A US President is being publicly friendly towards Russia [!!] which has thrown the entire Western intelligence apparatus into hysterical panic. This was the Friday evening news for one hour, where Vladimir Putin was treated with diplomatic respect [!] on American soil by Trump. This is all part of Trump’s strategy to win Election 2028. Hitler was friendly to Stalin when he needed to be, but it didn’t lead to peace. That’s a lesson worth remembering.
The CIA Democrats were at the center of a right-wing coup that installed a pro-Western neo-Nazi government in Kiev in 2014, and they mean to see it stays that way as it gets everything it needs to fight Russia. To US ruling class interests, this is about fighting the evil enemy in Russia through a proxy in Ukraine. This distant war is not only good political policy, it’s good business for Raytheon & Boeing.
The problem is Zelensky is widely hated in Ukraine, where elections & freedom of speech aren’t allowed. Young men are conscripted by being kidnapped off the streets or from their homes & work by neo-Nazi goon squads, who send them off to be canon fodder. That isn’t popular and socialists such as Bogdan Syrotiuk are thrown in jail for being actively anti-war. Western media never mentions the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk when talking about Ukraine, as it conflicts with their pro-Zelensky, pro-war narrative.
Putin was provoked into this war with Ukraine by the activities of Western intelligence & NATO, who supported neo-Nazi fascist atrocities against inhabitants of the Russian-majority population of Crimea & the Donbas. The Russia-Ukraine War is popular in neither country because it was instigated (& is maintained) by the external forces of imperialism. US, German & UK intelligence with their military advisors are the instigators & leading proponents of the Russia-Ukraine War, and they certainly don’t want a ceasefire that cedes the Donbas & Crimea to Russia.
Zelensky is running out of rope, as his hold on the presidency is tenuous. His unpopularity makes him susceptible to far-right forces in Kiev, as well as in Berlin, London & Washington that are ready to remove him if he can’t remain firm in keeping the Ukraine army fighting even though it has been exhausted. Manpower losses have reduced this to a defensive war for Zelensky & his NATO backers. No NATO country will commit its military to significant boots on the ground, due to the unpopularity of doing that, so this NATO-provoked war is lost for imperialism.
Drone strikes are the new warfare. Drones are hard to stop because they are high-tech precise & devastating in impact. Despite its high-tech costs and operator training, drone warfare is cheaper than tanks, jets & helicopters because it offers a lower casualty rate for the attack side as compared to human operated attack vehicles. Drones make warfare more economical in every military sense.
Russia is winning the war because; 1) it has more resources, and 2) the war is being fought on Ukrainian soil. That means the majority of civilian casualties & infrastructure damage is on the Ukraine side. Ukraine is losing the battle of attrition and this was inevitable. Trump will not authorize long-range missile strikes deep into Russia from Kiev, because he knows that will lead to nuclear war. The CIA Democrats want Trump to play a game of nuclear brinkmanship with Putin because US intelligence is Russiaphobic to its marrow. These ruling class conflicts highlight the fundamental madness of capitalist imperialism.
The October Revolution of 1917 still lives in the collective class consciousness of every CIA Democrat & fascist, and it arouses all of them into fits of anger & hysteria. Lenin & Trotsky are considered the most serious enemies of capitalism. CIA Democrats always collaborate with fascists to persecute & exterminate socialists. All intelligence dirty tricks operations target the political left, meaning the US intelligence apparatus is an agency of spying & right-wing provocation.
Liberal Democrats are tools of the CIA Democrats, meaning AOC is a tool of Chuck Schumer & Mark Warner. With Trump warming relations with Russian President Putin, the liberal Democrats are being outflanked by a fascist who brings hope for peace to his people. There was no hope with Joe Biden, and Trump exploited that in Alaska with Putin. Trump & Putin both won this political game they’ve played, while the CIA Democrats are fuming at their defeat. Just hosting this event was too much for most of them. Russiagate, the ‘2016 election interference’ narrative was ridiculed by Putin, then Trump, which certainly infuriates CIA Democrats. No peace until there is a complete carve-up of Russia is the CIA Democrat mantra. We need to risk going to nuclear war over this we’re told. And told, and told…
These protestations over Putin as an aggressive war criminal are cynical when Benjamin Netanyahu, an ICC-wanted war criminal is armed to the teeth for the Zionist led IDF genocide & starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank. Double standards are the standard for the US corporate news media. It’s straight intelligence propaganda on network news & the NYT.
The sands are shifting from under the Democrats, who remain less popular than Trump. Their educated, left-leaning, and industrial worker base had moved to the left. Most youth now correctly understand that capitalism is the problem. Anything that doesn’t move to the left, has to gravitate towards Trump & fascism. Any anarchists, fake-leftists and such are actually right-wing provocateurs in that they seek to create confusion & chaos through violent acts & meaningless stunts.
Speaking of impotent political stunts, I haven’t updated on Pussy Riot in awhile. Their latest news is a lesson on what happens when silly provocateurs try to make a statement against fascism and get overwhelmed by real-life events. According to a report in the July 15 Guardian:
Nadya Tolokonnikova was only three and a half days into what was supposed to be a “durational performance” reenacting her two years as a political prisoner in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But Donald Trump had ordered national guard troops into Los Angeles, over the objections of California’s governor, and the protests against immigration raids that Trump wanted to target were happening just a block from the gallery where Nadya Tolokonnikova was performing. The Museum of Contemporary Art hastily decided to shut its doors. But Tolokonnikova, 35, whose political art has left her as a wanted criminal in Russia, chose to continue her performance inside the empty museum. “Police State Exhibit Closed Today Due to the Police State,” she posted on Instagram.
This is what has become of Pussy Riot, the CIA cutout whose postergirl spokesperson is Nadya Tolokonnikova. You can hear the demoralization of this defeatist in her email statement, “I was thinking how the western idea that history inevitably moves toward progress is a mirage.” This begs the question: Who wants to be led by hopeless & impotent performers who can’t hold their audience?
Putin outed Nadya Tolokonnikova & her Pussy Riot cohorts as foreign agents a few years back, which was vehemently denied by CIA Democrats everywhere, particularly liberal feminists. Now, when Trump orders the National Guard to take over, her feminist milieu shuts down and abandons Nadya Tolokonnikova’s performance because in reality it is a useless & empty gesture which no one stands for when the military starts pointing guns in your direction. All of Nadya Tolokonnikova’s supporters ran away and abandoned her performance protesting life in a police state and her courageous resistance which has inspired so many…
Nadya Tolokonnikova performed to an empty room in LA for a bit, then gave up and went home because no one cared. She didn’t join the LA protesters just outside who were courageously condemning the ICE gestapo. Instead, she sat lifelessly in her fake prison cell until she gave up on her fake ‘durational performance’ which everyone had walked out on due to real threats from an all-too-real US police state which (according the her) can’t be resisted. This is the political & artistic legacy of Pussy Riot.
Preface: This article is the final essay in a recent trilogy on the game of basketball. The first concerned sex toys being tossed by crypto groups in WNBA arenas, and the second is a general discussion on the game of basketball.
All the best basketball players are black, but the game was invented & developed in its early stages by whites. So who’s game is it? This is the question all the racists & racialists ask out loud in the media and privately to their friends.
Blacks were first allowed in the NBA in 1950, but they were limited in number and function– blacks were to be “role players only” on their white teams. It wasn’t until Bill Russell (1956) & Wilt Chamberlain (1959) came into the NBA, and immediately dominated, that blacks could be stars. From the time Bill Russell joined the Boston Celtics until he retired in 1969, it was him & Wilt for the title every year. Only once, when Bill Russell got hurt in 1958, did a “white team” win the NBA title as the St. Louis Hawks were led by Bob Pettit.
Red Auerbach was a mob-connected NBA operator who ran the league behind-the-scenes during its Bill Russell dynasty in which he led the Boston Celtics to 11 titles in 13 seasons, the last two with Russell as player-coach.
Red Auerbach was white and not a racist, he only cared about winning and everything that came with that. He ran the Celtics until his death in 2006 at the age of 89. He had appointed Danny Ainge as team GM by then, who then engineered the Kevin Garnett & Ray Allen acquisitions to go with Paul Pierce that won them the 2007-08 NBA title.
