Tehran conscripts Ninja masters to crush democracy The Iranian government has been attempting to co-opt the country's Ninjas and other martial artists to help out with some light repression duties, US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks claim. Authorities in the country have been attempting to outsource some of the grunt work involved in political repression to martial …
Ever wandered why all "velvet revolutions" in Eastern Europe happened in winter?
There is a simple answer to that - because the local USA embassy sponsored the local baseball league. A snowball thrown by even a lousy amateur baseball player is on par with a rubber bullet even if it does not have a chunk of ice or a stone inside. The police guarding the parliament in Sofia during the protests by supposedly "unarmed" protesters in the 90-es had to me ferried away on a bus. The ambulances could not cope. "Unarmed" protest all right... Same in Chehoslovakia before that. Same in Georgia after that. Same in Belorussia with the difference that the police their did not just take it on their chin as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, they actually opened fire in return.
As far as Ahmadinedjad's use of "ninjas" that may in reality be an absurd rumour. However to someone who has actively used "sport sponsorship" to get their way it may have sounded pretty plausible.
"There is a simple answer to that - because the local USA embassy sponsored the local baseball league. A snowball thrown by even a lousy amateur baseball player is on par with a rubber bullet even if it does not have a chunk of ice or a stone inside."
I suspect I know more about snowballs and baseball than most people who spell the word "rumour". There might be a couple of hundred men in the US (not a few of them natives of Latin America) who can throw a baseball above 90 mph--barehanded, note, lightly clothed, and striding downhill. Having taken a couple of 60-mph batting cage balls--which are built to last, and damned hard --off my hand, I have to say that I wouldn't care to be the target for a 60 mph baseball. But dress me up like a riot cop, give me a baton to deliver reproofs with, and it might be a different story.
Are you volunteering to stand still while I repeatedly hit you with let's say mere 45 mph chunks of ice in the face (I can throw a reasonably good fastball myself by the way)? Are you volunteering to do that for 2 hours? Or a whole day? Or a one week "standoff with protesters"? Would you like some stones and pieces of the pavement for good measure with that?
I knew that "disgrunted yanks" are masohists, but I did not expect that much masohism even in the most disgrunted ones.
...a past student of ninjutsu myself (1st dan bb), this makes me smile.
Although, I remember from my training days, tales of a certain irish, Hatsumi taught, guy who had his own school who was meant to have given security help to an embassy in Ireland - the story went that he basically used his skills to get into the embassy and evade detection in order to point out the flaws in their methods...
I don't know that anyone can claim lineage to those shadowy warriors of the past, let alone claim to be one of them.
Ninjutsu schools apparently still thrive. Even if their claim to lineage is true, I believe they do not, at least as far as what can be publicly learnt, replicate training necessary to be an extremely hard man the way they did before in feudal Japan - I believe the equivalent level of training would be like what the SAS boys do. There are many reasons for this, of course, many practical reasons (safety, time and 'real life' etc).
However, I concede the training a terror cell in the middle east may well be just as intense as what our best soldiers go through albeit lacking maybe in finesse. Perhaps they have nothing else to do, perhaps they are motivated by other concerns and are less concerned about safety.
The upshot is, if one considers oneself "hard as" and completely imba as some do, please remember, knowing the 'apparent theory' of how to do something isn't the same as having done the equivalent things, in a more practical manner, a million times over in real conditions under pressure especially when one's life depends on it, for real.
They walk about about saying "Hi! I'm a Ninja!" Kind of misses the whole point of "concealment".
Oh, and they didn't wear black; that came from the No theatre hands who used to wear black so as to not disrupt the play too much. No point in being a master of silent death and camouflage, then sticking out like a sore thumb when you try to get near the target! They tended to dress in whatever fitted in.
As for the training? You can go as hard as you like when there is every chance you'll be dead before you're 40; equation changes slightly when that is no longer the case and it is not your source of employment.
"knowing the 'apparent theory' of how to do something isn't the same as having done the equivalent things"
Abso-fraggin-lutely. The question is "If I had to defend myself from myself, could I do so?" if the answer is "No", then one's training is inadequate. If the answer is "Yes", then one does understand how to apply shock and violence in the manner of a person who is intent on causing one harm; so one's training is inadequate.
I can't take "Ninjas" seriously anyway, not after watching "Taxi 2". *Ninja!*
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