Unhallowed Hand

I am a Brigham Young fan and have quoted him on this blog before, but I think he may have been THE Antichrist. How can I still be a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) if I think Brigham Young has been the most effective instrument of the devil for attacking LDS? It starts with something in The Wentworth Letter that I suspect was a prophesy regarding Brigham Young:

"The standard of truth has been erected. No unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished and the great Jehovah shall say the work is done." —Joseph Smith, 1842

Unhallowed has two definitions: 1. unconsecrated, secular, or 2. unholy, wicked. A hand in this context means an individual with an agenda working to achieve an objective, or in other words an agent. So the Unhallowed Hand would be a Unconsecrated Agent or an Unholy Agent. The succession crisis after Joseph Smith's assassination happened because it wasn't expressly clear to everyone who should be the leader of the LDS if both Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed simultaneously (as they eventually were,) so that Brigham Young could then be considered the Unconsecrated Agent leading the LDS. However I suspect Brigham Young has played a far more sinister role in the history of the LDS, and that the title of Unholy Agent or Antichrist may apply to him.

What is "the work" that will not be stopped from progressing? From Joseph Smith's personal view it could be only one thing: the LDS religion Jesus founded through Joseph. Why were people mad at Joseph Smith and wanted to have him killed? No matter how you look at it, the biggest factor was rumors of polygamy, and more than anything else was causing mobs to combine, persecutions to rage, and eventually in the case of the Utah War (1857-1858) literally the US Army assembled against the LDS . To this day Brigham Young's calumny, in accusing Joseph Smith of pedophilia and adultery in the form of a rewriting of history to justify Brigham's own foul sexual practices, is one of the biggest philosophical problems holding back the growth of the LDS faith. 

Another mess left over from Brigham Young that we still have to address is his overt racism. However before him Joseph Smith was NOT racist. He and his wife were close friends with escaped slaves, and he had the first black Elder ordained to the LDS priesthood in 1836. But once Brigham Young was in control of the LDS, LDS prevented blacks from holding the priesthood or entering the temple.

Brigham Young also introduced other false doctrines LDS have since totally rejected in favor of what Joseph Smith taught before.  Let's look at how Brigham Young's Antichrist doctrines confused the plain and precious truths of the Gospel:

1. Throughout my entire adult like the Temple Endowment ceremonies have evolved to be less and less like what Brigham Young established, generally rejecting much of the following ideas. 
2. Adam-God theory degraded Jesus Christ's (same as Jehovah in the LDS) role in the Universe, placing Adam somehow above Jesus. In Joseph Smith's view and in the LDS view today, Jesus was the principle creator of the world including the human species. Brigham Young taught that Jesus was something less.
3. Brigham Young's "Blood Atonement" doctrine taught that adultery was so serous that Jesus Christ's atonement alone was not sufficient to save someone from that sin, and that the adulterer would have to pay with their life in order to be saved. Adultery would be a surprisingly common sin for Jesus's sacrifice to not cover, so that again we see Brigham denying the power of Christ established in the Bible, Book of Mormon and teachings of Joseph Smith.
4. Racism is clearly against the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as racism is not kind or even respectful to those you are being racist against. Brigham Young falsely claimed his racist views were doctrinal and of God.
5. The most obvious sign of a benevolent all-knowing God is he would tell you to completely abstain from alcohol and tobacco, because of the suffering caused by the health and social consequences from the recreational use of these substances. IF Jesus is God, you can pretty much tell what church is His by looking at who takes this rule the most seriously. The LDS rules around forbidding these substances were revealed in 1833, "...adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints..." clearly intended for all LDS members. However Brigham Young went so far as to make and sell whiskey, which has about 4 times the alcohol content of any wine ever described in the scriptures. Brigham Young refused to promote the LDS rules regarding substances established by Jesus through Joseph Smith, and instead encouraged members to break those rules.
6. Since the time of Adam and Eve, including the times when populations needed to grow rapidly such as immediately after the flood or when the Lehites reached America, the commandment from God has always been one wife for each man, no concubines allowed. This creates the basic family and societal structure that successful civilizations are based on. Brigham Young fought against this basic family structure beyond anyone else I know of through his doctrine of polygamy.
7. Today the LDS and most other believers highly frown on divorce, because of the consequences it has on individuals and society as a whole. Jesus in Mathew Chapter 5 vs 31-32 describes divorce as a form of adultery. After all the huffing and puffing Brigham Young did over the importance of marriage, Brigham had 10 divorces!
8. Brigham Young twisted specific verses of scripture to mean the opposite of what they obviously meant. For example Jacob Chapter 2 is part of a huge sermon against polygamy, where "seed" has been established as "righteous people" and "things" have been established as various sins or abominations. Verse 30 reads "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things." In context this clearly means "I command you to be monogamous, otherwise you will sin." However Brigham Young considered this verse to be an exception allowing polygamy, undermining the intention of the entire sermon.
9. Today in the LDS community we have high expectations of our leaders, and though everyone is a hypocrite sooner or later, we really expect them to do their best to live the gospel. We also expect them to refrain from judging people as much as possible, only enforcing the most important rules in the LDS faith. This is all reflected in Mathew Chapter 7 where Jesus warns us about being hypocrites and to tread lightly when we judge others. Brigham Young on the other hand pretty much just made up the rules as he went along to suit his whims, constantly threatened people with an adverse afterlife for not going along with his Anthichrist schemes, and (as per this list) was probably the biggest hypocrite in the history of the USA.

If the LDS is a religion that is primarily about following modern prophets, then this means that the LDS religion was completely derailed at the time of Brigham Young, right? Not according to the prophecy above from The Wentworth Letter, which specifically said any such Unhallowed Hand would not stop the LDS religion from spreading throughout the world. Let's look at LDS spiritual practices to see how high priority "following the prophet" actually is. In order to even become an LDS member in the first place, you have to embrace the "First Ordinances and Principles of the Gospel", which are:

1. Faith in Jesus Christ
2. Repentance
3. Baptism
4. Gift of the Holy Ghost

That last step, #4, The Gift of the Holy Ghost is to enhance your personal ability to get revelation directly from God yourself. Which of these 4 says to "follow the prophet?" Yes of course following guidance from prophets both ancient and modern is wise, but it is fundamentally more important to establish your own personal relationship with God. The LDS is then a body of people who have embraced these Principles and Ordinances.

Perhaps this is why over 75% of LDS ignored Brigham Young's ranting on polygamy and never practiced it themselves. Even if Brigham Young was the Antichrist, he did not successfully lead away most LDS members to do polygamy, as they had the Gift of the Holy Ghost for themselves. Brigham Young himself said:

“The First Presidency have of right a great influence over this people; and if we should get out of the way and lead this people to destruction, what a pity it would be! How can you know whether we lead you correctly, or not? Can you know by any other power than that of the Holy Ghost?” — Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 6:100

Yes indeed Brigham, yes indeed. LDS reject the "Trinity" creed, and believe that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are separate individuals, so then why is the name of LDS not "The Church of Heavenly Father of Latter Day Saints," or "The Church of the Holy Ghost of Latter Day Saints," or "The Church of the Prophets of Latter Day Saints?" The Unhallowed Hand has shown us that regardless of who sits on the throne in Salt Lake City, Jesus Christ is the true leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. 

Ranking Martial Arts

Ranking Martial Arts videos are extremely shallow and uninformative. First they are nowhere near specific enough. Second they have poorly considered critieria. Third the scales they use on YouTube are pure trash.

