Dog Brothers Public Forum

Para quienes no lo sepan, les informo que el clip del Spring 2011 DB Tribal Gathering se encuentra acutalmente en la primera pagina de este sitio.

Woof all:

This thread is for the discussion of weapons out of the ordinary.

I'd like to kick things off with the Three Section Staff.  In the clip of the 2011 Tribal Gathering (currently on the front page) we can see C-Gong Fu Dog wielding this unusual and challenging to use weapon to good effect.  Today here in Bern I worked with C-GF on his TSS game a bit .  It will be interesting to see how things go tomorrow. 

The Adventure continues!
Crafty Dog

PS:  C-Mighty Dog:  C-GF gives his thanks for the TSS you gave him.  Methinks you may come to regret this generous deed

President Reagan nails it:  6/6/84

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganddayaddress.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArDRg5SkuT0&feature=player_embedded

In the Hermosa Beach area with Guro Crafty.  Details soon.

We are in preliminary conversations about a 4 day Camp at Peyton Quinn's RMCAT camp including two days of firearms with Peyton for June 25-28.  This is just preliminary talk right now, but you might want to hold your calendar open , , , Spaces ARE limited, so if you are interested please give us a howl.

www.rmcat.com will show what the facility looks like, including the elk in the meadow with a creek running through it.

Opening the thread:

Not that I agree with every single point or example here, but a great rant nonetheless:

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/train_like_a_man?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d8bbce17a57f7fc%2C0
Train Like a Man!
by Martin Rooney – 3/24/2011 

The Fall of T
America is becoming the poster-child for low testosterone levels. Men today are becoming increasingly more feminine, fussing about their eyebrows, spray tanning, and booking mani-pedis.

There are many potential explanations for the drop in testosterone and subsequent increase in American Idol voters. Skeptics will argue that it's simply our aging population that's to blame for our country's collective low T. Yet that fails to explain the feminine leanings of the younger guys. I believe their shockingly low T scores are due in large part to poor lifestyle choices.

Obesity, stress, prescription meds, staying up late, and poor food choices all affect T to varying degrees, but in a weird way, a low T lifestyle is almost glorified.

The 25 year-old guy with the muffin-top waistline due to the stressful job that keeps him up late is essentially what college prepares most "successful" people for. Follow that lifestyle too long and voila – self-induced castration, a gut you can't seem to lose, and an iPod chocked full of Kenny G.

But here's the kicker: castration has infiltrated and infected the one spot you might think immune to low T levels – the gym.


Castration in the Gym?
What do squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses, and dips have in common? Answer: They're all compound exercises that can be loaded to produce extreme amounts of testosterone-building tension.

Sadly, a lot of people answer: "They're all dangerous exercises that yogagirl127 posted on Facebook can hurt you and should be outlawed!"

Dangerous? To whom exactly? And what isn't "dangerous?"

Look, I'm not only a trainer, I'm also a physical therapist, and I respect the importance of proper biomechanics and injury prevention, but those basic exercises are not inherently dangerous.

Everything you do in the gym has some potential for injury, as do most things in life. Reading is bad for the eyes, door handles are caked with germs, and pesticides are sprayed on virtually every stitch of produce at the grocery store.

Are you going to stop reading, opening doors, and eating vegetables? Before we outlaw the overhead press, let's crack down on texting-while-driving and we'll really start making the world a safer place.

Safety in my training is paramount, but so is common sense – which isn't always common in the fitness industry. Over the last 20 years, I've watched bizarre trends in fitness information dictate the actual training that occurs inside the gym.

After the rise of the internet, articles written by any "expert" that could type had you in a full sweat-suit to stay warm during your dynamic warm-up and pre-habbed on the foam roller before you rehabbed with your corrective exercises.

In short, as information became more plentiful, more had to be written about the minutia. Once the minutia was deeply covered, the only thing left was to write about what everyone was doing wrong and the risks involved with just about every exercise.

Fact is, most stuff I see talked about today is about what we supposedly can't or shouldn't do. My goal is to remind us all that life is often better when you take the "t" off your can't.

This information overload leads us first on a quest for something safer, then moves us to something either more time consuming or boring, then moves us to skipping that new thing all together due to a lack of time or interest. Ultimately, we're unable to go back to the old exercise that worked and kept us stimulated because we're now convinced that it's bad for us!

Knowledge is power? No, knowledge is only power when we put action behind it. Today, I believe knowledge is often paralyzing.

Here are a few examples of "castrating" training trends and exercises.


Kettlebells vs. Dumbbells
 
Kettlebells are a great tool, but since the explosion of the kettlebell cults, dumbbells have taken a backseat in training. Funny, but no one ever takes a picture with a dumbbell, yet I see more shots every day of people carrying a kettlebell like it was his or her first-born.

I have nothing against kettlebells and use them in my training. I just wonder if the KB explosion would've ever happened without the internet? Kettlebell shirts, kettlebell necklaces...

