Chiron

Orders of Abstraction

2012-02-23T22:39:00.002-08:00

It feels like I am living my life one level removed from reality right now. It's not true, just a feeling. The stuff I am dealing with right now-- plane tickets and tax season and scheduling-- are completely real. Most people spend much of their lives at this level... But it feels artificial and unimportant.

It has been two years, give or take a month, since anyone tried to kill me. And that wasn't much of an effort, really, nor was it personal. But it felt real, infinitely more real than tax season at a small business.

In the 'ohno' moment, everything is what it is. Exactly what it is, no more and no less and no other. You see and you act, and every interpretation or memory or 'woulda coulda shoulda' thought is a distraction that can get you killed.

You see. You act.

Nothing more. If you do it right, you walk away. If you don't, you just become a piece of someone else's story.

When you think about it afterwards or debrief it, no matter how practiced you are in the AAR, you are removed from the event by a whole order of magnitude. It is a thing of memory now, something that happened. No longer a thing of fear and immediacy.

When you try to extrapolate the lessons (which is the sacred duty of all operators) you are yet another order of magnitude removed. Ten times as abstract. Trying to put or derive intellectual lessons from an event of meat and adrenaline.

Teaching is yet another order of magnitude removed.

Guest Post: Ty Johnston

2012-02-16T23:26:00.001-08:00

For the record, the only time I've ever done a guest blog post was when Bill Giovannucci wrote something absolutely brilliant that was too long to go in the comments section.

But some writer I don't know from Adam is doing a blog tour. He wrote a nice letter and I thought, "Hey, if the post is half as good as the letter, the kid's a damn good writer." also, the request came at the perfect time, since I was so deep in editing three manuscripts and finishing a fourth that the blog was languishing.

So, without further ado, welcome Ty Johnston:

--------------------------

When I was twelve, I stood between my mother and a man who was trying to kill her. I remember no emotions at the time other than a sense that “this has to end.” For five years my mother had lived with violence, beatings and worse that came at least once a month, almost on schedule. More than once she had to go to the hospital, twice for extended stays because she had cracked discs in her neck.

It might seem to some I exaggerate by stating this man, my mother’s second husband, was attempting to “kill” her. Perhaps so, but it did not feel that way to my twelve-year-old self at the time. I merely knew he had threatened to kill her on more than one occasion and had seemingly attempted to numerous times.

He never laid a hand on me during his violent episodes. There had been times when we had rough-housed out in the yard, and a couple of times he had left me with bruises and the wind knocked from my chest, but that had been play, though today it might be considered crossing the line. It didn’t seem so back then.

Though he was not my father, this was a man who I respected, as difficult as that might sound. He was a Vietnam veteran, earning my regard for his service and a bit of youthful awe at the tales of war he and his buddies would pass along. He was also educated and intellectual, and built by hand rows upon rows of shelves in our basement before covering those shelves with thousands of books he had acquired over the years. If not for this man, my interests in literature might never have blossomed.

Yet he was also the man who regularly attacked my mother, leaving her beaten and in tears.

Why she tolerated this for so long, I do not know, even to this day. She and I have talked about it over the years, and she does not have a good answer, not one she herself can come to grips with.

As I mentioned, I felt no emotion at the time of standing between this man and my mother. I do remember beforehand a general feeling that I knew this was coming, my facing down against this man. I was waiting, waiting for myself to grow older and bigger and stronger. I realized he would probably mop the floor with me, perhaps harming me worse than he had my mother all those years simply because I was standing up to him.

But none of that was in my mind the night I was in bed and heard the first of the screams. It was a familiar pattern, one I knew well, and I realized I would be awake all night, helpless to do anything but listen to the cursing and crying. That night was different, however. I can not say what was different, but I remember that “this has to end.”

I jumped up out of bed, wearing only pajamas, and rushed through the house and down the stairs to the basement where those lines of books encompassed the room. He had shoved my mother over the couch. She was climbing to her feet and he was approaching as I rushed between them and stood there and stared at him. I did not even raise my arms.

He did not look at me, but tried to rush past, to reach my mother. Without thinking, I shoved out, sending him sprawling across the couch. At that point my mother ran up the stairs. He jumped to his feet and lurched after her. I followed as fast as I could.

In the kitchen upstairs, my mother was at the phone, attempting to call the police. Somehow I managed to place myself between her and my step-father once more. I was in a doorway, and there was no room for him to get by me. The only way he could get to her would be to physically remove me.

I remember expecting to be slaughtered at that moment. But it never came. I continued to stare in silence into his face, and then I realized he would not look at me. His eyes were down, and he only stood there several feet away. His fists were at his side, and soon opened, hanging limp.

To this day, more than thirty years later, I’m still not sure what happened that night. Armchair psychologists and the like might say he was too much of a coward to face someone who was willing to confront him directly, and perhaps that is true. I don’t know. I do know that for only being twelve, I was pretty big for a boy at 180 pounds and nearly six-feet tall. However, my step-father was no small man, standing at about six feet himself and weighing slightly more than two hundred pounds. Plus, he was an adult, with at least some military training, whereas I was a kid who hadn’t even played football yet. Maybe harming a kid was a line he would not cross.

That memory is the most vivid one I retain of the few instances of violence that have intruded upon my life. Obviously I had witnessed many sessions of my mother being beaten, but after all these years they all seem to tumble together in my mind.

Of the other times violence has entered my life, there have been few, but I remember them with a little less recall. There was then time when I was ten and my grandfather, my mother’s father, pistol whipped my step-father, for reasons one can guess. There was the time I went camping with friends at 16 and ended up staring down the barrel of a revolver, to this day my mind’s eye telling me that was the biggest firearm I have ever seen in my life, even though cooler heads eventually prevailed that night and no one was hurt. There were a few fist fights in high school. There was the time I went hiking with my dad, I think I was 18, and someone fired several shots over our heads, for what reason I do not know, perhaps just to get their kicks scaring some yokels.

That is the extent that violence has directly affected my life, at least that I can remember.

Odd, then, at least to me, that fictional violence has become such a part of my everyday life. I’m fortunate in that I get to write fiction for a living, and my preferred genres are the fantasy and horror fields. Why is this? Why do I utilize so much violence in my work?

I can’t give a good answer. I could go on about the freedom I find in exploring the human condition when I write fantasy, or I could talk about the sheer fun I have at writing horror, because being scared can be fun, at least when the frights aren’t real.

I could also chat about other writers, how Hemingway used violence to subtly explore the minds of his protagonists, or how Tolstoy despised violence but still found a use for it to guide his characters in their search for God. I could turn to pulp writers and focus on Robert E. Howard’s use of violence as a way to highlight the eternal struggle between civilization and barbarism, or Ed McBain’s dichotomy of violence that on one side was often little more than a day-at-the-office for the police officers he wrote about, but could become quite personal and breathtaking in the blink of an eye.

I could go on and on about all of that, but none of it would be real, none of it would truly focus upon violence.

Before I was seven, before my mother remarried, the world I lived within found violence to be exciting. Back then I got my violence from comic books and television, and that stuff was tame by any comparison of what we have today. Spider-man pounced on crooks to set the world right again, and Roy Rogers blasted a six-gun out of a black-hats hand to save the day and win the girl.

Again, though, none of that is violence, real violence.

None of those memories answer the question of why I write using violence so often.

Or do they?

When I really sit and think about it, when I force my mind to go back, it occurs to me that I am not writing about violence, no matter how many villains my protagonists slay nor how many innocents fall prey to my monsters. What I am writing about is adventure, about a seven-year-old boy’s version of violence.

I have seen real violence, if only a little as compared to others, and I do not write about that. It is too painful to write about, but I can write about fake violence, which isn’t even violence in the first place. I can write the thrilling dreams of a little boy who has yet to taste real violence, because that is who I once was, and perhaps who I want to be again.

High Percentage Shots and Experiments

2012-02-16T09:53:00.000-08:00

The nature of life and modern ethics is that there is some stuff we can't, under normal circumstances, know. And it would be wrong to find out. That sometimes leaves us passing along questionable information-- questionable as to source and accuracy of transmission.

One example- a strike to the temple. I have read and heard from uncounted instructors how devastating a strike to the temple can be. Some talk about the skull being thin there, some about the geometry of a flat place on a generally curved skull, some about the trigeminal nerve...

But you know what? I've been hit there. A fair amount. And hit people there. And seen people hit there. And not once did it have any effect whatsoever. Maybe once, but that was with a tool. And sometimes the little blood vessel under the skin bursts and you get a nice, dark, bulging hematoma...

My sources say it is a high-percentage target. My personal experience has it as a near zero.

I only know one striking target that hasn't failed in my experience; and asking around, with the usual caveats (not missing, proper hitting) no one else has seen a failure either, despite size, strength, drugs or altered states of consciousness. One technique... and it's not something you can really play with because relatively severe injuries are common. (And, no, I'm not going to describe it here. Most likely you already know it, anyway.)

I have another small batch that I consider high percentage. But there's stuff I don't know. Got to play with an excellent BJJ instructor over the weekend who commented that a rabbit punch in a certain position wouldn't have an effect. Not that either of us were eager to risk a brainstem/cervical shot to be sure...

Hmmm. There's a target band that I really like. Essentially a reset button for the human brain. It has been incredibly reliable for me. It's also considered deadly force in most jurisdictions. But the mechanism of injury may not be what I think it is. If it is percussion to the brainstem, then the position we were discussing wouldn't matter. If it relies on creating even a minor and temporary separation of the upper cervical vertebra or C1 and the skull, then simply splinting the head against the opponent's shoulder would provide more than enough protection, at least at the only reachable angle.

And the only way to be sure would be to get a bunch of stup... I mean young, healthy martial artists and try it out. Full intention of finding the point (angle, force, position, freedom of action vs. splinting) that transmits the maximum shock to the brainstem.

It's a good core technique. I've given (and received) extremely severe concussions from relatively light force at the right angle. But waiting for the happenstance of combat (especially without access to an institutional memory in the form of thousands of force reports) gets small amounts of random data, often not clearly remembered.

Maybe we need a secret society of lab rats willing to put their brains on the line.

For science.

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Guest blog post tomorrow. Some author is doing a blog tour.

Port Townsend this weekend, two day seminar + Conflict Communications.

All of March in California, with seminars in Granada Hills, Oakland, Santa Cruz and San Diego.

"Talking Them Through: Crisis Communication with the Emotionally Disturbed and Mentally Ill" is up on SmashWords and Kindle

Student Profiles

2012-02-14T10:34:00.001-08:00

It's not always possible, but when your focus is on teaching students, as opposed to teaching material, it's kind of imperative to know who the students are.

Rookie officers, for instance, need a solid base. Sometimes that even involves detailed explanation of the problem, e.g. the different kind of force incidents, force policy and basic priority setting and effective motion. Experienced officers, on the other hand, may need a refresher on policy and most could use some practice at articulation, but the physical part has to center around taking what they are going to do (you will not, in eight hours, entirely replace something that has worked well for twelve years of a career) and making it better.

People with a duty to act have entirely different needs than people who have a preclusion requirement in their self defense law. Someone who has trained for a decade in a hard contact style will have different holes and advantages than someone who has only trained in air. Men are rarely exposed to the types of violence women are. Someone who expects to be traveling on the Mexican side of the border or working in Pakistan or taking pictures in Somalia has very, very different needs than someone doing the same job in St. Paul.

Some general categories of information for developing a student profile:

Safety Information:

Ranging ability (People who practice mixed-weapon sparring, for instance have skills at ranging that people who work at one range won't be able to see)
Know the rules for stopping action (tapping, safety words)
Too arrogant to surrender?
Breakfall abilities
Previous injuries
Previous traumatic experiences
Relevant psychological issues
Relevant medical/medication issues

Physical Ability:

Largely strength, skill, endurance and pain tolerance. Mostly how physical they want; how physical they can handle; and how physical they need. Those are three separate things.

Experience

Training experience-- because that will drive expectations, blindspots and habits. A lot of SD training with experienced martial artists is showing the disconnects between what they have learned about opponents and what they need to learn about criminals.
Life experience-- This is huge. Someone who has been victimized in the past will have different needs and triggers than someone who has never experienced serious trauma and very different reactions than someone who deals with violence professionally. One of the instructor's roles is to turn all experience into an advantage. Because it is, but not always in the same way.
There is a third aspect that can come from either training or experience. Call it 'heart' or whatever. But sometimes, especially in long-term training you have to (forgive the melodrama) forge spirit. Toughen them up and get them used to decisiveness. And there are other groups where this problem (which can be difficult and is usually time-consuming) is handed to you.

Possibly the most important: Understand why the student is there. And this can be huge, because frequently what the student wants, what the student thinks he or she wants and what they need are three very different things.

To be safer or to feel safer?
To polish or improve a skill?
Inspiration (a lot of experienced people start looking for new things when they hit a plateau. It's a good tactic.)
To learn a skill? Or understand where a skill they already have fits? Or find the pressure point where skills break down?
To stress themselves?
To test themselves?
Because all of their friends are doing it?

And so on. There are a lot of potential reasons and many of them are subconscious. The people who show up to SD classes but don't want to sweat usually want to feel safer, not be safer. And the ones who squirm and go into denial when they get some hard truths want an amulet, a magic cross to keep the vampires away. Some try to find arguments... they are the ones who wanted a previous world-view confirmed, not get new knowledge.

The goal is to get the maximum relevant information safely into the student.

Maximum

Relevant

Safe

What I Want

2012-02-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

I want a grumpy waitress who is a little overweight with a bad dye job. She calls strangers "Hon" or "Sweetpea" when they sit down to order breakfast. She probably needs, and richly deserves, a foot rub when she gets home. I'm a little tired of trim men in dress shirts hovering around like you might not know how to eat by yourself and pretty young girls clearly just going through the motions hoping to be 'discovered' and start their real life.

I want to look at a menu and see things that a working man would eat for breakfast. Sausage and gravy instead of cream brie or 'market berries.' A menu designed for fuel where the average job involves burning calories instead of the menu for a place where the average job is looking as young and thin as possible.

Young women have been checking me out. It made no sense. I'm dressed a little different than the average, but between the tourists, the different classes and the different ideas of style there really isn't a standard here. You can't (correction, I can't in only two days) reliably pick out the locals by dress. So why the checkout? I'm not pretty. Not distinctive. And the attention is coming from a very definite demographic. (If everyone was checking me out, I'd take a hard look at my dress and mannerisms and local standards and adjust.)

Then it hit me. Age, demeanor, gender... I'm edging into the 'potential sugar-daddy demographic.' The other, other, other career path for a young lady down here.

Everyplace is different, and this place is beautiful. The ocean is warm enough to swim in, by Oregon standards. A little rain, a lot of sun. One spectacular sunset. And the people I've met have been wonderful. Even the traffic (granted I'm here on a weekend and in a nice area) looks smooth, uncluttered and even polite.

But I think I'm missing the Pacific NorthWest just a little bit.

And I hope all the grumpy waitresses of the world have someone at home to give them a foot massage.

Five Days

2012-02-11T17:38:00.000-08:00

Annaka asked a question: if you wanted to take a group of women, strictly from the self-defense perspective, from zero to where you wanted them to be, how long would it take?

Instinctive answer was five days. Want to try to be a little more specific here.

Day One: The Theoretical Day

-Intros, goals, safety briefing, teaching philosophy, what I don't know

-Fear versus danger; fear management versus danger management

- Violence Motivations, Maslow model and Triune Brain from ConCom

- Violence Dynamics including Social, Asocial, Asocial Masquerading as Social, Deviant Social and cyclical violence

- Avoidance and evasion

- Context: Ethics and Law; breaking the freeze; aftermath

- SD Law

- Gender Differences in Violence

- Logic of Violence Method

- Individual Victim Profiles

- Violence for communication versus violence for effect

- Three natural strategies

- Mindsets

Day 2: Physical Day

- Not fighting. Close range assassinations.

- 'A' Targets. Easy, Reliable, Incapacitating

- 'B' Targets. Require strength and or practice. Incapacitating.

- 'C' Targets. Require skill and/or luck. Incapacitating.

- Power generation

- Other options: Movement and unbalancing

- Principles: balance; exploiting momentum; exploiting gravity; structure

- Immediate Action

- Fight to the Goal

- Counter-assault

Day 2 Evening: Field Exercise 1: Reading Terrain

- Cruise local area for ambush zones; E&E protocols and principles; Tags; Target-rich environments.

Day 3: Physical Day

- Safety Briefing

- Counter-assault Practice

- Takeouts

- One Step. Special emphasis on what it is and what we are NOT doing, e.g. practicing fighting.

- Targets and Targeting Drills

- Close range strikes

- Close range Kicks

- Take downs

- Leverage points

- Blindfolded work

- Counter assault practice

Day 4: Physical Day

- Safety Briefing

- Counter Assault Practice

- Moving a body

- Wall work

- Environmental fighting

- Weapons and Improvised weapons

- Ground movement

- Striking from the Ground

- Application and limitations of pain; tactical use of pain

- Weapon access under assault

- Mass brawl

- Counter assault practice

- Messy drill

- Individual fears and concerns brief and brainstorm.

Day 4 Evening: Field Exercise 2: Reading People

- Urban anthropology and victim/threat assessment practice

Day 5: Scenario Day

- 2 targeted scenarios for each participant. Each scenario debriefed to a peer jury regarding both tactics and legal justification.

- Articulation wars

- Tactical considerations to include the presence of children and babies

I think that would cover things. It's a lot of information, but not overwhelming if it is taught correctly. Everything interconnects and almost everything can be connected to common experiences, so it becomes a way to think and a way to move instead of stuff to remember. Might also add a daily debriefing that would include learning how to conduct an after-action debrief.

Love and Infatuation

2012-02-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

The difference between love and infatuation can be distinguished (in this model, for my purposes, in this post) as how accurately you see.

If she (or he, or it... we'll get to that) is the prettiest and the funniest and the smartest; if everything she (or he or it) does, no matter how stupid, is actually very clever on a deeper level... that's infatuation.

When you can see the flaws and still think, "This is right" it's probably love.

It applies to martial arts, too. People fall in love with an art or an instructor and sometimes the critical faculties disappear. Back in the '70's (that's 1970s to you whippersnappers) I read an article in a martial arts magazine trying to explain why the new contact kickboxing circuit was a bad idea and completely unnecessary. The author explained that a good point-sparrer because of his years of training in control and precision, could 'toy' with a street thug.

Control and precision at missing, basically.

You'll get it from almost every rookie in almost every system. And you'll hear it from the groupies and fanboys. And you'll hear it from the people who have found something damn close to a religion. Sometimes it's honest, though dumb or misguided. The guy who said that 'because MMA is the closest thing to real fighting, anything against the rules must be against the rules because it doesn't work' probably really believed it. He had accepted his religion as the highest possible standard of 'proof of effectiveness.' Therefore anything not within his religion must not rise to even a low level of effectiveness.

Same/same with RBSD instructors who insist that knowing self-defense law will somehow confuse and freeze their students. For what ever reason they didn't learn it coming up and, when you are infatuated, every blemish is a beauty mark.

Love is different. I love K, but she is not and can never be all things. If I have to go through a door I want Mike. For talking about stuff like this, it used to be Sean and Mac, but that list is growing. If I need a doctor, K can't step into that role. But I will happily spend the rest of my life with her. Somehow, in that process, I won't depend on her to be everything.

With combatives or martial arts, it's the same. Your art isn't complete. Get over it. Unless it covers everything from talking down emotional people up to small unit tactics and firearms, (and adjusts for you whether you are in the best shape of your life or old and injured) it is not complete. That's okay. You aren't complete either. Part of being human.

But some of them are damn good, and some of the ones you find damn good might not be a good fit for me and vice-versa. I loved judo and classical jujutsu. They made me better (and that's one of the things with my personal version of love-- it makes me want to continuously improve, to become worthy). But they had holes. Judo had few fast finishes; it concentrated on a level of chess-match that I rarely had time for and it trained against itself instead of the attacks I routinely got. JJ was beautiful for ambush survival, integrating a fighter, and paid proper respect to weapons... but it had almost nothing for the lower end of the force continuum.

But both of them were sweaty, physical and hands-on, something else I tend to like in love. And infatuation, actually. Hmmmm. Strike that whole sentence. I just like sweaty action.

Is infatuation bad? I'm not sure. Because I've experienced love and found it to be deeper and stronger, I tend to focus on the delusional aspects of infatuation and worry about the almost inevitable crash. But whether it is a first crush (except for the angsty stuff, let's amend that to the first mutual crush) or a rocking new ultimate unbeatable martial art, you don't often see people happier than infatuated kids. So maybe it's not so bad.

But I still encourage all of you, if you haven't already, to find something that fits. Something that you will be happy with and love, eyes wide open to what it truly is and what it isn't, for the rest of your life.

Manipulating a Committee

2012-02-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

Some day I am going to go through the draft file on this blog and finish some stuff. Started to write about friends and how they keep me on an even keel; how your friends tell you who you really are. Then I got all maudlin.

Noticed something today and I'm not sure what to think about it. Most of the times I've used it accidentally, but it could be a tactic...

People are essentially lazy. That's not a bad thing, it's true for almost all animals. If they aren't hungry or horny they conserve energy.

People also have this incredible and sometimes pathological fear of being left out. A kid will go to a movie he knows is crappy if all of his friends are going.

The first time I noticed was with "Meditations on Violence." The publisher was hesitant, since they hadn't published anything quite like it. They were going on four months without a solid answer about whether they wanted to publish it. Four months is a long time in my environment, especially since I had just moved into investigations. The learning curve was pretty steep. Going over the draft I thought of a ton of stuff I wanted to add or expand.

So I sent a polite note saying I was withdrawing the manuscript from consideration since I didn't feel it was current. Got a phone call and an offer immediately.

Working in a dedicated team is good. Trying to get work done in a committee sucks. My usual reaction was to just finish the project, sign everyone's name to it and present it. But I noticed something. If you announce that it is finished and you are ready to present it, everyone immediately jumps into action to get a hand in on what should already be a finished work. Suddenly all the people who couldn't be bothered to do their assigned tasks are trying to do them and redo and undo other people's assignments.

Curious. Sometimes it bugs, as now when I have to redo an entire project because a resource was withheld until I finished without said resource.

But I think it is something I could definitely use to force action from a generally inert thing like a committee.

Goals in Teaching

2012-02-06T13:25:00.000-08:00

I don't want to teach forever. Not talking about my career goals, I'm talking about the students. I don't want a student-teacher relationship.

I've never been comfortable in any relationship with a great disparity of power. Some of that is how you look at it. A bad boss has way more power than you. A good boss in the exact same situation has way more responsibility, duties and resources. Same thing, but that simple reframe makes a huge difference.

In an LEO agency, I would occasionally see supervisors and instructors withholding information. When cornered, it was clear that they were teaching or supervising underlings. Juniors. They were focussed on preserving the power dynamic.

I never saw it that way. As an instructor, I was teaching colleagues. I was teaching people who, one day, if I really screwed up, would be my back-up. If I knew more about a thing, I taught or shared. If I knew less, I learned.

In all that time, and even now, I never really had or wanted students. Just colleagues to bring up to speed.

I'll be in that teacher role. I accept that. But the goal is to get out of that role as quickly as possible. To transmit skills and confidence so that the students feel qualified to get in there and play. To make sure they understand that their own understanding of themselves and their world is at least as valuable as anything that can be taught. To bring all levels of observation skills as far as I can. Pass on what I know of how to experiment and test. To make each and every one a teacher, so that they can teach themselves. And me.

The First 3 to 5

2012-02-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

This will be a rehash of some things I've said before. Hmmmmm. Maybe I'll just make a post with a list of all the things I say too much and then quit writing? Naaaaah. New questions come up all the time.

Making certain people proficient at violence is simple. Not easy, but simple. The physical skills are not complicated nor difficult. Good basic skills, realistic expectations and then you put them in the situation, surrounded by veterans or at minimum backed up by veterans and most people will develop proficiency. Simple. Not easy and certainly not safe, but simple.

Works for most people, with at least one caveat-- the person has to want to be proficient. Someone who actively seeks to undermine being tested (not showing up, looking for a desk job, tying shoes before running to a back-up call...) won't get there. And there are a few people who never quite get there, and that can work a couple of ways-- someone who just can't hurt someone else will never become proficient at violence. And some one who can't control their anger may do things and survive things, but they will never meet my definition of proficient.

The core question for civilians is that most won't have the multiple encounters it takes to access skill. According to Ken Murray in "Training at the Speed of Life" the Air Force set the requirements for Ace at five kills because the first 3-5 were luck. Until some magical threshold, somewhere in the 3-5 range (I estimated 20-50 for unarmed encounters, but maybe I was slow) no one remembered, much less used, their training under the stress of combat. You survived the first handful on luck and instinct...and if you could do that five times, you probably had good instincts.

When you hit the threshold, you had a fighter with good instincts who could access all of his training, and that defines formidable.

For civilian self-defense, this is the big problem. How to get someone who doesn't necessarily have good instincts through the first encounter. These are the victim profiles, the people that need a chance. They are also the group with the most stacked against them.

The weird part, and what I really want to write about, is that sometimes we know what doesn't work. Complicated patterns, anything that requires calculation or prediction isn't likely to be accessible when the neocortex steps aside and the hindbrain takes over. Maybe after the threshold number, but not in the first one. Repetitive drilling of unnatural motions puts you in conflict with your own body and mind when you need things to be together most. If those repetitive, complicated, unnatural motions were practiced against attacks that don't happen, even worse. And telling fairy tales of what attacks are like or what your techniques can do... maybe it works. The Ghost Shirt society did pretty well in their first battle, believing bullets would bounce. But I still don't think lying to students is ever good.

We know (and by 'we' I mean other people) things don't work...and we still do it that way. We teach that a ridiculously obscure formula will give us the power to safely and without side effects put large men to sleep. Or we drill, drill, drill against attacks that don't don't don't happen. Because as teachers we have so much ego tied up in our years of training that we would rather provide a bad answer than admit that we have none.

That's wrong. It is managing fear, making us feel better, while doing absolutely nothing for danger. It makes no one safer.

Maybe. There's a lot of bullshit and misunderstanding, but almost every technique you drill hard at will have a use in real life. It may not be the block you were taught it was, but most of the motions are pretty efficient and they will stand you in good stead. Provided you survive to your threshold number of encounters so that you can access them.

There's also some data that what works at the instinct level, before the threshold, may not be the same skills or mindset that works after. Sanford Strong's research indicated that the most important survival element for victims of violent crime was not size or skill, but the ability to turn fear into a righteous rage. But rage almost always hurts a skilled fighter (though that, again, may be my opinion and based on an environment where we were expected to show complete self-control).

In Maslow's hierarchy, these would be the people tapping into their lowest level of survival brain and they would fight completely without skill, much like a drowning victim. No skill, but very dangerous. Past the threshold fighting is a marriage of higher brain function with animal intensity.

Basic point is that once we know what doesn't work we have a responsibility not to cling to it. If we do so, we do so for our own egos, not to make anyone safer. We need to be honest with our students and we need to look for new ways, or old ways that worked better. Other ways.

There is some stuff that helps, and again, almost every style and system has it. Operant conditioning or contact response or flinch training or whatever you want to call it will maybe get you through the first half second. That's important.

Good scenario training can help you adapt to the natural environment of conflict. It can also push a student to use judgment, bringing higher and lower brain functions together under stress.

Good information never hurts...

Homecoming

2012-02-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

D's home. Our home, anyway, but on this continent it is his home, too. He looks good. He finished Basic and AIT as the oldest man in his unit. He's the honor grad, as well. And a citizen (YAY!). He's a good man to have in my country. D was my translator in Kurdistan.

Picked him up at the airport in his dress blues, which are almost as ugly as our old dress greens were. Steak and long talk. Kept him up too late, but that's what happens when friends get talking.

The daughter made him a poundcake, something new.

So yesterday, a little cruising through town and then a long sit on the deck, crystal blue skies and a piercing wind. Narghila with watermelon tobacco, and talk. What he saw in BCT and AIT that he liked and didn't (my experience is out of date, but I too remember a qualitative difference between the people who joined for combat arms MOSs and those who sought support roles). The value of a good senior NCO.

We talked about old friends, about how the mountains of Northern Iraq can seem so remote and untouched though they have been inhabited since before humans were Homo sapiens. And, as old friends do, we solved all of the worlds political problems. No, not really. We actually wound up listing all the ones that no one seems to be anticipating.

And he talked of his plans. Old school working man ambition. Military. Get his masters while in, saving his GI Bill for his doctorate when he gets out. Settling in a place where a doctorate in petroleum chemistry married to a PhD in geology who are fluent in at least three languages each will have opportunities.

No doubt whatsoever his life is hard now. Being separated from family. New culture. Adapting to military customs. Full loads of work and study. But D is focused on a future and following a plan.

And he is a pleasure to hang out with.

