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Newest vid: Push - Restrictions & Variations

Think you've seen it all, do you? Well? Do you? 

You haven't til you've checked out superhandicapped wrestling. I mean we are talking quadraplegic etc. Not to mention the mental handicap vs mental handicap stuff...

Check out Wall St Journal on this.

Demo

There's a good martial arts manga over here in Japan. The link to it was sent to me by my Tai Chi quasi-student Tom. A small sample of KENJI can be viewed here.

Now I've read all 11 volumes, it's a really fun story about a Japanese boy who meets some of the great Kung Fu masters of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Northern China. He has a natural aptitude for martial arts and uses his native art (Bajiquan) to great effect as along the way he beats up various bullies and scumbags. KENJI series strikes a nice note of Sino-Japanese reconciliation while being more or less historically factual. 

Anyway one little segment particularly struck me. At various places the story digresses into an introduction to a particular historical master/art, then returns to the contemporary KENJI narrative. One of these digressions presents the Daito Aiki supermeister TAKEDA SOKAKU. It's a cute little thing over a few pages. The demo that TAKEDA is shown doing here is basically akin to what my own teacher Ben Lo often used to demonstrate. 

I've pasted those 3 pages, with translations beneath the pages.

 

Takeda Sokaku didn't have a permanent dojo. He wandered around everywhere teaching his Daito martial art. He'd have the local tough martial arts guys assemble for a demo session in a room of the inn where he would lodge, in any village or town. The guys would regard the small figure of Takeda with a lot of skepticism about him having any real fighting power.

"He don't look like much!"

"Say that again!"

"What a phony! This guy's rep is some kind of fairytale for sure!"

TAKEDA: YOU THERE, YOUNG FELLOW, YOU LOOK PRETTY STRONG! DO YOU THINK YOU CAN TWIST MY ARM?

"You talkin' to me??"

TAKEDA: YES, YOU.

"Listen man, I'm the top guy in local sumo here... a pipsqueak like you won't have a chance with me, so let's just forget about it!"

TAKEDA: JUST BE QUIET AND GIVE IT A TRY.

"You really want that? Listen if I do it it's gonna be for real I'm warning you"

TAKEDA: JUST PIPE DOWN AND COME UP HERE AND TRY

...

TAKEDA: HOW'S THAT WORKING OUT FOR YOU, CHAMP?

TAKEDA: OH - BANGED YOUR HEAD ON THE WALL DID YOU? YOU OK?

"... er ... I was just a bit startled is all..."

 

 

Too Good Tabby True

So now I've read Insanely Simple The Obsession that Drives Apple's Success by Ken Segall. It's not a bad book, and who better to judge it than me, having worked for seven years in Apple's Advanced Technology Group... Of course, the real meat and marrow of it are fairly predictable. Been said many times many ways: keep meetings small, flatten hierarchies, be flexible, etc. But there are many good "Steve stories".

However I'd really like to publicly wonder, how is a piece of over-complicated, horribly designed, nearly unusable shit like the iTunes software an example of insanely great simplicity? That piece of crap should never have seen the light of day. Barely functional as an online store (which is the only real function it seems to have been designed for) and almost unworkable in its supposed true capacity as a device management system. Garbage. And don't weasel to me that it's 3rd party, as this Simplicity book bleats on and on about the drive for pure simple quality cutting across everything with the company's name on it. 

iTunes vies with Facebook for the prize of worst piece of shit interface design of any major customer facing sofware in the entire world.

Anyway the real but unspoken message of this book is that you need a dictator (because a single one point of final decision absolute authority is insanely simpler than group or structured processes) - but not just any dictator, it must be one with special qualities of brilliance, direct honesty, vision, charisma, good aesthetic sense, etc etc. Same old same old about Jobs. So the message boils down to: If you can get a CEO like Jobs, your company might do better. Or not.

Premium Precogsmanship

So now Chinese scholars are questioning Japan's sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands which include Okinawa. Read all about it.

Once again I have trumped the so-called experts and probably the CIA etc. with the astounding reach of my felinic mind. Because see here - I already fully predicted this in my movie screenplay Imperium, the dynamic arc of which is fully laid out in this post. The geopolitical backdrop is China's claim to Okinawa, which escalates to full military subjugation and occupration of Japan when they sqawk about the initial Chinese incursion in to the Ryukyus.

So you don't need no steekin' experts, pundits, analysts or professors. All you need is a net hookup and TABBY CAT GAMESPACE in your bookmarks and you're good. Meanwhile as for those Chinese 'scholars', I oughta sue those fuckers back to the stone age for pre-empting my development schedule, infringing on my copyrights, and damaging my legitimate ability to pursue commercial exploitation of my own intellectual property.

Jesus H Christ

Now I'm reading the book Counterfeit Dreams by Jefferson Hawkins, his interesting memoir of 30+ years working on the inside at the higher levels of the Scientology cult's headquarters. It's an interesting story in a way, but of course quite a familiar pattern to me as I've tried to read every bit of first-hand experience and/or academic research on cults of all sorts. This one features usual deception, abuse, and exploitation. Yada ya.