Poor dumbbells, I'll miss them.


Bands vs. Chin-ups
 Chin-ups are one of the all-time great upper-body exercises (and I include the abdominal area in that too). But they're difficult to perform, which turns people off.

So some genius discovered that a band originally designed for stretching also works great to make chin-ups easier by removing all the testosterone-producing tension. Now you have rooms full of guys doing sissy chin-ups thinking they're Olympic gymnasts.

Dump the bands. Do your chin-ups. And hurry up, because even though they haven't been outlawed yet, I'm sure someone is already working on an article called "Why Chin-Ups Are Bad For You."


Glute-Ham Raise vs. 45-Degree Back Extension
Back extensions are a great exercise, especially when you hold as many plates as you can across your chest.

Too bad some "efficiency expert" discovered that by just having a glute-ham raise bench you didn't need a back extension or a lying leg curl machine because the GHR effectively trains both knee flexion and hip extension. So now, both the back extension and leg curl are falling into exercise obscurity.

Turns out the joke is on them. Glute-ham raises are difficult and about as comfortable as a muay thai kick to the quads, so no one does them. So now, no one does anything, except of course occasionally working the triceps while wiping the dust off the GHR.


Prowler Pushes vs. Suicides
 
I love the Prowler, but this idea that you need a special piece of equipment for conditioning is bunk.

Unfortunately, we've learned to value exercises either by their novelty or their ability to produce soreness or fatigue. I'm not sure there are many sports or activities that you need to prepare for by either passing out or puking in training, but hey, while we're lowering our testosterone levels, might as well find a way to crush our nervous and immune systems, too.

Want a really new exercise that no one is doing? It's called sprinting.

The biomechanics of sprinting is essential to our basic mobility, but it's also very much a "use it or lose it" skill. If you're 27 and haven't sprinted since high school, you need to get out to the field and start doing it. It's slowly leaving you, every day – and that means you're only racing faster toward the big dirt nap. (Maybe they should call being fat and sedentary a "suicide" instead?)

Notice I said "sprinting" not treadmill running, elliptical training, or texting your friend while you ride the recumbent bike. Each one of those pieces has castrated the thing we all need to make progress: impact. Oddly, biomechanists spend a whole lot of time trying to remove impact from our lives.


Lateral Raises vs. Shoulder Pressing
What's more functional than pushing something heavy overhead? I'm all for the YMCA dance and whatever else we do with ten-pound dumbbells to activate our lower trap, but there's nothing scary about a proper overhead press. It's a fantastic way to challenge significant musculature and load the spine.

Yeah, these can bother you if you have poor mobility, strength, or movement issues, but what wouldn't bother you in that case?


Pushdowns vs. Dips
 
Dips ruin the shoulders, right? That's why I see countless athletes in my facility with fantastic physiques complaining about shoulder problems from performing dips up to one hundred times per week.

Oh wait, that's right... I don't. And by the way, some of these athletes are girls I call "gymnasties" that often out-chin and out-dip the guys.

Pushdowns are great, but strap a 100-pound dumbbell around your waist and see if you can replicate the tension at the cable station.


Planks vs. Spinal Flexion
In the last few years, bending forward at the waist has been under siege. The firefight is all over the internet, and although I've adopted many anti-rotation, anti-flexion, and anti-everything else exercises to stimulate the core, I admit I still throw in some spinal flexion. Somehow I've still produced pretty solid results.

I will agree that a poorly performed sit-up isn't great for your back or neck, but you know what the absolute worst thing is for your back and neck? Sitting slumped over your desk surfing the internet for the latest plank variation.

Sit-ups aren't the biggest problem – it's sit-ting. Let's figure out how to stop people from doing that before we figure out any more things we shouldn't do.


Step-ups and Split Squats vs. Squats and Deadlifts
Step-ups and split squats are great exercises, but for building muscle they aren't in the same league as squats and deadlifts. Tension wise, they don't even come close. But because they're less "scary" than the big lifts, they're making a single-legged run at it.

Here's the irony: because they're unilateral, they also take twice as long to do, so people find them boring. So after a few weeks, nobody does anything. And then they sit in their chair and tell you to watch your back if you dare to deadlift?


Active Warm-Up vs. Static Stretching
Static stretching has been beaten down so hard it's barely breathing. Dynamic flexibility during an active warm-up is a wonderful thing and something I personally use daily, but static stretching definitely has its place in training.

Just about everybody has dropped static stretching in favor of dynamic movement, but here's the thing: dynamic flexibility during a warm-up is time consuming and sometimes complex, so many trainees simply skip it.

Now people are doing no flexibility training at all, and the result is they no longer have the mobility to squat or deadlift properly. So instead of performing some simple static stretches before performing the dynamic movements, we have immobile guys confined to doing planks on an Airex pad in the squat rack.

Stretch out, then warm-up, and then pick up something heavy!


