Krav Maga was the hand-to-hand combat technique I learned in the 82nd.

I spent nearly two years training on that, twice a week. It’s incredibly effective and I enjoyed it a great deal.

I usually don’t mention it to anyone because it causes all kinds of stupid ideas to form in people’s heads.

Krav Maga is great for overriding the human natural instinct to fight fair. Humans don’t naturally try to irreparably damage one another in hand-to-hand combat. Going for the head and the ribcage with a fist is not terribly effective, but that’s what untrained people tend to do. Hell, it’s what I did when I was bold and fearless but not that well-trained. It’s why I have two scars on my ring finger and pinky from punching some kid in the teeth (who had tried to make me eat a piece of paper).

Krav Maga is also great for women to learn as 99.9% of people attacking you will have no training. Size does matter, no doubt. In equally-trained opponents, the larger person wins 90% of the time. That’s just life.

However, I watched one of my 5’ 3” 140-pound female Krav Maga instructors absolutely destroy 200 pound military men who were giving it everything they had to take her down but who had no training. She was fast, relentless and incredibly strong.

Eventually, after two years of training, a few of them managed to sort-of win a fight with her (I never did).

That’s what training can do.

Krav uses short, powerful strikes and is like applied karate (which is mostly ornamental and not useful in a no-holds-barred fight). It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll win a fight if you are attacked unexpectedly, but it does a heck of a lot to even up the odds.

As anyone sane knows, the real use of Krav and any fighting technique shouldn’t be to punish your opponent or to kill them, but to disable and incapacitate them enough for you to get away.

I wish every woman got the chance to learn some Krav, but I also wish we didn’t live in a world where that wish made any sort of sense.

This is terrible news.

As for Windows 10, WZOR says it will be a cloud OS.

NOPE. Fucking double nope.

Looks like I will be stuck on Windows 7 until it is completely unusable, as the interface apocalypse that all other OSes have become makes them unsuitable for anyone who does more than look at LOLcats and click on the “Like” button through the drool slavered all over their keyboards.

I will sooner give up my computer and all internet access altogether than use a cloud OS. Truly.

If you think Ben Affleck is going to be bad as Batman, just wait until Larry Summers is the next Fed chair.

Shows how truly corrupt our system is, and that nearly anything good is the result of inertia and past investment more than anything else.

But now we are in the extractive phase, and that will have consequences. Most people are too self-deluded now to realize what’s happening. I call this the “bad news won’t affect me” cognitive flaw, in that they assume because their life now is good, society-altering consequences can’t reach them because they haven’t yet.

Hardly anyone ever comments anyway, but I’ve disabled comments on this blog. Anyone who knows me can email me. That I value. The rest I don’t really care about.

And it’s not that I don’t value other people’s thoughts and opinions in the abstract at least, but drive-by comments on blogs by people who know very little about me or typically about the subject at hand are almost always a waste of time. That’s just my personal opinion on the matter – others find much value in their blog’s comment section and I can understand and respect that.

For most people comments are usually enabled as social validation and to the extent that I need that, the blog itself suits the purpose. Truth is I’d probably write it anyway even if no one read it (which is nearly the case as it is!).

My thoughts formerly were the diametrical opposite, but as the internet has changed and has become less valuable and less useful to people like me, my thoughts have changed as well.

I’d add to this list “don’t buy ornamental hiking shoes.”

I have a pair of them. Of course I didn’t know that until I tried to walk on something slick. These shoes – which straddle the line between shoes and boots – resemble hiking shoes. A perfect imitation. They were even well-reviewed. And they do really well until you get them near anything wet and/or mildly slippery.

One time my partner and I were on a boardwalk with some moss on its surface and she was walking fine and I looked like I was starring in the Ice Capades.

Have to get better ones soon.