JusticeZero

The other day, my cousin had something happen. I'm not sure if it was an aneurism, a stroke, or something else. He was out hiking with some friends, then he just stopped suddenly, and started talking nonsense. They were words, they were in real sentences, but they didn't make any sense. He got more and more frustrated, and then apparently attacked someone. He apparently has no idea what any of the details were, and has been slipping in and out of lucidity. While my mom was checking on him at her sister's, he was talking, not very coherently, then suddenly turned to his daughter and asked her to go upstairs and play with her toys. She left, he stood up, and threw his mother against the wall, then started choking his sister. Then he stopped, sat down, asked his father if they could go for a ride, and asked why they were on the floor like that. No recollection of doing anything. So I have a family member who is suffering from a hopefully temporary, sudden mental issue that causes him to become violent with no warning or intent. Obviously nobody wants to hurt him. But if I were there, it would be nice to know that I would be able to gently take him and put him in some sort of hold until the state passes. No, I don't know what the problem is. Yes, I told them to take him to a hospital. Apparently he'd been arrested and charged with assault instead, I have no idea what's going on. But yeah. That sort of scenario is probably just as likely to be a problem for the people out there as some duel in a back alley. What tools do you have to deal with it?

I'm just going to repeat Kuma here and say 'Just train what you're working on now, for now'.

From what i've gathered by talking to it's practitioners, it suffers from having a lot of very strange-sounding drills and exercizes. They make sense once explained sufficiently, but there's a huge 'Whaaa..?' factor on seeing them first.

Well, it's happened before, obviously. I don't know that the goal in such a case is so much to fight the police as to get out of the situation. The situation that time was apparently, in general, that people in various law enforcement agencies apparently decided, presumably not so much as a policy matter but as an individual hiccough of some sort, to force anyone who wasn't driving a car to stay inside the city during an evacuation. Any time a disaster happens, similar strangeness has a high possibility of happening.

Yes, but the issue is that there are other ways to accomplish those goals, ones which aren't as alien to many of the people training. People think kata is "bad" when really the issue is more that the method doesn't make sense to them. It doesn't make sense because the context in which it is constructed is different.

I think that kata/forms are essentially just an Asian thing. Culturally, both Japan and China tend to respond well to taking an activity and ritualizing it as a way of integrating it into their daily routine. A kata or form is a ritual. Sure, they could have done the more modern practice of 'I need to practice kicks for twenty minutes, or is that just tuesdays and thursdays, no it's wednesdays and then I work on punching, and then I do cardio for thirty minutes and wait a minute, clocks haven't been invented yet oh for crying out loud i'm going to be late for work aren't I and did I forget any techniques, I can't afford a notebook to log this all because the paper is made out of sheepskin by specialists and then there's the ink..?' Or their teacher can just teach them a ritual training sequence containing all of the material they need to work on and say "When you wake up, do this ritual eight times, then go on with your day. I'll see you again after harvest when work eases up for me." If you already are accustomed to breaking your day into rituals, this makes perfect sense. Other cultures build their training into their culture in different ways, which I think is why kata have gone in such an odd direction in America. America and Europe don't generally ritualize their activities like that. Instead, they strap on pads, codify everything into sports rules, and say "Okay, you have seven months to train to beat the Red Team, figuring how to fit the training is up to you. On your mark.. go!" Of course, if you give people with this mindset a bunch of ritualized forms, their first reaction is to make a contest out of it. Same with my own art. People ask about the ritual dance structure and the singing and instruments. Really, all I can say about it is "How African of them." These are essentially the same cultural forces that make a Sunday in an African-American gospel church a very different experience from a Sunday in a conservative Northern church with no minorities in sight. Nonetheless, the purpose is the same, a way to work the material into their routine in a way that makes sense to them and the people in their community so that the practitioners can work the training into their life.

That isn't your job, though. And fighting them won't stop them, or even slow them down, unless you kill them, and that's very steep for having an ego. If anything, it will make them more desperate to find some helpless people to gank to puff up their ego. If they're "trying to pick a fight", they aren't actually fighting. They've got one for sale, but you don't have to buy it.

The Danziger Seven are having their day in court now, and the news is flooded with damning evidence and testimony about them. For those not in this area, the Danziger Seven is the name given to the seven police officers who were involved in an incident during Katrina on the Danziger Bridge. According to witnesses, the police drove up to a group of people attempting to walk across the bridge to evacuate, identified themselves as police, then ambushed them with a semiautomatic rifle and a shotgun, killing one person with a shotgun wound in the back and injuring others. The official police story is.. confused, at best, contradictory, incoherent, and has been changed several times. Furthermore, there is a distinct lack of evidence that counters the civilian report. This is clearly a severe failure of law enforcement to be the upstanding individuals that we trust in them to be and which they generally are. However, it begs the question as to how to respond should one find themself being attacked by the police in such an absurd situation. http://www.nola.com/crime/law_and_disorder/

This is really obvious. Someone posturing and stuff is playing a dominance game. Do you really think that it's worth applying potentially lethal force to win a contest for status that isn't even useful to you? That's like dancing naked between a church and a police station in order to get a wad of foreign currency for a country you never plan to visit and can't get exchanged.

As a practitioner of an art that emphasizes "move" over "strike" or "throw", the question seems really odd to me. It's a bit like saying that there's no need to learn how to throw a hook, since you already know how to throw a straight. Imagine, you're in front of someone, they throw a right straight. You step in and slip it by moving to their right. Well, now you're bladed to them, and they're on your right side. Well, you can reorient to them now, I guess, and face off again... I suppose you could take advantage with a backfist or something.. Or you can sink, look over your shoulder, and step your left foot past them. Now you have spinning momentum driving your shoulder and elbow into their waist, you've just slipped behind them, and all you have to do is continue the turn to bend them backward over your leg, or pick them up by their groin with your elbow, or come back up into their jaw, or any number of other things. I'll bet the grapplers can come up with more nasty ideas that I haven't covered yet.

A cane might require a bit of a limp sometimes, but an umbrella is equivalent. A tough jacket or equivalent seems useful against a knife, and you can always say you overdressed. Then of course, there's the trusty 6+ D metal barrel flashlight.

Falling.

Yep, i've been telling people this for years. Most people don't even know the laws, they just assume that they are whatever is convenient. A lot of people on bikes don't realize that there are road laws that apply to them (same laws as apply to cars), but car drivers ignore the law regularly too, especially if driving legally might cause them to be three or four seconds late to the next red light. I've been yelled at to 'get on the sidewalk' a few times in places where it is illegal to be on the sidewalk, and most everyone is aware of the raw hatred that you can be exposed to for choosing to drive at the highest speed you can go at without breaking the law - too slow! I assure you, there are other things besides all that recklessness that are just as bad. You might be concerned by the other health issues associated with driving. There is a substantial correlation between cars and health problems springing from inactivity. As roads are built up and improved for cars, neighborhoods tend to become increasingly spread out and forbidding for those who might want to walk. And so heart disease and diabetes goes up. There is evidence that mental development in the latest generation has been and is being impaired by a lack of contact with the world at large, since they are driven everywhere. This exposes them to dramatically higher risk of death or injury. Instead of letting their kids get some physical activity in, parents want to make sure that their kids are "safe". More on that in a bit. There is also the social cost. When I am in a car, entire neighborhoods whoosh by, and I am only able to gather the vaguest hints about them from the window. On a bike, I meet the locals, make friends, see all sorts of interesting sights. When I moved here, we rented a car to get from our hotel room into the city to apartment hunt. We found a place which is probably overpriced, but passable, through some online searching and looking for signs. On a bike now, we see that the apartment we are in has the only HUGE sign in the area - but in a two mile ride to my wife's job, we pass close to a dozen houses and duplexes for rent or sale that look at least as good. My apartment is in, as a woman who looked at the apartment next door put it with a disgusted sneer, "One of "THOSE" neighborhoods". From the window of a car, it's easy to see some lingering damage from Katrina, the big graveyard as a vague 'creepy graveyard here', and crowds of what look like poor, minority teenagers and the like that many might dismiss as a threat. The woman looking at the apartment certainly considered the neighborhood unsafe. I doubt she would have allowed a child to walk two blocks through the place. On a bike or on the sidewalk, I can admire the beauty of the graveyard, which isn't spooky at all. I can see the vitality in the neighborhood and the work that's been put into it. I meet the people hanging out on the street and trade jokes and recipes; they're really nice people, and not the vague sense of danger that people see when they look through a pane of glass in a metal box traveling five to ten miles an hour faster than the legal limit. When I cut deeper into the neighborhood, I pass kids playing with each other on the sidewalks, in lots and the street. Kids are running, kids are playing, kids are hanging out with each other, parents are sitting on their porches visiting and keeping an eye out. There are friendly people all over the place; I talk to my neighbors and they look out for me and let me know if anything is going on. I have a term for that; that's what I call "a good neighborhood". That's a neighborhood that I would feel safe letting a kid with a quick sampling of taught street sense wander off into for a couple of hours. There's a watermelon vendor on the corner. Nice guy, sells the juiciest fruit. For the life of me I can't see a place to easily park a car within two blocks of the guy, though. I drove past him in the rental car, but by the time the thought went through my head to check it out, I was three blocks away on a one-lane road with no place to easily turn around. Might as well go to the big chain store that some people blame for the woes in their neighborhood. The really ironic part about that is that I still make really good time going through town - I just don't spend it snared in jammed up lights with nothing to look at and nowhere to pull off. There's a laundromat a few blocks up the street. There are flashier and shinier laundromats if I were to toss my clothes in a car and check the yellow pages. I don't know that I would have even found the place in the yellow pages. But then I wouldn't have met the folks who were there. I ran across one of them at the store; he remembered me. Seriously, it's almost as if by the act of not driving the car everywhere, the world around you transforms into something out of the Andy Griffith Show. Met a woman at the store riding a scooter, one of the mini motorcycles that doesn't need a license. She reflected on how nice it was to experience all the same things on her trip through town at a more leisurely pace. For the most part, I no longer use a car, and I don't regret it. I feel like a better and more aware human being for it.

Always do your best. Your best is not your hardest, it is your most accurate and clean. Your best tomorrow should be better than your best today.

You should not be using more range of motion in training than you use in day to day life, for the most part. (with the exception of high kicks, at least..) Do you pop at other times? Is there a specific movement and point in the movement where things crack?

What kind of 'popping'? You aren't letting your limbs go to full/hyper extension, right? You should still have a slight bend in your joints at the full extension of the technique.. Without seeing what you're doing, that's the main thin that comes to mind..

Excellent, looking forward to hearing more from you.

I read it; it pretty much came down to this summary: For a baseline soldier, two hours daily (in two 1-hour sessions or one 2-hour one) of cardio exercise in the daytime heat will acclimate the soldier to hot weather in 2 weeks. You can miss a day here and there, but try not to. The more fit, the faster the acclimation and vice versa. Drink lots of liquids, don't overdo it, and save the strength and skill training for an airconditioned room.

Right, and I generally agree? But it really isn't Holley's place to say that. Holley is a student, and not even a senior student at that. It is a black mark on their instructor that this situation is coming up as anything more than an isolated incident.

Pro boxers have huge pads over their hands. There is a hand injury named after boxers that happens when a boxer punches something without the gloves and has not learned how to compensate and adjust; they break their fingers. Furthermore, it is well known that boxing is good with their hands, but the main part of that is the fact that they train their hands -more hours-, not that the training is inherently superior. Also, boxing changed it's stance work and structure substantially after the introduction of competitors carrying huge padded shields on their hands; a modern boxing block is more vulnerable than an old fashioned boxers block (which was very similar to the old karate stancework with the hands in front of the body, if I recall correctly?) in some ways; it's less of a fence, and permeable.

Unfortunately that's a bad situation. It's not the position that's bad, it's more that having someone double your mass who can hold your weight off the ground grab hold of you is not a great position. Most of the ways out I know involve hitting them with all your unbalanced weight to make them fall, but doing it in a way that you end up with your feet under you so that you can pop back up against them at an angle to twist away. Also, screaming a lot to get attention. Yeah, that and not going places where you will be isolated enough not to have some sort of backup soon.

Yeah. Nunchaku seem awkward to me.. Useful maybe, but awkward. My main experience with them is using them to demonstrate proper kicking technique. Hold one end against your hip so that it hangs beside, but not touching, your thigh; with our kick mechanics, if you are doing the kick properly, the loose nunchaku end will swing completely parallel to your kicking leg all the way and not touch it while it's in the air, like a double-image shadow of your kicking leg. Took a couple swings with it for kicks. I can see it being a useful peasant weapon, but it wouldn't be my first choice of things to pick up if I was on a farm and needed to improvise a weapon.

I don't see any way to get video where I live, honestly. I'd have to do some interesting stunts with extension cords (that I do not currently own) and move my closet just to get where I could show a ginga, and I wouldn't be able to do a lot of movements at all - such is the problem with a tiny apartment as befits a poor student. My netbook does have an integrated webcam, but I do not have a large enough space to use it for much beyond showing my face while i'm talking. Plus, i'll need a desk light in order to not look sinister while doing so. (I just tested it, that's what I was able to get out of it.)

Well, you're in the right art for it. It's worrisome to see "peaceful people" in very pacifistic arts; they have a tendency to become very wierdly passive-aggressive with their violence. "Your chi pulled my body into pushing you down the stairs. Then when I tripped you, I was protecting the women in the class from your aura. Then I slashed your tires in the parking lot to help you understand the peaceful philosophy of Moo Cau Do. After all, I am the most humble person in our class, I bow two centimeters lower than anyone else. I measured it. I even outsubmissived Linda. Booyah! Take that! Oh yeah, oh yeah, I am the greatest!" People will have some competitive, fighting urges. Best to recognize them and have somewhere to focus them than to stuff it away just to have them pop up in ways that sabotage you.

Just came back in from training. Did stuff like squats, fallbacks (don't know the term), au, kicks. When my head was throbbing and I started feeling stupid, I came back in to cool off. only 20 minutes? And no sun? Waah this is gonna take forever... I should have my bike soon, then I can get some cardio while moving and getting a bit of a breeze at least.. but I don't know how much that counts for acclimation.