and reputed over-recreation can be remedied.
Bragg needs a break and a post feed.
And a kind woman.
And a good friend.
And a new compass.
Would KU signing a shoe contract paying $5 Billion/year in gold bullion be enough?
Ok, so I don't follow the sizes of linemen these days. I see quite a few 300-335 pounders. Are these big enough, if sufficiently skilled, to control the line of scrimmage against teams in the top half of Power 5 conferences? Just wondering.
My initial response was to recall this quote...
"This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid!"
--Steven Keats as Jackie Brown in Peter Yates' 1973 film "The Friends of Eddie Coyle"
But then I remembered how much I struggled at that age and I felt ashamed for thinking of it. I can only say I hope someone looks after her and helps her through this tough period of her life. There is so much to live for and so much she can make of herself.
Rock Chalk!
If Lon were a real man, he would suspend himself for half a season for not keeping the kid in line.
Short of that, Lon should show some solidarity with the young man by make a deal for both of them to let their eye brows grow together.
jSPN XTReme Rumor Mill...
Tyler Self is undergoing plastic surgery and a shin extension procedure in a San Antonio hospital and will come back as a 6-10 walk-on named Roy Lobbs. His full legend has not been agreed upon yet. But it is believed that a KU coed will be asked to wear a huge white hat to home games and a spot light will illuminate her whenever he goes in the game.
How quickly we remember...
What losing is like.
Ewing...Muriel, et al, there will always be another spring.
What triggered your job change?
a.) escape young disingenuous Principal;
b.) achieve higher salary and benefits;
c.) a desire to teach in a different state that specifies less of the questions you are required to ask on standardized tests, so you can do a better job of teaching;
d.) move to a lower priority nuclear target of North Korea, China, and Russia;
e.) attain enhanced mass casualty event survivability by teaching at a FEMA COG high school deep underground at a classified location;
f.) a desire to move to an area where there is vastly less chemtrail spraying;
g.) moving to a private school where children are not forced by state law to take unnecessary vaccinations laced with mercury, which the CDC now reputedly admits does correlate with autism;
h.) more stimulating colleagues that do not keep white pillow cases with eye holes in their lockers;
i.) humidity below 96%;
j.) a school with a sharply lower ratio of students lost to voodoo sacrifice vs. honor roll graduates; or
k.) school in a town with an airport with regular non-stops to Lawrence during basketball season?
(Note: all fiction, no malice. Sure hope it works out well for you. You seem like a dedicated and good teacher.)
The solution here is obvious.
Go to the largest Chinese shoe company and propose a package deal with San Antonio and KU to promote their apparel and shoes in USA and across Eurasia. Offer to take at least one or two Chinese amateurs basketball players a year instead of us carrying walk-ons. The Chinese shoe company also agrees to deliver any great Chinese players to KU and then San Antonio. We create a China-KU One-Belt, One Path Invitational tournament that plays games in China and in USA. The Spurs agree to play exhibition games across the path of the Russo-China-India One Belt, One Path Supercorridor. The teams travel town to town to town across Eurasia on the Bullet Trains. The Spurs and KU also agree to play exhibitions at all the major China Towns in North America--San Francisco, LA, Toronto, New York, etc. One of the Big Commercial tie in is using old Kelly AFB in San Antonio as the place where the Chinese Shoe Co stages its All-star Games for high school recruits and its also sponsors a new summer league independent of the AAU that plays games at all the major stop points along the Super Corridor from Ixtapa to Kansas City. Tying Eurasia and North America into a single sports apparel market would within a year bring Nike, UA and adidas to their knees. KU and San Antonio would become the most globally famous and valuable brands on the planet.
Next.
The link @approxinfinity supplied below will access you to a couple of posts of mine on the subject of the Civil War of 1861-1865. Suffice it to say that I have gone from a very conventional, traditional, orthodox, catholic view of the war based on my public school education and informing by Shelby Foote and Ken Burns, to a rather different view of it after seven years of my own digging into that era. The war was much less about slavery, than I had originally been lead to think, much more important in grand strategy and global trade than I had any inkling in the beginning, and had many more far reaching dimensions and effect than I had thought originally. I am pretty confident that a final, enduring version of the history of the US Civil War will be written some time this century and it will be much more like the version I outlined in the other post. It was a large war, and when combined with the European Great Power Invasion of Mexico, as it should always have been, but never has been, it was a war of much greater global significance than most have grasped in the past.
I suspect you're going to get a kick out of my posts on the Civil War. 😀
I didn't mean to be so pessimistic. It's great to help anyone become a productive person. But a career-weary part Self has to ask: Where is Brannen Greene these days? He had many teaching experiences?
First, I don't want to mislead you,or others, into thinking this book by Abbott is a radical reinterpretation of the Civil War. It is not. But it certainly comes at it from an abolitionist perspective that differs from most mainstream historians.
Second, as indicated above, and now reemphasized here, much of what I wrote above was triggered by Abbott's brief discussion of Fremont and was not in Abbott's book. Abbott's remarks about Fremont enabled me a premise from which to bring together much other arcane reading I have done on the Civil War the last seven or so years that has focused on reading about many of the often overlooked aspects of the Civil War, such as the burgeoning rock oil kerosene exports, the repurposing of the whaling fleet, the ensuing decline of northern whale oil illuminant and southern camphene illuminant (an blend of alcohol and turpentine) exports, and Lincoln's conspicuous high tax on camphene and conspicuous low tax on kerosene. I also have read what I could about the Baltimore and Ohio railroads, and about the transitional era in railroading that began with railroads being built to connect the old north east with the Great Lakes and that then lead to a huge boom in Great Lakes economic growth that lead to much dislocation in the northeast subsequently. Likewise, I have read some about plantations, plantation development, and plantation financing, as well as about the aspect of the New York banking industry that financed both the slave trade and the plantation development and yearly operations budgeting. Yet another area of reading has been the connection between West Point military academy and the railroad industry. West Point was before the Civil War kind of the Silicon Valley of American Railroading. It produced a large number of the engineers and surveyors that oversaw location and building and later operation of building of railroads. West Point and the US Army were also intricately involved in the study and thinking and strategizing about the grand plan of transcontinental railroading and its relationship to what we might call force structure today. It is not an exaggeration to say that the two largest influences on the building and operation of the United States rail network was the US Army and the Morgan banking interests. Army engineers surveyed the the most important right of ways. Army engineers rolled out and took jobs working in management of the railroads. And the US Army was indispensable to providing the military force structure needed to both build the railroads, and then secure them during operation for several decades during the 19th Century. The US Army understood from early in the 19th Century that trains reshaped the battle space and constituted crucial lines of communication for fighting wars. They also understood that once the telegraph became technologically feasible that the telegraph line was the most important leap in lines of communication in war and peace in human history and that railroads, even if they had done nothing else, were necessary to enable the Army to secure the telegraph lines themselves, so that trade and military action could be conducted with the advantage of faster communications than one's opponent whenever possible. But I digress. Back to your question about where has this book by Abbott been? I will try to answer you question the following way, since I think it is a very good question.