This highlighted & made aware the need for a “big 3” to win a title, over the HoF Shaq/Kobe, then Shaq/Dwyane Wade & Kobe/Gasol model of winning. A ‘big three’ means one more star player, which is easier to acquire & manage as compared to two superstar players. Egos between superstars are more likely to clash & combust. Tim Duncan was the humble superstar in San Antonio, and his organization would draft & develop at least two All-Stars around him to became a dynasty with that big 3 model. They couldn’t replace David Robinson, so they developed Tony Parker & Manu Ginobli, etc. You need three guys who can score when it’s their turn and also shut down their man because it’s really about ‘plus-minus on match-ups’ that determines winning hoops.
Today the financial cost & self-destructive quality of two superstars playing together makes NBA dynasties impossible to maintain. This is the challenge every winning GM & team owner has, it can all be gone when one or two key guys go down with a serious injury. Just like that it’s over and that team is in the draft lottery. Winning is such a thin margin, and more variable to injuries than ever.
For example, I’m watching the 2025 NBA Finals and the announcers are constantly going on about the Pacers as being “a well-run organization and will be a contender for years under current management…” Then, Tyrese Haliburton tears his Achilles tendon trying to play in Game 7, which he clearly shouldn’t have, and a front office & team medical staff that was responsible for the health of their franchise player let him play and inevitably suffer a serious sports injury that could have been avoided. When players are expected to make those sacrifices for their team, the entire sport franchise model needs to be re-evaluated from the top down.
The NBA season is brutally long, the most grinding marathon of all the major sports, by this sportsblogger’s account. The NFL is surely the most brutal, and thus much shorter with 17 games plus the playoffs which are 3-4 games for the Super Bowl participants.
MLB is 162 over six months, so players gets days off, pitchers have their rest days depending on usage to be ready for the playoffs through the World Series, where the eventual champion has to win 3-4 playoff series. The MLB wild card round is best-of-3, all games at the same ballpark. The divisional round is best-of-5 (2-2-1 home format), and the league championship series is best-of-7 (2-3-2), as is the World Series.
The NBA is 82 games, plus 4 rounds of best-of-7 series (2-2-1-1-1 home format) to win the NBA title. On top of that there is now the ‘7-10 play-in scramble’, which adds a game or two for those teams.
MLB, is a regular season marathon, then a 12-team post-season tournament to crown the champion. It takes a roster of at least 60 players & pitchers to be competitive in a modern MLB season. Once you survive that marathon, you have to be able to win short series match-ups against the best remaining teams. You need time to rest some of your best performers during the season which starts in mid-February for pitchers & catchers, and in March for the rest of the position players. They need to be fresh enough to perform when it really counts in October, that’s what they’re paid for and that’s what they play for.
The NBA starts in the fall and plays its finals though late-June. The NBA fines teams for resting their starters during the regular season, as hot-headed & ignorant fans complain about paying big money to see stars and they are all on the bench in street clothes. The season & playoffs are too long, as star players commonly get hurt towards the end which is a result of these abusive workloads.
The regular season needs to be shortened to say 64 games, and the playoffs need to go back to a mini-series (best-of-3, 1-1-1 home format) in the first round, and give the top teams byes into the second round, which should be best-of-five, then best-of-7 for the conference & NBA Finals. That would cut out a lot of unnecessary basketball and finish things from April to mid-May.
After the NCAA Tournament should [immediately!] follow the NBA Playoffs. This would help the WNBA too, by getting off the main stage sooner and letting the women own professional summer basketball. The WNBA is way more entertaining than old pro 3-on-3, I will say that, and so do the number of fans in the stands. 3-on-3 leagues, alumni leagues, etc, are the XFL-ification & Hulk Hoganization of pro hoops– in their presentation, marketing & content. Try to find a corporate sportswriter who can convince his editor to print that.
The ABA (1967-76) deserves a ton of credit for diversifying pro basketball and getting the game moving in the right direction. Cocaine and other illicit drugs were widely available to professional athletes throughout the 1970’s, and the NBA & ABA suffered for it. The quality of basketball was negativity affected by cocaine usage, which was estimated by the late-1970’s to be 40-70% of the players– black & white.
Professional basketball had become black dominated by the time of the ABA-NBA merger in the summer of 1976, but NFL & MLB players had drug usage issues which negatively affected their sports, which were considered ‘white sports’ by the racist media & team owners.
Julius Erving, AKA: Dr. J, came into the NBA with the Philadelphia 76ers, and the league had a new style it could promote to inner city black kids as well as small-town white hicks with imagination. Bird & Magic (then MJ) re-imaged the NBA by not getting caught up in drugs, thus becoming transformative superstars through leadership & example.
Basketball became an inner-city game in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and this is when the preferred style-of-play shifted from the strictly-disciplined, Kentucky-Indiana white rural style, into a playground creative free-flowing black style that became part of pop culture. It’s like going from Dixieland & big band jazz to bebop & Sun Ra– everyone knows the change is for the better. That’s how basketball became black. It’s more organized, concentrated & competitive in the big cities, so that’s where the best players come from. Larry Bird was the exception being from a hick town– making him a rare bird for sure. That’s why he had to prove himself to all the black players from the inner cities & major NCAA programs, which he did.
The bottom line is you need black & white to win at basketball. All the best players are black, but you’ll always take a white baller, particularly if he’s seven feet tall. Even if he isn’t but he can shoot, pass, rebound, defend then he’s a winning player and you want him on your team. You need role players & glue guys to win a title, not as much as stars, but enough to define the difference between winning & losing in competitive basketball because it’s a team game.
You need great coaching, scouting, medical & training staff, and front office support that manages its roster & playing rotations to get the most out of it. It used to be a NBA champion could win with just a great player or two, then it became a Starting 5. Today you need your entire bench, roster depth and G-League support, etc, to be in the hunt. It’s expensive & costly in every sense, and when it goes down with a knee or Achilles tear, it first makes you sick to your stomach, and then angry at the people who profit most from this abuse and know better but hide from their responsibility for it by paying the media to cover-up everything and make excuses for them. This sportsblogger watches of lot of sports with the mute button on.
It’s this way when it comes to race as a political discussion in the 21st century. Officially we have white supremacists as Trump’s MAGA base, opposed to Democratic Party racialist identity politics as the representatives of Wall Street & the CIA. Republicans are shameless liars, while Democrats are the party of the big lie. Both always try to foist their crimes onto their political enemies, ie– anyone who will tell the truth about things.
Anyone who has seriously played & studied basketball knows you need black & white together to win. It’s about team, it’s about unity and accepting everyone as your brother or sister. It’s about being open-minded, as well as suspicious, on new things you don’t understand and deciding on their merits. When it’s your turn to speak your mind, know how to speak respectfully and when it’s time to trash talk, execute with precision & impact. The idea is to get in your opponents head with some hard truths and let that break them down while others watch. Ultimately, basketball is all about respect, which is why everyone respects a serious baller.
I’ve proclaimed myself a basketball purist, so it is incumbent on me to define this & then prove it as a sportswriter. Really I’m a sportsblogger, which is a form of sportswriter, but different in that bloggers aren’t held to a corporate standard or code-of-practice which binds sportswriters into a political straitjacket, severely restricting them from expressing their truest & deepest thoughts.
So much has to be censored & covered-up, in the name of fake news, which means corporate media sportswriters only scratch the surface on the most serious stories. Their task is often to keep it vague, and then forget it & move on. Current stories like ‘NFL ownership colludes to suppress QB salaries, then covered-up by NFLPA legal representatives’ don’t play well in the mainstream media. ESPN has just announced the purchasing of the NFL Network, so there’s no way ownership-union collusion can be a story to investigate & feature any more than professionally required.
The most compelling sports stories are usually discovered (& always best-analyzed) by bloggers & other independent entities these days. Virtually everyone promotes themselves on social media, which organically helps bloggers over corporate sportswriters whom we’ve heard from too much already. We all know they have very little to tell us despite all their Hollywood access & face time on Network cameras.
Network (1976) is the best Hollywood film ever. If you want to talk film with me then start there, otherwise you’re shit on movies. That’s basketball trash talking on cinema. Notice how it is concise & directly to the point. That’s how you win at a fast-moving game like basketball.
