5 Stars of Expertise

 I am a huge likert scale fan, and I have found that there are 5 levels of expertise in martial arts, and that this also goes for other subjects, and it applies to the difference in my personal skill levels when it comes to fighting vs. dancing. So let's apply it to fighters first:

1. A one star martial artist is someone who's fighting skills are a result of being athletic, naturally tough, or having taken a few hours of self defense training. There are life long martial artists who are only at this level because the way they train martial arts has little application for fighting.
2. A two star fighter is someone who has trained to fight specifically in the past casually but on a regular basis, or someone who has multiple elements from one star (a weightlifter who has taken a self defense class for example.) It could also be someone who on the job uses a system for manhandling opponents such as police, bouncers, or hospital security.
3. A three star fighter is what popular language calls a "black belt," in other words someone who has studied enough fighting to teach classes on how to fight. People who have trained martial arts in a way that is good for training to fight for multiple years usually fit into this category. This is the category most combat sports coaches fall under.
4. A four star fighter can be identified one of two ways. First they are the best student of a three star fighter/martial arts instructor, identified as being formidable enough to defeat their own instructor in a fight. (If an instructor can NOT produce this kind of fighter, than what kind of fighting instructor are they?) Second, this could be a fighter who fights in higher level tournament competition, or a fighter who fights in public matches.
5. I didn't know 5 star fighters existed until I found myself on the mat with one in a knife fight. People had warned me that there are these really dangerous people out there you will rarely see in competition, but which are feared by 3 and 4 star fighters. Ramsey Dewey describes a Tai Chi fighter like this who the high level Sanda fighters in China sometimes train with. Things I have noticed about them as I have encountered them myself: A. Most of their training time is spent on developing their own skills, not teaching others. B. They are NOT into publicizing their abilities, their skill level is a legal liability to them if they have to use it in a real situation, and since they aren't pro fighters or instructors they are not making money from people knowing what they can do. C. They are all into free sparring, but they don't want to take the injury risk of training in fight camps to prep for matches or tournaments, least bit participating in those fights. As a result, they do NOT accumulate the same career ending combat sports injuries pro fighters do, which allows them to train longer and accumulate more skill than what you would seen in say the UFC. 

How can I say there's a higher level of fighter beyond a UFC champ? There are two factors: 1. UFC fighters are train for the highly specialized rule set of the cage. 2. UFC fighters train for long extended matches, relative to real fights that typically end in less than 30 seconds, they are literally training for a specialized type of fighting that is not most fights. UFC champ BJ Penn learned this the hard way:

Now that was a VERTICAL left hook that knocked out BJ Penn, a highly specialized technique that requires a significant amount of training, but this is not to show that guy BJ Penn was up against was some 5 star fighter (though it's possible,) only that UFC is not the ultimate standard for what constitutes "good fighting" as that skill set can be inadequate for most types of fights.

I classify myself as a 3 star fighter. Most of the keyboard warriors who criticize me would not last 30 seconds against me, that's just the reality. I am however fully aware that an average MMA fighter going at it at a Casino every couple of months, is a level of fighting skill entirely beyond me. I am highly specialized in knife fighting and practical strategy for self defense and in that one area I might be 4 stars, but over all I am very typical 3 star fighter.

What I have come to realize as I have started dancing and exploring different venues and dance cultures, is that I am a 5 star dancer. I show up at clubs where there's something going on I find entertaining, and my biggest concern is that the other good dancers will stop dancing just to observe me. But I don't teach, I am there for my own personal entertainment and frankly to steal other people's dance moves I like and modify them to make them my own.

Why?

