TABBY CAT Gamespace

Only they would know

When I have a free afternoon time slice, I train boxing at a gym near Otuska station, JR Yamanote line. And this week it has been a madhouse over there each afternoon, as they prepare for the WBA Lightweight championship fight, to be held May 19. The current champ is Nicaraguan Jose Alfaro. The Japanese challenger (Kobori) is based at my gym there, so they have been holding all the pre-fight press conferences and interview/pic opps there. Resulting in hordes of over 30 reporters and an unspeakable array of photophilia hardware. Both the challenger and the current champ each did three demo rounds with a local Japanese sparring partner.

I will now risk my 24K Gold Tabbycat Precog Reputation (24KGTPR) by actually calling the outcome of this fight: The challenger Kobori will win. I will go further and say there's a 70% chance it will be a KO or TKO. I don't say this due to any favor of my home gym guy or any other reason other than (a) pure Tabby precogism; and (b) technical fight skills analysis.

Don't worry you don't need to follow boxing to check on my call, just dip your toe back in this blog on/around May 19th and I'll honestly report the result. Mind you I am really sticking my neck out here, as Alfaro has a great record with something like 95% of his wins being KO's. I won't give my tech analysis why I am confident making this call, right now. For now call it pure pre-cogism. But if I am wrong  I know my precog rep will be dented. Egg will be smeared all over my beautiful striped feline face.

But I'll report back the result without fear or favor.

The local fighter, the challenger Kobori, is a very nice guy. And I met the champ and talked a bit to him and his entourage, in Spanish. Very nice guys. They seemed relieved to hear some Spanish from somebody other than their local interpreter here. Language is fun that way. Was a good oiling for my brain to call up the Spanish underneath all the C and J packed in there.

Why are humans so utterly hung up on single combat anyway (at least, when they can spare a moment from mass slaughtering one another)?  That's a real primeval thing, I could feel the mindless genetic vibe to the whole affair these past couple of days. That's why these events can still make money. Because we are such absolute brutes.

Go for it

Where is the sun in the night?
Is it cold?
Does it feel left behind?
All alone?
Does it wander through the dark?
Does it wait for the dawn, wish on a star?
Does it stray very far? 

- Arlington (Wailin Jennies)

It is natural to think that ghosts (former humans now in gaseous or ectoplasmic form) miss the physically incarnate state. Are they nostalgic? Is the human scene where the real action is? Maybe the whole system is like a dance hall or a swim club or ski resort, where the center of the action is the dance floor, the pool, the slopes - that where the fun is, the chance to show your stuff, be a star, shake your bootie - and if you aren't out on the floor, in the water, on the powder, you are just a wall flower, loser, bystander, benchwarmer. Is that how it is set up? Do the ghosts miss the iron grip of matter? Are they eager for just one more toke of the sweet sharp smoke rising off the physical meat roasting in the fire of this world's pain?

Or have they moved on.

Off the rez

"Sixty-five yards, with these instruments? Squirt-guns would be deadlier at fifty. Consider, my friend, you and I are banded together to destroy life, not make it eternal."

 - Mark Twain 'A Tramp Abroad'

FormosaNeijia has a really great martial arts blog. Far eclipsing my dumbass Gamespace thing here.

*Tabby shivers uncontrollably*

Recently FNJ posted this:

I find it hard to have respect for people that don'€™t work with some form of resistance. ... Practicing IMA against people that don'€™t do what you do is hard. That'€™s where the real material is found. That'€™s the real meat of the practice. ... I often find that what people do works just as long as the opponent does exactly what is expected of them. So let'€™s just be clear on this: if someone needs the opponent to do what they do in order to make their stuff work, then what they do isn'€™t worth much is it?

I really agree in spirit. It should be as real as it can be. But I always have trouble with borders and boundaries. Because IMA shades off to the left into qi gong, yoga, meditation. And it fades off to the right into combative sports, reality self-defense, professional security work, military/police applications, weapons of all kinds, and finally totally annihilative self-induced Extinction Level Events.

Unlike FNJ, I have trouble drawing the lines. Of course when pushing hands it is silly to call someone out for using too much strength - unless you are his teacher and you are saying that to help him learn. My principle is the only time I ever say "you are using too much strength" is when he is the one getting the worse of the exchange.

