The Sayings of Kung Fu, the First Season
February 16, 2012
Reblogged from THE SOPHIST: TWO SIDES TO EVERY QUESTION:
The Late David Carradine in Kung Fu as Kwai Chan Cain
From the Crane, we learn grace and self-control. The Snake teaches us suppleness and rhythmic endurance. The Praying Mantis teaches us speed and patience. And from the Tiger, we learn tenacity and power. And from the Dragon, we learn to ride the wind. All creatures, the low and the high, are one with nature.
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WHY THE DEMS DON’T GET IT
June 11, 2009
Unfortunately, in light of recent domestic policy directions, I think the Dems have it all wrong.
Health care reform is an idea left over from 1991. The only reason the Dems want to push it through now is because they have the votes to pass the bills they didn’t get passed in the first session of the first term of the Clinton Presidency.
But is this a good reason to pass a law, because you proposed it before and you’ve been trying to pass it for so long?
Universal Health Care is an idea born of POST-DEPRESSION affluence–it’s a fringe benefit to be offered to a population that’s already employed, that already has a guaranteed vacation, a guaranteed pension, and has guaranteed housing. In short, guaranteed health care is the LAST welfare benefit that should be federalized.
In addition, and this is a revision from my original post, according to a recent article posted in a respected publication, the health uninsured are not universally distributed throughout the United States.
In point of fact, less than 3% of Massachusetts residents lack health insurance, thanks to the state law health care coverage efforts of people like Gov. Mike Dukakis and his successors in office. The fact that Massachusetts has nearly universal health care coverage proves that this is a STATE problem and not a FEDERAL problem.
Looking more nationally, the Midwest and Northeast have fewer than ten per cent uninsured as to health care.
It is the South and the West that have 15-25% health uninsured rates; the highest being the state of Texas.
You don’t have to be a statistics major to know that Texas also is a non-union state, has a large number of illegal immigrant resident aliens, and that these conditions are pretty much true throughout the Sunbelt, where the problem of lack of health care coverage is an issue of non-union shops and illegal immigrants competing for jobs, which drives down the employers’ incentives to provide health care benefits.
Consequently, why is this a federal problem? This seems instead to be either an immigration problem, a union/labor law problem, or a combination of the two (as Janis Joplin and Big Brother used to sing). (She was from Texas, by the way, before she got out the San Francisco).
Moreover, if Texas wants to solve their own problems, why not let them experiment? They’ve already reformed tort law to make it much harder to sue MDs–welcome relief to the medical profession, which has flocked in droves to practice in Texas, now considered a medical mecca.
Obama wants to ruin all this. His health care proposal, according to reports, would result in a massive transfer of wealth from the largely democratic and already overtaxed midwest and northeast, and transfer it to the sunbelt states, the south and west, in order to mainly put on federal health coverage, non-union workers who are scabs (union busters) and illegal immigrants (also scabs and union busters).
Do we really want to spend our tax dollars paying for health benefits for strikebreaking scabs and unionbusting immigrant labor? And for illegal aliens to get health care?
Also, additionally, Obama’s health proposal will cause deep cuts in the current level of medicaid, medicare and drugs provided to the elderly under medicare.
In short, the proposal will triage the old and deprive them of expensive end of life care, and let them die more quickly, in order to provide basic health care to young, healthy labor that is non-union, largely hispanic, and living in the sunbelt.
The demographic implications of this over the long run will be a much younger, more hispanic united States, even more concentrated in the sunbelt than it already is, and will likely lead eventually to a bilingual nation that speaks Spanish and English, as well as to the ultimate downfall of unions, since one of the major arguments for unions is that they provide their members with health care and pension benefits during job and contract negotiations.
If unions are deprived of health care as a benefit to negotiate for, fewer workers will opt into unions. Obama and the democrats, paradoxically, are going to drive the death nail into the coffin of the union movement in this country. They haven’t thought through clearly the implications of what they are doing.
In short, this is a regional problem, and a union/immigration problem, and not a national problem. National mandates for the states would probably fix this, along with a public/private partnership with some insurance companies that could work with some of the southern and western states.
Part II
The REAL problem today is not health care at all.
The real problem today is that people don’t have jobs and they’re losing their houses. We have lawyers, bankers, traders who have blown up, car companies laying off, people all over America losing good jobs. Everywhere you go in this country, houses are for sale or being sold off by the sheriff.
I’ve never seen so many homes for sale in my own neighborhood. Twenty-Two years i’ve lived here, and three houses were a lot to be for sale here; now we have 25 and none are selling. There is a glut on the market where two years ago there was a boom in the market. The bottom has fallen out of the real estate market and no end of the downward spiral is in sight.