When most people go to a dance, they dance a few songs. I dance all night. If 50 songs are played and they dance 5 songs and I dance 50, I got 10x as much practice that evening. Most people who enjoy going to dance venues maybe around twice per month. I prefer to go twice a week. This means I get 50 x 4 (200 times) more experience dancing than most other dancers. The other issue is though I took a very long hiatus from dancing for 25 years, before that I had been to hundreds of dances, always with the intent of getting better at dancing. Then I do something others don't: train at home on my own time. In my senior year of high school, I would practice dance moves to a metronome with a mirror alone in the basement. Then there's the formal training: a year of ballet in grade school, and a year on a ballroom team in High School. And then yes, there's the martial arts thing on top of all that, adding to my over all physical coordination. Finally, I study all forms of dance whenever I can (with a few exceptions for safety reasons (such as daggering or break dancing,) though I enjoy observing those more physically dangerous forms of dance.) I have recently added salsa footwork and some sort of mambo footwork into my repertoire, and I have taken a local Zumba instructor (who was rumored to be an excellent dancer before she got into Zumba) seriously as a dance floor rival. I've been to Country events, Islander events, etc. etc. even thought he main scene in my area right now is really EDM. 

So... I don't even know how to teach my moves to others... I tried to show one young lady at a club a few weeks ago for a move I had done, "it's just a crip walk with a knee roll from Jazz dancing..." and she was just left looking at me wondering what any of those words meant. I think back on the price I paid to learn each element of that technique and realize there's no place she is going to learn it, and as a 5 star dancer I have no incentive to teach it.

I am not the best dancer in the world, I suspect that for example Flint Flossy is probably a better dancer than me. However you have to be at a fairly elite level far beyond the average dance instructor or professional dancer to adequately challenge me on the dance floor.

Blinding Makeup

I admit I watched the first 4 seasons of Love is Blind more or less as they came out. It really got me thinking in a more nuanced way about romantic relationships. However my big take away was a lot stranger: Men don't like makeup. 

There are a few different situations in Love is Blind where the relationship is going well until the man sees the woman and then something strange happens: though he's happy with her physical appearance, he suddenly stops trusting her. In a few cases towards the end of the relationship (mid seasons) she stops putting on make up and the man suddenly warms up to her, and in at least one case actually says it was the make up putting him off.

When a man sees a woman's face that has a lot of makeup on it, he doesn't know if he likes her face or not, what he does know is he is looking at a woman who feels like she needs to wear makeup. It is at least in my opinion ALWAYS more attractive to see a woman's face without makeup on than with makeup on. A lot of the subtle intricacies of a woman's face that can make her unique and stand out from others are covered up by makeup. A whole bunch of laddies standing around with faces that look almost exactly the same because of the latest trend in makeup is very off putting. A woman standing near that crowd who used NO makeup (all other factors being equal) instantly stands out as far more attractive than the ones with the painted masks on their face.

Of particular alarm to me was a recent trend with long fake eyelashes. They were hideous and universal. It was almost like someone in the makeup industry wanted women to be less attractive to men. In the show "Too Hot to Handle" on Netflix where the show's producers attempt to reign in notorious sexual behavior with their contestants, we frequently see these attractive women with and without their makeup on, with the gigantic eyelash thing being a big part of their makeup routine. In every scene the women are always far more attractive without their makeup than with their makeup.

So what's with all the makeup? I am reminded of scams like Mary Kay that are pyramid scheme style companies who sell makeup. When a woman attempts covers up her faces it is inherently deceptive regarding what her real face looks like, and this deception is expensive to her because makeup is not free. In an MLM makeup scam, that deception is then used on the woman to drag her into the scam, leading her to think makeup is more normal and valuable than it actually is.

Now don't get me wrong I get that little makeup used with careful moderation is not some great evil. However it's clear to me that it has gone way too far in recent history, now having the opposite effect of what it was originally intended to have, making women look like clowns instead of looking good. 

Karma

 I have an extremely unpopular opinion:

1. Cheating disproportionately impacts men, in that it is more deeply wounding to a man than it is to a woman (all other emotional resilience factors being equal.)

2. There is a natural consequence of cheating for a woman that makes the consequence of her cheating more severe for her than it is for a man, and it has to do with men being an ideal mate for longer than women are.

Cheating Disproportionately Impacts Men

If a woman is raped, a great violence has been committed against her. But in addition to the violence against her, she has been denied the choice of who the father of her child should be. She may potentially give birth to a child that is half her DNA, and half her abuser.

If a man is cheated on, a great theft has been committed against him. He has been denied the right to be a genetic father at all of the resulting child. It's not that half of the DNA was not his to choose, it's that ALL of the DNA is not his whatsoever.

For men the line between violence and theft is much thinner than for women. Because of the potential to give childbirth, women value the sacrifice that goes into creating each life more than men do. Because men as a whole spend so much time getting resources to support families, they see their own life slip through their fingers in sacrifice for wealth, and stealing from them disregards their sacrifice.

It is a joke to say that cheating impacts women as much as it does men. Anyone saying this is either callous towards men or hasn't thought it through. Contemplate this song carefully, and understand the righteous indignation behind it:

Natural Consequences

"I the Lord delight in the chastity of woman" (Jacob Chapter 2.) Peak fertility for a woman is age 18. If she has the luxury of taking herself seriously and her mate selection seriously from a young age, she is likely to have an enjoyable life. But self destructive temptation can destroy a Queen's kingdom.

Many men, including even myself, can get continuously better looking and even stronger all the way into their 50's. Women have no such luxury, they can work very hard to age almost as slow as men, or they can age much faster, those are their two choices. This means that while women get accustomed to being disproportionately desired compared to men at a younger age, as they get older that is completely reversed with men their age being far more desirable than women their age.

The Karma here is that as men shed cheating women their options improve, and as cheating women are shed their options decline. Though I strongly resent this song's lack of sympathy for the damage done to who it is addressed to, I very much appreciatethe tone of regret, desperation, confusion and recognition of maybe-permanent loss that effects and vocals in the song portray:

Lose/Lose Situation

Men in our society generally do respect women, thanks largely to the feminist movement. The dark side of that success is now men are often disrespected by women. No man wants to be cheated on just so he can have the satisfaction of watching Karma run it's course - cheating on some level can be forgiven. However the point of no return comes fast with cheating, and Karma is a vengeful bitch.

Self Actualization

The dancing went well. It got a huge dose of cardio going once a week that I was not otherwise getting. This made me feel a lot better, and think a lot clearer, I suspect because of neurogenesis. This huge improvement in quality of life for me has me thinking a lot about self-actualization vs. the existential crisis.

Most of humanity believes in a benevolent higher power because they have had the experience of becoming desperate, praying for help, and witnessing a miracle as a result. But then why does the higher power not reveal itself to us in every detail? The only answer that works for me is that our beliefs dictate our choices and this higher power highly values our free will. So in the end, our higher power forces us to find our own way of overcoming the existential crisis, thus granting us self-actualization.

Though I have never used drugs, alcohol or tobacco, I am a fan of the notorious industrial band Skinny Puppy. They say heroin users have the existential crisis solved. When an active opioid addict gets out of bed in the morning, they know exactly what their purpose in life is going to be that day: they are going to hustle until they have enough drugs to avoid withdrawal. 

But when people get into recovery, the existential crisis is still waiting for them with all it's horrific riddles and doom. Skinny Puppy had a band member die and disbanded in 1995, and had a comeback in 2004. This is the first song off that first new album when they came back, and among other things it describes the existential crisis better than any other song I know:

The name of the song is I'mmortal. So is the problem either that we are all mortal and are going to die, or is the problem that our souls are immortal so we'll always live with the consequences of our actions? The answer is: yes!

