Indigenous Ability

We’ll be talking three little targeted aspects of street/reality work that we will loosely label “Scatter-Gun” tactics.  First, that name. In my ongoing historical research, I have come across a few instances of phrases along the lines of “ Scatter ‘em!” or “ Don’t forget your scatter-gun” also “ shotgun ” has been used here and there in the same context, as in “ He got shotgunned all to hell .” What was initially puzzling to me is that often these references were in incidents where no weapon was pulled.  Finally, the key came together when realizing that we are hearing archaic slang for targets along the periphery, that is, forgoing, or at least, adding to the usual targets of head, limb, and body. We hear echoes of this euphemism in old prison slang. The most current usage I can find of it is in “Paul Wade’s” Convict Conditioning 2 where he refers to training the neck, grip, and calves as “shotgun muscle.” He explains it thusly: “ These groups w...

Today’s sermon will weave a tale of housecats, early American colonists’ observations regarding battle-prowess in Native Americans, gang-bangers, good ol’ boy hunters, fox-hunters in the Old West, gamers and screen-users, Afghan Combat studies and, if we’ve done our job right, make a case for making risk part and parcel of cogent combat training. Let’s start with the adorable housecat, Felis catus . Study after study has recorded that outdoor housecats are responsible for an astonishing amount of depredation. Any of us who own one of these “awesome prowling machines” [tip of the hat to Les Claypool] is aware that they can go through chipmunks, field mice, and birds like nobody’s business but…the story is deeper than that. For every kill you see, there are likely a double handful that you were not privy to witness.  If you want the skinny on just how serial-killer-esque the common cat can be, Pete Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center authored a book on ...

Today’s combat voyage will take us into the mind of a legendary Civil War guerrilla fighter and what he learned from 17 th -century French drama. We’ll discuss two logical/cognitive fallacies and how they can drive even quite effective martial arts into useless margins, and, if we’ve been paying attention we’ll wind up back with our guerilla fighter and how to “ play the game well by not playing the game at all.” We’ll start with our French drama and not the Guerrilla warrior, you’ll see why we start here before we’re through. The following passage is from Moliere’s 1670 play The Bourgeois Gentleman , the premise of which is that a shopkeeper newly come into money decides that to be one of the upper-crust he needs to take great pains to “become cultured.” He engages numerous “culture instructors” who gladly take his money and leave him none the wiser or better cultured. One of these “culture instructors” is a fencing master who teaches him a few basics in the form o...

“ What do I do if I guy had me in this hold?” “What do I do if the guy knows jujitsu?” “What do if a guy is a good wrestler?” Combat Arts Instructors get these kinds of questions all the time. The question usually has a simple formulation with the interrogator not quite aware yet [due to inexperience] that they have posited quite a vast open-ended query. The inexperienced questioner is never at fault for questions along these lines. Here’s where the quibble begins [in Mark’s mind.] Any answer along the lines of: “ Well, all you have to do is just…” The implication that there is a simplistic answer to a large physical endeavor shows a good deal of short-sightedness or a staggering amount of hubris. We never succumb to such simplistic answers to encompassing questions in other physical domains. For example, if our naïve interlocuter asks “ What if I’m playing football and he has the ball?” See?  You immediately would want ...