One Boy at a Time

In our era of gender-fluidity and pomosexuality, maleness has been demonized. Whenever any of us experiences a strong sexual impulse, we sag our heads in shame of our maleness. By "emasculation" I refer to any time we are made to feel less because of our maleness.

Women have maleness. They carry genes which are intended to benefit male offspring should they reproduce. This maleness can be expressed in their own biology and personality. Whenever a woman is asked to refrain from "unladylike behavior" she is experiencing emasculation.

Sexual objectification of women is the most obvious form of female emasculation. When men only see her as a sex object, men cannot appreciate the male characteristics a woman is contributing to the group. Her male qualities are ignored, and thus her maleness emasculated.

In the martial arts, I have worked out with numerous females who were very physically attractive. Often we would be working on ground fighting, on a mat in very close quarters, bodies weighing on each other as we battled for positions to dominate each other. However these circumstances were far from erotic, as their male aggression forced me into numerous painful submissions as I was choked, pinned, or had my arm twisted until I surrendered.

These females, as sexy as they were, were brothers in arms to me, and that is exactly how I saw them. Without others to spar with, I could not get better at martial arts, and another potential sparring partner was much more rare and valuable to me than yet another potential sexual partner. Now as I encounter new attractive female students, my words for them are brother to brother, as I help them awaken and harness the male within: "Hit me as hard as you can. OK, now swing your body into it. Hit me harder! That's better, now keep your hands up!"

But most often emasculation is used to openly assault straight male sexual identity. Straight males are criticized for being more attracted to fit females over unfit ones - as if they were the only ones who can control who they are attracted to. They are criticized for being too forward with females they are attracted to, and criticized for not being forward enough. Never minding the fact that most females will develop self-esteem problems if they see themselves as wholly unattractive to men, male heterosexual attraction towards females is often seen as the definition of pure evil.

"One Boy at a Time" is what I refer to a specific canned response I often see on social media. It goes something like this: "males are all inherently misogynist. We have to overcome rape culture by teaching them to see females as people instead of sexual objects, one boy at a time." This sounds like a green skinned witch with a long warty nose, a dark hooded robe, and a straight razor wandering a city park and castrating any little boy she can get her hands on. This assumes most males can not see for themselves the painfully obvious fact that females are also people, as if most males constantly groped most attractive females they see. The message to boys is clear: "the way your were born is NOT OK."

One Boy at a Time is incredibly and naively optimistic about protecting females from male aggression. First it is assumed that a little education can change a person's behavior significantly. Second, it assumes that a "one at a time" approach can keep up with the birthrate of new males.

First, the kind of opportunist that takes advantage of vulnerable females at each convenient opportunity is not most males, or we would live in a much different world. Just as all women carry male characteristics, males also carry female characteristics and have an empathetic, nurturing side that is horrified at the thought of another human being being sexually victimized. This means that when a women is being sexually victimized by a male, it is a male that is abnormal in some way. With two equally large populations, if only 5% of population A is aggressive towards population B, that is plenty of aggressors to, as the days go by, repeatedly and regularly harass 100% of population B, even if 95% of Population A is horrified at the prospect of such harassment happening to population B. This kind of opportunist, the 5% as I have referred to here, aren't going to change by way of educational effort.

Second "One Boy at a Time" is not frequent enough to catch up with the birth rate of males. If every male is born with this sort of original sin of built-in-misogyny than no one-on-one tutoring program on how to think about females is going to reach them all. One Boy at a Time is practically inadequate.

Once upon a time I did an internship for college credit with an extremely progressive activist organization. One of the leaders in this organization invited me over to her place to work on some strategic planning documents. She acted as if she was unsure about where the most comfortable place to get work done would be, going from kitchen to living room to - before I realized what was going on - her bedroom, as she gestured to her bed "we could get some work done there." Not only did I need this project for college credit, I was married, and even more to the point, she was NOT my type. I pretended like I was just too stupid to understand and explained I needed a table to write on, and managed to get some work on the documents done with her before leaving without further incident.