There is a saying that "the winners write history."
That saying oversimplifies things some.
Winners are comprised of different subgroups.
First, there is the subgroup that came out on top and orchestrated the victory and usually orchestrates the peace afterwards.
Next, among the winners are the subgroups that helped win the war, or even catalyzed the war, but were maneuvered out of control, or were never in control, once the war started, and so after the victory find themselves marginalized increasingly. Abolitionists from the old northeast would fit this description during and after the Civil War.
So: while it is true that the winners write the histories that get canonized and taught, the winners that get marginalized, often write histories, too. And because they are on the winning side, they can often get them published, because the lesser winners like to read about their accomplishments, early on, too. But these histories by those that helped win the war, but were not in control, are apparently not canonized and taught forever after.
Note: losers also write histories, but they apparently often cannot get them published, unless what they write calculatedly portrays the losers as the "causers" of the war and quite outclassed by the winners. There are exceptions of course. Sometimes the winners have to immediately remobilize the loser to help the winner get the war torn country back producing again, and maybe even to take on another mutual enemy. In those cases, the losers histories are allowed to portray the losers in a more favorable, but not TOO favorable, light. Usually the loser gets its leaders to be portrayed as tactically brilliant, and it soldiers as heroic and courageous in their devotion to duty, and that it was the evil politicians of the losers that wasted the loser's great generals and brave soldiers on a lost cause, or a misguided cause. Its probably mostly orchestrated by the winners how the history by the losers is written. It probably depends on the expedient needs of the winner, as the peace unfolds.
Now back to the winners.
My impression so far is that the author, Cabbott, was solidly apart of the northeastern abolitionist movement and wrote about the early stages of a war in progress from the POV of such an abolitionist.
While the abolitionists were on the winning side, it at least appears to me that they ultimately may have been used by Lincoln and his core base of Great Lakes industrialists and Morgan banking interests to first trigger support for war, and later to broaden and deepen and perpetuate support of the war. Its also worth noting that the abolitionists and the northeastern wealth that funded the abolitionists do not appear in retrospect wholly altruistic in motivation, though at least the lepers with the most fingers. The northeastern wealth and ordinary workers were reputedly suffering significantly from their industries being eclipsed by the staggering population, rail, and industrial growth occurring further west along the Great Lakes. Whaling was in eclipse, too. Coal and iron production were moving from New York and New Jersey to western Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Northeastern wealth was thus caught between losing out to the dynamic industrial expansion on the Great Lakes, and to the massively expanding plantation economy being developed with New York loans in the South. Each year successful plantation owners, and would be plantation owners, went to New York to get the loans to buy still larger plots of land farther west (moving west from the old south on the seaboard to what historians now call the old southwest in Alabama and Mississippi, and then into the new Southwest of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona). Each year the newest plantations were being scaled up to achieve ever greater economies of scale and to hedge against soil exhaustion on the older smaller plantations farther east. The demand for slaves was rising. And the demand for rural rail road spurs to move cotton, camphene from turpentine plantations, and rice, to market, and slaves and supplies to the new plantations stimulated development of southern iron foundaries in Tennessee and Alabama, and a fledgling steam engine industry in Georgia. And the South's Senators and the Great Lakes Senators reputedly sometimes allied to suppress economic activities in the northeast to benefit their own regions. And the rising millions of slaves in the south posed a looming industrial threat to the northeast and the Great Lakes industrialists, because sooner, or later, the South would begin to divert its slave labor into industrial production and thus become industrial competitors the North could not match without adopting slavery themselves; this point is something insufficiently explored in histories of slavery so far IMHO. This would have made the northerners as dependent on the New York City slave trade and related lending as the southerners had grown. New York City banks supplied the vast amounts of financing used by southern plantations, which were proto corporate industrial farming. Many of the New York City banks traced their roots to London's banking entities. New York City, which started as a Dutch Colony, had by the time of the 1850s become a kind of British Hong Kong equivalent in North America. While Britain had lost USA as an incorporated colony on a map, it had regained her as a financial colony shaped and directed from its New York City bank lending.
In this context of changing control and rapid bursts of regional growth in the continental interior creating both huge winners and considerable economic dislocation out in the older seaboard regions of the young country: the appeal in the old northeast of abolition, and the funding of abolitionist movements, had both a moral and an economic dimension. Abolition was consistent with the northeast's dominant protestant religious values. But abolition also struck a blow at lessening the economic and political advantages slavery was accruing to the South, and the disadvantages accruing to the northeast. Put another way, the northeast was against slavery for the same reason England's working classes were against slavery. They saw slavery as holding down wages, and long term threatening employment itself. Upper classes in the old northeast appear divided on slavery somewhat the same as Great Britain's upper classes were. New Englanders had little trouble with the merchant marine fleet owners profiting from carrying slaves, so long as they offloaded and on loaded them in NYC, out of sight out of mind, rather than in ports of New England. So: if you were in shipping, you might look favorably on slavery, but perhaps not if you were in the whaling and fishing industries, or manufacturing. It was, as we say today, complicated.
So: why has Cabbott's book, which was published during the Civil War, at least in part, subsequently receded into the historical shadows (assuming that it has and we two are just not very well read in the field)?
My guess is that it is partly that we are not sufficiently well read. I have a hunch many Civil War scholars would have heard, or read of, this book, whether they relied on it much, or not.
But I suspect there is another part to the phenomenon, also.
My guess is that it has receded into the shadows the same way a more than superficial understanding of abolitionists and those that funded them have receded into the shadows of American history. The group of winners that were in control at the end of the Civil War, and remained largely in control for the remainder of the 19th and 20th Centuries, appear, in retrospect, to have decided that their own histories and not the abolitionist histories were to be canonized.
Further, I suspect there are probably more abolitionist histories of various aspects of the war that have fallen through the cracks and into the out of circulation stacks.
A case can be made that the old republic largely ended with the Civil War and that either a newly incorporated republic in 1868, or a private industrial oligarchy of sorts with some less specific date of inception, replaced it. This new republic, or private oligarchy, seems to have had little in common with the abolitionists that attained such a high profile shortly before and during the Civil War. Only a few short years after Lincoln's assassination, basically after Andrew Johnson's impeachment, Lincoln's little 'r" republican and abolitionist vision of reconstruction ended abruptly, and it was swiftly and cruelly replaced with Jim Crow feudalism aka as share cropping with persons terrorised and informally institutionalized into a politically disenfranchised, quasi-slavery called share-cropping. The plantation owner was freed from the cost of supplying food and housing and health care for the slave, the slave was nominally free but effectively not, and without the power to effectively bargain for his share, or alternatively to engage in businesses that could cater to those in the economy that had wealth and money to spend. And it was being insured as a new economic order by--drum roll please--British insurance companies, and enforced by groups like Knights of the Golden Circle and the KKK. And while this was happening, some former Confederate government officials and Generals that had escaped abroad and been allowed to live and find work in either England, or the British common wealth, began slowly trickling back into Dixie and positions of honor.
