December: Cute Hippie Chick Of The Month: (and other thoughts)

Ah yes, It's the first of December, it's snowing outside Dojo Rat's shack, and you know what that means--- Cute Hippie Chick Of The Month!
This young lady, third eye bead and all, is the living image of the hippie chick theme. Listen to her idealism, her compassion for humanity and hope for the future. There is no doubt that in this hopelessly screwed up world, we need more people like her. Listen to what she says about "planting the seed" and "cultivating". As I've said before, I believe that as we approach "Peak Oil", there will be a return to an agrarian society. It will probably involve co-op farming built around small communities. During the FIRST great depression, the farmers never went hungry.
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I had a young guy come to the Tai Chi Chuan class this week for his first class. He followed us through the form and then watched as we did some push-hands. I saw him the next day and asked him what he thought. He said he loved the push hands, but didn't think he had the patience to learn the form. I said I would never teach anyone push hands if they wouldn't learn the form, so he may as well quit now. This is interesting; some students only want to do the form, usually women or older folks, and some just want to get physical and learn a little self defense. I come from a hard style background, and always integrate self defense into our Tai Chi class. But I have no interest in teaching just one portion of an art like Tai Chi Chuan. I don't think a practitioner can be well-rounded without both form training and self defense. I suggested he find a Karate school instead. If this guy comes back, I'll probably make him just do form training until he can at least demonstrate the first set of the Yang form, and then have a talk with him about push hands.
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Bob over at "Striking Thoughts" has given me a sort of sideways challenge: He wants to see me develop a one-handed lock-flow drill while holding a Beer in the other hand...
Bob; I'm already working on it, give me a couple of weeks to set up the video!

The Great Jim Kelly

Jim Kelly 1970 Tournament Fight


"Tattoo Connection"

Thanks to Bob over at "Striking Thoughts" for this tip on a 1970 Jim Kelly Karate tournament fight. Kelly was a well-rounded athlete in basketball, football and track and field at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He went on to study Shorin-Ryu and Okinawa-Te Karate and later opened his own school after winning an international middleweight championship. Kelly is best recognized for his role as "Williams" in Bruce Lee's "Enter The Dragon". He later went on to star in "Black Belt Jones", The Tattoo Connection", "Three The Hard Way" and other films. The guy at THIS BLOG met Kelly recently at a Brew Pub in Huston, and found out Kelly is still getting movie offers, and runs his own Tennis club. It's a good "Where are they now" review, and has a few good pictures.
As far as Kelly's tournament fight above, he has great reach and it's a scrappy fight. I'd like to know who the other fighter is, they are pretty evenly matched and the outcome is unclear.

A Tale Of Two Masters

All Along The Watchtower-Jimi Hendrix

Bruce Lee

This is a tale of two masters; both from Seattle and both living there at about the same time. I'm guessing Hendrix was in Paratrooper school when Lee was at college in Seattle. * These Masters share a birthday today *, and these guys were two of the most powerful performers in my lifetime at least!
Hendrick's music shaped part of my young life, and Lee just plain blew me away. Listen to what Bruce Lee is saying, and he uses the Tai Chi Chuan form to demonstrate-- A true classic

