“Sir, I Demand Satisfaction!”

Turning on any television show based on small claims court a person is bound to hear some variant of that title, many times in a much less polite form. Sitting in a small claims court, or any civil court for that matter, a person is bound to hear some variant of that title phrase. Yet, in many representations of historical duels, those words are commonly found. Conflict seems to underscore our society and the phrase, “I’ll see you in court,” has almost seemed to reach the status of a common greeting. This could give someone cause to wonder that wouldn’t it be simpler and possibly more effective to just have the disputing parties put on gloves and go the proverbial twelve rounds rather than tie up the court with expensive and needless litigation. This lead this writer to the posting of the question, Should dueling (non-firearm) be legalized to replace some civil lawsuits?

A professional martial artist of this author’s acquaintance, Sifu Bill Phillips of NYC’s Patience Tai Chi, replied, “I was hoping we were becoming more civilized than that. I would like to see a world with less fighting, less lawsuits, and more quiet discussions. (I thought lawsuits replaced the duel.)”

Douglas Yarn, Associate Professor of Law at Georgia State University and Executive Director of the Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, observes:

Litigation can be seen as a form of dueling. Both litigation and dueling are methods of resolving disputes. Moreover, the sequence of events in both processes is similar. The filing of a formal complaint to initiate civil action is equivalent to issuing a formal challenge to duel. The responsive pleading is the formal reply of the party receiving the challenge. The courtroom is the dueling ground, the rules of civil procedure governing the trial are the terms of engagement, and the trial is the “combat” analogous to the duel itself. (Given the nature of much modern litigation, it may not be an exaggeration to describe it as a form of trial by combat.) (Yarn 16)

Attorneys are advertising themselves as “The Heavy Hitter” (Isaacs), “The Kentucky Hammer” (Isaacs), or promoting their experience as ring fighters (Winton). Such advertisements make litigation sound like combat and civil court the battleground. This seems closer to a street fight than not or why else would a person want a four time all-American Boxer and former national kickboxing champion (Winton) to represent them.

It can be asked that:

What is the acceptable degree of zealous behavior? This concept can be abused when used to justify the extremely hostile, hyper-competitive adversary behavior commonly caricatured as the “Rambo Litigator.” In this extreme form, the zealous advocate stops at nothing in dogged pursuit of victory for the client. Such a lawyer does not necessarily violate the law and ethical standards but simply seeks to win regardless of the economic and non-economic costs. Additionally, the zealous advocate ignores civility or violates non-obligatory professional norms requiring compromise or concessions or that imply weakness in the client’s cause. (Yarn 2)

Is such behavior in litigation really more civilized than the duels of the 19th century? Compared to such behavior from legal counsel, an unrestrained bar brawl might actually seem preferable. To be honest, one might actually have the better odds of winning in the melee. “As in dueling, the outcome of a trial may not favor the aggrieved party, nor may it reflect the actual facts underlying the dispute” (Yarn 16). Indeed, many hold the famous 1992 McDonalds’ coffee lawsuit as a prime example of the result of a civil lawsuit not reflecting the facts of case, although as with many examples of litigation not all the information was released to the public (” ‘Lectric Law Library”).

Indeed, the United States has become a very litigious society. In 2007, approximately 18 million civil cases were reported by state courts (LaFountain et al 1). Contract and small claims monetary disputes make the majority of these cases (LaFountain et al 1). That this actually represents an increase in civil litigation is subject to debate as different sources report varying claims. Some report an increase (LaFountain et al 1) and others report little change (Jost 1037). Small claims civil cases typically have very small awards, under $1500 in the Commonwealth of Kentucky (“Small Claims Handbook” 2).

Since, “Many states are struggling to clear their civil caseloads, possibly as a result of increased contract filings and tightening resources” (LaFountain et al 1). It might benefit modern society if an alternative method could be found that would take some of these cases out of the overwhelmed courts and settle them in another manner. With adversarial and predatory attorneys twisting civil law towards their own ends, what recourse apart from the courts does a person have?