Specificity

A classic example of how these "ranking" videos are not specific enough to be meaningful, is they tend to put all Chinese Martial Arts into one or two categories, typically called "Kung Fu." Tai Chi, just one family of Kung Fu systems, is so vast that more people do Tai Chi than all other martial arts and combat sports combined.

So how specific would you have to get for these ranks to be meaningful? Even Kung Fu critic channel Fight Commentary Breakdowns has come to acknowledge that Choy Li Fut (CLF) is one of the premier fighting systems in traditional Chinese Martial Arts. But not all CLF schools are into free sparring, because of the vast encyclopedia of techniques within the system, there are hundreds of forms to the point were you either have to sacrifice forms practice time for free sparring, or free sparring time for forms practice time. 

In the late 90's, the Twin Tigers CLF school in Bremerton WA produced various combat sports fighters including Margaret McGregor. Meanwhile an hour away, the White Snake CLF school in Seattle WA didn't believe in free sparring because it created "sloppy technique," and sulked about not being invited to perform at Chinese cultural events. About 5 minutes away from White Snake, a Mak Fai CLF club dedicated Friday evenings to free sparring, even though they were more recognized for their Lion Dancing.

All quality control issues within Kung Fu aside, these Ranking Martial Arts videos have similar problems when describing other martial arts. They frequently consider Boxing to be a cohesive fighting system when in fact we see drastically different training methodologies, techniques, strategies and definitions from gym to gym within the same cities* (for example Bumble Bee's Boxing [side stance, jab-centric, everyone fights orthodox, spastic hard free sparring] vs Cappy's Boxing [more front stance, safer free sparring] in Seattle.) Another common mistake is considering "wrestling" to be a cohesive martial art without specifying weather they are talking about American Folkstyle, Greco Roman, or Freestyle, which all have very different implications for self defense strategy. This failure to specify continues as they consider Aikido, Karate, "kickboxing," etc.

Criteria

Typically what they are ranking, regardless of what they say they are ranking, is how effective these martial arts are in MMA. However MMA is not very appropriate for self defense because it doesn't address self defense issues outside of the cage or defending yourself with legally viable options. MMA is a horrible lens for evaluating martial arts when MMA strategy is so different from what you need for self defense training.  

Very little consideration is given to the types of grappling that is useful for self defense. The Internal Skill is taking people down while you remain standing and able to maneuver under hostile conditions. Escape Grappling is getting out of an entanglement on the ground if you get taken down or end up on the ground on accident. Most people making these Ranking videos do not even understand these self defense grappling issues in the first place.

Little consideration is given to the health aspects of how these martial arts impact the practitioner. Is being a brown belt in BJJ better than no training at all for self defense, if in your BJJ training you have earned yourself various back and joint problems? Is boxing helping you defend yourself if your speech is becoming slurred and you are developing potentially fatal neurological problems?

I have said this before, but more consideration needs to be given to weather or not the martial art teaches physical and practical skills of value in the first 100 lessons. Most of these Ranking Martial Arts videos are being made by life long martial artists who can devote a large amount of time to training. This makes it harder for them to see things from the average martial art consumer's view, who has considerably less time to devote to training. Judo can make you deadly in 5 years. Cool story, most do not want to do anything close to as dangerous as Judo, nor do they want to devote all of their spare time to learning any martial art for 5 years.

Scales

There is only so much of YOUR personal opinion that OTHERS find meaningful, and only so much precision actually matters. The scale they have been using in these videos is trash: S = Super, A = top grade, B = Good, C = mediocre, D = bad, F = total waste time. Some also include an "E" in there, being generally unfamiliar with the American grading system, though there's no "S" in that grading system either. Notice how they just can't settle with an A, they just have to have that extra special higher-than-A. That is the level of intellectual discipline these childish videos adhere to.

A Likert scale would be the appropriate way to scale in videos like this. Likert puts things on a 1 to 5 star scale, where agreement is what is being measured. Agreement is key because it is literally what is being evaluated (the opinion of the creator.) 1 to 5 is appropriate because any more precision then that (say "5++") is not actually meaningful to anyone besides the creator. 1 = I can't agree with this in any way. 2 = I think this is incorrect. 3 = This could be correct, but I am not convinced. 4 = This appears to be correct. 5 = I know this is correct.

When multiple authors come together, their scores can be averaged to give us a familiar 1 to 4 scale rating. Let's say I do a Ranking Martial Arts video on grappling styles, and include BJJ, Freestyle Wrestling, Judo, american Folkstyle and Greco Roman. Let's say I rate American Folkstyle at 5 stars, but the other person making the video ranks it at 4 stars. Now we have a shared ranking of 4.5 stars. This then translates to the following comprehensible evaluations: less than 2 stars = trash. 2+ stars = mediocre. 3+ stars = Good. 4+ stars = Amazing.

Conclusion

*If you are going to make a martial arts ranking video, use a Likert scale, use meaningful criteria, and be specific:

Why Not Combat Sports?

All martial arts have blind spots. As a martial arts consumer advocate, it think it is important to look at the reasons why people do NOT train, and then look at issues with specific popular "combat sports" that are popularly recommended because of their practical hands on fighting skills they teach. In general combat sports provide built in training motivation and quality control as the next match or tournament is always approaching. Far more importantly combat sports always incorporate the most important aspect of martial arts training, free sparring.

Why Not MMA?

However there are universal problems with virtually all combat sports:

1. Risk of Injury: As Penn & Teller described in 2010, virtually all martial arts, though I would add especially combat sports, come with a much higher risk of injury from participating in them than not participating in them. Without any self defense training at all, you probably won't have an encounter in a self defense situation that will injure you as badly as participating in combat sports probably would.

2. Sacrificing long term health for short term performance: training in a health practice like Tai Chi or Weight Lifting usually keeps longevity in mind, but when training for sports your top priority for training is doing whatever it takes to be victorious in your next competition. You might be surprised at how bad that actually can be for you:

3. Huge time commitment: when you are training for sport, you are in an arms race with other athletes, and the main personal resource you are spending that can give you a competitive advantage is how much time you spend training.

4. Basic self defense questions unanswered: there are three basic self defense problems that have to be answered by any self defense system. First there is getting attacked by someone with a knife. Second there is being attacked by someone much larger than you are. Third there is getting attacked by more than one person. Combat sports generally disregards these questions because these questions are not important for the next upcoming competition.

Now lets look at individual combat sports we see frequently referenced in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA,) and why not:

• Wrestling?
• Boxing?
• Muay Thai?
• BJJ?

Why Not Wrestling?

American Folkstyle Wrestling is probably the best martial art for someone who has to fight another person where you are both unarmed, and there is no possibility of other people interfering, because it is one of the few and rare martial arts that competitively train Get Up Grappling. But aside from the universal problems with combat sports: 

• Good luck finding wrestling clubs that train adults. 
• Wrestling is even more injury prone than most other combat sports, because of the high emphasis on landing on top of the person whom you are throwing. 
• While most of the wrestling in the USA is American Folkstyle, some is not American Folkstyle nor is most wrestling outside of the USA, and as such does not train Get Up Grappling, while being just as injury prone as American Folkstyle, including: Greco Roman, Free Style Wrestling, Judo, etc.

Why Not Boxing?

Boxing is one of the best martial arts of all time for self defense against multiple attackers, because of its high level footwork and practical, potent strikes. But aside from the universal problems with combat sports: 

• Most boxing gyms prefer "hard sparring" which is the least safe type of free sparring, and training boxing casually long term can lead to neurological health problems. 
• Boxing has more blind spots than most martial arts, with no strikes allowed besides your fists and virtually no grappling or take down defense. 
• Third boxing relies heavily on closed fist strikes to the head, which puts you in danger of boxer's fractures and infections from teeth lacerations on your hand.

