Blog Labels

I have updated this blog by labeling each of the over 100 blog posts as one or more of the following:

1. Martial Arts: make no mistake, though I write about martial arts, I also practice them.
2. Ideology: I talk about religion and politics far more than is considered polite.
3. Entertainment: for everything that isn't clearly Martial Arts and/or Ideology.

Progressive vs Conservative in The Restored Church

Fall Conference has concluded, with a historical announcement about Sunday meetings going from 3 hours every Sunday down to 2 hours, and 12 new temples, many of them in remote or destitute parts of the southern hemisphere - everything was pretty progressive and exiting. But the strange thing is this has all be side tracked by Elder Oaks talk that was a rehash of all our current politically incorrect beliefs. What was Elder Oaks thinking?

Before you can understand what Elder Oaks was doing there, you first have to understand the ongoing debate that has dominated General Conference since I can remember. The Church has been making an awkward transition from a theocracy to a spiritual practice since Utah joined the United States. At one point in those days of yore The Church was running a form of Christian Socialism called "The United Order" and was anti-slavery, just as progressive as you can possibly imagine for that era. As The Church has assimilated slowly into its place as a global religion instead of a local theocracy, it has taken political positions similar to other major Christian religions.

But if you are a member of The Church, those political positions do not weigh on your day to day life. What takes its toll on your life is how much time your religion takes up out of your day. As an all volunteer ministry, you donate significant amounts of time keeping your local congregation going in volunteer assigned positions called "callings." The Church puts other demands on your time. Consider the expectations I had as a 16 year old member of The Church:

• Go to Church for 3 hours each Sunday.
• Go to Boy Scouts once a week and try to become an Eagle Scout (no small task.)
• Have a part time job to save money to serve a mission (I got employee of the month at my local Safeway.)
• Go to an hour of early morning Seminary each day before school.
• Participate in extra curricular activities, particularly athletics.
• Do well in school, doing lots of homework.
• Socialize with other youth from Church.
• Practice personal prayer and scripture study.
• Participate in family prayer and scripture study.
• Get adequate rest to do some fraction of the above.

Obviously that was impossible, and I chose to do martial arts instead of much of the above. But in the past The Church was an entire society/ethnicity/culture/theocracy that completely consumed the time of the people in it (as most cultures do.) 

The debate inside of The Church is about "how much time should members have to spend doing things related to The Church?" On a local level you might call this a power struggle between the Stake Presidents, (who's job it is to administrate the church in their area and thus need lots of volunteer man hours to help them do that,) and the Temple Presidents (who need people to have lots of free time to meditate, spiritually develop themselves, and thus spend time at their temple.)  If you pay attention to General Conference carefully, you will see some people are clearly on one side or the other, and others are caught in between in the fray between these two opposing factions.

This conference was a near total scorched earth victory in this great tug of war, with the 3 hour church meetings being reduced to 2 hour church meetings. The divorce between the Boy Scouts of America and The Church was another such victory. The Church is focused on becoming a serious spiritual practice rather than an all consuming volunteer activity.

Elder Oaks is the most single outspoken proponent of members spending as much time as they possibly can doing church stuff... to listen to some of his previous talks, you would think doing anything that was not in direct service to the faith could be considered a senseless waste of your life. So from an internal perspective as a member of The Church, Elder Oaks is the most conservative Apostle, the one who embraces the old theocratic lifestyle more so than the others.

Obviously Elder Oaks wasn't really able to do his usual thing at conference where 1/3 of the membership's Sunday duties were just excused. Instead, he just focused on his other extraordinarily conservative views. The apostles are not supposed to agree on everything, and it is refreshing to me that even with the frustration of not really being able to tell who the progressive minds within the apostleship are, we can at least see who the most conservative one is. I appreciate Elder Oak's transparency on this, even if his positions make it harder for me be a member of The Church:

Update: What is Tai Chi?

