This episode was taped a long time ago but it's good timing because we talk about China! We also talked about ancient and venerated American allies, the Kurds, some Baltimore updates, a reader question and don't miss the video analysis.
The Crackpot Podcast features James LaFond, a living library, and Lynn Lockhart, an amateur librarian.
Audio:
BitChute:
YouTube:
0:01:45 October 2019 Murderbowl update
0:07:30 Chuck Norris Rule at the Dollar General
0:10:20 Some Trump stuff, the Kurds
0:22:50 China
0:31:33 Baltimore, BTG
0:36:35 The Combat Space & the playlist
0:46:44 Sjambok, twitter questions. All Power Fighting, The First Boxers
0:53:52 Video analysis
1:04:35 Taco Bell video
We met behind an old rec center where the basketball nets had been removed to slow down the inevitable encroachment of, shall we say, a more colorful crowd. After introductions, James and Erique worked us through the basics of unarmed, stick, and knife fighting, punctuated by detailed stories of James's encounters with some of the more aggressive denizens of Baltimore.
James and Erique gave perceptive feedback as they watched our movements. The group came in with a variety of fitness and fighting backgrounds, and we all walked away more capable than we arrived. My favorite segment was one-on-one knife sparring, where my speed helped me out. It was a great time, and everyone involved is looking forward to more sessions, should James's busy nomadic literary schedule allow it.
I'm glad to hear James liked the group. He told us a lot of great stories, and he taught us a lot. Most of the group is not from the Baltimore area, and I think we all learned that things are even worse than we've heard.
When one coach-spars with a non-fighter who is schooled in a martial art, he is inconstant danger of suffering an ego-based injury, while his partner is operating in total safety, safe from all physical injury that is, but highly conditioned by the stilted, scripted version of his art to psychological injury. Just before the injury suffered below [two sprained toes] I said:
“We are sparring, not fighting. This is not a competition. We are working, not scoring. I will move at one fifth speed. Your goal is to defend at the same speed I am moving and to attack and counter at a slower speed. Tap and brush with the stick. This is learning. If you move at full speed I will get hurt. I am rendering myself helpless in a cooperative sense so that you may get onto the learning curve and grow.”
Sure enough, as soon as this bigger, younger, more fit, more skilled man discovered that even though I was moving less than half as fast as him I was outscoring him, he went into ego survival mode, misread my heel step, thought I was shifting back and then darted in like the Green Lantern, sprained my big toe and my first toe ligaments and snapped my first toe before he even knew where our relative positions were. As this happened, which, with street shoes would have resulted in zero injury to me, I struck the finishing blow to his head.
This is common. Earlier this year I received a concussion from a fighter I was tapping because his ego got engaged and he lost his cool in the drill. My brother in law, as he looked on in horror while my sister photographed these toes said, “Why didn’t you drop him?”
Dropping him would have lost a student for my host, would have degraded me by paying back an accident with intent and would have knocked the fighter forever off the learning curve as the session ended badly. He apologized and we continued. All martial artists have been conditioned by our sissy society to see sparring as fighting when fighters see sparring as work. This is due to the semantic game played by karate promoters who seek to avoid paying athletic commission fees by calling their competitions "sparring." People from MMA gyms also have this karate mentality of sparring as combat rather than work, which is why their boxing is so retarded.
Such occurrences are proof that technique training in combat without continuous contact practice [continuity of contact being much more important than level of impact contact] is not only useless but dangerous to the user. In practice I was injured due to the need to go barefoot in the mat, while in a survival situation such an attacker would scuff by boot and die. When this does happen, honestly informing the novice partner can be sobering for him and help in stay on the learning curve. The value of continuity of contact over level of intensity in training is proved by the general superiority of grapplers over strikers in MMA.
What happened was he ran the ball of his foot into my toes, snapping the first toe and spraining the tendons and ligaments. The bleed on the top of the foot is from the burst capsule and ligaments in the toe joint and that below from the torn tendons.
In our world of falsely supported, skill-based ego, which is known to be false in the mind of every deluded student when the fists and sticks and blades come his way, the body of the coach and the mind of the martial artist are both at risk, leaving the coach with the burden of leading by painful example.