80/20. Not 20/80.
Getting tension back into your workouts doesn't mean you have to kill yourself or get injured. It means scaling things back so that most of the time you spend in the gym is doing stuff that's actually productive.

The 80-20 rule never fails. If 80% of your time is spent straining under good old-fashioned barbells and dumbbells, with 20% spent doing pre-hab, rehab, and "potentiation work" then you'll probably look more fit and have a handful of calluses.

If that split is more like 20-80, then you likely have a problem that includes veggie hotdogs, waxing, and a dream to someday fit into those damn skinny jeans.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ8MK6JWIFA&feature=player_embedded#at=115

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0PIcIU1mcg&feature=related

Woof All:

Recently I had someone ask me what I thought of the Straight Blast and in that I have been doing some thinking on this recently  it occurred to me to put the question up here.

We have the Wing Chun SB; we have the JKD SB, and we have the Boxing Blast. 

Analyze/assess/comment?

TAC,
CD

DATE:   Monday, March 28, 2010
TIME:    6:45 p.m. to 8:45 p.m.
PLACE:  South Bay Jeet Kune Do Academy
             Nakaoka Community Center Auditorium
             1670 West 162nd Street
             Gardena, California
COST:   $25.00 cash only
CONTACT:  David Cheng at kalijeetkunedo@yahoo.com
TOPIC:  Stickgrappling and Short Stick/Palm Stick

Please bring a pair of escrima sticks and a palm stick/short stick.

"Zapata's Howl" (c 2010 DBI)
Guro Crafty

 Back in the mid 90s, on various occasions a friend and I spent several wonderful days on a ranch 25 miles up a dirt road in Baja California, Mexico located at about 2,000' altitude on the side of "Diablo de Picacho" (or something like that) the largest mountain in Baja California.  The ranch was an interesting place.  It had been in the hands of the Meling family since the late 1800s.  Culturally they were American cowboys, but having been born and raised there for over 100 years, they were 100% Mexican citizens and completely bilingual.  Conversation over meals was fascinating.

 We spent the day riding horses (in that wonderfully unconcerned-about-lawsuits way so common in Mexico).  Zapata, the Akita in our logo, was in his glory chasing the huge jack rabbits.

The area is quite remote and the air completely clean.  Due to the extremely low population density and there being very little electricity, light pollution is non-existant.  There was a stream with some small trout and some frogs and at night the three of us sat listening to the frogs, the hoots of an owl, and the cries of the coyotes and looking at some of the brightest clearest views we had ever seen of the night sky.

 I commented on this at breakfast one morning and was informed that due to three factors- the clean air, the non-existant light pollution, and the fact that the mountain was over 10,000' tall-- the world's third largest telescope was located there on the peak of the mountain.  So, after breakfast digested we drove up a very ragged dirt road to the observatory there.

What a magnificent view!  The Sea of Cortez to the east, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and no sight or sound of civilization-- just a bright sun, and the rustling of the wind over an unmarked expanse not unlike some of that in the "Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" though at 10,000' there were more pine trees than cactus.

 Such a moment in such a place is like a tuning fork for the soul-- something that allows us to put ourselves back in tune the inner vibrations of our Creator and his works.

 The three of us sat a while and breathed.  As Zapata lay sphinx-like next to me, his vibrations were part of the larger tuning fork of it all for me.

 On the way down, at about 7,000 feet altitude, there was a primitive little wooden sign saying "Meling Ranch".  At lunch I asked about it.  Andy Meling told me they had a property there of about 9 hectarias, including a year round spring, that they would sell me for $25,000.  Intrigued, the next morning the three of us went back up to investigate.   Andy, pointed out the lay of the land, which included a "fifth wheel" type RV camper which was to serve as our tent-cabin while we stayed there, feeling out the land.

 The camper was pretty ratty, and obviously field mice were present.  "Well, if you buy the land, just get yourself an old cat or two, and they will take care of the problem"  Andy advised.

 Why, I wondered, should the cats be old?

 "Because the owls will get the young ones" he explained "You want old ones that have already survived a close scrape."

 As some of you may know, not only is clear title to land ownership in Mexico sometimes fraught with problems but also from the Constitution on down Mexico has some very specific language concerning foreigners owning land. 

With some of these issues in mind Zapata and I set out on patrol to survey as best we could the boundaries of the land and to see what the neighboring lands looked like.  Of particular interest in this regard was the spring.  As we hiked up the mountain side well above the Meling's land in search the spring's source the terrain became both steeper and more rugged.  The boulders, juniper brush, and occasional cactus became ever more challenging.  Yellow jacket nests were not rare, and the possibility of rattlesnakes ever present.  Eventually we got to a spot where Zapata simply could not continue with me and I worried for his safety should I allow him to continue to try.

So I told him to go back to the camper-cabin, which was then about 3/4 of a mile away through rugged terrain.  I'm not really sure how he could understand my intention, but he did.  So he turned around and headed back down the mountain side as I continued upwards in search of the spring's source.