The abolitionists did wield considerable power in the Senate for a time, but never really controlled the administration of the war effort , or the train building, or the iron and steel and oil production, once the war got under way with southern states seceding and Fort Sumpter getting occupied (thus enabling Lincoln to shell it and get the war on its way). The abolitionists could make politics complex and conflicted for the private industrial oligarchy, but they could not in the end every really be the ones driving the war machine and then the peace machine that likely dictated which histories got canonized.
Hypothesized result: the abolitionist histories got marginalized and it was dumb luck that I stumbled into it a century and a half later, when Project Guttenberg mindlessly copied all the volumes in university and city libaries with expired copyrights that it could and listed them in ways that search engines could pick up when I was looking for other things. :-)
Self has to be wondering if he should just cut his losses now.
Thanks 4 the assist!
Look for the book on project guttenberg I think. It has several formats. .txt is one. There are others.
Prepare to be engaged and to have contemporary history's version of the motivations of Lincoln and his conduct of the early years of the Civil War significantly complexified.
You have to work some extra to put yourself in Abbott's position writing without knowledge of how the war would play out after 1862 to do justice to what he accomplished, even just in the reportorial aspects of his narrative.
But it is his remarks about certain incidences, like General Fremont's being relieved in the Missouri department, and the reasons behind it, that this book just dropped my jaw wide open.
Again, his is one version and one version only. But regarding Fremont, alone, what he claims is so crucial and so extensive in its implications, professional and amateur historians absolutely must revisit this moment in the US Civil War. I am already convinced that Lincoln's conduct of the war cannot be grasped until one understands that Lincoln had, opposing his then new political party--the Republicans--General McClellan on the Democrat's side hoping to replace Lincoln by building an alliance with the Democratic South, and on the other side of Lincoln, within the Republican Party itself, General Fremont wanting to build a staunch anti-slavery alliance (to take the young Republican party BACK to Fremont's 1856 presidential campaign position) intent on destroying the South and its feudal planter aristocracy built on chattel slavery and New York loans to build vast plantations. Without putting too fine of a point on it, Lincoln spent the first three years of the war largely having to defeat Democrat McClellan and Republican Fremont, before Lincoln could get on with defeating the South. This may be old news to some, but to me I had always viewed Lincoln as struggling only on one political flank, i.e., with Democrat McClellan.
Now, because my juices are flowing, I must inject some of my own thoughts expanding way beyond Abbott's relatively brief speculations about the possible motivations of the dismissal of Fremont, and about McClellan's often conspicuously limited macro prosecution of the war. IMHO, General Fremont may have actually conceived a detailed military strategy for military conquest of the South as far back as in the Missouri Department 1861, or also possible, the US Army may have previously conceived of this plan in the 10-20 year run up to the war, during the many times the southern states threatened the north with secession. But since prewar planning is pure speculation at this point, let me get back to Fremont. In 1861, Fremont recommended moving immediately from Missouri to take the forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, as was in fact done several years later by the Union. Note also that Grant was serving under Fremont in Missouri, and my hypothesis is that Grant got his big picture strategy for the war from Fremont and/or surviving staff in the coming few years. My speculation is that Fremont immediately understood that striking there, forced the South, not merely to fend off the attack, but to have to choose which way to defend the North at perhaps its weakest, most vulnerable point (note: not at the easiest, least costly point for the North to attack, but the point that would most devastate the South strategically and make it the least able to win an all out war). If the South defended the eastward path (i.e., to protect their supply lines to New Orleans, and later to Mexican ports used by the English) , Fremont would go south and take Vicksburg and the south Mississippi Basin. If they defended the Southern Mississippi, he would strike immediately farther eastward into the heart of the south. From that moment, the south would be continually in the grip of having to choose whether to stop his eastward movement, or stop his southward movement, as he progressed across the south, cutting it in two, as in fact Grant and Sherman would eventually copy. Starting so early would also have forced the South to move major forces from Virginia to stop Fremont, which would have enabled any Union general to march down the eastern seaboard with far less resistance and take over the ports and railroads of the eastern seaboard much faster, pivot and head east across Georgia and put the South in a hammer and anvil in Chattanooga, or Atlanta. If Abbott's speculations were to be verified about Fremont's astuteness and skillfulness, thus refuting the "official story" of Civil War history about Fremont being an incompetant--the version written by the winners afterwards that had cleared both Fremont and McClellan from Lincoln's wake, then it is significantly plausible that General Fremont's plan was intentionally shelved and Fremont cleared from Lincoln's wake, while Lincoln focused on finding a way to get rid of McClellan next, BEFORE getting on with defeating the South. Had Fremont not been sidelined, Fremont might well have accelerated toward victory in a way that would have: a.) enhanced a Fremont candidacy; and b.) forced McClellan to more aggressive fighting just to save his southern allies from Fremont, and so the war might have concluded by 1863! Why? Because left in charge and to his own devices, Fremont would likely have begun the operations on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in 1861, or early 1862, instead of as it dragged on due to unnecessary retreats, and reconquests, in Missouri and strategically unnecessary engagements west of the Mississippi, such as at Pea Ridge. Offensive action penetrating into the heart of the Confederacy did not reach full steam until October of 1863, when Lincoln promoted Grant head of the Division of the Mississippi, and March 1864 when Lincoln promoted Grant to head of all Union Armies.
Why would Lincoln not have been ready to defeat the south ASAP? That is a HUGE historical question?
The answer is likely multi-factorial.
Lincoln, a deeply unpopular President from the start, and one facing so many assassination threats even just as President-elect, that he came into Washington, D.C., unannounced, had to prosecute the war in a way that kept him President, or he would not have been able to achieve either his personal objectives, or the objectives of his core base base of Great Lakes industrialists and Morgan banking interests (the Morgan's being the USA agent banker for the Rothschild's and Bank of England, which were simultaneously financing the North, the South and the Joint Great Power invasion of Mexico that would start about a year after the start of the US Civil War, when Anaconda had blocked off the Confederate ports. The British invading Mexico assured they could keep ports open their and off load supplies to be shipped north overland to the Confederacy.