It's not like these Scientology morons are real Jim Jones-bots, the koolaid-drinking kind. With a bit of forethought and finesse, you could walk away from the scene without too much danger of being kidnapped or shot. And this guy in particular had genuine smarts. He master-minded a book marketing campaign that shot Dianetics to the top of the NYT Best Seller list in the mid 1980's (35+ years after 1st publication). Talk about putting lipsick on the pig! As a book (self) marketer myself (JUICE Radical Taiji Energetics), I can only plant my face in the mud at this genius' Lotus Feet, unworthy even to beslime his boots with my lowly tongue.

But anyway this whole area throws a limelight on a deeper economic thing.

QUESTION: What is humanity's greatest economic resource? Is it oil or gold or copper or rare-earth minerals, something material? Or is it as some have counter-asserted, the innovative human genius for coming up with creative intellectual property?

ANSWER: None of the above. Sheer stupidity is humanity's greatest economic resource and asset. It is the underlying resource that makes all wealth possible. Think of religion - Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Church of Scientology - all the same, all rooted in sheer human stupidity. Politics likewise, Republican, Democrat, Marxist, Maoist, etc. All stupid. Then the soft drink and fast food industries, and of course Hollywood, Madison Aveue etc. Then academia. Then the military. Wall Street. Finally the whole idea of nation states, flags, national anthems, all that kind of BS. And of course big pharm, medicine,... in fact almost every damn thing is rooted in pure stupidity of the masses. Their sheepish eagerness to believe something, anything.

As I read on in the book, about how Scientology bought promotional air time from networks and newspapers and worked with production studios to make 'documercials' and so on, how the red carpet was/is rolled out to them in their capacity as well-heeled clients by people who knew or cared nothing about Scientology doctrine per se, I was reminded of the old adage:

A villain and his money are welcome everywhere.

All that matters is: Can you pull numbers? Eyeballs? Butts in seats? If so you're golden regardless of any other attributes. When we see a red-faced ranting frothing televangelist screaming at a crowd of blue-hairs to send more dollars or go to Hell, we may laugh at how stupid the crowd is. But Scientology converts have tended to be young and well-educated. And anybody who works for or relies on a large organization in any way, or who believes in anything a person in power tells them, is already a full card-carrying cultist in my book.

 

I could easily have double sales of my book by simply using the common mis-transliteration of the art: Tai Chi. That's all it would have taken, instead of the correct Pinyin in my title: Taiji. But that's what I get for deciding to be principled. 

It's possible that someday the word will drift into its correct form. That's what happened with "Qigong" which began life as Wade-Giles "Ch'i Kung" then of course the apostrophe was the first thing to go, resulting in Chi Kung, but of course that stupid Wade-Giles consonant voicing thing confused everybody so somebody semi-corrected that to "Gung" then finally the whole thing was force-fed through the Pinyin machine to emerge correctly as "Qigong".

Would the same could happen with Tai Chi but it seems we are stuck in the first phase (loss of the Wade Giles apostrophe, as it was originally T'ai Chi). Can't seem to get off the dime on this. Even the 'World Tai Chi & Qigong Day" people have it bizarrely screwed up, using correct Pinyin for one term and the bastardized Wade Giles for the other - in the same phrase!

But given how screwed up everything is in the this world, we'll have to count ourselves lucky if at least it doesn't end up as: Tai Qi ! (I bet it will though).

Drainage vs. Detonation

I need to correct a misunderstanding. Though I haven't yet met up with the only apparently qualified present-day representative of Daitouryuu style Aikijujutsu, who seems to be one Professor Tatsuo Kimura of Tsukuba University Math Department, I've studied and followed that martial as closely as possible from a distance. And it's become obvious to me that their so-called Aiki power is identical in concept and execution to my Taiji thing. In my book, I've made this point via explicit quotations from Sagawa paired alongside comparable quotations about Taiji power from Professor Zheng. But here I want to approach the same issue photographically.

Notice I wrote  above that their Aiki and my Taiji are 'identical in concept and execution' but not necessarily equal in level. I certainly don't ever claim to be a true Master of my own Taiji discipline or any other, contrary to Sagawa Yukiyoshi and Prof. Kimura, who certainly were and are (respectively) masters of their Aikijujutsu. But the difference is one of quantity or magnitude, it's not categorical. The Taiji power as I've presented it is the Aiki (Japanese 合気) which Sagawa and Kimura demonstrated (don't let the fact that Sagawa routinely dismissed the ordinary sense of the Japanese word ki 気 put you off the scent).

Sagawa's transparent power (Japanese: 透明な力) is in fact the Taiji power that I have called in my book yinjection (Japanese: 陰透力; also potentially deployed as yinfusion, Japanese: 陰合力). It is applied as I describe in the chapter 'Push' in my book.

