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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
Then do the same with sparring knives.
Once you get to this point, then start exploring how to use the most basic and simple Aikido throws in your weapon sparring.
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
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:
Has never mattered.
Currently does not matter in any meaningful way.
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!
"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.
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:
"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.
"Ordain Women" types think it is important to have sexual equality in religious practices, and we should empower women by giving them the priesthood.
"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.
Tres Espadas does not actually have "lineage" per say, because no professional instructors ever gave us permission or endorsement to start the club. Instead we have influences. Here are those influences, giving credit even though it may not be wanted...
1. Cold Steel - No living Tres Espadas members have had correspondence with Lynn Thompson, and no member has ever met him (least bit trained with him) in person, but his instructional videos are easily the most influential influence on technique in our club. HOWEVER, we don't endorse all of his material, a lot of the strategy to us seems like it is based on fencing style stop and go sparring, and since that is heresy to Tres Espadas, we spar continuously, and so that makes which, how and when techniques are applied different. To be clear, Thompson has studied numerous martial arts, but the ones he is most vocal about are Filipino Martial Arts (FMA):
2. Dog Brothers - showed us that Gatherings (what we at Tres Espadas call "Tipons" because of the local Warrior Tipon Tipon North West gathering) were possible. Get together and really fight without it being a competition, as safely as possible, with different martial arts schools, continuously without the stop and go fencing nonsense? That inspired this Tres Espadas to form in the first place. More recently at the local Tipon we have seen people who train to participate in Dog Brothers, and that has influenced us as well. To be clear, most people participating in Dog Brothers study FMA explicitly. We do NOT consider ourselves to be a serious as most of the people participating in Tipons, as we are more fans than participants:
3. Doc Fai Wong - or more specifically his first student to be endorsed to start his own branch of Doc Fai Wong's Tai Chi & Choy Lay Fut system, Vern Miller, is the guy that really taught the original Tres Espadas members to brawl back in the day. We learned various staff, dagger and Tai Chi forms from him, but his Sanda-derived Duch-style kickboxing system changed how we saw martial arts forever. He is why we can never return to stop-and-go sparring. You know those long range knife swipes we catch people with when they are retreating? Very Choy Lay Fut there. With that said, no Tres Espadas members ever did weapon sparring of any kind when studying Doc Fai Wong's system, though we have been able to apply some of the moves in sparring since:
4. Dave Bird - mostly by way of Dave Coplan, was the older Tres Espadas members first martial arts master. Known for his FMA and kickboxing, he gave us our first experiences with Arnis and contact sparring in the late 80's:
5. SCA - Or more specifically the now deceased martial arts master Jess Roe who had studied everything from FMA to Budo to Chinese Martial Arts to US Naval Cutlass fighting. He would have been the first to tell you that the serious side of SCA martial arts was originally founded on FMA, which they adapted to western weapon simulations. I recently had a well respected FMA instructor and HEMA (European weapon martial arts) participant comment that as HEMA adopts continuous sparring they should not become WEKAF (a sport form of FMA stick fighting.) But I have to wonder how far removed HEMA is from FMA if SCA of 40 years ago was closely related to FMA:
5. Esgrima Criolla - South American Knife Fighting, which involves a lot more than knives. If I had to classify Tres Espadas as a Martial Art (which I don't), I might classify it as an Esgrima Criolla club. FMA practitioners in South America have resurrected this nearly lost art form, and we have had some direct correspondence with them over the years on Facebook:
6. Aikido (Honolulu Hombu Dojo) - by way of Bruce Baumann, he was focused on teaching us self-defense, bokenjitsu and Samurai strategy. Our "never stop moving" footwork strategy and dive rolling for weapons goes back to our Aikido from early 90's high school. Our swift overhead counters really go back to Aikido style bokenjitsu as much as they do Choy Lay Fut. Also our tendency to look at Tai Chi as a martial art rather than a yoga style is rooted back to our earlier Aikido days.
7. MMA - more recently various Tres Espadas members have taken to studying boxing, wrestling, BJJ and MMA generally and have started to incorporate that knowledge into the Tres Esapadas repertoire of techniques.
So a final note on FMA: when FMA was codified, they drew on Martial Arts from all over the Philippines. That is an ethnically diverse place, meaning they were drawing from martial arts from all over Asia and parts of Europe. FMA is one of the first weapon MMAs to incorporate martial arts from around the globe. As a result, FMA has 99% of all the weapon techniques from all other martial arts.
Because of the fighting and sparring traditions in FMA, many FMA schools have a truly deep and vast understanding of weapon martial arts. As a result FMA has become a shared language for talking about weapon martial arts (for example almost everyone exposed to FMA can tell you what the 12 angles of attack are) and it has been used as a basis to bring back mostly lost western arts such as SCA fighting, Esgrima Criolla, and probably somewhere along the line even HEMA.