Why Not Muay Thai?

Muay Thai is probably the best martial art for most martial arts consumers, because of it's high emphasis on practical techniques like low kicks, tripping throws, knee strikes and elbow strikes, as well as it's high emphasis on very safe free sparring. However, besides the universal problems with combat sports: 

• There is a high level of pressure on people who are getting good at Muay Thai to compete, and the intense training for that fight and the fight itself is far more injury prone than casual Muay Thai training. 
• Muay Thai has some reliance on closed fist strikes to the head, which puts you in danger of boxer's fractures and infections from teeth lacerations on your hand.

Why not BJJ?

BJJ has the best quality control of any martial art because of their ranking standards being tied to tournament performance: if you are a higher belt, you are expected to win against any lower belt in a BJJ tournament. However, besides the universal problems with combat sports: 

• BJJ is highly specialized and seriously lacks relevance to self defense situations: most of the submission holds can easily accidentally kill someone (potentially creating worse problems for you than getting attacked in the first place) OR trades injuring the attackers limb for you being down on the ground with the attacker being angry with you. 
• BJJ is even more time consuming than other combat sports over the long term: to reach black belt you can expect to train 10 hours a week for 10 years. 
• Though BJJ is better at avoiding the big injuries found in Wrestling styles like Judo and Greco Roman, BJJ's free sparring doesn't have the same longevity benefits as the safer free sparring in Muay Thai, and usually BJJ practitioners are experiencing joint or back problems long before they reach black belt. For self defense, is it better to be a black belt with back and joint problems or to have no self defense training at all?
• BJJ is somewhat socially destructive because it discourages the practice of other martial arts. Two popular MMA gyms within 90 minutes of where I live were started when BJJ organizations forbade the practice of Muay Thai and/or FMA at locations that were already teaching multiple martial arts. The whole point of UFCs 1-3 was to try to show that there was no reason to practice any other martial art besides BJJ.

So with this all said, even though combat sports for the most part have good free sparring practices and quality control, they are insufficient for the needs of the average martial arts consumer as explained above. This is why it's important for us reconsider older options and construct new options as we move into the future.

Participation

A brutal lesson I learned early on in my martial arts training as a young teenager, is that ALL training opportunities are temporary. On of the quality control problems in Tai Chi is instructors continuing to teach after they are too old to do free sparring, so that their students fail to fully grasp the applications of the forms. Besides aging out, instructors move, financial circumstances or life priorities change, facilities and other infrastructure deteriorate, etc. so that it is very rare to find a martial arts training opportunity that lasts for more than one generation. Most great martial arts training opportunities with the right people in the right place at the right time are very temporary indeed.

The upside of this for me is that I have been able to train and cross train in a wide variety of martial arts. However I remember when I was young and naive and thought the world would generally more or less stay the same, only to have three instructors move away in 4 years. Now that I have gotten to the point where I have more techniques I have learned that I want to perfect than I will ever have time to perfect, I have a number of people claiming they want to train with me. The question I have though is are they willing to make the kinds of sacrifices I had to make to learn what I have learned?

In Be The Shoulin! 5 years ago I explained that good martial arts training primarily comes for a like minded group of people coming together to train and spar. These kind of groups are only possible when people make sacrifices, especially of time. These groups are almost always very temporary, in my view they typically last less than 5 years on average.

In general, you can't just "wait until you retire" to enjoy life. In the case of martial arts, waiting around for some more convenient opportunity is particularly stuipid because you are getting older, and martial arts is best learned young. If you are 20, you are kidding yourself if you think you will get around to training when you are 25 instead, and by the time 25 gets there you'll have better things to do until you are pushing 40 and your best years for training will be gone. Better to learn at 40 than 50, 50 than 60, and 60 than 70, but procrastination will always be lurking, leaching away your opportunities.

When you see an awesome group you want to train with, and you have that impulse to start training with them, the thing to remember is what you are seeing is NOW, not LATER. Your opportunity to participate is only right now, that exact group is not going to be there a few years from now, and the most knowledgeable people in the group could be gone long before that. The key to learning martial arts is to realize that your only training opportunity is right now.

Casual Sustainability

In my 2019 blog post 100 Lessons I emphasized the need for martial arts instructors to consider the importance of delivering self defense value to beginners quickly. In my one of my last blog posts Risk of Injury I reminded you that martial arts training isn't worth it if it injures you worse than being attacked on the street would. In this blog post I am calling out the very problematic difference in perspective between many martial arts instructors and their students.

Most serious martial artists - people who intend to use martial arts in self defense if they need to defend themselves - are "casual" martial artists, meaning they train martial arts without intention to compete in martial arts competitions or matches, nor do they study martial arts like it was a part-time (least bit full time) job. Casual martial artists do not train for long hours every day, and though they may be able to practice or train on their own a little each day, martial arts is not a primary focus of their lives. Such individuals include people with low risk jobs as well as police, security, bouncers, etc. and it makes no sense for them to risk injury through formal competition or rigorous daily training, nor do most of them want or need a high level of accomplisment in martial arts.

This means that martial arts instructor's expectations need to fit the lifestyle that their casual students actually have, and the best example is POSTURE. Most martial arts students make a living by sitting at a desk all day in front of a computer, and most of those that don't spend a lot of their time looking at a cell phone. If you dump a bunch of push ups and sit ups (or bench press for personal fitness coaches) on top of someone who already has compromised posture, you will further contract the muscles on the front side of their boddies and lead to worse posture, leading to a worse long-term ability to defend themselves than when they started training with you in the first place!

If you teach fitness or martial arts for a living, you are not spending most of your day wrecking your own posture. Your students are. You can't ask them to quit their jobs or they can't support you financially. Therefore you have to help them correct their posture as a very high priority in your training. Physical therapists I have talked to have emphasized what THEY call chin tucks, straight arm push ups, and chest stretches as an important part of correcting that posture.

I am sure this applies to numerous other things besides posture. I trained martial arts for 20 hours a week for about 18 months during my failed attempt at becoming a professional kick boxer and Choy Li Fut instructor in the 90s. To this day I still do 30 minutes of Tai Chi standing meditation every day (another exercise that helped me prevent damage from bad posture, and helped me recover from bad posture after two shoulder impingement since 2019,) but I have to keep in mind that people coming to me to learn Tai Chi didn't come expecting to have to engage with Tai Chi on that level in order to learn some useful amount of Tai Chi, and that they are never going to put in the kind of hours that I put in to learn how to fight.

I do the full splits every time I work out. I don't expect others I am working out with to do the full splits with me, that's crazy. What I do have to consider is "what is going to help them like the splits help me, considering their casual commitment to this training?" What opened my eyes to this issue of Casual Sustainability was recovering from my own injuries and talking to physical therapists while doing so. I highly recommend that professional fitness and martial arts instructors make a casual study of physical therapy, so that they can apply their knowledge to the challenges their students are facing from having a sedentary professional lifestyle.

Get Up Grappling

 The "Grappling Gap" is what I call a problem that martial arts consumers have been facing for as long as martial arts training has been available to consumers in the USA. Where can a martial arts consumer go to learn the ground grappling that they REALLY need? Let's look first at what they do NOT need:

1. Most martial arts consumers don't need choke holds. In a real life emergency situation they are just about as likely to kill someone on accident by applying one of these as they are to successfully resolve a violent confrontation with one. Chokes are more curse than blessing.
2. Most martial arts consumers don't need submission holds. The average attacker on the street isn't going to know that they should tap once  you have them in a submission. The submission may or may not do enough damage to stop them, and most submission holds leave you on the ground in a compromised position.