Nothing Special

2012-02-02T10:50:00.000-08:00

This ties back heavily to the last two posts.

We all have things we like about ourselves. Special traits and abilities. Things that set us apart. Things that make us proud.

Probably the thing I like most about myself is that I rarely need approval. Peer groups and expectations have little power over me. Criticism is criticism and I milk it for information, but don't think it is about me. I like being the watcher in the corner of the room. I'm happy to walk the perimeter while the big wheels make their big deals and network.

It is almost a superpower. It allows me to blend in and make friends in many cultures. Things get done because it doesn't matter to me who gets the credit. We do the job, lieutenant gets the praise, Captain does the press release... everyone is happy.

It is almost the direct opposite of the personalities that Charles pointed out, the ones who can't distinguish between good and bad attention. Almost the direct opposite and almost exactly the same. Because in a deep level, I don't distinguish either. Neither is very powerful, but praise makes me almost as uncomfortable as criticism.

Talked a few weeks ago with a friend who shares some of these traits. What do we have in common? A childhood where any attention could be actively dangerous. We both learned very early that it was better to be invisible than to be good. With time and work and skill, we turned that into something to be proud of. Handled a little differently we may both have been one short step away from a groomed victim profile.

Same with the ones who don't distinguish between positive and negative attention. A very particular type of ass in normal life, but with time and work and skill thriving on both kinds may be what it takes to be a celebrity.

Nothing special. The personality trait I am most proud of may have been nothing more than a random result of early conditioning. This ability that makes me so special (in my own mind) might be just luck. I deserve credit no more than a turtle plodding through a maze. Some take the right turn, some don't. Some are in mazes with different rewards than others. All the ones who don't die adjust. Just turtles, just living.

Then the human tacks on an elaborate story of struggle and triumph, heartbreak and glory. An elaborate, fragile, wholly imaginary story.

I think this is why there was so much backlash against the Behaviorists long ago. It explained everything, was open to rigorous experimentation and study... but left no room for the story. No place to feel special.

It is a pretty deep abyss to look into: The possibility that everything you have done and been is...

What? Luck? Nothing at all? Random? Protoplasm responding to pain and pleasure?

This is what I think about when I snap awake at three AM, like I do most nights.

Bonus points: Did you notice all the weasel words in this? The 'may' and 'mights' and 'possiblies.' Not sure I like looking into this abyss much either.

Justification: Example

2012-01-30T15:32:00.000-08:00

I tend to be nice because it works. I can come up with rationalizations and reasons about why nice is better than nasty-- better for me and for society. But I don't think, deep down, that is what is going on.

I can be a dick. There are times when it is appropriate and works, but those times are relatively rare. I tend to be nice instead. Not because of any big ideals. No global ethic or right-or-wrong. Not even because being nice is a more effective strategy more often. Those things may all be true. I believe they are. But they are the rationalizations and justifications, not the reason.

Being a dick increases friction. It makes my life harder. My human brain has reasoned out all the other stuff I said above. A turtle wouldn't need any of that. 'Life is easier' is reason enough.

It's not universal. Some people eschew the 'nice' strategy and go for the 'jerk' strategy because it works-- for what they want or want to avoid. Some like friction. Some are jerks to get left alone, which also decreases friction. Some enjoy even negative attention. And being nice and having friends does take effort.

No two people like or value the same things in the same way. Did you automatically try to figure out a 'why' for that? Nature? Nurture? Seeking justification? Is the simple truth that people are different too simple?

Some people look for attached meanings, and see them for what they are. Same with attached reasons.

Or...

Justification

2012-01-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

Kris Wilder and Teja Van Wicklen are very different people. Talk to them in close succession, though and they might be nibbling at different edges of a big problem.

One of the drills I used to suggest for rookies (it's in the Drills manual) is the articulation exercise. Basically, most of our decisions are faster than conscious though. In "Blink," Gladwell described several studies that show that decisions are routinely made before the entire question is even heard. Most of our mental power doesn't go to making decisions. It goes to rationalizing those decisions.

Kris brought out that people also feel a need to rationalize who they are. We rationalize our emotional decisions. 'I feel' or 'I like' aren't enough. We want a reason, and that leads to an ugly dynamic.

I like orange ice cream better than rocky road. I just do. But there is a human tendency to want more. If I like something better, it must be better. If it is better and I see it and you don't, you must be wrong, stupid or evil...

As long as our reasons are enough, the slippery slope doesn't really exist. I like things, you like other things. At the most rational, if I like Islay scotches and you like Highlands, we don't have to share. More for me. Yay. The extrapolation, the rationalizations and the justifications are where people let themselves do truly hideous things.

Our ugliness rarely comes from who we are, maybe, it comes from the story we tell about why. Killing people may or may not be wrong in a given circumstances... but the rationalizations, the ideology that justifies it are where genocide comes in. Where things turn from bad to evil.

Justifications can present laziness as idealism. And that makes it attractive. Or fear as solidarity. That makes it good. So say we all. Hmmmmm.

The level of self-analysis critical to the articulation exercise stops there. How many people, if any, could go deeper? Could peel away the justifications and bullshit rationalizations and see who they truly are? Admit why they really do what they do?

Get this-- I don't think it would be bad. I don't think most people have dark reasons for what they do. I think the truth would be simple, and humans are far more afraid of being simple than being dark. There is more romance and a better story in dark and hidden meanings. I think deep down, most of us are about as complicated as a relatively smart turtle.

Teja's contribution from the other side: Have you noticed that if someone is the victim in an abuse cycle, they never describe what happened as an assault or an attack? Is that why most don't really defend themselves? But if you try to intervene, try to help, THAT is seen as an attack and the defense mechanisms go wild.

Hmmmm. Assault with black eyes and broken ribs is just a misunderstanding, a loss of control...

But asking about it is treated as a threat.

That's some pretty intense mental gymnastics. Lot's of roots of behavior lie in the justifications, the stories we tell ourselves and others.

Just a half-formed thought spawned by good talks with good friends.

Numbers

2012-01-27T13:27:00.000-08:00

Really overwhelmed in writing right now.

Finished the (hopefully) last review of "Force Decisions" the citizen's guide to understanding police use of force. Not terrifically happy with the title or the cover, but those aren't my decisions. Due out in April.

In the last or second to last review of the Collaboration with Lawrence, "Scaling Force" due out in September.

Just finished two articles for Concealed Carry Magazine and one for the Los Angeles chapter of the Guardian Angels.

Finished and uploaded two e-books, the fifth year of the blog (2009) and the book on crisis communication with EDPs. Which makes for eight e-books out.

The webpages for the seminar in Port Townsend in February and four seminars in California in March are up and running.

"Meditations on Violence" is at 99 reviews on Amazon. Who will be #100?

Life is good.

3-Way

2012-01-19T18:03:00.000-08:00

Good times with Mac, Maija and Edwin. Lots of thoughts, some insights. Found some of my own inclinations. For the first time I noticed that with training blades I target pretty much anywhere available but with sharps I immediately focused on the face. Interesting. Not sure what it implies.

One of the thoughts-- three ways of learning.

You can be taught. That's brains-downward stuff. It can give new information and polish skills and sometimes even cause a paradigm shift. It's not necessarily the best way to train, but it might be the safest and it is really the only one where a teacher has a necessary role.

I also don't see this kind of teaching doing deep work. You can't really teach adrenaline, you have to feel it. I have never seen a teaching that could change character, that could make someone brave. Or cool under fire. Or kind.

I see that kind of stuff in modeling. Someone who spends time with people with certain qualities-- like bravery, but it works for negative stuff to-- tend to grow those qualities. That's one of the reasons why it is critical to spend time with the highest quality people who will tolerate your presence. You will become more like your peer group over time.

I think this is one of the power of cultures. Not tribal or national... my dad was a Korea-era vet. Hunting camp was an annual ritual that included him and his buddies from the army sitting around the campfire and telling stories. I think a lot of growing up in many cultures is guided by stories around a campfire. You can learn the skills of hunting, but you model the attitudes.

Stories, modeling, bonding... this is where the novice gets a heads-up about what to expect. learns about fear and freezing, whether that is called 'choking' or 'buck fever'. Learns that good strong men are not oblivious to what they have seen and what they have done. It's huge, both in preparing someone to walk into the ugly and also, by telling the stories and preparing the next generation, it is an advanced way to process experience.

The third way is through intense experience. Some of this can be done in training. Sometimes I think learning doesn't really, really happen in intense experience. Not cognitive learning, anyway. By the time you can handle the adrenaline (and this is where the cognitive, intense connections are made) it doesn't really count as intense experience anymore. Maybe.

Intensity conditions deep, however. And it tests like nothing else. I don't think you can really find out about your core in a classroom. But that's probably bullshit. You just learn different things in a classroom (like how patient am I) than you learn on a cliff or entering a cell.

It can also shift paradigms. When the teaching has been aimed at intense experience, real intense experience can point out huge holes, raise doubt or confirm details. Validate or invalidate what has been taught.

And there's an interesting aside there: When people have invested identity into the learning process and identify with an instructor, how many of them avoid experience for fear of invalidation?

Three ways that I see for this, then: Teaching, modeling and experience. Each excels at giving different things. I don't think you can skip one and really get to a useful level of skill. Maybe.

So, practical application-- do you have teachers, mentors and an avenue for gaining experience?

-----------------------------------------------

CCA (and domestic bragging) announcement:

My lovely wife, writing under the name Tammy Owen has published an e-book detailing our move to the country. Names have been changed, but otherwise...

"House of Goats" on Amazon for Kindle

"House of Goats" on Smashwords

A Nice Big Cup of STFU

2012-01-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

A friend called yesterday and said I should write something about the video of US Marines urinating on Taliban corpses.

He's wrong. I do have an opinion. A strong opinion. But I am a former ground pounder National Guard medic. Not a Marine. The people that need to respond to this, to handle it, are Marines.

Not me. And certainly not any whiny media types with a history of agitating against the military. This will be handled, as it should be handled, by Marines.

Some of the best people I have worked with-- Mike, Craig, TJ, Jon (and I know I am forgetting some) were former Marines. Dedicated, effective men. Dangerous, but above all honorable. They have a tradition of combat and honor older than the country they serve.

Transitions

2012-01-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

The big question in all of this survival training—what training methods exist that will get you through an initial assault? Is there a training system that works, out of the box, in the first encounter?

There are assumptions built into that. Responding to a back-up call is different than being jumped. Just a few seconds can make a big difference in adrenaline control. Going into a situation gives you some perspective and time to evaluate what is happening. Even a second, even if most of the evaluation is subconscious. Being assaulted, you don’t know what’s going on. It’s not just that fighting multiple attackers is different than fighting a single attacker or that armed and unarmed attacks may change what you were trained to do… it’s that you can’t tell, that fast and that close what you are dealing with.

The stuff works. That’s not the issue. I’ve known people who have fired accurately under stress. I’ve used the ‘impossible’ small joint locks in real encounters. But not the first time. People have spent a lot of thought polishing the body mechanics. There is tons of physical stuff out there that works. But if you debrief enough people you will hear again and again, “I knew exactly what to do. But for some reason, I couldn’t make myself do it.”

The failures aren’t physical, they’re psychological.

Ken Murray, in “Training at the Speed of Life” using Air Force data estimates that your skills don’t even kick in until your third to fifth combat mission. The first three, if you survive, it was luck.

That’s chilling. It implies that all of the nifty skills aren’t going to be there on your first trip through the looking glass.

Force professionals have an advantage. A rookie can model veterans. You hang with the guys who have been doing it awhile, hear the stories, get some tips. It settles into your brain that it is ugly but survivable. You can do this. With luck (I don’t think it was conscious, but looking back we tried to do this) with luck, your first Use of Force will be with an experienced partner who can keep his cool and knows what to do.

None of that exists for a civilian self-defense student. There’s no, “The first time you are attacked, you’ll be with Shelly. She’s been being attacked for years and can show you the ropes…”

For most, if they get any serious violence in their lives, it will only be once. There’s no wading pool for assault.

You can be really good at something and there’s a transition when it comes to the next level.

You can be really good at forms, very pretty, and the first time you point-spar, things go to shit. In some cases. You can be really good at point sparring, but your skills go out the window the first time playing at contact. And if the contact was a surprise, point-sparrers tend to freeze, totally vulnerable. If you get used to some contact, the first hard contact has the same effect. And, if you’ve only played striking or only played grappling, the first time you deal with someone who does both… square one.

This is really consistent. Part of drinking the koolaid is believing whatever level you are working at has it all covered and transitioning to a higher level won’t affect you. Whatever you need to say so that you can sleep at night.

The next level, of course, are scenarios. I think they are critical. You must work judgment in tandem with skills. Have to learn to see the problem as global rather than a matter of just physical attack and physical counter. You have to practice adaptability and fighting in realistic environments. You have to train with all of your force options available. You have to learn to realistically assess what you are facing.

You have to… if you want anything to work.

Caveat—and that is why it is so critical to work scenarios with really, really good people. Bad scenario training can screw up everything on that long list of stuff you need.

And, yes, the first time people do scenarios, no matter how well they have done training at any other level, they look like rank beginners. (The exceptions I can think of all had pretty extensive experience in the real thing.) Super shooters or martial arts champions. Side note on the ‘super shooters’: First scenario, it wasn’t that it was bad, but they weren’t doing nearly what they were capable of or what they had trained to do. One comment during the break, that I was going to tell Jeff (their primary instructor that they choked) and they went through the second scenario like precision machines. It was beautiful to watch… but why not the first time?

So, scenario training is important… but my gut tells me it won’t transition to the first real encounter. Not just my gut. One friend was in a shooting post-scenario training. 15 closing to five feet, multiple officers with weapons out, seven hits of thirteen rounds, only two that could generously be called center mass.

Operant conditioning is the one thing that we know works, and it is the best option to get you through that initial assault. But it can’t be complicated. You probably can OC a string of responses and as long as the stimulus is predictable, or the stream of stimulus stays on the script, you’ll probably be okay. But if the stimulus doesn’t stay on the script, you will unconsciously try to and that leads to catastrophic failure, like trying to gun your way through a yellow light in icy conditions.

The other thing about operant conditioning is that it works at the speed of nerve and adrenaline works at the speed of blood. So you can get one good action in before your skills degrade.

If that first 3-5 are luck, OC might be able to buy you some time and turn the tables enough that the bad guy is in a similar situation. It might buy some seconds to create some better luck/

My best guess right now is OC training for the initial assault and chaos play (primarily jujutsu randori). The first to buy time, the second so that sudden motion, multiple hits, grabbing, falling unbalancing, slamming into objects (all the things that make a fight a fight) aren’t novel.

Dogshit

2012-01-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

This has been percolating since November. Sat in on a panel on Heroes in fiction. They really meant protagonists, I think.

Just to get a taste, here's what I think about people who need the 'warrior' label:

http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2009/04/warriordom.html

Needless to say, 'hero' would get more vitriol, except fewer people have the arrogance to claim it. I was taught early that 'hero' is a four letter word for someone who gets his friends killed...and somehow manages to write the report so he looks good. So the panel was about protagonists, not heroes.

Doing dangerous things because they need to be done isn't noble or heroic. It doesn't come from a sense of great passion. It doesn't come from a tortured soul or any of the motivations that writers try to imagine.

It is exactly like cleaning up dogshit.

There's a steaming pile of dogshit in a public place and most people just walk on by, pretending not to see it. A few will get indignant: "Someone should do something." The worst won't even clean up after their own dogs*... just as the politicians will never fix the problems that their policies created.

But a few, a very few clean up dogshit when they see it. Not because it is noble. Not because it resonates with knights on white horses. Not because it is fun and exciting. Not to save the maiden. Because it needs to be done, and if they don't do it, no one will. And if no one cleans it up, sooner or later the dogshit will get tracked everywhere.

So you hold your nose if you have to and you get in there and you clean up the dogshit. As quickly and efficiently as possible. And you try not to get any on you. Because someone has to.

Maybe it's your job and you signed up for it. Maybe it just needed to be done.

Either way, there's nothing noble about it. It just needs to be done. Which I find kind of noble.

*Any decent person will clean up their own mess, pick up after their own dogs.

Gifts and Systems

2012-01-07T14:39:00.000-08:00

Stew of thought.

Affordances, gifts and possibilities.

Open and closed systems and tasks.

First of all, some of the words and ideas came from comments on old posts and I can't remember who wrote what or even when, so I'm sorry if I don't attribute them. If someone wants to point me at the posts, I can fix that in edits.

There are some things that are simple to do and simple to learn. Those are closed systems. Throwing a ball. Learning to write your letters as a child. There are really only a small number of variables. These are things that you can learn by rote. You can actually get proficient merely through repetition.

There are other things, like fighting and, I don't know, LIFE maybe, where the possibilities are nearly endless and the variables are incalculable. Those are the open systems.

Throwing a ball at the garage door or playing catch, the variables are few and you can get better and better. But a million reps of that will only help a little when it is time to throw a pass to a moving player with blockers in the way and big men coming in to tackle you. By the time you've finished first grade you can draw all of your letters, but twelve years of repetition, even into the mechanics of writing doesn't produce authors.

It seems like the key to developing proficiency in the open ended systems is to get in there and play. That's how kids learn video games and they develop a level of proficiency in hours that wouldn't be achieved with months of classroom instruction. That's why immersion teaches languages so much faster. That's why highly trained martial artists sometimes fail.

Part of it is gifts, which is my less-intelligent word for what Edwin calls affordances. You kind of have to learn to see gifts in their natural environment. Rote learning is good for imposing your will on the simple parts of a simple world. When the world doesn't cooperate, you need to be able not only to see that, but to see how...and adapt.

For a class for writers (with Steve Perry) I wrote a few paragraphs about beginners grappling:

Grappling. At first, again, you are like a rag doll in the hands of a good player. Even if you are bigger and stronger, everything you do seems to make his job easier. If you roll away from his pin you roll into a strangle, you pull out of an elbow lock and into a shoulder lock. Everything you do feels anticipated, even expected.

The thing is that a good grappler isn't anticipating everything. There are people way better than me, but I rarely played the game more than three moves ahead. The thing is that once you learn to see it, any move is an opportunity, a gift. A better grappler than you may not be playing you like a puppet so much as just recognizing that any of your options can be played to his benefit. My first judo coach used to say that "Any way you stand and any way you move makes you vulnerable to a throw." You just have to know the right throw.

And grapplers, more than any other traditional martial artists, get in there and play. They play like it's an open-ended system and they tend to be far more adaptable than anyone who learned only by repetition.

And that's an interesting note-- there are levels of openness. Football has far more variables than playing catch, but the variables are far from infinite. Almost any training will limit variables, the system will never be completely 'open'... part of what I do is to try to open things up, at least a bit. And almost all of the carping, telling people that X isn't as realistic as Y boils down to how many variables are excluded.

Which brings up another thought. Living may be the only truly open-ended system... but no one has the balls to live that way. Everyone brings their own rules in to stay in a comfortable zone.

Do you learn faster playing or memorizing? Do you learn deeper playing or memorizing? Is the skill you are trying to ingrain designed for an open or closed problem? Is your training suited to your goal?

Assumptions and Biases

2011-12-24T13:19:00.000-08:00

We all have biases and assumptions as instructors. So does your instructor. We can't help it. We see the world a certain way and certain things have worked for us. The things that worked (for us, in our environment) are where we concentrate our teaching.

An athletic martial artist who has worked as a bouncer will believe and teach that you see things coming and your physical attributes are key.

An instructor who has survived a rape attempt may well believe that the key is unbridled ferocity, slipping the leash. If they won despite disadvantages in strength, size and position they will believe and teach that strength, size and position are secondary to mindset. If they could not even think of a technique in the moment, they will likely teach that technique is irrelevant.

So here are my biases and assumptions, to the extent that I see them (the thing with blindspots is that you can't see them, so there are many I will miss.)

Unarmed arts only exist for emergencies you didn't see coming. If you can predict it and plan it and force is unavoidable, it is stupid to go in without a weapon. For that matter, without getting every advantage you can.
Which means that the basic environment of an unarmed encounter is the position of disadvantage. Bad structure, positioning, footing, injured, overwhelmed and behind the curve.
Almost always, the ones you see coming you can ward off by positioning or verbal de-escalation. As such I've often and (so far) successfully, put myself in positions that weren't tactically optimal in order to talk stuff down (strategically preferable).
I don't think conflict is a physical problem most of the time (see number 3) and even when it is a physical problem, there are minds and social rules and the world involved. The more of those elements you can manipulate skillfully, the better off you are. Sometimes you play the cards, sometimes you play the person and sometimes you play the table.
I expect the threat to have the advantage in size and strength or to be crazy (mental instability or drugs). Because almost all of them were one or the other. Potentially sampling error... but I think it makes sense, since you'd have to be crazy to routinely attack bigger and stronger people.
I believe in the primacy of infighting. This is the prejudice that is most likely to be incompatible with a student's nature. Classical JJ is an infighting system-- weapons were assumed and there was no safe way to finish it at long range. Early I learned that people freak out more when someone tries to close, and that shaped my personality. Thus, by nature and training, I'm an infighter. I tend to reject techniques that keep distance and most of the techniques I prefer (and therefor teach) put you at clinch range. If that's not a good range for you, I'm unlikely to be a good teacher.
I tend not to injure people. That was the preferred outcome on my job-- maximum control with minimum injury. That's shaped a lot in that I have very few strikes I consider reliable. Marc consistently gives me a bad time because I don't always treat potentially deadly threats as seriously as he thinks I should.
Weapons: I'm completely cool with improvised weapons and using obstacles, etc. But for the first ten years of my career, we were not allowed to carry anything. When OC was finally authorized, I just never thought about it. OTOH, my weapon training was completely offensive, centered around hostage rescue tactics with a team. My mindset is completely different when I pack versus when I don't.
I have very weak social instincts. This means that I don't tend to get emotional or competitive when I fight...and I don't really understand why other people do. It's good in that the lack of anger never makes me want to overstep bounds, but some of my basic things- the range, positioning, not bothering to make eye contact, smelling, face contact-- are sometimes hard for others. Many people have to force themselves to grab a face, for instance, whereas grabbing a collar or neck is (emotionally) easier. Just rarely as effective.

There are more, I'm sure. Do this analysis for yourself, your style and your instructor. It all adds up to each of us are training for a generally narrow range of conflict. Including me. Be aware.

Hope you all had a good Solstice.

Illusions of Speed, Illusions of Power

2011-12-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

At some point some of you have met someone who was fast and looked slow. Someone who always seemed to be at the right place, at the right time; someone who never gave you a chance to respond, and yet the person looked relaxed, almost lackadaisical.

I was watching someone a few weeks ago who looked fast. The young gentleman was fast enough that most of his training partners froze. But there was nothing smooth about his actions. It was fast, staccato, choppy. Then it hit me. Choppy looks fast.

Strobe lights tend to freeze people because each visual snapshot shows a discrete amount of motion without the "in between" and our brain fills in that the motion is unbelievably fast. But it isn't. No one moves faster under a strobe light. Everyone looks faster. You can simulate that by using jerky, choppy motions. If you do, not only are the motions not faster than being smooth, they aren't as powerful, either. The quick stops apply brakes to the technique.

Check me on this, but my impression (never really looked for it specifically) is that the jerky 'fast hands' stuff tends to be far more prevalent in non-contact stuff. Largely because non-contact is scored by what looked like impact. Real impact is different.

It does have some advantages. Discrete motions act as discrete observations in the OODA loop and you probably more easily get the OO bounce type of freeze. On that level, the appearance of speed may be better for fighting minds than actual speed. But it isn't nearly as good for fighting bodies. The other thing, maybe the big thing, is that it is okay if you are fighting other people's minds, but if you buy into the illusions, you may be fighting the threat's mind but on some level defeating your own. Coming to believe what in the end is only a trick. A useful trick, but...

Similar stuff with power. What we are conditioned to believe feels strong doesn't necessarily deliver power. From the time we were little kids and dad said, "Show me your muscles" and we flexed our bicep we have the idea drummed into us that strength is about size (big muscles) and rigidity (hard muscles) and static.

It gets compounded with the dynamics of social violence. Most of the conflict we have seen is social and almost all of the violence-- Monkey Dances. And Monkey Dances are about communication and messages. The message is 'look how big and strong I am' and so the person tends to square up (wrong base for power generation, all targets exposed) and turn red (turning pale is the survival response) and go up on the toes to look bigger (sacrificing from the base both balance and power) and to flex and tense all the muscles, looking bigger (and making actions slower and weaker).

We all know, and have been taught and trained that power comes from motion, that loose is quicker and hits harder than stiff, that structure doesn't require muscular rigidity... blah, blah, blah. We know this. But our conditioning says something else.

So we all have a tendency, when afraid or feeling challenged, to tense up. To look big. To concentrate on the illusions of strength instead of what we know about power. If the illusion over-rides reality, you will get generations of people trained to rigidity. You will even get people who can mouth the words (often in a fake Chinese accent) "Life is supple, the only rigidity is in death." Who then turn around and not only move rigidly but fail to think in their rigidity.

And they are completely blown away the first time they see someone demonstrate a ballistic strike. Or a body slam. Or even a good jab.

There is a saying that slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Sort of. But smooth can look slow, even when it is too fast to react to...and jerky will always look fast even if it is not. Relax. Smooth your motions down. If all you need are illusions, it doesn't matter. If you need the real thing, it may not look like you are conditioned to believe.

Training and Conditioning

2011-12-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

Mentioned early, but it deserves some more talk.

I don't mean conditioning in the fitness sense. I mean it in the Behaviorist Psychology sense. It is a subconscious way to learn and we learn the lessons much more deeply than through regular teaching. We also condition faster than we learn.

My mother had been told by her mother that a baby couldn't hold a hard-boiled egg long enough to be injured. She conditioned me to the word "hot" through pain. One time and she could tell me something was hot, even before I could talk, and I would be very careful about touching it. On the other hand, that may be why I don't like eggs very much.

Conditioning is like that. Most of it is accidental. It happens so fast, so subtly, that we don't see it. We rarely exploit it. And some of our best teaching is completely undermined by concurrent conditioning.

My firearms training included hours of dry fire. Jeff believed in form first; that you got your fundamentals before you burned ammo. That was hours of four-count draw, presssssss, pressssss, low ready and scan, muzzle to muzzle, then 360. Reset weapon. Go to retention. Holster. All smooth.

There was one bad habit in the sequence. It was important, because it gave us the trigger pull. If we didn't reset the weapon we wouldn't get that feel. But later, I caught myself starting to reset the weapon in a venue where it was kind of important not to waste ammo by ejecting it onto the ground. I had conditioned the bad habits while learning the skills.

Very closely related to the story every range master tells about officers found dead with expended brass in their pockets because cleaning up the range was just a part of shooting.

We condition lots of small things all the time. With weapons training you can often modify the weapon to preserve the skills safely. Unarmed, that's harder to do. We wind up modifying the skills themselves. We pull punches or respond to taps as if a surrender signal was reliable. we pull up on throws and tell ourselves it is to increase the control for the follow-up when it is really about helping the opponent NOT get injured.

Conditioning is always there. If you practice a technique and reset (something I am guilty of with the counter-ambush material) you condition stopping based on what you did, as opposed to the effect it had.

We condition big things too, and this is something endemic in martial training. If the instructor is so ego driven that he must be the top dog in everything, he may be teaching students to win... but when a student tags the instructor and gets punished for it, the student is simultaneously learning to win and being conditioned to lose. When the student gauges the effectiveness of a technique by what the instructor says versus what the technique does, the student has been conditioned to require outside validation. Conditioned to not believe his or her own senses.

I've written about kids classes before and how the automatic obedience and "yes sir!" that is touted as discipline and respect is also exactly what a predator would want in a victim: conditioned obedience.

Habitual ways of doing things seem to get to the same part of the brain as conditioning. That's what makes a good drill good, and what makes repetition valuable. But repetition of crap is deeply habitual crap. And when the underlying skill you are training for is breaking people, crap has to be there to preserve partners.

Habits and conditioning.

More later, probably. Split up writing over three days and I sometimes lose my train of thought.

3-Way

2011-12-12T13:29:00.000-08:00

There are three ways to look at fighting (millions, of course, but three in this set) that are different, and those differences drive almost every aspect of the encounter. It's very clear, but sometimes people get confused and try to solve problems of one situation from another point of view. That fails.

I hate the word 'fight' because it implies a contest. 'Assault' doesn't work all the time as a word, nor does 'combat' so I'm going to default and use fight, but don't lock up on it.

Take the other guy out of the equation. There are three ways that you can go into a fight: You can go in on the offense, go in as a mutual fight, or be on the receiving end-- defensive.

Going offensive is not the same as being an aggressive boxer. It is a quantum difference. When you are intending to use force offensively, you have a goal. There is something or someone you want, some event that must happen. You do everything in your power to minimize risk. It is a job. Same as mining. You have a goal, you want to be safe.