Tres Espadas has been known to irreverently mock lineage. However we appreciate the fact that as recently as the 1900's people in East Asia were getting chased out of their homes and killed over the Martial Arts knowledge they possessed, and that in each generation teachers of the martial arts sacrifice vast amounts of time and other resources in order to pass their knowledge on. Though the nature of our club leads us to eschew lineage, we have great respect for the masters who exposed any of their knowledge to us.
Not into religion? You are done reading this post now, see you next time.
The purpose of scripture is to help us be better people, not to teach us history and science. According to Christianity God actually visited us in the flesh, and actually had a ministry here on Earth. During that time, in spite having access to all knowledge regarding history and science, God did not preach religion and science, but instead lectured at length on how to improve our spirituality and behavior. Certainly this is also God's purpose in scriptures from other religions.
Let us take the story of the Good Samaritan for example. It has a clear and intended meaning. The point of the story is not "Jesus is a good Samaritan, we are all wounded Jews, stand by and wait for him to help you." The point of the story is also not "did you know 1% of Samaritans were God fearing people that would even help their enemies on the road? Start looking for archaeological evidence of this near where the historical Jesus had his ministry, because he spoke of this phenomenon specifically."
No, the point of the story of the Good Samaritan has little information on it about God, and even less information in it about history and science. It has to do with how we should behave; we should help people when they need it, care for our fellow humans. God wants us to be good.
The misuse of scripture is by definition sacrilege. Off the top of your head, do you know what the implications for our ideal behavior would be from the stories of Noah's flood, or Eve's Garden? Or have we been so caught up in scripture being historical evidence that God exists, that we have for generations now completely overlooked the behavioral implications of these stories?
Adam and Eve is a story about sacrificing our own pride in order to keep important relationships together. There's probably a lot of other behavior implications in there as well. Instead of debating where the location of the Garden of Eden was, or instead of arguing over how this compares to DNA evidence, we should be contemplating the implications of this story for our own behavior.
50 years ago critics of the Book of Mormon claimed there was no physical evidence that: 1) anyone from Europe or the Middle East were ancestors of the American Indians. 2) That ancient Central American cultures were not advanced enough to have the kind of warfare described in the Book of Mormon. 3) More recently DNA evidence came out demonstrating all Native Americans had no DNA that could have possibly been from outside of East Asia.
But all of this evidence and arguing completely distracts from the Book of Mormon's main fundamental messages about what we should do with our spirituality and behavior. The Book of Mormon itself declares that it is to be taken spiritually, not historically. In 1st Nephi 19 v. 23-24, Nephi describes his own ministry to his people:
"I did read many things unto them which were written in the books of Moses; but that I might more fully persuade them to believe in the Lord their Redeemer I did read unto them that which was written by the prophet Isaiah; for I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning... I spake unto them, saying... liken them unto yourselves, that ye may have hope as well as your brethren..."
Here Nephi rejects historicity in favor of spirituality, "liken all scriptures unto us." But the Book of Mormon text declares itself insufficient to understand history. When Nephi passes the "small plates" (that eventually grow into what we now call The Book of Mormon) on to the next prophet, that next prophet explains (in Jacob chapter 1 v. 1-4):
"Nephi gave me, Jacob, a commandment concerning the small plates, upon which these things are engraven.. that I should write upon these plates a few of the things which I considered to be most precious; that I should not touch, save it were lightly, concerning the history of this people which are called the people of Nephi... I should preserve these plates and hand them down unto my seed, from generation to generation... if there were preaching which was sacred, or revelation which was great, or prophesying, that I should engraven the heads of them upon these plates, and touch upon them as much as it were possible..."
Centuries later the prophets in The Book of Mormon elaborate on how much it is NOT a sufficient historical commentary (Helaman Chapter 3 v. 14):
"...a hundredth part of the proceedings of this people... their wars, and contentions, and dissensions... their shipping and their building of ships, and their building of temples, and of synagogues and their sanctuaries, and their righteousness, and their wickedness, and their murders, and their robbings, and their plundering, and all manner of abominations and whoredoms, cannot be contained in this work..."
Is the Doctrine and Covenants supposed to be a complete record of early LDS Church history? Of course not. It is meant to focus on matters of spiritual and behavioral significance, far and beyond any historic or scientific truths that may or may not be contained within.
I suspect this is true of all scripture. Most scripture in most religions have more or less the same message, which is that we are God's creation, he wants us to be happy, so therefore he wants us to be nice to each other. Then scripture examines this form many perspectives in great detail with different strategies for accomplishing that goal. Focusing on scripture as historical evidence is sacrilege, because it entirely misses the point.
