Russian Systema Self-Defense - What is it?

Is it shown at the link below, filmed at the school of a truly great fighting master?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQDuCRMGJ3Y

Or, is the authentic Systema demonstrated at the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_-5MY7qFWA&mode=related&search=

See how different they are. It is tempting to say "There are as many Systema's as there are practitioners." True to some degree. But the two video clips above show mutually contradictory approaches. It is tempting to say "Training mode is not the real art. True to some degree. But the first clip shows sparring style, mutliple continuous moves, jabbing, parrying, twirling around etc.. The second clip shows the classical single-motion elegant quick takedown approach, as always exemplified in Mikhail's movements.

All people on all clips above are doubtless real hardass, kickass real-world fighters. But only one clip can be "right" about what is Systema. Ignorant onlookers would say of the first clip: "It has some reality, but where is the Systema?" The same ignorant onlookers would say of the second clip "It sure looks like Systema. But are the attacks and defenses real-world credible?"

I do not know the answer.

Yes, I know what you are talking about - the concentration of all your thoughts in the moment, the rush of adrenalin, the profound peace of simply existing when you could be dead the next second.

Combine it with a belief in something, and you have most repeat soldiers.

But it's bullshit. It passes the minute you are hurt.

In Iraq, most of the repeat offenders are there for the money.

And then you have the sick ones; there have always been sick ones.

-Kostas Dervenis

The inevitable fall of the US Dollar is unavoidable, when the charade can no longer be cloaked with smoke and mirrors or tolerable foreign adventures. At that point the calls for a single world currency, administered through a solitary clearing house and autarchic central bank, will be offered as the answer for economic stability. Thus, the ultimate transfer and expropriation of individual wealth will be achieved. The world runs on money, not oil. Those who control it and require legal tender laws, rule the economic and political order. You will come to learn this lesson, no matter what currency you use . . .

SARTRE - April 4, 2003

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic

than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day

to the making of money for money's sake.

-John D. Rockefeller

"In the face of the great superiority of another person there is no means of safety but love."

-Goethe

From: 'When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times'
by Pema Chodron

"The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face to
face. When we feel resentment because the room is too hot, we
could meet the heat and feel its fieriness and its heaviness.
When we feel resentment because the room is too cold, we could
meet the cold and feel its iciness and its bite. When we want to
complain about the rain, we could feel its wetness instead. When
we worry because the wind is shaking our windows, we could meet
the wind and hear its sound. Cutting our expectations for a cure is
a gift we can give ourselves. There is no cure for hot and cold. They
will go on forever. After we have died, the ebb and flow will still
continue. Like the tides of the sea, like day and night - this is the
nature of things.

The present difficulty is that the man thinks that he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the Higher Power which does everything and the man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles; otherwise he courts them. Take for instance, the figure in a gopuram (temple tower), where it is made to appear to bear the burden of the tower on its shoulders. Its posture and look are a picture of great strain while bearing the very heavy burden of the tower. But think. The tower is built on the earth and it rests on its foundations. The figure (like Atlas bearing the earth) is a part of the tower, but is made to look as if it bore the tower.

Is it not funny? So is the man who takes on himself the sense of doing.

- Ramana Maharshi

The present difficulty is that the man thinks that he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the Higher Power which does everything and the man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles; otherwise he courts them. Take for instance, the figure in a gopuram (temple tower), where it is made to appear to bear the burden of the tower on its shoulders. Its posture and look are a picture of great strain while bearing the very heavy burden of the tower. But think. The tower is built on the earth and it rests on its foundations. The figure (like Atlas bearing the earth) is a part of the tower, but is made to look as if it bore the tower.

Is it not funny? So is the man who takes on himself the sense of doing.

- Ramana Maharshi

I’m absolutely certain this stock could deliver 858% by July 1, 2006.

Even if it does half as well as what I expect, you’re talking at least a 400% return. For every $5,000 invested… that’s a $30,000 gain. Invest $10,000 and you could expect a $60,000 return. And let me remind you… that’s $60,000 in three months.

Christian DeHaemer
Editor, Red Zone Profits

"All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those towards whom it is directed will understand it. Therefore, the intellectual level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number of people who are to be influenced by it."

-- Adolf Hitler - "Mein Kampf" - (1925)

Frankly, I was rather dismayed by your use of the term "half-breed," Captain.
You must admit it is an unsophisticated expression.

I'll remember that, Mr. Spock, the next time I find myself in a similar situation.

Believe it or not, but to get bit by a snake in a dream is actually a very good thing! A snakebite in a dream is the equivalent to an injection administered by a doctor. It means some sort of emotional and/or physical healing is about to begin as well as a new awareness.

It's a trap.

And a SMART FOX will sniff and walk away!

"In so far as it helps the individual to forget himself and his ready-made opinions about the universe, religion will prepare the way for realization. In so far as it arouses and justifies such passions as fear, scrupulosity, righteous indignation, institutional patriotism, and crusading hate, in so far as it harps on the saving virtues of certain theological notions, certain hallowed arrangements of words, religion is an obstacle in the way of realization."

Aldous Huxley in the Devils of Loudun

Issac Newton and Edmund Haley were friends.  They once had a
discussion on alchemy.  You may know that Newton spent half his labors on the study
of alchemy. When Haley protested this foolishness, Newton responded, "I, sir, have
studied the subject, you have not."