So, offensively: you gather your intelligence, you choose time and place, you stack every factor you can control in your favor (weapons, armor, numbers, surprise) and you act, ideally never giving the victim a chance to respond in any way.

Good guys and bad guys do this. It is the essence of a military raid or a simple robbery. It is just the smartest, safest way to accomplish your mission.

So what skills do you need? Stealth. Clean hits. Almost any precision skill works here, very well. Emotionally there are differences, but whatever you train, if you have the complete drop, you can shoot like the range or strike like you were only hitting a bag.

Mutual fights have no surprise. Take that back- one of the essences of strategy is creating little pockets of surprise and some people go into a Monkey Dance believing the other guy won't really hit-- but generally, not only do you see these coming but both parties, on some level, have agreed.

They are very social. Consciously (sport) or subconsciously (Monkey Dance) they have rules. They almost always have an audience. Mutual fights are not about resources or survival, they are about communication: "I am a bigger monkey than you" "I deserve respect" "That's my woman" Stuff like that.

An aside- I like sport. Sports MA tend to be (IME) the least delusional of all martial artists (including RBSD) because they know exactly what they are doing and why. Most of us went into sports and competition to find out who we were and what we had.

In a lot of ways, mutual fighting is a testing ground and much of what it tests is attributional. Strength, speed, endurance, will. Many of which an offensive attack is designed to neutralize.

So what are the skills? You need the skills that you are testing. Boxers need boxing skills and judokas need judo. Then you need the attributes and then you need the ability to read an opponent and lead him and do all those things that add up to mat sense or tactical thinking.

A defensive fight is what happens when you are on the receiving end of an offensive fight. The bad guy has set everything up to his advantage. Whatever attributes you have trained (strength, speed, endurance) he has either found a way to neutralize or will simply (if he has the option) choose someone else. An unexpected blitz where your movement is restricted, probably coming from a zone where you have little practice or experience delivering power; with structure compromised...

What skills do you need here? The precision skills that work for an attacker won't be an option for you. If you can turn it into something that resembles a mutual fight, that's cool... but how? You can't handwave past that.

Most of the big chances to make things better come well before the attack. Use of terrain, reflections and shadows. Trying not to be surprised enough to ever be completely defensive. But that has limited utility, since these skills come into play when prevention skills have failed.

The skills I think are important? Having been inured to pain and the particular kind of chaos that comes with a blitz attack. Good training in a mutual combat-based system can help with that. Practice working against bigger, stronger people. Awareness and use of the environment and skill at exploiting momentum are probably two of the biggest. An indomitable will that goes to active rage instead of passive fear is critical, and I'm not sure if that one can truly be trained at all.

I see the lessons of these three as largely separate. Even though in any given assault one is offensive and the other defensive, the skills and strategies of the offensive actor wouldn't help the defensive. Nor will the defensive skill at recovery help the attacker. The type of tactical thinking needed in a mutual fight is counterproductive in both the offense and the defense. In the offense, it is unnecessary and the restraint required to balance offense and defense and feint actually impairs hard, efficient forward action. From a defensive position, trying to get 'set' trying to get into the position and distance where mutual fights start takes time and time is damage.

Some times I think I write the same things over and over in different ways.

Thought Process

2011-12-05T14:28:00.000-08:00

Was asked last night about techniques for gun disarms. Not my thing. I've trained them extensively, have a few I trust, but I've never done it for real. Even if I had, how many would it take to be sure? Too many.

But there is a thought process to working things through. Maybe valid, maybe not. It's the one I use.

Bad guy first. How and why would someone threaten you with a gun? Robbery? Intimidate you to a secondary crime scene for something that requires time and privacy? Each of those has very different needs, different geometries and intents.

Under what circumstances would it serves the threat's interest to threaten but not just kill? Does the fact that there isn't just a loud bang tell you something? Is that information you can use?

When and where would this happen? You can't predict perfectly, but sometimes I get the feeling that one of the most common types of armed robberies happen in convenience stores, across a counter. How many practice disarms across a counter? Is there a good technique for that? I can't think of one I'd trust.

There are distances that make a disarm completely impractical, and anyone who has been taught to hold a weapon at retention at certain ranges will be damnably difficult to disarm.

Which all adds up to, "How fricking narrow is the window of opportunity for this technique?"

Then re-examine the question. Because disarming is not the goal. Not getting shot is the goal. Whether that means getting to cover, disarming, creating distance or shutting down the brainstem (none of which are completely reliable) isn't dependent on what you are good at. They prioritize on which will be fastest.

Then, and only then, if disarms are the option, it has to be based on the geometry. That's just biomechanics and any martial artist who has played with another body should be able to see what has the best chance to work. Which motion works with the threat's joints (e.g. it is almost always easier to shove the weapon towards the threat than to pull it away from you). Which motion will get the barrel off your body fastest (I've seen and despised techniques where you pan your own face). That's just a matter of seeing.

Doing drills, almost anything works, provided you do it with full commitment and no telegraph. Action beats reaction very, very consistently. But if you haven't practiced untelegraphed explosive movement... not good.

And this is the part where I rant about technique. I don't like technique dependency. Whether it was the complicated, multi-step locks and handcuffings we were taught at the academy or simple disarms.... grrr.

Here's the thing. I can reliably make the very first action just like I want. Whether that is a drop step pass-parry or slapping a wrist doesn't matter. But people don't react or flinch or anything the same. Anyone who says, "If you do 'X' the threat will do 'Y'" hasn't fought people on meth. Calling a four-step move one action doesn't magically turn it into one. The first action, if you can do it explosively, will work. Everything after that depends on your adaptability. Which depends on your ability to apply principles.

Humility

2011-12-03T15:15:00.000-08:00

This came up at a class last night and it keeps coming up.

Last night was a homogenous group, almost everyone instructor level in the same school with, I believe, one guest. So there were a lot of questions that usually get a little debate where everyone tended to agree. Honestly, I don't care that much about right or wrong or who wins a debate. Partially because this violence things is an awfully big animal and right or wrong changes depending on what aspect you are dealing with. Mostly I don't care because you can win all the debates in the world and still be left bleeding and dying when you take your certainty into the bad places.

But the process of debate is important. If you listen. Most don't, just pouncing on the word or phrase that they can use as an opening and not hearing anything else. If you really listen, you question and you learn. It's one of the reasons I value mixed groups and people who question and argue and doubt. Celebrate diversity.

Humility. I am wrong most of the time. So are you. In a universe as complex as this one, the odds of anything we believe happening to be true are very slim. And, as a very wise man wrote, you can't make a good decision about anything you care about. You might luck into one, but anything you care about triggers your limbic system, not your neocortex. If you care you are not using your brain. And that sucks, but denial doesn't change it.

And a corollary-- Have you noticed that the more one knows about something, the less sure one is? And that rabid certainty seems more common in things it is impossible to know? The interested dilettante can explain geopolitics with great confidence and solve all the world's problems... the seasoned diplomat says, "It's not that simple. There may be no good answers."

Humility. I am the least important part of anything I teach. If I could remove myself from the process entirely, I would. It is about the student first, about the subject matter second. Anything in the teaching process that centers on me doesn't serve the student. There are tools. I have talked myself through some very shitty stuff with an internal monologue that starts, "What would Dave say right now?" If it helps and they have time, it's okay. But I want my students strong enough in themselves that they look to themselves to solve problems. I'm happy being an advisor, but not someone they feel a need to please.

We talked last night about all the times when we are teaching one thing and conditioning another. If you are doing multi-man, you may be teaching people how to fight multiple opponents... but because you need to control the contact, you are conditioning them not to hit. The instructor who makes an example out of a student who taps the instructor clearly taught good skills... but by making an example conditions the student to be afraid to win.

Embrace the fact that even the communication between two people is not simple enough to be sure. You are sending a million messages all the time without realizing it, and some will have profound effects, positive and negative, on those who watch and listen. You can improve, all the time, but only if you watch for it, only if you practice and see your intent, your message and the results.

The instructor's ego is one of the most dangerous opponents the student will ever face. Sometimes it is obvious. Martial arts has a hierarchy and a power dynamic and in too many places competency is not tested and compassion is assumed. It is a sweet spot for bullies and predators. Where else can you hurt people and they pay you and say, "Thank you, Master." What bully wouldn't get off on that?

Sometimes it's a notch more subtle: making examples, having your students give you 'feeds' so you can show off things you could never do at speed, changing rules and expectations to keep your students 'off balance' and your own power secure.

And sometimes it is just good intentions gone very wrong: The scenario trainer who wants the students to solve the problem the way the trainer would. The tournament champion who thinks what has worked for him will work for a scared tiny person with no experience or warning. The bouncer/SD instructor who thinks that everything he learned from a hundred fights with drunk college kids will cross over to date-rape defense.

Everyone is different. Every situation is different. That diversity thing again. Have the humility to let your students adapt. To cheat to win to excel. To be better than you and, even if you are stronger and faster and more skilled, give them permission (and maybe practice) at finding a way when your strengths might have trapped you.

-------------

The class last night was good. Good practitioners and instructors who asked the right questions and really got me thinking. Thanks for setting it up, Clifton. And for hosting, Kykle and Shannon. Good times.

Coming Up For Air

2011-12-01T11:34:00.001-08:00

For what it's worth, I have been doing a lot of writing. Just not here. So this will be a catch up: cool stuff, whining, bitching and rants.

Opened my 2012 seminar schedule and got a lot of action. Still working on scheduling since many people don't want to commit to hard dates. It actually makes it easier in that the few who picked gave me anchor points to work the others around.

It looks like January is still open; February will have confirmed private lessons (and maybe an open ConCom) in West L.A.; and a weekend in Port Townsend WA; with an as yet unconfirmed return to Granada Hills; March will be Oakland and San Diego; April/May in Canada; June will be a big month with Israel, Slovenia, the UK and Greece; July and August are clear, but there are two groups I like to hit that time of year, one on Cape Cod, one in Denver; September has fuzzy dates for Minnesota and Granada Hills; October Marseilles; November and December currently clear. Colorado Springs, Montana, upstate NY and New Jersey said yes but without dates.

A lot of openings left, but a lot of time filled as well.

"Force Decisions" and the video version of "Facing Violence" are in the new YMAA catalog, scheduled for release in April and May. Both are new territory. First video, and I know nothing about the video world. I rarely even watch them. "Force Decisions" is about how officers decide when and how to use force. Given the emotion right now, I'm not sure anyone is even interested in knowing the rules. They seem to just want to pick a bad guy and once a side is chosen, all bets are off. So I expect the book to get a lot of flack...and from both sides, since I think many force instructors have considered writing the same book and I'm sure the product won't match what they think it should be. We'll see.

Also, the editing process for FD was pretty hellish.

Tim's manuscript is basically done, just waiting for some more testimonials. (Thanks, David T and LD).

Did two on-line courses for writers in November. One on police force policy; one on weapons and wounds. I think the weapons and wounds might make a good addition to a second edition of Violence: A Writer's Guide. If I ever get the time.

Spent a day in Seattle shooting pictures with Lawrence Kane for the collaboration "Scaling Force" also due out next year.

Sent Kasey Keckeisen the notes from the UofF classes I did for his Ramsey Co. guys in September He made a very nice PowerPoint out of it and now the ChironTraining UofF is officially part of their training. Kind of cool.

(And that got me thinking-- how rare is it for Use of Force to be taught with all the background and concepts? It's the only way I've trained, so running into an agency where 'Factors and Circumstances' hadn't been an explicit part of training was unexpected. Which is the normal baseline? To just read the department policy and state law and send 'em out? Or to go into the cases and reasoning and have them practice articulation?)

The handbook on talking down EDPs is also, basically, done. Got the perfect guy to do a foreword, then a last editing pass and it should be available.

Doc Coray was in town for a long weekend and we got to brawl a bit and sample some microbrews. Next week, TVW will be in town to talk about some projects and see the PNW. She also sent me a draft CD of her audio program for Mommy and Me Self-Defense. Can't recall seeing many recorded books on martial or SD subjects, except for Gavin DeBecker. Considering how much I preferred books to music when I was commuting, I think publishers are missing a big opportunity.

And working on installing a floor upstairs. And Lee wants me to work on an instructor's curriculum. And I need to rewire the stairway light. And somehow get the tool out of the chimney that I dropped. Maybe fix the porch...

Back to the salt mines.

Sea Change

2011-11-23T23:30:00.000-08:00

Sampling error is a big problem whenever you try to figure out what is going on. You surround yourself with people and, at some point, you start attracting people who see the world in certain ways. What follows may simply be the result of sampling error. But I don't think so.

The martial arts world is changing, and the change is fast and the changes are big.

It's coming from a lot of different sources.

The obvious:

There is more information accessible than ever before. You want to argue endlessly about the lineage of some obscure family system, go right ahead. But if you keep doing it, the argument is the point, because we know someone who knows someone who has a cell phone who is right in the freaking village. If the founders's actual physical grandson thinks the argument is pointless...

Anyway, the combination of cell phones and "six degrees of separation"... which is actually closer to 4.7 degrees.

That's not even counting the internet, which has immeasurably increased the possibility of like-minded people getting together. Guess how many people who comment here are cops (or former) and martial artists of long standing with an introspective streak and a desire to understand and explain. Think there are more than a handful of those in any given area? And that's just one obscure blog. It cuts both ways, of course. People looking for new information and to be challenged can find that. People who want their personal flavor of koolaid praised and defended can find that as well.

The prevalence of video. You can actually see how bad stuff happens. No more excuses when you practice defenses against attacks that don't happen.

The rise of MMA. I don't think it's reality fighting or even a good laboratory for what I'm interested in. At some point, two guys of the same size planning to meet with several months notice at an appointed place and time without weapons and voluntarily using the same range of techniques became the benchmark for "reality fighting." That's a big WTF, as far as applicability to self-defense goes. But MMA and particularly the early UFC had a huge impact. It both made people think and question, which was valuable. And it made it unacceptable to hide behind tradition or received wisdom. Put up or shut up. Which was invaluable.

The RBSD...fad? Hard to tell if it is a fad. There is at least as much fantasy in the RBSD world as in the traditional. There are little battles about how real reality is. Is a bouncer's reality real? "I don't hide behind no badge." Is a cop's reality real? "We arrived on the scene..."

Does a RBSD system derived from military arts (designed around young men in peak physical condition and with ROE not related to self-defense law) automatically transfer to the needs of an undersized drunk college girl who badly misread the character of a guy she just met?

But just like MMA, RBSD is getting people thinking.

Teaching methodology, everything from adult learning models to Olympic coaching methods are changing the martial world. There may be a few dojo still practicing exercises known to destroy knees, but they are dying out.

But the biggest change, I think, is in the practitioners. Kris Wilder has been digging into body mechanics that I can only describe as Okinawan internal arts. That would be impressive enough and thirty years ago it would have been (hell, it was) a closely guarded secret. It's impressive that he is studying and teaching it. More impressive is that it isn't enough, not for Kris. He reasons that if the body mechanics are that good, they are universal...and he tests and refines them in judo competition.

When Jake Steinmann heard conflicting information from two sources he respected, he didn't feel a need to choose a side and get defensive. He felt a responsibility not to get his students killed and went to bang it out.

Teja Van Wicklen was a rough, tough martial artist... and then she found, eight months into a rough pregnancy, that none of her twenty years of training applied when she was truly and completely vulnerable. Another instructor might have ignored the truth or drunk some more koolaid or done something to feel better about the situation. Teja realized she needed to rethink the entire process from the ground up.

Jeff Burger... damn. Train with him if you can. Too long a story to go into here.

Testing. Challenging. Looking at real problems. Most importantly, I think, for the first time in martial arts (and this will ruffle a few feathers) we have a significant percentage of serious practitioners who are thinking for themselves. Not taking the word of a 'master'. Not pretending that techniques that failed worked. Noticing that sometimes, "We've always done it this way" has a direct correlation to "Every senior practitioner has had knee surgery."

It's not always cool. Along with the people who are hammering out the new things I hear a lot from people who are quitting. One who put his life on hold to train in Japan for a decade and a half doesn't want to deal with the politics, with the tribal vitriol of people who have never been and done and feel threatened by one who has. One talented instructor hit his funk, "I don't think what I'm teaching is what I think it is. I thought it was self-defense. I thought I was teaching fighting..."

Good people are considering walking away from something they love. That means they can see something big, so big that it frightens them. The rest of us... I don't think we see it as big. We see problems we can change and fix and as we talk and connect, it gathers momentum.

I don't think the martial arts of 2030 will look anything like the arts of 1990. The change we are looking at is big. Deep water stuff.

Offensive, Defensive, Active and Reactive

2011-11-18T15:15:00.000-08:00

Something that has been bugging me for some years and may have cracked it.

You can train not to telegraph, in fact that is critical if you want to have any success in anything involving combatives. But telegraphing is a common problem.

It's always puzzled me that attacks are telegraphed and defenses aren't, even when they are the exact same motion. See something coming at your eyes and you swat it away. The motion may look like a palm strike or a push block. No telegraph. Just a flinch. Decide to make the exact same motion as an attack to the ear or the jaw hinge and, boom. The telegraph is there.

That's bothered me for a while. Offenses are telegraphed, defenses aren't. Even when they are the exact same motion. I wondered if that could be harnessed, if the motions of attack could be instilled to follow whatever neural pathways made defenses so instantaneous and explosive.

There was some personal evidence. I used to have a paradigm for beginners learning to hit. They would start with the form and learn to hit. Then they would decide to hit harder and put more effort into it (and that never really works, the physics for a shot put are the physics of a push, not a strike.) Then most learn to 'throw' the strike, letting it go out loose and fast instead of forcing it to go out in a way that feels strong but is too tight.

And then, for some, the strike would just teleport. The fist would be out and then back at guard instantly, with no conscious thought. No telegraph, with that level. It just happened and usually it was sort of a surprise. It would be a good hit, and it would land before I even consciously saw the opening.

Talking this out with my daughter I realized I was dividing the techniques incorrectly. It wasn't that offenses are telegraphed and defenses aren't, it was that action is telegraphed and reaction is not.

You don't decide to avoid getting hit in the face. It's one of those things that would have really hampered species survival if it took too much thinking. It wouldn't be fast enough. And it's not just instinctive or basic things. Rookies in a war zone don't always hit the dirt when they hear incoming... but once the sound is associated with the result, it becomes an instantaneous, faster-than-conscious thought reaction. No telegraph. Once when I was about sixteen I heard the buzz of a rattlesnake much too close. When I looked down, the .38 revolver was in my hand. No memory, no thought and pure reaction (with very little training or practice in drawing, by the way, but that's another mystery.)

But choosing to draw a weapon, or punch or close or engage or do the dishes... all of those involve a thought process, and act of will, the conscious brain making the unconscious brain (you know, one subset of which is the one that fires particular neurons to nerves to particular muscles that the conscious mind can't even identify) make stuff happen. There are layers in it.

And it can be taught. Rather, it can be conditioned. The teleportation level of striking comes after lots of hard work in live training (and thus too many of the people who get this good have also ingrained pulling.) The brutal speed and effectiveness of the counter-assault/counter-ambush techniques are conditioned response. Clearly offensive in nature, but we teach them as reactive (flinch-based) and protective.

Just one of the mysteries, maybe solved. Maybe I should start a list of all the things I haven't figured out yet.

Speaking For The Dead

2011-11-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

Four major writing projects I want to finish this month. The hardest is Tim Bown's manuscript.

It's frustrating, and sometimes I feel the anger-- and always the responsibility.

Tim was an extraordinary man. I don't use the word lightly. He was a traditional karateka with a big, popular, successful dojo. All the hallmarks of a McDojo. But it wasn't. He loved teaching and he loved karate and he even loved teaching kids. And he was good at it. Then he could go to the Animal List barbecue and earn the respect and the friendship of cops and thugs, traditionalists and non-traditionalists. He could hang with any of the groups without needing to become what and who we were. He was just Tim, and that was cool enough.

I had hopes and plans for Tim. He was a Bulletman, one of the instructors certified under Bill Kipp. The first time we met was for my second seminar in Seattle. He showed up with his armor. He helped coach and safety and played the bad guy. He was an excellent instructor, a good fighter, as egoless as you need to be to wear the suit. He also could act, no mean feat when your face is covered and you are wearing padded armor. Lastly, he understood the problems at the level I was trying to teach and was perfectly comfortable with the layers of violence dynamics and criminal personalities and force law and tactical and strategic judgment.

I had plans for Tim. I think he would have taken civilian scenario training to the next level.

Then he up and died. 32 or 33 years old. Three-year-old daughter. Just decided to go where the rubber meets the road and had begun his job with the Canadian Border Service. Dropped dead. Turns out his body was eaten up with cancer. Maybe for years he had been shrugging off tiredness and pain that might have crippled someone else as "maybe a little overtraining." None of us caught it. Didn't notice anything.

Turns out he wrote a book before he died and had been hoping to get it published. I volunteered to edit it.

It's hard. The book, "Leading the Way: Maximizing Your Potential as a Martial Arts Instructor" is many things. It's a book. It's a message in a bottle from a time and person who has passed. It's a memorial probably more than anything. And it's good.

But it's also a first book and written by a friend. I catch myself wanting to call Tim up. Places I disagree, places I think he said too much or too little. Places where he wrote about the writing, a beginner thing. But he's not here to fix or clarify or even argue. And I'm here to preserve his voice.

Most of the hard stuff is done. Changed very little. Need to do some fact checking, make sure everything is formatted consistently. Put in links and set it up for SmashWords. Add some testimonials... the only hard thing left is writing the foreword.

More on Peace

2011-11-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

Anon1 and Josh both wrote some comments on Peace and Rehabilitation that deserve more space than the comments section.

Josh wrote:

"Do you think though that there are states of affairs -- call it "peace" or what you will -- that are stable situations worth working towards? If there are, what are some of the more important elements?"

My gut reaction is "No." I don't think stability is healthy. I also don't think it is sustainable or occurs in nature. Evolution doesn't stop; and societies continue to change. If change could be stopped and a society or group could be held in stasis, the best outcome I see is an entropy death and the total annihilation of art and creativity, because creativity will always threaten and eventually destroy the status quo. Not talking just art, either. Creativity in science and technology and commerce and agriculture have all far more profoundly improved the lives of average people than any changes in painting or music or literature.

Because people, like all organisms, seek homeostasis this natural change in life is profoundly threatening. That constant tug of war between a changing world and a desire for stability drives a lot of things. Including movements that purport to be about 'making a better world' but appear to concentrate efforts on stopping some of the forces that are directly responsible for the leaps in life expectancy and comfort that we have experienced since the industrial age.

And the last part, with any sort of stability, call it peace or whatever... I don't think you can create an unnatural state without coercion. I think any effective peace movement must, by it's nature, become totalitarian. It can't embrace diversity, since diversity would mean tolerating people who enjoy harming others or see force as an easy means to an end... so in order to get everyone to live in peace, you must first eradicate all the people who don't share that ideal.

But people are creative, and once the majority of people have forgotten the power of force the first person to figure it out will be, effectively, superhuman

I called Anon1 on the difficulty of defining peace except as an absence of conflict.

He wrote:

OK - Peace is the context in which the growth of relationship, culture, and civilization can occur.

That definition isn't static, and it goes back as far as Thucydides...

I don't recall Thucydides ever saying that... but for what it's worth, I'm okay with non-static definitions to an extent, as long as it's not a fudge factor built into the definition. But this definition doesn't hold up at all. I've seen too many relationships, good and bad, forged in open conflict; read too many poems written by soldiers; have a pretty good idea that the laptop I am writing on would never have been invented without the double influences of the Cold War and an essentially adversarial free market.

I'm trying to think of an era of peace. Tokugawa shogunate, maybe? Enforced caste systems with a ruthless totalitarian information system to enforce it? Graveyards are peaceful.

...peace isn't the *absence* of war; it's something *other* than war.

Does this mean (sincere question, not a debating trick) that peace can exist within a war? That this other-than-war peace can exist in a firefight? If you are talking about an internal feeling... maybe. But it is something that could be given to everyone who wants it chemically* while everyone else could play merry hell with violence and I'm pretty sure that's not what anyone else means when they say 'peace.'

More, and this gets close, IMO, to the meat of the disagreement here:

...violence wasn't the only real thing. It was one of the tools you used to achieve a "real" thing.

Part of what disturbs me about your notion that peace is simply the absence of violence ... is that it means that violence is the *only* "real" thing. That not only is violence/peace binary, but that violence is the #1, and peace the #0.

Why? Why not the other way round? Even if things are binary (and I don't think they are), couldn't violence as logically be the void when peace is absent? Why is violence primary?

The world is full of real things. Goals are real things, but so are tools. So in Clausewitz's definition, war and politics are both real. Violence is far from the only real thing. And there are lots of intangible things that I consider real, like love and compassion. But a sociopath's lack of compassion is really hard to define without accepting compassion as a baseline. Vacuum is it's own thing, but only as long as matter exists. Remove all matter and there is nothing but nothing.

Violence is the primary because it is the active force. I can show you videos of violence. I can show you videos of compassion and generosity and kindness and a thousand other active and real things. To show you a video of peace, would I show you an empty piece of space? Or a graveyard? Not a plant growing, those little devils are constantly strangling and shading each other to starvation...

So, not:

I suspect you'd say because you know violence is "real." You've experienced it.

And love and a bunch of other things... but the thing that marked the peaceful moments was a lack of conflict.

It's light and darkness (not in the metaphorical or value sense). Light is photons hitting things; dark is photons not hitting things. We can talk into we're blue in the face and convince ourselves that 'dark' is its own, real, separate thing; that darkness is a thing totally separate from light and photons or argue (and even decide to agree) that the absence of photons is the primary state. And photons are the zero.

But I wouldn't buy it.

So I'm still not seeing any definition of peace other than as an absence of conflict.

I also want to apologize. Nature of the medium is that Anon1 and Josh and I couldn't get together and talk before I wrote, which means that this is unfairly one-sided. So don't take it as a debate. Some smart people got me thinking. This is what I thought. Nothing more.

*When I went in for knee surgery I wanted to watch, so we did an epidural. Just before the surgeon started the nurse injected something into the port in my IV line saying, "This will take the edge off." No idea what it was, but even when blood splattered over the TV screen and the surgeon said, "Shit! We measured it wrong!" I didn't care. Sure felt peaceful. Wouldn't want to live that way.

Older

2011-11-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

It was always abstract. From almost the first moment we met, in a dingy basement apartment off-campus, discussing the probable nutrient value of the fat fly circling the chili, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with K. I wanted to grow old with her. It was always so abstract.

And now we are doing it. Growing old. Not just older.

She has always been graceful, and she is aging with the same grace as she moves, serene in herself the way that she calms others with her presence. Her hair has been silver for a long time, the premature gray I would expect from living with me. She has never tried to color or hide it, seemed unaware at the ethereal beauty that another woman might attempt to mask.

She is so unafraid.

Last night, for the first time, I noticed the translucent skin that I see as a sign of aging. Very fine webs of lines around her eyes and mouth and neck almost under the skin. And I found it beautiful and fascinating. One more thing about this beautiful woman that takes my breath away.

I never thought to grow old, never dreamed to be lucky enough to do so as a pair. Amazing.

And I know, Steve and George, we aren't that old. But I'm close enough to taste it and with K it doesn't seem the slightest bit bleak.

Peace and Rehabilitation

2011-10-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

In a couple of weeks I'll be doing a lot of panels for a local writer's conference. The usual stuff-- violence and bad guys. But they also put me on a panel on 'Peace'. I've been on that one before, with some of the same people. It puzzles me.

Peace is an interesting ideal, depending on how you define it. Like a lot of ideals, it's squishy enough that you can have other ideals directly opposed to your stated ends and throw enough words into the justification to miss the point.

The thing that gets me about peace activists is that peace is not a thing. It is the absence of another thing. Depending on how you define it, the absence of war or violence or conflict. Depending on how you define those, 'peace' ranges from a difficult improbability to an absurd impossibility. In any case where you are looking at an absence, you must look at the thing you want to remove.

You can't effectively work for peace without taking a good hard look at war or violence or conflict (or all three, depending on your definition). And not a knee-jerk, disapproving look, either. A good hard look at why, if something is so bad, it is so prevalent. Why, if something must be fixed, it is so endemic in the natural world.

It is exactly like any other group attempting to censor or ban any other thing. Prohibition was an ideal, largely put forward by self-righteous teetotalers. People talk about violence, it seems to me, the way that they talked about sex in the fifties. They don't. Most talk around it. If you have anything to say from experience, you are marginalized.

It kills dialogue. More to the point, it kills progress. Medicine advances as we learn more about disease. We solve problems by studying problems, not by meditating on an imaginary, problem-free end state. I guess, in a way, that is the defining difference between a peace-maker and a peace activist.

