In my final year at university, I took a module/course entitled “Psychology and Radical Economics”. It wasn’t so much by choice but as the result of a scheduling issue – to fit in the subject areas I wanted to study, I was left with a “gap”, that could only be filled by taking this course/module. It was a subject area that I felt completely out of my depth with, and a course that I barely felt I kept a grasp of, however there were only six of us taking the program, and we all bonded over our fai...(Click Here To Read The Article)
I was bullied as a kid. That experience shaped me. For a large part of my childhood I didn’t believe I had the right to be who I was. I wasn’t allowed and didn’t allow myself to have an identity, and when I tried to have an identity, it wasn’t shaped internally but externally to meet the requirements of others. When I was finally able to understand and realize who I was/am that became something extremely precious to me. Something that needed to be protected and something I wasn’t going to allow ...(Click Here To Read The Article)
In the early hours of Sunday morning, October 5th, (around 2 a.m.), a crowd of over 100 people gathered in the South End of Boston around Massachusetts Avenue and Tremont Street, blocking intersections, performing burnouts, donuts, and illegal racing, and attacking responding police vehicles with fireworks, traffic cones, and poles, with a police cruiser being set on fire in the chaos. In the same weekend similar incidents occurred in other Massachusetts cities including Fall River, Middleboroug...(Click Here To Read The Article)
Obviously, the world we live in isn’t a completely safe place and will never be so. However, since the mid-1990’s crime, and violent crime have been steadily falling, albeit with some blips along the way, which begs the question of how relevant learning to protect yourself is and will be in the future, if the trend continues. This is more of a theoretical question, than an actual one, with the purpose of making us think about the ways in which martial arts and self-defense training (including Kr...(Click Here To Read The Article)
One of the unintended consequences of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly known as the 1994 Crime Bill, was that it drastically altered the demographics of certain communities. One of its provisions was that it mandated life sentences for offenders convicted of a third felony, even if the third offense was nonviolent, which disproportionately affected Black and Latino men, who were more likely to have prior convictions for a number of reasons, including systemic p...(Click Here To Read The Article)
Violence, personal safety and security are all contextual, which is why a rules-based approach to violence prevention doesn’t work e.g., there may be a time when your safest option is to walk down a dark alley – to avoid a potential threat in front of you - even though every top ten list of safety tips says that you shouldn’t do this. This is why personal safety should be taught as a “mindset” rather than a list of “do’s” and “don’ts” etc. Unfortunately, many instructors lack both the experience...(Click Here To Read The Article)
Often when I’m teaching a women’s self-defense seminar or a corporate personal safety event, I’ll be asked if women are more likely to be the targets of crime than men. With certain types of crimes such as rape and sexual assault, women are more likely to be targeted than men, but generally, men are more likely to be both the perpetrators and the victims of violent offenses. However, there is one group/demographic that is generally at a greater risk of crime and being exploited, and that is the ...(Click Here To Read The Article)
There is a saying that “good” is the enemy of “best”, which is probably a paraphrase and re-working of an older proverb most famously phrased by Voltaire - “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien” i.e., “The best is the enemy of the good”. Whilst the first statement argues that being satisfied by something being “good enough”, prevents people from striving to achieve something that could be better, Voltaire’s statement is a warning against perfectionism. Insisting on the “best” (or endlessly improving) ...(Click Here To Read The Article)
In 1995 a small-time crook name McArthur Wheeler, with an accomplice, robbed two banks having sprayed his face with lemon juice believing it would make him invisible to security cameras; just as lemon juice could be used as “invisible ink” on paper, he believed that the same thing would happen on a CCTV tape. He was so confident in his belief that he deliberately looked up at a security camera and smiled. His reasoning came from the fact that lemon juice can be used as invisible ink, only becomi...(Click Here To Read The Article)
I’ve only ever met one person with a “genuine” wooden leg, and no they weren’t a pirate. It was somebody who had been the target of a contract killing that they’d thwarted/stopped. In the process of fighting for their life a shotgun, their attacker was using, had ripped into their lower right leg requiring it to be amputated below the knee. Rather than using a medical prosthetic leg, they’d had a friend make a wooden one that they proudly wore – sometimes with cut-off jeans – as a badge of honor...(Click Here To Read The Article)