Glory TV Technique of the week : Overhead Right

Are you putting in any bag work? Are you doing things to improve your offensive and defensive skill sets? You'd better be. Somewhere right now there are people who are polishing their skill sets up a few degrees higher than the average bear. 3 days a week in 1 hour workouts isn't enough. I should be working harder. You should be as well. There will be contact in our future with people who want to boss you around and make you do things that you flat out don't want to do. You will comply or you won't. When you don't comply, be prepared to fight. Being able to gain a few degrees of separation with a strike will break a hold on you and provide you with another opportunity to follow up with a shot that lets everyone around you know that they'd probably better not attempt stepping into your 3ft bubble again without a weapon. It will also give you the chance to break contact and run if you are outnumbered and able to attempt an escape. We live to fight another day.

This is a mean and nasty punch. If you have any athleticism at all, you can throw it. When it lands, it causes fireworks to go off between the brain and brain casing. The disruption of neurological function works wonders for us. It tears our coordination off the bone and when the feet go out from under us, our hands aren't too far behind. 

Defeating revisionist history : The Real History of the Crusades: An Act of Love

The article below was written by one of the worlds foremost experts on the Crusades. I saw it over at Shoebat.com and was so impressed by it I wanted to post it here. It kinda long but it is written very well and is an easy read. I would deem this as a MUST READ and I’m sure many of you will.

BY THOMAS F. MADDEN

With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant.

As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked. When were they? Just how insensitive was President George W. Bush for using the word “crusade” in his remarks? With a few of my callers I had the distinct impression that they already knew the answers to their questions, or at least thought they did. What they really wanted was an expert to say it all back to them. For example, I was frequently asked to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has a just grievance against the West. Doesn’t the present violence, they persisted, have its roots in the Crusades’ brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren’t the Crusades really to blame?

Osama bin Laden certainly thinks so. In his various video performances, he never fails to describe the American war against terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation’s editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president’s fundamental premise.

 

Story here 

 

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Damn good reading if you've got the time for it... 

New Ebola Cases Unrelated To West African Outbreak

If there can be any good news – or at least not further disheartening news – coming out of the African continent regarding this year’s Ebola outbreaks, we have one positive report this morning.

The World Health Organization has just confirmed that the newly-identified cases of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in the Democratic Republic of Congo is genetically unrelated to the strain currently circulating in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.

A WHO collaborating research center in Franceville, Gabon, the Centre International de Recherches Médicales, had previously identified six Ebola positive samples sent to the laboratory. They report today that, “the virus in the Boende district is definitely not derived from the virus strain currently circulating in west Africa.”

The WHO amplified that finding:

“Results from the virus characterization, together with findings from the epidemiological investigation, are definitive: the outbreak in DRC is a distinct and independent event, with no relationship to the outbreak in west Africa.”

The finding is worthy of such emphasis because of concerns that the west African outbreak had somehow spread to the DRC, formerly Zaire. The viruses in each outbreak are genetically distinct, but they are both of the Zaire species of Ebola virus, a fact that might be confused as meaning the outbreaks are related.

Story here

ISIS Beheads American Journalist Steven Sotloff, Monitoring Group Says

The Islamic militant group ISIS beheaded Steven Joel Sotloff, an American freelance journalist who was abducted a year ago in Syria, in a video made public Tuesday by a jihadist monitoring organization. 

The monitoring organization, SITE Intel Group, announced on Twitter that Sotloff had been beheaded. It said that ISIS had also threatened to execute a British captive, David Cawthorne Haines. 

The video, titled “A Second Message to America,” opens with a clip of President Barack Obama speaking after ISIS beheaded another American journalist, James Foley, last month. Obama vowed in those remarks to be “relentless” when Americans are harmed. 

The video then shows Sotloff, wearing an orange jump suit and kneeling, in a sparse desert landscape, next to a black-clad ISIS fighter — a replica of the conditions in the video in which Foley was beheaded. 

Speaking to the camera, Sotloff questions U.S. intervention in the Middle East and blames Obama for “marching us, the American people, into a blazing fire.” 

The ISIS fighter then blames Obama for an “arrogant foreign policy towards Islamic State” and for refusing to heed ISIS’s warnings and end military strikes. 

Story here

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Fuck your Jihad.

What say the rest of you fine upstanding American Infidels?

Colorado is missing $21.5 million in pot taxes

Voters legalized retail marijuana (pot for everyone, not just medical patients) in 2012. And they were told the state would pull in $33.5 million from two new taxes in the first six months of 2014. It turns out, the projections were way off. Here's why. 

Pot smokers are still buying on the black market: The state thought more people would migrate out of the black market. But only 60% of people who want pot in Colorado this year will buy it through legal channels, according to an estimate from the Marijuana Policy Group.

One big reason: Legal pot costs a lot more than illegal pot -- mostly because of taxes and fees. 

Story here 

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Hundreds of beers spilled onto Katy Freeway in 18-wheeler crash

HOUSTON -- A big cleanup was underway on the Katy Freeway early Tuesday after an 18-wheeler and a car collided.

It happened around 12:30 a.m. near the exit for Wirt Road.

Both vehicles involved in the wreck lost control and spun out. The 18-wheeler jackknifed and rolled, spilling dozens of cases of beer all over the freeway's main lanes.

Story here


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We've got to do better as a Nation to help end Alcohol abuse...