But anyway, it seems that every single practice has some kind of rules, though I guess FNJ would say that rules don't rule out resistance. But then what is resistance? We want to compel somebody to accept an outcome that is against their will. Against their will. I wish I understood all this stuff.

I was once pushing hands with a very experienced guy who I had only just met, of a different IMA line, and for some reason he was tense enough that he was easy for me to bounce around. And at one point he said, seriously, "I feel I want to kill you." If we are pushing hands and he pulls a gun and shoots me, then he's doing "something I don't do", right? Or we're boxing and he signals his buddy to cream me with a lead pipe from behind - is that just a stupid, laughable example? It would be surprise resistance though, outside my expectation. 

It seems there are always going to be boundaries or  everything will just turn to shit. Obvious I guess. So what kind of boundaries allow for  "realistic resistance training" while not risking making us into pansies or self-deluded fruitcakes as FNJ may be implying above?

Would the best, simplest, fairest thing be to insist on just basic "weapons equivalence" or "equipment equivalence"? As in: I am for you, sir, tomorrow at dawn. Will you have pistols or sabres? And at how many paces?

But what about inequalities in native inalienable endowments like size, speed, and killer instinct? Hmm but are these really inalienable? I remember a great Kurt Vonnegut story in which he describes a future world where everybody is forcibly equalized by law, pinpointing any special talent. For example, a great speaker must go around with his mouth full of rocks, a beautiful woman has to wear a hideous mask, a strong guy is wrapped in iron and lead collars and bands, and so on.

Well. No good answer.

Scale

I have casually followed Parkour since I heard about it years ago. The best Parkour runner I ever saw is the Russian guy on this video. Even the Russian Spetsnaz guys we trained with on their base in Russia in 2001 and 2003 just cannot compare with this guy.

Now Parkour has finally reached safe, serene Japan. Tokyo has its own fledgling little group.

Parkour reminds me totally of what we did as kids, our group of boys would sometimes run through any kind of landscape just vaulting and scaling whatever. as necessary, at top speed. Or when being chased by irate property owners firing birdshot.

If it happened

Here we have an interesting little snippet describing a minor assault that occurred on a Tokyo subway train:

"I was recently the victim of a Random Act of Violence.

To set the scene: I was traveling home in the sardine can known as the Odakyu line on a weeknight around 9:30pm. The Commuter in the seat next to the door had decided that getting a seat wasn’t enough—he also wanted the metal railing next to the seat as his elbow rest. When I entered the train, I was jostled and pushed, and eventually settled into the space by the door, my back to both the metal hand railing and the Commuter with the well-rested elbow. Unfortunately, my position meant that my rear end intruded upon his elbow rest space.

The Commuter expressed his dissatisfaction with a few vicious elbow jabs throughout our 15 minute train ride. I was completely unable to move away, or to communicate with him due to my squished, immobile position. When the train came to his stop, he gave me two particularly vicious final jabs before standing up to get off the train. As he passed me, he pulled back, punched me in the face, and quickly exited.

Needless to say, everyone was rather surprised. The other commuters around me were torn between shock, intense curiosity, and valiant attempts at pretending that they hadn’t seen anything. Only one man dared acknowledge the incident by digging into his wallet and thoughtfully (albeit impractically) offering me two rather old band-aids for my then-bloodied nose.

As for me, I stood with my mouth agape. A couple of elbow jabs in the butt was one thing—but a punch in the face?"

Anybody interested in combative arts should be constantly scanning for this kind of incident report, to check yourself - what would you do if it happened to you? Or more precisely, how to avoid having it happen to you. The downside is that these short textual accuonts never give anywhere near the detail we'd need to really understand what options were available to the victim guy - before, during, and after. But that's life, it's still worth anaylyzing for what you can get from it.

In the above case it seems that this guy was the victim of an absolute sucker punch surprise blitz attack and that no defense or pre-emption would have been possible. But is it really so? See how the Attacker guy was elbow jabbing Victim guy for some minutes prior. There's your Red Flag right there. Soon as something like that happens, the jabber has a big gold star on his forehead as far as I'm concerned, he is now a loose cannon on deck and a potential threat. Therefore I'd either move away or if not possible then at least track the guy's movement carefully and make all required adjustments in my own posture to deal with any kind of surprise incoming contact from him.