 About twenty minutes later, a tremendous wolf howl came.  Zapata was letting me know that he had arrived.

 This howl was the only time in his life he ever did so-- but in this moment I saw that the wolf, and its howl, was always there within him.

 I have many Zapata stories, (the coyote pack at the Bay of Whales-- again in Baja California wilderness-- the fight with the Rotttweiler with a fight collar unleashed by a neighborhood punk, humping the steroid bodybuilder, and many others) but this one is perhaps my favorite.

When he was riddled with cancer the day came when it was time to go for his last walk and go to the vet.  We walked on the path along the boardwalk along the ocean in Hermosa Beach, the wind in our faces. He was weak and his fur no longer glistened but still he walked in his gloriously arrogant way, but much slower than before.   It was a beautiful day and we drank it in, though only I knew it was to be his last.

Some clueless idiot with a young intact male Great Dane came up quickly on us from behind undetected by Zapata due to the wind's direction.  As the Dane drew alongside Zapata (at the angle that a dog seeking dominance goes for) Zapata became aware of him and without hesitation went for him and drove him back-- truly a warrior for all his days.

The Dane's owner and I were able to quickly separate the two and we all went on our respective ways, which for Zapata and me was the vet.

We were led into a back room.  Zapata was tired, and as we sat together on the floor he lay his head on my lap.  Of course he could feel my emotions. I held him as the vet administered the shot.

His urn sits in plain sight on my desk now, and when I need it he sends me a howl.

A Sad Howl:

I just received a tragic phone call from Lonely Dog.

C-Desert Dog is dead, at 40-something years old.  He leaves a wife and 3 (?) children.

Information is sparse at this time.  What Lonely told me is that at a light sparring day C-Desert Dog, who always came fit and ready (his stick skill impressed me at the August '10 Gathering) sparred a few matches and, saying he wasn't feeling well, sat down.  I am told that a) it was truly a light sparring day and b) he did not receive any head shots. 

Regardless, shortly thereafter he began to have an elevated pulse and rapid, shallow breathing.  His eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.  Immediate resuscitation measures were applied.  EMTs were there in 5 minutes and tried reviviing him for two hours, to no avail.

This is all the info we have at present.  C-Desert was a member of Cro Dog's clan in Germany.   I have emailed Cro Dog for additional information.  Lonely and I will be soliciting donations on behalf of the family.

The Adventure continues,
Crafty Dog
GF

Woof All:

For Those of you in the Los Angeles area:

L.A. Budo of Manhattan Beach is proud to host Marc "Crafty Dog" Denny, the Guiding Force of the Dog Brothers and Head Instructor Dog Brothers Martial Arts.  No experience needed; stick or BJJ experience will be a plus

Topics Covered:

*Intro to DMA Basic stick work
* Closing the distance from weapon range to grappling range
* Sticks on the ground

Sunday Feb 27
11:00-14:00 a.k.a. 11AM-2 PM   
$130
David Dow
L.A. Budo
1809 Manhattan Beach Blvd. (west of Aviation Bl)
Manhattan Beach CA 90266
tel: (310) 798-2010
david@labudo.com

Woof All:

On the "Citizens defend themselves/others" thread currently nearby, the discussion of the CCW hero citizen who jumped in to help capture the crazed killer has evolved into a discussion of what can be done to lessen the occurrence of such madness.  At the moment the discussion is centered on the issue of what to do about obviously crazy people such as the killer in this case.  How did he fall between the cracks?  What, if anything, can be done to prevent this without endangering our gun rights? 

These are good questions, and I think they deserve a thread of their own-- this one and I invite the discussion of "Citizens defend themselves" to continue here. 

That said this thread is for all larger societal questions of the societal/cultural context in which our violence incubates:  What to do about crazy people, what to do with those who do wrong, why do people do these crazy things, etc.

Much heat and little light has been generated by accusations of the alleged hatred of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh et al.  In my opinion this is drivel at best:  Where was the hatred at Glenn Beck's 8/28 rally of a half million?  What of GB's continuing praise of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi?  Where was the outrage when the President spoke of the opposition as "enemies" and "bringing a gun to a knife fight"?  Where was the outrage at the hatred spewed at President Bush? etc. etc.  More likely in my opinion is that the true motivation by those disingenuously oblivious to their own deeds is to neuter a properly vigorous reaction to the genuinely radical ambitions of the man who is our President-- and those around him.

We have always had vigorous political debate which often has wend its way through heated and dirty places.  We have always had political crimes of murder violence.  Southern congressmen used to cane northern congressmen opposed to slavery, sometimes on the floor of the House itself (see the American History thread on our SCH forum).   In my lifetime, accompanied by a liberal chorus about right wing hatred in Dallas for President Kennedy, a communist murdered him; a Palestinian murdered Senator Bobby Kennedy as the left rose up against the Vietnam War; a racist killed MLK; deranged hippie offshoots attempted murder of President Ford; a deranged whacko shot President Reagan.  With the possible exception of the murder of MLK, none of these were fomented by angry political words in public discourse.