Lincoln logically must have realized the Rothschild's and Morgans, and almost certainly the Crown itself, were financing the US Civil War (by financing both North and South) and planning for the imminent Great Power invasion of Mexico in order to bargain for control of both the building of the transcontinental railroads and a subsequent interocean canal across the Tehuantepec isthmus of Mexico, by destabilizing the troubled USA-Mexican relationship. In turn, Lincoln, the savvy politician, probably logically reasoned that it would be unwise to prosecute the US Civil War in a way that revitalized the Presidential hopes (and still strong popularity) of 1856 anti-slavery candidate Fremont--the anti-slavery candidate who unequivocally wanted to crush the South, and its English and French financed slave plantation economy, and use his wealth and influence in California in conjunction with the Big Four of San Francisco to control the western terminus of any transcontinental railroad and telegraph. Lincoln would also logically have been loath to have made a hero of General McClelland either. Lincoln would not have wanted to intensify the already looming 1864 Presidential hopes of the wildly popular and well connected General McClelland, the conciliatory, pro-north-south-power-sharing candidate with a political-financial base in Baltimore, Philly and with Southern rail interests, as well as specific ties to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad--the rail road and port that could strangle off export of iron, steel, grain, manufacturing, and rapidly increasingly, kerosene exports, from the north's burgeoning Great Lakes region , if someone other than a Great Lakes industrial coalition wound up with control of the B&O during and after the war. Both Fremont and McClellan were largely forced on Lincoln in the first place. Fremont was a part of the price of keeping California aligned with the North. McClellan was part of the price of trying to keep Philly, and Baltimore and the rest of Maryland on his side, when Baltimore and Maryland were likely to go Confederate, when Philly had to be appeased to keep them from fearing the Pittsburg mill owners were getting too powerful with Lincoln, and, when Robert E. Lee turned down Lincoln's offer to head the Union Armies, implying Virginia was joining the Confederates. Lincoln did not dare allow Maryland to go confederate for it would have met withdrawing from Washington and that would have opened up massive divisions in the north over where to locate the Union capital.
Lincoln also desperately needed California on the North's side, so the telegraph and then his backers' railroad could go coast to coast, and even more urgently in the short term, Lincoln needed California's gold to back purchases of munitions and other war spending.
But, at the same time Lincoln had to accept Fremont and McClelland for reasons just outlined, he had to find ways to keep them from pursuing agendas counter to his and battle plans that either enhanced them as candidates, or undermined his core base's capacities to control transcontinental rail, telegraph and iron/steel. In short, he had to accept the two generals (and many others, too), find ways to keep them from being too successful at what they wanted to do for their bases (war is economics by other means and many Generals represent private sector interests at least indirectly), and ultimately rid himself of both in order to prosecute the war successfully and come out at the end of the tunnel in control of the vast war machine that was going to be created in order to defeat the South.
It was the vastness of the war machine Lincoln was able to build and eventually gain full control over in the end that thwarted the British strategy of North American destabilization, brought them finally to partnership with the north in the closing years of the war, and apparently triggered the necessity to assassinate Lincoln at a war's end.
To be blunt, Lincoln was King of North America at war's end. He could have done what ever he wanted, and made it stick militarily, and financially, at war's end. Why financially? Because once rock oil and kerosene exports skyrocketed from Lincoln repurposing the whaling fleet to blockading the Southern camphene from being exported, thus driving up the price and demand for kerosene, annual kerosene exports quickly reached around $400,000,000 during 1862, alone. Further, Lincoln had both California's gold, and the Rockefeller Cleveland rock oil refiners associations oil exports to use to back his new green back currency that freed him from needing to borrow entirely at the mercy of the Rothschild's and Morgans, and so there was nothing the Crown, or the Rothschild's, or the Morgans, could do about Lincoln and his New World, American military colossus that everyone from Karl Marx, to Great Power generals had come to study, publicly scoff at, and and secretly worry like hell about. Lincoln also had a sizable Navy and could easily build one equivalent to the Crown of Great Britains in a year, or two at the outside. And he had too big of an Army for the Crown to invade and stop the building of the Navy. And by having taken Baltimore and Maryland, he had gained control of the B&O, so he had indirect control of all of the coal, iron, steel, and kerosene, that needed the B&O to distribute it. That meant that his own oligarchy could not necessarily make him heel. Further, by having authorized the hurried building of the transcontinental telegraph during 1862-63, and being in control of California (Fremont marginalized and broken financially and the Big Four made allies), especially San Francisco Bay, Lincoln had monopoly control of high speed, transcontinental communication, so he could easily out maneuver the Crown of Great Britain, or any other Great Power of Europe, at either end of the continent. Note also that Lincoln was so ambitious and far sighted that he further authorized the building of an overland telegraph from San Francisco to Russian America (shortly purchased as Seward's Folly called Alaska), thence across the Bering Strait, and across Asia to Moscow. This enterprise collapsed well before completion after Lincoln's assassination and with Great Britain finally succeeding in laying a transatlantic cable to North America. Imagine if Lincoln's telegraph linking New York to Moscow had been completed. Imagine an American empire stretching New York to Moscow. But I digress.
Finally, Lincoln's combination of a vast land army, near absolute logistical/communication advantage, and a strong navy that could have been easily expanded into the largest Navy in the world, would have made it child's play to go down and pick off Cuba and Puerto Rico, and eventually St. Kitts (what the British Admiralty called the Gibraltar of the Caribbean), and deny the Caribbean to the Great Powers of Europe, and build a central American canal within a few more years, obsoleting British trade routes around the southern tip of South America, and maybe even the nearly new Suez Canal passage. And Lincoln would have controlled via pure monopoly things like sugar, rum, grain shipping, and all the sea lanes related to such through the western hemisphere. Lincoln would have been in sole control of a toll booth in the Western hemisphere that he could have set any price on for tolls. Plus he would have controlled the world's center for Naval Stores production in North Carolina.
Plus he had been suggesting since well before and during the war, that it would be better in the long run if African Americans were sent back to Africa, rather than have America make what he thought would be a difficult, if not impossible attempt at living together. An ugly idea for sure. But what if too many persons have focused too much on the racist dimension of Lincoln's attitudes (there seems little doubt he was a racist, despite moderating it with his constitutional principles), and not enough on his remarkable ambitions for constitutional, representative government. The epic scale of his plan to join New York and Moscow by telegraph, makes me suspect that his occasionally expressed wish for sending African Americans back to Africa may actually be better understood in terms of Lincoln believing resettlement an expedient path to colonizing Africa to extend the empire of republican government there. Lincoln increasingly appears to me to have viewed the Great Powers of Europe (monarchies and theocracies with their wealth deposited in a British central banking system) as the greatest threat to the American experiment in representative government. Colonizing Africa with representative governments would in conjunction with a New York to Moscow rail and telegraph empire of sorts have formed a belt of representative government around the entire planet.
In short, Abraham Lincoln was in position to quickly become the most powerful man on the planet with a continental center point in global grand strategy under his nearly unchallengeable control, two oceans at his disposal, control of perhaps two thirds of the globe's sea lanes and strong prospects for further expansion to Africa. What if it were imperative that such a man be assassinated and that the assassination be blamed on an elaborate, but set up band of Confederate conspirators set up to take the fall, so that the American nation (at least the winning Union portion of it) that had grown to trust Lincoln in war more than anyone else, did not EVER come to realize the almost unimaginable power that they--the duly constituted, sovereign American nation--at that moment, prior to the 1868 14th Amendment incorporation of USA, held in their then sovereign, voting hands. What if they could NEVER be allowed to know that a variety of domestic and foreign interests had interplayed in politics, banking, and great power relations, in pursuit to attain just such a phenomenal position of global geostrategic advantage and that an unintended consequence had delivered Abraham Lincoln, and the sovereign American nation of individuals with certain inalienable rights, to that pinnacle of power, instead of them?
