Do not punch people in the face

Philosophically I am really into the golden rule and being nice to people. So when I say "hey, don't punch people in the face" I do mean it on a figurative level. For example, I probably should not have written a blog post about how lousy Texas is, it could have easily hurt some feelings. However, from a self defense perspective, I also mean "don't punch people in the face" on a literal level.

Let's say I told you an attacker could do the following things to you in a fight:

• Break your small hand bones in a so-called "boxer's fracture."
• Give you a nasty laceration on your hand basically guaranteed to become infected without immediate and professional medical treatment.
• Make you liable to pay for plastic surgery for injuries sustained in the fight.
• Make a public display of your confrontation, to help your assailant gain public support and hostile support against you.
• Make your attacker more likely to attack you again in the future.
• Make you more likely to get their blood born pathogens.

That is what you are doing to yourself when in a self-defense situation you punch someone in the face. You risk a boxer's fracture from pounding your knuckles on their skull, hand lacerations from their germ ridden teeth, give them good reason to sue you for plastic surgery bills, wear their trophies around on their face so everyone can see what a jerk you are so that their friends and your enemies can be rallied for battle against you, make your attacker explain why you hit him in the face so that he'll more so want a rematch in the future, and of course the human head lacerates easily and then bleeds generously helping to insure you will be infected with whatever blood born pathogens your attacker has to offer you.

The two most problematic face punches are the jab and cross (left and right straight punches with closed fist.) The farther a strike is from being one of these two punches, the safer it is to use. Straight punches to the body instead of the head for example are very practical in a self defense situation. An uppercut to the jaw for instance is risky as it can easily hit the teeth or cause them to bite their tongue, but is relatively safe compared to the jab and cross. Likewise hooks risk connecting with the skull, but are far less likely to result in a boxer's fracture.

Is this to say Boxing is a bad martial art? No, because people will try to punch you in the face, and boxing is the best way for you to practice against someone trying to punch you in the face:

That boxing defense is ideal because it sets up opportunities to counter attack:

If you can punch someone in the face, you can almost as easily grab them or hit them somewhere else on their body. But where should your jab and cross go if not to the face? I recommend you take a page out of Asian boxing styles and use your knuckles to drive into the large muscle groups in the arms, tolling their ability to attack you. As their arms tire, you can then more easily create openings for devastating body blows:

As I have studied traditional martial arts, I have noticed nearly total absence of straight punches to the head in the "kata" or "forms." Choy Lay Fut has almost all the kung fu strikes in existence in the style, yet all the straight strikes to the head are modified, typically using the fore knuckles instead of a regular closed fist, or an open thrusting palm, or some kind of wide hook is used instead:

However in the most extreme of all closed fist striking martial arts, Karate, it is still very unusual to see straight punches to the face in their drills:

So on one hand, in the gym practicing face punches can be very beneficial to building self defense skills. On the other hand, on the street I would recommend the wisdom of the ancient masters and avoid straight punches to the head.

Trump Card

Warning: this is post about a political subject.

In his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump continually makes more and more outrageous claims, which he himself cannot possibly really believe such as:

1. "Send back all the field workers back to Latin America." Obviously someone in Trump's position understands that our economy would come to a screeching halt, and people with lots money like him would lose out.
2. "No Muslim immigration to the USA." Trump knows this is logistically impossible, since Muslim isn't an ethnicity but a religious preference. Trump offers a clue about his real motivations when he claims "I have lots of Muslim friends and I am helping them."
3. "I want to turn off the internet to stop ISIS, I will talk to Bill Gates about getting it done." The average grade school kid in the USA could correct him on the problems with this statement, and obviously someone like Trump could not possibly believe that statement. Notice this is yet another logistic impossibility.

Let me say this slowly, listen carefully: CORPORATE LEADERS IN THE USA WANT UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WANT TO SHOULDER THE COSTS OF HEALTH CARE FOR THEIR EMPLOYEES. This is a position that organized labor has over time put them in, but it is still their position none the less. Obamacare makes the situation WORSE for these companies, forcing them to pay up more than ever before.

