Indigenous Ability

[The provided video will come into play in the second half of this essay. You’ll be prompted when to have a look.] Studying old school ways of hurt can go by many names: Combat Archeology, Combat Re-Creation, Historical Resurrection, but no matter what you want to call it, the goal and spirit are the same. We diggers in the past have beaucoup respect for old school tough, and if you’re anything like me, you’re more than a ‘Net-dabbler, or a mere copy-and-paster of what’s already been said by someone else. You drop money on the endeavor, you subscribe to numerous Historical Archive Societies, you keep your eye out for estate sales that might be pertinent to the facet of study. You test exhaustively via physical experimentation. You read anything and everything that is cogent, and you are even more deeply read in areas that seem tangential as often, like panning for gold, the dust downstream tells you there’s a good spot for a placer-mine somewhere upstream.  [See...

Teddy Roosevelt suffered a political defeat for a second non-consecutive term for the presidency in 1912. He dusted himself off from the defeat by joining an expedition into the jungles of Brazil that would wind up lasting two-years. [BTW-“Jungle” was the formerly Tarzan-cool word for what we know today as tropical rainforest.] Roosevelt recorded his perspective of the expedition in the self-penned volume Through the Brazilian Wilderness . This was a time when Presidents wrote more than tweets, and if they did write books, they were not ghost-written, they wrote them themselves just like big boys.  It has been decades since we’ve had any “leader” not foist off that dissimulation.  This is not a political statement. It is a statement of character and devolving ethics. Trump no more wrote The Art of the Deal than JFK wrote Profiles in Courage . Mr. Roosevelt wrote the books with his name attached, while no fan of his politics, I am a fan of the man, and, in th...

[For the mindset behind the following see Part 1 .] The car plunges through the guard rail into the river below… The recreational boat sinks from beneath you at 2AM… The bridge long overdue for inspection fails beneath you… The proverbial “100-year flood” occurs and that formerly high and dry street becomes a strictured fast-water nozzle strong enough to sweep cars and humans… The non-swimming loved one is thrashing and flailing mid-water… Your “unsinkable” luxury liner sinks beneath as you sip brandy in the smoking-room… The ability to swim and maneuver well in water, or as the old-timers called it, being possessed of good watermanship, is of ultimate importance at these times. But…again we often fail to consider that even if we possess the vital skill of swimming, like all other endeavors, it is subject to state-dependent learning. That is, if we learn our combat skills in a nice, calm, no-worries zone that is in no way reflective of th...