Note the wear on the right foot compared to the left foot. The right foot serves as a pivot point in stick fighting and a driver in boxing. I use medicated ointment to minimized the splitting of the calloused skin, which open into bleeding cracks if left untreated.
Race and War: The Aryan Conception of Combat by Julius Evola, 20 December, 1939
James LaFond's impressions, reading from pages 76-85 of Metaphysics of War
Evola begins this essay with a review of Aryan heroism supernaturally sprung from the duality of the luminous higher order represented by sun and cosmos in constant struggle with the chaotic earthly disorder grounded in the feminine principle.
He then goes immediately into the difference between the petty man and the higher man when faced with combat:
“…the petty bourgeois personality—tamed, conformist, pseudo-intellectual or empty idealistic—may undergo a disintegration…”
As explained by Evola in his previous essay, in such a case the domesticated person may altogether wither or may be reduced to a feral brutality, or may be taken back into a regressive primitive state from whence he might be able to reemerge as a human, that is to say a heroic, being, rather than as a whining, equivocating slave mewling for social sympathy. It is this reader’s thought that a retreat to an empathetic state, the place of the prize-fighter as a zoological object of fascination to modern denatured men as pointed out by Keegan in The Face of Battle, will permit the reconstituted person to empathize with the enemy—which is necessary for his stable function as a warrior—and then gain the path of higher relation, of relating to a higher state of being, leaving behind the conundrum of the returning soldier seeking sympathy from a society which is, in its materialistic miasma, only capable of worshiping or condemning him blindly. In Evola’s look at the petty man subjected to war he was predicting the societal trauma of the U.S. in the wake of Vietnam.
The higher, heroically oriented man is described like so:
“In the second type, in contrast, the most ‘elemental’ and non-human aspects of the heroic experience [the monstrous [0]] become a means of transfiguration, of elevation and integration of personality in—so to speak—a transcendent way of being.”
The sage goes on to express the ancient Aryan ideal that earthly engagement for a higher purpose—battle, war, the transformative quest—offer a path to the higher plane equal to asceticism and holiness. Evola invokes the ancient Hellenic branch of the Aryan experience as particularly heroic and important to Latin and Germanic heritage. This reader is reminded of the ancient Greek and Classical Latin heroes Phrynon [Torch] and Flamma [Blaze] who, despite being defeated, one in war and one in the Arena, were regarded as bearers of the eternal heroic light. Onward he elevates the hero into godhood, ever in light of the element of self sacrifice—not the passive sacrifice of the son by the father but the quenching of the human soul in the cosmos in seeker and in sacrifice as one. This element was richly represented in Native American traditions.
Evola rectifies the Norse Age of the Wolf with the Hellenic Age of Iron and the Indo-Aryan Dark Age and finally brings the circle of heroic light into circumference by properly relating the Crusades as a resurrection of ancient Aryan heroism via the Norse [the Normans being the dominant crusading force, with Germans and Danes figuring heavily in the crusades], citing the fact that the cult of Heracles was invoked by Germanic emperors of the High Middle Ages. Other than Harold Lamb and Robert E. Howard [fiction writers] few writers on the Crusades appreciated the heroic strand of actionism overlooked by academics in their studies of the material manifestations of Christian-Islamic warfare as purely political and ideological.
Here follow quotes by Evola on this upwelling of the pagan hero within Christendom:
“…the first military setbacks undergone by the Crusaders, which were initially a source of surprise and dismay, served to purify the notion of war from any residue of materialism and superstitious [1] devotion… Thus the Crusaders learned to regard something as superior to victory and defeat, and to regard all value as residing in the spiritual aspect of action.” [2]
“Thus we approach the most inward aspect of heroic experience, its ascetic value: it should not cause surprise if, to characterize it further, we now turn to the Muslim tradition, which might seem to be the opposite pole to the one just discussed, the truth is that the races which confronted each other in the Crusades were both warlike ones, which experienced in war the same supra-material meaning, even while fighting against one another…the ideas which we wish to discuss now are essentially to be considered echoes within the Muslim Tradition of an originally Persian (Aryo-Iranian) conception, assumed now by members of the Arab race.” [3]
In advancing to the elder Aryan tradition expressed in the Bhagavad-Gita, Evola discusses the judgment of God, via Krishna, condemning “humanitarian and sentimental scruples” as antithesis to the heroic experience, being both degrading and a source of impotence. This is quite instructive in light of the fact that the modern myth making of 20th century and even more so, 21st century movies always conflates the sentimental with the heroic, the hero forever enslaved to civic trivialities, rarely potent unless motivated by avenging the helpless or a grave personal loss. The postmodern hero is often consumed by hate rather than guided by empathy until the gross deeds of war are done and then he is rescued from the dark pit of heroism by some non-actionist moral authority figure, often a woman but increasingly a black man. We live in a world where the hero is taboo and the Aryan hero is evil.