But I digress , , , (not for the first or last time, no doubt).

Returning to the subject at hand, I would like to offer my own nominee to the list of candidates of variables that set the cultural stage for the acts of madness that we regularly see: the amoral violence we regularly see portrayed in Hollywood and on TV.

Details , , , soon

Hosted once again by DBMA GL Rob Crowley.  Details to follow.

Woof All:

If you think about it for a moment, it is clear that doing what we do in
the American legal environment is no small trick.  Not only in litigation
crazy America is our foundation a form of fighting that the early UFC turned
down for being “just too extreme”, but in order for me to dedicate my life
to the “Dog Brothers mission” it is necessary for me to earn my living at
it.  I know, I know, it is not the craftiest of financial decisions I could
have made -- as I sometimes joke, “I used to be a lawyer, but then I went
for the big bucks in stick fighting.”-- but it is a life in which I believe
in what I do.

Pay attention, this is a guide to how things are organized around here:

The DOG BROTHERS (DB)/ The DOG BROTHERS TRIBE:  “A band of sweaty, smelly,
psychopaths with sticks dedicated to higher consciousness through harder
contact”. © DBI.  My role within the Dog Brothers is “The Guiding Force”.
The “Council of Elders” helps me make important decisions.  The Council of
Elders is Benjamin "Lonely Dog" Rittiner, Mike "Dogzilla" Tibbitts, Philip "Sled Dog"
Gelinas, and me.

The Council of Elders (COE) is the body that after consultation with the Tribe,
confers membership in the DB Tribe.   To become a member of the Tribe no
money is ever involved.  It does not matter what your lineage is. Stating the
matter plainly, though a goodly percentage of the Dog Brothers Tribe trains
in Dog Brothers Martial Arts, the DB Tribe is a separate matter and having the
COE bestow membership in the Tribe helps make the point.

DOG BROTHERS MARTIAL ARTS INC. (DBMA Inc):  DBI has been incorporated in California since
1988.   DBI is the legal vehicle through which “Dog Brothers Gatherings of
the Pack are held”.  This helps minimize the risk of legal liability for all
concerned—including me!

Indeed, for that very reason all my teaching and all my other martial art
professional activities I do not as Marc Denny, but as an employee of DBMA Inc.
This also applies to my wife Cindy Denny, who is in charge of Reality at
DBI.  (I am in charge of everything else she informs me)  Amongst other
things, “Reality” for includes our DVD and other product sales and the
websites.   The “Magic Words” that open a “DB Gathering of the Pack” apply
to all dealings with DBMA Inc too: “No suing no one for no reason for nothing no
how no way.  Only you are responsible for you, so protect yourself at all
times.  California law applies.” © DBMA Inc

DOG BROTHERS MARTIAL ARTS (DBMA):    I am the Head Instructor of DBMA, which
I founded in 1995.  The mission statement of DBMA is “To walk as a warrior
for all your days” © DBI.  Please be clear that although lots of DBs got
some or all of their training in DBMA, being involved with DBMA does not
make you a Dog Brother or a member of the DB Tribe.  Please keep this clear
in your dealings with others.

As stated a moment ago in the previous section, all my DBMA activities are
as an employee of DBI.  These activities include:

a)      private and group classes;

b)      seminars (to which it is agreed that California law applies);

c)      The Dog Brothers Martial Arts Association (DBMA Ass'n)  The DBMAA is for
everyone, particularly those without regular access to DBMA training.  The
heart of the DBMAA is the DBMAA website—particularly its forum, where I can
be found most days.  For more info http://dogbrothers.com/join-dbmaa/

d)     DBMA Training Groups (DBMA TG):  Typically DBMA TGs are your
quintessential backyard groups.  Each group has its own feel and its own mix
of interests be it "Real Contact Stick Fighting", “Kali Tudo”, or the “Die
Less Often” material.  Each DBMA TG has a Group Leader (GL).  A DBMA Group
Leader is someone who is training with me (or Guro Lonely Dog in Europe)
whom I have certified as a Group Leader.  A group leader must train with me
at least once a year with a “Personal Training Program” (PTP) or by hosting
a seminar. (There are some additional requirements that will be discussed at
an appropriate moment).  There is a secure forum for DBMA GLs where DBMA and
teaching DBMA can be discussed with privacy.  GLs can post their lesson
plans for commentary by either GLs and/or me.  Videos clips can be posted.
At random intervals, “Vid-lessons” are released.  I am available to answer
questions on the forum.  DBMA TGs have the support of DBI/DBMA/DBMAA e.g.
listing on the DBMA public site or on the public site forum.  This can
greatly help in finding kindred spirits.