And just as modern law can be twisted to benefit the unjust, so too could the law during the Viking Age. However, during that time there was a way in Iceland and Norway for a litigant to achieve the justice sought by a faster route than a suit. Anyone could challenge his opponent to a duel called a holmganga. (Matson, “Holmgang Part One”)

That is correct, dueling. The famous Japanese swordsman and philosopher, Miyamoto Musashi stated, “It is by virtue of the sword that both society and oneself are put in order” (52.) Small claims cases are over small amounts of money, and contract disputes run the gamut from serious economic issues, to wording disagreements, to disagreements about whether or not a contract existed in the first place. Therefore, in any case where there is not clear injury to one side, the litigants may be better off by marking out a ring and fighting it out.

Now, this suggestion does not mean that folks should start brawling in the streets with fists, knives, and guns at the slightest perceived insult. Before, the cry of “how barbaric” escapes unbelieving mouths, an understanding of what exactly historical dueling entailed might be in order.

Douglas Yarn shows the most common image of a duel, in the minds of many, in an article about the professional ethical conflicts attorneys face. “Two men, with their backs to each other and observed only by their solemn seconds, walk ten paces, turn, aim, and fire. One or both fall dead or are mortally wounded” (6). Yet, society has become more civilized than the society of previous times when dueling was commonplace, has it not?

“Surprisingly, dueling was a recognized form of extra-judicial dispute resolution sharing some of the same objectives as modern ADR [alternative dispute resolution] – to avoid the courts, contain violence, and promote reconciliation” (Yarn 6). Readers of this tract may very well be asking themselves how the formalized combat of a duel could possibly contain violence.

The answer is simply that duels were never thought of as matters to be undertaken lightly. The 15th Century Fechtmeister (fight master) Hans Talhoffer writes that there are only seven reasons for calling a duel:

Yet, firstly this – Nobody is happy when one of his comrades cuts up his honour [sic] with loud words. He who have at dueling with such a comrade, indeed he is within his rights and may well-fight him if he would. Thus dueling is wantonness ~
Now those aforesaid causes and articles are seven, wherefor [sic] a man has duty to fight:
Thus the first is murder.
The second is treason.
The third is heresy.
The fourth is becoming an urger [sic] of disloyalty to one’s lord.
The fifth is betrayal in strife or otherwise.
The sixth is falsehood.
The seventh is using either a maiden or lady. (Hull 8r)

In modern times, that list would differ, as some of the reasons mentioned by Talhoffer are criminal acts. However, it can be seen that dueling was not a light undertaking, even in the supposedly unenlightened society of the 15th century. The more modern “Code Duello” adopted in the 18th century (“Code Duello”) which does allow for dueling over insult has as its first rule, “The first offense requires the first apology, though the retort may have been more offensive than the insult” (“Code Duello”). This requirement of apology before proceeding certainly does not sound like the image of dueling mentioned earlier in this writing.

Many people do not realize that dueling is not brawling. In the days of dueling, one could not just pick up weapons at the spur of the moment and go after someone’s blood. Even in Viking times, “Almost all duels were to be fought three to seven days after the challenge” (Matson, “Holmgang Part Two”). In the 19th century, “Dueling traditions discouraged parties from acting in the heat of passion by prohibiting challenges in immediate reaction to a perceived insult and before the offended party had sought advice and politely requested an acceptable explanation or apology, known as an amende honorable” (Yarn 7).

A good example of this difference in modern times actually comes from the actions of a five-year-old child. Now, during one of my son’s Taekwondo classes, an older child (who shall henceforth be known as nameless brat) spent a good portion of that class calling my son, “baby.” For readers unfamiliar with the social mechanics of young boys, them’s fighten’ words, to use the common slang. My son did hold his temper during class and did not let his increasing anger about the name-calling distract him over much. However, when we were leaving class and walking home my son said, “I want to spar nameless brat. I want to punch him and knock him down when we spar.” This was not my child asking permission to fight another child, which would have been assault. This was my child seeking redress for a grievance, since what the other child did legally constitutes harassment, “the act of systematic and/or continued unwanted and annoying actions of one party or a group, including threats and demands” (Law.com).

Grown adults may have well brought this issue to litigation. Instead, the five-year-old wanted to join in a formal physical confrontation with rules, limits, safety considerations, and under the watchful eye of trained professionals. Had the sparring match actually happened, it would have been a contest of Olympic Sport Taekwondo. This is a bit different from a street brawl or playground fight.