Ever since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, then it appears possible that America had been caught up in the midst of an unrelenting, private oligarchic free for all attempting to cartelize control of the North American geostrategic center point from which awesome global power over global trade could be exerted. It has resulted in the most extensive global financial hegemony over global trade in the history of the world and easily the greatest bloodbath of slaughter and conquest in any 170 year stretch of the history of the world. And what if the private oligarchs were not done struggling for control and empire yet?
This could explain the relentless thirst of American leadership for war for expansion of financial empire that persists to this day in a country that on paper at least constitutes itself as a republic based on principles of all men being created equal and sovereignty of the people, rather than sovereignty of the government. Most ordinary Americans believe in representative government with liberty and justice for all--not global financial hegemony for a 1 %, yet our government, especially the Deep State apparently embedded in it, largely appears to devote our government's resources to maintaining and expanding the global financial hegemony of the 1%.
Could it be?
Hmm.
Rock Chalk!
P.S.: Abbott wrote many histories of major military-political figures of the era leading up to the Civil War, also. He wrote biographies of: Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Bonaparte, Josephine Bonaparte, and one I am especially interested to find and read on Frederich II aka Frederich the Great. I have not yet formed an opinion on how right he got things. I haven't read any critical assessments of him yet either. But his book on the US Civil War is worth its weight in gold just for his discussion of Union General Fremont's bitter Civil War legacy that is diametrically opposed to what conventional post war histories have made it appear. It could be that Abbott is wrong about what happened to Fremont, but if what Abbott asserted holds water, it makes Lincoln's conduct of the early years of the US Civil War make stark, if disillusioning, sense in strategic terms. Get ready to go through the looking glass on Lincoln's conduct of the early years of the US Civil War. It is flipping amazing.
I have found a marvelous history of the origins and early part of the US Civil War online published in about 1862 by an northern professor, minister, and lecturer that was apparently an abolitionist. His name was John Abbott. Incredible human being. This is the best underrecognized book on the Civil War written back during that time I have yet found. If I understand correctly, he wrote his history of the Civil War as it was unfolding in volumes covering about two years at a time. He is amazingly frank in his comments and he bases his narrative on newspaper accounts, some observation from travels, some on interviews with politicians and soldiers, and it is utterly remarkable. Being written before the outcome, it is a history with a biased POV of a northern abolitionist, but without the bias of the winners. It is history written before the ending, so there is an absence of the rationalizations and covering up of what happened to preserve careers and nation state relations that plagues most Civil War history. Here is a good quote from the preface. It is an Edward Everett interview of the Duke of Wellington about the difficulty understanding war. It goes like this: “The Hon. Edward Everett once inquired of the Duke of Wellington,
respecting the battle of Waterloo. The Duke, with that singular good
sense, which ever characterized him, replied, " By comparing and study-
ing the various descriptions of the battle, by English, French and German
writers, a man of sense can acquire a better knowledge of it, at the present
day, than any one, even the commander-in-chief, could get, at the time,
from personal observation.”” Here is the link to the Civil War history book by John Abbott. https://archive.org/stream/historycivilwar00unkngoog/historycivilwar00unkngoog_djvu.txt ↗
Thanks. I've read some Philbrick. If you like Philbrick, get Charles Olson's trailblazing 1947 critical analysis "Call Me Ishmael." It was actually written some years earlier for a thesis at Wesleyan, but some profs rejected it; too conflict averse to take the controversy the thesis would have stirred at that time, I've heard. Olson is chiefly responsible for recovering Melville and Moby Dick from the out of circulation stacks. Olson was the first to publicly connect Moby to Shakespeare and to explore the actual events the novel was based on. No Olson, no Philbrick. Of course, it's pretty likely Olson's mentor at Wesleyan was part of a number of English scholars knowledgeable of the real story on Melville, but too afraid to tell the true critical story of Melville. They let a naive young maverick genius take the blowback from telling Melville's controversial personal story and the depths and origins of his dark, controversial novel. Olson took some lumps and was never thereafter able to have a conventional scholarly career, even though he forged a very influential one off the beaten path.
I had just watched Dr. Strangelove. It is an amazing movie even after all these years. I had also recently reread parts of Moby Dick. I was too easily influenced and so unable to be so economical. :-)
I disagree.
It was intended as a piece of satiric black comedy poking fun at our annual debates about what basketball offenses Self should run leveraging off the incredibly menacing current context and rhetoric regarding and preparations for nuclear and thermobaric exchanges.
The discussion took off in a political direction about those sorts of issues, and about other political issues, instead of toward what offenses would be run, or toward whether debates about what offenses Self will run each season are useful, which was okay with me.
IMHO, since you are concerned about the political direction that the thread discourse has taken, you should request that those political comments be relocated to whatever other section you want them in.
But my initial post?
It belongs in the basketball section, unless you want @approxinfinity to create a subcategory for humor about KU basketball, which I would be happy with, also.
But I can certainly live with moving it to the general discussion section, though NOT the political section, if it makes persons feel the website more orderly. But I had no political agenda in my post, except maybe that in passing one world government is a silly notion. I guess it could also be moved to a war section, if we had one, but again my purpose in writing was entertainment, certainly not to advocate for war.
Rock Chalk!
The short answer is I quit reading and relying on Snopes to any significant degree many years ago, well before it acquired much notoriety, so I am not qualified to comment on what its like today.
About all I can say is: I am increasingly wondering about the fiscal independence and content objectivity of organizations showcasing the term "fact checking". Investigators showcasing the term "urban legends" and organizations showcasing the term "myth busting" also make me wonder about the origins of their funding and about whether they have connections to the military-intelligence complex's processes of manufacturing consent in public opinion during an era when the military-intelligence complex has reputedly expressed a goal of full spectrum dominance. I, for one, take them at their reputed word that they want full spectrum dominance, and such dominance would likely involve manufacturing consent in public opinion.
Finally, I hope someone investigates the recent proliferation of the term "fact checking" to see if it is a product of memetic engineering by those tasked with clandestinely manufacturing consent in public opinion in some way similar to the way "conspiracy" was reputedly weaponized and reputedly used for so many decades, according to reputed FOIA document releases. It may not be. But after learning of the reputed weaponization of "conspiracy" to discredit skeptics of the apparently implausible Warren Commission Report, and then afterward reputedly to discourage much reputedly reasonable skepticism on a variety of subjects, well, I like to know more, rather than less, about such things before attaining a comfort level of trust.
I jerked it right down the power alley and out of the park.
Coach K, Cal, and Roy would have been long forgotten had they not had the Dump Trucks for much of their entire careers.
