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Most combat sports make you wait a little for the violence. Boxing gives you a few rounds. MMA gives you a feeling-out minute. Sumo makes you wait so long that you forget you came to watch two men touch, and then it gives you about four seconds, and then it sends everyone home. The lead-up is a full production. Salt gets flung across the ring to purify it, fistfuls of it, arcing through the air like a man seasoning the largest steak ever conceived. The legs come up one at a time and slam down…

As she opens the window, the wind starts to blow. The clothes she hung on the threads outside started to fly. A hand picked her favourite white frock. It was a monkey, and it wore the frock and ran away.

My nephew and his wife said they won’t come back again to this City last year. But this time they had wonderful experience.

An indepth emotional reflection

As a parent, I fully support the ban!

The Cultural Beauty of Kashmir...

This is my first time making a live so....yeah, you can watch me if you want!

Life is a whole package and don’t just look at one aspect and conclude which one is better.

Too tired to find it, too exhausted to endure it. Theres nothing special in this article, its just my mind farting uncontrollable thoughts

It’s a poem

No one hangs a fruit upon a tree; no one ties a seed to its branches. Growth reveals what was already possible.

Oracle is the cockroach of enterprise tech, hated by everyone, used by everyone, and staffed by people who stopped pretending it was cool around the Clinton administration. The product is the sales motion, and the database is the hostage.

The Morning Train

The startup guy will tell you he is basically a co-founder. He has 0.05 percent. The founder described this on the offer call as "could be worth millions someday," in the warm tone of a man who has personally read the cap table and knows that after three more rounds and a 1.5x liquidation preference, 0.05 percent of the exit is enough to buy a used Subaru, if the exit happens, which it will not. He is counting on you not running the math. You do not run the math. You frame the offer letter.

Krav Maga is the one of those martial art that found a way to never lose. Boxing tests itself every Saturday. Wrestling tests itself until somebody throws up. Jiu jitsu tests itself so relentlessly that a purple belt will tap his own grandmother for the data. Krav Maga skipped all of that and discovered something better than winning, which is being too dangerous to check.

Spotify is genuinely great. The app is excellent, the discovery is top-notch engineering, and it pulled a music industry that had been thoroughly looted by piracy back into being a business that pays. I open it forty times a day. None of that is the joke. The joke is that the most dominant music product ever built still cannot reliably make a dollar, and everyone there has decided to solve that by becoming something other than a music company.

Kung fu has the best movies of any martial art, and that is the whole problem. Fifty years of cinema promised hands too fast to see, a punch that detonates a man from one inch away, and old masters who knock you over with chi from across the room without leaving their chair. You grew up on that. Then you sign up... and slowly learn that the trailer was the entire film.

MMA is the closest thing we have to an actual fight. Two people, almost everything legal, find out under pressure who actually trained. I love it. I will defend it against every traditional art that claims to be too deadly to test. Which is why it kills me that the average guy with eighteen months of it now narrates his entire life like color commentary for a fight that is not happening.

If you are going to eat an animal, the question is not whether its death is sad. It is how much suffering your choice actually adds to the world for each gram of protein you get back. Most people answer with a feeling instead, and the feeling favors the cow, because a cow is one large familiar death and a tin of sardines looks like a small massacre. Scored properly, the feeling is backwards.

Before this man is permitted to touch a barbell, he must first do his 30 min prep. Out comes the lacrosse ball, and he rolls his glute on it on the gym floor with the face of a man receiving terrible news over the phone. Then the foam roller, the full length of each leg, wincing theatrically at knots he has decided are there, even though science cannot yet see these knots. Then the little resistance band, looped above the knees for the side-steps, the monster walks, the clamshells, the entire…

For nearly the whole of human history, the standard of living did not move. A peasant in Roman Gaul, a peasant in medieval England, and a peasant under the early Stuarts lived at roughly the same material level, because any surplus a society produced was eaten by the mouths it then fed. Good harvests bought more babies, not better lives, and population climbed back to the edge of hunger. Economists call this the Malthusian trap, and it held without exception. Then, in a damp corner of England…

There is a strip mall near me with a vape shop, a place that does eyebrows, and a taekwondo academy that has a banner reading BLACK BELT BY AGE 10. I want you to sit with that as a business strategy. They have looked at the single most loaded object in all of martial arts, the thing Bruce Lee bled for, and decided the move is to guarantee one to a fourth grader on a timeline, like a savings bond that matures into the ability to register your hands as deadly weapons.

We carry an unexamined assumption that culture follows power, that the great age of an art is the great age of its army. Renaissance Italy refutes it cleanly. Between roughly the fourteenth century and the sixteenth, the peninsula produced linear perspective, humanism, the recovered ancients, the secular gaze, and a recognizably modern idea of the individual person. It also failed, completely and humiliatingly, at the one task we usually call the test of a civilization. It could not unite,…

Most nations remember a morning they would die to defend: a Bastille, a Boston, a shot that started everything. Canada has no such morning, and that is the point most easily missed about it. On 1 July 1867 the British North America Act took effect and the Dominion of Canada existed. No declaration was read to a crowd, no army had to be beaten, no king was overthrown. A handful of colonial politicians, John A. Macdonald among them, had argued their way through a series of conferences and…

Most nations are facts before they are ideas. France was French, with its language and its soil and its dead, long before anyone wrote down what France was for. The American Founding ran the other way. In 1776 there was no American people in the old sense, no shared ancestry, no national church, no thousand-year memory, only a set of colonies that had been quarreling with London and, increasingly, among themselves. What held them was a written argument: that governments exist to secure rights,…

Judo is the only martial art that has been defeated by paperwork. No opponent did this. No rival style exposed it in the cage. A room of men in blazers met in a hotel conference center, looked at one of the most complete grappling arts ever built, and voted, year after year, to make it less. They are still doing it. Judo is being strangled, slowly, by its own governing body, and the governing body keeps calling it a rule clarification.

Apple makes the best phone on earth. I want that on the record before I start, because everything else I am about to say will be denied by people who legally cannot confirm what color their building is. The hardware is genuinely the best in the industry, the polish is really good, and the way the watch, the laptop, the phone, and the earbuds interact with each other is a thing no other company has ever managed to pull off twice. None of that is a controversy, I'm an Apple fanboy myself after…

Wing chun has the best lore in all of martial arts, and that is exactly its problem. Ip Man taught Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee became Bruce Lee, and now a strip-mall class on a Tuesday gets to borrow the entire glow of two of the most charismatic men who ever lived. You did not sign up for a fighting system. You signed up for a biopic with a folding-chair budget, and the trailer is doing one hundred percent of the marketing.

Twelve weeks ago this man could not skip rope without garroting himself. He has now decided he is a boxer, the way you become a sommelier by finishing a bottle. The wraps come off at brunch with the reluctance of a soldier removing his medals.

Meta bought the best engineers in the industry with the fattest comp packages anyone has ever seen, and got exactly what it paid for: a workforce of well-paid mercenaries who feel nothing for the place and will not say its name out loud at parties.