But Krishna sounds more like a boxing coach:
“Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat—and by so doing you shall never incur sin.” -2:38
Evola continues with the ancient Aryan truth, opposed to the Creation mythos of Christianity, that “created beings” are rather “preexisting beings” which have been transformed by participating as “finite” beings with something “infinite,” “conditioned beings, subject to becoming, change and disappearance, precisely because, in them, a power burns which transcends them, which wants something infinitely vaster than all that they can ever want.”
Evola is clear that in the Aryan tradition, restoration, awakening, the return of tradition and the upwelling of the infinite within the finite is sourced via the warrior, the actionist, the doer, not the priest, the submitter, the binder. Hence the advent of Christianity brought a moral paralysis and spiritual suffocation by the slave faith out of the Middle East, but that the percolation of heroism within such universalist systems of subjection as Islam and Christianity has caused, in Christianity at least, a continual fracturing of the Christian sarcophagus caused by the upwelling of the very actionist mythos it was constructed to contain. The lesson rolls lukewarm from the sage’s pen, but is implicit nonetheless, when the slave collective swallows the heroic imperative, the inner light eventually burns through, sometimes rising as a force to sustain the consuming slave collective against a rival subjection matrix—as with the Crusades—but eventually to burn off the alien encasement, as Evola wrote:
“…we must proceed to the rediscovery of values able to purify the race of the spirit of Aryan humanity from every heterogeneous element…”
Notes
0. Beowulf, in his combat with Grendel, is on the path of higher war, while the son of his host, in attempting to challenge the hero in mean wise, is spiritually foredoomed.
1. This is a sharply Gnostic statement.
2. The Gnostic or hermetic tradition shared some roots with agonistic rites. Hermes was not only the escort of souls and patron of travelers but the god of the palaestra, the wrestling ground where athletes trained and scholars taught under the covered walk around the wrestling ground, named for his daughter, Palaestra. The entrance to every training ground was graced with a Hermea, a sculpted symbol or likeness of Hermes. Nothing better exemplified the ancient Aryan devotion to the sanctity of action as a spiritually annealing process than the sacred Agons.
3. Jason Reza Jorjani - The Iranian Renaissance & Aryan Imperium, Red Ice radio
Just about every woman I have known deeply enough to have serious conversation has named the eyes “the windows of the soul.” I gather this is a common belief, one that I share, which vexes me, having grown so smug in my apartness.
This week I viewed a conversation between Joe Rogan and Bas Rutten, in which Rutten was speaking of the fact that the eye is not a magic bullet in combat and you had better not poke the eye of some caveman like him who has you in a dominant position.
This requires an address from a coach who advocates spearing and raking the eyes in a survival situation. Rutten was discussing poking and gouging, which puts you in the grappler’s game.
I have trained with guys that were so strong, that if you started digging around in their eye they could just snap your bones. I also once protected myself from a furious attempt to crush my throat on the steel blade of an upturned dolly by scraping an eye, my would-be murderer only permitting me a one-finger scrape before adjusting his hold and maintaining his determination to kill me. This is covered in detail in Thriving in Bad Places.
In Being a bad Man in a Worse World, I cover attacks against the eye, which should be strikes from an oblique angle for shocking the brain and ripping open the eye ball.
What I would like to discuss here is the tactical facility of using eye contact in pre-combat situations.
Keeping one eye on someone while using the other for peripheral detection of an accomplice or third party is something I can only do from left to right, by turning my left side to the primary threat or target, keeping my left eye directed at him, while utilizing my bony beak to divide my vision, scanning with my right eye. Practicing this for more than a minute causes a headache. My left eye is damaged and has no real peripheral vision so I’m no good on this from that side. This provides a more subtle form of pre-sucker punch setup.