What has caused a lot of confusion on this point is the descriptions people sometimes give of their experience of this power at the hands of Sagawa and Kimura. They often speak of feeling "drained" of energy, of being "collapsed" or melted away into an unresisting puddle on the floor. This kind of talk has led many to believe that the Daitou masters had a way of siphoning out an attacker's power, which seems on the surface slightly different than the usual descriptions of Taiji power. The accounts of Taiji usually seem to emphasize a kind of power emission that just blasts the opponent totally off his feet like a bazooka or something.

But these two kinds of apparent effects are, at least in my version of Taiji, one and the same. And this power is not a bazooka that blasts people off their feet on its own merits, nor is it something that melts or drains people. All this is a misunderstanding that I've covered in the book.

The key point you need to understand is: tension. The Aiki/Taiji power is a process or meta-technique whereby you instantaneously locate, lock onto, amplify and finally detonate your partner's or attacker's deep tension. (I've also covered deep tension in the book.) That the intial effect of this process is one of heightening (not dissolving) the partner's inherent tension or muscle power is absolutely obvious from even the meagerest examination of photo's of these two masters at work.

Consider the typical photo below:

Here it should be readily apparent that tension in the attacker/gripper is not being dissolved, drained, or melted away at all in the initial encounter. On the contrary, the attacker's tension is being heightened, then detonated with the result that the attacker's body is moving itself. That's a point I make in great depth and detail in the book: because the Aiki/Taiji power does not apply any physical force at all, the only way the attacker's body can be physically moved is under it's own power (deep tension). It's not so much that the attacker is drained of power, it's more that he cannot control his own power when it is triggered and detonated via the yinjection.

Now look at this next photo that illustrates the above point even more clearly:

Does this look like anything is being 'drained away' or sucked out or melted down to nothingness? Didn't think so. It's obviously a display of inherent tension being amplified and detonated. He's actually arching with extreme tension, the exact opposite of any kind of 'drainage' effect.

And now also: do you think Kimura (right side) is physically throwing this guy into the air with muscle power? It should be really obvious both from the Sagawa/Kimura absolute persistent denials of any use of muscle power whatsoever that this is not the case, not to mention any casual perusal of the body language of this photo tells the story. Kimura is not using any muscle power to hoist this guy in the air.

So then - where is the power coming from? It's this guy's inherent tension throwing his own body up in the air. That doesn't mean he's faking or 'cooperating' though. It is the process fully detailed in JUICE - his deep tension has been locked and chain-reacted via yinjection, with the external result that he temporarly loses control of his own muscle power, as it runs wild. This is not the same thing as the mysterious and fictitious 'draining' phenomenon that people love to speculate on. The reason experiencers sometimes mention the draining effect is the pleasant fatigue they feel from the exertion of uncontrolled muscle tension release, after completion of whatever technique was used to finish off the interaction (notice that Sagawa, though he taught an inventory of classical techniques, consistently dismissed techniques as on the one hand unusable in the absence of Aiki power, and on the other irrelevant in the presence of Aiki power. This point applies to our Taiji also.)

The attacker is no more thrown upwards by the master's physical power in these photos than an Orca killer whale is physically thrown out of the water in a jump at the trainer girl's signal. Nor is the master emitting some kind of tractor beam that itself power's him up externally. It's just like Sea World - the Orca's own power is doing it, under the linked control of the trainer girl. That does not mean these attackers in the photos are trained or conditioned to react this way though, the Orca thing is only a metaphor. *pant* It just means that these attackers have deep tension that the masters can easily identify and exploit.

Notice that this analysis (in this post) also covers the fact that Sagawa/Kimura have 'thrown' people who (in their own estimation) believe they have grasped or attacked lightly and softly. That's because while it's easy for the attackers to modulate their own superficial tension - resulting in what they believe is a light or soft touch - it is nearly impossible for the average person to modulate or effectively reduce their own deep tension. So the Aiki/Taiji trigger effect and chain reaction detonation works the same in all cases, whenever the master can detect deep tension.

There's a lot more on all this in the book JUICE Radical Taiji Energetics.

 

Oracle

Like some bold seer, in a trance.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

* * *

OK people - pay up! I mean, um, listen up: just as I pre-cogged in this post last week, Japanese champ boxer Takashi Uchiyama won over Venezuela's Jaider Parra via ROUND 5 KO. 

Unbeaten Japanese Takashi Uchiyama (20-0-1, 17 KOs), 130, kept his WBA super-featherweight belt as he sank previously undefeated challenger Jaider Parra (20-1-1 10 KOs), 129.75, a Venezuelan jabber, in agony with a single body shot at 2:15 of the fifth round on Monday in Tokyo, Japan.

So has Tabby written,

So has it been done.

Yojimbo

Yes, I practiced Japanese Iaido (art of the quick draw and return) for many years, under a Kendo/Iaido 8th Dan sensei.