Self is so much better coach than these guys it is not even close. I suspect each of them would admit. Bo Ryan is the only guy even close to Self the last ten years. I'm not positive Self could have coached some of Bo's teams and beaten Bo coaching some of Self's teams. Bo was a flipping genius that passed himself off as just another cheese head. And Bo, after all, was the guy Self stole drive ball from and put it on steroids to create BAD BALL. I would have to rate Bo and Bill about equal, because even though Self won at a much higher percentage, well, he was doing it at KU and Bo was doing his magic up in the cheddar tundra, where the great basketball legacy got truncated back in the 1940s in Mad Town until Bo was able to build on what Dick Bennett built the foundation of and do some just plain amazing things without dump trucks. Imagine Coach K trying to gut it out to stay above .500 with most of Bo's teams!
But I don't want you to think I don't respect Coach K.
I think the first 20 years of Coach K's career he was one of the all time great coaches with a great coaching foundation from Knight and a helioarc weld grade of fire in his belly. As long as he did what Knight told him and got some players, he was ferociously competitive and he apparently taught that Big Ten cheap-shot-em into the next century whenever you get ten down in order to stay in the game that he apparently learned from Knight at Army. He was very successful, because of his competitive intensity and his encyclopedic knowledge of the stuff Knight taught him. He probably should have won another two titles back in those days, but was struggling with Dean's Dapper Dan-Sonny Vaccaro Proto-Dump Truck teams and the usual asymmetric whistle young coaches face. But from the moment Coach K first had to bail out of a season, because of his health problems and burn out back in the mid 1980s, or was the first time a little later, IMHO he's never been up on the same edge since. He's just been a sound coach willing to go to the wall with the cheap-shotting to stay in a game long enough for his superior roster talent to weigh in. I don't know what happened to K back then. I never really understood it. He was really driven to beat Dean and maybe he just drove himself too hard. Whatever, ever since, when he had superior material, he won a lot, and when he didn't, he just fell back to the pack until he could round up another bunch. Somewhere in there shoes appeared to became the biggest driver of his recruiting success and it never changed afterwards.The big problem with Coach K is that he is just not creative. Self has made more brilliant innovations that spread around the game of basketball and changed the way the entire profession coached than Coach K has in his entire career. Self is just the most incredibly adaptable coach in the country the last 10 years. He was running high-low when everyone here and everyone across the country was running other stuff. As soon as 2/3s of the country had copied him, he shifted gears and took small ball out through the roof. When everyone else was trying to control tempo like Wooden and Knight and Calhoun and then Calipari had taught them, Self was at a completely new level of the game letting the other team set the tempo. When half the country started letting the other team set the tempo, Self jump shifted into setting the tempo. For years Self was stretching defenses with the high low and perimeter passing to create impact space, while the rest of the coaches were getting wet about the Princeton, the Princeton on Steroids and other timing offenses. When every one jumped on his bandwagon and was going on about "spacing this" and "spacing that" Self started collapsing the spacing with Drive Ball, and then later with Bad Ball. And then when everyone copied that Self leaped in 4 out 1 in that a few others had pioneered and then before you know it he is playing 5 out at times. And I'm not even talking about all the defensive wizardry he has introduced. Hell, Self tells everyone what he is doing on the offense, but its the defense where he is secretive and they can't figure out how to copy him. He was running junk defenses a full two seasons before anyone at this web sight even figured it out. He finally had to tell everyone. Hell, Self has tried and thrown away more terrific ideas than Coach K ever even thought about and couldn't figure out how to try.
Don't even get me started on Calipari. That guy has never had an original idea in his life. Everything you see is either LB, or that high school coach that came up with the Dribble Drive. Calipari has two secrets: WWW and Nike.
Roy? Roy did really well aping Dean's "system" at KU, which was Iba's 3-2 high low that Dean called the Carolina Passing offense, and taking the west half of the Dean-Sonny-Nike Tennis Shoe-Industrial complex feeder line. This was very much like Coach K aping Knight. But the thing about Roy was that the last two years at KU he (and probably Dean and Gutt) FINALLY figured out running systematically, rather than running to outrun and wear down another team. He finally worked out the math, so to speak. Spike the number of trips, take more high percentage shots on more trips, run the secondary break to get super high percentage shots, trap on the other end to give up an easy basket or two in exchange for a half dozen strips, and against a team that is trying to slow it down and run the stuff, your athleticism is going to weigh in over time, even when the opponent starts the rough stuff. It was a brilliant insight and lead to two fine years at KU and then a half dozen at UNC, before folks like Self exposed how to jump the passing lanes and funnel to the lane for help and, boom, the race horse is stuck in glue. Roy stumbled around trying to find another way to keep running, but without Dean and Gutt to help him come up with another hat rabbit, Roy bogged down for a few years at UNC. And then he got into that awful "Easy Class Gate" stuff that UNC maybe should have gotten a death penalty for, but didn't, and low and behold, ol' Roy starts running drive ball and the weave and aping Self pretty much the same way Calhoun did when he was in his flat lining days UConn trying to eek out another ring. Both Calhoun and ol 'Roy should have dedicated their last rings to the Master Hat Rabbiteer, Bill Self, and to their Shoe Companies.
Don't get me wrong. Coach K, Cal and ol'Roy are hall of fame coaches. But they just couldn't take Self's players and beat if Self were coaching their players. Not in this basketball universe.
And, well, Self has shown he can beat Roy AND Cal, when they had equal, or better talent.
Self up here.
|
|
|
|
|
|
V
Coach K, Cal and Ol'Roy down here.
Buffer 2.
Buffer 1
The only way Duke, UK, or UNC could have duplicated KU's conference winning streak with the same quality and depth of talent that KU has had to make do with (no OAD 1s and 5s, and usually less than 3 OADs, often 1 or none, and sometimes no Mickey Ds at all), would be with Self. Self is the only coach today remotely good enough to do what he has done.
Now, if Self had been at Duke, UK, or UNC, and had dump trucks coming to town as Coach K, Cal and Roy have had, well, I think it would be quite likely that Self would have won at least 10 national championships and perhaps 13.
It is just not even close anymore.
Has Coach K, or Cal, or Roy gone to a National Finals without a Mickey D? No.
Has Coach K, or Cal, or Roy won a ring without better material than Self had? No.
Has Coach K, or Cal, or Roy been able to win as high of a percentage of games over the last decade with better material than Self has? No.
Has Coach K, or Cal, or Roy, ever won a ring at a non EST program, as Self has done? No.
It goes on and on.
Self is up here.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
V
Coach K, Cal and Roy are down here.
|
|
|
|
V
Everyone else is down here.
I have always loved the Hoosiers movie, but I am not quite sure of the tie in here.