I’ve loved this game since Bird & Magic, and of course I was a Celtics fan back then. I hated the 76ers & Lakers, until the Celtics won three championships. Then Len Bias tragically died and these Celtics were finished winning titles. It got to the point where I accepted the greatness of Magic Johnson. That junior, junior sky hook was undeniable in its beauty & championship finality. Larry Bird’s shooting and overall play made black players give their respect to white dudes who can play. That was only part of how they transformed the game of basketball.
Basketball is a game where it is accepted by all serious participants that the black players are the best. When it was Larry Bird taking the last shot, it scared opponents to death, because they went in so often, and Larry would look at everyone with an expression that said, “I knew it was going in. What did you expect?!” That’s legendary hall-of-fame trash talking from a master, the first time a white guy could really do it.
Michael Jordan became the ultimate hoops master, the perfect basketball player. What does this mean? It means he has no weaknesses in his game, every aspect is the highest level of excellence & durability: scoring, passing, rebounding, defense, making your teammates better, being a team leader, winning, handling the media & being an ambassador for the game without claiming to be perfect. It takes all that & more to be the best and MJ did that for Generation X. He was the first modern rockstar athlete who you compare to Tiger Woods, Roger Federer & LeBron James.
Before Michael Jordan, sports heroes were different. They were allowed their privacy because they were so revered by sportswriters, as compared to the TMZ paparazzi media we’ve had since the rise of ESPN. In baseball Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax & Bob Gibson would be treated much more harshly today by a media industry that is looking to build you up to tear you down. We shouldn’t do that to our sports heroes, and I’m a sportsblogger who understands & expresses that. Too many sportswriters have egos and want to make the game about themselves. For example the issue of PEDs & MLB hall-of-fame voting, it is very political with stubborn intransigence among a class of ‘old school’ sportswriters who are eligible to vote, but maliciously shut out worthy candidates.
The NBA is a much different game today because of the great players I’ve mentioned from the 1980’s. The 1992 Dream Team is unquestionably the best basketball team ever assembled. Being on that team is equivalent to winning a NBA championship, so Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullen, John Stockton & Karl Malone earn that respect. They are ALWAYS to be addressed as champions in NBA terms. What they did in Barcelona transformed the game. Opposing players were asking for pictures, sincere handshakes & autographs before their games because they knew they were going to lose and were simply honored to be on the court with them. No one had, or has since, seen anything like that in Olympic competition. It’s the athletes who create these-type moments that catapult them into the best-ever discussions, in any sport.
Here’s a digression that will eventually lead back to modern basketball, I promise. I’ve been a fan of women’s soccer since before the start because I played with girls in our hometown leagues as a kid and through high school. Summer leagues were more relaxed and you could pick your coach which was important because high school & traveling league teams were monopolized by local sports politics, with coaching dads often prioritizing college scholarships for their boys over developing the best players and building a winning style of play that can eventually compete with Europe & South America. That still hasn’t happened and that’s why the USMNT loses.
The World Cup is in North America next summer, so the USMNT gets the automatic hosting invite and didn’t have to qualify. If they had, they wouldn’t have made it. The next big day is when the World Cup teams in the 12 groups are revealed and the brackets are set. Lots of betting worldwide on the World Cup. It’s bigger than the Super Bowl because it’s only once every four years and football/futbol is the world game. The world stops when the ball is rolling in the World Cup.
As for the USWNT, their next World Cup is in 2027 and there will be no issue for them qualifying, they’ll again be a favorite but no longer THE favorite. The USWNT has slipped from it’s highest of highs in WC 1999 to settle in as a global force in women’s soccer. The best coaching in US soccer eventually realized the men were hopeless, so they gravitated into the women’s game. It was that dynamic that help US women’s soccer win the world.
Their best player from the start in 1991 was Michelle Akers. Mia Hamm was the first Gen X rockstar female athlete. They all had something you liked so they were like the Beatles in the summer of 1999, and after that it was cool to be a soccer mom. Soccer in the 1980’s didn’t have enough girls in most towns to have their own league, so they had to play with the boys.
The 1999 USWNT became the Dream Team of their sport. Now girls in every small American town have girls soccer leagues. What was achieved was a social revolution and what is important to understand is that an entire society was involved in it. Everyday people were inspired by this team of determined young women, and used their glorious victory to get something they didn’t even know they wanted for their children. The revolution was inspired by sports stars, but achieved by all the “little people.” Understanding that is the art & science of dialectics.
This is why I prefer the USWNT to the WNBA. They did it more organically and under greater adversity, where the WNBA has had huge promotional assistance from the NBA & its corporate sponsors from the start. Since the USMNT has always sucked, the soccer women had to do it on their own, which is much more impressive to me. Soccer & tennis are the two sports I most enjoy watching women compete, outside of the Olympics.
===========
My all-time rotating basketball five by position: PG- Magic Johnson/Steph Curry; SG- Michael Jordan/Kobe Bryant; SF- LeBron James/Larry Bird; PF- Karl Malone/Kevin Durant; C- Kareem Abdul Jabbar/Wilt Chamberlain. You get two bench guys and three reserves on a NBA team. Tim Duncan is one and the rest are debatable among a dozen or so great great players. You want Phil Jackson & Gregg Popovich coaching, I’ve always loved Hubie Brown, Chuck Daly, Doc Rivers & Steve Kerr too. They know the game, understand what it takes to win, and always respect the talent and get the most out of it by treating them as men first.
If you want to become a good basketball player then learn the rules. Become an official and learn the game from a different perspective and get paid for it. You’ll play a lot smarter after doing this because you’ll know how & why officials make calls– good & bad. Handling the officials is a skill & artform and no one was better at it than Michael Jordan. This video is the only known instance of MJ getting handled in trash talk, and Magic Johnson still half-apologizes for it– because he knows. Larry just laughs. This is as good as it gets.
Basketball is the easiest game to manipulate/fix through corrupt officiating. Too many team fouls and the other team gets free throws (easy points to a good team) for the rest of that period. Too many individual fouls and you’re either on the bench or disqualified. No other sport has this as such a big part of the game that determines winning & losing. Soccer is the next easiest sport to manipulate through officiating, but fans seem to recognize it quicker so it’s less of a constant at the highest professional levels. VAR and replay officiating have cut down on bad calls determining the outcome, but also have slowed down the game.
The NBA has had officiating problems since before the ABA/NBA merger in 1976. The NBA allowed the ABA to raid its top officials early in their existence, which helped the ABA gain legitimacy with its players and hurt the NBA. If you know you have straight & professional officiating, then you can actually play. If you have an incompetent officiating crew, then it’s hopeless and good players will quit on it one way or another. No point busting your ass only to get cheated with every whistle. I’m not MJ, I can’t overcome bad officiating by being ultra-dominate to a point where the officials have to respect my game. That’s how the rest of us who aren’t superhuman approach playing against bad officials. It’s part of the game, no question.
As far as not watching the NBA, the Shaq/Kobe Lakers early 2000’s titles were all tainted by league-biased officiating, favoring the Lakers every step of the way to three consecutive NBA titles, before it blew apart. It was a political ideology of the era (9/11) that insisted on physical dominance being the most rewarded trait that biased NBA officiating in favor of Shaq & his power game. I always thought Tim Duncan was the superior big man to Shaq. He worked hard and was a better teammate, a true quiet leader– the rarest of rare birds.
There was an aesthetic quality to Tim Duncan’s game that really impressed basketball purists. There was no waste in how he did things. Economical equals five NBA titles with the right coach. Critics called his game boring. The lesson there is don’t listen to the critics. Tim Duncan was the last great college player (Wake Forest) to stay four years when he could have been a top pick earlier. The San Antonio Spurs were the perfect franchise for him, an organization that understood him as the main guy to replace Dream Team center David Robinson when he retired. The right organization builds a dynasty around that by properly valuing his contribution to winning and showing him contract respect by never letting him get close to leaving.
On the other side of the management scale, Shaq from LSU went to the Orlando Magic in 1992, which proceeded to foolishly squander its championship aspirations in that era despite have (on paper) what it took to win a NBA title. They had Chris Webber as the #1 overall pick to go with Shaq in 1993, and potentially replace him in case he bolted for Hollywood– which he did. Weak management in Orlando listened to Shaq lobby for Penny Hardaway, and Magic management let their superstar player make their trade, dealing away the best player in the draft in Webber, a sophomore from the University of Michigan’s legendary Fab Five.