Rarely does something come totally from the blue. But it could happen.

Anyway to defend against anybody all we can do is attempt to affect one or more of the following attributes of the attacker(s):

• Vision
• Consciousness
• Breathing
• Balance
• Structure

Apart some peripheral exotica, that's all there is to work on, just those Five. First move is directed primarly to affect one of the above five, but if it is going to be effective it needs to entail or influence the other four as a natural consequence. Here's the list again with some examples:

Vision (throw something in eyes)

Consciousness (knockout blow to head, very high decible scream)

Breathing (solar plex punch; throat strike, choke hold)

Balance (takedown; throw; sweep; foot stomp)

Structure (significant strike to knee, hip, shoulder, neck, etc.)

Anyway for more examples of armchair scenarios to ponder, of course there are many crime/assault new websites, but for more extreme and challenging cases I highly recommend reading The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo. My full Amazon review is here. That book contains numerous detailed accounts of specific actual criminal assaults with deadly intent initiated by a professional. Some people don't believe this guy's account of his own misdeeds, but to me the book is invaluable as a source of ideas nonetheless.

Fangs for the Memories

I know how I'll die because I saw it in a dream. Not any ordinary dream, this was a full-on Panavision Technicolor SurroundSound Dolby haptically prophetic vision of a dream. I will die from a venomous snake bite, in the left palm heel. Ouch! Hurt like hell. Scary too, having that thing writhing from my hand and dug into it, unshakably so. Then lights out. Seemed to be a rattler.

Drive

”I never said actors were cattle. All I said is that actors should be treated as cattle.”
-Alfred Hitchcock

It will be interesting to see how the Inner Party handles the current USA presidential election. The puppetry is proceeding with its usual bland and insular smoothness. Obviously the last two presidential outcomes were fraudulent, in that Bush supporters clearly tampered with the vote illegally in a variety of crude and subtle ways. Before we go any further I should clarify that I don't support any candidate or either Party in this Gamespace. All are mere pawns, nudged over the board by the hidden talon of the Inner Party and the High Command. Nevertheless, for reasons unclear, the IP/HC felt it necessary to rig up the outcomes of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, to insure Bush's butt on the throne. Why they'd go to the trouble, when they have their claws all over all the switches and levers to begin with, is beyond me.

Anyway, the interesting thing will be if Hillary "loses" the popular and electoral vote in November, due to similar Republican rigging. Then we'll have an interesting scenario. You see, Gore and Kerry were good little boys, well disciplined operatives who gladly took the required dive to the canvas at the merest ringside gesture from the Handlers. In post fight interviews all they ever said was good sportsmanlike blather such as I came out swinging but he just out punched me. That kind of claptrap and all was well.

But Hillary - though obviously a Deep Operative and willing puppet, might her enormous ego and ambition for public spotlight overwhelm her Party discipline? Might she break ranks and go public with what should be at most a discreet boardroom spat? Start mouthing off  "I was robbed!" ??

Then the interesting question will be: how exactly, using what method, will the High Command go about the job of suiciding her.

All public politicians are actors, mere dancers to the tune commissioned by the Inner Party. And as the quote above this post implies, no sensible rancher can tolerate Mad Cow disease in the herd, no matter how valuable or otherwise prize-worthy an individual animal may be.

Poetry in Motion

"Then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them - terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. Then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up, up, up, right up into the air. A helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up, and there was a lot of applause from the Party seats."

- George Orwell; 1984

In the most recent issue of Harper's Magazine, May 2008, Wendell Berry (ecological economist and green philosopher) writes as follows:

To deal with the problems, which after all are inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts.

Here's what the High Command thinks when they read stuff like that:

Oh really? Does a painting have a greater than 100:1 kill ratio? Explain to me the megatonnage and blast effects of a sonata. How does a poem compare to a Daisy Cutter in terms of compression wave? Is a sculpture as effective as napalm on a non-compliant civilian population?

Berry has forgotten or never known that despite all the civilian tech wonder we see, internet web, cell phones, and so on, the sine qua non of technology is military applications. That's the heart and soul of the game, and it will never be given up in favor of 'art', and will never be pried loose from the Inner Party's cold dead hands.

Wrong end of the gun

Wendell Berry has a good piece on Peak Oil and general environmental trashing, the need to accept limits, etc. in the most recent Harpers Magazine (May 2008).

It's nice, his heart is in the right place, and he talks interestingly about the Faustian echoes in our refusal to accept any limits and so on.

But... to me this guy, Berry, who has a good track record of writing about economy and environment, he's just not in the game. While he's fussing with his tepid dinkly intellectualism, he misses the big picture, or should I say, the deep picture. Which is as follows:

The world is controlled by the Inner Party (Orwell's term) or High Command (Tabby's term). However you toetag them these guys are absolutely, resolutely, and immutably IN LOVE with:

• Money
• Machines
• Death

They love that stuff and NOTHING will ever change that. Not all the professorial gibbering about Faust or any other damn faggot nonsense (if I may paraphrase the Command's general point of view) is going to have any effect on that. All that crap, to them, is for girlie men.

And I do say 'men', advisedly. You cannot talk about these issues sensibly with bringing gender into it. The High Command is basically all men. The Outer Party, the intelligent functionaries and useful idiots who keep it all going, they are also mostly men, or in any case aping skill sets and thought motifs developed by human males as opposed to females.

The Proles of course are men and women. The male proles would wish to ape the Inner Party, in love with money, machines and death. But they are drugged with sex and TV as John Lennon has noted elsewhere. So they are out of the game. Meanwhile the female proles live in self-constructed emotional fantasy worlds, so they are pretty easy to mind control as well

Meanwhile, the Outer Party technologists continue to work on ever badder ass weaponry, so much beloved of the High Command. The megadeaths from atomic weapons and firebombs and so on of 1945 was just a little preflight check compared to what these guys have in mind. You might ask then why the relatively long period of relative calm and peace in the over-developed world, at least since 1945? Does that mean I'm wrong after all about these guys loving death so much? Naw they were just re-stocking the pond and re-greasing the skids, sharpening their axes.

Guys like Berry don't have or at least don't show any feel at all for the sheer overwhelming scale of  pure weaponery that exists in this world now. Not to mention other technologies of control, surveillance and so on. Is there even a ghost of a chance that the High Command would ever allow any radical social/economic change that in even the slightest degree impaired or impeded or even decelerated this death march? No chance in hell. None. They'll see us all dead first, and I mean that literally.

You can't reason with these guys. The High Command is psychopathic by nature and by definition. A guy like Berry will get as far with them as anybody got reasoning with Anton Sigur in the recent film No Country for Old Men.

Run with it

Movies really suck these days. Look at the recent (2007) movie Sublime, whose high concept is obviously totally ripped from the superb movie Jacob's Ladder (1990), itself done from a much older screenplay that gathered dust in Hollywood for decades).

Sublime fumbles with similar themes but totally miscarries the ball and is just plain stupid (though I will admit it is excellent fodder for mediphobics such as myself. Yes damn right I am iatrophobic after suffering through three massive neurosurgeries (that is drilling through the skull deep into the brain three separate sites/occasions, not to mention uncounted number of spinal taps and other procedures that would make Torquemada himself weep with envy and drool with lust, during my six months hospitalization at age eight for ... what exactly?)

But I digress, I was in the process of kicking Hollywood's ass for putting out such stupid crap as Sublime. And look at the recent movie Invasion (2007) - total crap, especially compared to its own high concept precursor, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). I don't mind at all that these tools haven't got a single original thought in their heads, that's expected, but nowadays even the execution sucks.

Actually I have a great idea for a blowout cool movie. I'll give it away here for free, just to show you what a nice feline I really am, underneath all the sarcasm, arrogance, and hostility that are my blog's stock in trade.

Here ya go: somebody needs to make an animated version of Hesse's novel Siddhartha. Everybody loves this book, uncounted zillions have read it so the market is ready made just waiting to be scooped up into some smart producer's bank accuont. But the animation work would need to be really good, deep art, total psychedelic. And the soundtrack should be carefully selected greatest-hits type of chants by Deva Premal, Jai Uttal, and others of that caliber. I know there was a lousy super cheesy 1970's live action version of S but this time it needs to be done right, and with all these yoga bunnies everywhere it just couldn't miss. On second thought I take it back about giving this away free - I take my finder fees in catnip (no cheap ass streetnip, it has to be high grade Burmese Blue).