Some of history’s famous duels, notably the Lincoln-Shields duel, the Dooly-Tait duel, the Jones-Gardner duel, and the Adams-Richards duel were all conflicts that were actually avoided before reaching, or just after reaching the point of combat (Yarn 10-16). How was this done? The conflicts in these duels were arbitrated by the “Seconds” of the dueling parties (Yarn 10-16). The dueling seconds were friends of the disputing parties in a duel. The job of the seconds was to “conciliate by using his personal skills to restrain his principal [the duelist], defuse anger, lower levels of hostility, and reframe perceptions” (Yarn 15).

Many litigants in civil cases would benefit from such oversight that ensures attempts at reconciliation before continuing further. It is this writer’s opinion that, many civil litigation cases to include some types of personal contract disputes, some cases of harassment (personal, non-terroristic, non-sexual, and with no economic damages) could be more effectively settled by the plaintiff and defendant fighting in a formal sport combat than by tying up the legal system. To make this all nice and legal would be litigants should go through Professional Dueling Seconds. These professionals should be trained in martial arts, inter-personal conflict resolution, and legal arbitration.

The job of these professionals would be: primarily, to determine if the dispute is something that could be decided by a duel; secondly, to seek equitable resolution between the disputing parties; lastly, to ensure that the combat is carried out so that neither party has uneven advantage over the other even if it would mean the second fighting in place of one or both of the disputants.

These professionals could be trained with less schooling than is required for a legal degree. While I am not using the term Martial Arts to apply exclusively to Asian martial arts, the Asian martial arts can be looked at as representative in terms of training time. “The community consensus seems to be that a black belt should take about 5 years to earn” (Martial Development). This could be done concurrently with the other training in arbitration, and inter-personal conflict resolution. These new Professional Seconds could be finished with training and entering the workforce with only the expense of a bachelor degree. This should help hold expense down, as these persons would not have costly educational debts to recover from, at least not as costly as a law degree. Lower expense would open this method of dispute resolution to many who feel they would not be able to afford the court costs associated with a legal suit, and fees could be recovered from the losing party.

Going through such professionals would help eliminate unfair advantage between combatants, as would happen with an elderly woman and young construction contractor challenging each other. It would be the job of the second to fight for the disadvantaged party; the other party would have the option of either fighting themselves or also being represented by the second.

Non-lethal forms of combat can be used such as boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts, fencing, or even arm wrestling. (This writer prefers fencing with wooden sword under the rules of the Traditional Chinese Sword League, but that is because this writer practices Tai chi and Tai Chi swordsmanship.) It is no secret that shows like WWE Raw and UFC fighting consistently score high ratings. Legal dueling could even be made into a public event with paid sponsorship generating an entire industry. Moreover, such a system could keep the court system clear so that other legal actions could be accomplished more swiftly.

Yarn comments that:

On the surface, dueling was a violent, archaic ritual that relied on seemingly irrational social conventions that are almost impossible to imagine today. Under the surface, it was a very rational method of managing disputes in an elite society lacking acceptable alternatives to unrestrained violence. Similarly, litigation appears to be a costly, archaic ritual often relying on seemingly irrational social conventions that may be impossible for some future generation to imagine. (22)

Perhaps, the solution to this dilemma is to bring back the duel but updated for the modern age.

How to Summon a Supernatural Dimwit

Let’s say we want to win a million dollar prize for rigorously demonstrating something psychic in a scientifically acceptable way.

One of the best candidates at present is the ganzfeld telepathy experiment…

A session typically takes about an hour for the two participants. For the investigator it takes another hour to prepare and to close down the session…

First, we do a power analysis to determine how many repeated sessions we have to run. Let’s say for a million dollars we are required to achieve results associated with odds against chance of a million to one. That seems like a reasonable criterion for success…

We’ll design an experiment that is run in three phases, where each phase has the same parameters: p(chance) = 0.25, p(hypothesis) = 0.32, alpha = 0.003, power = 0.99. This means that if we assume that telepathy gives us a hit rate of 32%, then if we run this experiment we’ll have a 99% chance of getting a final p-value of 0.003 or better, i.e. good evidence for telepathy.

The power analysis tells us that we need to run N = 1,147 trials to achieve this result. So now we will run this same experiment two more times, get a result each time at least as good as p = 0.003, and then the combined p-value over all three phases will be one in a million or better, or odds against chance of at least a million to one.

This requires that we run a total of 1147 x 3 = 3441 sessions.

Say we pay each sender and receiver a modest $50 to help compensate their time and costs. So we need to budget $344,100 for participant compensation. And let’s say we run one session per workday, and we pay our investigator $80 per hour. That comes to 688 weeks or 14 years of effort assuming we run the experiment 48 weeks per year. For the investigator (we’ll assume one investigator, which is an underestimate), at two hours per session x 3441 sessions x $80, we end up with an investigator budget of $550,560.

Now we need a testing facility that provides exceptional security against cheating and will also allow independent observers, and perhaps the general public, to witness each session from afar. (Observers interested in monitoring this experiment are not going to camp out in the laboratory for 14 years to personally observe every session.) To do this, we could use a secure digital video recording system that streams encrypted data over the web to a secure site, and is also designed to detect any interception or tampering of the video record…

Click through to Dean Radin’s blog to read the punchline. Ironically, it seems that the JREF “Million Dollar Challenge” may be nothing more than a tax on the mathematically impaired (at best).

The greatest trick that Google Corporation ever pulled, was to convince the world it didn’t exist. Although its shareholders know it as a profitable advertising brokerage, the majority of Internet users believe it to be nothing more than a benevolent purveyor of web search, email, and other free online services.

Google is a fierce and formidable competitor. Its network of websites is the Internet’s single most popular destination; it processes more search queries than all its competitors combined, including stalwarts Microsoft and Yahoo; its annual revenues and profits are measured in billions. Through all its successful expansions, Google has worked to maintain an image of simplicity and altruism.

Google’s bungled launch of their Buzz platform illustrated the pervasiveness, and the deceptive nature of this public image. Their initial decision to quietly convert 100 million private email contact lists into an open social network was met with immediate shock and outrage. It was widely regarded as an invitation to espionage and cyberstalking.

Google had chosen to present Buzz with a simplified interface that neglected its users’ privacy concerns. This was a profit-maximizing decision for the Buzz platform: a social network is only as valuable as the user data shared within it. By leveraging their enormous GMail database to expand into a new market, Google hoped to instantly close the gap with, or overtake their new competitors.

Public demand forced them to reconsider this “beta experiment.” Google product managers declared a “Code Red,” and company engineers worked nights and weekends to revamp the Buzz sign-up process. A week later, reporters in the traditional media breathed a sigh of relief, and praised the company for its contrition, and for acting in the broader public interest. According to a popular narrative, Google’s quick turnaround once again demonstrated their commitment to “do no evil.”

Simplifying the news industry

Traditional news media sources are suffering today, due to decreases in print circulation, loss of classified ads, and obsolete business models. Nobody disputes that the future of mainstream news publishing is online, and that Google will continue to lead the transition, extending its own reach and power along the way.

As explained by Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, “Serious reporting… has simply never paid its way.”

What exactly is Google’s role in online publishing today? Although it enjoys an esteemed reputation often reserved for public broadcasting services (with their strict policies against undue commercial influence), Google actually earns its money by placing advertisements.

This is how their ubiquitous AdWords program works: first, Google invites advertisers to bid for the right to display their commercial message, next to a desired set of keywords. Whenever or wherever Google can find those keywords–in web search results, or users’ email boxes, for example–it displays the highest bidders’ ads. Depending on the individual agreement, Google may then debit the advertiser’s account immediately, or only if a user clicks on the advertisement.

In order to gain access to a richer keyword database, Google designed the complimentary AdSense program. Independent publishers who agree to host Google-negotiated advertisements on their own websites are promised a percentage of the resulting AdWords income. There are currently over one million publishers participating in AdSense; only a small percentage of them earn anything near a living wage.

In an era where stories are consumed individually and immediately, rather than as cross-subsidized bundles of daily newsprint, the news is less profitable than ever before. As explained by Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, “Serious reporting…has simply never paid its way. What paid for newspapers were the automotive sections, real-estate, home-and-garden, travel, or technology, where advertisers could target their ads.” Relative to its new unbundled and electronic format, high-quality news is more expensive than ever before.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt confesses that, without the survival of serious journalism, his company’s own future is placed in jeopardy. Google does not consider itself a competitor to the traditional media outlets that provide shelter for good journalism; but it has no interest in directly supporting those outlets either. Instead, Google is working to address what it calls “inefficiencies” in its own online ad placement services.

Consolidation makes sense: increased efficiency is improved profitability. Why should every city manage its own news media organizations, and pay its own support staff, when Google can perform these functions remotely at a lower cost? The principle applies not only to the news industry, but to all electronic communications.

Google has not confined itself to sponsoring the written word, but has also experimented with (or committed to) supporting online maps, streaming online audio and video, spreadsheets and stock tickers, digital photography, medical records, traditional radio and television broadcasts, and even long-distance phone calls. It is all to fulfill Google’s corporate mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The Beast File: Google

Google must admit that it intends to enrich its shareholders in the process. And we might agree, as a democratic capitalist society, that their corporate success is well-deserved–even if their gargantuan size has tilted the competitive playing field.

But would this be the full extent of our compromise?

Independent news with Chinese characteristics

When Google announced its intent to cease self-censorship in China, in defiance of Chinese law and precedent, they were hailed in the West as champions of human rights and free speech. Few thought to scrutinize the laws Google applies to its own vast publishing empire. As it turns out, Google’s content restrictions are no less oppressive than those applied by the Communists.

According to the longstanding official policies of the Google AdSense program, no publisher is permitted to create content that Google deems violent, mature, or intolerant. Any violation, as determined solely by agents of the Google Corporation, can result in immediate expulsion from the AdSense program.

Google’s editorial policies are no idle threat. According to one indignant former AdSense publisher: “Their entire program is Kafkaesque.”

The Chinese government is criticized for censoring online discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and repression of Falun Gong practitioners. Incredibly, Google forbids these same topics as a matter of official policy. There are no exceptions for news reporting. (Unofficial policy allows these stories on a case-by-case basis, with risk of permanent expulsion born by their publisher.)

When a publisher is ejected from the AdSense program, they lose not only their source of income, but also their online friends and business partners. Google warns participants that, if they dare link to a forbidden work, they risk ejection themselves. Since Google and other search engines use incoming links to estimate a work’s importance, and consequently its proper ranking in search results, ejection from the AdSense program may constitute a de facto banishment from the public web.

Despite numerous requests from its partners, Google has declined to clarify what it considers to be unacceptably violent, mature, or intolerant content. Its precise definitions are either secret, arbitrary, or nonexistent; and the mere threat of enforcement is sufficient to produce a chilling effect.

This is Google’s vision for the future of the news.

Google’s secret trials

These policies are no idle threat, according to one indignant former AdSense publisher, who wished to remain anonymous in fear of retribution. “Their entire program is Kafkaesque. I asked for permission to write news and opinion for my chosen niche; my note was dismissed with a vague injunction to follow the guidelines. After surveying the market, I assumed that I could proceed safely. So I invested hundreds of hours producing and promoting my content.”

“Then they booted me out. An anonymous reviewer stated that I should have followed their guidelines, refusing for the second time to explain what those guidelines actually mean. Meanwhile, dozens of other AdSense websites continue to operate in the same niche, with similar content. I was wrong to place my trust in Google.”

Like any other private media organization, Google Corporation has the right to enforce its own editorial standards. But then again, Google is not like any other media organization. There are already more people in AdSense than in the state of Montana. The size of their audience, and the scope of their current and planned operations is unprecedented. With Google’s control over the flow of information, they are already an international government unto themselves; and theirs is not a rule of law, but of men. They endorse democracy, but deliver simplicity and efficiency instead. And nothing is simpler and more efficient than a dictatorship–at least from the dictator’s point of view.

Mystic philosopher Krishnamurti warned that the devil might come in the form of a search engine; that if we accidentally stumbled upon a piece of truth, the devil would help us to organize it. In its plans for guiding independent journalism, it seems that Google has abandoned the slogan “Don’t be evil,” and embraced “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The real cause is inappropriate conduct. It is, primarily, neglect and disregard for the effects of diet, exercise, environmental conditions, and other factors under our imperfect but substantial control.

As a holistic form of exercise, martial arts can arguably be classified as health care. Experienced practitioners also recognize it as a form of health insurance. Daily practice provides a richly detailed baseline against which latent health issues can easily be observed, and hopefully corrected in their earliest stages.

Those are the straightforward facts; now here is the tricky part: we can use martial arts to insure and ensure our health, but how do we insure the practice itself?

Unfortunately, many martial artists seem to rely upon faith-based insurance plans–plans consisting, first, of faith that the traditions of their (ancient or modern) style function as intended; and second, of a belief that their own personal practice is congruent with the canonical methods and standards of the style. And the only evidence required by these plans, is the testimony of one’s own teacher.

If we were to structure a martial arts liability insurance plan in the style of conventional health insurance, it might look something like this:

1. The student selects, and pays a premium to their chosen provider.
2. They study what initially appears to be an excellent style of martial arts.
3. After investing years of time and effort, they finally learn otherwise.
4. The student files a claim with their insurance provider for tuition reimbursement, plus pain and suffering.
5. For one reason or another, an adjuster rejects the claim. (That is how they make their money, after all.)

So, are you interested in signing up for this plan? I should hope not. Here is an alternative.

A serious student of martial arts should make a serious effort to meet, and compare notes with their peers–especially peers from outside their own school. There is no better way to get an accurate assessment of one’s own strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement; to insure and ensure the integrity and continued fruition of one’s study.

Meeting martial arts practice partners can be awkward and difficult. You can simply walk into someone else’s school and ask, but that is easily interpreted as an outsider’s challenge (with dangerous consequences). You can post on a message board, but that only works if other locals are reading the same board at the same time. Fortunately, a new online service makes the chore of finding partners a little bit easier.

DojoScore.com is, to my knowledge, the one and only website specifically created to help martial artists seeking practice partners. After entering your address and chosen style(s) of martial arts, DojoScore allows you to search for and chat with like-minded students in your local area. Unlike other generalized “exercise friends” and social networking services where martial artists were clearly an afterthought, DojoScore is tailored specifically to the unique needs of the martial arts community. Matching up practice partners is only one of the services they provide, and for free.

Free martial arts insurance? Finally, a reform proposal we can all support!

At this point you may be wondering, what is the rebuttal that we all needed to hear? Here it is: I am a 90lb twat who types with his pinkies in the air, and you are all developmentally disabled.

In other words, they desperately wish to change the subject.

OK. I accept the concession, and will not belabor my point any further, as that would be unsportsmanlike. But before dropping it altogether, dear disabled readers, let’s squeeze these lemons dry!

Martial Development Charity Drive

If you have enjoyed Martial Development this year, I now ask for a small token of your appreciation; not for myself, but for the less fortunate among us. Five or ten dollars is enough; give more if you can, less if you must. Here is a list of deserving charities to choose from, or you can go with Special Olympics.

(In the spirit of the season, why not make your donations in honor of “Jack Frost”?)

After doing that, I would like you to leave a comment below, with the name of the charity you have chosen, and the amount given. (Feel free to omit your full name for privacy reasons.) Let the sum of those comments serve as evidence that martial artists can make a positive difference in the world, if they are properly motivated.

Given the number of subscribers and daily visitors here, I hope for at least 50 comments! (Until that number is reached, there will be no more posts on this blog.)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

If you have to choose between seeing Ninja Assassin and Red Cliff this weekend, I recommend the latter–even if this abridged US release is not quite as good as the original 4-hour Chinese version. (Curious John Woo fans can order the longer cut of Red Cliff on DVD today.)

Fantastic tales about Ninja clans and other secret fighting societies are depressingly common in the martial arts world. These legends are used for marketing and entertainment purposes; repeated often, but rarely taken seriously.

Benjamin Fulford wants to be taken seriously. Formerly the Asia-Pacific bureau chief at Forbes Magazine, Fulford spent years reporting on the highest and lowest echelons of Japanese society, from politicians to Yakuza gangsters. While many of his native colleagues were kidnapped or killed, in retaliation for their stories on the hidden structures of government, the Canada-born Fulford managed to escape their fate.

Today, Benjamin Fulford has an incredible story to tell, grounded in personal experience, and supported by his university studies in economics and Asian history. Once threatened by a menacing ninja assassin from the shadow government, he now claims the support and protection of the Triads, in his mission to end the corrupt global plutocracy.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Find a comfortable chair, make some popcorn, and enjoy this interview by Project Camelot.

Video transcript

Martial arts practice in America is entirely unregulated. There is no central body that issues standards, no set of accepted practices, no communication between different styles. State and local governments have nothing to say about who is and isn’t a martial artist. After all, consumers are free to make their own decisions.

Unfortunately, it can be very hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality when studying an ancient, esoteric and exotic discipline. Not many people have any idea what martial arts training should consist of. There is almost no agreement within the martial arts establishment over what is effective training and what is not.

Investigation is expensive and the market is too small to attract much media attention, aside from cinematic mythmaking. The mainstream martial arts magazines have never made investigative journalism part of their repertoire. George Dillman, the mental KO king was Black Belt Magazine’s instructor of the year in 1997. There is simply no money in exposing these martial arts entrepreneurs. Some people, however, are willing to do it for free.

Bullshido.com…was set up in 2002 for just that purpose. Bullshido tries to use crowd-sourcing and citizen journalism to investigate and expose the worst of the martial arts phonies. Its founding goal was to be “a virtual meeting place and sounding board for a grass roots movement to restore ethics and realism to systems shrouded in misinformation and irrational mysticism.”

Ten moderators who review its 500 to 1,000 daily posts police this faceless mob. They seem to believe that those moderators are best who moderate least. “We don’t pre-screen our comments,” says Samuel Browning, one of the site’s attorneys. “We don’t have an intelligence test for our comments.”

I have previously described the world of commercial martial arts instruction as a market for lemons. Now, I would like to examine the limits of that analogy.

If the potential buyers of a used car are unable to immediately assess its condition, they nevertheless agree on its ideal characteristics: functioning brakes, smooth shifting, no leaking fluids, and so on. No such agreement exists across the broad spectrum of the world’s martial arts.

This conflict is not a result of fraudulent and under-qualified teachers; quite the contrary, it is driven from the demand side. The majority of martial arts consumers in the United States are irrefutably content with an art that just “doesn’t work,” by Wikipedia standards.

Instead of addressing the underlying issues—legitimate differences in training goals and values—the Bullshido mindset specializes in penny-ante skepticism of lineage credentials and historical claims. At this task, they are a success: they can tell you whether Sensei Bobby Joe really worked as a soldier of fortune in the Central American jungle, or if he truly received a teaching certificate from an unnamed Shaolin monk. (The answer is no.)

With respect to concrete martial skills, and the ability to teach them, their suspects are deemed guilty until proven innocent by YouTube—the kind of populist “reasoning” that would make any legitimate researcher blush.

The beneficiary of these investigations is less clear. Surely it is not the student who voluntarily signed up for Oriental fantasy role-play. Yes, a few of those will be shamed into departing their chosen McDojo, but their embarrassment leaves them no better equipped to search for superior alternatives. Here there is a thin line between exposing victims in the name of justice, and creating them for sport (and profit).

Through its zeal to punish wrongdoers, the Bullshido mindset holds its supposed audience—the inexperienced student—in thinly veiled contempt. Its average product reads more like taunts scribbled on a UFC bathroom stall than an issue of Consumer Reports, with a level of violent fanaticism rivaling the worst martial arts cults.

If all McDojos were somehow wiped off the face of the Earth today: Hollywood would recharter them, charlatans would restaff them, immature students would patronize them, and the equally childish Bullshido mob would ecstatically debunk them. In other words, everyone would find their satisfaction. Personally, I see no problem to be solved.

From his recent interview with Lama Somananda Tantrapa…

“Between the ages of 9 and 12, I had almost no food. Taiwan was preparing for a war against mainland China. Most of us kids were starving.

There were nine children in my family, and at that time, feeding nine children was not easy. All our problems gave me an ulcer by the time I was 16 years old.

One day, I was sitting in the corner in a cold sweat. My White Crane Kung Fu master said I had a stomach problem. “What should I do?” I asked him. I had no medicine, and no money to see a doctor.

“At that time, in the early 1960s, you could not go learn another style without your master’s approval. It was not like today—people making ‘chop suey’ by mixing all these different styles.”

He said, “I’ve heard that Taiji can help you relax your internal organs.”

My master encouraged me to learn Tai Chi Chuan. That is the reason I started at the early age of 16. My motivation was not fighting; it was to ease the pain of my ulcer, and hopefully to heal myself.

Did it work? It surprised me. Six months later, the painful episodes had been reduced. After most of a year, they disappeared.

So that is why I started practicing Tai Chi Chuan. It is not because I liked it…I hated it, but it helped me to calm down.

Listen to the entire MP3 interview with Dr. Jwing-Ming Yang at Secrets of the Qigong Masters.

We have to admit that the popular image of the black belt is inextricably woven into the general perception of these arts we follow. While we may have a more comprehensive view of the belt, we need to see that in the population outside the dojo, in the world at large, it usually means something else. When a black belt is conferred upon a karateka, that has implications in the popular imagination. And we should consider some ramifications that perception and those implications have upon what people think about karate-do.

Most readers will know that the belt system (dan-i) was created entirely by judo’s founder, Jigoro Kano. If has no ancient, feudal, or samurai connections. Belts in black or any other color were not a part of martial arts practice before the twilight of the feudal period in Japan, which ended in 1867. Kano awarded the fight black belts around the turn of the last century. Karate-do and other Japanese arts adopted the system, and later on so did most Korean combat arts.

Nearly all classical martial arts of the feudal period used some variation of the menkyo ranking system, and those extant today continue to use it. A series of licenses and sometimes accompanying scrolls were given to the student at various periods in their education, and their message was usually clear: the recipient is officially recognized in some capacity by the headmaster of that school. It is relatively easy to determine what this capacity is in the wording of the document. What exactly the black belt signifies in the modern dojo is another question entirely.

The public sees a child with a black belt and they assume that training is literally kid’s stuff.

In Japan, it is not uncommon to see sixteen- or seventeen-year-old children with black belts. No one in Japan would regard them as anything like a “master,” of course, just because they were wearing a black belt. It would be nice if we had a similar understanding of what a black belt means here, but we do not.

I can remember in the 1960s when some people seriously believed that in order to get a black belt, you had to kill a person. Or that you had to open-handedly chop through a requisite number of boards successfully. The general public has become a little more sophisticated now, but that’s not to say they don’t still have some odd ideas.

This morning’s paper contains a story about a “black belt” in a local karate school. He has been training for about two years and has completed successfully in several tournaments. He was recently promoted to a black belt rank. He is nine years old.

From a Western perspective, there is nothing good that comes from awarding a black belt to a child. For better of worse, the perception of the black belt is different here than in Japan. The public sees a child with a black belt and they assume that, in this dojo at least, training is literally kid’s stuff. They expect some level of competence and skill in a black belt that they know no child that age has or could have. Since Karate is inextricably linked with personal defense, they wonder too how the kid would do against a serious threat by an adult attacker.

While you could try to explain that this is a special junior rank…it all sounds like rationalization to the public. You are giving the kid a black belt because you want to encourage more children to enroll and thus pay the bills, or because it has to do with some other profit-motivated scheme, or because you just do not take your art seriously. That is going to be the assumption.

Come on. If a child can get a black belt in your art, how much is a black belt worth? Or for that matter, how much can your art itself be worth?

The biggest secret is a simple matter of dollars and cents…

• Do you know the average martial arts school tuition rate in your area? Probably not.
• Are you paying too much? Maybe.
• Is there anything you can do about it? Absolutely!

By refusing to publish their class tuition rates, commercial martial arts instructors hope to prevent potential students from disqualifying them on price alone. As a result of this secrecy, it was nearly impossible to determine a “fair” market price for martial arts lessons–until now.

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