To summarize:

DB: The Dog Brothers
DBMA Inc: Dog Brothers Incorporated
DBMA: Dog Brothers Martial Arts
DBMAA: The Dog Brothers Martial Arts Association
DBMA TG:  DBMA Training Group
DBMA TG GL:  DBMA TG Group Leader
DBMA Ass'n: DBMA Association



The Adventure continues!
Marc F. Denny/Crafty Dog/Punong Guro Crafty
Guiding Force of the Dog Brothers
President Dog Brothers Inc.
Founder/Head Instructor Dog Brothers Martial Arts

Date:  Feb. 4th - 6th

Dog Brothers Martial Arts School Program - Seminar and Padded weapons
tournament.
Adults and kid's seminars and divisions in the tournament.

Location:  Chicago, IL

Contact:
petejuska@sbcglobal.net
===============

Woof All: 

This is the first seminar of the Dog Brothers Martial Arts School Program.  A formal announcement should be out in the next week or two.

TAC!
Guro Crafty

Espera lo inesperado:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mj8Z2xG_Rs&feature=related

Reading body language and facial cues is a very important skill that can often have personal safety implications.

Recently my wife and I have become quite enchanted by the TV show The Mentalist, whose lead character is a high IQ fellow assisting a police homicide squad peopled by model beautiful cops (well, it is in California )  Amongst his skills is the ability to read body language and facial cues very well.

Similarly there is the TV show "Lie to me" which is based upon the work of this Dr. Paul Ekman http://www.paulekman.com/

Vanity Fair

After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.
BY MARK BOWDEN

 



Private investigator Ken Brennan (foreground) and retired Miami-Dade police detective Allen Foote



From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.

Miami-Dade detectives learned that she had been living for months at the Airport Regency Hotel, eight miles from where she was found. It is one of those crisply efficient overnight spots in the orbit of major airports that cater to travelers needing a bed between legs of long flights. She was employed by a cruise-ship line and had severely cut her finger on the job, so she was being put up at the hotel by her employers while she healed. The assault had begun, she said, in her room, on the fourth floor. She described her attackers as two or three white men who spoke with accents that she heard as “Hispanic,” but she wasn’t certain. She remembered one of the men pushing a pillow into her face, and being forced to drink something strong, alcoholic. She had fragments of memories like bits of a bad dream—of being held up or carried, of being thrown over a man’s shoulder as he moved down a flight of stairs, of being roughly violated in the backseat of a car, of pleading for her life. Powerful, cruel moments, but there was nothing solid, nothing that made a decent lead. When her lawyer soon after filed a lawsuit against the hotel, alleging negligence, going after potentially deep corporate pockets, the detectives thought something was fishy. This was not your typical rape victim. What if she was part of some sophisticated con?

The police detectives did what they could at the hotel, combing the woman’s room for evidence, interviewing hotel employees, obtaining images from all of the surveillance cameras for the morning of the crime, going over the guest lists. The hotel had 174 rooms, and so many people came and went that it would have taken months working full-time to run checks on every one of them, something beyond the resources of a police department in a high-crime area like Miami-Dade. The sex-crimes unit set aside the file with no clear leads, only more questions. After several weeks, “we were dried up,” recalled Allen Foote, the detective handling the case.

So the action was all headed toward civil court. The hotel engaged a law firm to defend itself from the woman’s lawsuit, and the firm eventually hired a private detective named Ken Brennan to figure out what had happened.

Foote was not pleased. It was usually a pain in the ass to have a private detective snooping around one of his cases. Brennan was right out of central casting—middle-aged, deeply tanned, with gray hair. He was a weight lifter and favored open-necked shirts that showed off both the definition of his upper pecs and the bright, solid-gold chain around his neck. The look said: mature, virile, laid-back, and making it. He had been divorced, and his former wife was now deceased; his children were grown. He had little in the way of daily family responsibilities. Brennan had been a cop on Long Island, where he was from, and had worked eight years as a D.E.A. agent. He had left the agency in the mid-90s to work as a commodities broker and to set up as a private detective. The brokering was not to his taste, but the investigating was. He was a warm, talkative guy, with a thick Long Island accent, who sized people up quickly and with a healthy strain of New York brass. If he liked you, he let you know it right away, and you were his friend for life, and if he didn’t … well, you would find that out right away, too. Nothing shocked him; in fact, most of the salacious run-of-the-mill work that pays private detectives’ bills—domestic jobs and petty insurance scams—bored him. Brennan turned those offers away. The ones he took were mostly from businesses and law firms, who hired him to nail down the facts in civil-court cases like this one.

He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find out what happened. I’m not going to shade things to assist your client, but I will find out what the truth is.” Brennan liked it when the information he uncovered helped his clients, but that wasn’t a priority. Winning lawsuits wasn’t the goal. What excited him was the mystery.

The job in this case was straightforward. Find out who raped and beat this young woman and dumped her in the weeds. Had the attack even happened at the hotel, or had she slipped out and met her assailant or assailants someplace else? Was she just a simple victim, or was she being used by some kind of Eastern European syndicate? Was she a prostitute? Was she somehow implicated? There were many questions and few answers.