Dancing Past Midlife Crisis

 

Last week I confessed to a friend of mine and her boyfriend "I don't care if I have to pay a male sex worker to take me dancing at a gay bar, I will be on a dance floor this New Years!" (He was like "well... good luck with that..." but she knew I was 100% not joking.) Then this happened:

My age starting with a 5 has been a huge issue for me - I finally have employment that allows me to live comfortably after a lifetime of keeping my "career" on the back burner in favor of family and personal projects, but my life is over half way done - so what good does this comfort do? Just after I turned 50 I met a 55 year old knife fighter on the mat who taught me to focus on my strength training and to stop pouting (and since then I have become 20 lbs lighter and 10% stronger):

In 2021 I went to Detroit for a wedding. My wife's health issues that keep her in bed most of the day were acting up, so I took her back to our hotel room and with her blessing headed back out to the dance floor. It wasn't very long before cell phones were out and people were recording me. (Same cellphone recording happened more recently at an event for high school seniors I was chaperoning.) That 2021 dance floor in Detroit was the most fun I have had in decades. 

I took a year of ballet in grade school and was a captain of a small ballroom dance team for a year when I was in High School, and when the early 90's changed the dance scene entirely, I would practice in a mirror in a basement to a metronome. Later in my 20's I attended hundreds of dances. Dancing was never a sexual thing for me, but rather a fun way to spend time with friends in a social and healthy activity. But you know my ride-or-die BFF's I used to go dancing with in my teens and 20's? They are old or dead now, mostly from ailments that could have been prevented through cardiovascular exercise!

I haven't been sleeping well latey, partly due to lack of any signficant cardio exercise. When I dance I like to hit the dance floor for about 3 hours straight, 180 minutes... take off 30 minutes for slow dances and water breaks, that's 150 minutes. It says "preferably" above because the American Heart Association has noticed it doesn't actually matter very much if that 150 minutes per week is all at once or in multiple workouts, and I am still going to be doing my martial arts and strength training exercises of course.

The big problem with cardio training is it is highly repetitive and thus more likely to result in injury. Over the last 10 years I have been injured jogging more than once, causing me to miss out on several months of serious training. With casual dancing however you are just doing whatever moves you feel like with the beat of the music setting the pace, making it the safest possible cardiovascular exercise.

I don't do break dancing or dirty dancing, but everything else is on the table: swing, hip hop, EDM, goth, square dancing, Latin, ball room, you name it, I am down! The problem is I am going to have to find people to do this with: maybe I know some people already, maybe I don't. Dancing is literally the only thing I want in my life but don't have, and for the sake of my mental and physical health, I have decided to embrace a new adventure of finding dance in my life again.

LGBN

In 2000, George W. Bush (the W,) the worst President of the United States of America (POTUS) of all time, became POTUS under shady circumstances. He proceeded to get the USA into wars that had massive popular disapproval and questionable legality. 

In 2004 after starting those wars, the W was popularly and legitimately re-elected. This was a slap in the face to those of us who cared about peace and healthy democracy. The USA paid dearly in blood and money for decades. But beyond that the balance on the Supreme Court changed to eventually allow the biggest threat to the integrity of the USA's democracy, Citizens United v. FEC, allowing nearly unlimited access to the manipulation of our democracy by those who have the most money. 

I have despised Trump since long before 2016 because if his involvement in ACN and other Multi-Level Marketing schemes which damaged communities and destroyed families. He went so as to promote ACN on The Apprentice:

So yes I was horrified when he soundly defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Though he wasn't re-elected in 2020, his impact on the Supreme Court led to the overturning of universal abortion rights in the USA. Virtually no one recommends abortion as the ideal form of birth control: any argument over abortion is a bad omen for any society that has to have it. But as Americans when faced with the choice of two evils (a woman being able to threaten the life of a man's unborn child, vs a woman having to provide legal proof of rape or incest in order to access abortion,) we should pick the evil that allows more personal freedom, not less, but instead we have chosen to have less freedom in the USA.

Beyond this, Trump showed sincere contempt for democracy on January 6th, 2021:

And after all that, the citizens of the USA re-elected Trump! This is the similarity between 2004 and 2024, is the USA reinforced bad behavior against it's own democracy (W's 2000 election scheming & Trump's January 6th.) 