The Occult Nature Of Martial Arts

In my nearly thirty-year experience in the martial arts, I have seen some interesting things. Most of them are ordinary, some spectacular. These include mere human feats of incredible jump spin-kicks, power breaking and manipulation of opponents. Sometimes these demonstrations have crossed into states of metaphysical events.
Martial arts often suggest a level of skill beyond the mere physical, and hint at an intangible or esoteric knowledge. This skill is recognized not only as a fighting skill, but also a healing skill.
From the earliest times, Warriors and Occult practitioners, or Shamen have been closely linked. Going to battle was a spiritual event, involving preparation and in some cases, inducing a trance state. The Vikings were known to have taken mind-altering mushrooms before going into battle, hence the term “Berserker” (Berserk). They went nuts and killed things. That warrior cult was also steeped in pagan gods, divination and superstition. They were a warrior culture, yet given the opportunity, they melded with the populations they had just kicked the crap out of and helped build much of Europe.
Other aboriginal cultures across the world have their warrior cultures closely linked to shamanic experiences also. Anyone who has read the Carlos Castenada books with Don Juan the sorcerer have a look into native American Indian culture and warrior spirit. Part of coming of age in warrior cultures has often been linked to taking psychedelic drugs or experiencing extreme hardships under the guidance of elders.
With Japanese martial artists such as Aikido founder Ueshiba, there were cults such as the Shinto O-Moto Kyo, that were based in natural science of every day living, and the older and revered Chinese occult systems. Chinese “Tao” is Japanese “Do”, and the esoteric knowledge of each has the same root. Nearly all cultures revered the sword as a spiritual tool, some bearing generations of blood.
Perhaps no esoteric system is better known than the Chinese five-element theory that governs acupuncture and pressure points. An unknown number of people partake in the healing arts provided by these techniques, yet they are hardly recognized by modern medicine today. Contemporary medicine looks upon Meridian theory as placebo therapy, yet in a martial as well as a healing application, the results are “striking” (pun intended).
The five-element theory is akin to the child’s game of rock-scissors-paper, where there is a healing aspect as well as a destructive nature. Wood feeds fire, fire creates earth, earth produces metal, metal leads to water (somewhat obscure, possibly water witching). The destructive cycle is just the opposite; metal cuts wood, wood penetrates earth, earth dams water, water cools fire, fire shapes metal. While each element relates to a meridian, combinations of strikes in the destructive cycle on meridians can cause knockout and damage. Experts more knowledgeable than me may expand on this.
The point is, there is a lot more to the skills involved in both healing and killing than most martial schools offer. Pressure points, sacred sounds used in ki-ai’s and much more.
From an internet search, there are scores of articles by Christian authors that indicate their fear of these ideas. Too bad for them. They may be missing out on a whole bunch of stuff that was known to the old Christian Gnostics that are abhorrent to modern evangelicals today. For instance, the Knights Templar was a Christian warrior society that found enlightenment in the middle-east, and incorporated it into their Christian rituals. The Templers were a Christian Knight organization that was created to guard passage to the holy lands from Europe. They built their fortress on the Temple mount In Jerusalem, and are said to have found the holiest ancient Gnostic (self enlightened) Christian relics. The Templars, according to author Jim Marrs (“Rule By Secrecy”-Harper-Collins), cut deals with and gained esoteric knowledge from “The Assassins”, the Hashish cult-for-hire in middle age Islam. Speculation is there was much information exchanged. Upon their return to Europe, the Templars used sacred geometry to build the Gothic Cathedrals, celestial navigation, and the first banking system. All this was built on Arab culture, and it revolutionized Europe. They were a Christian martial society, and on Friday the 13th 1307, many of the Templars were rounded up by the church, tortured and disbanded, partly for their esoteric and non-conventional knowledge. The contemporary Catholic Church may be the worlds largest practitioner of ceremonial magic, with the ritual cannibalism of the wafer and wine, or the methods of choosing a Pope.
Then there is the dark side. The Japanese Yakuza and Tong Chinese Mafia have long had blood rites. Secret societies such as Ninja clans developed many black-art techniques, the same techniques that are seen today in drug-induced interrogation, water-bording etc.
In the past, I have written about other cult-like schools. In Portland Oregon, there was a school called “Poekulean” or “A rose with thorns”. This was primarily a woman’s self-defense school, and they had candlelight rituals with knives involved. Now, this was an Indonesian-based school, and such is the nature of those arts, but it freaked a lot of women in Portland out, to the point where a critical article in a weekly paper was written.
I have also witnessed some “No touch knockouts”. I am telling you, these are very controversial, and don’t always work, but when they do, they do. There is an element of the Master-student relationship that is conducive to achieving the no touch knockout. I believe it involves hypnosis similar to that experimented with by Anton Mesmer in early European culture. I have also seen these attempts at knockouts go very bad. Hardened athletes and skeptics are more resistant, suggesting an element of Hypnosis is involved.
There is however, something that does happen. George Dillman’s Ryukyu Kempo group hooked students up to medical recording equipment and performed no touch knockouts on them. The results were startling and cautionary. Over cold drinks after a seminar I discussed this with experts Jack Hogan and Dan McCusky, both who had witnessed Dillman’s experiment. In their opinion, people went out very heavily, and were difficult to recover. They felt there was a tremendous amount of psychic energy involved. This practice can come at the physical expense of the practitioner. One of the men who was knocking people out urinated blood afterward, indicating that it had affected the prenatal Chi residing in his kidneys. Hogan and McCusky hinted that this art was possibly taken further, and commented that “There are some things that people just shouldn’t be doing”.
Most of us practice martial arts for health, self-defense and self-improvement. Just how far down the path we go, and which turns we choose are up to the individual. Through modern methods such as biofeedback and brain imaging, we are now able to see how shamanic practices of the ancients actually work. How they are used is a different story…