I have updated the "What Is Tai Chi" page on this blog to include a new 4th section called "Combat Sports Participation", after the Plumb Blossom Federation removed an article where Doc Fai Wong praised BJJ, and after I argued with people on Bullshido.net about "How to Fix Aikido." (Turns out the best full contact sparring rules for Aikido, for both historical and functional reasons, might be Sumo sparring rules.) In that time I realized I never met a good Tai Chi instructor who didn't also at least encourage his Tai Chi students to participate in some form of Combat Sport. So in my view Tai Chi includes four main elements of training: standing mediation, stationary push hands drills, moving step push hands sparring, and combat sports participation. Here is the new section on Combat Sports Participation if you are already familiar with my "What Is Tai Chi?" page:

Combat Sports Participation

Every solid Tai Chi instructor I have encountered also coached some form of full contact fighting beyond moving step push hands. In my case my first Tai Chi instructor Vern Miller (Doc Fai Wong's first student officially endorsed to start his own school) was also a boxing and kickboxing coach who trained various successful fighters, the most famous of which was Margaret Macgregor. It is very common for Tai Chi instructors to also train their students in Chinese Kickboxing. I have also heard of Tai Chi masters encouraged their students to cross train in Judo, Knock Down Karate, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai and many different styles of full-contact Kung Fu (Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar, Pa Kua, Hsing-I, etc.)

There were various old-fashioned types of Tai Chi with lots of deep stances and hard core Chinese Wrestling and Fencing techniques. The most common was Chen style Tai Chi. As Chen style became very popular, one branch became more popular than the others, which is Yang style - now the world's most common style of Tai Chi, known for their slow moving forms. Yang has also had a few break off variations, the most common of which is Wu style Tai Chi.  Chen (older than Yang) and Wu (newer than Yang) are still often taught as full contact martial arts. This idea that "Tai Chi is just exercise" has NO historical basis, and comes from the lazy practices of many substandard Yang style Tai Chi instructors (though not all Yang style instructors are substandard.)

Tai Chi is usually taught with other martial arts. This is common of many good martial arts, because good martial arts tend to focus on a particular range of self defense techniques. In MMA the four most common Martial Arts offer deeper understanding of Tai Chi:

1. One of my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instructors was Wu style Tai Chi master Dmitriy Gak. He agreed with me that the one martial art that does what Tai Chi aspires to more than any other in MMA is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Yang style Grand Master Doc Fai Wong has also made similar claims. When it comes to absorbing a larger, stronger opponent's attack and defeating them with their own energy, BJJ is where it is at.
2. Vern Miller once pointed out to me the alarming similarities between Muay Thai and Tai Chi. If you are familiar with both arts than you know what I am talking about, with the aggressive use of cat stances when fighting, the hand positioning in fighting stances, Golden Rooster, etc. However since I more recently got exposure to striking for MMA specifically, I found even more similarities, especially when it comes to weight shifting. Muay Thai is more like Tai Chi than any Chinese martial art I know of. One of the 8 Gates is "elbow," and there isn't anything more "elbow" than Muay Thai. Even the take downs in Muay Thai are similar to Tai Chi take downs.
3.  Boxing, more than any other martial art, will teach you what those five steps are all about. That ideal of being able to take on multiple opponents, the idea of being able to put an opponent at a disadvantage simply by getting out of his way, that stuff is all extremely manifested in boxing training.
4. Compared to the other internal martial arts, Tai Chi is a wrestling style. Of the 8 Gates wrestling covers splitting and plucking like no other, but wrestling also teaches some of the other 13 principles as well.

The reason why Tai Chi is so often cross trained with other martial arts is not only because other martial arts help us understand Tai Chi better, but also because training in multiple martial arts has always been a best practice for fighters and martial artists.

Fixing Aikido

Critics of "Traditional Martial Arts" often forget that martial arts weren't originally for fighting in a ring. They were typically preparing people for life and death conflicts using weapons. Many say this side of the martial arts has always been codified in kata and never sparred with, but historical research time and again reveals weapon sparring practices among warriors using safety gear, in almost every culture.

But isn't this what Aikido is trying to avoid, violent conflict? Violence is on a continuum. We can all agree that it is less lethal to slice someone's face with a knife than it is to shoot them in the head. Both will probably end the fight, but one is clearly less violent than the other.