People’s equity in their homes, the main source of wealth for most Americans, has vanished, and the federal government has done NOTHING about it.
Except, of course, to bail out the rich fat cat bankers, and appoint a salary czar to oversee their million bazillion dollar bonuses.
Is this for real? Federally funded trickle down? If Reagan had done this, there would have been riots in the streets.
What we need precisely is a sort of FDIC, but instead of guaranteeing your banking deposits against banking failure, you would be guaranteed your home’s equity value, an FDIC for home equity, that will guarantee up to $1,000,000 of value in your home’s equity value against falling home prices, that is either automatic through fannie mae or freddie mac, or that you can purchase as insurance, for a small sum of money.
Now isn’t THAT a SENSIBLE idea?
Second, everyone with negative home equity should be forgiven their loans in excess of 80% of their debt loads immediately, and the banks commanded to write that debt off immediately.
Third, anyone who files for bankruptcy should be able to modify his or her mortgage under sections 1322 of the Code or anywhere else as pertinent, or under a Chapter 11 Plan, and cram it down the bank’s throat against their wishes if the bank’s loan exceed’s 80% of the value of the home and there is a negative equity spiral, the debtor should be able to eliminate all but 80% of the loan.
My point is, what good is free health care if you have no job and no house? It’s like serving gelato to a man who is homeless and has no money and hasn’t eaten in days–health care is like dessert.
Back in the 90s, when everyone had a job, it was ok to talk about health care–it was the LAST thing we needed. But now we’re back to square one–we need to talk about guaranteeing incomes, jobs and housing. We’re back to FDR and Truman and LBJ.
This administration just doesn’t get it.
Paradoxically, I think the right Republican approach might get it and win back the white house if it’s sufficiently populist in nature and goes after the big banks, which the democrats appear to be, pardon the expression, in bed with.
The Democrats need to examine an NRA-style national Jobs Program that will put everyone in the United States to work. Second, the Draft needs to be re-instituted. Kids that are in the army will be employed. Third, we need to nationalize the universities and make education free of charge. Fourth, we need to nationalize the cable companies and make the internet free of charge to the poor and to the rich equally, as well as making basic cable tv a free resource to everyone.
Fifth, for anyone that’s not employed, a Guranteed Annual Income or GAI must be mandated and paid by the Government, along with a negative income tax to avoid work related disincentives. The welfare reform measures of the Clinton era will have to be undone for the time being, because right now, middle class families are starving and in danger of homelessness, and THEY need welfare. The program needs to be federal, and the income level to be guaranteed needs to be large, around $15,000-20,000 annually, and adjusted for children and circumstances.
Sixth, the government has to embark on a massive program of propping up the housing market, investing in public housing, investing in Section 8, expanding the HUD budget, and so forth.
Seventh, we need to start investing in having one spouse stay home and take care of the kids. I know this is controversial, but two wage earners has destroyed many marriages and the american way of life.
Eighth, we need to reform the real estate brokerage business so that commissions from family homes are much less than for commission from commercial real estate. Instead of six points, let brokers earn only one point. This way, brokers won’t churn real estate and people won’t use their homes as profit tools.
Ninth, reform the tax code so that people have to pay MORE income tax on the sale of their primary homes, e.g. remove the exemption entirely, unless they stay in them a minimum of five years, unless they have to move for cause, such as a job-related transfer to another city, or medical reasons. This would stop people from buying and selling homes constantly and churning the market.
Tenth, more closely regulate lenders, brokers and sellers of real estate. Let people buy and sell and profiteer on second homes, commercial real estate and so forth, but those parcels will be taxed, etc.
I think this is the approach we need.
This is what the democrats are ignoring.
They’re going to raise taxes and bring down the house as it were on average joe while they raise up false idols like the bankers.
We badly need a new prophet in the land, and i’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh here.
–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion philliesght
Chicago-Boston NBA Series
May 15, 2009
Well, no matter that Boston won in 7 incredible games, this has turned into a pleasant surprise, and a rivalry at that.
I remember well the old Michael Jordan-Larry Bird Chicago-Boston series of the 1980s, which were insane, with Jordan scoring infinity points, but Boston having a better team and winning anyway, and these games have been a lot like that.
Without Garnett, Boston has come down to earth, and Chicago has great young players, especially DERRICK ROSE the SUPER ROOKIE who’s really come to play. He only dropped 36 on Boston his first playoff game—Iverson-like intensity in the playoff cauldron. Watching Rose square off against Paul Pierce and Ray Allen was really something.