If you are not close enough to be hit and he seems like he is ready to go, a sharp look to the side—as if you are startled by something suddenly appearing to your side—has worked for me. Do not turn your head even a little or he will belt you. This is a good one if you are about to bum rush, not punch.
Mentally weak people are easily cowed through cold, hard eye-contact from just beyond touch range. Maniacs, however will often attack precipitously over such eye contact. Emasculated dindus and whindus will generally begin wolfing at this point, which will permit you to drift away with your eye on them while they go about saving face by running their mouth.
Hot eye-contact, works best at close proximity if you have overwhelming psychological or physical strength and your rear and flanks are secured. Keep in mind that such close range grilling can trigger sucker punches from a crafty antagonist and is, legally, assault, for which you might be charged in a court of law, or even arrested if you don’t cool down around a responding cop. This shows wisdom on the part of the courts as eye-to-eye grilling is a highly successful and much used form of intimidation.
The most effective way to use the eyes against dangerous men is to make and maintain neutral eye-contact while seeking superior position and maintaining time and measure by subtly shifting angles, one sucker step at a time. This often tires and confuses the confrontational personality.
With the exception of hot, close eye-contact, little to no conversation, no insults, no arguments and preferably the mystery of cold silence will break the resolve of most confrontational antagonists and many predatory aggressors before contact.
Studies in Awareness, Avoidance and Counter-Aggression
At a glance, how lethal is the environment you find yourself in? How can you predict aggression? How can you detect threat development? How can you discourage aggression? What are the phases of confrontational escalation? What does predation look like? What are the foundations for effective counter-aggression? If you would like to know the answers to these questions read Thriving in Bad Places.
From 1998 through 2016 James fought 673 stick bouts for a record of 449 wins, 171 losses and 53 draws. This introduction to stick-fighting fundamentals covers:
-The four basic stroke angles
-The three basic methods of stroking with a blunt extension weapon
-The basic defenses against the stick
-The only disarms that will succeed with any regularity
-Basic, intermediate and advanced foot work
Twerps, Goons and Meatshields is not about twirling a stick, but about navigating the combat space in the most brutal context, with stick in hand.
In the youth of our kind men of many tribes sought out, mined and painted themselves with ochre, the "bones of the gods." The most sought after earth pigment was red ochre, with the ancients sometimes thinking it the blood of ancient gods and giants slain in titanic battles. Or, at the chemical level, did our most ancient ancestors realize that this oxidized iron, the rust of the earth, was related to the hard-edged metal that would someday tear us to shreds in our groaning millions and leave the teeming survivors dependent on a great, metal-boned apathy machine?
40,000 Years from Home is an examination of, as well as a meditation on the lesser, graceless side of human kind.
Crackpot boxing coach, stick-fighter, urban survivalist, and horror writer, James LaFond, explains why you are surrounded by animals and automatons, how their fate is linked to your demise, and how you might defeat them in combat when they attack—because they will.
From 2012 thru 2014 James LaFond investigated the practice and teaching of the combat arts in his hometown of Baltimore Maryland. Letters from Planet Meathead is his journal.
Includes: Planet Meathead Rhee, Ali, Lee and Me Why I Am Not A Martial Artist MMA and Honor And over 50 other articles on fighting, training and coaching
Deluxe Mancave Edition
James LaFond has been banned from a writers’ group because of the content of his work, barred from the AAMMA because of his writing, barred from USA Boxing because of his involvement in stick-fighting, rejected by four publishers on politically correct grounds, dumped by nine women, kicked out by three women, attacked by members of six black ghetto gangs, targeted for death by BASH [Baltimore Area Skin Heads] and the Wasted Youth [white street gang], threatened by three police officers, harassed by eight police officers, chased through the streets of Baltimore by feral pit bulls and numerous pairs of rednecks in pickup trucks, was once chased down a back alley by a gear-head in a yellow mustang, was once hunted through the ghetto by a scorned psychobitch with a blade, has been homeless, was once barred from three high school classes for reading, walked away from an $80,000 a year management job without giving notice to take up writing for an annual salary of $198, will be homeless, has turned down 13 promotion offers and 9 management positions, and is generally regarded as either insane or eccentric depending on which Baltimoron you ask. Taboo You is his advice for living such a life if you so choose, and how to survive with dignity as an individual, in our sick tribal world.
