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Another ridiculously hot day, another day at the pool…. Having gotten a handle on the 3-meter board, I decided it was time to figure out what I was doing wrong on the one-meter board and why I was always hitting the water on my butt. Upon consultation with the kid who has been zen master to my grasshopper, I discovered that I was rotating too slowly, so speeding things up took care of the problem nicely and I went back to the 3-meter after a few successful splashes.

The problem, however, is that what is an ideal rotational speed off a one-meter board is somewhat excessive on the higher one, at least if you harbor a desire to enter the water feet-first. It must have looked like a cartoon or something, because I came flawlessly out of my tuck only to discover that there was way too much space to spare. So, thanks to my momentum, I continued to rotate and smacked into the water face-first. And yes, that will sting. Fortunately, there weren’t many people using the diving pool just then, but the lifeguard and the zen master got a pretty good laugh out of it. I have now learned that hearing “are you okay?” immediately upon surfacing is not a hallmark of the successful adventure in diving.

I did manage to get the rotational issue under control, finally, just in time to see that two of the younger guys had joined the party and were starting to do flips off the 5-meter platform. I was tempted to give it a try, but in the interest of maintaining structural integrity, I think I’ll make sure I can reliably control what part of my body hits the water first before giving it a whirl. I am not so determined to experience new sensations that I wish to discover what adding another two meters to that face-flop feels like.

Persona falls for an old canard:

But lets get this straight. Try that hocus pocus matial arts crap in combat against seasoned veterans and REAL warriors, and brother, your just as dead as if you never walked into a dojo and waxed left and waxed right.

Yawn. I’ve heard that nonsense from several military vets, up to and including the Commandant of the USMC. In each case, I have convinced them to retract the statement after getting thrown, locked into an arm bar or trapped into a neck lock, in less than ten seconds every time. And it’s pretty obvious, after all, even Rangers and Marines spend mere weeks practicing that which martial artists spend years on.

Persona’s attitude is merely a variant of the warrior’s notion that martial virtue would suffice to overawe German machine guns in the trenches.

What’s particularly ridiculous about his statement is that the REAL warriors are perfectly aware of this gap in their training, which is why the Marines recently incorporated MCMAP into their training and Israeli military personnel developed Krav Magda. There isn’t a single deadly military technique that isn’t incorporated into some martial art somewhere.

Now, it’s true that not all martial arts are created alike. Tae Kwon Do and other kicking-centered disciplines are relatively useless against a hand fighter or a grappler. I’d much rather take on a kung fu or karate fighter than one trained in aikido or jujitsu. But the fact that so many special forces personnel gravitate towards the traditional martial arts demonstrates that no amount of military discipline, military experience, jumping out of airplanes or learning how to shoot an M-16 can ever substitute for the constant repetition required for mastering martial arts skills.

I do think that the one area that a veteran soldier is likely to have an advantage is what Joe Lewis called commitment. A good soldier will have learned to overcome that internal hesitation that slows most people’s actions down. Lewis even states that fighters don’t have it, I certainly don’t, but commitment alone is not enough to overcome significant deficits of skill, speed or power.

JT emails:

For years corporate America imposed a glass ceiling (or restricted professional career path) on gyno-Americans because of a real or imaginary perception that gyno-Americans would choose child-rearing over duty, loyalty to child over loyalty to business.

The feminist movement argued that the male bigots (chauvanist pigs) in the boardroom projected these unreal ideas upon women with and without children and with and without husbands. They argued that if women were given a chance, they could prove the fallacy of the ideas.

Recently Perky Katie Couric made the illogical leap from mindless morning show hostess to netowrk news anchor. Even more recently she was told to proceed to the Middle East battlegrounds to report live and on scene. She refused. She said that it is dangerous and that she is a single mother.

Is her refusal to go a fulfillment of the glass ceiling mentality?

Where are the feminists and why aren’t they calling Perky Katie less than a woman?

I don’t have much of an opinion on this, because it involves one of the old TV channels, television news and Katie Couric. I have never seen the lady on television nor read anything she has written, I couldn’t care less about her and my only thought on the matter is that she will probably transform a previously male occupation by her inability to perform it adequately, in the ignoble tradition of female policemen, firemen and soldiers.