Vanishing Act
‘I used to be a cop and a federal agent,” Brennan told Detective Foote, introducing himself at the Miami-Dade police sex-crimes-unit offices. Foote had long strawberry-blond hair, which he combed straight back, and a bushy blond mustache. He was about the same age as Brennan, who read him right away as a fellow member of the fraternity, somebody he could reason with on familiar terms.

“Look, you and I both know there’s no fucking way you can investigate this case,” Brennan said. “I can see this through to the end. I won’t step on your dick. I won’t do a thing without telling you about it. If I figure out who did it, you get the arrest. I won’t do anything to fuck it up for you.”

Foote saw logic in this and did something he ordinarily wouldn’t do. He shared what he had in his file: crime-scene photos, surveillance footage from the hotel security cameras, the victim’s confused statement. Foote had interviewed a couple of hotel staff members, but they hadn’t seen a thing. He’d gone about as far as he could with it. He thought, Good luck.

The insurance adjuster had fared no better than Foote. As Brennan reviewed the adjuster’s detailed summary of the case in early November of 2005, eight months after the victim had been found, it was easy to see why. The woman’s memory was all over the map. First she said she had been attacked by one man, then three, then two. At one point she said their accent might have been not Hispanic but “Romanian.” There was no evidence to implicate anyone.

The hotel had a significant security system. The property was fenced, and the back gates were locked and monitored. There were only a few points of entry and exit. During the night, the back door was locked and could be opened only remotely. There were two security guards on duty at all times. Each exit was equipped with a surveillance camera. There was one over the front entrance and one over the back, one in the lobby, one at the lobby elevator, and others out by the pool and parking lot. All of the hotel guests had digital key cards that left a computer record every time they unlocked the door to their rooms. It was possible to track the comings and goings of every person who checked in.

Brennan started where all good detectives start. What did he know for sure? He knew the victim had gone up to her fourth-floor room at the Airport Regency at 3:41 A.M., that she had used her key card to enter her room at about the same time, and that she had been found at dawn in the weeds eight miles west. Somewhere in that roughly three-hour window, she had left the hotel. But there was no evidence of this on any of the cameras. So, how?

The victim was colorfully present on the video record, with her bright-red puffy jacket and shoulder-length blond curls. She had been in and out all night. After months of living in the hotel, she was clearly restless. She made frequent trips down to the lobby just to chat with hotel workers and guests, or to step outside for a smoke, and the cameras caught her every trip. She had gone out to dinner with a friend and returned around midnight, but she wasn’t done yet. She is seen exiting the elevator at about three in the morning, and the camera over the front entrance catches her walking away. She told investigators that she had walked to a nearby gas station to buy a phone card because she wanted to call her mother back in Ukraine, where people were just waking up. Minutes after her departure, the camera catches her return. The lobby camera records her re-entering the hotel and crossing the lobby. Moments later she is seen entering the elevator for her final trip upstairs. A large black man gets onto the elevator right behind her, and the recording shows them exchanging a few words. The police report showed her entering her room 20 minutes later, which had led to much speculation about where she was during that time. The victim had no memory of going anywhere but directly to her room. Brennan checked the clock on the camera at the elevator and found that it ran more than 20 minutes behind the computer clock, which recorded the key swipes, solving that small mystery. After she entered the lobby elevator, she was not seen again by any of the cameras.

The surveillance cameras were in perfect working order. They were not on continually; they were activated by motion detectors. Miami-Dade detectives had tried to beat the motion detectors by moving very slowly, or finding angles of approach that would not be seen, but they had failed. No matter how slowly they moved, no matter what approach they tried, the cameras clicked on faithfully and caught them.

One possibility was that she had left through her fourth-floor window. Someone would have had to drop her out the window or somehow lower her, presumably unconscious, into the bushes below, and then exit the hotel and walk around to retrieve her. But the woman showed no signs of injury from such a drop, or from ropes, and the bushes behind the hotel had not been trampled. The police had examined them carefully, looking for any sign of disturbance. It was also possible, with more than one assailant, that she had been lowered into the grasp of someone who had avoided disturbing the bushes, but Brennan saw that such explanations began to severely stretch credulity. Sex crimes are not committed by determined teams of attackers who come with padded ropes to lower victims from fourth-floor windows.

No, Brennan concluded. Unless this crime had been pulled off by a team of magicians, the victim had to have come down in the elevator to the lobby and left through the front door. The answer was not obvious, but it had to be somewhere in the video record from those cameras. “Needless to say, the big mystery here is how this woman got out of the hotel,” read the summary of the case prepared by the insurance adjuster. It was a mystery he had not been able to crack.

Brennan penciled one word on the memo: “Disguise?”

Do Cortisone Shots Actually Make Things Worse?
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
In the late 1940s, the steroid cortisone, an anti-inflammatory drug, was first synthesized and hailed as a landmark. It soon became a safe, reliable means to treat the pain and inflammation associated with sports injuries (as well as other conditions). Cortisone shots became one of the preferred treatments for overuse injuries of tendons, like tennis elbow or an aching Achilles, which had been notoriously resistant to treatment. The shots were quite effective, providing rapid relief of pain.

Then came the earliest clinical trials, including one, published in 1954, that raised incipient doubts about cortisone’s powers. In that early experiment, more than half the patients who received a cortisone shot for tennis elbow or other tendon pain suffered a relapse of the injury within six months.

But that cautionary experiment and others didn’t slow the ascent of cortisone (also known as corticosteroids). It had such a magical, immediate effect against  pain. Today cortisone shots remain a standard, much-requested treatment for tennis elbow and other tendon problems.

But a major new review article, published last Friday in The Lancet, should revive and intensify the doubts about cortisone’s efficacy. The review examined the results of nearly four dozen randomized trials, which enrolled thousands of people with tendon injuries, particularly tennis elbow, but also shoulder and Achilles-tendon pain. The reviewers determined that, for most of those who suffered from tennis elbow, cortisone injections did, as promised, bring fast and significant pain relief, compared with doing nothing or following a regimen of physical therapy. The pain relief could last for weeks.

But when the patients were re-examined at 6 and 12 months, the results were substantially different. Overall, people who received cortisone shots had a much lower rate of full recovery than those who did nothing or who underwent physical therapy. They also had a 63 percent higher risk of relapse than people who adopted the time-honored wait-and-see approach. The evidence for cortisone as a treatment for other aching tendons, like sore shoulders and Achilles-tendon pain, was slight and conflicting, the review found. But in terms of tennis elbow, the shots seemed to actually be counterproductive. As Bill Vicenzino, Ph.D., the chairman of sports physiotherapy at the University of Queensland in Australia and senior author of the review, said in an e-mail response to questions, “There is a tendency” among tennis-elbow sufferers “for the majority (70-90 percent) of those following a wait-and-see policy to get better” after six months to a year. But “this is not the case” for those getting cortisone shots, he wrote. They “tend to lag behind significantly at those time frames.” In other words, in some way, the cortisone shots impede full recovery, and compared with those ‘‘adopting a wait-and-see policy,” those getting the shots “are worse off.” Those people receiving multiple injections may be at particularly high risk for continuing damage. In one study that the researchers reviewed, “an average of four injections resulted in a 57 percent worse outcome when compared to one injection,” Dr. Vicenzino said.

Why cortisone shots should slow the healing of tennis elbow is a good question. An even better one, though, is why they help in the first place. For many years it was widely believed that tendon-overuse injuries were caused by inflammation, said Karim Khan, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at the School of Human Kinetics at the University of British Columbia and the co-author of a commentary in The Lancet accompanying the new review article. The injuries were, as a group, given the name tendinitis, since the suffix “-itis” means inflammation. Cortisone is an anti-inflammatory medication. Using it against an inflammation injury was logical.

But in the decades since, numerous studies have shown, persuasively, that these overuse injuries do not involve inflammation. When animal or human tissues from these types of injuries are examined, they do not contain the usual biochemical markers of inflammation. Instead, the injury seems to be degenerative. The fibers within the tendons fray. Today the injuries usually are referred to as tendinopathies, or diseased tendons.

Why then does a cortisone shot, an anti-inflammatory, work in the short term in noninflammatory injuries, providing undeniable if ephemeral pain relief?  The injections seem to have “an effect on the neural receptors” involved in creating the pain in the sore tendon, Dr. Khan said. “They change the pain biology in the short term.” But, he said, cortisone shots do “not heal the structural damage” underlying the pain. Instead, they actually “impede the structural healing.”

Still, relief of pain might be a sufficient reason to champion the injections, if the pain “were severe,” Dr. Khan said. “But it’s not.” The pain associated with tendinopathies tends to fall somewhere around a 7 or so on a 10-point scale of pain. “It’s not insignificant, but it’s not kidney stones.”

So the question of whether cortisone shots still make sense as a treatment for tendinopathies, especially tennis elbow, depends, Dr. Khan said, on how you choose “to balance short-term pain relief versus the likelihood” of longer-term negative outcomes. In other words, is reducing soreness now worth an increased risk of delayed healing and possible relapse within the year?

Some people, including physicians, may decide that the answer remains yes. There will always be a longing for a magical pill, the quick fix, especially when the other widely accepted and studied alternatives for treating sore tendons are to do nothing or, more onerous to some people, to rigorously exercise the sore joint during physical therapy. But if he were to dispense advice based on his findings and that of his colleagues’ systematic review, Dr. Vincenzino said, he would suggest that athletes with tennis elbow (and possibly other tendinopathies) think not just once or twice about the wisdom of cortisone shots but  “three or four times.”

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Hah!  Not what you were expecting 

http://www.yachigusaryu.com/blog/2008/01/k-9-self-defense.html

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