Ninja Technique

Here, a young Saudi boy demonstrates a Spiderman/Ninja technique. It's based on what rock climbers call the "chimney", using opposing force to keep you between two walls (as in a chimney). This one is excedingly difficult however, because it is a CORNER, with the walls at 90 degrees rather than opposed. Now, if he just had a sword on his back and a hood, he could drop over a wall on the other side and go into battle!

November 22nd 1963 - Why Kennedy Still Matters

Forty-four years ago today the United States of America experienced a hostile takeover of our government, perpetrated by industrialists and their henchmen that continue to resurface today.
Researching the assassination of President John F. Kennedy provides a road map to understand how and why corruption is so pervasive in American government today. I was very young on November 22nd 1963, but I remember my parents explaining it to me the day it happened, and later watching TV and seeing Kennedy’s young son saluting his father’s coffin as it passed him in the funeral procession. People have commented that America lost its innocence that day, and the dogged research into the event that followed became the model for understanding later conspiracies. These include the CIA’s importing heroin from Southeast Asia (and cocaine decades later), The deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Watergate and Iran Contra.
This week, a book publisher has released a book authored by President Gerald Ford titled “A Presidential Legacy And The Warren Commission”. Ford was himself a member of the commission, and in the book claims that the CIA covered up evidence relating to the assassination of Kennedy, fueling debate once again on what exactly happened.
The same characters appear again and again. Richard Armitage has long been rumored to have been involved with the CIA heroin smuggling, and recently was involved with the current plot to expose CIA analyst Valerie Plame-Wilson. George Bush senior was apparently photographed at the scene of the Kennedy hit in Dallas,
and is named in FBI documents investigating the assassination.
Bush Senior was also involved in “The October Surprise”, a conspiracy to insure that the American embassy hostages in Iran were not released until Reagan’s inauguration. This was the first treasonous deal the Republicans cut with the Iranians, which led to the later revelations of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Most people now believe that Oswald could not have pulled off the seemingly impossible shots, and a friend once told me that in Marine sniper school they use the Dallas hit as a model of a perfect triangulated fire pattern, or how to set up an ambush with multiple shooters.
All this matters because it keeps happening. We clearly had a coup in the stolen 2000 election, and Colin Powell claims he was lied to about the mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Presidential spokesman Scott McClellen now says he was lied to about Bush, Cheney and Rove's involvement in blowing Valerie Wilson’s CIA cover, and bringing down the analyst division she worked in.
The tragedy of 911 is the Kennedy assassination of our modern era. I highly recommend people check out “The coincidence theorist’s guide to 911”, and go to the numerous links provided in this un-nerving essay.
Much like the Kennedy hit, we may never understand just what happened on 911, but one thing is for sure- the Bush-Cheney cabal is not even close to telling the truth.
It’s been forty-four years since Kennedy died, and evidence like the new Gerald Ford book continues to surface. I expect that as the years go by, we will see more leaks and testimony dribble out regarding 911.
That’s why Kennedy still matters…

Dojo Rat Blog Is One-Year Old !

Hey! Dojo Rat Blog is one year old this week!
Ah... the Beer will flow tonight!