But based on JT’s email, there does appear to be a certain amount of irony there.

My sensei has been working on a book laying out the principles of martial arts combat and I’ve been helping him with the editing. While we were talking yesterday, I remembered I wanted to get a clarification from him on something about our lineage that confused me. Now, keep in mind that my sensei is a big fan of the Way of the Intercepting Fist and the principles he’s developed were inspired, in part, by the blended style developed by Bruce Lee.

Vox: “I know you got your black belt at House of the Dragon, but what dan are you now? Third?”

Sensei: “Fifth. You were there, remember? I got it in the ring that fight night up in Duluth.”

Vox: “Oh yeah, when you fought that point fighter.”*

Sensei: (Laughs) “I put the tokes to him, didn’t I.”

Vox: “Yeah, that was a quick one. Anyhow, when did Terry get his black belt from Bruce Lee? I didn’t see his name on the list they’ve got on some Jeet Koon Do site.”

Sensei: “No, Eizo Shimabuku gave it to him, in Shorin-Ryu. In Okinawa.”

Vox: “So, what’s the connection with Jeet Koon Do?”

Sensei: (thoughtful pause) “He read the book.”

Okay, that may amuse no one but me, but it still makes me laugh.

*The guy was ranked 10th in the nation at the time, but after performing two full armadillos, he gave up after getting floored a third time. In the words our second sensei, “if you want to play tag, go play with the children”.

DJ Gallo on ESPN:

Have the Colts addressed their protection problems?

If by “their protection problems” you mean “their quarterback who always cracks under pressure in the playoffs and then shifts the blame to his teammates,” then, no, they haven’t addressed their protection problems.

The man is also very sound on Michael Vick, the bestest quarterback ever.

From National Review’s cover story:

In his recent book Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . ., John Podhoretz outlines a ten-point plan to prevent that scary prospect. Point number ten is “Nominate Rudy.” Podhoretz counsels that Republicans “not hold ideological purity more dear than partisan victory in the coming two years.” And he believes that victory-minded Republicans are heeding his advice. In a recent column in the New York Post, he noted that Giuliani and McCain both hold views at odds with their party’s base yet head every poll of GOP primary voters. He concluded, “Such people tend to be more involved in and better informed about politics than the average American, so it stands to reason that they have some knowledge of McCain’s and Giuliani’s positions. And so far it isn’t bothering them. Why? One word: leadership.”

How many of you fell for this in 2000 and 2004? How many of you are going to fall for it again?

Veni, vidi, risi:

Anyway, I went home a little depressed last night after reading a lot of these back-and-forths, feeling like it can’t possibly be productive to attack each other and to act like we’re players on various feminist teams battling it out for who’s the most feminist, and whose feminism is the best. And when I read this Stranger thread (which is also chock full of, “But things are way worse for men!”) I felt like punching my computer screen, because, for the love of God, it isn’t a fight between the kinky girls and the dowdy, sex-hating feminists. And when I read through some of the other threads on feminist blogs that were full of “whose feminism is the most feminist?” challenges, I felt like screaming.

I do so love feminist women. They can’t even get together and hate men without it turning into a shrieking, hair-pulling catfight.

Zapata King takes another shot, but again goes awry:

So, what Vox considers courageous, I would merely label as

1. acts of pushing around physically weaker men,
2. acts of pushing around physically weaker women, and
3. the drawing together of men who would feel at home in a strip club

Since almost no one has read this entire blog, let alone all the columns, we shall excuse his apparent ignorance of various posts from the past and merely correct his inaccuracies. Courage is not manhood, as any child or woman can exhibit courage but they are incapable of manhood. I would say that courage involves facing once’s fears, whereas manhood involves accepting responsibility for oneself as well as for the well-being of others without complaint. But to his points:

Point 1 is almost irrelevant given my martial arts background. I have pushed around larger and physically stronger men in acts that required no courage and little effort, whereas it has required quite a bit courage to even face a smaller, physically weaker (although admittedly not much weaker) man whose skills were such that a complete ass-kicking was all but inevitable.

Point 2 is both silly and redundant. There isn’t a woman in the world as strong as I am – the women’s world record bench is 11 pounds less than my current max – and any woman who can bench over 225 moves like a turtle on qualudes. It would take as much courage to swat a puppy on the nose.

Point 3 is equally silly. Sure, there are men here who would feel at home in a strip club, and there are plenty who would not. I’m not a strip club guy myself, never having seen the point of window shopping. But apparently unlike Zapata King, I am capable of entering one without my knees knocking in fear.

Courage is an individual concept. An action that requires courage on the part of one is trivial to another. By way of example, we went to the pool to get out of the heat the other day, and I was surprised to see the teenager who does the craziest flips off the 1.5 meter diving board twice climbing down from the 10-meter platform, as he was afraid of jumping off it. Meanwhile, it doesn’t bother me to jump off the high platform, but I have to grit my teeth to make myself do a simple front flip off the 1.5-meter board.

I don’t think I could summon up the courage to go headfirst off the high platform, but my friend, a former US national team diver, would do it without blinking. Does she possess more courage? Or does she simply know what she’s doing?

It’s impossible to judge a man’s courage by his actions without first knowing what he fears. His manhood or the lack of it, on the other hand, should be more readily apparent to all.

NP sends a link to give me the chance to say “I told you so”:

Israel’s new chief of staff, an air force general, believed that most of Israel’s future operations would be conducted from the air. Military leaders were convinced that with superior communications and air power they did not even need new U.S. “bunker buster” munitions to root out terror leaders in underground hideaways.

Today, this vision of air power as a panacea has been shattered.

Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz and his advisers have been stunned by the failure of Israel’s air war against Hizbullah, which has shrugged massive air bombings on its headquarters in Beirut to maintain the rocket war against the Jewish state. “Air power is not the answer here,” a senior officer said. ‘You have to go from one Hizbullah [weapons] bunker to another. Some of these bunkers are seven meters deep and can’t be destroyed by aircraft, even if you could find them.”

From time to time I wonder why people continue to try arguing with me. Seriously, how many metaphorical heads do I have to hand people before they start thinking that, at the very least, neither history nor the odds are on their side?

This isn’t to say that I’m always correct, I’m not, but I think it’s safe to say that based on the evidence right here on this blog, we’re on the high side of 90 percent and the skulls stacking up are beginning to approach Genghis-Khan-before-a-once-resistant-city levels.

So, what clueless cretin wants to make the case that Lebanon and Iran are two entirely different matters and that US air power will suffice to knock out Iran’s nuclear capability and/or its current regime? Because – sigh – I know you’re out there….

That’s the problem. If this book didn’t exist, I’d have to straw-invent it:

There is a book making the rounds in America. It’s called “Why Men Marry Bitches”, by Sherry Argov. I work at the library and we bought quite a few copies in both English and Spanish, and it is being reserved by a lot of women who can’t wait to read it. The revues on Amazon.com, by women of course, are 100% positive! You’d think that it would be an insightful, self help book for men, warning them of their tendancy toward marrying women who start out nice, but later prove to be, well, bitches, but it is not. The authoress states that in order to get a man to the altar, you have to be a bitch. She describes the best ways to manipulate men and make of yourself, a challenge….

I say, if you see this book on a woman’s bookshelf or next to her bed, hot foot it the heck out of there!

This aligns rather nicely with a personal theory of mine, which is that people usually worry most about that which should least concern them. For example, the jerk always worries about being too nice, whereas the nice guy is constantly concerned that he’s being too much of a jerk. The cutthroat rich guy is always afraid of leaving money on the table while the less-affluent, more easy-going guy tends to fear ripping people off.

I don’t think it’s completely reliable, but applying it on a regular basis might help some people view their actions and motivations in a more objective light.

And naturally, I second the recommendation regarding the book and its readers made by Miss Carnivorous. If a woman is trying to manipulate you to the altar, then you can either ensure that her manipulations amount to nothing in the end or resign yourself to Gamma Hell.