See how fast I can kick and punch. Blinding. A one-two kick and punch. That’s all I need to start/end a ‘fight’. But the founder of Aikido needed only to stand and his ‘opponents’ would respectfully withdraw. That is the essence of Ai-ki-do.

I love to kick, though, which is why Taikwondo appealed to me. But a broken foot, a cracked toe and a thumped toe convinced me otherwise. But I could do it. I loved it. But my hip and my newly broken bones held me up half way to the Black Belt. I made Camo with 2 stripes, but my bones thwarted me.

I still love the moves and they are now a part of my physicality, my existence. I have always loved kicking. Indeed, my most memorable kick was on a Beach north of Boston when my thigh knocked my glasses off and I lost them forever, and had to drive Val’s VW Beetle back home. Luckily, I had a pack Lucky Strikes to mitigate the stress.

That was one high kick!!

Straight up beginning with knee to shoulder, and then thigh to shoulder. Straight up. Punting as it were. A kick that raises you off the ground. That’s the Martial Arts (cf.

I was at a party at a Castle on the North Shore….this is the late 1970s or so…...and I was at the Shore and decided to practice my kicks and kicked my eyeglasses right off my face and lost forever. I was without glasses for a while until I was able to buy a new pair (Lenscrafter no doubt).


“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is the essential Martial Arts defying Gravity film. From Amazon, “But the result is a seamless blend of action, romance, and social commentary in a populist film that, like its young star Zhang, soars with balletic grace and dignity. --Eugene Wei

Populist? Wow. Reading about the death of the populist movement after World War One and the subsequent Death of the Liberal Class (Chris Hedges, 2010) it seems a bit anachronistic not to say archaic to use the term ‘populist’ when describing anything - movies, movements, newspapers and periodicals, books and popular uprisings, anything as populist unless you want the stench of socialism attached.

That’s what we want to believe. What we are taught from cradle to grave. And despite commentators such as George Orwell, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and a slew of others we refuse to accept the facts in front of our faces. We’d rather believe the Lie, the fantasy that the Armed Forces of the World can sort things out for our benefit.

A Trillion a year since forever. What can We do with such nearly unlimited funding? Have a World rid of industrial/corporate Arms Merchants? Fat chance. Which is exactly the Problem. Why do the Masters of War hold sway over the rest of Us? The US seems to be in the grip of a Worldwide Military Hegemony of our own making.

I don’t get it. Since shortly after Nine Eleven Buzsh invaded Iraq and started a War...even though he had already commanded troops to scope out Afghanistan in the search for “bin Laden”. The latest “Hitler”. The Boogey Man in the shadows.

What fucking Bullshit. Show and Tell Puppet Theater for the benefit of Mr. Kite (there will be a show tonight on trampoline…)

Boy!! Reading Chris Hedges is mind blowing. Who is a better ‘reporter’ on the current State of Affairs afflicting Us? He rips the scab off by exposing the History of our Disease (dis-ease, cf. Being and Time). Hedges is the consummate term paper writer. His 200 some odd page discourses are models of philosophizing with an axe. For he is in a very real sense (cf, Monty Python and the Holy Grail) a kind of Socrates exploring the root of our ignorance, our forgetfulness because we have been beguiled by mind fuckers.

The propagandists, corporatists and bankers who emerged and who prospered during the 1914-1918 War. Death of the Liberal Class is, like the last two of his books, irresistibly good writing that explores America, explores Us. Like Mencken who went to Dayton, TN to witness the Scopes trial, Hedges reports from Reality [not from a studio. That’s the all important difference. Reporting from the field, so to speak, versus reading a script on tv.]

Reading versus viewing. Oi!!
I do both, no doubt. But I do both. I miss a lot of tv (and movies), but that’s a price I’m willing to pay in order to read. I strive for discretionary viewing and reading.

I want to read guys like Chris Hedges; I want to listen to guys like Noam Chomsky; I want to watch documentaries by guys like Adam Curtis, Jonathan Miller and Richard Dawkins and a multitude of other ‘outside the box’ thinkers. Just as, LOL, Charles Darwin is still outside the box. Which is why this massive archive of reasonableness is virtually unknown by the populace (cf, the populist movement of the pre-WWI America that Hedges reports on in this book).