When Michael Jordan came out of his first retirement to re-join the Bulls and kick every team in the Eastern Conference’s ass, that was when Shaq finally went to the Lakers as a free agent and trashed Penny & the Orlando Magic as he left. When Penny hurt his knee and Orlando Magic team physicians were too incompetent to diagnose & understand the serious nature of his injury, Penny Hardaway was finished as an All-Star player. They didn’t do too well with Grant Hill either, all covered in this classic write-up of this tragic franchise.
Brian Hill, Chuck Daly, Doc Rivers & Stan Van Gundy are all above average NBA head coaches (at least) which needs to be respected. None of them could win a title despite having hall-of-fame dominate big men in two different eras: Shaq in the 1990’s & high school #1 overall pick Dwight Howard in the 2000’s. That’s organizational failure starting with cheapskate ownership and its incompetent GM’s, first & foremost. They had great players and all the resources needed to be a dynasty, but couldn’t figure out winning and still haven’t. They have another chance now with Paulo Banchero, another miraculous #1 overall pick that fell in their laps (call it NBA Magic), but I don’t like the guys they have around him so color this central Florida native skeptical on the Orlando Magic for a NBA title. Salary cap aprons really limit a modern NBA franchise’s ability to maintain championship rosters, meaning ‘windows to win’ are shorter, tougher and less predictable than ever.
If it happens for the Magic, it would be like how the Bucks got lucky in 2022. You need a great player, some serious guys around him, good luck & full health. They all count the same when you do it, dominant or lucky. It’s so tough to win so it’s celebrated as greatness as it should be in any integrated & competitive era. Can you imagine the NBA without blacks or foreign players today? Just watch a few YouTube videos and you’ll see it’s unwatchable by modern standards, NBA & NCAA. Diversity is good for everything is the lesson basketball teaches us all.
To understand the greatness of Steph Curry requires respect for ‘old school’ to be blended with an appreciation of ‘new school’ when referring to style of play in professional basketball. When the NBA began after WWII, it was all-white & had only has two levels of scoring: the painted area and an outside shot. Both counted for two points, but since it’s easier to score the closer you get to the hoop, an inside shot in the painted area was always preferred as a winning strategy. Coaches, announcers & analysts harped on this repeatedly, so you couldn’t get past it.
The ABA (1967-76) had the three-point shot from the start and its outside shooters embraced it. Boston Celtics GM (& league power broker) Red Auerbach was against the 3-point with the NBA-ABA merger, but when he acquired the draft rights to Larry Bird in 1978 he changed his mind and the 3-point shot has been in the NBA since the 1979-80 season. Larry Bird was immediately the best 3-point shooter in the game and changed how NBA players & coaches thought about that shot as a weapon. Back then it wasn’t used enough to be considered as a consistent source of offense. That came with Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers and his era. Ray Allen is the other hall-of-fame sharp-shooter in the pre-Steph Curry era. Their three-balls were now a potent source of offense on championship level teams.
What the 3-pointer did was create a ‘third level’ of scoring offense, where you can get 3 points by making a shot behind the line. This opened the game up for little guys (under 6’5″) who can shoot, which is always fun & exciting to watch as a basketball fan. SGA of OKC has mastered the mid-range, the area between the 3-point line and the painted area. Jimmy Butler is another guy who has that mid-range game and can finish at the rim. The 3-point shot has caused a lot of young players (Gen Y & Gen Z) to mistakenly abandon the mid-range. There are plenty of clean scoring opportunities in the mid-range, without have to absorb all that contact you get taking it to the hoop. A good mid-range game is a career-extender at any level of play.
What Steph Curry did was create a ‘fourth level’ of offense, well-beyond the 3-point line. You can’t give Steph Curry a wide-open 30-footer, he’ll make that shot consistently and if he gets hot the other team is finished– at any point in the game. Draymond Green sets a solid screen just past half court and the defense is in trouble. No basketball player has ever created such fear & panic from a screen set just past half-court. That’s how far the ‘fourth level’ extends out from the 3-point line.
Everyone from Luka Dončić to Caitlin Clark are prodigies of the Steph Curry ‘new style’ of play. Big men now handle the ball & shoot 3’s, when that was discouraged or forbidden by head coaches back in the day. Quick shots are okay now because advanced metrics have proven you might not get a better look so take the shot. No need to make your team work longer & harder to get essentially the same (or a worse) shot. Hubie Brown & Tex Winter always understood this, but they were in the minority in the profession of basketball coaching.
This ‘fourth level’ creates more opportunities for little guys with skill. For big guys, they are considered & referred to as ‘wing players’ instead of forwards in modern basketball terminology. They need to be long, quick & athletic. Their job is to rim protect and cover out to the 3-point line on defense, and be a vice versa threat on offense. Centers are thicker today, all can shoot 3-pointers, and need to be good passers to help their team on offense. Wing players are more shot-blocking conscious than ever, so center dominance of the Shaq/Wilt variety isn’t really possible in today’s NBA. The level of grinding & physicality creates a big man preference towards skilled mid-range & 3-point shooting over power basketball in the painted area. This reduces wear-and-tear on the body, and saves energy for when it is needed late in the game & season.
Health is a skill, and staying healthy in such a grinding game as the NBA requires hard work and serious maintenance. LeBron James is the ‘old man’ of the NBA at age 40, yet he has maintained his body at the highest level of basketball fitness. He went straight from high school, at age 18 into the NBA, and now you can’t do that anymore. When they change rules because of your talent, and fans are still amazed at it over 20 years later, that’s true greatness.
Basketball is a trash talking game. Every sport has its form of discourse between the competitors, but basketball is a fast moving game that only allows a series of split seconds & brief pauses to say what’s on your mind, and if you hesitate, the moment is gone and the other guy might get hot from there on which really shuts down your trash talking ability. That’s why so many young players start trash talking from their first made shot, because they know they might not see another one go in, so they’re talking like they are Kobe Bryant. As a rule: If you don’t have the skills & ability to back it up, then it’s usually best to check your trash talk.
The best way to shut down trash talking opponents is to play good defense. Shut them down, steal the ball, block their shot, fake them into travel violations, etc, and they’ll get real quiet. Defense is ~15% physical technique with the rest being heart, hustle & brains. All great defenders are among the smartest players. They know the rules, as well as all the tricks they can get away with and how to work the officials. And how to trash talk.
The US men’s team lost to the USSR in the 1988 Olympics because basketball is a team game. The US had the most-talented players, but they were up against professional teams from Europe that had been together for years. Playing as a team is the ultimate difference maker in competitive basketball. This filters down to high school, AAU & even YMCA leagues.
Unless there is a player who is exponentially better than everyone else on the court, generally speaking it’s the side that plays most as a team that wins the game. If you have basketball talent, but don’t help your teammates, then you create a ceiling for that team’s success because it’s all about the individual ego. Speaking of egos in basketball, corrupt and/or bad officiating can skew any game into unwatchable madness. There are plenty of (too many) out of control egos in the ranks of basketball officiating.
This is how I view basketball from an amateur perspective. I’m an amateur in the sense that I’m not paid for any of this, I publish here because I love the game and believe these thoughts are worthy of your consideration. You don’t have to have played the game professionally to know the game, you just have to study & apply yourself at it and you can learn many things about yourself and the world we live in.
Delbert Carver, 23, was arrested after throwing a sex object at a July 29 WNBA game in Atlanta. Charged with disorderly conduct, public indecency/indecent exposure and criminal trespass; Carver told police, “This was supposed to be a joke, and this joke (was) supposed to go viral,” according to the arrest affidavit. Since then at least half a dozen similar incidents have happened in WNBA arenas. WNBA spokespeople have been dumbfounded over this, often refusing to comment when pressed by media. This ducking of uncomfortable questions makes Trump’s continual lying on the Jeffery Epstein files look strong by comparison.
Los Angeles Sparks coach Lynee Roberts after Aug. 5 incident: “It’s ridiculous. It’s dumb. It’s stupid. It’s also dangerous, and you know, player safety is No. 1, respecting the game, all those things.”
“I would have picked that thing up and thrown it right back at them,” former Phoenix Mercury star Diana Taurasi.
