Indigenous Ability

Crew, a little self-aggrandizement here, as I offer a podcast interview I did with the knowledgeable and good man, Richard Prosch.   Some may see the title of the podcast and think to themselves, “ Westerns? Why would I listen to that?”   Well, I offer a few reasons why in the conversation, but it is more than that.   We roam over rough and tumble combat, the Comanche Empire, autodidacticism, philosophy, and…well, hell, give it a listen and find out for yourself, it’s only around 20 minutes long.   If you like what you hear, well, view the links below for more in my bailiwick and…   Proceed on with more Six Gun Justice from Mr. Prosch and his stalwart partner, Paul Bishop!   For info on the referenced Subscription Service .   For the whats and whys of The Black Box Project .   For ThisOld Man’s Musings on matters frontier and fictional .  

  First, an observation from General George C. Marshall quoted by Bernard Loeftke in his volume, From Warrior to Healer. “ I saw about twenty-seven of twenty-nine divisions in battle. There were more failures, more crushed careers of officers of considerable rank, which grew out of physical exhaustion more than any other one cause. One acquired judgment with the years but lost the resiliency of tendons and muscles. Leadership in the field depends to an important extent on one’s legs, stomach, nervous system, and on one’s ability to withstand hardships and lack of sleep and still be disposed energetically and aggressively to command men on the battlefield. In World War I, many men had to be relieved because their spirit, their tenacity of purpose, their power of leadership over tired men—was broke through physical fatigue. They became pessimistic.” The easy lesson gleaned from the above is that, while we may not suffer the demands of commanding an army, we are the generals of ou...

  The recent pipeline shutdown and the many affected recalls this passage on the thin veneer of civilization… “ The thought terrified him; the delicate arrangements and systems that made life on the outside so easy; the massive industries balanced on knife-edge adjustments; the handful of men who kept it all running and the fewer who were able to improve it, add to it. Modern man was a parasite living off the fat of the past, living on the dividends of a few great brains. He did not gather his food or build his home or rear his children; his hands and his brain were soft; he consumed and manipulated and lived isolated and aloof from the natural world about him. It was comfortable, it was good, it was civilization; but it could vanish overnight if the mechanisms of it were destroyed.” — The Sands of the Kalahari , William Mulvihill, 1960. The “hacked” pipeline is just one of many rumblings that security specialists have been warning about for some time.     Do y...

  [The Video has little to do with the following, just a sort of eye-candy for those not into the heavy-lifting of combat musings.] The Static-Expectation Let’s toe-in with a bit of wisdom from Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart. “ An important difference between a military operation and a surgical operation is that the patient is not tied down. But it is a common fault of generalship to assume that he is . (May, 1934.) Thoughts on War. My like-minded readers have already made the jump to visions of “martial demonstrations” conducted in sanitized predictable environments with freeze-framed demonstration partners behaving exactly as we desire. In such conditions, our martial surgeries can do wondrous things. We can execute pinpoint strikes with a spinning hook kick, expertly slash and cut beaucoup “ beauty to behold ” knife “replies” to the frozen attack and find that very specific nerve bundle that will render an attacker’s knees jelly. To be candid, some martial endeavor...