First, let's take what Trump himself has said on health care in a 1998 NBC interview: 

"...I am a liberal on health care, we have to take care of people that are sick... I like Universal health care, we have to take care, there is nothing else. What is the country all about if we are not going to take care of our sick?" 

Second, let's take the ultimate "evil corporation" by liberal standards, WalMart. In  2007 WalMart actually sided with the notoriously progressive SEIU in calling not for Obamacare, but full blown universal "socialist" health care, just like what Trump was praising in 1998.

Third, even GM Motors CEO Richard Wagoner testified on December 5th, 2008 before the House Financial Services Committee something along the lines of "universal health care coverage would help us against foreign competition where health care is provided by their governments instead of by our competitors."

If Donald Trump is elected, he will do everything he can to develop a "socialist" single-payer health care system. Consider what he has already suggested about health insurance companies controlling politics, and his plan to get rid of state borders in a healthcare insurance market place. The health insurance industry would be the first to bemoan this as the end of their existence - it's a stab in the back to the health insurance industry who Trump wants to see die, so that a "socialist" universal health care system will replace it.

However if he wins, it will be because of a groundswell of conservative voters showing up to the polls, which will get other conservative politicians elected, making the establishment of "socialist" universal health care far more difficult. IT IS MUCH MORE EFFECTIVE FOR HIM TO DISCOURAGE CONSERVATIVE VOTERS FROM VOTING IN THE FIRST PLACE. His comments mock conservative sentiments, exaggerating them to the point absurdity; HIS OUTLANDISH COMMENTS ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE CONSERVATIVE VOTERS TOO ASHAMED OF BEING CONSERVATIVE TO VOTE.

This is not the first time you have seen a millionaire do this. Consider Mitt Romney. In 2008 - an election where at the time it was painfully obviously that the number one issue was going to be the economy - where Romney would have easily trounced Obama in the general election because of his business experience - Romney dropped out only when he was sure that his last GOP rival, McCain, was too old-looking to be credible on solving a new financial crisis compared to the Democrat candidates. It is no coincidence that this act of sabotage led to Mitt Romney's health care system in Massachusetts - aka "Romneycare" - becoming spread from sea to shining sea as our nations new "Obamacare." Romey's lackluster performance as the 2012 GOP candidate - and his flaunting of his unpopular LDS faith in front of largely conservative Christian GOP voters - clearly intended to keep conservative voters home from the poles, just as Trump's outrageous comments are being used today.

As a radical left-wing progressive, I am a huge fan of Trump, like Romney before him. As a conservative voter, this should alarm you:

TX: GTFO

Warning: this is an overtly political blog post. If you are sensitive about these things, this is the end of this post for you, see you next time.

When I see my friend suffering from congestive heart failure in GA denied health care because his state successfully rejected some portion of Obamacare, it makes me mortified to be an American. I take some small comfort in knowing I don't actually have to migrate to Scandinavia to live in a civilized world, I can simply defect to Canada, only a few hundred miles north of where I live.

But there is hope for the USA, with Bernie Sanders being taken seriously as a political candidate, and Hilary Clinton showing much more political spine than her spouse. Even GOP Marco Rubio seems to be looking seriously at issues around poverty and taxation.

However if we really want to civilize the USA, we need to get rid of Texas. Keep in mind they never have valued their status as USA citizens above their status as Texans anyhow, and that the idea of them leaving the USA is actually very popular in Texas. Why make them stay? There are a lot of really important reasons why we would be better off without them:

1. They elect dangerous anarchists like Ted Cruz who do things like shut down the federal government at every available opportunity.
2. They have 38 electoral college votes which always swing to the far right, so that it is impossible for the GOP to win the white house without Texas.
3. They are a socially backwards bad influence on and embarrassment to the rest of the country.
4. They elect corrupt idiots who don't understand science and see no problem with letting the world burn from global warming, like Ted Cruz.
5. Most importantly, while doing the very least they can to help their poor, they are the ultimate welfare state, sucking up much more national resources than they contribute.