This was not the only time women have tried to coerce me into sexual encounters with them when I found myself alone with them. I use this specific example so that it is crystal clear that from my experience, hard-line anti-cis-male ultra-progressive feminist females are far from above this kind of harassment. Ideals do not guarantee behavior, and women possess a wealth of toxic masculinity themselves.

In my personal life, I categorically don't hang out with women who are having more than one drink, ever. I reserve the right to be a red blooded male. I retain my maleness - I have sexual might that is all too easily unleashed - and I reserve the right to constrain it by avoiding even the appearance of evil.
If it LOOKS bad, why go there?  Male. Heterosexual. 100%. That is my sexual identity, ready and willing to inflict bedroom mayhem on vixens everywhere, if unrestrained. Restraint is part of taking my sexual identity seriously. THIS prevents "rape culture." THESE kind of "avoiding the appearance of evil" standards are the ONLY effective protection for females from highly opportunistic males. 

Orthodox Stance With Weapons

Orthodox stance, by my definition (and most others), refers to a fighting stance where:

1. The weak foot is forward, and the strong foot is back.
2. The weak hand is forward, and the strong hand is back.
3. Both hands are held defensively in front of the the body or head.
4. The stance is square enough so that the opponent can still be easily reached with the strong hand.

In fencing they have the opposite of an orthodox stance. They are standing so far sideways that it is hard to reach the opponent with the rear hand, and they are leading with the strong side. This stance is often popular in light contact point-sparring competitions that imitate fencing.

The best weapon fighters right now seem to be using a stance that is strong side forward, but which is otherwise what I would think of as an orthodox stance.

I am very interested in using an orthodox stance (instead of a strong side forward stance) in weapon fighting, a tactic that after a lot of experimentation and development, I tried out at the 2017 Pacific North West Tipon Tipon:

Besides Boxing and Kick Boxing, typically Sword & Sheild fighters will fight with an orthodox stance:

And most people who train with spears quickly realize you want to use an orthodox stance with long weapons as well:

Even in the notoriously strong-side-forward world of Japanese weapon martial arts, with long weapons a more orthodox stance is preferred:

What the orthodox stance brings to smaller weapons such as knives, is it keeps the empty hand in the fight. Normally beginners and many others will want to knife fight with only one side of their body, keeping distance from the opponent and not endangering their weak hand (which is full of vulnerable and valuable veins, nerves and bones). But when using an orthodox stance in knife fighting, it forces you to keep the weak side of your body in the fight, so that you are more likely to employ two hands instead of just one:

The other big advantage of the orthodox stance is that kick boxers and boxers should be able to integrate their unarmed strikes into their weapon duels more easily, if they are starting from a stance they are already trained to use.

Right now the orthodox stance is not the dominant stance in full contact weapon sparring, but for me the verdict is still out on this.

Kudos for Kudo

By the early 80's martial arts master Takashi Azuma had earned advanced black belts in Judo and Kyokushin. He then created a synthesis of the two arts, now called Kudo. At first glance Kudo looks like MMA with uniforms and helmets (raising the question as to why we still need Judo or TKD in the Olympics when we could have Kudo instead):

But the use of the Gi in Kudo is even more practical and street-fighting related than what we find in in other Gi-grappling arts:

While those helmets make for some good-looking athletes with relatively few boxer's noses and cauliflower ears compared to MMA, those helmets also help allow headbutts which are now often illegal even in MMA. When I studied Judo off and on over the course of a decade (never making it close to yellow belt,) I was always puzzled at how easy it was to accidentally smack your head into your opponent's head in many Judo throws. Allowing headbutts as intentional attacks makes for more head position awareness:

Kudo has a rich tradition and philosophy as well, complete with (above mentioned) legendary martial arts master founder doing a super human martial arts stunt:

Though it is interesting that Kudo has been around far longer than MMA, Kudo has managed to incorporate plenty of boxing, Muay Thai and BJJ over the years, so that it is basically the perfect martial art for the self defense consumer:

Health Care Reality

I have stated repeatedly that the number one reason why Hillary lost the electoral college vote was because she continued to defend Obamacare (ACA) even as it continued to fail the fly-over states. Many of you seem to think Health Care Coverage is not the number one political issue of our time, yet it is.