But aren't weapon fighting techniques too deadly to spar with? In 2018 it is more than possible to find adequate safety equipment for weapon sparring. In fact at least one major branch of Aikido, popularly referred to as Tomiki Aikido, is highly focused on multiple types of sparring, the most famous of which is their knife-vs-unarmed sparring:

Aikido pacifist ideology justifies a lack of sparring when taken to a religious extreme.  But let me be clear, many Aikido techniques have practical application in fighting... consider this first 90 second round I fought in at the 2018 North West Warrior Tipon Tipon (first 90 seconds of this video):

There was lots of non-stop foot footwork, a knife disarm applied to me while I was resisting 100%, and I used shoulder roll (I originally learned in Aikido back in high school) to pick up a lost weapon. Why can't most Aikido guys brawl like that? Simply put it is because of a lack of sparring. Tomiki and Hatenkai Aikido practitioners probably would bring a lot of executable technique into a fight like mine above. But what can the average Aikido sensei who has not been lucky enough to have access to Tomiki or Hatenkai do to inject a healthy does of practical application to his school?

1. Get head and face protection and sparring swords, and start sparring with your Aikido sword technique. Spar as if they were bokens, continuously like a boxing round (NOT stop and go like fencing.) Practice using your Aikido footwork, entering and blending as you spar, and tons of circular footwork as well. Start at half speed, and work your way up in speed and contact level, and wear cups. 
   
2. Do Randori with two people attacking, while one person protects themselves with a sparring sword (the two attackers will need the face and head protection.) 
   
   
   
3. Then do the same with sparring knives.
   
   
4. Once you get to this point, then start exploring how to use the most basic and simple Aikido throws in your weapon sparring. 
5. Next let take this contact sparring into your randori. Have have one person protect themselves against an opponent with a sparring weapon. Have them practice against two people with sparring weapons. Get creative and mix it up in some full contact randori. 
6. Once you are comfortable with this full contact randori...  add in Aikido atemi... whatever strikes is you defend against in your kata, front kick, punch to the body etc. Work this atemi into your one on one weapon sparring and randori.  
7. Once you are used to sparring and doing randori using these techniques full contact, your last step is to train for a compete in Traditional full contact Jujitsu, also known as "Sport Jujitsu", and not to be confused with Brazilian Jujitsu. Sport Jujitsu is not from Brazil, it includes stand up striking, and stand up throws are just as important as the ground fighting. Aikido must take its place along side other forms of traditional Japanese Jujitsu in full contact competition if it is to be considered an authentic martial art with real history and technique.

You may need to train with like-minded martial arts (such as Enshin Karate or Brazilian Jui Jitsu) in order to adequately prepare for Sport Jujitsu.

But once you are full contact weapon sparring in randori and competing in Sport Jujitsu, you have saved your Aikido school and preserved your art for the next generation.

Seattle Problems

Seattle has turned into a lefty distopian nightmare. There are many great and wonderful things about the place, and lots of people who used to live there still work there, for all of those good reasons. However the housing crisis, inflated by investors using Seattle's real-estate market as a piggy bank, and shockingly bad transportation policy has made Seattle basically unlivable for families. Here I will get into some details, and the one and only solution to Seattle's problems (driverless cars.)

People who think Seattle is family friendly, for some reason, seem to love to point out yuppie waterfront-neighborhood Belltown as the ideal example. It is the last place I have worked or lived in, including some of the worst neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, that I would ever want to raise a family in:

1. A quick glance on Redfin suggests the prices on condos in Belltown range from just under $400,000 to just over $2,000,000. People with kids have responsibilities beyond showing up to work on time and doing all that off-the-clock training their employer demands, and have precious little time for sucking up to bosses after hours, and as a result generally don't have the kind of priorities it takes to afford an $800,000 condo. And news flash: healthy kids make noise, and they don't wait to go outside to do it; smart and active children should be arguing with their parents, running around the house, jumping off of furniture, wrestling, playing loud music and otherwise being completely incompatible with condo life. So that's $800,000 for a condo that is bad for your kids.
2. Families having fled Belltown long ago, it has been for decades now one giant Jerry-Springer-like singles club, and as a result has the worst crime rate in Metro Seattle. No hard working kid from a mid west college or India, with serious intentions of starting a family, is going to be interested in living in that cesspool. Seriously, when vigilantes in Seattle go looking for crime to stop, they go to Belltown:

So every lefty Utopian scheme imaginable has been applied to Belltown and completely failed the future of he human race.  And it's not like bus stops connect you to buses that go anywhere of significance in Belltown, nor would there be any parking, nor is there a light rail stop in Belltown. You better not need to go anywhere during rush our, because you simply aren't going to get there. Though not as bad as Belltown, the rest of Seattle suffers from similar problems.