It is time for the USA's strained love affair with Texas to end. Seriously Texas, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out: 

Gun Owner License

I am not sympathetic to cry babies in the USA, who fearing their favorite toys could be no longer available for sale, moan that "the 2nd Amendment guarantees our right threaten the government with firearms, which is the only reason why we still live in a democracy today." The original intent of the 2nd Amendment was guaranteeing the right to control slaves and not about freedom of speech, which is clearly an entirely different amendment.

We shouldn't be restricting what types of guns we can own, we should be restricting who is allowed to own guns. We need a standard training credential for gun ownership, something like a driver's license for guns. I do not think the average citizen should be allowed to own firearms without significant training, qualification, and accountability for what happens to weapons in their collection.

I think gun experts - people who care enough about guns to know how to maintain them and be well trained in how use them - including weekend warriors with constitutional concerns in actual militias, but also most other serious hobbyists ranging from collectors to marksman to hunters - should be able to own any firearm they want, as long as they are going to take real responsibility for what happens to and with those weapons - just like with me and my car.

A final afterthought is that if we are going to regulate hardware, the ONLY consideration should be clip size. Time and again when mass shootings are interrupted, it is usually by a bystander grappling with the shooter as they attempt to reload or switch weapons. Furthermore, there are various hacks that can convert common semiautomatic handguns into viscous fully automatic assault weapons. I see no point in controlling so-called 'assault riffles', forbidding our veterans who have been trained in their proper and expedient uses (speaking of something that could potentially interrupt a mass shooting,) while allowing paranoid untrained soccer moms to purchase hand guns, making those hand guns more likely to end up in the hands of children or criminals:

Oblique Kick: MMA saves TMA

Normally we think of low kicks as leg kicks, or in other words round kicks to the usually-upper leg. This is swinging your shin like a base ball bat into your opponent's thigh, and it is probably the single most productive kick in the history of the martial arts:

However, this kick has a gory weakness, which is that a proper block of the kick does not completely protect the blocker, but is even more devastating to the kicker. In other words, its preferable to take a leg kick yourself than it is to have one of your leg kicks blocked properly. In extreme cases, a proper leg kick block has been known to break the leg of the kicker in two:

In traditional martial arts low side kicks and "oblique kicks" (stomps with the heel of the foot, with the toe of the foot pointing slightly to the direction of the side of the body from which it is thrown) are more common. The strange looking oblique kick is seen in all kinds of kung fu (every major type I can think of), Hapkido (which supposedly got them from Taekkyon, the ultimate "push kick" style,) some traditional Japeanese striking styles, very old Thai martial arts (even Lynn Thompson covers them in his instructional videos,) and many other martial arts. Starting at around 7 minutes, 45 seconds this Choy Li Fut instructor shows the very common kung fu technique of practicing oblique kicks on a wooden dummy:

However, until very recently, oblique kicks were pretty much unheard of in sport fighting. Low side kicks and oblique kicks are normally illegal in kickboxing and other full contact martial arts. The the closest thing to an exception to this I have heard of is in Taekkyon (real traditional Korean martial arts) battles where Judo-like sweeps sometimes double as low kicks (almost like shin-kicking from the UK):

Then controversially Jon Jones brought these traditional low thrust kicks kicking and screaming back into MMA. Here he is with his coach, Greg Jackson, explaining their use:

But Jon Jones is a notoriously dirty fighter, so I wrote this street fighting off as an anomaly. But then I saw Holly Holm defeat the invincible Rhonda Rousey, using those oblique kicks to help keep Rousey in striking range:

Now Holm is one of the most qualified strikers to ever compete in MMA, and she is using those oblique kicks more than regular leg kicks? I could understand if it was just a short cut so that she didn't have to learn round kicks, but she has a kickboxing background in addition to a boxing background, and she KOed Rousey with a round kick to the head. So where did these oblique kicks come from?

What Jones and Holm have in common in is coach Greg Jackson. It turns out he got these kicks from studying traditional martial arts for self defense as a youth. They come from Kenpo. This is another example of why MMA is the best thing that ever happened to traditional martial arts; now we know how these moves are used, even though they probably weren't sparred with for generations.

Of course this isn't the first time Kenpo has been seen in MMA: