Words and Labels....

Language can be terribly important.

I was watching some fake Jiu-Jitsu instructor on Youtube the other day. He was trying to give a lesson about something he clearly knew nothing about. He didn’t even know the correct names for what he was trying to do, and had come up with his own labels for everything.

He kept calling things holds, and pins, and locks.

This struck me, as absolutely nothing in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is called a hold, or a pin, or a lock.

There is one exception, but I’m going to ignore that for now.

What do you think of if we are talking about people wrestling around, and somebody says that one of the people pinned the other down, or had him in a hold?

Likely, you imaging that they had grabbed hard, and made it impossible for the other guy to move at all.

We don’t use those kind of terms, because we don’t want our people to ever think that is the goal of any technique.

One of the principal ideas of Jiu-Jitsu is defeating somebody while using the smallest effort possible.

Grabbing somebody and keeping them from moving would require a crazy amount of effort, and there is absolutely no need.

So you lay down, flat on your back, and a Jiu-Jitsu person sits on you. This is not called a pin, or a hold. Their position is called Mount. You try and get them off.

You buck and struggle and push. They remain planted on top of you. They have not held you motionless, but rode along with everything you tried. You will be insanely tired, more so than if they had managed to totally pin you down. They are not tired at all, which they would have been if they had tried to turn into a rock holding you motionless. Not only are they still on top of you, but you have been working very hard and achieving nothing.

How about if somebody wraps their arm around your neck. This is commonly called a headlock. The person holding the headlock typically clings on as hard as they can, again wasting effort. It is also very easy to get out of, no matter how hard the effort of the holder.

Interestingly, Jiu-Jitsu people call this a headlock when it is done to them, but whenever they do something that seems similar, it is called a neck hug.

Does a neck hug sound like it should be held with every ounce of strength that a person can muster? Of course not, it’s just a little hug.

Jiu-Jitsu is a mobile thing. We want movement, as people who can move can also make mistakes. If they make errors, it is easy to exploit them.

Let’s say you are being sat upon, and are thrashing about trying to get out. A very, very common response of an untrained individual is to roll off of their back and onto their hands and knees.

If you do this and are super observant, you will probably say to yourself, “why did that seem to be easier than what I had tried earlier?” The reason is that the Jiu-Jitsu guy on your chest got most of his weight out of your way; he wants you on your hands and knees. He is now sitting on your back, riding you like a pony.

Suddenly his legs entangle yours, and his arms clamp down around your neck. If done properly, you will still be fully able to breath, but within seconds everything will be turning black as blood flow to your brain is cut off.

The guy on your chest was controlling you, helping you tire yourself out, and when you made a rookie mistake, he let you do it and capitalized on the mistake to end the confrontation.

The only exception to the non-rigid language of Jiu-Jitsu labelling comes in the names of some of the final submissions.

There are lots of things called leg locks and arm locks, but it is aways very clear that the name has nothing to do with any sort of rigid position. These moves all relate to when a joint is extended as far as it can go, and then maybe a bit more. The word lock describes the condition of the extended joint under attack. This naming does not lead to confusion.

Jiu-Jitsu contains no pins, or holds at all. Everything is fluid, and is related to energy consumption. That’s one of the reasons that smaller size or strength are not unsurmountable disadvantages.

Balance, coordination, and speed are just as important, and they are all less important than skill.

It is what make’s it all so fascinating, and addictive.

Show It

The American media is not handling the Covid situation the way it should.

Their country is full of people who insist on blithely ignoring that there is a real epidemic at all.

In a strange way, this almost makes sense. Most people don’t equate statistics to their daily lives. Their reality revolves around what they see, and what they can feel. To them Covid isn’t a big deal to them. They are not being allowed to see it.

It should be the job of the media to make the pandemic real to the American people.

They should be sending crews into hospitals that are collapsing under the weight of the exploding contagion.

The same lack of coverage was characteristic of American news during the Second World War. It was felt that citizens wouldn’t be able to handle images of dead American service men, and so none made it into any newspaper, newsreel, or magazine until the February 15th edition of Life magazine.

That was more than 14 months after American entry into the war. The result of people seeing images of American service men dead on a Pacific shore was a stiffening of resolve regarding the war, rather than the reverse.

Why are heart-rendering images of the Covid pandemic so few and far between? Is some similar strange kind of logic being applied, or is it courtesy to the struggling health care workers, or patients, or is it cowardice towards entry into that dangerous environment by news personnel. I can’t imagine that it is due to physical fear, as news people are forever putting themselves into war zones and places where disaster has struck.

Whatever the motivation, it is misguided. People need to see the reality that currently exists in some places so that they can extrapolate that reality into a real possibility for their own situation.

Let them see what is happening, so they can understand what can happen.

Bad Art and Names

Statues are strange things. They can be anything from a kid’s shaping of a handful of clay, to a cement turtle in the garden, to a massive marble equestrian representation of an emperor.

They don’t mean anything more than a pencil sketch, but for some reason they sometimes seem to.

My wife and I travel a lot, and have seen a great many statues.

Some notable examples are; Nelson atop his column in Trafalgar Square in London, the 56 figures of military notables in the lobby of the war museum in Vienna, and the Merlion in Singapore.

These are all public monuments, paid for and maintained with tax dollars. That fact matters a great deal.

If I wanted to put a statue of some wretched creep up in my front hall, it wouldn’t be anybody’s business but my own, although my wife might have something to say about it.

In the case of public monuments, there is a purpose behind the expenditure, and it need not be limited to carved stone and bronze. It can also be in the form of street names, or murals, or what rivers get called.

As they are public displays, they should be under the control of the public who pays for and supports them.

In my province, there was an area known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. This is a name that Captain Cook slapped onto the map. He named it after his ship, that in turn was named after the wife of King George III. It stuck for a long time, even though it was about the most arbitrary name you could imagine.

Eventually, this was changed to Haida Gwaii, which was the preferred term given by the indigenous people of the area. The Haida people make up about half of the 5,000 or so modern residents. They wanted the new name, as did a majority of the non-indigenous residents. With no reason at all to keep the old name, the government switched it to Haida Gwaii.

Strangely, there was a backlash from people who live nowhere near Haida Gwaii, had never visited Haida Gwaii, and hadn’t the slightest idea who Queen Charlotte was. I guess people just don’t like anything to change.

I live in a province called British Columbia. Let’s drop the British part of the name for now. That leaves Columbia.

I guess I live in Columbia. For a while, this area was known vaguely and unofficially as Columbia, after the Columbia river. The Columbia river was another of those places that got named after an explorer’s ship; this time the name’s source was the vessel Columbia Rediviva.

This ship was built in Massachusetts, and one would have to assume named after the explorer Columbus. Of course, Columbus never sailed anywhere close to Massachusetts than the island of Cuba.

So, my home is named after an area, that was named after a river, that was named after a ship, that was strangely named after a Spanish explorer who never visited the area, or the river, or the place where the ship was built.

Stick on the word British, and you have a pretty stupid name.

Would I be averse if a more meaningful, lyrical, or clever name were proposed? I suppose I might not be willing to march in support of such a change, but nor would I be willing to march against it.

But getting back to statues.

Am I marching to remove marble representations of horrible people? Am I marching to keep them? Not at all.

It is a big problem in the United States right now, and it’s all because of a movement that grew towards the end of the 19th century.

An entire mythology was created to make the failed, slavery-based Confederacy into a glorious and noble legend. This was mostly within states that had made up that Confederacy, but was not limited to them.

Statues went up to glorify Confederate Generals, and US military bases got named after them, as were public schools, and city streets.

A very uniquely American phenomenon, considering that these men were not only fighting to retain the morally bankrupt practice of slavery, but were also traitors to the United States itself.

Black Americans were expected to happily walk down streets named after men who wanted them to have remained slaves, past statues of others of the same ilk, and, once schools were desegregated, send their children to schools named after yet more. All of the while paying taxes to maintain all of it.

Now, there is a serious movement to rectify all of this. People want the statues down, and the other things renamed.

A glaring example is the flag of Mississippi. Their original flag was the one that they actually used during the Civil War. It was white, with a star and a tree on it.

In 1894, almost three decades after the War was over, it was changed to three coloured bands, with a Confederate Battle flag covering the upper left quarter. It remained that way until June of 2020; just a few days ago.

Keep in mind that 37.3% of Mississippians are African American. And this was the flag that flew over all of their civic buildings, and over their schools. They have never been OK with that, but for some reason the supporters of the pro-Confederacy mythology managed to fend off all attempts to remove this symbol of slavery, and of treason.

Finally, the state got a governor who said he would sign a bill that would change the flag, and the legislature promptly passed and sent one on to him. Suddenly, the Confederate flag no longer flies in any official capacity within Mississippi for the first time in 126 years. Instead, they only fly the American flag.

The sticking point currently for these changes is mostly revolving around statues of Civil War Generals. People want them gone, and others want them to stay.

A lot of people in power are deciding to be on the right side of history, and getting rid of them with great speed and no fanfare. The alternative would be to try and defend the stupid things, causing more conflict between law enforcement and the general population than is already occurring.

A few states continue to resist the trend, and in those areas statues and memorials are being vandalized and some destroyed. It seems to be only a matter of time before the trend towards removal overtakes these areas as well.

Then, of course, there is the president. Desperate to hold onto any kind of constituency, he has decided to take up the task of preserving the memorials and statues honouring treasonous, slavery-supporting individuals.

As it doesn’t look like Republicans in either the House or the Senate are willing to follow him down into this cesspool, the president will only be able to respond with bluster.

Where does it all end?

Hopefully with no more military bases named Fort Bragg, or Fort Hood (or any others named after Civil War generals who helped kill American service men), or statues erected to promote the myth of the noble confederacy, or kids forced to attend in schools named after people who fought and killed to keep them in slavery.

And if somebody wants to pull down statues around here of individuals with shady pasts, I won’t mind at all.