No mercy for first offenders

The laws of thermodynamics allow no leniency in the court of cosmic justice. An inflated
Greenhouse effect due to increased CO2 and CH4 is even now yielding vast pools of
buoyant freshwater from the world’s shrinking icecaps, and these are already beginning to
shut down the giant gyres that drive the world’s abyssal currents. Readings from one arm
of the Gulf stream currently show a 30% decline in just 50 years.33 If that process
continues, fingers of warmth will reach down to unpin the methane hydrates that carpet
many seabeds and methane eruptions will send global temperatures rocketing upwards.
Agriculture will collapse under the climatic onslaught, and our energy-starved civilisation
will implode. Within a century the population will shrink below its 30% point, completing
the symmetry of a transitional pulse. Human population growth and decline will then
display the elegant waveform that typifies all animal plagues.

As one of 30–100 million extant species, ours does not differ from the others in any
fundamental respect. It follows that those who contend we are not in plague and will not
collapse are merely displaying one of our species’ most hallowed (genetic) delusions:
anthropocentrism. Such belief hinges on a bet that has odds of at least 30-million-to-one
stacked against it, and while astronomical odds like those might seduce the odd obsessive
gambler, no respectable scientist should fall for it.

-Reg Morrison

Evolution’s Act-of-God clause

“Our time bomb is mysticism. Its delivery system is language. And its hiding place? The
unfathomable coils of our DNA.” I first wrote those words in 1997 simply because the
process of evolution dictated them. At that time I had no inkling of the immediacy of that
prediction nor did I foresee how this lethal evolutionary mechanism would be launched
on a global scale.

Adaptive specialisation in any species is a two edged sword. Disproportionately
productive in their birth environment, specialisations usually become lethal handicaps
when conditions change. A peacock’s tail is the standard illustration for this crucial
evolutionary principle. The peacock-tail of our species is our predisposition to
mysticise—to assign peculiar, even supra-natural, significance to people, events, places
and things that matter most to us. As the late Carl Sagan wrote: ‘We’re significance
junkies’.

-Reg Morrison

If I tell people here about my plans to buy land, grow my food, get off the grid, etc. and suggest they do the same, it is as if I just told them I was planning a trip to the moon, to collect pixie dust. Most people here can not and will not imagine an energy deficient world.

One more twist to the complexity screw.

Carlo Rubbia Nobel Price ofPhysics, I believe, and director of the CERN center (particle'saccelerator in between Switzerland and France) was the godfather ofthis idea, some 10 years ago. He suggested to transmute Thorium intothe U233 by shooting with a particle accelerator.

I see now the mining of thorium (3 times more abundant than uranium in the Earth crust; that is peanuts also) having a good time in scratching the Earth surface a little bit more (today the Earth movement of materials is about a mountain 16 Km radius (some 256 Kmin the base perimeter) and some 8 Km. Of height; more or less, a newEverest per year).

Plus, of course, the attached device accelerating particles in each of the thorium transmuted nuclear power plants (or at least every few reactors). As I said before, I believe we are all crazy and among us, more the ones resigning from the fight, due to the fact that "nukes are coming, whether we like it or not"

Pedro from Madrid

Subject: Re: Non-agricultural ethanol - assessment please?

How terrific the people may be!

They look at the ground and see a factory. Modern man does not see a
live organism, with nutrients evolving from organic matter into
plants and back to the earth, in a living cycle. They just see a
factory with a programmed annual output of biofuel per hectare, to
feed gas guzzlers, to move humans in a forest of concrete, steel,
asphalt and bricks, to go to routinely jobs at 30 miles from home, or
to entertain at 200 miles from home in the weekends.

This is what the modern man expects from the earth: to behave like a
clock machinery (round the clock manufacturing), because obviously
the modern farmer does not look for his/her own survival and that of
his/her family on the same piece of land, for generations. No. He/she
obviously wants equal rights and the same living standard than an
urban citizen: car, home appliances, holidays in the other side of
the moon, motorized weekends, a 1,000 sq feet home/10,000 cubic feet
conditioned volume of air per family or individual and so forth.

Therefore, modern farmers also see the piece of land as a factory, a
tool to produce a given and pre-fixed output, regardless the weather
or the rain fall or natural, logical nutrients as input, as a return
or gift to earth for the given output. They can not afford the land
the have a breath, in a literal sense, to lie fallow, to rotate to
have a rest, perhaps for years, when the sensible and sensitive eyes
realize the earth is tired. This close relationship of human beings
and earth is lost. Earth is a factory and has to produce as per the
market demand. The god Market is now in the altar, together with the
Goddess economy.

Do not have any doubt that we will pay for this behaviour. I am not a
believer in any faith or religion and less of all, in the Market and
Economy gods. I just try to explain myself something that understand
is common sense, but I do not see much common sense these days. I do
not personally find much sense in discussing Patzek, Pimentel or
Naredo rich sources of information, getting into ratios,
crosschecking piles of data, etc., to see if it is interesting to
produce fuel from food, to feed the uncountable number of machines we
are able to produce in the present industrial society. I see now,
with all respects to those doing it, that he simple time spent in
these analysis is already a hint on our own craziness.

Pedro from Madrid