First understand how bad Obamacare actually got for many people. In at least 5 states there were only one carrier in the ACA health exchanges, while healthcare insurance prices soared in those states as you would expect with such a monopoly. Alabama's health insurance prices became more expensive than California's. Some of that was state-level self-inflicted wounds by conservative states rejecting the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, but just as the public option would have been required to make the ACA/Obamacare work, so allowing for this obstructionism in Obamacare's design was also a fatal flaw.

Various polls have shown that when the policy is explained to the person being asked, we in the USA strongly prefer a "single payer" system for health care to any alternative. The problem is now the name "single payer" because of the specific disaster mentioned above with health insurance monopolies created in Obamacare exchanges. The plain American English for what we mean by "single payer" (which is not private health insurance monopolies) is "Medicare for All," as espoused by Bearnie Sander's platform. There was a very significant anti-establishment overlap between Trump voters and Sanders voters, but once Hillary got her party's nomination, she guaranteed "Medicare for All" would not be on the agenda, and voters desperate for change on this one most important issue had little choice but to vote for Trump.

Before  Obamacare, we Americans were easily frightened by tales from Western Europe and Canada about the failures of single-payer health care coverage. However now that we have seen just how rapidly things can decline, a "European-style health care system" is sounding very good to us. There is one other English speaking country in the Americas, and they are right next door to us. We know the Canadians have a superior health care system to ours, and there isn't any hiding it. 10 years ago you could have pointed to their taxes and convinced us it was too luxurious for the USA, but now that we have seen our health care prices skyrocket in spite of the Obamacare overhaul, "Canadian taxes" are the least of our health insurance expense concerns.

As Americans, we believe in freedom, so that employer based health insurance is a very poor cultural match for us:

1. From an employer's perspective, an entrepreneur or manager shouldn't have to sweat how to cover employee health insurance. This is not a natural part of the wages vs. hours formula, and when health care insurance prices go up for exactly the same or worse coverage, your employees do not appreciate what you are paying for them because they aren't paying for it, except for in lower and less frequent raises. Employer-based health insurance impedes our ability as Americans to complete fairly in business.
2. From an employee's perspective, the threat of losing employment means loosing access to your doctor. For anyone with a significant health condition OR at risk for a serious health care condition (basically all of us,) this is very like threatening our lives. In other words, employer-based health care for the employee is strikingly similar to guns-pointed-at-our-heads slavery.

I also often say "do not tell me about political parties. Instead give me Libertarians and Socialists, so we can have a grown up conversation about meaningful policies." In an era were most jobs are rapidly being replaced my automation, the most important question voters should be asking themselves (besides perhaps issues around maintaining their rights to vote in the first place,) is "what should be paid for by taxes, and what shouldn't be paid for by taxes." We get so caught up in political bike shed issues, that this critical question is rarely debated:

• Roads should be paid for by taxes, because they are too expensive for any of us individually to build and maintain, but we all need those roads. See also military, court system, government, etc.
• Chocolate should not be paid for by taxes, because it is inexpensive enough for anyone who wants it to get it, and even in the case of extraordinarily expensive chocolate, we do not depend on chocolate to survive. See also piano lessons, watermelons, entertainment, etc.

In the days of the traveling door-to-door doctor (think 1800's,) health care coverage was far more affordable and far less effective at extending our survival. Now in 2017 health care is like roads, incredibly expensive and critical to survival in our society. Health care should be paid for by taxes and have have nothing to do with our decisions regarding business plans or how we spend our days.

Mint

At the Game Arts Guild we get the most powerful hardware we can afford by buying last-years laptops that haven't sold and go on sale to make room for the latest inventory. We then put Linux on them instead of Windows to get maximum performance (and so they aren't at all outdated.) I have two secrets that make this simple to do.

First and foremost, if your Linux machine has a problem where the screen freezes up for no apparent reason (a chronic problem for us in the past), do this:

(This is from: http://askubuntu.com/questions/760731/lenovo-thinkpad-11e-randomly-freezes-on-ubuntu-16-04 Note: to edit grub, you have to run the text editor from the command line with “sudo”. In Mint, you would open a terminal and type “sudo xed”.) 

Edit /etc/default/grub. Change the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_idle.max_cstate=1 quiet splash" 

then in the terminal enter:

sudo update-grub

and restart the computer.

Second, use Mint Linux:

1. Your first clue is because it has been the most popular version of Linux on DistroWatch.com for a very long time. 
2. Your second clue is that though it is based on Ubuntu (the other most popular type of Linux) it has three major versions, two Ubuntu versions (MATE based on the older, faster, more established Gnome 2, vs. Cinnamon based on the slower, fancier Gnome 3,) and a Debian version, so that the Mint Linux community has a very clear definition of what their operating system experience should be like in spite of whatever desktop (MATE vs. Cinnamon) or back end (Ubuntu vs. Debian) they are using. Obviously you should be going with Mint MATE in most cases.
3. Anything lighter weight than Mint MATE (like say Xubuntu) comes at a great sacrifice (as with Xubuntu's Thunar file manager which in my experience cannot reliably either move large files around or see USB drives. Lubuntu? Worse.) The good news is that Android is turning into a real OS called "Andromeda," and most low end machines will not need a new OS for most users.
4. That Mint "definition of operating system experience" is ideal. The default set up is simple, familiar, easy to use, and conscious of screen real estate. It installs easily. It starts with the software that makes the most sense such as VLC for a media player and GIMP for an image editor. This Mint definition has also very stable, not changing with fads like Windows 8. Installing other software on it (such as the Chrome Browser) is easy.

Levels

In 2006, while a graduate student at Antioch University Seattle, there was an Open Space event where I tried to promote the idea of "replacing classrooms with diagnostic portfolios." A school is trying to teach specific things, so they should teach those things until point by point the students prove they know those things, and thus should abandon the classroom structure all together. Now, 10 years later, upper level admin are going rogue at MIT to do something very similar:
http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Start/235121?cid=trend_right_a

Think of swimming lessons. They have groups of student at different levels, and when a student has mastered the level they are on, they move on to the next level, not before, and not after. Because if you don't teach swimming this way people drown.

A friend of mine tried to put her 14 year old son in her more talented-when-it-comes-to-swimming 11 year old son's swimming level, because she just figured the 14 year old could handle it. He ended puking up water in the pool gutter from his constant barely not drowning he was doing instead of swimming, and back in the more novice swimming class. He lost his tolerance for swimming lessons all together, and now he and his brothers are doing parkour classes instead.

As students are plummeted forward through classes on a rigid time line they don't have time to develop, least bit maintain, demonstrable skill. They find challenging material overwhelming, and often abandon the subject all together.

Taking the subject of mathematics for example, it is impossibly demanding for a teacher to be expected to get every single student to learn every single thing over the course of the school year. The result is a loss of interest in mathematics from students, bad over all test scores for the school, and not enough well prepared students for the future workforce.

What if instead we taught Math like we do swimming lessons. Instead of dividing students into classes and years, divide them into weeks-long levels, with one teacher per level, and the students stay in that level until they are competent at that level. This does not require a development in curriculum, because we already have Khan Academy. Just as the rogue MIT administration has determined that lectures and classrooms are extremely outdated in the face of things like Wikipedia, Youtube and other internet resources, it's time to stop torturing students instead of teaching them:

Personality Vortex

This post is primarily about one article:  http://qz.com/841049/election-2016-america-has-elected-its-own-berlusconi-in-donald-trump-now-its-about-to-repeat-italys-biggest-mistake/

Let me summarize the point for you clearly: If you make this about Trump's personality, (which is easy to do because his neon physical appearance, lifestyle, and criminality is so very larger-than-life,) you will make him much stronger politically. Remember when Hillary was content to let Trump hang himself with his own rope by letting him just keep talking? How well did that work for her?