If the sexist & hateful feminists who monopolize WNBA management can’t find a spokesperson who can understand what’s going on & represent the players here, then they all should be fired and replaced with real women such as those quoted above. Diana Taurasi is a strong woman who understands you can’t allow ANY disrespect on this, because once you do (by not having a serious & immediate WNBA spokesperson response), the league appears weak & becomes the butt of a sick joke. That devalues the league, and if the WNBA can’t handle this appropriately, then they deserve to be devalued.
I’ve never seen Diana Taurasi play, but I can tell you she’s a great player because she’s thought about this situation & understands exactly who to pass to. Basketball is a trash-talking game, which means you have to be able to handle it & dish it back out, otherwise you aren’t a real baller and you won’t get any respect. Players get this, while bureaucrats don’t.
Basketball purist thoughts
Was Diana Taurasi disrespected at the 2024 Paris Olympics by her coaching staff? It felt that way watching, even though I’m not a WNBA fan. I don’t follow the players because I don’t watch the games. I also don’t watch men’s college basketball with much enthusiasm anymore, as it’s a qualitatively inferior game when compared to the 1980’s & early 1990’s when it was at its best. The NBA is the best basketball organization by far, and I’m a purist, so as a sports fan I don’t really watch the WNBA because any men’s college team would beat any WNBA champion in any year. It’s my right as a sensible sports fan to not be interested in the WNBA for these reasons.
The following is a fact of sports everyone needs to accept: men are better because they are bigger & stronger due to natural testosterone. That’s basic biology and it isn’t going to change. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for women’s sports to be popular & respected. If it inspires young girls (& boys) to be healthy & active, then I’m all for it. If the WNBA gives good paying jobs that provide quality entertainment for their audience, then that should be encouraged in every way.
I notice they’re on everywhere these days: ESPN, ABC, CBS & ION. You can’t miss the WNBA, it’s on every weekend (multiple times) on network TV through the spring & summer. I’m a sports reporter so now I’ve had to start watching a few WNBA games because of how this sex toy campaign has gotten so out of control. That’s the real story here.
Barry Bremen was a salesman [!] who knew he didn’t have a life, so he became the great impostor. Those were different times and it was considered funny at first, but then he started getting arrested and it wasn’t so funny anymore. Barry Bremen died in middle age of cancer, so really his antics became defined as sad & sick cries for attention. It’s wrong because it disrespects the game, the athletes, coaches, officials, and everyone in the crowd who paid for a ticket. To continually insert oneself where you don’t belong is selfish & childish. Crypto enthusiasts & online gamblers (nurtured by ESPN) have taken the example of Barry Bremen to the extreme in this sex toy campaign.
The biggest problem the WNBA has had during this string of events is the lack of statements from their spokespeople, who are paid to represent the players in times of crisis, which this has become. Over & over I read, “A WNBA spokesperson declined to answer questions about…” The WNBA players have been requesting updates from the league, and getting nothing. Players have now been told by league officials they are “investigating claims that individuals were being incentivized” to carry sex toy stunts. All vague talk with no answers, explanations, or details to satisfy those asking the questions.
To get answers, we had to go to Dave Mason, brand manager of Panama-based online sportsbook BetOnline, who told ESPN that when the second sex toy was also green, he started looking for who could be orchestrating the stunts. Mason put a betting line on where the next toy would be thrown and what color it would be, then tracked his winning bettors and quickly found the crypto coin group Green Dildo Coin. Dave Mason said in an email to ESPN, “It’s part of the game when offering markets like these. We can either choose to offer them or not. We know people will have inside info and might bet.” To figure it out you have to follow the money, and notice it was an independent gambling site that discovered this, not ESPN or USA Today.
Green Dildo Coin (DILDO) is highly active in the Telegram community (& also X), and apparently they are behind this memcoin/sex toy stunt campaign. Green Dildo Coin is a Libertarian cyberpunk group, meaning they are young crypto Kool-Aid drinkers, responding to what they call a “toxic environment” in the current crypto world. This is a typical Kool-Aid drinker capitalist reaction to Trump taking over crypto & shutting them out. Green Dildo Coin’s deity is surely Elon Musk.
What I’m describing is the kind of leadership & understanding that is necessary to stop this nonsense, instead of relying on more police, security, media hysterics, etc. This is what spokespeople are paid for, so if officials all reply “no comment,” then the players will be asked about this when they shouldn’t have to answer to it. They are paid to play, not answer questions about how the league isn’t handling this issue and letting it get out of hand, and not figuring it out, etc.
Clearly there are too few adults in the WNBA front office, who don’t know how to handle this like a man. It’s young men (& a few inside girls who also want to get rich) that are doing this, so it therefore needs to be handled in a man-fighting way. Bitchiness & cat-fighting won’t cut it here for the WNBA, and it’s not unhealthy to admit this truth. It’s past the point of no return, where the WNBA players have to get together and put a stop to this the next time it happens, or they will continue to be disrespected & devalued. That’s a capitalist law.
Another law of capitalism is capitalists only care about money. So the players looking towards ownership & management for guidance on this is futile. Futility would be a good word to describe the WNBA spokesperson response since July 29, when the first sex toy in this memecoin campaign was tossed in a WNBA arena. Any WNBA player would be justified if she went into the stands and kicked that person’s ass. Fans would cheer that. As wrong as that would be (see the Malice in the Palace incident), it’s better than waiting for a WNBA spokesperson to make some lame politicized statement long after the fact.
This intersectionality of sports financialization with the political weaponization of sex, in the absence of trigger warnings, has made certain WNBA representatives very uncomfortable, and thus they have no comment. So they look to others to handle it for them, which no one respects.
An honest DEI spirit would be to have a few good men around (because diverse points-of-view & experiences are valuable) when shit like this hits the fan. But when #MeToo campaign feminists insist on running out all the good men because they are too threatening, this leaves WNBA players wide open to these kind of punk attacks, which are easy for any real man to handle, but can become troublesome because players are being misrepresented by enabled hysterical women who never became adults.
In short, there are too many sexist bureaucrats in management and not enough former players, which is a BIG problem no one in the WNBA wants to admit. This is also true in the NFL, NBA & MLB. Professional athletes need smart & successful former players in management to keep these union lawyers in line, otherwise these attorneys & PR flak will play back-room politics every time. This is where league officials are collaborating with ownership, instead of representing the interests of the rank-and-file. It’s not a sex issue as much as it is a class issue, but that isn’t allowed to be acknowledged in the capitalist media– another immutable law.
Legal fees are about to eat up all the betting & crypto profits of Green Dildo Coin, yet another capitalist law. Libertarians aren’t too well-read on history, politics, or anything else. They just want to make money fast and not have to pay any taxes. In a word they are lazy, impatient half-baked parasites. In essence those qualities define crypto and also modern-day capitalism.
Final thoughts
No one has been more of a crypto skeptic than Ric Size, as industry leaders hate me (bigtime) for it. When I posted on July 20, concerning the WNBA CBA situation after their All-Star weekend (linked above), I began with the statement that the WNBA was now a financial speculative bubble in terms of exploding franchise values, and later compared it to crypto in profitability. As a skeptic I am privy to no inside information, so I clearly had no official knowledge of this ‘crypto green dildo campaign,’ yet somehow I foreshadowed it and am not at all surprised by it.
I can explain all this emotional stuff (sex, sports, money) rationally in a media environment that is all hype, which is no mean feat. Any intelligent dissent has been censored, blacklisted & slandered for over a decade now– on all corporate platforms & political institutions. If you know sports as I do, then you earn some readership credibility over time. first with the athletes, and then with their leading fans who are online 24/7. I’m a players booster here because I’m ALWAYS a booster for the workers who create the economic value. That’s what a socialist is and it’s what scares Trump & his gang of fascists, first into incomprehensible fury and then into violent reactionary assaults on the working class.
All Trump can do is lie at this point, while the Democrats still accept it as good coin because he’s President, when really Trump is a sociopathic conman now hawking memecoins by pumping the Ponzi scheme known as bitcoin. Donald J Trump should have been thrown in jail for life with no parole long, long ago. He has committed heinous crimes against humanity and his accomplices are on both sides of the aisle.