Universal abortion access was the single most sacred political institution for feminism. It is roadkill. The LGBT community needs to radically accept the political reality in which they exist, in order to best serve LBGT. The most important thing to remember is this: 52% of Americans will never accept a difference between sex-at-birth and gender - they frankly will not acknowledge any such thing as gender that is not biological sex-at-birth. That 52% of Americans also believes almost any biological male in a female only space is a threat to female safety, and that same 52% believes in protecting females with lethal force.

I have numerous trans friends, but I do not believe they are well served by using language that 52% of their country will never understand. When a biological-male says they are a woman, having 52% of the country feel they are a threat is of no service to that woman. What I strongly recommend instead is that going forward we completely drop the use of "transgender," and instead use "non-binary." The reason why is claiming to be non-binary is not claiming to be something-you-were-not-at-birth, and is offering more transparency to that 52% who will otherwise possess lethal force and see you as a threat. I think the use of non-binary instead of transgender will make transgender people far safer and far more accepted in our society. 

What the phrase non-binary effectively communicates: this person is not going to conform to your expectations for males and females, but they do not expect you to call them something you do not think they are. I used to think this controversial scene from a recent popular video game was under-serving the transgender cause and was over-preachy towards the transphobic, but now I am thinking is it is the safest survival strategy:

As for gender, I have been against gender specific pronouns since the first Trump presidency:

As a nation we have been in dark places before. We can use that adversity to build personal resilience and stronger, more sustainable survival strategies. Dress however you need to, but if that doesn't meet conservative expectations, I recommend describing yourself as non-binary and as they/them in order to more easily interact with society safely. 

Joseph Smith: Innocent

The founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Church,) Joseph Smith, was in no way a polygamist. There are two things that must be considered: 

1. The actual evidence that exists and what that evidence suggests, and
2. the narrative that emerges from that evidence powerfully defends Joseph Smith and The Church. It raises questions for Brigham Young, but Brigham Young has always been a problem for The Church and we've been eschewing his influence on our religion since the day he died.

Evidence:

You want a complete breakdown of the evidence? OK, you asked for it, so pay attention:

Joseph Smith, his wife Emma, and Joseph's brother Hyrum were main leaders of The Church before Hyrum and Joseph were assassinated on the same day. They always did preach against any form of polygamy, and excommunicated people for doing anything like polygamy. All of Joseph Smith's interpretations of scripture reject polygamy, and that Jacob 2 verse 30 clearly means "if God wants to a chosen people to grow He will command them to be monogamous, otherwise they will fall into the same evil practice as David and Solomon and have multiple wives." All of the evidence to the contrary is pure trash, and yes this can easily be proven with each and every wife example that has been brought up, as per the video above. That's why DNA evidence has proved that Joseph Smith had no children with anyone but Emma, is because he was only having sexual relations with Emma. If you doubt this, watch the above video again, more carefully this time.

Narrative:

This is very good news for members of The Church, because means that Joseph Smith WAS trustworthy, and that he was NOT a womanizer or pedophile. Now we can look at how The Church got side tracked by polygamy:

Basically people who later led The Church after Joseph Smith did not work very closely with Joseph Smith for very long, and were heavily influenced by other religious sources. The Church was only one of may Christian Utopian movements, and many of those movements disagreed with monogamy. The Church absorbed and was otherwise exposed to these movements both in North American and in Europe. The new leadership under Brigham Young may have believed Joseph Smith had practiced polygamy, even though in hindsight Joseph obviously did not. The fact that this new leadership intentionally altered the historical record shows there was an organized movement soon after Joseph Smith died to try to make Joseph look like a polygamist. Confused or disagree? Watch the last video above again, more carefully this time.

Joseph Smith was a hard-core monogamist and this is great news for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.