In When You’re Food: Raw: A Fighter’s View of Predatory Aggression, James LaFond elevates the art of extreme political incorrectness to its uncomfortable apogee in this very personal exploration of human-on-human predation in Baltimore Maryland. Engaging urban survival guide, brutal oral history and outrageous memoir, this disturbing book makes the case that civilization is a lie, human society is essentially cannibalistic, and you are on the menu.
Let's take a break from talking about Sickness of the Heart and take a look at Modern Agonistics. This book is a highly readable account of your eponymous collaboration with Chuck Goetz, encompassing every kind of brutal combat you could think of, and most astonishingly, involving other characters who willingly participate in this practice.
My first question has nothing to do with all that. How do you keep records? As you know, I am a big fan of spreadsheets, but I have learned that you are unfamiliar with this marvelous technology. Yet you recount here information from thousands of encounters. How do you do it?
JL: We used small spiral memo pads and recorded our bouts, the first few years we did everything on a 5-point system. You start with five points and call yourself out when you take five points. A blunt hit was 1, a slash or non vital stab 2, and a vital slash or stab 3. So if you slash me once and I stab you twice, you call yourself out, scoring a 0 on defense and a 2 on offense, where I record a 3 on defense and a 5 on offense. We were trying to workout what worked, what happened when two guys just went at it with weapons. After a while, when more people were involved, we only used this for testing and I retired from keeping track of anyone’s record but my own, really as an experiment. I wanted to hit 1,000 stick-fights so that the math would be self-evident and match this up with my injuries, in order to determine how safe it was.
LL: James, the motto of Modern Agonistics is "As real as you want it." It seems like a core value of this endeavor is genuine, full contact, competitive combat. How do you find people to do this with? When you are training a fighter how soon can you tell if he will be willing to go the distance in this way?
JL: Chuck came up with that motto and he was my first recruit. I asked athletes, martial artists and assorted weirdos if they would like to try it. Roughly 90% of the martial artists recoiled in horror, perhaps 70% of the athletes did the same, and about half of the strange eggs, said, “Why not?” I found hockey and lacrosse players most amicable to fighting with weapons.
LL: One aspect I enjoyed, particularly through Evolutions 1.3 - 1.5 and beyond, is that you experienced a form of arms race, almost as though you worked your way through the development of weapons and armor through history, including crafting weapons and armor yourselves, as you and your training partners advanced and gained experience and skill. How much of this was a conscious decision to expand your armory, versus a natural progression?
JL: We wanted to try different weapons. It was gross act of morbid curiosity in many cases. The evolutionary aspect was just that, not planned. At first we added armor, then we took it away as we got better and narrowed the weapon set. If you are only dealing with one type of weapon you can minimize your armor, unless it is a pole axe or some other crushing extension weapon. We eventually settled for what most primitive warriors have settled with, using a round flexible stick to train, spar and compete with, as this generalizes to many other skills. We did not start out looking at it from an escrima point of view, but did end up using an escrima weapon set, stick and knife with limited machete.
LL: How did you come up with the idea to chain the opponent's weapons together? Has this ever been tried by anyone else?
JL: We didn’t chain the weapons together but held the chain between us, which gives the option to quit, by dropping it and keeps the encounter tense for spectators and does not allow resting. This was Hollywood inspired, I am afraid to say. I don’t have any historical basis for this. Gladiators were forced into close contact by a lanista armed with a prodding weapon. The chain was a way to replicate that forced proximity without getting extra people involved. We had enough trouble getting fighters, let alone officials. Besides, if there are officials for a new sport it can come under fire from the state athletic commission. Realizing this, we decided that taking responsibility for your safety and your opponent’s safety—by breaking off when the other guy is in trouble—was realistic practice for defending oneself on the street. This jived with the fact that more and more of our participants saw this as a type of reality based survival practice.