Couple of caveats. We all do this. If you consider yourself on any side of a line: conservative/liberal; atheist/christian/pagan; Cougars/Huskies; RBSD/traditional... and you cannot explain, with compassion and understanding ,why the other side may very well be right; if you've always been sure; if you've never felt that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you could be entirely wrong... then you are doing this. You are holding a belief (and rationalizing and reinforcing it) not because you are right, but because of a tribal identity. You are doing the same thing that you denigrate people on the other side for doing.

Also, this is not about peace or peace activists. I actually want to talk about criminals and rehabilitation. Not really about crime, but that may come up. That was all just a long preamble.

So let's get crime out of the way first. Not enough people look at it right. Crime fighting is an ideal, just like peace. And we won't make progress until we take a good hard look at why crime is prevalent. Which means acknowledging that it works. It satisfies needs. It's not just that there is little opportunity for honest employment in certain areas. There are damn few jobs, much less entry-level jobs, where you can make thousands of dollars a week, get automatic deference and an instant family.

Crime fighting is an attempt, instead of lowering the rewards of the criminal lifestyle, to raise the risks. Catch 'em, book 'em, hard time. You have to take a look, a hard look at whether that is a risk or even a punishment in this subculture... or just the way rugby players think about the occasional injury. I don't think surveys will help... but I recall the young man about to be transported to prison for the first time at the tender age of eighteen. He was excited. In his family, doing time in prison was the rite of passage to manhood. Jail didn't count.

And this is where we get to criminals. We look at them from our point of view and our world. Most of the things that make a career criminal would be and are profoundly dysfunctional in polite society. So we look at our world and us and the criminal and try to 'fix' what is 'broken'.

There is nothing broken. For the most part (possible mental illness and stuff aside) the serious criminal is not incomplete. There is no pathology. He is perfectly adapted for his world. The things that we think of as normal and good, the things we try to instill when we rehabilitate, might be profoundly dangerous behaviors when he goes back to his old haunts and sees his old friends.

We pretend we are fixing a person, but in reality we are trying to reshape him into a person that makes us more comfortable. Altering a human for our purposes, not his. In the process making him more likely to die in his natural environment and he damn well knows it.

The few people I know who have truly rehabilitated themselves, started by deciding they wanted to live in the non-criminal world. That's rare. If you become an adult in almost any environment, that becomes your comfort zone. That world makes sense. You know the rules. The eighteen-year-old mentioned above knew the rules for prison far better than he would ever know the rules for college.

Despite the fact the stakes are higher in the criminal culture than in college, he felt safer (we all do) in the place where he knew the rules. Where he could blend in and knew how to behave.

Same as if someone insisted on teaching you the proper way to dine and converse based on diplomatic functions. It's not going to help you and will hurt you at your bowling league's nacho feed.

There is another factor in rehabilitating successful criminals that is hard to get over. They know they were raised in a dangerous environment. They believe, with justification, that many of the people trying to fix them would have died in that environment.

Tell me truly, have you ever changed anyone who already thought that he was smarter and better than you?

Raised in an environment where reading and manipulating people are far more valuable skills than getting along, the average criminal is better at reading and manipulating the people trying to 'help' or 'fix' than all but the best therapists. When you have consistently conned PhDs and psychiatrists, the best that civilized training can produce, it's natural to feel superior.

And this ties back to violence and peace-- it is hard to convince someone who sees violence as a tool that the peaceful way is better when he knows that he can have you, the product of a peaceful (and in his eyes weak) world on your knees begging to give him what he wants. He can't help but see that as the weak trying to make everyone else weak to feel safer. Rabbits trying to talk coyotes into giving up their teeth.

There are definite drawbacks to the criminal life. Many die young. Those that don't have no one to care for them as they age, except the prison system. There are profound drawbacks to the lifestyle. The criminal just doesn't look at the drawbacks-- in the exact same way that none of us look at ours.

In Search of Clarity

2011-10-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

I'm working on the manual for talking down EDPs (Emotionally Disturbed Persons) and I pretty much have to do a section on what to do when it goes bad. This will be an e-book, since it is far too short for print publishing. Since it's an e-book I want to avoid pictures. They really mess up the formatting.

Is this description of a figure-four leg lock and seal position handcuffing clear?

The figure-four leg lock is also useful. Any technique used on the knee joint, especially if it relies on pain, will have a risk of injury. To apply the technique you place the threat’s left ankle directly in the hollow of his right knee (if I have to tell you the directions can be reversed, you probably aren’t bright enough to be literate anyway). The right knee is then flexed (bent) which both traps the left ankle and puts pressure on the knee such that it can be snapped.

The farther towards the toes you apply pressure, the better leverage you have. Many threat will be able to simply kick you off if you don’t apply good leverage. Almost all will be able to kick you off if you try to cross the legs at the ankles instead of putting the ankle directly in the knee joint.

You do not need to control this hold with your hands. In the example above (right knee locked, left ankle trapped) I kneel with my left knee outside of the threat’s butt, the threats right foot in the crease of my thigh and my right ankle hooked behind the threat’s trapped left ankle.

I learned the hook trick because the only person I’ve ever had escape from the figure four was a very small, wiry and quite dangerous mentally ill female who had a thing for stabbing people. She just did what looked like a military low crawl and pulled herself out of the lock.

This is an excellent unhandcuffing technique and a very good hands-free control hold. If the threat will not give up the hands for cuffing, if they ‘turtle,’ you can reach under their face (fingers flat to prevent biting, just like feeding a horse) and use the pressure point under the nose at the base of the bone to extend the spine. They will put their hands on the ground to support their own weight and you can simply yank one of the support hands back for cuffing.

After experiencing this, most NTs will voluntarily give up the remaining hand. You may have to do it twice for EDPs.

'NT' in the above paragraph means 'neurotypical' short hand for not an EDP. It's explained elsewhere in the handbook.

Clear enough to do?

Never Seen Florida

2011-10-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've been here for two days and I still haven't seen any of. It's easy to joke with K: "Been to some of the coolest cities in the world but they all look like sweaty gyms."

Red-eye flight. Meet Rick Brumby, who is a thoroughly cool guy. Check into the hotel. Explore the grounds. Shower. Try to nap. Get up, go to the local police academy to teach Conflict Communications. Nargilah and late dinner with Dan G. Back to the hotel. Try to sleep. Up too early. Go to the business center to make copies. Meet Rick in the lobby. Return to the training center. Teach an introduction to violence. Teach part two of ConCom. Dinner. Hotel.

Too tired to write, but I don't want to sleep just yet.

Anyway, been in Florida for two days, haven't seen anything yet. Maybe tomorrow, or maybe I'll find a quiet place and write and drink coffee.

Working on the "Crisis Communication with the Mentally Ill" book. It will be too short for print, so expect an e-book fairly soon (finally). This one's disjointed, more a series of tactics than a coherent strategy. That's okay, I guess. Can't see all patterns at all times for all things. But it should help a lot of people.

The hotel has over three acres under glass with an a alligator lagoon and a small schooner. There is an artificial thunderstorm playing above my head right now. They tried to make the atrium like wild Florida, but air-conditioned and without mosquitos.

Good mix of martial artists today. Most had extensive experience. Lot's of sweat. Well, a little anyway. George Mattson showed up, and I did give him grief about his pink polo shirt... but he is one of the Old Dragons and it is an honor just to be in his presence. I also got to meet Phil Peplinski, who founded the original "Come Get You Some" website. He also really doesn't mind tangling it up and going for eyes. I'm not really sure what a cockle is, but it warmed the cockles of my heart.

The class ran long and just blended it in with the 'Violence' module of ConCom, and that worked pretty well. The information is pretty seamless. That feels good, it means that there is a skeleton underlying the words. It also means that there is a curriculum in here somewhere.

Have been getting pressure to set up a curriculum and create an instructor's class for this. Looking at a two-year date. I have quibbles and hesitations. The essence is teaching to think for yourself. The second that becomes dogmatic you have failed catastrophically. It is also teaching people to stand up, alone, in fear... something I feel is countert-intuitive to a world of Instructors and Senior Instructors and certifications...

But you know, being afraid of failure is one crappy excuse. It's also about facing fears, so that's something I just have to do. More later.

Pockets

2011-10-19T12:11:00.001-07:00

I expect this post will come off as esoteric and unfocused and confused-- but that's okay. I'm looking for answers to messy situations so I'd be a fool to expect clean answers.

"Pocket structure" has been coming up a lot. A little preamble:

1) You only get to use your killer self-defense skills when you are losing. If you are winning at the outset, you're probably the bad guy.

2) 'Losing' generally means that you are already hurt or injured, your structure is likely compromised, you may not be able to see, and the threat is in a position of his choice.

3) Threats aren't stupid (at least about this.) If he had any inkling that you might turn things around, he would have picked someone else. So expect him to be bigger and stronger. And it probably won't be his first rodeo.

4) None of the above applies to Monkey Dancing.

It's obvious that you need to work this scenario. You need to learn to hit hard from compromised structure and to deliver power to things that would normally be dead zones. Last post mentioned in passing a way to throw a good elbow to your rear flank.

Part of this is pocket structure. I think most martial artists have an idea of what structure is. It is the bone-to-bone connection between target and the ground. It doesn't generate power, but the better the structure, the less power is lost. Almost anyone can hit hard enough to do damage, but when you see the 240 pound power lifter who can't hit as hard as the 160 pound woman who has a little boxing training, structure is at least part of the reason.

Pocket structure practice is just putting yourself in bad structural position, like bent over with the threat pressing your head down and one side against a wall, and finding where you can align joints to still deliver power. This is one of the esoteric parts, hard to put into words: you find the arches instead of the lines that most people rely on with good range and you also tendon-hook to the back of the joints (that's what it feels like to me) instead of lining up the bones. That's pocket structure.

There are also pockets for power generation. You can use the Dempsey hip-twitch while lying flat on your back, mounted, and get almost your full power into a hook punch. It's just a matter of lifting your off hip an inch or two and then snapping it into the ground with your punch. It's creating a pocket of space so that you can generate power.

Pockets for mobility as well. I'm not nearly as flexible as I used to be, so it sucks when I try to demonstrate this, but Dave Sumner, my jujutsu sensei, had a full power high kick that he could use from the clinch without losing eye contact. It was a lead leg rear kick, so it hit like a mule. The key was clearing the off hip back and away to leave room for the chamber. A mobility pocket.

This, of course, got me thinking about pockets of time. One of the huge keys to defeating bigger and stronger people is to use time and information better than they do. Information first, since it doesn't directly (as far as I see right now) relate to pockets:

If you are outmatched physically, you must be significantly better at reading the situation than the other guy. If you are being blitzed, one of your few chances is to be able to read exactly what is really happening and how to use it. Someone grabs you from behind to slam your face into the pipe above the urinal you must be able to read where every bone in his body is and his current momentum and any shift in center of gravity that presages momentum change. You must be able to do this instantly. You have to know where every corner and hard object and reflective surface and slippery place you can use is located. All instantly.

You see why I consider blindfolded fighting to be a fundamental skill.

Back to pockets. You also need to be able to find or create pockets of time that you can use. Threat smashes your head into the pipe and pulls back to do it again... that instant, from contact through pull-back to centering to forward slam, is a tiny pocket of time where you are not taking damage and if you have the nerve and the skill, you can use it all.

Maybe. And this hits the essence of the teaching problem. I know this is possible. This is how I've done it and others have done it. When the math looks bad (Ralph jumped by an ambush artist, 20 years younger, stronger, faster) the ability to create and exploit time, to know what is really happening is the difference between walking away and not.

But can it be trained? I can show all the pieces. Let people play with and see how it works. Develop the skills and attributes. But when the shit hits the fan, it seems some people act and some don't. Most act with experience, but is that learning or just natural selection of a sort? Those that don't act either get injured or find another line of work.

If you are smarter, cooler, more aware and more efficient it makes up for a lot of size and strength. Those are the attributes you need to utilize most of the pocket concepts. But how many people can stay cool under assault? Or can you train it such that it is just a natural and obvious way to think and move?

---------------------

Leaving for Florida tomorrow. Hope to meet some of you in person there.

http://chirontraining.com/Site/OCT-Florida.html

Drop-Step

2011-10-14T07:09:00.000-07:00

Since you asked...

Read this first, if you haven't already. It's the basics of how I teach power generation. The drop-step falls under the category of power stealing. It is very simple. It is also counter-intuitive and violates a lot of what martial artists are taught from day one.

The drop-step is as simple as falling. Ernie described it pretty well in the comments of the last post, but I glitched on some of the words, so here's my take.

Stand with your feet a little over shoulder-width apart. Lift one of your feet. You will fall. You will fall quick and hard with absolutely no telegraph. Most of you, especially trained martial artists, won't be able to do it.

We've all been taught from our first class to never, ever lose our balance. And so before we 'fall' we subtly shift our weight to one side before lifting the foot on the other side. That creates a telegraph and, because the Center of Gravity is now just barely out of the base, changes a violent fall to a slow topple.

If you can just lift the foot, nothing else, trusting to get it back under you before you land on your face, you will move with great speed, power, and no telegraph. That's freaking useful.

My training trick (because I'd been taught to always keep balance too) was to try to touch my left knee with my right foot as quick as I could. Or reverse the left/right. All same.

It's not a step. It's not a leap or a lunge. The effect you want is of a table that suddenly has two legs removed. Just fall.

You can add lunge dynamics to it, and that is one of the reason that fencers are so freaking fast. But the lunging leg adds after the fall. Other than the natural bend in the knees, you don't load the lunging leg. That's the telegraph and it slows you down. That lunging leg can also steer you a little.

Steering might be important because the natural direction of the drop-step is along your strong line, the line you get if you draw a line between your feet. You want that strong line pointing in a useful direction (towards the threat for impact damage, obliquely towards the threat for damage + position.)

You can also, for the record, go straight down by lifting both of your legs. There are times where that is very useful. The stupid-looking move of drawing fists to hips and dropping into horse stance is one of the few motions that can generate a lot of power (concentrated on an elbow thrust) to the rear flank dead zone.

All of your normal power generation, hip action or hip twitch, whip action, dead hand, ballistic, structured ballistic... whatever you do, can usually be stacked with a drop step for a big increase in power. When you hit, though (and this is another thing that contradicts some training) you want your attacking weapon to hit the bad guy just before your foot catches you. If the foot hits first or at the same time, that's a certain amount of kinetic energy going into the floor instead of the bad guy. In efficient. I think the emphasis on simultaneous impact of foot and hand is a side-effect of the influence of fencing. Pointy swords require very little kinetic energy to do damage.

Ernie's drill is good and I use it as well. Take a stance perpendicular (hips, feet and shoulders square) to a training partner. Have him throw linear strikes at your face. Fall out of the way. Gradually speed up. Once you are consistently falling out of the way, change the angle so that you are falling 45 degrees towards the threat, but still getting off line before the punch lands. Add a mirror block for insurance but do not rely on the block.

And if your training partner starts tracking your fall, have him target and shut his eyes before he punches.

Values in Sparring

2011-10-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

This is a preview/think-out-loud for the print edition of "Drills" that should be out in 2012. The publisher wants added material, so that it can compete with the e-book version. That's fine. I'm going to add a section on sparring. Different types, different purposes.

The thing that hits me again and again about lots of drills is that what we are learning (or simply ingraining, creating a habit without any awareness) is rarely what we think we are learning. That's huge for instructors, too-- You may not be teaching what you think you are. There's a video out of some instructors 'woofing,' screaming horrible, rude things in student's (largely women) faces. The instructors are certain they are conditioning women to the emotional context of an attack. But the women are practicing, rep after rep, letting a threatening individual invade their space, take a position of physical and psychological dominance, and the women practice doing nothing.

Sparring, at any level, is a special case. Humans mistake intensity for truth. Things that trigger bigger reactions- fear or anger or exultation- simply feel more real than than the drudgery of day to day. In almost any given martial art, sparring is the most intense training methodology and feels 'more real' than any other exercise. Humans rarely question such a natural feeling. Most have never had their roulette table moment.

That means that any bad habits learned by sparring are learned deeply. And there must be bad habits. The essence of martial arts is the manufacture of cripples and corpses. If you have never crippled or killed anyone in training either what you do doesn't work or, more likely, you have also learned flaws with every drill. Those flaws are critical in any live training. Never forget that you are practicing at least as many reps of not hurting people as you are of hurting people.

Sparring is not a fight simulation. Maybe most types of sparring are intended that way and certainly people believe that they are, but the math doesn't work. At some point two oiled-up guys in speedos of the same weight getting together face to face without weapons at an appointed place (without obstacles) and time to work under an agreed set of restrictions somehow became 'reality fighting.' It's not, and if you feel a need to defend it as "as real as it gets" take a deep breath and think for a second.

So lets start there. MMA contact sparring/competition. It covers a lot of skills and it is pretty damn effective at what it does-- which is prepare you for MMA competition. I don't think that's it's real purpose, though. The real purpose is deeper than that. There has been a long evolution of coming up with the best venue for testing ourselves. Boxing and wrestling always tested the essence of manhood-- strength and speed and endurance and toughness and smarts. By making it broader, MMA added an incredibly valuable level of mental flexibility. MMA deepened how far you can go with strategy. At higher levels all contact sports are strategy sports. MMA took that to a new level. If you want to find out who you really are, MMA is the way.

There is lots in there that applies to self-defense. Same with any of the contact martial sports. People who get hit regularly have a huge advantage over people that don't (until the concussions start to add up.) People who actually hit moving targets are way ahead of people who hit air. The fact that it hurts... damn, people, fighting hurts. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone. And pain is a great motivator to train harder.

It's good training, but it predicates on bad strategy-- equal people, weapons, techniques, location, no surprise. All that jazz. If this is your gig, be sure to spend some time working solutions when you give the opponent 50 pounds of weight advantage and your back. It can be done, it has been done. But if (again) you have this urge to come up with excuses about why it is impossible, you've confused the game (MMA) with the solution.

Similar stuff goes for all the heavy contact stuff. Boxers are formidable fighters because they are used to taking and giving hits. There is something fundamentally fucked up in martial arts if being 'used to taking and giving hits' is special. That's the natural environment of a fight, people. That said, there is also something fundamentally screwed up about a fighting style that has its own fracture. When boxers do use their skills in real life far too often their hands are shattered. Outside of the safety equipment (tape and gloves) the essential weapon of boxing is more likely to hospitalize or cripple the guy using it than the guy it is used on. That's a whoops. What does boxing develop? Courage, and that is huge.

Moving and controlling a body is one of the core skills of fighting. You will learn this in a grappling art (especially one with throws) better than anywhere else. It is huge and important. It makes everything else easier ("Position before submission!") Good grapplers/throwers will also teach you much of what you need to know to handle bigger and stronger people, especially if they are old-school enough to practice without weight classes. Definitely spend some time here... but it is not fighting. In a fight, moving and controlling a body is intended for another purpose, like escape or disabling. In order to get really good at grappling, people often forget the context-- bad guys and weapons and obstacles and "Why am I here?"

As a general rule, if your grappling changes a lot when the other guy has a knife, you were probably a little too caught up in the game side. Or, to phrase it another way: If you grapple differently when the threat has a knife you were probably doing it wrong when he didn't.

And then straight non- or controlled-contact kumite. This was the big epiphany in Minnesota, at least as regards sparring. Marc has a drill he calls the 3-2-1. I will probably misrepresent it here. For the pure version, work with him. But my understanding (or misunderstanding) is damn useful, so here it is:

There are ranges and positions where someone can stand and hit you without any telegraph. The threat has to be in range (drop-step exception) and have their limbs in certain positions. This is a code red thing, or what Marc calls "1". The bad guy can hit you in one motion.

For the most part that's not true. Even in range, most positions require you to shift your center of gravity (CoG) before delivering power (again, there is an exception for the drop step. I love the drop step). Marc calls this a "two". It will take two motions, a precursor and the attack itself, to do you any harm.

"Three" means the threat has to change his foot position (and the drop step, in certain positions turns all three to a one... very cool) as well as shift CoG.

I spent a lot of time in close proximity to very bad people. More than a few commented on how relaxed I was. It's powerful. Relaxation can be disconcerting, it makes the criminal think that you know something he doesn't. This was why I could do that. Not only could I tell if the bad guy could reach me, I knew, in advance, exactly what he would have to do or where he would have to shift his center in order to attack. I knew when I was safe and I knew exactly what to watch for should the threat try to move.

These are critical skills in point sparring. Minor, maybe, and nothing like what I though I was learning (timing and strategy and ...) But killer skills in the real world.

It Was Sort of Awesome

2011-10-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

Just got back from the Secret Giant Violence-Prone Play Group. Very cool.

First, the concept behind the VPPG:

KJ and I started ours a year or two ago. The original notice is here:

http://chirontraining.com/Site/VPPG.html

I've had a few people ask about joining who aren't from around here, which won't work really well. Here's the deal, and the format. Nothing is written in stone, so if you decide to form one, do it your way.

There comes a point in everyone's life/career where they should start running out of instructors, or at least start running into questions that the available people can't answer. It happens in every science, and that is how science keeps growing. Everyone, if you've been doing martial arts for a while, should have a 'mystery': "What are the principles behind X?" "What are my options if..." "Does technique Y or drill Q really help? What is it really teaching/ingraining?" "How do I teach ____?"

Stuff like that, and even more. If you don't have questions you might be in your comfort zone. Or brainwashed. Or maybe dead. If all of your questions can be answered by your available resources, you need to get out more. That's my opinion.

So the idea behind the original VPPG was to get together people we respect from the widest variety of backgrounds possible. Not a lot of people-- any group that is willing to play at that level will be pretty small. We get together when schedule allows (rarely, right now, since two of the other key members have regular jobs and I'm traveling most weekends).

The format goes like this, "Kevin, what are you working on?"

"Well, I've been trying to figure out how to..."

Then we all brainstorm it.

Then we go bang. Pressure test. Scenario. What-if. Levels of contact matter because there are some things that can only be evaluated at certain levels of contact... so it has to be a group that we trust for everything from judgment to contact to first-aid skills.

When we are all good and sweaty, and maybe have some insights or (gasp!) answers, we go back to the circle and the next person kicks out a question.

Question, brainstorm, bang. That simple.

R&M (we never really discussed how secret the secret VPPG last weekend would be, so I won't use names) asked me months ago if I could set up a perfect VPPG, who would I want?

Two very different reality instructors. Two top eclectic practitioners. Two weapons guys. Two super-traditional.*

M offered a venue, R pressured me to set a date...and with about two months lead time, I sent out invitations. The group of eight I envisioned was a group of five. Which isn't bad for the phenomenally busy people that were invited.

Two days and nights in a remote piece of northern California. Hikes, shooting, brawling and brainstorming. It was sort of awesome. I got to play a little and talk extensively with someone I've admired for a long time. Got to look at the thought process behind his teaching (for almost everyone, how and why they teach is far more valuable to me than what they teach.)

Played flow. Brainstormed operator problems, and having operators and martial artists there made for an interesting synergy because each worked really hard to make sure the other side understood the underlying problems. Got called on some of my own bullshit, "You say it's a bad habit to practice moving straight back and yet you love fencing. Isn't that pretty linear?" Touche.

I think everyone left with pages of notes, plans, new ideas. Some got answers and I think everyone found a blindspot or two.

So my legs are sore, face sunburned, and a new scratch is scabbing nicely. Very nice.

*Which is another blindspot. I have access to some pretty extraordinary sport MAs and it never occurred to me to add two of them. Hmmmmm.

Obsolete Technique

2011-10-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

Used to be, back in the day, (imagine a reedy, old-man voice) we sometimes had to go in on combative inmates without weapons or armor.

For whatever reason, you had to pull a guy out of his cell. Used to be for any disciplinary reason: he was tearing things up or making so much noise the other inmates couldn't sleep. Nowadays, we would just let them vent. In order to be a Threat, a person must have Intent, Means and Opportunity to hurt you. Going into the cell would give Opportunity, the third element. We would be responsible for making him a danger. So only self-harm (for which there is always Opportunity) really justifies entering.

So the tactical problem, back in the day, was that you would have to go into a concrete cell through a standard (except for the steel reinforcing-- standard sized) doorway. On an inmate who can see you clearly, is completely prepared for you, may have weapons, sometimes made armor out of blankets and occasionally soaped the floor. Commonly in a boxing stance just inside the door.

Even in Corrections, at least in our system, this is an obsolete problem. But before the Team and pinning shields, when no one was allowed to carry OC (pepper spray) or Tasers, it both common and dangerous. An unarmed or semi-unarmed classic 'funnel of death' problem. Only one person could go through the door at a time...

It's obsolete even for Corrections. Enforcement always had force options available, so this never was an issue. For citizens, there is no intelligent reason to close the distance on someone who is prepared to fight you. That makes it a remarkably useless technique, but technique isn't the point. It's all the nuances that made it work that apply to everything.

What follows is the first actual technique I came up with as a DT instructor. Sgt. Gatzke presented the problem.

It's simple, really. Hands up, non-threatening, you approach while talking. As you get to the Critical Distance Line you drop-step hard and fast, forward and very slightly off-line to his lead side, pass/parry the lead hand and voila, you are at his flank or behind him, out of the danger zone and with a plethora of options.

Approaching, hands up and non-threatening. Hands are in some version of the Fence (as described by Al Peasland who learned it from Geoff Thompson). Lots of people screw this up. If you look angry or tense, like you are ready to fight, not only will the threat have a better chance of clocking you when you make your move, the tension will slow you down. You must carry yourself like you believe talking will defuse the situation.

The second killer little detail is that you must walk unnaturally. Humans are direct-register animals, like cats. When the left foot goes forward, the right hand goes forward. In this instance, your right side moves together. Done fluidly enough, I've never had a threat notice.

As you get to the critical distance line. You must be able to read exactly when the Threat can reach you. Most of the ones I've used this on seemed to have boxing backgrounds and I needed to know exactly when I was coming in range for the jab. You had to be able to read when any shift in feet or center of gravity altered the critical distance line or loaded a different limb.

You must time it so that you will cross the Critical Distance Line with the mirror side. If the Threat is in a left lead, you must cross the CDL with your right hand and foot. That makes the distance for your drop-step and parry as short as possible. Short distance makes for better speed.

And you must be smooth. If you try to adjust your footing on the way in, the walk will be unnatural and the Threat will know something is up. You can't stutter-step or skip to get to the CDL with the right foot forward.

While talking. Sort of. You also want to judge the distance and speed of approach such that when you cross the CDL, the Threat is talking. Not critical, I've made this work on a number of Threats who were stone silent and watchful. But if you can get him talking there will be an additional delay, just a fraction of a second, before he figures out what is going on. For that matter, look at everything going on in this technique and see how much of it is about shaving fractions of seconds. Talking guys have slower reflexes.

Drop-step. A good drop-step is an incredible power and speed multiplier. Unless you can throw yourself to your feet from a push-up one handed, you fall harder than your arms can hit. Because gravity is always on, there is no delay and no natural telegraph. Unless you screw it up with hesitation movements or weird breathing or something, you will be moving before the threat sees, and probably finished moving before he can react.

The drop step is slightly off line. You don't want to fall into him or into his punch. You fall (and can add a fencer's lunge for more distance but DO NOT sacrifice the drop step and surprise by loading the lunge) to just outside his lead foot. The angle takes you off line of jabs and crosses. The drop tends to protect you from high hooks and roundhouse punches. Low hook you would have seen coming from his hand position at the start.

The drop step has to be practiced, by the way, and I've seen some very odd things called drop steps.

Pass/parry his lead hand. I learned it as the mirror block decades ago. Hard to describe in print. Basically, both open hands make part of a circle. The lead (right hand for this example) has the palm to the left and comes from belly button to ear, ending with the back of the hand right near the left ear. The left hand, palm facing right, follows from the other rim of the circular action.

You don't block. Ideally, your drop-step was just enough out of line that the punch, if it happens, missed with no contact. The mirror block is just a form of insurance, with the added benefit that that the left hand will come in contact with the leverage point at the distal end of the humerus. Especially if you have practiced forearm rolls, you will have the leverage and power to completely turn even a much larger man.

Oh, and trained karate guys tend to screw this up because they point their fingers up like a shuto block, which costs them four inches compared to the far more comfortable technique known as a handshake.

This all puts you in his dead zone, that special place on the rear flank where it is very difficult for him to apply power. You have force options ranging from a simple off-balancing push (or an ear-splitting scream I guess, if you want a very low force option) through spine controls, joint locks, damaging and crippling strikes all the way up to lethal force.

Again, don't nut up on the technique. It's obsolete anyway. Just as in breaking two fighters apart there is a lot more to think about than just the technique. How people walk naturally and how to exploit that. The need to train your eye for reading range and balance shifts. Application of gravity for speed. How communication affects reaction time. Lots of stuff.

Minnesota Mini-Debrief

2011-10-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

First of all, it was a great week. Eight days of training, 10-12 hour days except for one (that was just eight). Except for ConCom, this was the first time Kasey, Marc and I have watched each other teach our material.