And here's what they are doing to fix the problem: replacing a major transportation viaduct with a tunnel of less capacity, and trying to establish tolls on roads down town. All of this will push more traffic onto I-5, which already routinely comes to a stand still almost every rush hour. In other words an impressively disastrous problem is about to get a lot worse.

How did this happen; aren't commies supposed to be good at infrastructure building? In the 1970's America was preparing for the future with huge infrastructure projects, most importantly serious subway systems, which are now the backbones of major metropolitan areas like NYC, Chicago, LA and Atlanta. Atlanta!? Isn't Seattle bigger than that? How did they get one and Seattle didn't? Atlanta got Seattle's subway because voters in Seattle didn't want one!

See, it is a simple issue of ideology vs. pragmatism. You can have all the post-modern, marxist, misandry-based, city-wide-strike having, granola eating ideology you want, but if you have no thought in the world for practicality, then your ideology:

1. Has never mattered.
2. Currently does not matter in any meaningful way.
3. Never will matter at any possible point in the future.

And now we get to the heart of the problem with popular solutions to Seattle's problems, which is that everyone should just simply ride the bus or a bike to work. The problem for parents is time. Every second we are not with our kids, we are risking raising future prostitutes, violent criminals or Belltown inhabitants. If we indulge in the guilty pleasure of taking time for ourselves to go to the gym, take a shower or sleep, that time is incredibly precious.

The problem with the Bus or a Bike is it demands your attention. You can't e-mail or watch the news on your bike for hopefully-obvious-reasons-to-even-someone-like-you. But you can't do this on the Bus either, because the bus also demands your attention, the bus driver does not guarantee you will get off the bus when you are supposed to. Because it is so easy to miss your stop on a bus, it is impossible to accomplish meaningful activity on a bus ride.

I take an hour long ferry ride to Seattle for work. It is never too crowded to have a seat. I don't have to drive, I don't have to peddle and dodge texting drivers, and when the boat stops, if the legions of fellow commuters getting up and leaving doesn't catch my attention, ferry staff will personally come by and make sure I know it is time to get off the one and only possible stop for the vehicle. I get tons of work done on the ferry. I even occasionally get some Netflix in on the ferry - real, actual entertainment - an unheard of luxury for most parents.

My co-workers try to express sympathy for the long commute. But when they leave the workplace at 4PM, how long do you think it takes them to get home? They might only live 20 minutes away at 2 AM in the morning, but in Seattle rush our traffic that often takes longer and ends up being more expensive than my ferry ride. When I lived in Seattle I used to take crowded buses to work that took just as long. I even rode my bike and admittedly got to work a few minutes quicker, but it was incredibly dangerous and it was easy to get a flat tire, so it wasn't very reliable.

And *driving* to work in a car in Seattle - if it isn't painfully obvious already - is no kind of solution. The experience is dreadful, terribly slow traffic with horrible drivers. Parking is... I don't even know how to explain it to someone who doesn't live in Seattle... but essentially the Seattle City Council has for decades tried to prevent people from driving downtown by not having parking spaces... you can easily pay over $20 a day for parking downtown, and it's not likely to be very close to the destination your are trying to get to.

Taxis are too expensive for anyone to commute to work daily in. Ubers though more affordable have other problems that illustrate other problems from driver-based transportation: if you can trust the driver to get you where you are going without constantly looking over their shoulder, they will often want to talk with you, making it impossible for you to be productive. Then there is the question of reliability, will your Uber driver show up on time, if at all?

So the solution is ferry rides for all parents. What that means in practice is diverless cars. In a driverless vehicle you will be able to stretch out your feet and relax, almost as well as on a ferry.  You will be able to pull out your cellphone or laptop and get very caught up on many things you need to do, and you might even be able to get caught up on your favorite Youtube channel. It will show up much faster than a bus or ferry, and will be a lot more affordable than an Uber, least bit a Taxi.