LL: This book has a lot of informative pictures, particularly in a yellow-walled, red-carpeted dungeon of punishment, as well as detailed instructions on stick fighting drills and techniques. Anyone who enjoyed Sean's recent videos (featuring James LaFond in a red t-shirt, and Sean Glass occasionally sans shirt) will get a lot out of Modern Agonistics, the book. How much do you think a fighter can advance through books and video?
JL: The “dungeon of punishment” was Sifu Edgar Livingston’s Tai-Chi school. He was aligned with Saint Jude’s Children’s hospital, the only honest charity we were able to find. We even got ripped off by the Maryland Diabetes Associate, who refused to credit us with the $260 donation we made because they said they only filled out paperwork on $1000 or more and the meathead I sent down with the money believed the thieves in their office.
Book learning combat depends on the person. In order to learn from books you need relevant experience and a partner. You cannot use a book alone unless you are an experienced fighter with some self-coaching ability. Realistically, books that I write as instructionals are reference works for trainers and coaches and for people who are being or have been trained and coached in similar activities.
Videos, on the other hand, are almost identical to the instruction had in the martial arts setting, which is a fair learning environment. The gym setting is better than learning via the ‘monkey see, monkey do” martial arts method. In boxing your goal is to be able to verbally coach a fighter who is looking at the guy that he is fighting while listening to you. In this sense the boxing and stick fighting books are much more useful for the coach than for the fighter. The videos are better for the fighter, especially the novice. Some fighters, with a governor on their ego and an ability to conduct an analysis of their body mechanics, have successfully become formidable combatants through books and videos. One of the ways this self-critique and self-coaching ability can be cultivated is by retooling your skill set in slow motion while you are injured.
LL: James, you cover scoring quite a bit here, including the importance of self scoring and the rationale behind determining when a fighter has been eliminated from competition. How does this fit in with your gaming writing? Do you have any active gaming projects right now?
JL: Once, when I was fighting Don Plot in 2006, with 10-inch polypropylene dagas I had him dialed in with the knife. He was just a stick-fighter and every time he advanced I stabbed him in the throat or face and the four corner judges saw no point. He looks at me, and says, “You better do it again.”
We move around and I stick him again and he chuckled. “I guess you’ll have to rip my head off before they notice.”
What I did was lifted my foot for the next stab and made a theatrical kill and they called the point. This points up the ridiculousness of judges scoring any fight with blades. I am the most experienced knife and machete fighter in the United States [though certainly not the best] and I cannot watch two guys that I have trained go at it and know what happened. In many cases a fighter does not know that he hit another fighter, especially when they are amped up. Calling yourself out is the only way. This was essentially how bare knuckle boxing worked.
I used my role playing game designing projects to bridge the reality fiction gap for others. I did three, with none of them, including the last, being playable by video game paced minds. In order to accurately pursue a combat simulation on paper it needs to be conducted at a pace that is at least 100 times slower than the action being simulated. What I used these role playing designs for Tribes, Fights and Triumph for was transferring my combat experience into a form that made a combat scenario builder for writing fiction. Although I don’t write that way—I don’t plot fights—someone else who does plot action scenes could use it like that.
I have yet to convert my 200 page Tribes sourcebook into fiction. I am in possession of over 20 excellent illustrations for the World of Oth and, as soon as I finish Drink Deep of Night, Seven Moons Deep, The Spiral Case and Yusef of the Dusk, I intend to begin publishing pocket-sized paperback novelettes of about 700-800 words, with Richard and Joseph’s fine art work as covers.
LL: Readers, this book has a ton of highly amusing anecdotes, pictures of men trying to hurt each other while wearing gladiator gear, valuable and detailed instructions and more. We know from Winter of a Fighting Life what this book cost James to write. I think there is nothing out there like Modern Agonistics, and strongly encourage you to pick up a hard copy or Kindle edition.
JL: One final word, Lynn. When I was promoting events for charity, I made sure that I stocked the front row with a few blood-thirsty babes, to whom I gave free tickets to and it worked like charm—with those meatheads fighting like savages for female approval. Thanks, Lynn, for reminding me of the good old days. I hope some young guys out there have some of their own to look forward to.
PS: Don't miss this video of James and Damien (a prominent figure in Modern Agonistics) fighting. James is using a sword and shield, and Damien is using a pole flail. More videos are available at James's main site, under the Modern Agonistics link.