Even ConCom we split and did solo. Marc and I have done a few ConCom classes each over the last year and we usually talk afterwards. It's become really apparent that we get different questions from our students. Questions coming up are a sign that something is being missed. If one instructor is getting the questions, there is something in the presentation that is less clear... so it was a good chance to watch each other talk and see what and why.

Couple of things deserve whole posts:

True value in sparring (found it!) More convinced than ever that a lot of training paradigms are crappy for what we think they are and really, really good at developing abilities we aren't even aware of.

Pre- and post-internet language and instruction. Touched on this before, but a few things have to come together to get useful insight in certain areas. Not a lot of people in any given area have a complete package. Even fewer, before the internet, wrote anything down. That's created a network of private languages and theories for similar observation. Interestingly, it's also created an etiquette that feels natural to the people raised with it.

The ConCom issues are big, even and maybe especially in teaching. Saw excellent examples of that.

Symbiotic adversaries. Take two longevity-oriented groups who have their identities based on being enemies. Neither side can ever 'win' without losing. Neither can let the other win. Even when they agree, they must highlight the differences...

Do some things need to be taught? Or is just playing with the ideas better?

And maybe a technique post, an obsolete thing that I teach because of everything that goes into making it work.

There was more. Kasey could apply the body mechanics of sword to take-downs in a tactical entry because body mechanics don't change. We used different words but all three of us talked about structure and motion and core, smooth versus staccato or explosive, damage versus pushing or unbalancing. 'Gifts' became common shorthand. My esoteric sounding 'big wave' body mechanics are exactly the same as Marc's "It's just exactly like puking, bro." Make the connections.

DTs taught in coordination with force law and local policies. Knives the way bad guys learn them. Brainstorming each class of violence from the point of view of the perpetrator. We even got some range time. Five inch pattern at seven yards. I am way out of practice.

East Coast Good News

2011-10-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

Jeff Burger ("All it takes is all you got"), after years of teaching in other people's schools, has finally opened his own. It's in Peabody, MA (which is pronounced sort of like pibedy there).

This makes me happy and this is the big news I've been sitting on since I was in Boston, patiently (ha!) waiting for the official announcement.

Jeff is part of my ECBT (East Coast Brain Trust), one of a handful of people I go to for reality checks, advice and ego control. It's a pleasure to drink coffee with someone with such deep experience. Jeff stories: Once upon a time, a young karate kid decided to try kungfu, but it was right at the beginning of the kungfu craze and he was observant enough to notice that all the new kungfu schools were just new signs on old karate schools. "Hmmmm, what to do?" he thought. It seemed logical that he must go to China.

So he learned some Cantonese (completely wrong dialect for where he was going) and went. His first exposure was one of the tourist trap, state-run schools. It struck him as suspiciously easy. So he picked the best instructors and asked where they had trained...and he wound up in a far more dingy, far less comfortable training center with very few tourists and tons of hard work. He loved it.

Then he got curious and did the same thing in Thailand to learn Muay Thai. Again, not at one of the resorts pretending to be a school. At the place where the poor kids hoping to break out of poverty and into a little fortune and fame trained to give and take a beating.

So, in Jeff, you've got a guy who can and has taught pro MMA fighters how to improve their strikes and clinch work...and he can also teach stuff like rope dart and iron fan. And tai chi, but I hear he's looking for a yoga instructor to rent some time in his building. Evidently he can't teach that. Yet. If he decides to, he'll probably feel compelled to go to India.

Two other things. He's a former bad guy. Not super bad, but he's spent enough time in that strata that much of the bullshit in self-defense training won't get past his filters. When he teaches SD he is teaching how to deal with someone the way he used to be, how to deal with predators that he knows very well.

Last thing- unlike yours truly, Jeff teaches kids, and he (and Jess) are good with them. He's run a non-profit for years to get MA classes to kids who can't afford them (or, I guess, technically, to get the kids to the classes, but you know what I mean.)

He credits martial arts with giving him a reason not to become a criminal. He uses the K.I.C.K. program to pay that forward.

"Hi" From Minnesota

2011-09-26T17:26:00.000-07:00

At some point I have every intention of getting some sleep.

Swords with Kasey yesterday, a nice class showing the physics of sword and how that applies to takedowns (primarily) and other aspects of force. It was a blast, and I always like playing in the gray areas between my training and someone else's-- especially someone who is good that I absolutely respect. Got to bang with western sword as well, a little.

Today, taught ConCom to a group of (primarily) LEOs. Seemed to go well. Actually it seemed to go very well and cops tend to be a tough audience, but I never think my teaching is good enough. Hopefully that will be incentive to always improve.

Tomorrow I get to watch Marc teach his "Martial Mechanics" class for the first time. Later in the week, high- and low-level defensive tactics (Me); edged weapons (Marc); Environmental fighting (Me)... some other little classes as well as a day on the range with the local SWAT. Lots of stuff. Not so much sleep.

And good talks, too. Kasey is one of the (despite his age, he's relatively young) old-school tactical operators. Work hard, laugh much, keep the world safe. Have a cigar and some nice scotch when you can look around and your part of the world is safe... Surrounds himself with good people as well.

Still some class times available:

http://chirontraining.com/Site/Home.html

-----------------

Lots of comments on the last post. Too tired and rushed to review them all, but I want to make sure that the point is not lost: Size (strength, speed, ferocity...anything you can name) does matter. But it's not a binary thing and never has been. 'Matter' does not mean the same as "If you have more X than I do, life is hopeless." And it's not just harder or easier. It changes more than that, sideways things.

It changes the value of evasion.

It changes the relative value of the principle of conservation of momentum.

It changes the importance of environmental fighting.

It reorganizes the relative values of the MPDS paradigm from Meditations.

Lots of stuff. You can't fight big guys the way you fight small guys. It's a different problem. In friendly matches with friends I think the most weight I've ever given up and won was about 240 pounds. Only around 100 with real criminals. Ergo, I have some confidence that it can be done... but I also know damn well that I would have failed in those matches or fights if I'd tried to go toe to toe. I've also been surprised by a very, very good MMA kid who used a technique on me that a bigger man could not physically have done (If you're reading this, Joey L. that was awesome).

If you are studying with someone who gets his feedback from sport with weight classes, not only might you not learn the techniques, mindset or principles that have to be emphasized when fighting, defending from or attacking a bigger person, you won't even be exposed to the concepts. And if you aren't careful, you might wind up in a weird state of denial.

Big and Bad

2011-09-23T08:59:00.000-07:00

This is one of the things that is so obvious I sometimes don't mention it at all. It only comes up when someone says something about fighting different sizes and the only way to get to that conclusion is to miss this point...and that's weird, because I don't think you can miss this point. I believe that you must choose to be willfully and actively blind to miss it.

You don't fight very large people and very small people the same. It's an entire galaxy of reasons, from differing legal justifications (very unlikely that the force you need to stop an angry 100 kilo guy is the same force you need to stop an angry 40 kilo guy) to different angles (a foot difference in shoulder hight is a foot difference in the origin of all the hand strike attack angles) to different dead zone sizes and different access to the dead zones. The threat's lever arms are different lengths and the mass you need to control with those lever arms can vary widely.

It's not just that you take the skills in your weight class and take on someone three weight classes up and do your stuff harder or better or more. The things that work are qualitatively different.

Take the elbow leverage point, (what Al Arsenault calls, "the magic place"). At around my weight class I can reliably control the threat's entire upper body. Someone smaller, unless they have extraordinary rooting, I can get absolute control with one hand. But on an immensely strong or big threat, it takes all my structure to turn or to prevent him from turning and the wonderful control technique buys me time to get to someplace else and do something else.

And that's not all. If I have the edge in size and strength, I can work the elbow point with unidirectional power-- just push where I need the threat's shoulder (and then spine and pelvis) to go. With the super strong, I tend to shock-stop it and wait for the recovery power I know is coming and use that.

We all know this. If you have any exposure to judo at all you know that some throws are very difficult to make work against some body types, and some may be difficult depending on your own body type. Full-entry hip throws work great short-and-stocky versus tall-and-lanky but are hard to work the other way. The momentum throws tend to work great against strong, aggressive people in a fight, but not very well in matches at all.

Simple and obvious things-- whether you go over the humerus or under it to turn a body at close range is a matter of comparative height. So is the efficiency of working the back of the neck versus the chin. Head hunting on someone a foot or more taller is completely different (and loses a lot of efficiency).

There's more going on than just size or strength, or even just the threat's size and strength for that matter... but it's still one of those things so obvious that it might be missed.

Crabs in a Pot

2011-09-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

The bad thing with any major life change is that circumstances conspire to prevent you from changing. That's how it seems, anyway. One of the reasons so few people really change, even when they are living a life with a definite expiration date, is that they stay in the same environment with the same people.

You decide to change profoundly and give up crime and drugs... how do you think your druggy criminal friends will respond to that? We all know it's harder to give up any bad habit, like smoking, when we spend time with people that smoke.

One friend uses the analogy of crabs in a crabpot. If one did figure out how to climb free, the others would pull him back. Changing your life affects the homeostasis of all those around you. Maybe they don't want to live with the constant reminder that if you can change so could they. Maybe it's darker and they want you to fail so that the part of the brain that's afraid of all change can point to you as an example and keep from trying at all. Maybe...

But there are other crabs in your own mind, things that pull you back. I'm watching two people right now that have made huge gains and it looks to me like they are about to lose it all. That's what has me thinking. But in small ways, we all self-sabotage to prevent change, including success. Some write and don't publish. Everyone has great ideas that they don't try to produce (why have I never got around to substituting the peanuts in a Snickers bar for coffee beans and sold them on college campuses?)

Everyone, with just a few minutes thinking can come up with a plan to make life better. Profoundly better. Almost none will ever write down the plan or execute the steps. Those that do have found a pair of super-powers, planning and execution. But most won't. Crabs in the head hold them back. "That's for special people, not you." "You'd just fail anyway, it would be better not to try."

The crabs in our head hold us back with whispers, not claws.

Simple Brutality, Brutal Simplicity

2011-09-14T22:42:00.000-07:00

The title is a quote from Kris Wilder.

Another thought from the week of insane business:

Fighting is complicated and hard and can take quite some time to learn.

Hurting, damaging, injuring, killing (whatever level of harm you wish to invoke) is relatively easy, and often the matter of a simple decision.

If you and I were standing in arms reach you could take me out. Orientation wouldn't matter-- standing side by side on the deck or walking past each other or sitting on the bus. If size and strength were too disparate, you simply employ a tool. All provided you could simply decide and act.

Most can't. Physically, most people have a host of precursor motions and telegraphs and intention signals. Mentally, it's not enough to simply have a good reason. Most people need a justification as well (killing someone to protect yourself or your children is a reason. "Because he was a bad guy" or "He was a piece of shit" are justifications.) Killing animals 'for food' is reason enough. We don't need to be angry, don't need to convince ourselves that the animal is bad. Socially, most people must go through steps as the conflict escalates, must seek hooks so that they can blame their own violence on the victim.

And so we have a tendency to kill animals, but to fight humans. And everything about fighting is inefficient. Bullshit dominance games played out physically.

And so, for self-defense, you don't 'fight off' an attacker. You hurt him. You make him pay. If necessary, you kill him. But you don't fight. He's a human too, and may have needed both a reason and a justification and all that jazz... which meant he wouldn't have picked you if he had any concerns about winning the fight. Work on conditioning and skill. They will never harm you. They will take you off the target list for many predators.

But if you, or your students, are on that list, the skills needed are qualitatively different than simply being a good fighter. You need to know how to break a human being (the easy part) and you need to be able to make the simple decision to do so. Not fantasize about the decision, not imagine your heroics. Simply decide and act.

1234

2011-09-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

"1234" was our code word for mentally ill or emotionally disturbed. Crazy. "I've got a twelve thirty-four..." We used to joke that their should be a "Two-four-six-eight" for the ones that were twice as crazy as usual.

Sometimes, teaching a Conflict Communications course, one of the students will be in a Mental Health field and will ask about dealing with the mentally ill, or a cop will ask about dealing with someone in extreme emotional crisis. THat was my job for a long time. There are techniques and stuff to know and ways to talk... but most of what I learned came from an attitude.

I admired these guys. Understand that I was working with severely mentally ill people in a jail. Mental illness is one thing. Some (but not all) were also pure criminals. Most, outside of the jail, were homeless. How many people do you know, including yourself, that could handle being homeless? Could figure out where to get food and shelter and clothes and the occasional shower?

Add to that that you can't even trust your own mind. Not all of the things you see and hear are real. You are sometimes compelled to do things you don't want to do or can't force yourself to do things you need to do...

"I know Sarge, I do better on meds and I'm happier when I'm on meds, but I can't make myself want to take them..."

And these guys (and gals) survived. They didn't thrive, not by any stretch of the definition, but they survived. Would I? Dumpster diving and hustling would be hard enough, coming from my old-school pioneer stoic background (Stoics suck at panhandling) but not knowing if the person I was begging from was even real?

Every time I looked at the inmates in the Mental Health units, every time I was tempted to look down on them or feel superior, all I had to do was look at the other officers or counselors or nurses or myself and wonder if we would even have survived.

Same with criminals, and this is a weirder line to cross. There are many, many violent criminals, some extremely depraved, that I got along well with. To put it another way, there were a few that I would play chess with and listen to their problems and even counsel that I would shoot without hesitation if I saw them near my children. As people, I got along with them. As predators, my job was to stop them cold. It wasn't an either/or thing. Both. At all times.

Most, at least most of the ones I knew, were raised to be criminals. Daddy a drug dealer and pimp, mommy a drug addict and whore. Extended family and many friends and some of the neighborhood similar. Sometimes you wanted to bang your head. What was the rite of passage in your family/group to be a 'real man'? First deer? First time getting laid?

For one family I knew from jail, it was prison. Not jail, jail didn't count. "Hard time" a violent felony and more than a year sentence were prerequisites to being a man. They couldn't wait until they were eighteen and it became a possibility...

Raised in this environment, some profoundly antisocial things made sense. Lying was constant, since giving up information in that environment was unsafe. Trust is stupid. Intimidation is fine but showing anger? When you felt anger you showed a smiley face and got a weapon.

Like a lot of officers, I don't believe in rehabilitation. We simply haven't seen it work. You raise a violent criminal's self-esteem he gets more, not less, violent. I have enough background in psychology to be able to tell how individual studies were fudged.

But sometimes I think we made a difference. When someone who had been raised to lie and con as the only effective ways, short of violence, to get what he wanted would start the long story and we'd say, "Eddy, you don't need to hustle me. Tell me what you want and if it's within the rules, no problem. You don't have to work so hard."

I don't know how many, if any, really changed. But showing someone raised in the criminal subculture that there was sometimes a better way, that sometimes they could get what they want without lying, without pissing people off, that there was an effective solution that was safer...

They had never learned, growing up, that sometimes it was safe and effective just to ask. That away from their family and friends and subculture people being out to screw you was the exception instead of the norm.

So, I don't think I ever rehabilitated anyone. But teaching a few that there were less damaging ways that were safe and effective may have been small steps to habilitating a few.

"You can't rehabilitate someone who was never habilitated in the first place."-- Don't remember who said it, one of my instructors two decades ago.

Packed

2011-09-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

A lot of writing to catch up on, especially here, but I need a little debrief and decompress first.

Sitting in Logan Airport with a coffee and some precious free moments.

Two days of filming. Part done in Club 58, Jamie's place, where we played scenarios last year, part at the YMAA kwoon in Jamaica Plain. Some really nice people and excellent martial artists showed up to help, and Nick stopped by to say 'Hi.'

It was hectic and the days were way more exhausting than they should have been. Not sure why, it was basically teaching, but I was pretty drained every night. It might have been exhaustion from the night-flight out (no real good sleep this week, that always seemed secondary to spending time with friends I don't see enough). It might have been the choppiness, as things were paused so the cameras could be fed and cared for. It might simply be because shooting order is different than the logical progression of teaching. You need to shoot all the scenes you can without moving lights or cameras, then move them and shoot all you can with the new orientation...

Or a combination. David Silver was great to work with and from everything I hear, he is a genius with editing and production. That's outstanding, since I am completely ignorant. One of the martial artists who showed up to assist, Teja Van Wicklen, has training and experience in video production and she seemed impressed. Frankly, I wouldn't know good if it bit me on the ass.

The videos will be released by YMAA and the working titles are "Facing Violence" and "The Logic of Violence." I'll keep you posted.

Two days of that then an evening/night drive to NYC. With a GPS that decided to send us in circles on the bridges between NY and NJ.

Followed by one long but fantastic day brawling on a rooftop with a small group of mostly strangers. It was a blast. Since the group was so small and familiar with the books, I did it private lesson format: "What do you want to work on? Dealer's choice."

Groups, fighting the mind, weapons, coaching the one-step and a really quick run-through of Conflict Communications.

That evening, Afghani food followed by scotch and conversation on a deck in Weehawken, NJ in a very light rain. The deck looked over NYC with an incredible view and was attached to a beautifully restored 3-bedroom apartment that happens to be for rent...

Then up in the morning and a train back to Boston. On the train, we met the rudest, funniest person. When we asked to sit in the only paired unoccupied seats opposite her she actually sniffed (not the snooty sniff, but inhaling, like a dog seeing if we smelled clean enough to be in her world) and turned away.

It got worse from there and it was so hard not to laugh. I did giggle a little.

Mike and Tia and two of their friends invited me to Oktoberfest, so it was arrive in Boston, dump things off at J&J's apartment (and if you wonder why they aren't in the story so far I was almost never with them, but they do have some great news that I can't divulge until they do. No, it's not that.) Then to the meeting place. Got there a little early so had a snack, then the big meet-up for the Sam Adam's Okoberfest. OMG. Crowds. Beer. Polka music. It was like hell but with a worse dress code.

I came of age in the microbrew capital of the world. Sam Adams is good beer compared to... PBR and Bud and Coors and that's about it. Even given that, I don't like beer that much. Four free pints of not very good beer came with admission. Yay. And crowds. Drunk crowds. And dumb little trivia games- for weird little fake felt hats. And pretzel tossing. And polka music. Oh. dear. god. polka music. It must take a gene to appreciate that. Or more beer than I was willing to drink. It was also deafening loud and I think no more than six songs played over and over again.

I really want to know this-- who plays the accordian? I can see some little kid forced to play against his will, but when he grows up and moves away and his parents die... he still plays? In public?

It sounds horrible, but hanging with this group, horrible can be fun. The best part was talking about dark thoughts with... a certain person who will go nameless. But thanks, M, you made the night.

Then too short sleep with enough bad beer on board to keep one farting all night and off to the seminar. Which was held in a venue that googlemaps indicated was at the bottom of a lake. Half-hour late to my own gig, which wasn't too bad because everyone else was too.

It went well, a good, sweaty day. Intelligent questions, hard players. We skipped counter-assault in favor of Plastic Mind. Not sure if it was a good call, but some people really made progress with some of the plastic mind exercises.

Dinner with M&T and some fantastic people watching. We were competing to try to guess details and back up our observations on couples: first date? Long-term relationship? Hook up? Stresses? What are those two complaining about?

Then to T's to wash clothes and sleep (done far too late to go back to J&J's)

Slept in until seven, the longest sleep all week, and then up and deliver the Conflict Communications talk. I think it blew some people away. I also saw some people get very uncomfortable on certain parts... which is good. Emotions are signs the limbic system is stepping and you may want to see where that is coming from.

Then, for the last night in town, dinner at a Brazilian BBQ (which I love, but we passed a place that had Iraqi kebabs and I had a sudden stab of what can only be called homesickness) and narghilah at Habibi's Hookah Lounge.

Home in less than twelve hours.

The week has been packed.

Time to Breathe

2011-09-04T17:06:00.000-07:00

Just for a few days, of course.

The last (hopefully) revision is done on "A Citizen's Guide to Police Use of Force" which will be released under the title "Force Decisions" early next year. The scene list for the videos is written, submitted, and approved.

Filming starts Tuesday in Boston. A one-day small class in NYC Thursday, then an Intro class and ConCom in the Boston area the weekend of the 10th and 11th and then back home. Nothing pressing, nothing on deadline...

Except for the Minnesota week-long gig at the end of the month with Marc and Kasey.

But aside from that, a little time to think. To work on some projects that have slipped to the B-list. Do some long-overdue house and land maintenance. Put a dent into the two-foot tall "to read" file.

On the B-List projects-

The e-book for talking down EDPs

Editing Tim's manuscript, which will involve a long talk with his widow, I think

Proof-reading my wife's latest opus

Write the last of a series of articles for Concealed Carry Magazine

Shooting and gathering pictures for several projects

Working on the expanded print version of "Drills"

Taking a stab at putting "Logic of Violence" down on paper

Magically, some of these will move to the a-list.

I might even find some time to blog.

Edge of the Blade

2011-09-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

On one level, there are few things as obsolete as medieval sidearms. Whether kobudo or iai or fencing, sword attacks, much less sword fights have become pretty damn rare. Which might make it seem a pretty silly thing to study. Combined with my general attitude about dueling training being applied to self-defense, you might expect an automatic rejection.

Can't do it. There are some things you can learn from the edge of the blade that get sloppy and take too long any other way. Also, especially in Western weapons, there are centuries of people working out very carefully efficient ways to kill and not be killed.

Maija (and Jake and Mac) got me thinking about this. What follows is a mix-- big things and little things. Don't waste time looking for a theme. And a caveat: I've trained and played with swords and other weapons extensively. I've even slaughtered livestock with swords... but I've never been in a sword fight. Take everything that follows with the appropriate amount of salt.

Margin of error:

Dealing with a sword, there really isn't a margin of error. Unarmed you can afford to make far more mistakes, give yourself more time. You take a glancing blow to the head or someone tags your upper arm with a fist and it's not a big deal. Bladed weapons force you to think in a more demanding way.

Weapons teach distancing faster and better than unarmed:

You need to be able, at a glance to tell from build, grip, foot position and weapon if the threat can reach you. Exactly how his range changes with shifts of footing, grip or center of gravity. You can predict the 'tells' you need to watch for when and if the threat decides to develop range. It's a critical skill with weapons and the cool thing is that it translates. After getting ranging with weapons down, unarmed range assessment is even easier.

You learn not to waste time or motion:

Related to 'no margin of error.' A sword fight is won or lost in fractions of seconds and fractions of inches. If the person is going to miss you by the tiniest of margins, you don't waste effort or time in motion. You never parry even an inch more than you absolutely have to. Unarmed fighting allows for a lot more slop.

It requires (and thus develops) commitment:

There's no way you can hit someone without being close enough to be hit back. Or maybe hit first. But we've all been hit enough to know it really isn't a big deal. With a blade? Any decisive action means you are close enough to be killed or maimed. Every time you engage you are betting your life on your skill, your speed and your ability to read what is truly happening.

Strategy:

This is specialized, maybe, but by truly limiting the weapon, strategy comes to the fore. Unarmed we can get by forever on tricks. Given just hand strikes, foot strikes, take-downs, locks, gouges, strangles, head-butts and slamming I can keep shifting between the options and force you to play catch-up, or find the one that you haven't experienced before. Limit it to just one class of tool (hand strikes in boxing, for instance) and it forces the skill to go up another level. t changes from tricks to tactics and then, maybe even strategy. Dealing with just a point (foil or epee) and limiting offense and defense to the same tool in the same hand pushed a deeper understanding of all the elements of strategy: timing and distancing and psychology and...

All of these things, and there are more, inform and improve your unarmed skill. They change the way you see and think.

Things Change

2011-08-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

Talking with the Doc last night. About a lot of things, training and the past and connections and places been and things done. He observed, (or maybe it was me, doesn't matter) that when we were young, we were shaped by 'perfect days' which usually included adventure and often danger. The big learning, the cool things, the events that shaped us were defined by discomfort and risk, challenge and the unknown.

That's still there, that will always be there. You find out stuff on the edges, find out who you can be. In comfort, 'you' becomes sort of a compromise. Not sure I can find the right word.

As we get older some of the best memories are of quiet times with good people. Talk or silence. Sharing with or without words. Sometimes with a great view and a fine meal. Sometimes in a dingy office in Baghdad eating strawberry jam and processed cheese spread on flat bread.

The August Babies party was the same. Good food and a plethora of fine scotch... but I was looking forward all day to listening to stories around the fire. Old stories and new. The things the old timers thought were important and the things that excited the kids. Brand new stories and stories many of us knew by heart. Competing versions of the same stories or commentary by the others who shared a particular cave trip or mountain slide or fire or electrocution. (Not kidding on that list. Explosions, too.)

If ever my confidence starts to slip, I just have to look at my friends. They are extraordinary and, somehow, they seem to think I am worthy to be in their company. No higher compliment exists.

Proto-Zombie Alert!!!

2011-08-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I hope no one reading this is really stupid, but just in case: What follows is a joke. Please do not act on it. Or, if you do, man up and take personal responsibility.

It is common knowledge in certain circles that George Romero's early zombie movies were financed by the US government. The DIA and NSA having found compelling evidence that the Soviets had perfected a weaponized rabies virus, the government decided that moving zombies into the mainstream might help survivors of a bio-war overcome the emotional challenge of killing a friend or relative who had become a murderous, bloodthirsty and highly contagious monster.

The situation is worse than we feared. The weaponized rabies has been released into the population of the United States. We don't know who released the virus: terrorists working with Soviet cold-war scientists? The Yucatan Socialist Worker's Party (YAZIs)? Some lost cell of the long-defunct KGB?

We only know that the virus is here and it is subtle and more dangerous than our initial intelligence estimates.

The first generation of weaponized rabies works slowly. It can take as long as five years to build up in the system and create "zombies". As it does, the virus slowly eats away at parts of the brain that control independent thinking and compassion. When, and it is when, gentleman, not if, the first of the infected turn, it will be hell on earth. Their bites will turn others almost instantly. And they will be fast-mover zombies, not the shamblers we hoped and prayed for.

What follows is a list of signs and symptoms that indicate the virus is building up:

The subject is a shitty driver. It may be a loss in reflexes from the virus eating at the nerves or rudeness and aggression or both.
The subject sometimes just stops his or her cart in the middle of big box stores and just stares around with a blank expression.
The subject demands to do whatever he or she wants while simultaneously declaring membership in a special group. A sign of the essentially sociopathic lack of compassion of a zombie combined with mindless herd instincts.
Constant texting and social media. Appeals to the zombies attraction to shiny objects and the herd instinct.
Ignoring children, especially leaving them to be raised by television.
Constant complaining. As their brains are eaten away, the proto-zombie experiences mysterious pain and becomes stupider, which gives them a lot to complain about.
Inability to solve problems for themselves. A side effect of stupidity, but with low cunning, the proto-zombie often combines this defect with #6 and demands that others-- friends, family or the government-- solve the proto-zombie's problems.
Working to make a world safer for zombies and other monsters. Probably not a conscious decision, but working to disarm future meals is the proto-zombie's way of ensuring the safety of the zombie it will be.
Doing nothing in large groups of similar people. Whether common loitering or the feeding frenzy at the free samples in the big box stores, watch for the zombie tendency to hang out in groups and just mill around.
Loud and rude in public. The higher brain functions, such as those controlling civility, are among the first to go.

If you see a person exhibiting seven or more of these ten symptoms, they are on the verge of total metamorphosis. Do the right thing.

Reno

2011-08-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

This is my first time in Reno in 25 years. I used to joke to my wife, "I can't go back until a few more people have died." Yet here we are.

I don't tell the Reno stories. In a lot of ways, this is where I came of age, crossed a barrier, whatever. I came here to find out who I was. I found out, and in the process changed.

My eyes feel tight. Watchful. K said, "You're different since we got into town. All teeth." She didn't mean smily teeth.

I didn't really noticed until I casually, habitually, laid my sunglasses on the table upside down. It's a better angle for seeing anything behind me in the reflection. I haven't done that in years and here it just happened without a thought.

Have to get up early or tonight would be a night for prowling. See if the hobo "jungle" is still there on the railroad tracks west of town. See if the storm sewers are still open on the Truckee. Night action at the CalNeva. Maybe a midnight run to Pyramid Lake and the Needles. See how many of the hidden service doors I can still remember or find in the strip casinos.

Just stuff. Memories.

Teasers and Pitches

2011-08-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

Trying to hit things from the other side. I have real trouble, sometimes, putting a label on what 'this' all is, on what I do and teach. Sometimes the best way to explain to yourself is to explain to other people. I'm also crappy at the whole business side of this, so consider this marketing practice as well.

The 'elevator pitch' is something I learned about from writers. You happen to step onto an elevator and there is the editor of your dreams. How do you sell him or her on your project? Teasers are things I've been playing with, so:

Conflict Communications

Elevator Pitch: Marc and I seem to have stumbled on the principles underlying all human conflict.

Teaser: In every long term relationship, there is at least one argument that the couple have word for word periodically. There were some clues in that: It's scripted. You say the same words without ever deciding to. It's also hard to just walk away without bringing it to closure, finishing the script. It's subconscious, you are sometimes minutes into the script before you realize that you know exactly what everyone is going to say. You don't choose it. It doesn't resolve and at first that was the puzzle... but once we figured out who it served, lots of things came together.

