Right.
Billy (Blackswordshinobi) is pretty well known in you-tube ninjutsu circles, and honestly for all the wrong reasons. He is associated with some of the most questionable practitioners around, which accounts for some of his misunderstandings, but there seems to be more to it than that.
From what I've been able to gather, Billy got interested in the art from movies, and started to read Steve Hayes books, which is where his initial education and training came from. After that there was some training with people such as Jason Stork (Mountainous), Dan Bowen, and so on, none of whom really had any training themselves. More recently he has purchased a Shodan Home Training Program from Steve Hayes' organisation, and that means (to him) that he is a Shodan with Steve Hayes as his teacher. In the MAP threads there were a number of coherent posts, which were really copy-pastes of emails he gets from Steve Hayes as part of the program.
The catch is that Billy is dyslexic and borderline illiterate, as well as frankly delusional. As a result, he can't really understand what he's read, but believes what he thinks he's read anyway. This is shown even in this thread where he was asked who his teacher was, and interpreted that as asking who it was he teaches (his girlfriend... let's not go too far there...). This has lead to his saying that he trains in Togakure Ryu Ninjutsu and Ninpo... as that is the term used in the early Hayes books, and Billy can't see the actual difference, amongst other things.
Sadly, what all this means is that Billy has very little understanding or knowledge, and no way of actually engaging in conversation coherently or productively. So while I would suggest not necessarily belittling him for his learning disability, I can see little productive of engaging him.
And yes, this is Billy:
(on the right, with "Shinobi Mystic" Mike).
opcorn:
