Indigenous Ability

  [The following is meant as an adjunct to the accompanying lengthy video.] Novice Question : “ What’s the best punch/kick/strike/submission?” Answer : Overwhelming Force Or… “ Combinations, combinations, combinations.” Or… “ Punches in bunches!” Wise striking, canny grappling, and experienced weapons-wielding all fall into the General Forrest strategic camp of “ Get there firstest with the mostest .” [With a big emphasis on “mostest.”] There are two general ways to “prepare” combinations. One-Rapid Turnover ·         That is, a succession of strikes, submissions, slashes, shots fired et cetera in rapid succession. Two-“Clearing the Kerf” ·         “Clearing the kerf” is an old rough ‘n’ tumble phrase borrowed from woodsmen and lumberjacks. ·         We’ll come back to this… Comanche Vocabulary Word of the Day: “ Wuhpa [?] itu ” ·    ...

  “ If you miss your first buttonhole you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat .”-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims & Reflections Our wise and polymathic Goethe is pointing to a simple but oft overlooked fact that wrong-footing from the get-go can set up a cascade of poor habits or accretions after that first step. If we step-wrong with our initial act, each act afterwards must have an element of compensation to adjust or supply course-correction for the preceding error and each additional deviation that follows. These “ workarounds or quick-and-dirty solutions ” are often “ clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain” are known as a kludge in computer science, aerospace engineering, evolutionary neuroscience, and other such affairs where “fixes” to prior problems are mainstays. For our purposes, a kludge is any tactic or strategy that is unintentionally or unknowingly the result of a wrong-footed prior or earlier step in combat-dri...

  Man is a questing species. Go to a scorching desert—You will find our fellow humans there. Go above the Arctic Circle—More Brethren. Go to a punishingly humid and dense mosquito filled rain forest, formerly “jungle—There we are. Look to wind-whipped oxygen-depleted mountains—Again. Look to the seas—There we are yet again. Look above your heads—Human filled aircraft and the International Space Station [ISS] sail there. We are found in all these unforgiving environments. There is such a spirit of intrepidity at the root of this species, a desire to go where the environment provides no quarter to our ambition. It should conjure jaw-dropping amazement and perhaps a dint of pride. Pride —There’s a word to be used carefully. Despite the moral hustings of “ The Seven Deadly Sins ” tale we are right to feel pride in our accomplishments. Pride is the emotional dessert after cleaning your plate and doing your chores aspect of a given task. The word pride, strictly ...

  Author David Waller’s book, the full title of which is The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman is a brisk detailed biography of the man considered the father of Modern Bodybuilding. Sandow’s physique served as a reminder that much of the carved figures we see in Greek and Roman statuary were not necessarily idealized but indeed possible.   He stood out in a world of “strongmen & women” where often the figures were undoubtedly strong, but the beefy aesthetics did not resemble the Greco-Roman statuary ideals. Sandow, while being hailed as a Father of the modern body-culture movement [or physical culture as it was known then] serves as the narrow bridge between the early portlier strong man physique and the modern pharmaceutically engorged physique that simply is not possible without wizards in the lab. [I leave it to the reader to decide the ethics of chemical enhancers. Suffice to say, it is not Old School; what was built...