Trump is the NYC underworld financial mob boss who became a realty TV star and then the fascist strongman politically demanded by the US ruling class, with the Democrats being his Vichy collaborators to recall a WWII analogy for Nazi sympathizers in France. The most serious lesson of WWII was that we can’t tolerate fascism in any form because it is inherently hostile to peaceful democracy & human rights. It never cuts off its own claws and can only be defeated through organized class-conscience struggle. That’s a Trotskyist– the most serious, respected & (by the bourgeoisie) politically-feared Marxists who are represented by the Fourth International, SEP branches worldwide, and the WSWS their daily publishing organ. That’s where to go for political clarity & leadership on a daily basis.
This crypto dildo throwing campaign has gotten so insane for WNBA players because everything is allowed to be irrational under Trump– tariffs, support for Israel & Ukraine, Jeffery Epstein, ICE Gestapo, public health policy, global warming, etc. These are the most dangerous criminals in the world, and it’s no secret, yet they keep presenting themselves as legitimate and are entirely propped-up by a corrupt corporate media which can now certainly be defined as entirely state propaganda. This is why people call it “fake news” and Trump now owns it with his political power over the media, courts, Congress, higher education, the police, military & intelligence, so this lewd behavior will be tolerated/exploited to its political limits by the anointed fuhrer. Only the political defeat of Trumpism (and all its state-corporate collaborators!) will stop this exploitative pornography.
You can no longer separate sports & politics, at all, there’s too much money at stake these days. Sports franchises are now expected to double in value overnight, yet player pay hasn’t increased along the same scale. It’s this nagging feeling working people EVERYWHERE have that tells WNBA players they are being cheated by capitalism, as salaries aren’t rising as fast as crypto profits for politically enabled pump & dump dildo memecoin campaigns. Like all the WNBA players, I’m over it.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (July 25) that Bill Clinton has a handwritten entry in the Epstein birthday book. It allegedly reads, “It’s reassuring isn’t it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible word], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends.”
Leon Black (pic above), the head of Apollo Global Management who paid $158 million to Epstein for financial services, allegedly handwrote a poem which reads:
Blonde, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically With this net of fish, Jeff’s now ‘The Old Man and The Sea’
Love and kisses, Leon.
An alleged note from British politician Peter Mandelson referred to Epstein as “my best pal,” and included pictures of a tropical island and whiskey.
Former Microsoft executive and billionaire Nathan Myhrvold reportedly wrote in the Epstein birthday book that he was sending photos from a recent trip to Africa, which included lions & zebras mating, where a zebra’s penis was reportedly visible. “They seemed more appropriate than anything I could put in words.”
Billionaire Mort Zuckerman, who owned the New York Daily News at the time, wrote in his letter that “he had searched the newspaper for information about Epstein and joked he was born in Liechtenstein and had a wife and three children.” That begs for clarification.
Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie Wexner, who previously condemned Epstein’s crimes as “abhorrent,” is also in the birthday book according to the WSJ, as well as (pics below) fashion designer Vera Wang, deceased Wall Street mogul Alan Greenberg, and deceased Epstein business associate James Cayne.
The tone of these entries suggests all this was a big joke to these people. The ruined lives of these exploited & abused young girls counted for nothing, yet they are now all regretful they met Jeffery Epstein, etc. Just as telling, none of them have responded to media questions on their birthday book entries.
Donald Trump has denied his typed note & lewd drawing, as he told reporters yesterday before departing for Scotland, “You ought to be speaking about Larry Summers. You ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys. They’re all over the place. You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton.”
Okay. Question #1 for Bill Clinton, “What was that illegible word in your birthday note to Jeffery Epstein in his 50th birthday book?”
Recall President Bill Clinton’s public statement on January 26, 1998, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Note in the video that Bill Clinton walked away after declaring his boldfaced lie, and for the record, the audience of politicians in the room roundly applauded him. That’s the ruling class cover-up.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell in Tallahassee, FL on July 24-25. As a reminder, when Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in 2024 in his Stormy Daniels hush money trial, Todd Blanche was Trump’s defense attorney, so the political self-interest here is clear to all.
Another reminder, Ghislaine Maxwell was not only convicted of abetting Jeffery Epstein in his sex trafficking ring, but was also found guilty of two counts of perjury. This makes Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell all the more troubling, since he hasn’t reviewed all the FBI Epstein files and therefore wouldn’t be able to keep her in line during questioning if she attempted to lie– as she has provenly done in the past.
Despite this criminal history, Blanche claimed, “Ghislaine Maxwell answered every single question” during the Justice Department meeting, and that she answered them honestly without taking the 5th Amendment. That’s quite a statement, and impossible to verify without transcripts of the interview and the full release of the FBI Epstein files.
Along these same political lines, Trump’s impromptu order to release grand jury testimony, which was denied by the courts, was another red herring in that nothing revelatory or consequential was contained in them. Victim privacy wasn’t asked to be protected, which was the reason for the court’s denial, which once again indicates Trump’s motivation was to distract, instead of reaching truth & justice on the matter.
What we have is a bipartisan cover-up operation that is fooling no one. The Democrats are just as implicated in the Epstein files as Republicans, along with their rich friends & political supporters who solicited the services of Jeffery Epstein for decades. Bill Clinton rode the “Lolita Express” 27 times, so he doesn’t want these files released any more than Donald Trump, meaning any Democratic Party posturing on this is cynical grandstanding meant to score political points while they work behind the scenes to conceal the evidence & facts.
What keeps getting lost in all this are the rights of the victims, as over 1,000 girls & young women were molested, abused & discarded by this criminal & depraved sex cartel and its clientele. There has been no justice for these victims, as political interests have protected the powerful men who solicited Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) called an early recess to prevent any Congressional action this past week, as Trump tries to evade responsibility for his criminality. All Congress has to do is subpoena the estate of Jeffery Epstein, and the attorney in charge of it would immediately release the Jeffery Epstein “50th-birthday book” to Congress, but that hasn’t happened either. All evidence of criminal relations to Jeffery Epstein have been systematically kept from the public by both political parties as they maneuver to cast ‘conspiracy blame’ onto the other.
All this is meant to protect the existing set-up. A vast fake economy is being insulated from accountability because to expose this criminality would lead to its collapse. Corporate bosses, major celebrities & sports figures are surely on the Epstein client list, and to ‘out’ them would be to prosecute them, which is something that is unacceptable to the ruling class. Capitalism has created these fake heroes and to disgrace them en masse would undermine the authority that has been bestowed upon them by their wealth & celebrity.
ICE immigration raids, #MeToo witch hunts, and slandering anti-Zionist protesters as ‘antisemitic’ are all part of the same reactionary cloth, whose purpose is to attack & scapegoat the working population and keep left-wing political dissent under the thumb of right-wing class rule. Occasionally a prominent politician, businessman, or celebrity needs to be sacrificed to maintain the whole, but never can the entire ruling class be prosecuted. This is the class battle that is being fought now. It is a war for truth & justice, and working people everywhere must take up the fight themselves, otherwise the truth will get buried (as it always does) by corporate-driven, two-party politics.
Tulsi Gabbard has become one of Donald Trump’s leading flak stooges in his campaign to deflect the Jeffery Epstein crisis. Gabbard’s recent attack on Barrack Obama, claiming he ordered a false intelligence analysis to show Russia had worked to help Trump win the 2016 election has truth to it. This has elicited a violent reaction from the Democratic Party controlled media.
Recall that the “Russian interference” campaign began as an attempt to deflect WikiLeaks revelations of the DNC fixing the 2016 primary for Hillary Clinton after Bernie Sanders received an unexpected groundswell of popular support, especially from young voters. Support for Bernie Sanders was deemed unacceptable by Democratic Party bosses. The DNC staffer who likely leaked this information, Seth Rich, was murdered under murky circumstances, and his murder (unsurprisingly) remains unsolved. “Russian interference” then became the Democratic Party & liberal media standard line for the reason Hillary lost to Trump in November 2016. Any left-wing critique of this elite-level corruption & electoral defeat branded commentators as “agents of Putin,” etc.
So what we have now is a political death struggle, with Donald Trump & his MAGA political supporters on one side, and the rest of the ruling establishment on the other. It is the working masses who must intervene with an international socialist program to prosecute & overthrow this entire rotten political system, otherwise there will be no justice for any of the victims of Jeffery Epstein & his elite clientele.
