Indigenous Ability

We’re all high-speed, low-drag, “ Keep your head on a swivel, eyes on everything ” sorts, right?  I’m assuming that because I am bombarded with a never-ending posting parade of “ Awareness Musts!” “Situational Readiness Always!” “Eyes of Jack Reacher” or commentary on shared violence-porn, “ This guy got popped because he wasn’t paying attention; what he shoulda done…what I woulda done ” that sort of thing. We’re all wide-wake great ones from what I read. I’ll give you a super-easy quiz to test that assumption in a mo’ but first, a little tale of one who was always eyes-open even amongst other eyes that were also straining to be open and these allied eyes had use of new technology to assist “seeing.” [The following is excerpted from Biographical Sketch of James Bridger: Mountaineer, Trapper, and Guide (1905) by General Grenville M. Dodge. Mind you, a military man not prone to exaggeration.] “ Captain H. E. Palmer, Eleventh Kansas Cavalry, Acting Ass...

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...

Neuroscientist, Scott Grafton, has gifted the empirically thoughtful and scientifically literate a volume that is chockful of provoking information. The book, Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life , makes a case that smashes a bit of that Cartesian duality mind-body separation nonsense that many armchair philosophers wheedle and wrangle over till the cows come home. Mr. Grafton, warns that perhaps the cows will never come home if we stay mired in “ This is mind stuff ” and “ This is physical body stuff .” He demonstrates more than capably and quite convincingly that we need to recognize that mind directs the body [no argument there I wager] but also what makes up a large part of our mental intelligence is how the body bolsters and interacts with the mind even in areas you might have formerly considered mere intellectual matters. The volume is full of provoking/enlightening observations throughout.  Let’...