Barkour, Ninja training for your dog

You may be familiar with Parkour, the ninja-like training that gained some notoriety ten years ago as you bound off walls, jump off buildings, and leap between roofs. It’s like flying, assuming you survive.

Well, don’t forget your best friend. Meet TreT, an American Staffordshire Terrier from Ukraine. This crazy canine does the same in this amazing video.

If you can get your own pooch to stop eating cat poop and pay attention for a minute, you can even get him to do the same with tips from TreT’s trainer’s web site. Or at least the pair of you can watch the video together while you eat ice cream and dream.

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A real gun license

Gail Collins writes in Arms and the Duck in the New York Times:

[I]t’s only in movies that people are good shots during a violent encounter. In 2008, Al Baker reported in The Times that the accuracy rate for New York City officers firing in the line of duty was 34 percent.

And these are people trained for this kind of crisis. The moral is that if a lunatic starts shooting, you will not be made safer if your fellow average citizens are carrying concealed weapons.

I’ve been kickboxing for ten years.  I’m a muscular macho guy in great shape.  When I began sparring I had the false confidence of the pro-gun crowd, as well as the oil rig workers in Collins’ article, and got creamed.  I could barely last one round.

The first lesson any fighter must learn is to conquer your fear.  A combat situation is fundamentally different from any exercise, class, or simulation, including shooting at defenseless animals.  It’s biologically impossible to keep your wits about you.   The natural adrenaline rush is conducive to running, not effective fighting … not thinking … and absolutely not firing a gun. Be very afraid of those with concealed guns.

Now if you really have to have a License to Kill, there should be a way to qualify where you’re trained and have proven you can be effective under extreme pressure.  Perhaps a Marines Boot Camp.  With copious live and accurate return fire. That ought to cull the herd.

Free and easy startup recruiting and jobs

Angel List just introduced a free startup recruiting service.  It’s about time.  I’ve been tracking these sites at Blue Entrepreneurs. It’s basic functionality that anyone can develop.  As the markets play out, the razor blade approach will prevail.  It will just be a free feature of a much larger matching service where the companies already exist for startup funding like Angel List and networking like LinkedIn and …

… Blue.  I provide a service through DallasBlue that’s virtually free and even better.  Not only is your position distributed to thousands of startups worldwide and in particular in Dallas, plus 30,000 DallasBlue members, it’s also syndicated through LinkedIn, Cnet, Plaxo, Business Week, Mashable, GigaOM, and thousands of other sites through SimplyHired, the world’s largest search engine.  Such a deal!  Contact me to learn more.

Find more entrepreneur recommendations and links at Blue Entrepreneurs Building Teams and Startup Jobs.

 

Texas, not so great

No, the United States is not the greatest country in the world and Texas is not the greatest state.  I’m sorry.  You’ll just have to leave your ranch, take down that orange U of Texas flag, and join the rest of us in reality.

I’ll leave the first to Aaron Sorkin and just handle Texas … Texas where we proudly executed a retarded man and ignored the U.S. Supreme Court, and wallow in the bottom with states like Mississippi when it comes to health care.

Execution

Of Mice And Men: The Execution of Marvin Wilson
By Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic
Aug 8 2012

How the State of Texas blew off a Supreme Court decision so it could execute a mentally retarded man.

At 6:26 p.m local time last night, an hour or so after the last appeal was denied, Texas executed a mentally retarded black man named Marvin Wilson, a man who could not handle money or navigate a phone book, a man who sucked his thumb and could not always tell the difference between left and right, a man who, as a child, could not match his socks, tie his shoes or button his clothes, a 54-year-old man with an IQ of 61. …

Health Care

Texas is the #1 state with the highest medically uninsured residents and was rated among the 10 worst US States for Women’s Health from Health.com.

Texas ranked dead last in the percentage of women receiving first-trimester prenatal care in 2006 (just 62%, versus 89% in Massachusetts), and the percentage of women with health insurance (31% had no coverage in 2008-2009, compared to 5% of women in Massachusetts and 20% in the U.S. overall).

Women in the Lone Star state had the third-highest rate of chlamydia infections (12% in 2010, up from 9% in 2007). Nationwide, the chlamydia rate was 7% in 2010, compared to 3% in West Virginia, the state with the lowest infection rate.