I have written previously that the 21st century is the beginning of the golden age of documentary filmmaking. The internet now provides ambitious artists with the means & material necessary to make a movie on any subject, and distribution is more readily available. This means the rules have changed, and of course the Hollywood film industry doesn’t like this. In fact, it is fighting this with everything they’ve got as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now their main tool (weapon) of choice in creating new dramatic films.
But technical gadgetry & AI special effects can only take filmmaking so far, and its limitations are already being reached. The quality of Hollywood films now is generally poor. Audiences who thirst for challenging & stimulating content aren’t finding it in the multiplexes, whose vapid content is generally a form of dumbed-down propaganda.
Sports movies: a critical analysis
Hollywood sports movies are generally disappointing because they fail to capture the “spirit of the game,” emphasizing fictitious drama over hard realities. See Moneyball (2011), perhaps the best baseball book ever published (2003), which became a watered-down sports-drama starring Brad Pitt. Actors aren’t professional athletes, and their attempts to portray them are usually unconvincing & clichéd.
To this movie-lover, the best Hollywood sports movies are The Longest Yard (1974), Bull Durham (1988), and The Great White Hype (1996), which had engaging scripts revealing a deep respect & understanding of that particular sport. Most of the rest of Hollywood sports movies are lame-to-unwatchable because they lack these qualities. Note that this phenomenon also applies to films about musicians & artists. Documentaries on such subjects are almost always more worthwhile because of the authentic footage, voices & artistry on display. Hollywood sports flicks suffer from a lack of genuineness created by an inherent weakness in these types of movies that few filmmakers can overcome.
The difference from other subjects of Hollywood films is that the public is usually very familiar with celebrity athletes, sports, music, etc, so the audience is harder to fool on the big screen. Movies are about creating an ‘illusion of reality’ with scripts, actors, special effects, etc. Network (1976) & House of Cards (2013-2017) are brilliant examples of bringing political reality to life through film fiction. Politicians & business executives generally hide their intentions & actions, so Hollywood filmmakers can exploit that gap in understanding more readily & effectively because the public is often unaware of these realities. Conversely, sports are rabidly followed by the masses, and thus their level of comprehension is far greater from the start, which makes sports movies unsatisfying to many movie buffs, especially sports fans.
War movies: documentaries vs dramatic re-enactment
War movies are an area of filmmaking that provide room for Hollywood-type dramatization and documentaries to be artistically successful. This is because the subject is far too broad for just one genre to tell the whole story. The best documentaries on war include The World at War (1973), a 26-part UK production on WWII narrated by Laurence Olivier. The authentic footage & participant interviews are its greatest strengths. But what is missing are the individual acts of bravery, heroism & drama, and that’s where dramatic films can fill in the gaps.
Das Boot (1981) is a German/UK production on the life of a German U-boat crew in 1943, a perilous time for these sailors. It has riveting action & drama, bringing their terror to life on the big screen. The World at War has a chapter titled “U-boats in the Atlantic,” which relates the objectives, strategies and history of this war theater. The U-boats had the potential to win the war for Nazi Germany if Hitler had used them properly, and it wasn’t until mid-1943 that the Allies solved the U-boat problem by exploiting aircraft with radar. This is an instructive filmmaking example of a documentary & a fictional thriller complimenting each other. If you’ve seen them both, then you have a much greater understanding of the subject from both a military & human perspective.
Midway (1976) is a Hollywood war movie that splices actual US Naval war footage with dramatic Hollywood filmmaking. The Navy war footage was shot in 16mm, and then blown up to 35mm and weaved into the fictional drama. This movie has many stars, but the editing-in of authentic war footage is what makes it all come together. Film clips from war dramas 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) & Tora Tora Tora (1970) were also used, along with newly shot warbird & aircraft carrier footage at sea. Miniature models were filmed on a lake in California to great effect for recreating the destruction of the Japanese carrier fleet at Midway in June 1942. Midway is one of the best Hollywood war movies because of how it edits authentic Naval footage with dramatic film scripting.
Ken Burns best documentary project is arguably The Vietnam War (2017), and probably the best film on the subject to date. In the Year of the Pig (1968) is the other essential Vietnam War documentary. Many dramatic Hollywood Vietnam War movies had been made previously, the most notable & popular include: Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986) & Full Metal Jacket (1987). Until Ken Burns’ definitive documentary, these Hollywood productions were among the best film documents on the subject. What Ken Burns did was to render these Hollywood productions less important by creating a definitive documentary. Apocalypse Now and Platoon no longer have the impact they did when they were released because a documentary has artistically eclipsed them.
What this process reveals is that just about any important film subject (based on non-fictional events) needs a definitive documentary, and when it is made, it renders all Hollywood dramas on the subject less vital. This is a dialectical process of discovering truth, first through fictional drama, then through documentary authentication. This is why documentary filmmaking is the true future of movies as an artform.
The WNBA is now a speculative bubble, and the only way players can significantly increase their salaries is to take ownership of the league for themselves. Expansion fees are now so high that owners won’t agree to any significant payroll increases during the next CBA negotiations starting this October. WNBA expansion fees for the newest franchises in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia were $250 million each, compared to $50 million paid by the Golden State Valkyries who began play this season.
How can the new owners in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia afford payroll increases with a $250 million entry fee? They can’t. Therefore that franchise value must go to the players who create the league value, otherwise the disparity between ownership revenues and players’ salaries will become highly contentious, threatening a destructive labor stoppage. The NFL, MLB & NBA have all experienced work stoppages in the past which hurt their leagues. At this crucial point in its development, the WNBA can ill-afford one itself, yet that is where it is heading.
WNBA franchise valuations have ballooned, with the average team value jumping from $96 million in 2024 to $269 million in 2025, according to GoLocalProv, a 280% increase in value in just one year [!]. The jump in WNBA valuation is entirely attributable to irrational exuberance & TV money, as the WNBA has secured a new media rights deal worth $2.2 billion over 11 years.
Caitlin Clark (2025 averages: 16.5 pts, 5.0 reb, 8.8 asst, 1.6 stl), personifies the irrational exuberance, as she has become the face of the league. Caitlin Clark adds value to the WNBA because: 1) she’s a transformative basketball player, and 2) she’s white– not necessarily in that order. The racialist aspect of this is not a good sign for the WNBA. Note that this is not Caitlin Clark’s fault, it’s the fault of ESPN and the media executives who encourage this.
WNBA minimum salary for players with 0-2 years of experience is $66,079, while players with 3+ years of experience have a minimum salary of $78,831 for the 2025 season. The highest-paid players can earn the super maximum salary, which is currently around $241,984, according to ESPN. The players naturally want a bigger piece of the pie as the league grows, but it is likely that the WNBA has already had its biggest growth spurt. It’s impossible to keep growing at a rate of 280% per year. The only other industry that does that is crypto.
So what the WNBA players face is a political choice of insisting on owning their league, or being salary-stunted by traditional ownership. “Pay us what you owe us” is an empty protest that will fall on deaf ears, as owners want to make money, and with such a high WNBA start-up cost the only way to do that is for owners to keep players’ salaries depressed. The only fair solution is for the players to become owners in the franchises they play for, as that’s where the money is.
But instead, the WNBA players have taken up a protest campaign, which may rally some support initially, but history shows that when the CBA negotiations come around, fans won’t be so sympathetic. Sports is entertainment, nothing more, and if these WNBA players strike over salaries that are already higher than what many fans make, they will be seen as greedy & selfish, just like the MLB players in 1994, the NFL players in 1987, etc.
When this much money is involved, it becomes a Marxist issue of worker control over production vs. exploitation. Instead of complaining about this unfairness, WNBA players need to take control of their game by becoming owners themselves, otherwise they will get cut out of the profits and be castigated by casual fans who view striking players as unappreciative of their privilege.
After all, sports is entertainment, and fans can turn off the TV and do/watch something else anytime they feel like it. What basketball players do isn’t essential, so the only way working people & youth (the vast majority of their fans) will get behind them is if they take a revolutionary stance at the next CBA– demonstrating actual leadership against ownership oppression. Any other position is acquiescence to the status quo, which inspires no one and is a losing proposition for the players.
NFLPA corruption: A serious lesson for the WNBA players
When it comes to representation in CBA negotiating, the WNBA players would be well advised to look at the current NFLPA situation where union representatives withheld evidence of ownership collusion from the players after QB Deshaun Watson signed a five-year, fully guaranteed $230 million contract in March 2022. Owners clearly colluded to suppress NFL player contracts after that deal and the players weren’t informed of this by their union representatives after evidence came to light in the courts. The NFLPA kept ownership collusion a secret from the NFL players for three years, until ESPN reporter Pablo Torre, broke the story a few weeks ago.
Union representatives who aren’t rank-and-file members, in any industry including the WNBA, are tools of management & ownership whose job is to keep labor in line and working for suppressed wages. These union representatives are nothing more than well-paid lackeys who collaborate with ownership to maintain their cushy jobs, salaries & benefits. This applies to teachers, auto & factory workers, municipal employees, etc.
This is why the emerging WNBA CBA is now a cutting edge sports issue. The WNBA’s new found success presents the current players with an opportunity to take control of their industry by representing themselves. For this they need to be a united fist of rank-and-file players, insisting on a fair stake in ownership, otherwise they will eventually be crushed by ownership duplicity with union/management collaboration.
These same issues apply to every industry globally, but they are more highlighted here because because sports gets so much media attention. WNBA players taking control of their negotiations and insisting on becoming the owners of the game they’ve created & built themselves is the key to a labor victory for the players. It is the only way to garner lasting public support for their cause without alienating their fans.
The Epstein ‘client list’ which had been promised to be revealed by Donald Trump has now been officially denied by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The public outrage over this ranges from grassroots MAGA Trump supporters who feel they’ve been lied to, to everyday people who want justice for these crimes of pedophilia & sex trafficking. What has been notable this past week has been the silence from the MeToo campaign, which purportedly claims to be protecting women from such predators.
The fact is the MeToo campaign is a political tool of the Democrats who have no interest in exposing Jeffery Epstein’s client list, as many of its supporters and party members were connected to this criminality. Bill Clinton, Donald Trump & Prince Andrew are among the most prominent names on that undisclosed list, which now officially doesn’t exist.
Most people with any intellectual faculty believe Jeffery Epstein was murdered in prison in August 2019, and everything since has been a FBI cover-up. The MeToo campaign which came to prominence in November 2017 has made no statements on the recent government denials of any Epstein client list. How is this to be explained?
The MeToo campaign is an attack dog used by the Democratic Party to silence left-wing artists & political dissent. It uses terms such as safe space for women to justify attacking men, particularly working class straight white men. For nearly a decade it’s been a propaganda war, with MeToo claiming women are always the victims, women are always to be believed, facts don’t matter, etc.
But this propaganda only holds true for MeToo when accusing someone outside the ruling elite. Within the ruling class lurks the most dangerous sexual predators who are protected by their wealth & privilege, and MeToo has shown no interest in prosecuting those individuals. A Google search of ‘MeToo & Jeffery Epstein’ shows no recent articles.
MeToo is the political flipside of MAGA Trump racism & sexism. MeToo is meant to attack & divide working people, through toxic feminism, while offering no real justice against those sex offenders who are most dangerous to the public. MeToo prosecutions are always politically motivated to silence any real dissent on the left.
The MeToo campaign began in earnest with taking down Kevin Spacey on false sexual assault charges because of his role in House of Cards (2013-2017, season 1-5), a powerful political streaming series on Netflix that educated viewers on the inner workings of government corruption at the highest levels. This revealing series had become intolerable to the ruling establishment. After Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, MeToo became a primary propaganda vehicle for the Democratic Party in its attacks on leftist figures.
MeToo claims to be a movement, but there is no popular support for this reactionary feminism which has nothing to do with equality & justice. The MeToo campaign is really about Democratic Party led feminist oppression of men and deflecting the blame for its own political & social criminality. It’s a tired act based on false narratives.
MeToo is largely despised by the public at this point. Democratic Party DEI initiatives dovetailed with the MeToo campaign to create a reactionary climate where white supremacists could reasonably claim they were being discriminated against, thus creating a social groundswell for Trump’s politics. This was a major reason Biden/Harris lost to a fascist in 2024.
The MeToo campaign has nothing progressive to offer. It is a slander campaign meant to intimidate & subdue the masses through false narratives & political intimidation. Exposing MeToo lies gets you branded as a ‘woman hater’, the same way those protesting Zionist genocide of the Palestinian population are slandered as ‘antisemites’. MeToo is a slander campaign with ruling class bias, attacking the truth while protecting class privilege.
In musical artistic terms “the blend” refers to how your voice is integrated with the instrument you are playing. In my case it’s guitar. The blend is correct instrument playing & vocals which are projecting your true voice. You don’t have to be a 4-octave vocalist to be an influential singer. You don’t need to be Eddie Van Halen on guitar either, but you do need to blend like Jimi Hendrix. Blending means you have no weakness which limit your ability to communicate with an audience. All aspects of performance have to be at a high level of competency to be able to effectively blend.
Jimi Hendrix is still that standard for perfect rock blend, an unbeatable guitar prodigy who found his songwriting voice which is now imitated by everyone. No one can match Jimi Hendrix, so take what you can from that and realize he didn’t leave a blueprint to follow– for if you try to live like Jimi, you will die like Jimi. Hendrix had so much pure talent (which none of us have), meaning you can’t surpass him artistically– only be inspired by his greatness & learn from his mistakes. Jimi Hendrix was too far ahead of his time to be understood, but he was also human with fallibilities like the rest of us.
Blending on guitar means playing the notes well along with using volume & syncopation. Volume helps create drone effect, which the Velvet Underground perfected with John Cale, while Jimi Hendrix mastered drone by controlling amplifier feedback. See his famous Woodstock solo performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” posted below, as it’s the drone effect which hypnotizes the listener. He’s so natural.
Syncopation comes more into play as a solo performer who favors an acoustic approach with no drummer. Artistically & stylistically it can be considered the difference between Bob Dylan & Jimi Hendrix. Bob Dylan can’t play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, but he is a better songwriter, so he turns down the volume (even in his electrified coming out era) as compared to the Velvets or Jimi. Bob Dylan favors syncopation (beats in his head) over feedback. Bob Dylan achieves drone effect on harmonica, and is one of the most prolific harmonica players ever. Bob Dylan came from folk music & the blues, and when he found his songwriting voice (which he also blended as drone) became arguably the biggest rock star ever. It’s because he could blend.
John Lennon is another brilliant example of blend. Whether it’s on guitar or piano; with the Beatles, solo, or with studio musicians John Lennon could create songs with anyone who had talent. He could always blend.
Understanding the recording process & production is part of the blend. If you can do this then surely you will perform better to a live audience. The studio is where a lot of good musicians feel intimidated and can get overwhelmed. The art of blending comes when nervous, but talented musicians are on the clock in the studio. A new song is uncharted territory which can be scary. The leader is the one who blends by getting their part (in my case guitar & vocals) well recorded in a way that makes everyone else’s job on the song easier. If it needs a click track, for the drummer & bass player to add later, then it must be done to a click track, otherwise they won’t be able to blend with the song. Figure out what the song needs and pick your blend.
If the lyrics are tight & engaging that will inspire creativity from everyone involved. Everyone wants to be part of something great, especially in the music business. It is the songwriter’s responsibility to give the musicians & producer what is needed for them to blend their talents into the project. You can’t do it all by yourself, but you can learn how to do as many things as possible, making everyone else’s job easier.
Blending is about leadership. In rock music you start everything by writing a new song, then you find the right people to help and inspire them to be creative. It really can’t happen any other way. Blending isn’t allowed to happen anymore by a music industry that has been locked-up tight since the late 1990’s & American Idol. What’s happening now is all about professional songwriters & producers who are completely out of touch. Technically they have the chops, but there is no heart, soul, or real love in any corporate music anymore. It’s all canned product. The producers deserve most of the credit for any catchy hit that is made anymore. As a musical artist, it feels like K-Pop has now been mainstreamed into American popular music. K-Pop is about sexual exploitation, human trafficking, drug trafficking & the fashion industry but no one is allowed to say that.
Blending a songwriting voice with guitar in this era means understanding the politics of our time and being a leader. This means you will have fans & haters, so deal with both appropriately. What we have politically is fascism under Trump with the Democrats acting as Vichy collaborators. Writing new songs from this Marxist perspective keeps an artist on the path of truth politically, making the music more influential & easier to blend over time.