What ground grappling every martial artist needs to understand is how to get off the ground when someone is trying to hold them down on the ground. 

This obviously means that they then need to learn to hold others down on the ground, which can be handy in some self defense situations when police are expected and the person you are holding on the ground is someone the police are looking for. This then means American Folkstyle wrestling right? NO. American Folkstyle covers much more than this, much of which is highly injurious to the martial arts consumer. If it's too injurious practice it is of no value at all. Picking someone up off the ground and throwing them back down while falling on top of them as hard as you can with all of your body weight is an extremely dangerous thing to do. 

Though Judo is more common for Adults, it's NOT recommended for casual self defense training for the same reason as American Folkstyle wrestling. Also Judo does NOT have the same focus on escaping to their feet that American Folkstyle has. So then we must want a more traditional grappling art like Glima, Bokh, Sumo or Tai Chi, where the focus is getting the opponent on the ground while remaining on your feet, right?

That's what I call the Internal Skill, and it's much more useful for self defense than going to the ground with your opponent.  But the Internal Skill does not fill the Grappling Gap! The Grappling Gap is: what do you need to get back on  your feet when you are on the ground? Even though this is practiced in Combat Glima, still most of the focus of that training isn't getting up from the ground as much as it is on the Internal Skill.

The most popular grappling alternative to Judo or Wrestling is Brazillian Jujitsu (BJJ.)  BJJ doesn't want to get up to their feet, and BJJ is completely focused on 1 and 2 above which can do more harm than good for self defense. Also for long term lower back health and speed of learning, it's best to avoid BJJ's main strategy for being on the bottom, which is to pull the attacker into your "guard" (between your legs.)

So far the only way I have personally addressed the grappling gap is through one-on-one instruction from MMA fighters. Though I love MMA and Muay Thai, finding coaches that will take you seriously as a student when you yourself specifically intend to never compete (as getting into a public fight intentionally is the opposite of self defense,) is easier said than done. However, it is interesting to me that when the Karate Nerd resorted to the same remedy that I did (seeking one-on-one instruction from an MMA fighter,) the Karate Nerd ended up learning exactly the same techniques I did:

Hypothetically what then we need now is a new type of focused sparring to learn this kind of grappling, which I have been calling "Get Up Grappling." It should NOT start on your feet, because we all have answers for what to be doing when you are on your feet. Get Up Grappling should start on the ground: 

1. They should start in side control with the "attacker" on top and the "defender" on the bottom. 
2. The attacker should then try to get in full mount and slap the defender in the face a few times to simulate striking vulnerability. 
3. The defender should try to get to their feet. 
4. Once the attacker gets in full mount and lands a slap or two, or once the defender gets to their feet, they switch roles with the attacker now the defender and the defender now the attacker.

Here's an example of the kind of technique this type of practice may result in:

Risk of Injury

 In 2010 Penn & Teller claimed the entire martial arts industry was a sham. They offered many arguments that were convincing, but the most convincing one was essentially "you are far more likely to get seriously injured practicing martial arts than you are to be seriously injured by an attacker that you could protect yourself from using martial arts." As a martial arts consumer advocate, risk of injury is one of my primary concerns.

This is personal for me. Since 2019 I have had to recover from two shoulder impingements, one on each side of my body. One was from a car accident, the other was a martial arts injury. Beyond this I learned talking to my various physical therapists that it is common for weight lifters and martial artists in the USA to develop shoulder impingements from over training muscles on their front like chest and abs, while under training muscles between their shoulder blades. This combined with the fact most martial artists make their living by sitting in chairs in front of computers, is bad news for their posture in general.

Some of the Katas I look down on from some styles of Southern Kung Fu and Karate have a strong emphasis on holding tension on those very muscles between their shoulder blades. Thinking back on my own traditional training in Tai Chi and Choy Li Fut if I had listened to my instructors better I would have put more focus on maintaining good posture and spent less time doing high reps of push ups. Standing Meditation (Zhuan Zhuang) and Tai Chi forms have helped me greatly in rehabilitating my shoulders and correcting my posture. However there is one exercise I would like to point out that all chair dwelling martial artists should consider, and that is the straight arm push up:

But I got one shoulder impingement from doing a grappling drill. Specifically we were practicing double leg take downs on a mat, and I got turned sideways with one of my arms isolated, slamming my shoulder and face into the mat, compressing my shoulder and collarbone. And this a drill wasn't even necessary as it wasn't free sparring.

But when it comes to free sparring injuries, the worst martial art I have studied is BJJ. In one year I had 3 injuries that prevented me from free sparring for more than one week (about a month in two cases.) I have done full contact 1990's (today would be called Dutch-style) kickboxing, full contact stick fighting, full contact karate, a lot of dangerous stuff, and BJJ on paper shouldn't have been the worst, but it was. Icy Mike reports more serious long term problems here at 4:40 :

Joe of Fight Bible (the not-pro-fighter on the channel) reports numerous injuries, including even a broken neck, from doing BJJ. Now let me ask you a question: are you better off doing martial arts that give you a broken neck, or doing no martial arts at all?

Many people love to dismiss some forms of Tai Chi sparring as useless, because they don't include strikes and try to remain standing on their feet instead of going to the ground when they execute take downs:

But not only does this help people develop some stand up grappling skill without getting a shoulder impingement or more serious injury (it helps that they aren't landing on top of each other when executing a throw,) it helps to build balance to prevent injuries outside of fighting. But we need to know how to fight on the ground or we have a big missing piece from our self defense training, right?

Well what exactly do we need to know about ground fighting? We need to know how to get up to our feet. It then follows we need to know how to hold someone down on the ground. That's it, that's all most martial artists need out of ground grappling, is one person holding on the ground and the other getting back up. Which grappling arts commonly available to martial arts consumers commonly teach this? Not BJJ or any other Judo lineage martial arts, because they are obsessed with smashing the other guy on the ground and getting a submission, and dedicate less than 1% of their training getting back to their feet.

Fight camps for striking sports such as MMA, Boxing and various forms of kick boxing are notoriously injury prone. The biggest problem with Muay Thai from a consumer perspective is the culture of having matches: you don't have to be good at Muay Thai for very long before you will feel pressure to take a public fight. The punishment you will take in that fight, and the punishment you will take prepping for that fight that you wouldn't get in regular training, will likely be far more dangerous to you than any injury you would have avoided by beating up an attacker on the street with your Muay Thai. Consider the injuries from fight camps endured by both fighters from one of the most important boxing matches of all time:

Traditional martial arts seem to have a clear advantage over combat sports when it comes to risk of serous injury. However these arts are also not without their safety challenges, and almost useless if they do not include free sparring (free sparring is often done safely in both combat sports and traditional martial arts.) Risk of injury should be a top priority for anyone to consider when evaluating a martial arts school, trainer, or technique.

Knife First

When people train with me they learn knife sparring first. There are many reasons for this: unlike firearms knives are found in every home that needs defending, knife sparring teaches evasive footwork that translates well to many situations outside of employing a knife, knife sparring makes you understand the various ways you can be attacked by a knife, etc.

And knives are somewhat unique in their ability to intimidate an attacker...

I very often see YouTubers suggesting that if someone has a knife, there's nothing you can do but run. However it turns out that may not a be a reliable solution.