Making this about Trump's villainy is handing the narrative right on over to him. Consider just for a moment the power of name recognition. Trump's name is out there now in an irrevocable way. He now has the most name recognition of any president in history. The best.

If he is what is in the mind of the voters, the voters will vote for him. All of this constant onslaught of attacking his moral character because of his amoral cabinet choices (military leaders, known racists and scam artists) plays into Trump's strategy, which is to simply keep the narrative all about him.

Obama's personality was over the top. First black president, played basket ball, attended Black Church. Smarmy-annoying-lawyer Chicago-Politician attitude. Impeccable political strategy. There was a lot to like there for metrosexuals, but what most lefties didn't realize, is there was even MORE there to HATE for ammosexuals!

McCain and Romney lost to Obama in very significant ways, because they got in what I call Obama's "personality vortex." The more corrupt, wall street, silver-spooned, drug using, pandering, Joker-like they made him out to be - the more they turned Obama into a super villain - the more Obama's victory was assured. "Bad press is better than no press" means that if your opponent isn't currently making headlines and you create a headline for him by attacking him, you have just done your opponent a huge favor.

Look at Ronald Reagan's personality vortex. It was so powerful that after his eight years he even got George H. W. Bush elected, far more potent than Obama's vortex. Even more perilously for the people of the USA, Bill Clinton's sax-playing personality vortex was so strong that he got reelected even as he passed overtly racist policies, pumping up the prison industrial complex, dismantling the public safety net, and sending jobs out of our country with NAFTA.

Now we are caught in Trump's personality vortex. It is exponentially stronger than even Reagan's was, and the progressives are not only going to lose 2020, but at this rate they will lose 2024 as well. Instead I strongly recommend the following strategies:

1. Talk about POLICIES, not about PEOPLE (unless they are your people, but then you must focus on policies all the more to compensate.) In the face of a Trump personality vortex, you must show why your IDEAS are better than their ideas, because in so far as this is about individual virtue, the bigger personality will win regardless of how virtuous they aren't.
2. Have policies that matter! Propping up Obamacare as it fails to contain health care costs was a fatal error for Hillary. Even though Medicare For All (espoused by Sanders) was seen as less politically viable - it is that very controversy that would have focused more attention on Hillary. More importantly, Medicare For All had it's own personality vortex as a policy that would have attracted votes. In today's era of mechanization and radical loss of jobs, the left should be all about Basic Income right now, but instead they flounder while Elon Musk is left to proselyte the idea on his own. Now that the Electoral College has proved to fail to protect us against demagogues, how is it that progressives aren't turning this slave-era form of voter suppression into a major political issue?
3. Point attacks AWAY from the opponent. It's NOT Trump's racist cabinet picks when the whole GOP stands by, holds their nose and nods - that is the entire GOP failing to protest Trump's appointing of racists and charlatans while militarizing our government. That isn't Trump, it's the whole GOP. Make them OWN that. More importantly, as with Medicare For All, it isn't just the GOP to blame, it is all of us: our country is out of touch with the fact it would be better for businesses (because of international competition with government subsidized health care for their employees) and individuals (who's insurance premiums are clearly raising faster than their taxes would have from a single payer system) alike to to have a single payer system.
4. Seize the Change brand, and hold on to it for dear life. Hillary's status-quo strategy was ill conceived from the beginning. Manufacturing jobs and fly-over states are so compromised that it will be a very long time before protecting the status quo will be a viable political strategy.  How did the DEMOCRATS become the pro-war, pro-insurance, pro-corporate-oligarchy, defending status-quo party? That happened when the DNC thought conservatism would be a good way for a progressive party to win 2016. Wrong. 

By death gripping the change brand, generalizing blame and focusing on policies that matter, it is far easier to draw attention to the more progressive candidate, steering clear of Trump's personality vortex, and by attrition making him seem like an old boring idea from the past, along with the GOP and their anti-people agenda. Don't let conservatives scapegoat Trump so they don't have to own their own garbage. Don't let progressives use Trump as an excuse for their own political ineptitude and lack of conviction. Every time you see some post or article demonizing Trump, remind them of the fact they are erring, drop something along these lines in the comments: