October Hippie Chick of the Month: Female Cops

I know, I know, "Cute Hippie Chick of the Month" is a day early - but I'm busy tomorrow and had to put it out today.
This Month we take a look at female police officers from all over the world...

Singapore


Japan


Pakistan


Indonesia


Hong Kong


United States

Warrior Hair: Long or Gone?

I found this short piece on Warrior Hair at THIS BLOG. There is absolutely no way the information can be verified, it could be complete crap - But here goes:

The Truth About Hair and why Indians would keep their hair long
Reported by C. Young

This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Viet Nam War.

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair style is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue. Back in the Viet Nam war however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical hospital. He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Viet Nam.

Sally said, ”I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example. As I read the documents, I learned why. It seems that during the Viet Nam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities. Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious casualities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistantly that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ’sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ’sixth sense’ , their ’intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ’read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas. Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests. They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut. Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.

Here is a typical test:

The recruit is sleeping out in the woods. An armed ’enemy’ approaches the sleeping man. The long haired man is awakened out of his sleep by a strong sense of danger and gets away long before the enemy is close, long before any sounds from the approaching enemy are audible.

In another version of this test the long haired man senses an approach and somehow intuits that the enemy will perform a physical attack. He follows his ’sixth sense’ and stays still, pretending to be sleeping, but quickly grabs the attacker and ’kills’ him as the attacker reaches down to strangle him.

This same man, after having passed these and other tests, then received a military haircut and consistantly failed these tests, and many other tests that he had previously passed.

So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long.”

Comment:

The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years. Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural. Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive. Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole.The body has a reason for every part of itself.

Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ’feelers’ or ’antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brainstem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out .

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems. It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds. It contributes to sexual frustration.

Conclusion:

In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error. It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.

The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us. When Delilah cut Sampson’s hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.
----------------------

A few people responded with plenty of examples of Bald warriors, you can find them at the Blog linked above.

Of course, Kimbo still has plenty of hair...

More Kids Cagefighting Controversy

In another instance of self-inflicted damage, the MMA scene is back in the news. This time due to complaints raised about young boys grappling as a demonstration in an adult club before the main events.

Readers may know I have a more nuanced view of the sport after helping train two fighters in our local area. While the crowd at the events I attended were like any other drunken louts at football games, the fighters showed respect for the process, winners consoled loser's and there were bonds between fighters.
While I am steeped in traditional martial arts, I appreciated what I saw and realized the nature of evolving fight-sports.

None of the techniques these kids in the video are using are much different than the wrestling seminars I attended as a youth.
What looks bad is the spectre of adults in a drinking club cheering and raging outside the cage. It just looks bad. I mean we are critical of the occasional little-league parent that acts like this on the sideline, so it's little wonder that the presence of the cage and adult behaviour tainted an otherwise safe wrestling match.

Here's a few snips from "The Guardian":

"Council chiefs have ordered the review of the licence of a Lancashire club after it staged cage fighting using children as young as eight.
Concerns were raised after the boys took part in a fight at the Greenlands Labour club in Preston before a 250-strong adult audience. The city council will be checking to see whether any licence conditions were breached and will ask the club not to stage similar events involving juveniles.
A video of the bout on 10 September, posted on the internet, showed children fighting in a cage without protective padding or headgear.
The deputy leader of Preston city council, John Swindells, said: "I, like many other people, am appalled by the incident of cage fighting involving children taking place in Preston. I am really concerned about the potential of harm to the children who were as young as eight years old."
(snip)
"Police will not be taking action over the event. A Lancashire police spokesman said the force had looked into the matter fully and there were no issues to pursue."

'Nuff said.

Man Escapes Prison With Nunchucks

From "The Raw Story":

"An inmate in the St. Louis city jail escaped Friday after fighting off more than a dozen correctional officers using a self-made pair of nunchucks then climbing to his freedom over a barbed wire and razor fence, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

The prisoner, 31-year-old Lorenzo Pollard, was caught and back in the jail by Sunday night.

Pollard was in a medium-security cell on charges of theft, trespassing, property damage and resisting arrest. On the way to the bathroom Friday evening, he pulled out his homemade nunchucks, pieced together from bedsheets and a chair, and fought his way through a dozen guards, climbed to another level of the jail, broke through two layers of glass blocks and shimmied over two sharp fences.

Another inmate walked out of an open gate and climbed fences to escape in July, and two others broke free in April.

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There's some serious security and training issues at that lock-up...

Archery Experts

From YouTube:
"Hungarian archer and boyer Lajos Kassai shoots 12 arrows in just 18 seconds."