Logic of Violence

Elevator Pitch: Just simply using the methodology of disaster planning and applying it to self-defense.

Teaser: Take a guy who teaches self defense. He's well trained and from his work as a bouncer has over a hundred real fights. How applicable is that? He's also six foot two, in great shape, and has dragons and tigers tattooed on his arms. He has had hundreds of real fights, but all with drunk college kids saying, "You don't look that tough to me." What in the hell does that have to do with an elderly lady mugged for her pension check or a 110 pound drunk girl being singled out for an abduction rape? Is the approach similar? The type of attack? The force parity. You know damn well it's not. For generations, martial arts has been about fighters teaching fighters how to fight other fighters. Almost nothing about how to teach victims to survive attackers.

Introduction to Violence sometimes called Ambushes and Thugs

Elevator pitch: It's an introduction to the context of violence. Most martial artists know how to fight, but they don't know when and they don't know exactly what they will be fighting against.

Teaser/Elevator pitch: You've been studying martial arts for twenty years? Twenty years of training in what to do if you were ever attacked by a bad guy. Cool. Tell me, in those twenty years have you spent one day studying how real bad guys attack? Doesn't that strike you as odd?

More a straight pitch: There are seven areas of vulnerability for your students and if any of those areas are left out of training your students can fight like demons and still lose. If you are teaching self-defense you have a responsibility to make sure that they understand the legal and ethical ramifications of force; how bad guys really attack; that they practice avoidance, escape and de-escalation; that they have some tools to deal with the ambush and suckerpunch; that they are prepared to break out of a freeze; that there skills for fighting adapt to the real world and; what to do and what they have to deal with after a force incident.

Dream Team

Elevator pitch: Really want an inside view on high-end criminal violence? It's expensive, but if you think you're up for it I know the guys.

Teaser: You get a former high-end criminal or three; one of the best and most experienced bouncers in the business; a role-playing and safety expert (for obvious reasons) and me. If you want to know not just how violence breaks down, but how violent people think, plan and react to violence this is a weekend that should rock your world.

Recap

2011-08-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

I want to do the last two weeks justice and really can't.

I love this world. It's messy and chaotic and maybe things are breaking down, but it is full of wonderful people who are deeply passionate and caring. In the last two weeks I've spent time with people who have spent fifty years with an art that they loved (and probably dozens who have loved their arts for forty or thirty years). Spent time with extraordinary individuals who walked away from everything out of a passion to learn. Spent time with people who are experts to the point of being savants and some who are just as good but also complete and functional.

Martial arts attracts some very broken people. People who have always felt awkward can learn to move with grace. People who feared and avoided the primate aspects of high school locker rooms can feel like jocks. People who don't have the social skills to get a date can be called "master."

It can be incredibly empowering or heady or toxic. Or all three. I got to spend time with people who saw it clearly and still forged ahead, subtly pushing students towards the empowering and away from the toxic.

There is a special group coming of age in the field of self-defense right now. Men and women with the insight to see how much crap is taught, with the passion to do better and with the humility to wonder, "I've never done this. Who am I to teach it? How will I know if I start teaching crap without that frame of reference?" It's a good internal debate, it keeps them honest and skeptical and learning.

If mastery means anything in this culture (and I hate the word, the connotations in America are too dark, it becomes reminiscent of slavery rather than guilds and implies control more than ability), but if mastery means anything in this culture, George Mattson's annual camp is a collection of Masters. Brilliant researchers and thugs and historians (yes, thugs can be brilliant). people who care about a system and each other and their students above all. Awesome.

I got to meet with my East Coast brain trust, and I absolutely owe them a dinner. We got sooooo busy talking we forgot to eat. Jake, Erik and Bill are brilliant and insightful (Jeff couldn't make it). They helped with presentation and got a taste of the Logic of Violence material in return. I got the best end of that deal. Erik is also a consumate business man (huge compliment in my world) and may have come up with a way to present LoV not as a book, but as a self-study (group study, actually) program. that will probably be my November writing project.

Jeff and Jessica and (for a day) Lisa were awesome hosts. Hospitality is one thing, but learning something every day (side kicks without hip replacement surgery; a refresher on how to suture wounds) is very special.

The seminar at YMAA was new material to a new audience. Nick Yang is one of my favorite martial artists. At the Crossing the Pond seminar in Seattle there was Al Peasland (thug); Marc MacYoung (thug); Iain Abernethy (Really nice thug-- imagine what Santa Clause was like in college); me; and Nick Yang (serious martial artist, super nice guy and definitely not a thug.)

So we were talking about brawls and dismemberment and stuff like that and Nick was talking about White Crane...and we all liked him. With absolutely no idea how to express that without scaring him. Thing is, Nick wouldn't have been scared.

Anyway, Nick hosted a session on recovering from overwhelming force. It's stuff the regular readers are familiar with, but the big gain for me is how natural the concepts were for this group. It shouldn't have been a big insight-- the stuff these guys studied dated from eras when people were trying to kill each other. It wasn't a contest and there were no weight classes. Why should I be surprised that the things I learned were important in jail ambushes were part of systems that dated from this world?

Wes Tasker worked on my back and the difference is incredible. Still pain and numbness, but much less. Much happier...and Wes is one of the people I find intimidatingly intelligent. Cool. Also got to stick spar with Mike M... tee hee hee.

Raffi Derderian is a damn fine man, a great martial artist and an extraordinary teacher. It was very good to spend a day with the people that he admires. I also got to hang with Chris, who is one of the coolest people in the world and meet some new people: Stephe, a bulky, carnivorous, Tai Chi guy who admonishes people to, "keep the F.U. in kung fu." Yet another Erik with a "k" who was that rarest of martial artists: a kenjutsu instructor who isn't anal-retentive. That was awesome. A recluse who hits like a freight train... Good times with good people and a chance to put out some new material (gender differences in violence) and get my material critiqued by new eyes.

All in all, an extraordinary time. But I am missing Kami and eager to be home. Next week: Reno.

Lisa asked at one point what I am most proud of. It's my friends. That I am allowed to spend time with people of this quality blows me away every day.

Too Simple

2011-08-12T05:18:00.000-07:00

Teaching new material tonight. That always feels weird going in. Not so much worrying about whether people will like it or not, or the usual bullshit stagefright thing. It's mostly when people ask for something or I see an obvious hole, the program always feels too simple to teach.

"Facing Violence" is doing pretty well and getting good reviews... but did anybody NOT know that self-defense has ethical and legal dimensions? That avoidance was a skill that needs to be practiced? That bad guys attack differently than training partners? Seriously?

In almost every class I'm almost embarrassed to point out that it is easier to beat people up from behind. There are giggles, but always several who have not really practiced it, who don't even realize how their learned strategy is derived from dominance displays (which kind of require fighting eye-to-eye.)

Logic of Violence is merely an exercise in examining a problem from the viewpoint that drives it. We all do this every day. There are nuances and details that people who don't spend time with criminals might miss, but humans think like humans. Apply your mental tools to the threat's problems and you will come up with some things very close to the threat's solutions.

I'm proud of ConCom, but on at least one level it is just a taxonomy, just putting labels on things that every person sees every day. We have made important connections. Just as an example, in every long-term relationship I've seen, the couple have at least one argument that they have word for word periodically. That one observation leads to some pretty cool inferences. But once the program is laid out, it's just stuff that every person does and sees every day. Once you see it, you can act with far more skill and intention... but I wonder why people don't see.

Self-defense is what happens when you are losing. Everybody knows or should know what losing feels like, should know that part of losing is not having access to the resources you rely on when you are winning or even. Anyone who has spent thirty seconds thinking about this grasps it. Anyone who has a background in any kind of movement art and gives a little effort to understanding bad guys can start coming up with some solutions. What feels to me like ten minutes of correlating known data will be two hours of class tonight.

So I keep expecting every last student to look up and say, "Well, duh."

Pain

2011-08-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

I remember, once, laying (lying?) on my back and trying to scream. I'd taken a fall, about twelve feet is all, but flat on my back. I couldn't breathe and I wanted someone to know. It's hard to scream if you can't breathe. The pathetic squeaks that came out never carried past my own ears.

A couple of years later, frostbite. An arrogant teenager it, seemed stupid to put on gloves just to water the neighbor's rabbits. 17 degrees below zero fahrenheit with a stiff wind... when I got home, my fingers looked like they were made from candle wax and clicked strangely when I slammed them together. My mother had me slowly thaw my hands in lukewarm water. It felt like it was boiling as feeling returned. I promised myself I wouldn't scream, but I couldn't stop the little animal whimpers coming from my throat.

Learning sword and buckler, somehow-- still not sure how it happened-- the ring finger on my left hand was crushed. ICES--Ice, Compression, Elevation, Splint-- didn't cut it. Went to the doctor. He said it wouldn't hurt as he heated a straightened paper clip under a Bic lighter to melt through the fingernail to relieve the pressure. It was a lie, but he was sprayed in blood and pus for the lie so, in retrospect, it was okay.

Run on a broken fibula. Liver punches and testicle kicks. Broken ribs and broken fingers. Lacerated eye. As the man says, "Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell something."

Living is a privilege, and sometimes we pay a price to get here.

Recovering Under Overwhelming Force

2011-08-09T05:57:00.001-07:00

Will be doing a workshop in a few days and I want to think out loud here. Nick wants me to do self defense law, and that's easy. One of the standards. He also keyed on an article I wrote for YMAA and wants a class on recovering from overwhelming force.

It's one of those things that is so inherent in my assumptions that I hadn't thought about breaking it out. I mean, physical self-defense is what happens when you are losing. Deadly force is justified because you are about to die-- so having a solid base or good structure or room to move or time to think or space and time for feints or a single opponent in your weight class are all really, really unlikely.

So, brainstorming, this is how I plan to structure it:

Super brief Logic of Violence intro: Self-defense predicates on a threat doing something bad. The threat will be doing whatever he does for a specific goal and with definite parameters (don't get caught, don't get hurt and two more). His choice of time, place victim and specific situation derive from the goals and parameters. His choice of time, place, victim and situation also completely drives who the victim will be and what the victim must defend against.
Quick talk that most crimes involve psychological dominance rather than injury for very logical reasons, at least in this country. Signs of psych dominance, signs it might go bad, decision points and the one thing you absolutely don't want to do.

Then the actual elements of physical dominance (speed to freeze your brain, power, compromised structure, constant movement... that kind of stuff) and what to do:

Beating the OODA loop-induced freeze.
Fighting emptiness: Not the direct skill needed under an assault, but a habit and way of thinking that helps with other direct skills. It sounds esoteric, but fighting emptiness is just ignoring our primate instinct with other humans to try to match force with force and instead use our force on the undefended place, or get to the flank or squeeze out of a lock or wall pin through the gap... it's a pretty universal principle.
Which leads to exploitation of the threat's momentum.
Pocket structure: Finding and training places where you can create structure to hit hard with only some bones in alignment.
Trying to come up with a name for this one. "Gift-blasting?" Often, the thing the bad guy does to compromise your structure, (like whipping your jacket over your head and forcing your head down) gives you something cool, like a powerful falling shoulder slam directly into his knees if you can see it. It plays a little off the fighting emptiness concept because most people instinctively try to rise directly against the force and fail to see the gift.

If there's time we might go into the fighting the mind stuff, but it already looks fairly ambitious for the time slot.

Does that look like a good intro?

Anyway, if you're going to be in the Boston area Friday:

http://ymaa.com/seminars/boston/selfdefense

And, for that matter, Saturday in Rhode Island:

http://www.damajkd.com/camp.html

Uechi

2011-08-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if I can ever really explain how much George and the Uechi crew mean to me. Martially, I'm a bit of an outcast and an orphan (cue the violins for the sad, self-pitying music. Naw. I like running alone.)

There are a lot of people I play with, like and respect in the martial community, but as far as family... Dave retired about a year after he ranked Bo and me. Bo moved away. Don't want to hurt any feelings, but the few yudansha who continued to teach didn't come close to matching Dave's depth or intensity. It was easy to drift, looking for that level of play.

Found a few training partners, but never did, outside of the Team, find another 'home.'

So my first time at Uechi camp was like an orphan being invited to an Italian family dinner. Then just kind of accepted.

So, brawling and everything aside, the Uechi crew have a special place. I'm a little bummed the weekend is over.

Darin told stories, and so did George. Bill brought a friend, an impressive martial historian who will have his brains picked in the future like a baby at a zombie rising. Patrick and Sara and one other person of unknown name worked on my shoulder. Robb was Robb- big brawling profane and devilishly intelligent. Van and I talked, but not enough. Never enough. Someone shared things that neither of us normally talk about. Mike and Harry shared great talks, even when I was close to drifting off to sleep.

It was a good time.

Landed in Boston

2011-08-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

Couldn't nap. Red eye flight. Didn't want to sleep during the day and mess with sleep cycle... so the answer was coffee and constant movement. Jeff and I walked for six hours yesterday (his estimate) constantly talking. About martial arts and martial artists, fights and psychology, early criminal behavior, and Boston. He talked about training in China and Thailand (and he really needs to write a book, not on the training so much as the personalities). I showed him what I meant by 'fighting the mind' and now he wants to gestalt slap somebody. He gave me some exercises for an old injury that seems to be getting worse.

Then a hookah lounge with Mike and Tia. Very nice company but the music was too loud for conversation after a certain point. Good talks as well, and Boston traffic, which makes all driving sort of funny.

Then sleep.

Teaching first class at 0900 tomorrow. May have to experiment.

Packing

2011-08-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

Today will be a prep day. Packing. Laundry. Going over lists. Just a few. Nothing in the next two weeks requires armor or special equipment, but I should bring the knee brace and the wraps.

Catch an all-night flight tonight, then ten days or so in Boston, Plymouth and Providence. I love two of the groups I'll be working with. George Mattson is one of the Grand Old Men and it is always fascinating to watch this group of people that he has created. Strong, serious, talented and each individual very different, and George cherishes the differences. The Summerfest is always a blast.

Raffi Derderien is good. I've only taken a couple of classes with him and been very impressed, but a long time ago I quit watching instructors. If I want to know about the instructor, I watch the students. I love hanging with Raffi's students. Smart, quick, skilled and they laugh and think and question and change.

This will be my first time at Raffi's summer camp and I'm a little excited.

Somewhere in the middle I'll meet with four of my favorite self-defense instructors in the area. Jeff Burger is a fighter, an obsessive martial artist and hasn't always been one of the good guys. His perspective is invaluable. Erik Kondo is one of the most dangerous men you will ever knock out of a wheelchair. He knows the real problems of self-defense from a perspective most martial artists can't grasp. Bill Giovannucci is a Uechi guy who thinks deep and makes me grateful for good armor. Jake Steinmann is a PDR instructor who thinks, experiments and uses words like pedagogically. Want to bring your game up? Surround yourself with people smarter than you. Works for me.

The goal is to get these few good men to look over the Logic of Violence concept, evaluate, tweak, and possibly help with one of the sticking points in presentation.

There will also be an evening workshop with YMAA. It will be my first time at their facility, but with luck I'll see Nick Yang again, and that's always a good time. Nick asked me to go over SD law, which is pretty a standard by now, but also recovering under overwhelming force. I haven't considered teaching that as a separate thing before. It's just sort of one of the background facts of SD: hard, fast, close, surprise. It will be good to separate it out, I think.

So pack, prep, clean up the house a little. Say goodbyes, fly. Should arrive in Boston in time for a breakfast cannoli and a nice coffee in the North End.

Tricks

2011-07-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

Anonymous asked about "messing with the mind." I hate it when people use movies to illustrate things, but I'm going to.

There's a wonderful movie called "By the Sword". To the best of my memory, the fencing master in an epee bout with his promising competitive protege suddenly springs straight up and thrusts straight down on the kid's wrist. The kid tears off his mask and screams, "You never taught me that!"

The fencing master screams back, "I can't teach you surprise!"

That's the problem with a lot of tricks, with most of the tactics that attack the mind or the context or the relationship directly. The obvious concern is that if you show people the tricks the tricks won't work as well... but obvious doesn't mean important. You show a trick, people memorize the trick. It becomes a technique. The things that made it work (reframing the question, fighting in the emptiness, social/asocial juxtaposition, feeding expectation....) get lost. I can teach tricks that might allow you to gain surprise, but that's not the same as teaching surprise itself.

Same with the Baby Drill. I took it out of the drills e-book not just because it is more a trick than a drill or just because if you read it, you won't make the same mistakes, but because if you read it you will THINK that you know it... but even people who do the baby drill don't always learn the lesson of the drill. We've demonstrated that again and again.

Reading, hearing doesn't lead to understanding. Even a few experiences don't always. And if you learn something real good, it doesn't mean that you will be able to recognize when you can generalize the lesson.

So, attacking the mind, the no touch parry, the baby drill, knife exposure, super woofing... some of the cool stuff will have to be in person. Not because of the exercise, always, but often because of the debriefing. The no-touch parry looks like magic, but I can explain why it works. More importantly I have a good handle on the personality types it will fail. You kind of need to know that.

More Math

2011-07-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

The math thing. Remember that any model is a model, a way of explaining the world and no more. It is not the world. No model is "truth" whatever truth may be. But many models are useful (and, in my experience, useful can be measured by how well the model predicts the future.)

You can represent the problem with knives as math. One of the cool things about knives (for math purposes) is that they operate so much like hands. Baseball bat swings have huge dead zones, but a knife doesn't require any more of a swing that a bare hand. For that matter, it can do more damage with less speed and distance.

So, for our model, a knife is functionally a hand, but say, increases the effectiveness of a threat's attack by 'sixty'. Part of that imaginary number is damage/lethality, and part is the way people tend to choke when they see something shiny and sharp rising towards their belly.

So, in our completely imaginary, numbers-pulled-out-of-the-ass mathematical model, we have two people with combative chances of o-100. Hand one a knife and the balance becomes 0-100 on the unarmed side, 60-160 on the weapon side. Mean is 50:110, for what it's worth. All other things being equal, the knife is a huge advantage.

There are other things making that initial score of 1-100. Size, strength, speed, ferocity... it seems like a some of the dynamics on defending against a knife involve trying to amp one of these. For that matter, a lot of self-defense: "Your natural ferocity is about a 12 out of 100, like most nice, civilized people. Let's ramp that up to 80 and you will be a far more effective fighter."

That rise from twelve to eighty is huge... but if the threat started at ninety you have only begun to level the playing field. It's a big gain in an area where it is easy to make big gains. Lots of skilled martial artists are shitty fighters. Teaching them to slip the leash is huge. But that doesn't mean that the threat started at a twelve, and if you are slipping the leash for the first time and he's been doing it for awhile... it's an increase, but it's still a far cry from an edge.

Hmmmm.... and willingness to use a knife (an up-close, messy and personal weapon) usually indicates that the threat has already pretty much maxed the 'ferocity' and 'disdain for human life' attributes.

Controlling the weapon arm is an attempt to neutralize the knife's sixty percent advantage, but it does so at a cost. If you don't know how to control a limb without hands, it often ties up two of yours. Do you lose forty or more points of your own effectiveness? If you went into any other type of fight and decided that you would use both of your hands to keep a death grip on one of the other guy's hands... how do you think that would work out?

The thing with a knife, not just in skilled hands but in any except spectacularly stupid and brain-washed hands, is that the sixty-point advantage doesn't come at any cost anywhere else. Swinging a club involves a vulnerability in geometry and another one in momentum. The only cost to a knife is that you can't grip with that hand, and sticking a piece of steel through flesh and under a bone can do almost everything a grip can do.

*Over-reaching generalization alert*

It seems that lots of the RBSD out there focuses on increasing one or more attributes (aggressiveness, ferocity, strength, speed) to give one an edge. I dunno. There are very few attributes you can increase that the threat can't increase as well.

Traditional martial arts *over-reaching generalization alert still in effect* tends to focus on precision and technique, which I've found are pretty unreliable in your first few encounters until you get used to what is going on. But sometimes it works. The cool thing is that you can work on efficiency for a long time, but there are genetic limits to most attributes. But... there is nothing in here inherently that says the threat hasn't spent more time on his technique than you have... and he damn sure has more experience with good guys than you have with bad guys.

My focus tends to be on changing the game. Not because a crook can't be better at it than I am. Aside from prevention, I find the big gains in in messing with minds, because far more people have practiced or trained with their bodies and weapons than have even considered playing with their own minds.

It's maybe only a few points, but it doesn't cost anything and fewer threats are prepared for it.

-------------

I'm tired, and very soon I will be tired of doing serious posts and having the posts (or parts of them) taken seriously. There was a rule I used to teach rookies: You can take yourself seriously or the job seriously, but never both at the same time.

Life is cool and complex. If you aren't laughing at something, you're probably missing the point. Plus being serious all the time isn't good for you. Ulcers and such.

Before Math

2011-07-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

I want to do a post on math and odds and factors. It's one of those things that is very true and consistent, but isn't necessarily real. Like math. 1+1=2. As long as you are talking about rocks, anyway. Talking about rabbits and given a little time, not so much. The thing is that numbers by themselves are not real. They are just a way to count things that are real.

You can have two rocks or two rabbits, but you can't simply have a two. That's why we distinguish numbers from numerals. Same with odds. A coin will flip with equal possibility of heads or tails. The odds are 50:50, but the actual flip is either heads or tails. Odds are 50:50, reality is either heads or tails. 100 or 0. No fifties.

So before a future post about math and odds, let's look at the rocks.

Thomas, a young German cop, asked me last night about some of the things I'd mentioned here, fighting the mind and my high percentage options and such, and we were able to play with them.

Knives are not mathematical fictions. They are real things that cut and maim and kill. In training, they can be introduced for artificial reasons: "Let's see what works against a knife." Then you give a student a knife and have them fight. Just like sparring but with a knife. It adds a level of difficulty, but it is artificial.

In the real world, knives are used for concrete reasons.

1) A knife can be used to kill people. One of my adages is "Knives are not used to win fights, knives are used to kill people." This goal dictates how it is used. Stealth. Sentry removal tactics. Close range. Weapon out of sight. Control the victim's arm or body or head. Training comes into this. People who learned to kill in jail or prison will do it differently than those who trained in the military. But not that differently. The reason for the kill matters as well. If it is just about money, that changes a few factors. Different than if it is about revenge, or establishing a reputation or a hit...and whether the hit is about removing a problem or sending a message changes things as well.

But in any case, hard, fast, brutal, surprise. Maximum effect and shock, minimum reaction time for the victim. (Survived this once, so luck or not, I know it can be done)

Knives aren't always used to kill.

2) Intimidation. If someone stabs you and you die, the crime, in most places, will be investigated thoroughly. If a threat shows you a knife and you hand over your wallet and no one is hurt, that will not be investigated nearly as thoroughly. Criminals know this. They also know that showing a weapon is more likely to intimidate than being polite.

So knives are used as intimidation displays. The only reason to let you see a knife is if the threat intends NOT to use it. This can go bad, but usually only if you are stupid. Challenge the threat's manhood, try to save face, dare him to use the knife and he just might. This is also the only scenario where a knife defense might look like it does in many classes: a half-hearted knife thrust from well out of range. The regular class stuff might work here, as well... but you have to be stupid to escalate it to here. (Survived this once)

3) The live knife. A trained knife fighter deciding to slice and dice on an unarmed man. This is the training artifact mentioned earlier. It's a challenging tactical problem, but does it happen? I know lots of people who train and play at it, but I don't know any experienced knife thug who would even consider it. The assassination route is safer if you are willing to go there.

4) Rage or fear. You absolutely should practice against certain 'stupid' attacks. Enraged people do sometimes grab the nearest knife or pair of scissors and charge screaming in an icepick grip. Or in fear, pick something up and slash wildly. Some of the old-school stuff, like the figure four armlock, works here. But the same tactics are sometimes rejected because they fail so miserably at category 3. So if "The live knife" as described above is your bench mark, you might not appreciate some things that work in the far more common fourth category, rage and fear. (Survived this once. Overhand scissors to be specific. That 'once' keeps coming up.)

5) Monkey Dance gone wrong. Sometimes the threats escalate and an insecure person draws a knife. It is almost always a dominance display, display being the operative word. Particularly common if the person perceives himself to be out numbered, sees it possibly escalating to a Group Monkey Dance. Thomas described a situation where a friend reassuring the threat that it wasn't a group thing and just a friendly fight talked the threat into throwing the knife away and voluntarily engaging in fisticuffs. Sometimes people amaze me.

Big ego or honest fear of death can also trigger someone to pull a knife when losing a dominance fight.

There may be more, but I think these cover the scenarios I've seen, at least in broad strokes. So, next post when I talk about knife math and knife odds, keep this in mind. Knives are used for purposes and it happens in the real world. Any talk about abstractions, including math, can be a distraction from the world. Be careful.

"Who Will Guide Us...?"

2011-07-12T09:25:00.001-07:00

In a comment on the last post, AF1 made a comment that gets to the core of what I see as a major problem. AF1, this isn't aimed at you, but aimed at an attitude that I see throughout the martial arts world.

AF1 wrote:

The Straight Blast Gym guys use the S.T.A.B system of knife defense which focuses on controlling the weapon arm.

That gym is famous for banging it out. In fact if I'm not mistaken it was them who first coined the phrase "alive training."

So if they say it really works, and you say it doesn't work, who are we to believe? Is it possible that there is more than one way to skin a cat?

The point is not whether to believe me or to believe them. Either way, it is an "argument from authority," one of the classical logical fallacies. (Especially annoying, if I am the authority in question.) All it means, whichever you decide, is who you have chosen to do your thinking for you. It has nothing to do with being right.

That's getting really close to the essence of one of the things that has been bothering me. Martial arts, self-defense, whatever label you put on this endeavor is supposed to make you better. Stronger, fitter, and, in my mind at least, smarter and tougher and more independent as well.

That means thinking for yourself. Observing for yourself. And sometimes challenging ideas from people you respect.

So if you want someone to do your thinking for you, go with the other guy. You've already missed the point of everything I have to say. There are lots of people out there actively looking for acolytes and yes-men who will welcome you with open arms.

And, to be glib, when we are talking about knife defense, it's more accurate to say that there is more than one way to fail to skin a cat.

Science, Knives and Rambling

2011-07-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

My heart is warmed.

Jake Steinmann over on his blog has a cadre of volunteers to go bang my contention that "controlling the weapon arm" as a first defense priority is... well, he'll see and then he'll pass on the data. I hope everyone understands how critical it is that people go see, and then pass on the data.

Most of the science of self-defense is crap. Someone comes up with a contention or a marketing strategy and then medical and psychological journals are combed looking for something that might support it. But there are problems with that. Most of the people combing the literature aren't scientists, they're martial artists. And sometimes I'm convinced that they never read past the abstracts... and so we have cardiac stress tests (treadmill running) used to substantiate the effects of hormonal stress. Stuff like that.

Dr. Bill Lewinski over at Force Science News seems to have the best grasp of experimental methodology... but most of the rest of the stuff in the field is crap. From voluntary questionnaires aimed at mass murderers, (Oh, he may haver killed six people without any motive but he doesn't have a reason to lie... sigh) To people getting in a pissing match because research and marketing may not match

Or people who quote in little circles: Dr. A says, "Mr. B contends that X+X=Z" and then Mr. B says, "In a paper published last year, Dr. A said X+X=Z" which is technically true, but still a form of intellectual incest.

I'm an INTJ. I pretty much only give a crap about whether something works. That outweighs whether it was handed down in a pure form for 200 years or if elite commandos train it. I'm also not super-interested in whether it works in class. If you explain to a group of people that hitting three points on the lung meridian in succession will knock them out, it will work on a surprising number of people... but if you go randomly smacking three points on strangers without the explanation, none pass out and they tend to get mad. Hmmmm.

So when someone tells everyone in a class how to defend against a knife and it works in class, that's not enough for me.

The live knife thing. We banged it. Mac came up with the best answer (though he has since said it was my idea, he is old and his memory is incorrect)... but just think it through: if there was something that worked reliably against a knife, people would quit carrying knives.

I'm rambling now (hotel after about twenty hours driving). The late Carl Cestari wrote something interesting about knives and knife users. His widow gave me permission to use it in "Violence: A Writer's Guide"... but not here.

I think Jake is on the right track. Question. Test to destruction. Report. That is the Scholar's courage, and it completely trumps the Warrior's.

------------------

I have been remiss in keeping you up to date.

Seminar in Lakewood, CO Saturday

Bunch of stuff in New England in August (I'm not running any of it, but if someone wants to get together on the off times, let me know.)

A two-part interview with Kris Wilder and Lawrence Kane (I seem incapable of sticking to a time limit):

http://www.martial-secrets.com/2011/05/31/martial-secrets-12-part-1-of-2/

http://www.martial-secrets.com/2011/06/06/martial-secrets-12-–-part-2-of-2/

I think that's about it.

"Getting the Stupid Out"

2011-07-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

Andrew Middleton teaches Systema in Montral. He has a cool way of describing certain drills that I will shamelessly steal. He called it "Getting the stupid out."

The VPPG does a similar thing, we call it 'banging' as in, "Let's go bang it" which translates to "Let's see if that works." Similar, but not the same. In the VPPG, it is an experiment. We present a problem (e.g. what do you do for face-down weapon retention?) then we come up with some ideas and then we test them to failure.

Getting the stupid out is an experience. He presents a standard self-defense platitude, like "In a knife fight, control the weapon arm*" and lets the students try it. But not against a compliant partner, against someone using a knife the way the knife was meant to be used. The fail is spectacular and memorable. It gets the stupid out.

One of the things to watch for, in our training and when we teach, is where the stupid has crept in. When we train against unrealistic attacks, or count on artifacts of the dueling or sport paradigms (equivalent weapons and size and numbers; advance notice; uncluttered environment...) we have let some stupid in.

So bang it out. It will never be perfect, and keep an ear out for anyone who has been in the field who finds a flaw... but if it fails in live training it has little hope to work when you are scared and surprised.

And especially if you have students who cling to myths, bang it. Let them get the stupid out.

*This is one of the classics and one of the big issues in training. "Control the weapon arm just makes so much sense... The issues is that I have never seen anyone actually make it work, not in real life or even in free training, not for more than a second or two. The fact that it makes sense doesn't, somehow, prevent it from being a messy and suicidal tactic. I may get flack on this, which is fine... but before you tell me how wrong I am, go out and bang it, with someone given absolute freedom to play 'live' and tell me how it works.

Thanks, Paul

2011-06-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

Paul Kirchner is the author of "Bowie Knife Fights, Fighters and Fighting Techniques" and "Jim Cirillo's Tales of the Stakeout Squad" and some other books that will probably creep onto my "to read" stack. He sent an e-mail after reading "Meditations on Violence" and "Facing Violence." He wondered why Col. Jeff Cooper wasn't in the bibliography.

The short answer was that I've never read his stuff.

I read. A lot. But there is a huge amount of information out there. There are experts I haven't read. Many of them. People I've never studied with. Months ago, I did a post on possibly working up a course for extreme CQ gun, specifically deploying under attack... and a lot of people gave me leads on work already going on. That was a relief. The late Jim Cirrillo or Southnarc or Mercop are the people who have had to do it and someone in the middle of the problem will tend to understand it far better than someone who has only brushed at the edges.

The list is long, and I make it longer by reading sometimes skeptically. If an author intrigues me, I tend to dig into his bibliography, and sometimes an author's sources do not say what he claims. I like reading on the edge of the field. I know what it feels like to be in certain kinds of problems, have developed a comfort level. I actually learn less from people with similar experiences than I do from researchers or sometimes reporters. If you know human pack behavior, sometimes books about dogs or apes will give a new piece of the puzzle.

Anyway, Paul very graciously sent a copy of "Principles of Personal Defense." It was a short book, I read it while waiting for the coffee to brew. But it was concise, accurate and wonderful. The reading list grows.

Re-Cap and Thoughts

2011-06-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

I feel obligated to recap the last three weeks and I'm not sure I can. Partially because parts are a blur, partially because I don't think I could write about all the great people equally and I don't want to hurt feelings to no purpose.

We did do both Plastic Mind and Scenarios in Halifax. Much of that was because Jim Maloney's crew had most of the physical skills down cold. Those guys were solid, physically and combatively. It was nice.

There were some oddities in the scenarios, a phenomenon that I'd read about in Amanda Ripley's "The Unthinkable" that I'd never seen in a scenario before. Can't describe it here because I don't want to give scenarios away- but it was interesting and disconcerting both. Saw some good tactics and hesitancy to commit and all the usual things, which is good. Most people who have trained are to some degree in denial. Scenarios help them get a taste of how much they will change when there is stress and things are moving fast. Just a taste.

Over the last three weeks I've played with at least sixty people and the most ferocious were the ones from the most traditional of the systems, and that got me thinking. It's not about system. I'm not even sure it's really about the individual. If the teacher is a real fighter, like Jimmy, someone who has thoroughly gathered perspective both in competition and countless real encounters, he gets the core.

Traditional or non-traditional, whatever we studied came from somewhere and was adapted for something by someone. If they sucked at what they were designed for, they quietly disappeared. (Now, what they were designed for my not be related in any way to their marketing or what their students or even their senior leadership believes they were designed for.) They all fill a need. Maybe the need is only cameraderie or testing yourself safely. And that's cool.

And a lot of the needs have changed over time. 350 years ago almost anyplace was violent beyond what most modern Americans can really grasp. Might did make right and there was no recourse or justice beyond what your tribe or family would and could provide (until a guy named Sam Colt made it possible for the small and weak and poor to make predation dangerous... my opinion, of course).

So 350 or even just 100 years ago when some of the traditions arose, people trying to kill you and take your stuff were baselines of the environment. As that need faded and the traditions continued, other things became important: hierarchies and ritual. precision becomes more important than effectiveness. All that stuff.

When a real fighter comes up in that system (or comes to the system or someone gets exposed to violence later after learning in a system) they see it entirely differently. If they have the courage to start teaching it for effect (as opposed to not rocking the boat and just making the hierarchy happy) it becomes an entirely different thing. The bones come alive and sometimes the bones are very strong.

Just some thoughts, sitting in the Halifax airport.

Last Leg

2011-06-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

It will be a different crowd, and that's always a test.

There will be a few people with no training, some martial artists... but the core will be the students of Jim Maloney. Jim is a fighter and he makes fighters and it will be a blast and a challenge to present the material so that his crew get the maximum out of it without leaving anyone else behind.

OTOH, some of the stuff I usually need to emphasize will be familiar to the students of this Old Dragon.

Nightmare

2011-06-23T03:46:00.000-07:00

Logic of Violence does it better, because it is sneaky within the format, but for the quick down and dirty, we can be totally up front. You won't own it the same way, but the information is still valid.

At the Montreal seminar I asked, "Who is your nightmare opponent?" If you are a martial artist, take a few minutes and think about it.

One of the answers: "He'd be about 50% more than I weigh, much stronger with more skill and experience."

Yeah, that would suck, huh? Then add that he gets the first move at the time and place of his choosing. And he may be counting on a previous relationship with you to keep you from acting.

Gentlemen, our worst nightmare is where the average woman starts her day. We've been roughhousing, pushing and hitting each other since childhood and, largely, we've been encouraged. Sometimes overt, often subtle, girls have been punished when they wanted to play like that. So the average man reaches adulthood (even with no formal training) better trained and far more conditioned and experienced than almost any woman.

And men are stronger. We rarely get into contests of direct strength with women without holding back a lot, but when we do the difference is stark. (With the exception of KG and RM, two of my favorite cover officers.)

On top of it all, most women have only learned social strategies to deal with conflict...and social strategies not only fail but backfire when attempted on a predator.

Like I said, in LoV you come to this realization slowly and own it. Here it is quick and dirty. If you are teaching self-defense what you can do within your weight class doesn't mean anything. You need to teach people what works outmatched in strength, skill, experience and ferocity. How to deal when the assault is on before they are aware. And help them work out and overcome much of their social programming.

It can be done. It has been done. But not by staying in your comfort zone perspective.

Responsibility and Blame

2011-06-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

I refuse to get into the particulars. Too much Monkey Dancing. Scott's written about it. Some other people I know have written and some are getting sucked into little vicious flame wars where nobody is really listening to anybody else.

I don't like seeing people get hurt. It makes me feel bad. That's probably petty and childish on some level, but for me it trumps politics or dreams or justice or wishful thinking. Maybe I should amend that to good people getting hurt, but you know what? Even when it was absolutely necessary, there's no joy in hurting others. There's a weird and intense kind of joy in taking the risk on being hurt, but that's for another time.

I don't like seeing people get hurt. No mi gusto.

Should, as the platitude goes, a woman be able to walk naked into a biker bar (no idea why everyone picks on bikers for this) and be safe? Sure. That would be cool. And it will happen when a wounded seal pup can swim through a school of sharks and not get eaten. It would require a change in the nature of sharks.

Rape is a pretty nasty crime. Whether it arises from nature or nurture, by the time someone can commit that crime, they've already gotten past the issues of the victim's rights and humanity and justice and the way the world should be.

All protests, all consciousness-raising aimed at violent criminals centers on the message, "This is wrong."

The criminals already know it's wrong. The issue is that they don't care. You can't fix caring through reason. It's a deeper part of the brain.

I don't want people to get hurt. So I place the responsibility to stay safe on the potential victim. NOT because it is just or because I want the world to be this way. I place it there because, faced with a violent bad guy, the victim is likely the only one there who gives a rat's ass about her safety. The rapist doesn't. If the bad guy knows what he is doing, there won't be any indignant bystanders (and god help the victim if it is a Group Monkey Dance situation) to care and get involved. Even if they would get involved, which might be doubtful.

There are some things that society has, can, and will slowly change over time. Our ethics have advanced so far that we quibble now over hurting feelings when 150 years ago it might not even be a crime to kill someone of a different color. That's good. But on this very day, if something bad were to happen, society can't do anything specific and the bad guy has already decided to be bad. That puts the victim in the role of the only one who will act on her own behalf. Absolute responsibility by default.

And this is totally separate from blame. If a criminal attacks, it is his bad act, his choice. Whether the potential victim took precautions which the threat overcame or took no precautions at all, the blame and punishment should fall entirely on the perpetrator. That's justice.

But even in a world of perfect justice I would still prefer that no one got hurt in the first place. It's a pipe dream and childish, just as much a platitude as walking naked into a biker bar...

But it's still where I'm going to focus my time.

Re-Thinking the Seminars

2011-06-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

Lots to write about, lots to think about. One thing at a time.

I'm rethinking the whole seminar format. Some time ago, a friend said I was trying to do too much. I understood, but I had two defenses:

1) It all ties together. If I leave one of the big pieces out, the picture becomes incomplete.

2) It's all intuitive. There's a lot of material but there is almost nothing to remember. Just stuff to feel, things put in different places in your brain.

For those who haven't been to one, a typical one-day seminar flows like this:

Safety Briefing and teaching philosophy
Intro to the One-Step drill
There are a bunch of things that come out in even a short application of the One-Step, but the ideal is for the students to notice them and bring them to light. It usually works.
Violence Demo, if necessary
Specific One-Step Lessons
First Long Talk: The Context of Violence
Blindfolded Infighting
Leverage and Leverage Points
(Sometimes an extra building block class, if requested)
Second Long Talk: Self-Defense Law
Power Generation
Counter-Ambush
Last Long Talk: Violence Dynamics
Debrief

That's a lot, but it all integrates and the physical stuff is experiential, not technique driven. The Counter-Ambush is the only thing that comes close to being a technique and it's really about designing your own technique and the training method, straight Operant Conditioning.

The second day in a two day is the one I'm thinking about redoing. I'm thinking about dropping scenarios. Scenarios are a blast and they are important. Judgement and physical skills have to be trained and tested together. Good decisions have to be backed up by good articulation. Scenarios are the place for that.

But doing scenarios well and safely is time consuming and takes a lot of detail work. I'm reluctant to be both the primary threat and the safety officer. I'm equally reluctant to use untrained, inexperienced people in either of those roles. And, self-serving sniveler that I am, I don't heal like I used to. I can take care of myself and the armor is good, but being a bad guy for twenty scenarios in an afternoon (even if most of them are targeted at judgement and don't go to force) is still a lot of kinetic energy to absorb.

In addition, I'm adding new material. The Plastic Mind exercises are cited a lot in the AADs as very useful and the violence dynamics section keeps expanding.

The old Second Day used to go:

Safety Briefing, Safety check
One-Step refamiliarization
Ground Movement series
Ethics and Application of Pain
Dynamic Fighting
Wall Fighting
Environmental Fighting
Mass Brawl
Detailed, specific scenario safety briefing
Scenario Briefing
Area Check and Pat Down
Scenarios (each debriefed on the spot)
Class Debriefing
Clean up

Just adding Plastic Mind and removing all of the scenario stuff still nicely fills two eight-hour days. We can even take a short lunch break. (I usually forget to eat and just have any hungry students eat during the lecture parts of Day One and while setting up for scenarios on Day Two.)

So this is what I'm thinking. Four Programs:

Basics- The Day One by itself or both days above, but without the scenarios and with Plastic Mind.
Conflict Communications
Logic of Violence
Scenarios, basically just offer them as a special training to specific individuals.

Just thinking out loud, here. Any thoughts?

Deep Definitions

2011-06-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I did a talk for the Iraqi Society of Oregon. One of the men had almost gotten in trouble over words that flared to a fist fight. They asked me to talk about force and self-defense and the cultural differences on conflict between Iraqis and Americans.

It was a good talk, fun, but the need for it was based on cultural differences. Deep ones. And not overt ones, like THEY are okay with violence and WE aren't. It was deeper than that, more basic. Too deep to question. The initial problem that sparked the whole thing centered on what it is to be a man.

In some cultures, maybe, manhood is a clear thing. I don't believe that it is ever clear for the young. You may have a ritual that declares you are in fact a man and yet still live with your parents and act and be treated as a dependent. If manhood was clear, in any culture, there wouldn't be all these weird ways to prove or maintain it.

And so, we have a man from one culture where he is taught and believes that if someone insults you, if you are a man, you must fight or at least be willing to fight. That is what a man does. That is who a man is.

And he is living in a cultural (the Atticus Finch-influenced part of America) where it is common sense and practically written into law that a real man would never lower himself to fighting over mere words.

Not a value judgment here, just had a few things pop up lately where my definitions of deep behaviors may not match those around me.

The second is polite rudeness. I don't want to hit this with cultural identifiers because I don't want people to try to throw a label on my thinking process ("That bastard is anti-anglo!") and quit listening... but it's going to come up.

I was raised to respect lines. "Cutting lines" or even allowing lines to be cut was a big social no-no in grade school. We stand in lines, we wait. The very thought of cutting lines implied not just that you were special but that you thought you were better and more deserving than people who had made the effort to get there first. It was a personal and calculated insult to everyone else in line.

My friends from the old Soviet bloc don't respect lines. When they were kids, it wasn't a good idea. If you waited your turn, there was a good chance that there would be nothing at the end of your wait. We can wait in line because, though we may not like it, we are generally sure that it will pay off. Remove that assurance and our politeness, which just seems common sense, becomes a failing strategy.

I've seen some "polite rudeness" in the last few days. It comes from a very particular social set. In my social caste asking to cut lines is nearly as unthinkable as just doing it. I've sat on planes with people terrified of missing a connection who refused to ask for a little consideration in getting off the plane early. But in the last few days: "Excuse me, may I go ahead? I have this bag of oranges, you see."

The man he was asking had an entire cart... but he was raised very much as I was and had a hard time saying 'No.' Work a couple of years in a jail and you get over that quick.

Thinking about it, I don't think the person was being rude, just as I don't think the Iraqi was or was not being manly. He was following the rules as he saw them.

In the other gentleman's world, maybe politeness is in the form. Asking nicely enough, even if you were asking something far more terrible than just cutting line, doesn't involve any violation of social rules. Ripe territory for villains, if they can do evil with Captain Hooks 'good form'.

Worth It?

2011-06-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

Teo asked to play this morning, to work on anything. Dealer's choice.

So I said, "How would you take me out?" From that position, that range, relative body configurations... Teo is an intelligent young man (not really young, anymore. He is a father now and all grown up but in my mind he will always be the kid from ten years ago that we tried to tease into asking a waitress out). He moved to take a better position, guarded against a counter-attack that wasn't coming and used a technique that might, might have rattled me.

I know one of his instructors and I know damn well that Teo knows how to finish a human. We talked.

"But in sparring, no one ever just lets stuff come in and if I did really get aggressive, he'd just get aggressive back."

He put a finger on one of my deep problems with sparring and I want to think it out here. First and foremost, I've always loved sparring (of almost any type, not so much into pitty-pat) but it has been bothering me for awhile.

What has been bothering me is the sheer artificiality of it. On one level, MMA sparring is "as close as you can get to real" and "the only way to pressure test techniques." I see where those arguments are coming from but still...

If anyone squares off, if any threat gives me any indication that something is coming, I can walk away. Or talk it down. Or, if that's not going to work, access a force option that turns the whole situation into something that doesn't resemble a fight in any way.

The serious bad guys don't fight. They take you out. They stack everything in their favor: surprise, position, number and weapons (depending on the goal) and finish it. The last thing they want is a fight. Serious bad guys don't fight, they take you out.

And so do successful good guys.

In order for sparring as a fight simulation to even happen, you have to behave stupidly. You choose not to leave or talk or gather resources. Then you have to allow it to become a very particular and tactically silly kind of fight, where you stick to the same options and parameters the threat has chosen. It's a stupid way. One of the basic tactical rules that not only every tactical operator but even every serious sport competitor knows is: Don't play the other guy's game. Sparring specializes there.

And there are good reasons for it. If you want to test and measure and improve the same skills as the threat, it's one of the best, fastest ways to get better... but where does getting really, really good at the tactics of a bad strategy fit?

Bad guys take you out. From surprise. First hit. With a size and strength advantage or, if they can't manage that and really, really need what you've got, with weapons and numbers. They deliberately choose people who won't or can't fight. There's no value to complicated strategy or feinting.

This is an internal discussion. Not a conclusion. I love sparring, but I do it for what it is, know what it is and I'm very, very clear on what it is NOT. Those aren't the skills I'll need if an old acquaintance from the jail decides to even a score or enhance a rep. Those skills are different, qualitatively different.

And don't go tribal on me, either. Saying sparring is artificial is NOT saying that kata is better or realer or some variant. All the training methods are what they are and no more.

Live training is vital, but training stupid tactics live is not just ingraining stupid tactics. People mistake intensity for truth. The more contact and speed, the more real it feels, the more it feels like truth. Not only does it ingrain stupid, it ingrains it hard.

We need live, hard, contact training. But smart. Working from real distance, from positions of disadvantage, outmatched in size and strength. We need to find a safe but live way to practice taking a threat out instead of fighting. We do practice those skills and I know a lot of you do as well. But every so often a good martial artist or even a good fighter is given a problem of force, survival and decisiveness and instinctively tries to turn it into a contest.

It makes me wonder if the training method does more harm than good. Still pondering.

Long Four Days

2011-06-13T14:54:00.000-07:00

This has been fantastic and like many wonderful things that means I'm slightly battered and exhausted. In twelve hours or so, I'll leave London, Ontario for Montreal. Right now there is a large gray cat on my bed and my host's dog just hanging out by the desk.

The host- Chris and Michelle have been fantastic. Very easy to settle down with, great conversation and food and lots of laughing.

The classes. Three separate classes.

The Logic of Violence went through all the material in nine hours. That was faster and more thorough than the original run in Seattle, but I was more directive. Instead of letting the students work out almost everything themselves, I provided a lot more direction. It got to the same place (further, actually, and in less time) but I always fear that anything handed out doesn't resonate as well as something discovered.

The 2-day Ambushes and Thugs covered more material more thoroughly than ever before, but we made a consensus decision that there wouldn't be time for scenarios. A little sad, but there just wasn't time to run the numbers through, not safely and properly, anyway. Day one was in a dojo setting at the Family Karate Center in London, Ontario. That was a good time covering what I consider the basics with a good group. One of the few times people under eighteen have been allowed and none of them seemed terribly traumatized. Some of the parents looked a little perturbed, though.

The second day was held at Chris' shop. Damn. Rolling on concrete, mass brawls and practice fights with claw hammers and compressed air hoses.

The last day was Conflict Communications...and thus ended my weekend.

Sort of. I crashed trying to write this and when I came up for air, I was in Montreal. I'd fully intended to get to the airport early and do a little work, but coming in two hours early with a Canada Air strike in progress was barely time to make the plane. I'm just warning. Ignore that last paragraph.

There were two personal highlights- one was the long talk with Chris on the drive to the airport. He's a thoroughly good man and gives great advice. And he moves, fights and thinks very, very well.

The second was meeting Steve Pascoe. Years ago, just figuring out this internet thing, I ran across a BBS called Cyberkwoon. It's now defunct, but the archives are still up. Steve was one of the cool people that I hadn't met in person. Now I have, and he can hang with the fun crowd on many levels-- sarcastic, funny, intelligent and brutally skilled.

"Tried by Twelve..."

2011-06-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

There is a saying you will hear in the self-defense community: "I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six." If the reference isn't obvious, it means I would rather stand trial, and risk going to prison, than die.

And that's perfectly cool. Given a choice between those two options, prison beats crematorium any day. In my opinion. You can make your own choices.

But almost every time I hear it, it's a platitude. It is not said to clarify a truth. No one ever slaps their head and says, "Shit, I was wrong all along. I always thought dying was better! Thank you Mr. Wise One."

The first time I watched a self-defense class was in 1981. I saw a big, burly guy teaching women that if someone grabbed them in a front hug they could beat on the chest of the bigger, stronger man until he would magically loosen his grip and then they could hammer fist him in the nose and they would be safe. Then I saw the instructor teach that if someone grabbed a woman's wrist she should just chop his throat.

Even as a seventeen-year-old with just a couple of months in judo and some weird hybrid striking art, I knew something was wrong: Low levels of force (that wouldn't work) when high levels were needed? And potentially deadly force to a stimulus that might just be a child reaching for your hand? Ineffective AND inappropriate offended me on two levels.

When someone says "I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six" and they are sincere, it's simply unnecessary. But in almost every instance that I hear it, it is an excuse. The instructor has some idea of how to hurt a person and absolutely no idea of force law. So they say this to convince the people listening that force law is not nearly as important as what they can teach.

In logic or debate, this would be called a 'false sort.' It only has any validity if those are the only two options and they are mutually exclusive. "I'd rather hit myself in the head with a hammer than stab myself in the leg with a screwdriver." Simple fact is, you can do both of those things or neither. Dying might take going to prison off the table, but going to prison certainly doesn't take dying off the table.

The essence of self-defense law isn't that complicated. If your life is on the line, it doesn't hamper you at all. If you want to Monkey Dance or teach somebody a lesson, that's a different story... but you already know those aren't self-defense. Plus, most of self-defense law makes sense. It's not some esoteric weirdness.

If someone refuses to teach it, it is because they don't know it. If they offer the excuse that they are afraid worrying about the law will freeze you I would question, well everything. Their knowledge, first. Their common sense. Their commitment to your survival over their ego...

There are lots of reasons people freeze. In my experience, scary ignorance is far more freezing than informed fear. "I'm going to get sued but I know the ropes" is far less freezing than, "OMG, am I going to get sued? What will that be like? What should I do?"

One of the keys, though, and even good, knowledgeable instructors might miss this, is that knowing force law isn't enough. The students have to practice articulating decisions. Even most cops could use more practice at that.

Fighters All the Way Down...

2011-06-06T14:44:00.000-07:00

It's a reference to 'turtles all the way down'.

The first Logic of Violence seminar went well, I think. The feedback has been positive. Turns out ten hours is too short, but that can be tweaked with, to an extent.

Fighting systems come about because when someone is good at fighting, it behooves the other members of his tribe (whether that is a family or a cohort) to imitate and learn. So, in an ideal world, experienced fighters taught other fighters to fights. Whoever the founder was, whether of a classical sword system or a modern low-light handgunning system, he was good at what he did and started teaching other people. Other fighters. Soldiers, cops and civilians can all learn from each other, but their needs aren't the same. So it's not just that fighters tended to teach other fighters but that they taught the same tribe or kind. Soldiers teach soldiers. Cops teach cops. There's some cross-over, but when a civilian learns from a tactical operator, sometimes they feel like they are finally getting the real stuff.

Kasey did a post a while ago about how nonsensical it was to teach or learn building-clearing as a civilian. It is real stuff, and specialized, and something an entry team needs...but not a skill a civilian will have either the resources to perform properly or any legal reason to do.

So when you look at the history of an art, it's a line of fighter/instructors all the way back to the mists of time. (Okay, in the modern era, fighters or wannabes, but you get the idea.)

Anyone see anything missing here? At least in the self-defense context?

Martial and combative training has changed vastly over the last hundred years. It's been slow because the traditions run so deep, IMO, but there has been change. Modern teaching methodology introduced by Kano rocked the world. Sports physiology. The advent of MMA gave some people a good hard shock that what they thought they were doing was not what they were doing. There is more information available and more cross-over from different areas than ever before (I'm still absorbing the applicable combat lessons from a damn book on acting).

Logic of Violence just takes another, very obvious discipline and uses it to look at most self-defense training.

Here's the basics of the class. It might take ConCom or a quick read of "Facing Violence" to make sure we are using the same language, but if you have a little experience with criminals, you can keep up.

We go over the different types of violence. Heavy emphasis on motivation, since trying to prove you're tough (monkey dancing) has nothing in common with feeding a drug habit (resource predator.)
A little on the triune brain theory, because it comes up in social violence habits and certain predator's tactics.
Quick examination of violence-prone places.

Then, for each type of violence, from the predator's point of view:

Goals: specifically what the predator wants
Parameters: what the predator doesn't want: To get caught, to get hurt...
Victim profile. What will we look for to get what we want?
Where to look: what will be the hunting ground?
Behaviors: Given the above, what will we look for that says a victim is ripe?
Access: How will we get close enough to accomplish our goals with the privacy to act?
Control: What will we do, specifically, to get what we want?
Attack: If it needs to go physical, keeping in mind the victim profile and that every aspect of the set-up is under your control, how will you attack?

Then we went out and banged the attack patterns the crew came up with. There was some back sliding into martial thinking, some squaring off.

"I was trying to take out a big guy from the front?"

"Why? Get this straight, 120 pound meth-heads need drugs too. This isn't about if you can take him out but about how. You choose when, you choose where. Need a weapon? That's up to you too."

In the process, it becomes clear why assaults are so rare (there have to be hundreds of incidents of car burglary or 'aggressive panhandling' for every committed assault) but also why they are so effective.

Once we've run the list and banged from the threat's point of view, we keep the list on the board and run through it from the potential victim's perspective. What needs to happen to bypass the situation at each level or step?

Prevention is good. Understanding the time line is powerful, but experienced self-defense teachers were at a loss on the attacks. Fighters teaching fighters how to deal with fighters is one thing. Fighters all the way down. But fighters (most self-defense and martial instructors are fighters on some level) teaching victims (the whole victim profile: young, drunk, insecure woman? Or out-of-town businessman, drunk and out of shape trying to unlock his rental car? Or...) how to deal with predators (people who use distraction and ambush and overwhelming force to not just injure but to overwhelm the OOODA loop)... that's a challenge.

Yet, it's obvious. For all of violence being the soul of chaos, there is a logic to it. And applying the tools of disaster planning makes sense. Fighters (soldiers, cops, bouncers) get into fights. The types of violence a fighter will be exposed to are limited and predictable.

Victims get victimized, and that can be a wider range of behavior. High consequences. Fighters teaching self-defence could stand to take a look at it from the yes of both a victim and a predator.

Before I Forget...

2011-06-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

Details. This is for posterity.

First some background on the Plastic Mind Drills. If you want a more detailed description, check out the "Drills" manual available on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle (link is over on the right).

Mind controls the body. It actually works both ways, the body influences the mind as well, but changes in thought change a lot of things, some deeply. The Plastic Mind exercises are a progression that show, first, how emotion, even artificial emotion completely changes the way that you fight. Second, that iconic images (think the Animal Styles of Kung-fu) change movement in an integrated way and that almost all of the integrated ways are effective, yet different.

In the third step in the progression, the students create in a matter of minutes four complete, integrated martial arts. The arts are each unique, coherent (you can tell the difference at a glance, usually) and in many cases, the student fights better in this mode after thirty seconds of thought than they do in their primary martial art even with years of training. Get this, it's not some miracle or magic bullet, it is merely a way to show that thought can influence motion and that integrated thought (everything connected and arising from a single concept) makes for efficient motion.

Because it works on some pretty primitive brain levels, I've always known that there was a possibility for a student to get into it pretty deeply, potentially to match the trance-states of some of the animistic practices. Last weekend, it happened.

Subject: male, mid thirties, former kumite competitor for the national karate team.

What I observed: He was doing the drill with a slightly stronger but less-skilled opponent. I noticed the subject was breathing oddly, exhaling with a sharp rhythm. He was not looking at his opponent. Subject was on his knees, knees wide and feet together with his opponent face up. Subject had one hand on the opponent's upper chest, the other on his abdomen at about bladder level. Subjects back was extremely arched, like a seal.

Despite the apparent weakness of that position, his (slightly stronger) opponent was unable to move and starting to panic (white showing around the eyes, struggling ineffectually, unable to remember or follow the steps of the drill.) I ordered them to freeze. No response from subject. Repeated order. No response. No response until I shook him hard. He appeared dazed and uncertain of what happened. He had been fighting as the alchemical element 'fire' and had no memory of the incident other than a need "To spread wide and get higher." He had tears on his cheek during the debriefing.

Things to note:

No response to verbals; physical contact required
No memory of events
Extremely effective results from what appeared to be an extremely weak position

And two other things:

It affected the subject pretty profoundly and he kept trying to tie everything else covered that weekend and other extraneous events to that one aspect of the one drill.
I had to really fight a very strong urge to make a joke or belittle what happened. I wanted to give him a nickname. I wanted to say how ridiculous he looked while he was completely dominating his opponent. It seemed to trigger some kind of deep defense mechanism in me. If I ridicule, it might not happen again, perhaps?

No conclusions here. I'm just not keeping a private log right now and I wanted the observations recorded while they were still fresh.

FWIW, I've considered two more levels to this drill, Masks and Personas, but I'm not sure who is ready. Definitely not for public consumption yet.

Children of Blood and Brain

2011-05-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

I've got at least four things I need to write about, but first...

Athens and Bruno and his crew have been a blast. Good people and good fighters, mostly from an MMA background-- and these guys love to wrestle. Enough of them working high-risk professions that we have a common language even though we didn't, for the most part, have a common language.

But it has been four hard days-- if I wasn't training I was hiking around Athens or being stuffed with fantastic food. Asleep late, up early. It has been great, but it will be good to wing it on home. Really missing my K.

The ideas I need to write about (placed here for reference so I don't forget later):

1) One of the students went into full trance in the Plastic Mind exercise. Some interesting observations and ties in well with some mystical practices.

2) "I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six" and specifically why it is a nonsensical platitude.

3) Turning into a fortune cookie.

4) "Is there a curriculum for this?"

Okay, now to the thought about children of blood and brain.

If you don't have children, you at least have been a child. Almost all biology and all of mammalian history has been about children. Your children are more like you than a stranger's child. In any given population, some traits work better than others. Those with the good traits have more children and slowly, ever so slowly, the species drifts to look more like the successful ones.

(Nota bene: One of the things people screw up is trying to bring the teleological fallacy into this, assuming a plan or assigning personal values to a natural process. Sure, being smart and strong and fast are good things, from our point of view. But if you are smart and strong and fast and opt to have only two children and your neighbor is a vile, lazy slug but has fathered fourteen illegitimate children, nature is valuing what he has, not what you have, not what you might think nature should value. And this process never stops.)

So we have children of our blood and we are children of someone else's blood.

But we also have ideas and we teach. The ideas are children of our brain, or rather a form of what the old naturalists called the 'germ' (like sperm and ova or pollen or seed). Spreading the germ transforms all of your students and many of your friends into your children. Progeny, rather.

There are a lot of parallels between ideas and genes, or children and students. Some ideas die out, others thrive. Some spawn a huge number of variations and create a complex web, others are monolithic and simple. The ideas that survive aren't necessarily the best by our human standards (of course we all believe that our ideas are the best or we would change them. Really sure we would. Sigh). And ideas, and those who hold them, will battle for survival.

A powerful idea can create millions of children, for good or bad. Shakespeare's words have spawned immense creativity. Or go back sixty years to find a demagogue who started a war and slaughtered millions.

I see another pattern here, and I see it in teaching and parenting both. Some people raise their children to be good children. To know their place as children: "You'll always be my baby." It makes them manageable and a comfort, and sometimes it seems a very healthy, safe and pleasant way to grow up. But teaching a child to be a good child is very different than teaching them to be a good adult. "You won't be a little kid forever. You need to learn how to handle this."

Teaching the way I do makes sense to me. In the last two days I've been called LSD ("That Elements drill changed our minds, for Kostas it was just like beer but for Thanasis and me it was like LSD.") Lucifer ("Not in the bad way, like the devil. He also brought the light.") And a contagion (I'm pretty sure that was a mistranslation and he meant "affected," not "infected" but it was funny anyway.) I think it is hitting some people hard because in this context they are used to being taught like children-- doing what they're told, cautioned not to break anything...and careful not to get their feet wet.

A Good Question

2011-05-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

It's almost 1 AM here. For some reason, the TV turned itself on at midnight. I'm feeling entirely too refreshed for four hours of sleep after 30+ awake. If you have no sleep cycle and regularly go for long periods without sleep, take a nap, and do it again...there is no real difference between jet lag and the normal state of exhaustion.

The signing went well. Just under forty people, including a few who drifted by, heard parts of the talk and stayed until the end. Then good talks and food at the nearby McMenamin's pub with a few friends.

One of the attendants asked a good question. It's one of those questions that has real depth into some of the underlying issues. The hypothetical: You're traveling out of country, taking pictures. You find yourself triangulated by three people who want your camera and money. What do you do? How do you prepare?

The rote answer is that you give it to them. Which is fine, I don't have a problem with that answer... but it's important that you understand why that is the reflex answer for most instructors, NOT what most people actually do, and the dynamics that underlie the answers that exist, the options that are seen, and the answer that is chosen.

I see six potential responses: To acquiesce, to run, to bargain, to struggle, to fight or to destroy.

1) Acquiesce is what most instructors would advocate, and in many situations it would be the safest thing. In much of the world, violent crimes are investigated more thoroughly than non-violent crimes. Killing tourists drives away tourists. Because the set-up described has all the ear marks of resource predation, it is probably safe to give up the goods... but every situation is different, every place is different.

There is an ego cost to acquiescing as well, and that ego cost drives many of the other options. Being mugged is just resources, on one level, but there is a dominance aspect. Many people, especially young men will feel like they should fight or they aren't men at all.

2) Running- If you're quick, not over-burdened, not cut off (and sometimes even if you are) and there is a safe place nearby (lights and people, generally) a sudden sprint can be a good option. The key is that sudden part. The bad guys expect a little hesitation as you decide if there is enough risk to keep you submissive. They might even expect backing away (and so it is likely, if they are experienced that there will be one behind you)... but taking off like a jack-rabbit with no hesitation usually buys a second of surprise. You might even be able to go through the people cutting you off. Few people do this, but it is on the table.

3) Bargaining is not about stuff. It is about ego. "Okay, I can't fight all three of you, so let me just give the camera and my cash. I need my passport..." This is one of the methods used so that it feels like you have some power in the situation. The power is actually an illusion, but some will let you keep a token if the threats are feeling generous. Not because you had a chance if it came to a fight. There is a similar dynamic in some sex crimes where the victim draws a line, sometimes a non-sensical line (actual example, a woman terribly assaulted and abused but she refused to 'talk dirty') to maintain some dignity.

It can work, or, if you either are disrespectful or the threats are NOT feeling generous, they can throw in a beating to teach you a lesson.

4) Struggling. This happens, for some reason. A bad guy grabs a woman's purse or a tourist's camera and the victim holds on to it, refusing to give it up, but also refusing to do any damage to the attacker-- They death grip on the camera strap but don't bite or punch or kick. Maybe it's instinct. Maybe it works sometimes, it's possible it could draw enough attention to make the bad guy run (witnesses are bad.) But in most cases, it just forces the bad guy or guys to use violence. The snatch becomes a beating. I'm not sure (pretty confident, but not sure) that this is another ego thing, your limbic system trying to prevent you from the "I shoulda done sumthin" blues of merely acquiescing.

5) Fighting. This is the overly-confident alpha male approach and what every teenager fantasizing (and, I suspect, many martial arts and self-defense aficionados) think they will or should do. Make 'em pay. Give 'em a good fight. Stand up, be a man. Sometimes it even works. You hit one or two of them or you get lucky, or you don't go down easy and they may decide the price is too high and scurry away, which will nicely reinforce the tough guy image. It's rare, though. Most three-on-ones, they just beat you down. With weapons (this is cultural, a lot of places in a mugging, the weapon is implied, not shown. It may not be there.) there is almost no chance.

6) Destroy. This goes back to flipping the switch and qualitative differences. Very few people just run. That's what makes the tactic so effective. Even fewer can just explode into violence. Destroying is not the same as fighting. You explode while the threats are expecting you to think, vacillate or agree. You do fast, extreme violence. It is not fighting. You don't defend yourself in anyway, confidant that your attacks will give them no time to react.

It can work. If it is not a simple mugging over stuff but, say, a group taking a hostage for later filming of a beheading, it is one of the few things (along with running) that has any chance at all. At the minimum, with this level of aggression and mindset, you will force the threats to make a choice: they can run or they can kill you then and there. You allow nothing else to work.

It's an alien mindset and there are more people who believe they could do it if necessary than actually can. Many, probably, that will think this is just like #5, fighting, only harder and more serious. It is nothing like fighting. It is slaughtering. And if you go there, you will kill or cripple someone... For a camera.

This is why the question was hard to answer completely in a short session. It's also an example of why prescriptive answers set students up for failure. If I tell him, "Just give up the camera, you'll be okay" that might be the right answer, 70% of the time. But if he is sure it is the right answer, he quits looking for all the little clues that this one is different.

I (or any other instructor) won't be there if he needs to make the decision. We won't see what he sees. He need to show what to look for, not tell what to do.

The Busy Season Begins

2011-05-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

The signing at Powell's in Beaverton tomorrow (my very first) is at 1900. Hope to see some of you there. We'll see if my voice still gets squeaky when I read in public.

Then hopping a plane to Athens (Greece, not Georgia) the next morning.

Back for a breather and then Seattle, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. You have no idea how much mowing and yard work this is getting me out of.

It's not up on the webpage yet (see the link off to the side) but Toronto has confirmed that they have a space for three separate classes, so Logic of Violence Friday June 10th; the two day Ambushes and Thugs seminar over the weekend of June 11-12; and Conflict Communications Monday the 13th. That should be severe information overload for anyone who makes all three. Montreal is working on the possibility of ConCom as well.

More Thoughts From Saturday

2011-05-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

Two people playing and talking- large male, small female:

Woman: You're intimidating. I feel like I can't do anything.

Man: Not true. You're a much better martial artist than me. You have more moves, you move better and you're crisper.

Woman: But if you decided to take me out, there's nothing I could do...

Man (dumps her quickly, double leg takedown): Decision stick.

So, first thought: Gender, size and skill aside, making decisions will always overcome weighing options. The decision stick is faster than the decision tree. Moving beats thinking about moving. Later, the woman described the man as "implacable" which ties in with something E and I were talking about last night. Skill levels, strength, speed and size are all quantitative differences. The more you have, the more the odds shift in you favor.

Making decisions is a qualitative difference from weighing options. Moving and thinking are qualitative differences. So are fighting and hunting (or social and asocial violence, if you're just catching up on the language.) Skilled fighters and skilled killers are not at different levels of skill, they aren't even playing the same game.

That was the first thought, not really new, but this is something I keep trying to say in new ways because it seems that this thought brings up a lot of resistance and ego-defense.

The second thought is about gender, and this is something we will hit heavily in the "Logic of Violence" seminar. There are a limited number of very specific types of violence. Many of the most dangerous are predatory. When the people in the class do their self analysis most fit male martial artists (who don't go clubbing, get drunk, go regularly to unfamiliar cultures or have old enemies) are not at risk for much. What they are at risk for, especially if they do go to places of drunken revelry, is largely social: low stakes and easy to avoid.

The women, on the other hand, are at risk for more things, a wider variety of things and the types of violence with the highest stakes. No one is going to pick a former bouncer and Muay Thai fighter with a shaved head out of the crowd and decide to lure him to a secluded place for an act of sexual violence and murder. Victims are chosen for safety.

People forget that their world is not the world. Men teaching self-defense, even with a lot of real-life experience, sometimes forget how limited their experience is. If you have thrown a hundred people out of bars, 100% of your experience is with drunk young men challenging with a dominance display. It is easy to come to believe that your 100% must at least relate to 90% of the world's experience. Surely...

Gender. Women are attacked differently and for different reasons than men. They are even intimidated differently. The average women can be knocked flat with a single blow from a fairly athletic men. Women know this. Athletic men teaching self-defense tend, it seems, to forget. When a guy gets knocked down, we don't like it, but it has happened before-- playing football or rough-housing as kids.

When a woman gets knocked down it is often new, a blatant expression of power she can't match and with an emotional element men rarely grasp. You knock me down, I'm a guy. This is now a contest. The message is, "This is what I've got. What have you got?"

You knock down a woman, it is a stark affirmation of something she knows: men are powerful. The message received is not about a contest. It is about worth and power and inconsequence.

Are the messages true? Doesn't matter, because they are often received, true or not. When you are teaching self-defense to women it is not merely a matter of overcoming a 5-to-1 power deficit and a 3-to-1 size deficit as Teja points out. It also happens in a sometimes crippling psychological milieu. You can't ignore that.

In sparring and drills, I watch big people ramp back on strength so that they play skill against skill with the other students. It's very natural, but it's not true. There is a piece missing. That piece has to be brought out occasionally and looked at.

Cold Math: Epipheny

2011-05-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in Everett was very good. John had a great venue, the mix of skills and intensity was wonderful. Several previous attendees and some new blood. Sore muscles, rug burns... some of the best things in life.

With a few exceptions, I stayed away from the dark stuff. Yesterday was about fun and movement and efficiency. We played at mass brawls and (almost) everyone learned and extrapolated the lesson of the baby drill. Score! And I saw something I have been trying to put into words for a long time.

It is some pretty cold math.

People, generally, are very inefficient fighters. Contestants regularly go two-minute rounds in any full-contact combat sport you care to name yet, hospitalizations are rare. Deaths are very rare, and these are skilled fighters in excellent condition.

On the other hand, people can be extremely efficient killers. The longest stage in butchering an 800 pound steer or 200 pound hog is watching it bleed out. There is no ritual when you butcher meat. You don't take time to bow in, you don't get angry. There is no fight.

People can apply this skill and mindset to other people. Some can, anyway. It becomes very efficient. It doesn't have to be just killing, either. It's a tiny switch in mindset to simply knock down a threat and cuff him while he is still waiting for the fight. We can do it. We don't. We are so conditioned-- biologically, socially and through training-- to fight, to struggle, to turn any face to face struggle with each other into a dominance game with rules we are not even aware of...

(The tempting tangent, here is to go into how completely unprepared skilled fighters are when they meet a casual killer, but that's not the point.)

The one-step drill has to be done slowly to be safe. I want good power generation, good targeting. Each moment or action should be a cold assessment of the most efficient option. I want people to practice or at least think of skills closer to butchering than to fighting. Each action should be intended to incapacitate the threat or put the threat in a position to incapacitate. I want them going slowly enough that they can stay (safely) in the cold, killing mindset when all of their instincts are pushing them to fight, to contest.

It's hard to go slow, and always a few people ramp it up. Usually no one gets hurt and I usually just tell them to slow down, remind them that the drill isn't a fight simulation, it's about learning to see and encourage them to slow down and see...

"...always a few people ramp it up. Usually no one gets hurt..." That clicked, yesterday. Finally, and I feel like an idiot for not figuring the words out sooner.

Here's the deal, and herein is the cold math: If you are ramping it up, if you are putting energy into a system designed to hurt people and no one is getting hurt, the energy is being dissipated, wasted in some way. In other words, if you are training to injure people (which is the essence of martial arts) and you practice with speed and power in sparring and no one gets hurt you are being inefficient. There is no way to put ten times the energy (effort, power, speed) into the system (sparring) and get the same results (no injuries) unless you also drop the efficiency by a full factor.

It is completely subconscious, for most people. I caught myself tensing up punching someone I didn't want to hurt a while ago. A subconscious inefficiency I hadn't felt in years... and also the first time I'd fought within my own tribe in years.

This post will bring up all kinds of resistance. We all do things that feel stronger that makes us less efficient, but we all deny it. You only really have to look at the threat displays versus the pre-assault indicators to see it in others, though. All the 'big, red, loud' pattern of a threat display makes for a vulnerable, exposed, weak and telegraphing fighter... but we are programmed to feel and sometimes see stupid rage as strength.

Thanks to the crew who showed up yesterday, I think I finally found the words.

Finally!

2011-05-16T17:50:00.001-07:00

After three autovetter failures the fourth installment in the blog series is up on Smashwords. Kami did an outstanding job on the cover.

"Facing Violence" appears to be doing well, as near as you can tell from its Amazon ranking which has stayed under 10k for eleven days and counting.

Combative Poetry

2011-05-16T09:37:00.000-07:00

Lots of things coming together that feel important. Some from the book, some from talking to E, some old mysteries.

I think more and more that 'art' in combative or martial arts is probably the right word. It is and must be a creative, spontaneous process. The logical part of the brain, the one that tries to remember what you were taught or what you 'should' do is too slow. But so is the creative part, if it is bounded. If you come up with an idea but reject it because the idea isn't good enough, that is also too slow to work. Probably slower than relying on memory and certainly closer to a freeze.

With my family I sometimes do extemporaneous rhyme. Usually at the Fessic level (Princess Bride reference), just trying to think up every word that rhymes with one that catches my attention and maybe keep them in a sentence. It's not a sonnet by any means, but it is poetry-without-thought. Reciting poetry takes a hesitation, and you must have the right poetry memorized for the occasion. Spontaneously composing good poetry is hard... and it rarely is or sounds spontaneous. It takes time.

You can get better at it, but the key is practicing spontaneity, not studying poetry.

Am I the only one that sees the correlation here with survival fighting?

Kids do poetry naturally. Show them rhyme and alliteration and rhythm and they will have fun. They will play with words and make up songs. (When my daughter was five years old and very angry at the entire adult world she made up a lovely and disturbing ballad called, "I Ran Away From Home and Got Raised by Some Cougars." No adults survived the whole song.) They don't start losing talent until someone tells them there is such a thing and that there are good and bad rhymes and that (and this is subtle but it is always there) they will be judged. That's when kids quit making up their own songs. That's when they tell themselves that they aren't fill-in-the-blank. Talented. Smart. Creative.

This ties in so hugely with the 'Permission' aspect of self-defense.

Some, a very few, don't care what other people think. It's very hard to truly fall into that camp without being an ass. (Damn, I went judgmental.) A slightly larger number realize that no one can judge us unless we let them. You can tell me that you think something I did was incorrect, but if it worked your judgment doesn't mean a lot to me.

Training for spontaneity isn't hard. And you will come up with things that are better than anything you were taught, since they will come from who you are. And it can be faster than responding from any other complex part of your brain.

We go around and around about what can really be taught. Appropriate and graded ruthlessness. The instinct to attack when under attack. Unfreezing. The will to recover and fight when you are pretty much finished. Taking pain and even injury as a data point, ignoring the emotional element... and spontaneity.

Realistically, I know that most high-end operators are identified in selection, not forged in training. Some of these abilities I have seen trained and most grow to some extent over time, but always by being in the company of a group who showed the traits.

But, in martial arts, there may be a problem with the student population. Kids lose their creativity when they realize they will be judged. It's a defense mechanism. But it is one of many possible defense mechanisms.

Another is to memorize well and seek out a group where the standards are clear. To work hard at conforming to what the teacher wants. To be an obedient student.

I think that will work better at a recital than playing the dozens.

A contrast- where these kinds of thinking lead:

In "Meditations on Violence" I wrote: "... if you are scheduled to fight a world champion heavyweight boxer on Thursday, you shoot him on Tuesday."

As opposed to, "If I had a fight to the death next week I would practice my forms every day."

Yes and No People

2011-05-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of reading a fascinating book. Full review when I finish.

In one section, the author states that there are 'Yes' people and there are 'No" people, and that 'Yes' people are rewarded by the adventures they have and 'No' people are rewarded by the security they bring into their lives.

So much in that little statement. He writes that there are many more 'No' people, and you see this soooo much: people who have always wanted to write a book but never got around to it, people who go to the same vacation spot every year, people who hate a job and stick with it. It's natural, organisms tend toward homeostasis. "The over-grazed pasture here is my ancestral homeland, we will not leave for those green hills..."

There are always a few who take challenges, a few 'Yes' people, and they drag civilization along behind them, otherwise our species would have died an embarrassing, boring, entropy death long ago. And there are always 'No' people who specialize in trying to rein in and control the 'Yes' people.

Looking at my writing and things I sound, martially, like a 'No' person. Everything is presented as a tool to come home safe, to keep my homeostasis. But it is a big element of the 'Yes' part of my life as well. I intend to go into unsafe places. That's not "No' person behavior. I need the tools to come home.

So here's the thing we maybe all need to think about with our martial arts training.

Why do we do it?

Do we do it so we can then take risks with better chances?

Or do we train so that we get that feeling, but then never actually take the risks. Does MA help us (me, you) become a more effective 'Yes' person? Or just give us a beard we can hide behind and pretend to be explorers while never actually taking the risks?

And that's just in application. In training, do we give over our agency to someone with a title so we don't have to think for ourselves? Avoid training with strangers or new ideas to maintain our level of comfort? Accept that our instructor's superior years of training in some way requires us to act and think like dutiful children instead of men and women?

Or do we brawl and challenge and play? Look for things so different that they will shift everything we thought we knew? Try to find those edges of fear and exhaustion where the world changes?

In the end, is your training about being comfortable? Or being incredible?

Bone and Muscle

2011-05-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

Deep water and shallow water as well. The Beaverton seminar was small, but went well. A really wide mix of skills and, as always, there are a number of things I consider basic that we didn't touch.

A lot of my purpose in teaching the way I do is to, as Joe Lewis says, "Lead them to the deep water." Until you complicate it, the physical stuff is easy. Striking two people while doing a back flip is probably hard and somewhat complex...but knocking someone on his ass isn't complex. Not unless your internal "what if monkey" gets involved. There are few things more natural and intuitive to an organism than delivering kinetic energy.

I consider that shallow water stuff, and people do need some training in it. But spending years in the wading pool doesn't prepare you for the deep end...and, to stretch the metaphor too far, many people work really hard to convince themselves that their little wading pool is the ocean. Power generation is easy. Power generation with compromised structure and injured (which, unless you are the bad guy, is the normal starting place in an assault) is a different skill.

Fighting well when you have psyched yourself up for a match is different than fighting well surprised and scared...and that is different than fighting after you have been crushed and humiliated and all you have left is a life that may or may not be worth living. I spend a lot of time on context and a little time on emotion. Partially because they are important but even more because so few people really look at them and they affect everything else.

One of the rank beginners asked a question. There is simply no way to move or stand where you are safe. Multiple targets are always exposed and every motion exposes more. If the threat has the power or a weapon, the human body is all target. He wanted to know how to defend his vulnerabilities.

I paused for a second because the question was so backward... and then we played with it. It's not about your vulnerabilities (much) it's about the threat's capabilities. He is composed of bone and meat. Any way that he stands, each motion creates and eliminates specific vectors. His weight is on his right foot? He can't kick right without shifting. Leaning away? His lead hand is weak but his rear, especially if his spine is twisted, is loaded.

Once you read the opponent, you know how he can hurt you. His options are limited. You don't need to defend everything, only what he can hurt. It's one of the reasons I prefer infighting is that people are easier and faster to read by touch than by sight, but the principle really doesn't change.

Things change by history. This isn't deep-water stuff for me. I don't think I learned it my first day of martial arts, but certainly in the first year and probably the first month. It's a basic. Getting the question from a beginner was okay... but I also got a 'thanks' e-mail from someone else at the seminar who considered this the big take-away. Not sure how I feel about that.

I Was Mean

2011-05-10T16:08:00.000-07:00

One of my pet peeves is bad science. I'm not just talking ignorant science, where people with no background or training parrot back opinions that they don't really understand. That's just the tribal brain pretending to be logical.

I'm annoyed by bad science. Poorly designed experiments. Bad survey design. Ignorance of the process of science.

For example, in an upper-level psych class in college, our textbook had an experiment. In an effort to find where thirst was detected in the body, the experimenters injected hypertonic saline solution into the hepatic portal vein (liver) and the jugular vein (neck) to see if thirst was detected in the liver or the brain.

Can you believe that? Someone (I assume a student) designed and proposed an experiment; that was reviewed by the instructor; that was reviewed by at least one committee (ethics). It was performed, written up and submitted for publication. There it was peer-reviewed and published. Then someone decided it was really cool and found its way into a college textbook.

No one, evidently, in that long, involved process knew that veins move blood towards the heart. Away from the organ. All that they measured was which would make the hypertonicity go systemic faster.

Last night I got a call:

"I'd like to ask you a few questions for a survey. What region are you in?"

"You called me. How can you not know what region I'm in?"

"Are you in Washington State?"

"If you knew, why did you ask?"

"What is your opinion on the changes to the health care law?"

"Federal or State?"

"Excuse me?"

"Are you talking about the changes to federal laws or the changes to state laws? They both changed last year, right?"

"I... I don't know."

"How can you not know? You're trying to conduct a poll on a law and you don't know which law?

"The survey form doesn't say."

"Well, since I don't know what you're talking about and neither do you, I don't think I can help you. Good bye."

Okay, it was a little mean and maybe a little funny, but it also was wrong and infuriating. The only valid data possible from this survey is measuring the emotional reaction of people who don't know what they are talking about. Nothing else, because by the nature of it, no one COULD know what they are talking about.

What's your opinion on Blixismaciousness?

But this survey was designed and paid for and someone is going to use the data generated. Use it for what? Not to change the unknown and possibly imaginary health law. At least I don't think so. More likely to tell people what other people think: "80% of the people agree on "X" what is the matter with you?" "Over half the people surveyed in your district don't support your position, Senator." "Our survey indicates that people think this is a serious problem, so we need more funding."

If I hadn't hung up, I probably could have figured out what the survey was designed to elicit (and only really good surveys are neutral). Most people have never even seen a neutral survey. Either by design-- which seems quite common now-- or by subconscious bias in the designer, most surveys and many experiments are targeted at a specific result.

And there's some guilt in this mix of feelings as well. When everyone refuses to play the stupid game it only leaves the ones unable to see the stupid game still playing. Do they then wind up driving policy?

"Facing Violence"

2011-05-05T15:00:00.001-07:00

The new book ships in less than two weeks, if my math is correct. I should be able to bring a few to Athens at the end of the month. My publisher has express mailed me the first two off the press and they should be here, oh, about now. That's cigar worthy.

I'm not sure what it means, but on pre-orders alone, "Facing Violence" is currently ranked #7858 on Amazon out of more than eight million books. According to the secret author page, it hit a high rank of #5748 Wednesday.

Those are numbers. My assessment, as the author, is that "Meditations on Violence" was more personal and visceral than "Facing Violence" but that "Facing Violence" is infinitely more practical and useful. In the end, as always, the readers will decide.

Two More Thoughts

2011-04-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

High-level playing for me isn't a thing of words or sight. What I remember tends to be tactile and not stored in the word-part of my brain either, so forgive me if details are wrong.

Two more insights playing with Maija: Her instructor had moved completely away from forms and patterned drills. They trained by mixing it up with range and rhythm and weapon and intensity. It is really close to what I am trying to do in making the one-step the basic drill. Most efficient movement in any given instant. Fight to the goal. Constant adaptation. As it speeds up, the one-step blends flawlessly with jujutsu randori, but that's another thing.

The effect it had on Maija were pretty obvious on one level: she didn't need any idea of what I did or how I fought or moved to be able to play. She could adapt to almost anything I threw at her and if it took a second, that was okay, too. But possibly the most profound thing, the thing that took a couple of days to bubble up to consciousness was Maija's attitude towards fear.

I'm not going to say she didn't feel any. I have no idea what she felt. But almost every high-level practitioner I've played with had a little hesitation, a little ego, a little worry in them. It showed in how they moved and revealed quickly how to hurt them. No emotional hesitation from Maija. Damn few glitches, and almost all of those were just unfamiliarity.

By playing in chaos from the very beginning, she was expecting it. She may have been feeling fear but if so it was the kind of, "Well, what do you expect? Of course I'm afraid" that doesn't affect performance. Fear, insecurity was just a data point. The teaching method had shifted it to the 'irrelevant data' list.

--------------

The second thought is comparatively minor: Maija'd asked something about taking some one down to control. So I shifted mindsets and did it: pass, control elbows, sweep to handcuffing position.

Maija asked, quite reasonably, "Wouldn't that also make it easier to kill?" It took me a second to understand the question, but it opened up a huge can of worms that might be important for martial artists.

Control and injure are two totally different mindsets for two totally different situations. Yes, if I can take you down and get you in a submission, I can stab you easily. But if I can take you down and control you, there is no need to stab. It's no longer justified or necessary. If I can disarm you and then stab you with your own knife, it may be elegant martial arts, but it is also homicide.

Unless I am sure I can take the person down without injury, I don't use that mindset. It's dangerous and I will likely be hurt. Conversely, if I am sure, going into predator mode is unethical and what I would do would be unjustified and likely illegal.

Different things and this is one to watch: if your training or your personality presents these two situations as equivalents with similar skills and priorities it is profoundly out of touch with reality. If I ever make the big list of "Signs that all my training is really only indulging in a fantasy" this would be high on the list:

Does not distinguish between life-threatening and non-life-threatening situations.