I had read about The Black Sky Drill a few weeks back. It would appear the name of the drill was conceived to attract attention and scare the American public some more. But I for one am glad they are training for this sort of thing, and only wish they would invest even more heavily in negotiating arms limitation agreements that walk us back down from the current mutual first strike postures the USA reputedly adopted in the 1990s and that Russia has reputedly resorted to as counter strategy recently. Nevertheless, the Black Sky training exercise seems one of those training exercises, where our government is damned if they do, and damned if they don't. If they DON'T train for such things, then disinformation professionals on all sides would blame them for negligence, if such an event were to occur. If they DO train for such things, then they would be said to have been creating the process that a foreign, or domestic, Deep State could use as cover for a false flag terrorist event to be blamed on some country that such Deep State types want the USA to invade (i.e., so as to make some noncompliant, but oil&gas rich state safe for implanting a central bank franchise and a "Trade Bank of State X" organization enabling an oil reserve collateralization process that in turn secures western loans for funding reconstruction, funding importation of Death Squads, and funding establishment of vicious counter terrorism security services, should the indigenous folks persist in not wanting to give up control of the oil&gas and pipeline right of ways targeted beneath their feet.
But what's up with Google? Haven't read anything about them.
I was just doing some comedy.
What's up on September 23?
Is that the day we shift to FedCoin, or something?
It depends on the level of the bodily fluids of those being preyed upon.
And on then current levels of fluoridation of the tap water.
And on whether Allen Dulles' preserved brain signals with alpha waves that "conspiracy theory" should continue to be the smear of choice to discourage truth seekers.
It's VERY complicated.
What basketball offense should KU run this season under various looming war scenarios?
It is a near certainty that the New World Order and its symbiotic enemies want no part of an unlimited nuclear war that unforeseen consequences assure escalates to Mutually Assured Destruction; that would end all of their gravy trains built on diverting exorbitant shares of ordinary persons income to pay for "national security" in a world skillfully made dangerous enough to need such never ending security—what might be called The Bomb Tax.
Can't have that!
Both sides apparently seek only an end to duly constituted republican government subordinated to a sovereign nation of individual persons with certain inalienable rights, and to end certain other governments, regardless of type, that refuse to subordinate to the Bank of International Settlements' private central banking system.
Thus the rational fan, the sane fan, the decent, law-abiding and hardworking fan, the fan that must carry on--regardless of what anti-democratic, one-world idiots and megalomaniacal financial oligarchs do in coming weeks and months--has no choice but to ask the aforementioned question: what basketball offense should KU run under various looming war scenarios?
Black Sky: The Black Sky scenario involves an opponent of America using various forms of directed energy and/or high altitude detonation of one, or more low yield nuclear devices designed to optimize EMP (electromagnetic pulse) effect, so as to bring down one, two, or all three components of the USA electric power grid, and simultaneously wipe out all digital electronic data on electromagnetic storage devices not protected by Faraday cages on the surface of the USA, or otherwise protected by location in deep, EMP-resistant, caverns. Americans would within seconds lose electrical power. As night follows day, lights would go off, and most if not all electronically operated devices, especially anything relying on digital electronic subsystems, but without back up power supplies, would immediately cease to function, and when power was restored, function erratically, if at all, unless protected data back ups survived the EMP event and were properly rebooted. In any case, such a Black Sky event would likely persist for months, or years. Food and water supplies would be exhausted within days, or a week, despite there being a theoretical 10 day supply in the pipeline. Unless one were to be selected to inhabit one of the many hardened underground communities reputedly developed with absconded, unaccounted for tax payer money to house members of the Deep State, one would be FOL (fecally outta luck). Survivalists, especially those with food and guns, would be quickly identified by their "grey man" uniforms by starving and overwhelmed individuals, and then killed and eaten; there being no known 1,000 to 10,000 round clips of ammunition for assault rifles, even those illegally modified to fully automatic, capable of stopping a large, hunger-crazed crowd. After dining ravenously on grey men on foot, these same starving masses would quickly focus on pursuit of grey men survivalists in grey man vehicles (e.g., pre black box 6 cylinder pickup trucks and small Subaru sedans with four wheel drive). Once forced off the road, and fleeing on foot, these grey men would be tracked by their "non-military" back packs, as they attempted to get to pre-arranged bug out destinations cached with food and water. Certain starving masses would simply try to catch and eat the survivalists on sight, while others would learn quickly to pursue the survivalists to their bug-out destinations and then eat both the cache and the survivalist. In such an environment, where high mobility predation was the coin of the realm, the best offense would, I suspect, be a Dean Smith-derived four corner stall modified so that all players cut holes in the floor and dug down to a depth of 8 feet, then pulled the wooden floor cutout over their hole and delayed until the opposing team was either shot dead by grey-man-disguised survivalists using either their concealed carry Sigs, or their illegally modified assault rifles, or eaten by the starving masses pursuing said grey-man survivalists through Allen Field House.
A second likely war scenario would be…
Limited Thermonuclear Exchange: In a limited thermonuclear exchange scenario, the bat-shit crazy one worlders set off a false flag event, like a neo Nazi march salted with agents provocateur, and enabled by police stand-downs, leading to a panicked population, a declaration of martial law, and the resort to use of a low yield, fission uranium suit case bomb, probably in a Democrat controlled sanctuary city, that is blamed on an opponent with a noncompliant dictator refusing to subordinate to the western private central banking cabal. In turn, the bat shit crazy one worlders launch high yield, thermonuclear-tipped missiles from Trident class nuclear submarines off the sea coast of the opponent that are then further chased with some in-theater ABM's retipped with high yield hydrogen bombs located a few scant minutes from their destinations. In this scenario, the actual offensive set run by KU on offense would be less crucial than avoidance of the sanctuary city where the false flag detonation were to occur. The recommended avoidance strategy hinges on embedding a KU basketball fan into the current “Deep State in Perpetuity” running America that can give Coach Self early warning about which sanctuary city will be sacrificed, so that Coach Self and other KU coaching officials can come up with a palatable excuse about why KU has to delay the doomed game and seek a change of venue without a forfeit. In short, KU must not only find a way NOT to play the game in the vicinity of the false flag suitcase nuclear detonation, but it must also try to impose a predetermined replacement game site outside the blast zone, in order to avoid adverse effects of prolonged post-blast, radiation exposure. KU holds too great of a home court advantage to expect opponents to agree to a replacement game at Allen Field House. And the same holds true for Sprint Center in KC. So: KU cannot reasonably expect to schedule change of venue games at either location. Of course, KU should not agree to playing the change of venue game on the opponent's home floor, after the blast, because it will likely be in a state of ash and green glass for many seasons afterwards. So: the obvious scheduling move is to offer to play the game in a safe, desirable location likely not to be targeted for retaliatory nuclear strikes. The no-brainer solution is obvious. The game should be rescheduled to be played within 1 mile of the next scheduled secret meeting of Bilderberg, where there will be absolutely zero chance that a nuclear device will strike the private oligarchy of the West, which reputedly attends the supposedly secret, but always leaked, Bilderberg meetings. Bilderberg meetings tend to be held in secure hotels with four season climates and a suitable supply of non-unionized sex workers. All of the above, of course, implies Coach Self could reasonably resort to ANY of KU's typical offensive sets.
Spit Wads: If the universe were to turn out to be a computer simulation running what-if scenarios for a higher form of intelligence, basic statistics with assumptions of normal distributions of mean of zero, sigma^2, an underlying randomness free of autocorrelation, there is a remote right and left tale chance that the insane leaderships of the one-worlders and of the megalomaniacal central bank financiers could temporarily transcend their respective insanities and agree to have the leaders of each of the warring sides engage in a winner-take-all, battle to the death using Bic pen bodies and well-masticated, paper spit wads. In such an eventuality, once again, Coach Self would be free to run what ever form of the offense he prefers.
(Note: All fiction. No malice.)
BPI: Bull Puckey Index.
I think you missed a golden opportunity for a title.
Try this...
"Bol Bol's team walks off-off."
Same great content, but less filling look.
Oh, well, it was a beta that pointed the way.
Maybe some day.
I want to applaud and call attention to this white virtual piece of paper floating on a magnificently subtle background. I am blown away at how perfect the site looks and feels now.
This is elegant.
@approxinfinity has hit my sweet spot on web site design. It functions beautifully, effortlessly and intuitively. Its a perfect fusion of analog and digital visual cues leading to seamless functionality. Its so elegantly simple in feel that it reminded me of the first time I used one of Steve's iPods. I am a design afficionado and the highest compliment I can pay any design is the following:
a.) it is what I always hoped for but needed a designer to bring from silence to light (a tip of the hat to Louis Kahn);
b.) it is so organically right it seems like it has always been their waiting to be discovered intact as it is;
c.) immediately after seeing it I can no longer recall what previous designs looked like, or how we functioned with anything else;
d.) it flat works.
Congratulations, @approxinfinity and lucky us.
Rock Chalk!
Though his assessments of America and Great Britain lack candor about his relationship with and the function of the private oligarchy that actually has operated and funded both the British Empire and then the British-American Empire lurk behind the nation state facades, these three books offer a lot of interesting facts, if one is game to read between the lines.
Ferguson, Niall (2004). Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-7139-9770-2.
Ferguson, Niall (2003). Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9615-3.
Ferguson, Niall (2003). Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02328-2. American edition.
I especially appreciated the middle one listed above.
I don't recall anyone eating dog in Italy, unless there was a food shortage during a World War. But horse? Well, I don't know the roots of it, but I recall it being served in some restaurants there.
Horse has been a guilty pleasure of Italy for many centuries, or so I was told. Never tried to confirm it though. You have to get off the beaten path some to find restaurants with a sign in the window indicating it is served. I recall one in Bologna. But most Americans don't go to Bologna. Its a little TOO Italian for most Americans. But I loved the place. The cathedral several miles outside town there is my favorite of all the cathedrals I have been in all of Europe.
BeddieKU23 said:
Louisville's Onuaku 2 years ago switched to the Rick Barry style and went from 46% to 58% with the switch. Not exactly ground-breaking numbers.
I understand why you curbed your enthusiasm. 58% FT shooting still makes a big a sure target for fouling to send him to the strip. But...
Sometimes numbers over focus us on their magnitude and lead us to under recognize their change.
Compare...
Player A: 46% to 58%
Player B: 70% to 82%
Wouldn't we be lavishing praise on a player that improved his FT shooting from 70% to 82%? Stories would be being written about how the Player B improved so much. What technique did he use? Who taught it to him? And so on.
If a player can improve to 58% from 46%, one has some reason to hope he has the get better gene.
60-65 % may be within his grasp in another season.
FT shooting involves mechanics and mind. There is a lot of interplay between variables of mechanics and mind, also. Often, players (and coaches) get discouraged, because players shooting 200, or 500, free throws a day don't get better. This lack of improvement with high reps betrays an unimaginative, uninsightful approach to getting better. Worse repetition without effective mechanics and effective mental approach digs the hole deeper. Mechanics and mind need revision ASAP.
Ask yourself why do some consummate athletes in college have such a hard time getting better at free throw shooting?
It is because they have been using the wrong mechanics and/or wrong mental approach they learned early on for so many years by the time they get to KU. Mechanics and mind approach I want to address later. Other possible drivers are eyesight needing proper correction and neural nets not yet grown in.
Why can some special coaches (guys that specialize in coaching FT shooting) do such an effective job teaching FT shooting to so many poor free throw shooters and yet not be able to reach some others?
It is because they know a lot about mechanics and mental approach, but NOT everything.
NO. EXPERTS. KNOW. EVERYTHING. EVER.
Doke is such a potentially exceptional player that he must keep seeking out free throw shooting specialists, if Self and staff cannot get him over the hump.
Nothing is written about FT shooting to crib for the umpteenth time from T.E. Lawrence.
Now, about mechanics: mechanics have to be found that fit the morphology and musculature and feasible muscle memory from repetition of each individual player. I worked for years trying to be a better FT shooter in my early teens (I made about 65% and never improved) and then found a coach in high school that actually knew something about FT mechanics. He looked at me for one second and said, "You need to build up the muscle that runs down the back of your arm from your shoulder to your elbow. Also, move your right foot back three inches. Forget everything anyone told you about how to hold the ball. Hold it whatever way feels comfortable. Look at the back of the rim. Hold the ball so your index finger is in line with your left eye (I'm a lefty), release it how ever you like, but make sure the left index finger follows through and points down at the back of the rim at the end. Don't think about anything, except what I told you, until you don't even have to think about that. Walk up to the line like you own it. Bounce it once and shoot it. Next." This was a session right before school let out for summer. I came back a 75% FT shooter.
I talked to other players. He told each one something different. Almost every guy was told to work on some muscle, and some repositioning of the feet. Everyone's FT shooting improved over the summer. I asked him about it later. He was a big tennis player. He said everything in sports started with footwork, then you built upwards based on the right footwork for the person's body. He said, "Get a persons feet in the right position that gives them the most neutral balance for them, then find the muscle most related to the activity that they are weakest in, and strengthen it; then assess, and seek another muscle related to the activity that might benefit from strengthening to work better with the muscle you already strengthened. He watched you shoot about 5 free throws, then he walked up to you and squeezed your arms, or legs, or shoulders, to feel for muscle, then told you what to do; that's all there was to it.
I never got better than 75% in high school, though.
Because good as that coach was at mechanics, he lacked insight about mental approach. He could not tailor your mental approach with the effectiveness that he tailored your mechanics.
It was not till early middle age that I asked a sports psychologist I knew about what he taught professional athletes that I began to understand relaxation and broad and narrow focus. I had always just tried to be "relaxed" and "focused." I didn't know you could modulate and fine tune these states of mind some. When I tried his exercises, I became an 80 percent FT shooter for awhile, before my muscles and muscle memory began to get old and flabby and imprecise.
My point here is that Doke is a great athlete with the character to play for Bill Self and the desire and will to change cultures and learn a new game and play it at a very high level. With the right mechanics and the right mental approach, there is no reason to think he cannot achieve 60-75% FT if he stays two more years.
And if he gets to 70% from the line, then he can play in an NBA rotation, maybe as a starter, for as long as his joints hold out.
We are looking at a future independently wealthy human being, if he invests in FT mechanics and mental approach now.
Go, Doke, go!!!!!