Pretty damned cool.
And dangerous.
It's kind of funny how guys that train together develop the same habits. My brother gave me an English longbow last year and we had a great time shooting it. Recently, three of my training partners have started shooting bows also. This was completely unplanned, just seems to be a natural transition into a deeper level of martial weaponry. One of our guys is making his own arrowheads out of native rock and building a bow from local wood - native style. His goal is to take a deer with his home built rig this fall. These are the kind of survival skills most people never experience.

Check out this shot:


And who doesn't like this view?

Can Intense Exercise Actually Make You Gain Weight?

Time Magazine has a very interesting article that examines why people can exercise like crazy and still gain weight:

"Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.
And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government's definition. Yes, it's entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don't. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight?"
---
"The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder."
---
"Some of us can will ourselves to overcome our basic psychology, but most of us won't be very successful. "The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure," says Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. "If you're more physically active, you're going to get hungry and eat more." Gortmaker, who has studied childhood obesity, is even suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. "Why would they build those?" he asks. "I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000."
---

And here's the "meat" of the article:

"But there's some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded."
------------------------------

(D.R.)- So as modern society has developed, people simply do less work. They sit in an office for hours and hours, take long car rides to work and back and sit in front of the TV at night.
In order to compensate, they hammer it out at the gym with intense bursts of exercise three hours a week.
This dovetails perfectly with an article from "Mark's Daily Apple", and the authors of "The Primal Diet". Here, Mark describes the activity of primitive man:

"We’re talking about a favorite of mine: low level aerobic activity. Sure, it can feel all too relaxed, even indulgent compared to the intense stuff. But don’t be so quick to disparage. Low level aerobic activity, I’m here to tell you, is the crucial base of Primal Blueprint fitness (Rule #3 in my book for those of you who are currently reading it). It’s the base, the foundation, the keystone to the big fitness picture.
After all, it was how our good man Grok and his family spent most of their days. Carrying water from the stream. Collecting fire wood, walking through the forests and meadows to gather greens, berries, and other plants. Working on their shelter. Perhaps migrating to another area because of drought, predators or competing tribes. Butchering, building, washing, cooking, dancing, you name it. Some of it was hard work, but it was mostly just continual – the sheer volume of low level activity that characterized Grok’s existence."
---
"If the human body evolved within these conditions, our lives today often leave us as fish out of water. There’s the joke about old time farmers laughing at people who pay to slog away on a treadmill for hours at the gym. Why would anyone pay to run in place like a hamster when there’s plenty of real, hard, useful labor to be done instead? Of course, not all of us have livelihoods that involve enough physical exertion to constitute adequate exercise, and our modern home lives (with washing machines, electric/gas mowers, etc.) don’t require the same labor as they once did. Unlike Grok, few of us built the homes we live in. Few of us till large tracts of land for planting. We generally don’t spend our days scrubbing, hauling or foraging. But it doesn’t matter, ultimately, what form our low level cardio takes. What matters is what happens on the inside."
---
"As I’ve suggested before, our society has come to worship a chronic cardio model as the beacon of fitness. It follows that low level aerobic activity appears to do nothing but fall short – a weak attempt at the “real” thing. Worse yet, it’s an attitude that makes the fitness quest seem like an all or nothing proposition. No pain, no gain. Total bunkum. Sure, the Primal Blueprint model incorporates low level aerobic activity as part of a larger picture along with strength and “sprint” interval training. The PB fitness model, however, is built upon that low level foundation.
Not only is low level aerobic activity the natural evolutionary expectation of the body, it’s flat out beneficial in its own right. It plays an integral role in maintaining weight and metabolic balance. It also builds your base and makes more strenuous workouts possible by toning all the muscles, joints and connective tissue needed for optimal strength training and high intensity aerobic activity. Low level aerobic exercise engages your energy systems and incrementally improves their functioning and efficiency. And while it does all that, it also physiologically and hormonally counters the effects of stress."

*********************************************

So there you have it;
Our bodies are genetically geared for constant, low-level activity. It maintains our metabolism much better than short, intense bursts of exercise - the kind that tends to make people eat more to store energy.

You can read much more at the links embedded above.

Great Video Interview With Tim Cartmell

Video Link
Rolled Up Epsiode 27: The Never-Ending Path of a Martial Artist with Tim Cartmell

Here is a really, really good video interview with Tim Cartmell, one of the absolute best instructors I have trained with.
Readers may know I met Tim through Jake Burroughs of Three Harmonies Martial Arts in Seattle. I learned more in a half-dozen seminars with Tim than in any two years of past Karate training. Most of the seminars dealt with application of Tai Chi Chuan, Xingyi and Bagua - with a heavy influence on knock-downs and throws.
As you will see in the interview, Tim was an expert in Chinese martial arts (he trained for years in Taiwan) and has now focused on Brazilian Jiujitsu.
Watch the way Tim moves in the mat work with the interviewer at the end, complete relaxed power.

Tim Cartmell's "Shen Wu" website

Palin' Around With Terrorists

George W. Bush with Saudi Prince Abdullah


As we approach the ten year anniversary of the 911 attacks, with the successful hit on alleged mastermind Osama Bin Laden, questions abound.
Information is not trickling in, the floodgates have opened and we are witnessing an information dump. None of these revelations seem to be related to the killing of Bin Laden, but more reflections of the guilty consciousnesses of Government investigators and officials.

In a seventeen-page article appearing in "Vanity Fair" titled "The Kingdom and the Towers" Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan detail how the Saudi Royal family clearly funded and provided intelligence to the 911 hijackers. Not only that, but the Pakistani I.S.I. intelligence service was likely involved long before they hid and protected Bin Laden in a comfortable military suburb.

John Farmer, Dean of Rutgers Law School and senior council to the 911 Commission knows the Commission was a cover-up:

"At some level of government,” says Dean Farmer, “at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11." (Rutgers Link)

The Bush family has always "palled around with terrorists". George W's grandfather Prescott had his bank shut down for trading with the enemy (Nazi Germany) in World War Two. George Bush senior secretly funded the Contras in Nicaragua, terrorists by any definition. The Bush family has had long-standing ties with the Bin Laden family.
From "In these Times":

"In 1979, Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, obtained financing from James Bath, a Houstonian and close family friend. One of many investors, Bath gave Bush $50,000 for a 5 percent stake in Arbusto. At the time, Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the wealthy Saudi Arabian family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden."

The implication is clearly that the seed money for Bush's oil company came directly from the Bin Laden family.

But I digress; In Summers' "The Kingdom and the Towers", nobody is more critical than 911 Commission member and former Senator Bob Graham:

"Congress’s Joint Inquiry, its co-chair Bob Graham told the authors, had found evidence “that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers. . . . It’s my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States. By ‘the Saudis,’ I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government—which includes all of the elite in the country.”
(snip)
"Those involved, in Graham’s view, “included the royal family” and “some groups that were close to the royal family.” Was it credible that members of the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation? “I think,” the former senator said, “that they did in fact take actions that were complicit with the hijackers.”
(snip)
And in this bombshell criticism of Bush:

"It was,” Graham wrote, “as if the president’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.” In Graham’s view, Bush’s role in suppressing important information about 9/11, along with other transgressions, should have led to his impeachment and removal from office."

----------

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney is making a book tour attempting to re-write the 911 and Iraq war history. Cheney, who throws the rest of the entire Bush administration under the bus, admits he was actually in charge of the country.
Nothing to see here, move along now...

And as one domino tips into the next, toppling the whole series of events, Former National Security Advisor Richard Clarke claims the CIA was trying to recruit several of the 911 hijackers:

Did the CIA cover up its advance knowledge of at least two of the 9/11 hijackers?

"Richard Clarke, the national counterterrorism czar on 9/11, thinks so. In an interview for an upcoming radio documentary, Clarke claimed that top-level CIA officials deliberately withheld from the White House and the FBI knowledge as early as 2000 that two al Qaeda members - Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar - were living in San Diego.
The former anti-terror chief said he believes that the CIA kept the info under wraps because it wanted to recruit the two Saudis to serve as double agents within bin Laden's organization. Instead, the two terrorists ended up hijackers on American Flight 77. George Tenet, who was CIA director, claims that Clarke is "reckless and profoundly wrong."

Tenet, of course, is understandably covering his ass.

And the information continues to pour out. Yesterday's Miami Herald published yet more information linking the Saudi Royal Family to the hijackers and foreknowledge of the 911 attacks:

"Link to 9/11 hijackers found in Sarasota-
FBI found ties between hijackers and Saudis in Sarasota but never revealed the findings"

"Just two weeks before the 9/11 hijackers slammed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, members of a Saudi family abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter — and an open safe in a master bedroom."
(Snip)
"In the weeks to follow, law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights — including leader Mohamed Atta — in discoveries never before revealed to the public."
(snip)
"Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who co-chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, said he should have been told about the findings, saying it “opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11. ... No information relative to the named people in Sarasota was disclosed.”
(snip)
"The fact that the FBI did not tell the Inquiry about the Florida discoveries, Graham says, is similar to the agency’s failure to provide information linking members of the 9/11 terrorist team to other Saudis in California until congressional investigators discovered it themselves.
The Inquiry did nevertheless accumulate a “very large” file on the hijackers in the United States, and later turned it over to the 9/11 Commission. “They did very little with it,” Graham said, “and their reference to Saudi Arabia is almost cryptic sometimes. … I never got a good answer as to why they did not pursue that.”
The final 28-page section of the Inquiry’s report, which deals with “sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers,” was entirely blanked out. It was kept secret from the public on the orders of former President George W. Bush and is still withheld to this day, Graham said."