 The reality is having a knife pulled on you is a very common self defense situation, and one of the few that justifies spending a lot of time studying self defense in the first place. Every martial art has to be considered in this context: what if they have a Knife?

People think of sparring oriented stick fighting styles like Arnis and Kendo as bladed fighting arts. However were they really shine is for using sticks to knock a knife out of the hand of someone causing problems. This is true of virtually all sparring oriented stick, cane and staff fighting systems: they are great for dealing with a knife attacker.

Brazillian Jiu Jitsu compared to stick fighting does not fair well. If you don't spar with any strikes, defending against a force multiplier like a knife is nearly impossible. If you pull guard on a knife attacker, you just made his job of killing you much easier as now you can not evade him with footwork.

Wrestling does much better than BJJ in the context of a knife, because Wrestling has tools used in sparring for getting back to their feet. Wrestling's raw explosive aggression is more appropriate for a situation with a knife than BJJ's chilled laid back mentality. Wrestling is more focused on takedowns that will make a knife attacker far less dangerous. However not handling strikes in wrestling makes them generally unfamiliar with how to handle a weapon swinging or stabbing at them.

Some think Western Boxing changed drastically when the USA got involved with the Philippines. Filipino Boxing is more or less that square style of boxing with your hands up and forearms facing your opponent like you see with Manny Pacquiao or Mike Tyson. If you are going to be struck with a knife, you want it to be on the outside of your forearms. Having clever head movement and defensive footwork focused on KO strikes is a viable option for defending against a knife.

Tae Kwon Do and Capoiera have been mocked for being impractical. However in the context of a knife, on the street someone has shoes on, the bottom of those shoes is probably the best striking weapon they have against a blade. Jumping back and managing distance while looking for a chance to KO the attacker with a kick is not a bad option to have compared to grappling.

This is another place Muay Thai shines. With the aggression of wrestling and most of the same tools as both boxing and Tae Kwon Do, if someone must take on a knife wielder unarmed, Muay Thai is one of your better training backgrounds to have. Muay Thai has footwork and potent kicks to keep the enemy at bay, while also having practical sweeps and takedowns with which they may be able to get the knife attacker on the ground.

As Christopher Hein has pointed out, Aikido theory makes the most sense when a knife is in play. I would add that Aikido's defensive footwork and courage to use practice knives frequently in Randori actually teach the Aikidoka a lot more about knife fighting than they would like to admit.

There are too many Karate styles to analyze here one by one how effective they are against a knife. However all Karate styles seem to have some kind of clue about where a person could start with knife defense as well as practical kicks. 

There are at least 10 times as many Kung Fu systems as Karate styles. In general Kung Fu systems are more comfortable with using bladed weapons for self defense, train in variety of weapons so that they can use any improvised weapons available to them should they have to face someone with a knife, and they have more answers for defending against bladed weapons while unarmed than most other martial arts.

Next time you are evaluating a martial art, don't forget to ask how it would work against a knife.

Groin Kicks?

My first style of martial arts I ever studied got a lot of things right in the 1980's that I have only come to appreciate in the 2020's. The style was most often called "Tae Sho Arnis," though it was also called at other times "Tae Sho Karate Do" and "Combat Arnis." In an era of Kumite Point fighting that was decaying the quality of martial arts in the USA at the time, Dave Bird decided to combine the best aspects of the martial arts he had mastered: forms from Shotokan Karate, free sparring from old-school Tae Kwon Do, and Arnis for weapons technique. Though he his style produced kickboxers who competed in our area, most of the sparring in class was continuous controlled contact and included both unarmed sparring and stick sparring (though we did also train for Kumite Point Fighting tournaments a few times per year.) 

In the 1990's this controlled contact free sparring would be lost in the USA as MMA got more popular and we over compensated for our participation in no-contact kumite point fighting, but would return to the MMA community by way of Muay Thai within a few decades. But there's something that has not returned 1980's controlled contact free sparring that we used to spar with frequently: groin kicks. I am not sure if these came from Shotokan or TKD, and I have wondered if they came from Arnis; see the kick at 1 minute 26 seconds in the last video I know of featuring Dave Bird:

Later as I studied Chinese martial arts I noticed that the most basic kick WAS the groin kick. If you pick your knee up with a groin kick so that you can stomp forward with the bottom of your foot you get a front kick. If you swing your groin kick around to connect with the side of your target's body you get a round kick. Watch all of this UFC champ and Shotokan master's kicks carefully and you will see many of his kicks that connect are not much more complex than a groin kick (especially his round kicks that connect to the body):

This Kung Fu teacher does a great job of explaining how in traditional martial arts, many different kicks are built from a basic groin kick:

To this day when I am free sparring with kicks I have to be careful because my feet target the groin like a heat-seeking missile because of all that free sparring with groin kicks I did in Tae Sho Arnis. Our basic strategy was simple enough: groin kick to set up straight punches to the face, and straight punches to the face to set up groin kicks. To block the groin kick we would bring up a knee. To counter the knee block we would use a round kick to the calf muscle on the blocking leg. To prevent groin kicks we would try to step on their lead foot as we threw straight punches. In retrospect there was a lot to like about that strategy from a self defense perspective. 

When going full contact you can't count on a cup to protect your groin. But now that controlled contact free sparring is back to the USA, groin kicks are still not used in free sparring because most people doing free sparring are training for combat sports were groin kicks can get you disqualified. But this raises the question: should students who train for self-defense-only include groin kicks in their controlled contact free sparring?

Do As I Say; Not As I Do

 In Make Yang style Tai Chi Great Again I mentioned various problems with Yang style Tai chi, and  how and why it has degenerated so badly as a martial art. There is a very specific issue with Yang Style footwork that helps demonstrate another problem with passing down martial arts. But first, let me point out why I have an opinion on this specific subject.

Yang Chen Fu was THE Tai Chi master who made Tai Chi famous (largely by selling out and watering down the system to outsider students.) His top INSIDER student was Hu Yuen Chow, so that Hu Yuen Chow was the best FIGHTER Yang Chen Fu produced. Therefore Hu Yuen Chow's opinion on technical details regarding Yang Style Tai Chi would be VERY important.

My main Tai Chi teacher was Vern Miller, 1st Disciple of Doc Fai Wong. Doc Fai Wong was one of Hu Yuen Chow's top students in both Choy Li Fut and Yang style Tai Chi. However, Vern Miller did travel to Hong Kong to work out with Hu Yuen Chow and asked that master many detailed questions about Yang style footwork specifically, as Vern had noticed many different opinions on Yang style footwork.

I have studied several martial arts for more than a year each, and cross trained in several others still. When it comes to why different martial arts have different footwork, I have as much experience understanding the differences as anyone. So when Vern Miller lectured me extensively on EXACTLY what he got STRAIGHT from Hu Yeun Chow IN PERSON, I understood very well what Vern was saying.

Let's say we have a two dimensional rectangular box on the floor. In your basic Yang style stance (which is not unlike a Karate front stance,) if your left foot is forward, your left foot would be on the front left corner of that box and your right foot would be on the back right corner of that box. The width of that box would be the width of your shoulders, and the length of that box would be how far you can step in one stride without discomfort.

I am not going to try to explain here all the intricacies of basic Yang style Tai Chi walking, but the issue at hand is how far apart your feet are supposed to be when you walk forward. When you take a step forward, there would be a new box in front of the (and identical to) box you are standing on now. When you step forward onto the next box, what path should your right foot go in as it steps forward onto the front right corner of the next box?

• Should the right foot travel diagonally to the left foot before traveling out again diagonally?
• Should the right foot come up to knee level before going back down to the ground?
• Should the foot drag along the ground as you step forward?