Some cities can get by with condos and subways, and still end up being family friendly. Not Seattle, our history has been catastrophically consumed by ideological delusions trumping practical reality. But there is a way out of this mess in the future, and that is driverless cars. No city's future is as dependent on this emerging technology as Seattle!

Weapons of Consequence

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

You can't fight a Tank or a Drone with an AR-15. The NRA has been selling us on a lie: guns can project us from military evils. Hand held firearms are not nearly enough.

Can you fight off a chemical weapon attack on civilians with an AR-15?

Can you fight off a jet fighter dropping barrel bombs on civilians with an AR-15?

Can you stop a nuclear dirty bomb with an AR-15?

Small arms are of little consequence in today's world. The 2nd Amendment clearly guarantees weapons sufficient to support a "well regulated militia." But no such weapons have in anyone's living memory been legal in the USA.

The NRA is a pawn, who keeps us too docile to demand the weapons of consequence guaranteed to us by the 2nd amendment.

High Priest Group Extinction

This blog post is going to be about the changes in the LDS priesthood and why they are important. This change is being overshadowed in the media by the fact that they called the first two men of color to be apostles. But what no one is talking about that is far more significant: one of these men of color is in a mixed race relationship... at least until yesterday some LDS still thought that was wrong...  This apostle in his appearance is obviously far-east Asian, and his wife is obviously not:

Any individual LDS congregation (typically called a "Ward," and represents a specific geographical area,) has two major bodies by which the work in the church is done. One is female, called the "Relief Society," and the other is male, called "The Priesthood." Traditionally the priesthood has been divided into two groups, the "Elder's Quorum" for the child-bearing aged men and the "High Priests Quorum" for the older men.

The Relief Society has been one solid body, with no age division. Priesthood and the Relief Society both have similar functions, and their primarily responsibility is what is called "ministering." In a church with a lay ministry, this is how they are able to reach out to members of their ward and see what their needs may be. Don't have enough food for that month? Going through a family emergency and need more social support?  Need help teaching your kids how to grieve for a recently deceased pet? Your ministering brothers or sisters from your LDS ward are trying to check in with you once a month to see if you can use their help. Christianity 101.

Now, before I explain the change, understand that it is a going assumption throughout the Church that the visiting teaching (Relief Society) is generally more frequent and effective than the home teaching (Priesthood.) This is why so many LDS women eye-roll and giggle "I don't think we really need it" when the Media asks them "don't you think you should have the priesthood like the men do?" Because it is a constant source of humor in the LDS faith that the women are already more effective at being disciples of Christ than the men are.

So here's the change in the priesthood: that age division has been nuked. There are no more ward-level "high priest groups." Now all men are in the same "elder's quorum," just like all women are in the "relief society." The message to the men is simple: "The priesthood isn't your own personal boy's club. You are expected to be as effective as the Relief Society now."

They also took a step to make the Relief Society more like the Elder's Quorum. Ministering is always performed in pairs. The Elder's Quorum has been able to have male youth age 14 to 18 pair up with older Priesthood in order to minister, expanding the available pool of ministering brothers. They announced today that female youth age 14 to 18 may now be ministering sisters in the same way.

IF the LDS were going to give women the priesthood (and they made all kinds of Freudian slips that suggested that this is right around the corner,) these would be a critical first steps. (Mormons are of three different categories on that topic:

1. "Orthodox" types are concerned that the current structure helps to keep men involved in family life in the face of misandry and careerism, and that we shouldn't "give women the priesthood," since women are already more effective disciples of Christ without the priesthood.
2. "Ordain Women" types think it is important to have sexual equality in religious practices, and we should empower women by giving them the priesthood.
3. "Sunstone" types think the woman are already given the priesthood when they go to the Temple, and that it wasn't until the mid 1900's that for cultural reasons they formally stopped performing rituals like faith healing on their own.

Regardless of what category most LDS fall into, it isn't a huge significant controversy to them, and it is just one difference of opinion one LDS can have with another LDS. I personally sympathize with all three views.) At any rate, this is a huge unisex structural change that will have a positive effect on the behavior of Mormons, helping us be better Christians and more sensitive to the increasing diversity that is inevitable with an increasing population.