Chicago has at least six championship banners from the Jordan years, and a lot of titles, and Boston has at least thirteen from the Russell year, another five from the Bird years, and one from last year, so between them these two franchises have about half of the all the NBA championships of the last fifty years. It’s a lot of history and pride on the line.
I know Philly-Boston used to be something, and Boston-LA is always something, but Chicago-Boston is surely something too, and this year’s playoff series between the two was SOMETHING.
Chicago was assisted by at least three ex-Sixers this year—Larry Hughes, Tim Thomas and John Salmons—for different portions of the year. Hughes helped Chicago in the first half of the season, before he was moved to the NY Knicks, while Salmons was a late season acquisition from the Sacramento Kings. Thomas was over the hill, but helped them all year, including during the playoffs.
Everyone will remember the awful trade of Salmons, Kenny Thomas and Corliss Williamson a couple of years back for an over the hill, injured and not so productive Chris Webber—well, to be fair, in 2005-06, Webber’s only full season with the Sixers, he did average 20 ppg, balancing scoring duties with Iverson, and the Sixers won 38 games—and missed the last playoff spot in the east by 2 games. Such is the difference between success and failure in the NBA. Everyone thought that pairing would last forever.
That is until the two of them missed fan appreciation day the next to last day of the season. All the old fat white guys on sports radio suddenly went nuts and demanded they both be traded. Are you kidding me?
By the very next season, Webber played only 18 games, Iverson was back to scoring 30 plus ppg, but the Sixers panicked and traded Iverson after only 15 games, regressed to 35 wins, again missing the playoffs by five wins. Webber’s contract was bought out and I’m not even sure he ever played again.
In the meantime, John Salmons by this past season had developed into a very fine player with Sacramento—at 6 foot seven he was a good defensive player, and he finally had learned the offensive game, pouring in twenty points a game for the lowly Kings.
Chicago, in need of a scoring guard, took notice and picked Salmons up for a song during midseason (where was Eddie Stefanski during all this?) and Salmons helped drive Chicago into the playoffs and the final seed during a late season run.
Watching a guy like Salmons who played his high school ball at Plymouth-Whitemarsh, and who spent his first four years in a Sixers uniform, help drive the Chicago Bulls to a playoff spot, was kind of annoying to me this year. It only got worse during the legendary Game Six of this years Chicago-Boston series, the triple-overtime game in which Salmons dropped 35 points on the Celtics. Now that was showing off.
Does anyone doubt that Salmons could have been helpful at the two guard position this year for the Sixers? I think the case is closed on that one. Salmons is tall, he plays good defense and he can score.
This past year Salmons earned 5.7 win shares, one of those defensive, and averaged close to 19 ppg. His field goal average was .473, very efficient, and his three point average was .415, also excellent, and he averaged 2 assists and only 1.7 turnovers a game. That goes along with 4.3 rebounds a game. Throw in a steal a game and a block a game, and you’ve got a really good player who can do a lot of good things. It’s true Salmons is now thirty years old, but so what? He might be a late bloomer, but if he’s learned to play the game, he’s learned to play the game. And he can play.
Ray Allen is what, a hundred? He was playing for Milwaukee back when the amphibians and the reptiles first walked on dry land. He’s so old that some of the cave paintings in France are attributed to him. I’m not saying Ray Allen is old, but he has grandchildren playing ball in college right now. It’s not that Ray Allen is old, but he’s the only NBA player I know who get’s Social Security checks delivered next to his NBA paychecks.
Seriously, though, Ray Allen is the ageless wonder, a beautiful player who can still play the game beautifully, and for those who think Allen Iverson is washed up or too old, I offer as exhibit one, Ray Allen. Small shooting guards who are pure shooters can play a long time in the NBA—I think here of the wondrous Hal Greer of the Sixers—a Hall of Famer—who played of course with Wilt on the 1967 team that won 68 teams and dethroned the Celtics for the title—and we should be mindful of this fact.
In short, Boston-Chicago was a wonderful, marvelous series, a beautiful thing to witness, pure basketball at its best, overtime game upon overtime game, each with its own storyline. Neither time yielded or gave quarter. It’s nice to see pro athletes play that hard and that long and give effort on that scale. Again, it’s reminiscent of the days of Jordan and Bird and when they first met in the late 1980s—those playoff series were wars between Chicago and Boston. This latest series was no less.
–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion philadelphia phillies
Cap and Trade – A Horrible Idea – Let’s Abolish Cars and Build a Real Rail System Instead
May 13, 2009
Cap and Trade Is a very bad idea, right now.
First, a history lesson. President Clinton’s first term was a disaster, in large part, because he spent most of his first two years pursuing three very liberal ideas—gays in the military, universal health care, and a federal tax on BTU usage.
These three ideas were, at the time, in 1993-1995, so controversial, that they not only threatened to sink President Clinton after only one term, but resulted in 1994 in the largest shift in a mid-term election in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in United States History.
The House lost more than fifty Democratic seats and went Republican for the first time in a long time; and the Senate also suffered huge democratic losses; all due to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, which was a direct and overwhelming refutation of Clinton’s liberal agenda.
Much the same thing happened in the first two years of Jimmy Carter’s term; Carter pardoned all of the draft-dodging Vietnam protesters hiding out in Canada, and virtually declared war on the CIA and all of the US military operations around the world, which led to terror operations and revolutions around the world intensifying, culminating in the Iranianian Revolution and the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the holding of 52 U.S. hostages for over a year, a spectacle so embarassing to the United States, repeated night after night on national TV as it was, that virtually every Democrat in office lost his seat by 1980, and the Republicans and Ronald Reagan were swept into power, with a whole new agenda of re-arming America and restoring her lost prestige abroad.
Getting back to Clinton, the BTU Tax was an idea very similar to the current notion of Cap and Trade. Cap and Trade, like the BTU Tax, is essentially a tax on carbon usage. The idea is, if we tax carbon-based fossil fuels enough, and make them costly enough, it will force everyone, including consumers and energy companies, to seek non-carbon based alternatives.
There are three basic problems with cap and trade (actually, there are many more, but I will discuss three here) that make it a bad idea for now. First, we are in a recession that is actually more of a depression. Cap and Trade is a large TAX INCREASE that will suck spending power out of the hands of consumers. Consequently, it will kill the marginal propensity of consumer demand, and attack the very object of the Stimulus Bill.
I don’t have to be a doctor to know, that you don’t give a man a sleeping pill, just when you’ve given him a shot to wake him up, while he’s still groggy and coming around.
Right now, the American economy is like a man who can’t wake up. Cap and Trade would be like a sleeping pill to that man. The Stimulus Bill was like a cup of coffee or a shot of epinephrine—a stimulant to wake him.
Cap and Trade is like a sleeping pill that would suck away his vital energy.
Second, in order to invest in, and build, energy alternatives, there has to be a venture capital and investment banking, and regular banking systems, in place. Today, those systems are impaired, crippled or functioning at about half capacity. Consequently, Cap and Trade can’t work under today’s economic conditions. Consequently, no infrastructure would develop under Cap and Trade to produce renewable energy alternatives until the banking and lending systems come back on line.
All we’ll have is a tax that makes oil and gas and coal more expensive, but no alternatives will develop for many years yet, due to the impairments of the banking, VC and R & D systems.
Third, even if the banking, VC and R & D systems were perfect, there is no energy alternative that could come on line sooner than ten years from today to replace current oil, gas and coal based consumption.
Wind and solar currently provide less than 1% of current energy needs; energy needs keep GROWING at an exponential rate, if you include the third world, and none of the so-called renewable energy forms are anywhere close to being ready to assume more than a micro-share of the energy load, whether we’re talking about wind, solar, geothermal, capturing energy from ocean waves, and so forth.
It’s been fifty plus years since the hydrogen bomb, but no one has yet developed and sustained a fusion reaction that can last and power an energy generating plant. That technology seems as remote as the so-called “WARP” engines on the starship Enterprise on STAR TREK.
That leaves us with one, and only one realistic alternative, and that is nuclear power plants. They are tanned, rested and ready, and the newest generation of nukes have much higher capacity factors and higher safety factors than ever before.
The problem with nukes is, you still need about two billion dollars to build a single plant, about 3-4 years to get the necessary permits to build a plant in the U.S. and another 3-4 years to build the plant and get it on line.
That’s 6-8 years and two billion dollars to get each plant on line, and most of the two billion dollars will have to be absorbed by the consumer in electricity costs. Let’s figure that we build fifty of those plants—that’s a hundred billion dollars in construction costs alone that have to be absorbed back again by means of utility bills to the consumer over the next ten-twenty years. That’s on top of the cap and trade tax costs.
In short, it’s a very expensive proposition to jettison oil, gas and coal.
It’s too bad that the United States didn’t commit to a nukes policy back in 1955, when nuclear power was cheap and we could have covered the US with nuclear power plants for a fraction of the cost of today.
If we had committed to such a policy then, we could have been completely independent of Middle Eastern Oil as of 1970.
Even as late as 1975, we still could have committed to nukes for a fraction of today’s costs, and been independent of Middle Eastern Oil by the 1990s.
However, the wacky left and particularly eco-wacky californians, continuously opposed nuclear power in this country for decades. Nuclear power could have given us full independence from the Middle East a long, long time ago, and spared us these last two wars in Iraq and Kuwait.
The problems we face today are a consequence of our leaders living life as if we can’t shape the future. But we can and must shape the future.
The future is not shaped by dice rolling or by random events. The future is shaped by decisions we make and by policies we need to hew to in order to shape the probabilities and likelihoods of the future outcomes to be.
A responsible United States Government would have made us one hundred percent reliant on nuclear energy for our power production as soon as humanly possible, once we unlocked the secrets of the atom, back in the 1950s.
Our failures to do so may have been the result of many causes, and I won’t speculate here on the role of the oil and gas companies, the so-called, Seven Sisters, and their multinational interests linked to Middle Eastern oil producing states, but clearly nuclear energy would have a lot cheaper over the last sixty years than two wars fought directly by the US in the Middle East, and five wars fought by proxy between Israel and the oil-producing states.
Had we eliminated oil dependence early by committing to the atom, we would have changed history decisively and for the better.
Cap and Trade is not the answer.
A federally-sponsored program of accelerated conversion to Nuclear Powered electric generation, followed by a fifty to one hundred year phase in of solar, wind and fusion power, is the answer.
All electric companies should be abolished in favor of one company modeled and based on the Tennessee Valley Authority, that will erect Nukes until the United States is 100% nuclear based electric power, and zero percent coal or oil.
Combing this with a program of converting all cars to electric power would also solve another problem as well. This is clearly doable in the next five-ten years.
This is the kind of program that would involve spending money on a specific problem, creating jobs, and stimulating the economy. It’s better than cap and trade because it puts dollars into the economy instead of taking them out. Also, it federalizes the utilities, which do a horrible job.
Finally, the electric grid needs to be updated using superconductors and the latest electric technologies, including quantum conductors and new metals to conduct electricity. With superconductors, electricity can be sent from location to location without any loss of power or current. This would eliminate the need for transformers and high voltage lines, etc. Again, a vast federal program committed to upgrading the grid is needed.
These steps would be much better than cap and trade.
A final note about cars–Why do Obama and the Democrats want to prop up the car industry if they are truly worried about Global Warming? Cars contribute more than 50% of the hydrocarbon emissions in the US that contribute to global warming.
Instead of paying consumers a $4,000 tax credit to buy new cars with high gas mileage, wouldn’t it make more sense to get people to STOP DRIVING CARS AND TAKE MASS TRANSIT?
In short,
1) Let the U.S. Auto Industry DIE.
2) Put an enormous carbon tax on all car purchases. Make any new car cost around $50,000 to buy.
3) Apply that tax backwards to used cars as well.
4) Massively subsidize AMTRAK and all local mass transit across the nation, and let people ride the trains and Mass Transit free for the next five years. Yes, I said it, FREE OF CHARGE for the next five years. Why? To get them used to doing it. The massive federal stimulus bill to build rail, subway, light rail throughout the US would be in the TRILLIONS of dollars, as well as to subsidize AMTRAK everywhere so it’s FREE OF CHARGE. That would be a net STIMULUS to the economy and create the world’s finest light and heavy rail systems. We could also finally build HIGH SPEED RAIL SYSTEMS modeled on France, England and Japan to cover longer distances that could go 300-400 miles per hour, that could eliminate many shorter airplane routes, unclogging the skies of needless plane flight. This is a win, win, win plan. We get rid of filthy autos and planes and replace them with electric trains. And net net net create jobs.
5) Starting in 2014, you can slowly re-introduce fees again for Mass Transit and AMTRAK once we’ve started to eliminate all of the automobiles.
6) Start reclaiming the inner cities by closing roads and creating pedestrian zones and mass-transit zones, and creating more and more parks in which no cars can come into the city, until finally, all cities will have no cars or trucks at all.
7) The goal would be to eliminate cars and trucks by 2025, and convert everyone to mass transit and rail.
8) Electric cars only would be allowed eventually, powered by the nuclear grid. These would be cheap and affordable.
This is a far reaching and thoughtful plan. Abolish the internal combustion engine as we know it and force all americans out of their cars and onto trains, buses, subways and light rail.
This is the true path to ending global warming and reaching a green economy.
Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
Home of the World Champion Phillies
up
THE SIXERS STAND PAT AT THE TRADE DEADLINE
March 5, 2009
The Sixers stood pat at the trade deadline and promptly came out of the all-star break looking awful, dropping five of six. Meanwhile, Miami, which is in a position to catch Atlanta for the #4 see in the NBA east playoffs (the Sixers are 6th, Miami is 5th, and Atlanta is 4th), made a major move, obtaining Jermaine O’Neal from Toronto, though they had to give up some talent to get him. O’Neal always give the Sixers problems because he’s a good big man who’s mobile and can outplay Dalembert one on one. He will likely give Atlanta problems as well in the playoffs, incidentally.
In the meantime, looking from a distance, the Sixers have not really capitalized on the big event of the season, which is the decline and fall of the Detroit Pistons. While Orlando has risen up to join Cleveland and Boston as division leaders, the Pistons now have a worse record than the Sixers, and this was a Detroit team that last year was the #2 seed playing the Sixers and defeating them at the #7 seed. Right now
Detroit is the #7 seed BEHIND philly and fading out of the playoffs.
When a major team like this is out of the playoff picture, your GM should be approaching them about obtaining one of their players at the trade deadline, like a Rasheed Wallace, who can hit the three and rebound, and doesn’t have that much time left on his contract. He could have helped the Sixers. Or even Allen Iverson, who while obviously in the decline phase of his career, could have helped the Sixers coming off the bench, or playing the two guard, a position that has been a problem for the Sixers this year. Iverson could have helped the Sixers playing alongside Andre Miller, with Iguodala up front and Dalembert and either Young or Speights playing the power forward.
Even if AI only played 20 minutes a game, he’d help.
But the Sixers have done nothing. They instead committed everything to a gigantic blunder by signing Elton Brand, who is hurt, injured and will never be better, I predict. Even if he comes back, this is starting to look like the Jeff Ruland situation all over again. A hurt player who will never play like he did pre-injury. Or Glenn Robinson. Or Chris Webber. Or any of ten other guys that have come to this ballclub hurt and making a bundle. The guys who can play and never get hurt, like Barkeley and AI, we seem to give away for nothing.
Or Brad Doughery or Moses Malone.
How about this team?
Brad Dougherty, Moses Malone, AI, Charles Barkeley, Wilt Chamberlain.
You think you could win a few championships with that team?
That’s the five greatest sixers in history traded for virtually nothing.
For those five NBA hall of famers, the Sixers received; Roy Hinson, Jeff Ruland, Andre Miller, Jeff Hornacek, Darrell Imhoff and some other throw in players.
Those are five ok players, but not hall of famers.
Malone, Barkley and Chamberlain are 3 of the top 10 all time NBA rebounders of all time, incidentally, while if you add AI, you’ve got four of the top 25 scorers in NBA history as well. Dougherty, though he was finished early by his back, was a stud every year he was in the league, 20 ppg and 10 rebounds or more. The Sixers could have had Dougherty AND Barkeley for ten years straight. They would have won five championships in all likelihood with that combination. Even against Michael Jordan that combo wins.
The late Timmy Ling, my dear prep school classmate and friend, used to make fun of the Sixers’ drafts when we were in high school. During those years, the Sixers took some #1 draft picks as follows;
1969 – Bud Ogden
1970 – Al Henry
1971 – Dana Lewis
1972 – Freddie Boyd
Ling was relentless making fun of Ogden, Henry, Lewis and Boyd, and justifiably so. While other teams were drafting some of the greatest players in history in these years (Kareem Abdul Jabbar, for example) the Sixers basically decided, we aren’t going to get into a bidding war with the ABA, so we’ll just draft nobodies and pay nothing to no one. It was horrible, and got worse when Billy Cunningham walked to the ABA in 1973. The franchise hit bottom when they won only 9 games in the 73 season, still an NBA record for futility. Shortly thereafter, came George McGuiness and Dr. J and the big turnaround, but it was a bad stretch.
They got it right in 1973 with Doug Collins, but in 1974 the Sixers drafted Marvin Barnes, who I think is dead or in rehab now, but anyway, Barnes was about 7 foot, but had a drug and rap sheet as long as could be, and he ended up in the ABA and in jail much more than on the court. In 1975 the sixers drafted Darryl Dawkins #1 right out of high school.
Dawkins in today’s NBA would have been a star. In the condensed NBA of the 70s, he was only ok. He wasn’t as good as the best centers, and consequently was underrated at the time. Today, he’d be a star in the expanded NBA.
In 76 and 77 the Sixers drafted #1 Terry Furlow and Glenn Moseley, non-entities, but in 1978 they picked Mo Cheeks, a legend. 1979 was a miss, but 1980 got them Andrew Toney with the #1, and Andrew Toney became the Boston Strangler. Though his career was shortened by injury, Toney would have become a Hall of Famer with longevity.
And, of course, 1984, #1 pick was Charles Barkeley, who was the quintessential hall of famer and probably the Sixers’ best player since Wilt and before AI.
Even though Sir Charles is a DWI man, and spit on girls while he was here, and is overly fond of guns, we still like him because he’s a bit of a buffoon, and a bit of a thinking man’s man. Also, he lived to rebound and score, and he rebounded and scored because that’s what he lived for. 20 ppg and 10 rebounds pg were his calling card, and he punched those in every season like clockwork.
and no one his size (as short as he was) ever led the league in rebounding once, let alone several times.
When he played alongside moses malone, who was basically the same kind of player as Sir Charles, the two were an unstoppable force.
But the Sixers broke them up with trades, and also traded away Dougherty; Dougherty, Malone and Barkeley would have been the core of an unstoppable basketball team. You’re talking three guys who clocked 10-15 win shares every year routinely.
And we wonder why the Sixers never win championships or make the playoffs like they used to. For a while they wanted to trade Dr. J too.
Getting back to the now, Eddie Stefanski has watched and done nothing while Atlanta, a horrible team, passed the Sixers by this past year. He made noise about signing Josh Smith of Atlanta, but never got serious. Instead, Atlanta got him back, signed Bibby from Sacramento and added both a point guard and three point threat and made the playoffs last year; this year they are the fourth seed and playing much like the sixers, a young, running team, except that Atlanta are better at it than the Sixers because they can shoot the three. If I’m sitting down comparing Atlanta to the Sixers, I’m saying Atlanta has the better squad right now, up and down the lineup. It’s not close.
And because it’s not close, and because you want the 4th seed if you can’t have a LeBron, a Howard, a Garnett like Cleveland, Orlando or Boston, you have to compare what you do have to what the competition has, and try and get better at the trade deadline. Miami did this but Philly did not. I see this as weakness from the GM and a refusal to invest in the team. Furthermore, weakness caused by commitment to Elton Brand.
I had a lot of comments in the AI post, below, about what’s wrong with Elton Brand and why the salary cap dump of the AI trade was botched by the Brand sigining. In a word, the Sixers moved too quickly to lock up their salary cap room with the wrong guy. they should have waited for someone better and waited another year if necessary.
It wasn’t necessary to fire mo cheeks. Cheeks’ record was mainly due to Brand playing a poor brand of basketball; once he was pulled from the lineup, the team played better automatically. While Tony DiLeo gets some credit, the fact is the team played better because subtracting Brand was addition by subtraction.
Cheeks is the guy who got them to the playoffs last year. It remains to be seen if DiLeo has the necessary skills to get the Sixers to the playoffs and actually win two games if he gets there. I doubt that he does.
Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
Home of the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies
It probably isn’t news to anyone currently breathing that every newspaper owning corporation in the United States is currently in bankruptcy Chapter 11 proceedings. Here in Philadelphia, after sinking more that 500 million bucks to take the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philly Daily News off the hands of the guys who bought them from Knight Ridder, the purchasing group headed by Brian Tierney et al. ended more than eleven months of negotiations with creditors by filing for Chapter 11 protection with the United States Bankruptcy Court, meaning reorganization and possible liquidation. There are serious rumors that only one of the two newspapers will survive, probably the Inquirer.
In a way, this is strange, because there was a time in Philadelphia, and I don’t mean going back to Ben Franklin, when it was obvious that the Inquirer was the worst and most pitiful newspaper in town. The Philadelphia Public Ledger was the newspaper of record (its building still stands at 6th & Chestnut) for many decades, while the Philadelphia Bulletin was clearly the better of the two papers while the Bulletin and Inquirer were the two main papers in the second half of the 20th century.
Of course, the Public Ledger went under in the Great Depression; it died in a court-ordered liquidation in 1941 or 1942. This may just be history repeating itself. The Public Ledger was owned jointly by the owners of the NY Times, incidentally.
For a complete list of ALL newspapers ever printed in Philadelphia, go to this website pdf of newspapers held by the free library of philadelphia;
http://libwww.freelibrary.org/faq/guides/FLP-NEWSPAPER-HOLDINGS-BY-DECADE.pdf
you’ll be shocked and amazed how many newspapers there have been and how many small ones there still are other than the inquirer and daily news even now.
But then again, the Philadelphia Athletics won five world series and too many pennants to count between 1901 and 1953, and were the main baseball team in Philadelphia for more than fifty years. No one gave a fig about the Phillies. It was only after Connie Mack died and the A’s moved away that the Phillies finally developed a fan base, and even then not really until the 1964 pennant run with Dick Allen and Jim Bunning did they really draw any fans. But who remembers the A’s today in Philly? Where are they today? No one in Philadelphia remembers them at all.
There’s a small museum in one of the counties, and a small bronze plaque at the new ballpark. That’s about it for the team that in the first half of the 20th century was the second best ballclub in the American League, and by far the best professional sports team in Philadelphia.
Getting back to newspapers, the point is that you can’t understand history by looking at it now. If you looked around now and saw humans, you’d never know that dinosaurs once ruled the earth. Likewise, looking around and seeing the Inquirer being the main newspaper, you’d never know that once there was a Public Ledger, a Bulletin, and probably a dozen other papers. Even the Saturday Evening Post, the nation’s number one women’s magazine, was published right here in Philadelphia, but it died too. That building is still around also. We have seen the end of magazines like Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and most recently, U.S. News & World Report, in the past forty years. Now newspapers are dying as well.
There were a lot of great movies about newspapers. The best movie of all time is about newspapers. Here I refer to Citizen Kane (1941), which is a thinly veiled biopic of William Randolph Hearst and his media empire.
There’s also Meet John Doe (1936) and let’s not forget All the President’s Men (1974).
I’d throw in Broadcast News (1980s) as well, even though it’s really a TV movie, just because it’s flat out hysterically funny and not at all dated, and because Brooks is one of my favorite comics in the world other than Mike Reiss. Just looking at Brooks makes you laugh.
But history does repeat itself. The Hearst media empire was bankrupted by the Great Depression—so much so that Hearst himself, so rich that he could build the Heart mansion—the famous “Xanadu” in the Kane movie—in San Simeon, California—now a famous museum—actually lost all his money to his creditors in bankruptcy proceedings and lost control of his newspaper holdings. No one today has heard of the New York newspapers that Hearst made his fortune from.
Now, we are going through another serious economic dislocation which is again severely affecting media badly. As badly as Hearst was affected by the Depression and War years, that’s how badly newspapers and old media will be affected this time around. Add to that the free news which is available on the internet, and on every persons’ telephone, and one would be silly to expend money for a newspaper.
It’s quite obvious that within another twenty years, there will be no more magazines or newspapers in print at all, that everything will be delivered right to your computer, tv or phone via internet. Maybe (and I often futurize about this) the convergence of nanotechnology and biotechnology will eventuate in a chip being implanted in your brain or neural net, so that you can visualize the images yourself without a machine mediating at all. Perhaps we’ll all be connected to the internet and to each other one day in such a fashion. It’s difficult to make radical predictions, but then again, in 1910, no one could have predicted that baseball, then a deadball sport based on bunting, stealing and pitching, would in the 1920s and thereafter become a sport of sitting around waiting for someone to hit a three run home run.
I will miss the Philadelphia Daily News. For the last forty years, it’s been the best sports paper in the country, and I’ve read all the other papers around, including the Boston Globe, the Chicago, the LA, the NY and SF papers. NY has tabloids basically and no good writing at all; the Boston Globe for a long time had great writers, but they’ve all gone to ESPN or national outlets where the money really is; and no other city really had good sports writing. Philly might be the last town in which there’s been good beat writing and sports writing for a long time now.
If the Daily News goes, that will probably be the end of it, though it may survive on line since there’s an online edition of the daily news that’s pretty good, and even better, available nationally to all former philly residents who follow their teams. So when they throw the last daily news into the fire and you see the sled burning with the name “rosebud,” remember you read it here—this was all a story about Charley Foster Kane, who wanted to be the world’s greatest newspaperman, and succeeded all too well.
By the way, I mentioned in a prior post that GE was way off about Jimmy Fallon? GE stock is now trading at five dollars a share. That’s right, five dollars a share. they made a big deal about this on one of the network news shows while i was working out on the elliptical at the gym. whoa nellie! The stock apparently has completely crashed.
Jack and Suzy Welch, would you buy this company’s stock? It was trading at $40 just last year. And now it’s down to $5 a share and dropping like a rock. Pretty soon it will be worth, say, 1923 German deutsche marks, which is to say, nothing.
Oh yes I would says the Wizard of OZ. You can get a thousand shares in this company now for the price of a song. Heck, the only place the stock can go is a little down, or a lot up.
I said they should have bumped Leno three years ago. While I recognize most of their problems are with GE Capital, entertainment is the division that’s always recession proof.
If you’re not sure about that, check out the fact that 1930s and 1970s are the greatest eras of film history.
Jimmy Fallon had another great show–Jon Bon Jovi did a duet with one of his fans, while Tina Fey sat and rooted the two of them on. I think it was the girls’ dream moment of her life, all caught on camera. You can bet that will be on youtube.
Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
Home of the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies
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