None of the above. The right foot should travel right side of both boxes, with the right big toe about one centimeter off the ground. This is called "staying on the 3rd line," the "1st line" being the left side of both boxes, the "2nd line" being the exact center of both boxes.

This has significant impact on application of techniques. What happens to your feet in relation to your target's feet is very different if you are doing any of the bullet points above, and because so many techniques in Tai Chi are tripping, where your feet end up in relation to your target's feet is extremely important. Beyond this there are questions of efficiency, your foot goes faster from point A to point B in a straight line, and the kind of balance you train is different than intended if you are embracing any of those 3 error bullet points above.

Good luck finding ANY YouTube videos explaining this, and this kind of basic detail about foot path movement wouldn't be debated in Choy Li Fut or Karate, yet there is ZERO consensus on this basic fundamental detail in Yang style Tai Chi. It's so bad that I have found other people who's Tai Chi comes from Hu Yuen Chow who strongly disagree with me on this detail!

Let's actually look at Hu Yuen Chow's Tai Chi form for a few minutes:

He's not a little man, he's tall. If he takes a step forward while keeping his feet on the first and third line all the way through the step, and he takes a full step forward, his stance might look very long and rectangular rather than square. Another thing you notice is that his head is quite hunched forward. However as you see him adjust his student's Tai Chi form, you see that he is getting them to stand perfectly upright instead of being hunch backed! Likewise you see his students using that full box footwork structure in their stance without his apparently more narrow footwork.

When it comes down to passing on important details of martial arts, remember that it's not simply copying the moves of the master, imitating old black and white photographs. It's much more important to do as that master instructed rather than as that master demonstrated.

Tai Chi is the Dominant Martial Art

 These are the top 10 most practiced martial arts in the world. These are numbers just estimations based on Google searches, and probably mostly industry hype. My best guess is the numbers are probably all equally inflated so that the proportions of the true numbers would be about the same...

The hardest and least accurate number for all of these is for Wrestling. My estimation was somewhere between 16,000,000 and 280,000,000 depending on what you call wrestling. One of the things I had to take into consideration is that most wrestlers only wrestle for a few years as a youth. If you have better numbers for the total numbers of people wrestling globally, please post those numbers and links to your sources in Self Defense Evolution. 

The finding is bizarre: not only is Tai Chi the most commonly practiced martial art in the world, but it is practiced more than all other martial arts combined. On one hand this is bad news for humanity because of quality control problems in Tai Chi, but on the other hand there is opportunity here because Tai Chi is rife with potential martial arts application for those who do free sparring. For example, in the following MMA Shredded video, more of the techniques than not are expressed in Yang style forms, especially #2:

Polygamy Is Not Doctrinal

I am active LDS and a descendant of polygamists, and I do not think that the founder of the religion, Joseph Smith Jr. was a polygamist. As a Brigham Young fan I do not think that this creates a "succession crisis" for the mainstream Salt Lake LDS Church, and I do not think Brigham Young was a "fallen prophet." I think prophets make big mistakes all the time, and that Brigham Young was aware of his own limitations as a prophet.

Brigham Young knew that his way of leading the Church and his spiritual gifts as a prophet were different from Joseph Smith Jr's. Brigham Young stated in the context of the Utah War that was beginning: 

"...They have not as good a man to deal with as they had when they had Joseph Smith. I do not profess to be very good. I will try to take care of number one, and if it is wicked for me to try to preserve myself, I shall persist in it; for I am intending to take care of myself... I am not going to interpret dreams; for I don't profess to be such a Prophet as were Joseph Smith and Daniel; but I am a Yankee guesser..." https://journalofdiscourses.com/5/17

Brigham Young led The Church in a very violent and racist era of American history. In the context of African American slavery, extermination orders, the US Military mobilizing against his people and bloody civil war, Brigham Young's sins (talking women into joining a harem, saying black people can join the church but only with limited access, having some strange interpretations of Genesis, rewriting Church history and coming up with doctrinal justifications for violence) do not seem relatively serious compared to the evils of his day. In today's world such actions would be unforgivable, but the Mormon people (a few of them black themselves) were in a run and gun battle for their survival in those days.

It is really clear that all of Joseph Smith Jr.'s public comments on polygamy before he died were against the practice, and emphatically so. He would have people excommunicated for it and then publicly describe exactly why they were excommunicated. The Book of Mormon itself is strangely anti-racist (with some of the prophets being racist and then as the book goes on those racist views are corrected by other prophets, God, etc.) It is also overtly anti-Polygamist, with the practice being condemned as "abominable." 

There's supposedly a verse in the middle of an anti-polygamy rant in Jacob Chapter 2 v 30 that says "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things." But in previous verses he just called it a "whoredom" and "abomination," so since God doesn't command people to do whoredoms and abominations, that verse must necessarily be interpreted as something like "If you are my followers and I want you to have a ton of kids, believe me, you will. Otherwise you need to avoid abominations and whoredoms anyways." No one in the vast period of time covered in the Book of Mormon is commanded to do polygamy by God.

Most of the characters focused on in the Book of Mormon believe they have descended from Israelites escaping Jerusalem in around 600 BC. In that same chapter of Jacob in the Book of Mormon, God calls David and Solomon's polygamy "...abominable before me..." Verse 30's supposed justification of polygamy particularly does not make sense in this context, because of math. The average married woman without birth control will have about 8 kids. Solomon had 700 wives. This means for Solomon to be able to keep that birth rate up to average, he needed to have 5,600 children. Similar problem by the way with Brigham Young's own polygamy. Even if only 25 of Brigham Young's 55 wives were both fertile and seducable, Brigham Young needed to have at least 200 children for his polygamy to keep up with the monogamous average... but he only had 57 children... that is only one child per wife instead of 8!

And about polygamy in the Bible, I can't find a clear case of anyone being commanded to do it. In general "going after many wives" is frowned upon in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Christian congregation leaders are required to both be married AND to have only one wife. Taken as an over all work, The Bible frowns on polygamy as less than ideal if not sinful.

Most of the women claiming to be Joseph Smith Jr.'s wives during his lifetime made those claims decades after he was dead. Their husbands were none other than Brigham Young himself and Heber C. Kimball, his right hand man. At around this time these two had to demonstrate that polygamy was part of their religion, because they were under the scrutiny of the USA, and thus were highly motivated to prove Joseph Smith Jr. practiced polygamy. Evidence suggests they rewrote history in order to protect themselves and the Mormon people from the invading forces of the US government.

The people closest to Joseph Smith Jr. while he was alive (his brother Hyrum and his wife Emma) always maintained that Joseph was against polygamy. This is important to note because none of the people who have been DNA tested to see if they were Joseph Smith Jr. secret polygamy love children have actually turned out to be his. Hundreds of sections of the Doctrine & Covenants, only 1 supposedly supports polygamy, section 132.

Section 132 is basically in two parts, the part that is compatible with the rest of the D&C, and the part that is sex-pirate crazy. Versus 1-20 read something like this, "in regards to your questions about polygamy, understand that a one on one marriage between a man and a woman sealed together for eternity is the stuff Gods are made from." Then, no joke, starting in verse 21 the writing style totally changes to what I can only describe as a very horny pirate, who by the end of the chapter is threatening to kill Emma, "...I will destroy her..."

As critics have looked into 132 there are numerous problems with dates. The sealing power being revealed in 127 and 128, years after Joseph supposedly started using it according to 132. William Clayton is supposedly in October writing down Joseph's revelation, when he was fired as Joseph's scribe the February before for stealing money.