History will not be kind to the legacy of the Bush family.

Two takes on 2-Man Xingyi Drills

Hal Mosher

Everybody has their takes on the simplistic whole-body techniques of the Xingyi Five-Element Fists.
Above, Hal Mosher (Website Here) demonstrates some attacks and counters, each partner using the same technique. I think Hal has some good ideas, but his video production could be better. (Hal, keep your other hand up!)
I have his Sun-style Bagua video and for the price I paid I got very little. Just Hal rolling through the palm changes one time with no verbal description or application. None-the-less, Hal has some good stuff which stimulates other ideas.

Below is another old favorite, Sifu Rudy and B.T. doing their version of a drill, alternating between fists:


For traditionalists, drills like these help students get a general idea of how the forms they practice can be used in application and as a bridge to some light free-sparring. I like to think about mixing this in with Tai Chi Chuan push-hands, so you get a little standing grappling with hitting and neutralizing an attack.
We have to remember, these are just drills, not actual fight training.

Steven Seagal Denies Killing Puppy

Steven Seagal with fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio

In a surprising new low, "B"-grade actor, former martial artist and current "Lord of Pasta" Steven Seagal is denying that he killed a puppy in an Arizona police raid.
Yes, Seagal - a wanna-be spook, army man and SWAT team Nazi played dress-up in Cammie Jammies and raided some dudes home in Phoenix resulting in the death of an 11 month-old puppy and 100 chickens.

From "The Huffington Post":

"Seagal and numerous deputies and posse members were present March 9 during a raid at the home of Jesus Llovera. In the claim, Llovera says an 11-month-old puppy was killed along with 100 roosters.
According to witnesses at the raid, a dog was present on Llovera's property when deputies and SWAT team members, including Seagal, entered the premises with a search warrant to arrest Llovera on cockfighting charges and seize all evidence pertaining to the crime"
(snip)
"Llovera's attorney, Robert Campos, told The Associated Press Friday his client didn't accuse Steven Seagal of killing an animal on his property in a notice of claim filed against the sheriff's office.
"My client never accused Seagal of having anything to do with the death of his puppy," Campos said. "He (Llovera) just wanted an apology from Seagal for his role in the destruction of my client's home, property and animals."
(snip)
"In Llovera's claim, the sheriff's office and Seagal are accused of setting off explosives to create a distraction and confusion. The claim says Seagal was free to commandeer a tank and crash through an iron gate on the southeast corner of Llovera's property in southwest Phoenix.
In an interview with KTAR Radio in Phoenix during the March raid, Seagal said he was there to help guard one side of Llovera's house.
"We're just sort of, you know, trying to guard one side of the house and see if anybody would run out or anything like that or, do anything worse than that," Seagal said. "We're kind of just doing that and I didn't really enter the house today."
----------------------

Hmm. So let's see if we get this right; Seagal really does not participate in any of this wanna-be cop foolishness.
He just stands around the corner eating doughnuts and drinking coffee waiting for photo ops.

Punk.

"Lord of Pasta" credit to our friend Bob at "Striking Thoughts"

For more on Steven Seagal's fantasy life, see my 2008 piece "The Company He Keeps: The Mafia, CIA and Steven Seagal"

and "LeBell vs. Seagal" from 2007

Cute Hippie Chick of the Month: The New Gypsies

From "The Huffington Post":

"London based photographer Iain McKell offers an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of a real and raw group of present-day nomads whose culture is built around ideals of freedom, nature, and simplicity. The New Gypsies are British horse drawn travelers. The movement began in 1986 when a group of Post-Punk Anti-Thatcher protesters headed out of London into the English countryside.
Iain McKell spent the last 10 years documenting and living with travelers of all ages: parents, children, couples and loners."

You gotta' admit, these girls are beautiful and live free. The term Gypsy appears to have lost it's racial stigma, as anyone from any culture is free to join this lifestyle.

I predict we will be seeing a lot of this in America's not-so-distant future.
As large urban areas become more dysfunctional people will begin fleeing back to the prairies and farmland of middle-America. For years those rural farms and towns have lost population as youth moved to urban cities with the promise of jobs and adventure.
Soon, things will become to dangerous and expensive in the city, and a new "back to the land" movement will begin.