Indigenous Ability

Let’s talk buccaneers for a paragraph or few and then settle into a mighty pragmatic lesson that these spoilers of the seas took for granted and that many of we, the 21 st Century coddled crew, a bit less so. Hand-to-hand fights were quite common in the days of sailing piracy, in fact we get our phrase “hand-to-hand combat” from this very fact. A crewman on a sailing vessel was and is a “Hand” and thusly hand-to-hand combat in piratical parlance is just that, a one-on-one affair between marauder and mauradee. Contrary to cinematic depictions of rival ships holing one another willy-nilly with cannon shot, the preferred tactic was to fire upon masts and other standing rigging and leaving as much of the ship intact as possible. Afterall, a sunk ship cannot be looted, a sunk ship cannot be taken over as additional transportation booty. No, the crux, more often than not, was to use sailing prowess and well-placed shot to make boarding feasible. With boarding an ulti...

[Consider this Part 2 of the offering Move Like a Scout or Indigenous Warrior . You can consume this piece in isolation but to really follow the arc I’d recommend reading the mentioned piece [or even re-reading it] to gather fully where we’re going.] Many of us tout our bona fides as high-speed, low-drag, can-the-noize-boys cuz’ I’m lock ‘n’load from bang to go! It’s a fun little play-acting symptom we see in grown-ass adults who wear the gear, talk the talk, but…do they walk the walk? Before you answer, I’m going to drill down so we get mighty specific with that question of walking the walk. I have zero doubt that there is a squared away cadre that walks a walk some of the time. I wager there is a smaller contingent [not anyone you likely see on the street in the day-to-day] who walk the walk more often than not. I refer to those folks in war-zones, battle-zones, boots-on-the-ground, no time for drill cuz’ this shit’s real. Environment shapes behavio...

In today’s sermon we shall ramble through WWI nautical ingeniousness, Old West architecture, Major League Baseball fashion, and, if we’ve done the job right, wind up with an observation or two regarding the cost-to-benefit analysis of being a bad-ass or simply “ dressing like a bad-ass.” Let’s start with our WWI history. Q-Ships. What exactly is/was a Q-Ship? Let me back up a little, let’s discuss why Q-Ships were conjured in the first place. U-Boats. We all know what these are. The U-Boat, or “ Unterseeboot ” [you guessed it, “undersea boat”] was a major contribution to Germany’s success at sea. These roving bands of submarines sank exhaustive tons of ships, cargo, let alone the number of lives lost. Many were lost on both sides, as submarine duty is particularly hazardous-even today, all the more so in the early days of the technology. U-Boats stalked shipping lanes, looking for ship profiles that read as easy prey and then they struck. ...

In four weeks we do the photo-shoot for the long-promised volume Boxing Like the Champs, Round Two . Consumers of the 1 st book and the companion DVD-set Boxing like the Champs can expect more deeply researched fistic malice. [All available at our little ol’ website store.] The publisher tells me it will see wide release this Fall. Coming Up Sooner in the Pipeline: The Suakhet’u. First, what The Suakhet’u is not… ·         It is non martial arts or combat sports related. ·         It is not a strenuous physical endeavor. What is The Suakhet’u? ·         It is an audio-visual course detailing a morning enlivening/awakening practice culled from various American Indigenous traditions. ·         Although there is some “sitting” involved, it is not meditation. ·         Altho...

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...