Some of the people spreading rumors about polygamy were specifically doing it to try to kill Joseph. Polygamy was introduced to the community through notorious scoundrel John C. Bennet. John had abandoned his family to come to live with the Mormons, and as soon as he was able to gain some status started using his plural wife scheme to seduce Mormon women. Joseph had him excommunicated but John saw himself as a rival leader of the Mormon movement, and continued to spread rumors of plural marriage regarding Joseph as to enrage the locals into wanting to kill Joseph.

It goes on and on like this... since I was a child it made sense that Brigham Young was a polygamist based on his behavior, but not Joseph Smith Jr. When the DNA came out against Joseph Smith Jr. being the baby daddy I took a controversial troll stance against the position. Now the position that he was a polygamist is not making any sense at all anymore...

There are important LDS theological concepts at play here:

1. Again, we don't believe in ex Nihilo, so that creation is the act seizing chaos and organizing it into order.
2. We don't believe in infallibility of any mortal or scripture written down by mortals. Every mortal is a work in progress for God trying to help a sinful chaotic being become a good being of His order. 
3. This is true of prophets as well as the rest of us.
4. This is true of our community as time goes on generation after generation.
5. This is evident in our doctrine of "continuing revelation."

But more importantly this is evident in our doctrine of "personal revelation." The "first principles and ordinances of the gospel" are:

1. Faith in Jesus Christ
2. Repentance
3. Baptism
4. Gift of the Holy Ghost (source of personal revelation.)

Isn't interesting how 4 is not "strict obedience to the will of the Prophet"? During the era of mainstream LDS polygamy, over 2/3 of Mormons ignored Brigham Young's hellfire and brimstone sermons about how important it was to do plural marriage. Most just said "no thanks," and passed on it. Many of them had met if not known Joseph Smith Jr. personally, who once said:

"…God is not a respecter of persons; we all have the same privilege. … We believe that we have a right to revelations, visions, and dreams from God, our Heavenly Father; and light and intelligence, through the gift of the Holy Ghost, in the name of Jesus Christ, on all subjects pertaining to our spiritual welfare; if it so be that we keep His commandments, so as to render ourselves worthy in His sight." (Chapter 10: Prayer and Personal Revelation, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, 2007.)

As the LDS Church started to grow in popularity in the late 90's, the Warren Jeff (polygamist and child sex predator) controversy broke out, raising many questions about Mormons in popular culture. This is the same time I was on my mission in Western Pennsylvania.  The prophet of that time was Gordon B. Hinkley, who said on Larry King Live "...I condemn polygamy because I believe it is not doctrinal..."

In the end, the Prophet Gordon B. Hinkley openly disagreed with the Prophet Brigham Young on the doctrine of polygamy. This justified all those who had disregarded Brigham Young's suggestions to engage in polygamy. The lesson for LDS and non LDS alike is simple: don't be a lemming. God gave you a conscience, and He expects you to use it. 

Haves vs Have Nots

The activist (open source) game development team I am on has recently unleashed a tittle wave of productivity and are about to complete one project we have been working on for over 10 years (2nd Edition of the Squawk Role-Playing Game.) But maybe the most important project I have been working on lately is the Resilience Role-Playing Game, which I am hoping to have a hard-copy book version of this year. One insider knows there is a significant creative difference between how the online version looks and what the final product will look like, and has question this decision.

While the book uses photographs and a lot of them, the website only uses illustrations. Each and every photograph is being personally vetted by me to make sure it's 100% legally legit before I use it (we've been doing this open-source thing since the mid 90's and have a lot of experience with copyleft.) Yet I refuse to use photos on the website because of the Ghetty Images "extortion scheme."

Ghetty Images (or someone on behalf Ghetty Images) has some kind of bot that constantly crawls the web looking for people who use images that Ghetty Images considers themselves to have control of. Once they find such an image, if that website does not have a pre-existing agreement with them, Ghetty Images sends a letter to the web provider shutting down the website. Ghetty Images always asks for thousands of dollars to establish an agreement with them so that your website isn't shut down. The trick is they ask for a few thousand dollars less than it would take for you to get a lawyer. This has never happened to one of my projects, but it did happen to minority immigrant friends of mine who own an auto glass repair shop in Seattle in the late some time around 2009.

The image in question was:

1.  from a website that specifically gave anyone on the internet permission to use the image (Ghetty Images has a way of purchasing rights to collections of these kinds of images,) and 
2. was heavily modified as to without that permission be within the terms of "fair use." 

However the Ghetty Images bot discovered the photo, and the ACCUSATION was made. The ACCUSATION does the damage regardless of guilt or innocence.

When I was doing an internship in the Education programs at the King County Jail on 5th Ave in Seattle (2003-2004) through Americorps, I saw numerous people do something called "a plea for time served." Let's say a cop ACCUSED you of some wrong doing and throws you in jail. While you wait for your lawyer, the more law abiding you are, the more damage is being done to your career and your family by your absence as time goes on. After you have had some time to simmer in jail for a while, the prosecutor offers you a deal: say you are guilty, and we'll let you out of jail now, no more questions asked. If you are a career criminal with money you fight it, and probably win against their usually weak case. But if you are a law abiding working class citizen, you take that plea before you lose any more of time from your job or family than you already have.

It's the ACCUSATION that does the damage.

Back to Ghetty Images, if a lawyer typically costs $7,000 in your area, then they will ask for $3,000 to $5,000. And that's just it, law abiding working class people get criminal records in Seattle constantly for the crime of not having $7,000 to pay a decent lawyer who isn't in the cop's pocket. (Public defenders rely on the court system to give them referrals. The prosecutor is part of that system, and too many victories is going to encourage that court system to direct their referrals elsewhere.)

There's a lot of problems in Seattle with housing, addiction, income and healthcare, but those problems all impact rich and poor to one degree or another. What the rich never feel is the raw, pure injustice that happens when you can't afford your own lawyer. I know a lot of people don't like hearing this, but the difference between a have and a have not is only about $7,000.

The moral of the story is this: pick your battles. You can die on almost any hill you want to die on. However, you need to reserve your personal resources for whatever matters most to you in your life, which is probably not some hill a loud personality is waving a flag on the top of.

Make Yang style Tai Chi Great Again

On one hand Yang style Tai Chi is the style that popularized Tai Chi throughout the world. On the other hand Yang style paid a very significant price in doing so, and now is sometimes no longer considered a martial art but a form of Chinese yoga descended from martial arts. This price was paid intentionally by the Master who was guilty of the worst selling-out in all of martial arts history, Yang Chen Fu.

According to Doc Fai Wong's book "Tai Chi Chuan's Internal Secrets" (pages 8 -10) Yang Chen Fu had two totally different types of students. One type of student was serious about fighting and was usually training to become a Tai Chi instructor themselves, what you could call an insider student. Everyone else was learning a watered down form of Tai Chi that was based on forms and didn't get seriously into the other aspects of Tai Chi training, who we could call outsider students. (Doc Fai Wong's master was Hu Yuen Chow, who's master was Yang Chen Fu AS AN INSIDER.)

Insider students AND previous generations of Yang style practitioners training happened in two phases, each about 4 years long:

1. The first phase was mostly static postures. If you know much about Tai Chi then you are of course familiar with standing meditation, but this was only one part. Basically every move in Tai Chi forms has a static version. Imagine holding each posture for 30 minutes at a time, just as if each move were a standing meditation posture in it's own right. MY sifu (Vern Miller, who's master was Doc Fai Wong) actually did a version of this making us hold each posture for only 5 to 10 minutes, and it was so intense that it was the 2nd time in my life I have sweated out of my ears (the first time was cross training in a variation of Kyokushin.)
2. ONLY after having done that kind of training for the first four years, would they start doing ANY forms at ALL. In addition to forms, free sparring, push hands, and training with weapons was all highly emphasized. No insider's training was complete until they had mastered all 8 years of training.

Outsider students only did forms, without the 4 year foundation training of static postures and without the free sparring in years 5 through 8. From this I personally deduce that Yang Chen Fu wouldn't have much cared how good the "form" of his outsider students was, which would explain why there are so many bad versions of Yang style out there that lack decent structure for functionality or application.

IF you are trying to practice Yang style Tai Chi as a martial art, here are some things you must include in your training:

1. You must be serious about standing mediation, otherwise you can't be said to be doing serious Yang style.
2. You must be doing two partner exercises with a high level of resistance called "push hands," or else you can't be said to be practicing Tai Chi with physical martial arts skill.
3. You must be doing free sparring, otherwise you can't be said to be doing any serious form of martial art.
4. You must include some type of weapon training, as Tai Chi applies to weapons as much as it does to empty hands.

I have heard many credible Yang stylists criticize photographs of Yang Chen Fu's technique, saying that those photos do not represent the structure he taught to his insider students. To really practice serious Yang Style it is wise for us to consider the technique of his insider students, and the technique of Yang stylists from outside of the Yang Chen Fu lineage.

This is not to discourage you from trying to study Yang style. Remember some of the greatest styles of Tai Chi are break offs of Yang Style, such as Wu style and Sun style, both of those having a better reputation than Yang style.  Beyond this Tai Chi has been around longer than Yang style. Even older styles such as Chen style and Wudang Dan Pai are evolutions of earlier systems of Tai Chi going back before the 1300's.

All Martial Arts Change from one generation to the next, either for the better or for the worse. The next generation of Tai Chi will be better than what we learned, or it will be worse than what we learned, based on how we practice it and what we pass on. Just like Yang Chen Fu damaged the efficacy of Tai Chi in order to popularize Tai Chi, we can improve on outdated practices and make Tai Chi better than it ever was before.

Real Kung Fu vs Fake Garbage

Since I and a few others started Self Defense Evolution a few years ago, people from all over the world have been joining. The creator of "It's about gōng fū (功夫)" joined recently, an advanced Kung Fu practitioner from India:

One style he has been mastering is the "Cigar Shop" or "White Crane" style that is the foremost ancestor of Karate. Looking at his form, we can deduce that he does indeed have a very advanced "jing" or proper energy & breathing you would expect to seen in an advanced practitioner of Kung Fu:

Where as Kung Fu in the USA was influenced by various trends such as Kumite Point Fighting and kickboxing, what we see in India is a more traditional practice. He has offered valuable insight into traditional Kung Fu free sparring: it is full contact, and while what techniques and targets are used might vary, it is much closer to a fight than the light contact sparring we see in modern Muay Thai, MMA. and my own unarmed sparring practice:

This above video with very light or no contact to the head but blasting away spastic hard to other targets on the body gives us a better idea of where Knock Down Karate rules (originating in Goju Ryu before Kyokushin) came from. It also gives us insight into western bare knuckle boxing having a higher emphasis on strikes to the body, as well as "traditional" sparring practices in Choy Li Fut with nearly identical rules. Without boxing gloves and other safety equipment, this is the type of sparring practice that allows you to not die from having an infection caused by a human tooth laceration on your hand, before western medicine figured out how to cure such infections within the last 100 years.

But as bad as Martial Arts has fallen in the past in the USA, he argues that martial arts in India is in a far worst state than anything in the USA's past. He has made a very interesting point about categorizing the types of fake masters out there:

"...there are three types of fake masters as I categorize them...

1. First are those who are doing it for money... just a money making scheme. But if they are doing it to feed their family, I cannot judge that... but these fake masters are the easiest to expose... that's why I say they are the least harmful ones.
2. The second category of fake masters... wants the RESPECT that people give to a teacher. Once he teaches one or two people he always wants more. These people are difficult to point out... they are the most dangerous I would say...
3. The third type are the most harmful to the martial arts world... he who used to be a student of a fake master. HE WAS a legit student... it was his bad luck or lack of intelligence that he did not research much on his teacher... 30 years ago they did not have the internet to help them do their research... so they have been practicing a set of fake skills for 20 to 30 years... and you can not tell them that their life long effort was wasted... they will create more fake pupils who believe that fake skill is real. They are not dangerous, they are not lying, but they are the most harmful species of fake masters." Feb 19, 2023, 10:24 PM (Seattle time.)

Looking at this problem through his lens, it explains some of the aberrant behavior we have seen in my area with our most notorious martial art instructor.

OGL = TSR Lawfare Threat

As an indy RPG developer myself, I can tell you chances are I will not break even for how much labor and time I spend making a quality RPG product. When doing a cost-benefit analysis on weather or not to produce an RPG product, one consideration is ALWAYS: will this get me sued? Because if I have to get a lawyer to publish, that's a lot of money I have to raise that has nothing to do with making or distributing the product, before making any money from the product, and I already know odds are against me breaking even on what product is going to cost me in time.

Once upon a time there was a Game Company called TSR, who were really mad that anyone but them published table top RPGs, because they owned the original table top RPG, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D.) TSR decided to sue Palladium, who in turn decided to sue so many other new RPG system developers that in the 1980's and 1990's people were scared out of trying to get into the table top RPG market.

We (the team known as the Game Arts Guild, previously known as Galbraith Games,) were one of these groups in exile. Before 2000 our plan was to make a computer game version of our RPG first (the precursor to Squawk RPG and The Dark Woods,) and then make a computer game hand book that could coincidentally double as an RPG book, to try to avoid all that threat-of-lawfare we could not afford.

Then in 2000 the OGL came out. It ended the two decades old threat-of-lawfare preventing indy RPG development, and we entered the golden era of indy RPG publishing that we are in today, which has grown rapidly because of print-on-demand technologies and services. We at the Game Arts Guild never did embrace the OGL however, and instead relied on traditional open source licenses such as the LGPL and later Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike. As Quake 1 Total-Conversion developers we had started one of the world's first open game projects called "The Free Models Project" (the inheritor of which is Open Game Art who we endorse,) and as a result of that experience we realized at the time the OGL was suspect.

That's right, THE OGL WAS NO-DAMNED-GOOD ANYWAYS. The ONLY thing it did was end an age of lawfare-threat preventing indy RPG development. The problem then and now is the OGL grants Wizards of the Coast the ability to revoke your right to use the OGL at any time:

Hasbro (the now owners of Wizards of the Coast) has a parallel process going on with their most popular product, the board game Monopoly; they really think like that game, hate competition, lock down intellectual properties in ethically questionable ways, etc. What all of this "new proposed OGL 1.1" drama described in the above video has really signaled, is their intention to reengage in TSR style THREAT OF LAWFARE by way of OGL-license-revoking (remember it is only the THREAT that prevents indy game development as per my first paragraph of this post,) to shut down indy RPG development. The current OGL everyone seems to want to preserve will NOT prevent them from doing just that!

As a byproduct of working on Squawk 2nd Edition for the last 10 years we have produced a role playing game system we call "Resilience" (www.ResilienceRPG.com) licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license (which is set in the modern day but has been designed to adapt to other settings,) which I hope disgruntled indy developers will consider as they exodus D&D.