Unloading

Impact arts- karate, wing tsun, TKD and the like have a serious disadvantage in live scenario training. In real life, you hit someone hard or hit someone a lot and they either stop what they are doing or they don't, but you know. In live scenarios with the emphasis on safety you can't hit for real. Even in baton training, the practice baton is light and padded and the threat can take more harder hits than he could hope to survive if they were delivered with a flashlight or a piece of hickory.

Grappling and locking arts have less of a disadvantage. A guy is pinned or he isn't, locked or he isn't and there isn't much difference in the end state between real life and playing. (There are differences leading up to the end state, trust me, but a threat choked unconscious looks almost exactly like a competitor choked unconscious).

What this means, in training, is that the students see grappling (using real technique) stop the fight and they rarely, if ever, see striking (using pulled or padded or otherwise safe techniques) stop the fight.

It also means that strikers rarely get to unload. When they do unload, they don't know what to expect.

To an extent, that's realistic. You can line ten people up and hit them in the head as hard as you can (taking your own broken hand out of the equation) maybe two will lose consciousness; six might go "ow" and/or fall down; one will hit you back without thinking and one will look at you and smile. The effects of striking are really idiosyncratic and unpredictable- which is why if somebody is worth hitting, they are probably worth hitting a lot.

I've used armor to offset this a little. This goes back to the last thread on the knife thing. Every so often you run across a pure striker with a lot of faith and they do very, very well. They power in continuous damaging strikes, usually with a nice loud kiai. They ignore the weapon, don't try to block, defend or grab and they do very well. The constant attack tends to freeze the guy with the knife, defeating the mind first (and thanks, Mac, for being the first to figure this out).

Even armor doesn't do it though, it's not quite enough to make things safe. Armor is impact reduction, but the person wearing armor has to be able to defend himself. He must be sufficiently more skilled than the striker to protect his joints, especially his neck; take take some pretty unorthodox falls; and still allow the student to impact.

There's also a mental switch and levels of unloading. My dream day used to be playing the bad guy for cell extraction practice with my tactical team. Five to eight skilled fighters, fully armored. I could unload, but not all the way. Ribs and noses still broke, hands bounced off walls and other helmets... the dream needed to be toned down. It was unloading, but not completely slipping the leash.

When my students go after me in armor, I get the same feeling. They are unloading, and some think they are giving me everything they have, but there is a whole other level they don't touch. It reverses, I have a student (big and skilled preferably) put on the armor for me to unload and everyone gets hesitant. Wearing armor is the sign that there will be an ass beating. That probably sounds like punishment, but it isn't.

This is hard to explain. Contrast:
Students practicing non-contact.
Students striking, me in armor- tap, tap, set hard with a grunt of effort, another hard strike, a follow-up medium, get distance, tap
Me striking- close range, hard; drop step for one strike, leg scoop for the next; multiple directions to make it hard to set, unbalancing to combine and offset with the strikes... It's overwhelming and it is supposed to be: speed + power + multidirectional + integrated throwing, striking and locking + kicks closer than most have trained, multiple striking surfaces (fist, elbow, hand, wrist, inner elbow, shoulder, hip, knee, head, feet).

The students know how to do this, they've seen me do it, they've practiced each piece of it... but they hold back. Their unloading isn't the same as my unloading. And my unloading on a student isn't nearly the same level as my unloading on the team and a far cry from slipping the leash when I think my life is in danger.

But they seem to think it is all they have.

Why I Don't Pretend to Teach Knife Defense

This is the title of a seminar that I've done a couple of times over the last few years and I recently read someone describing 'safe and efficient' knife disarms. It made me a little ill and a little scared that some people believe in this, believe it enough to teach it and can find students naive enough to swallow it.

The class starts with some pictures I've collected of knife wounds, empasizing that one set was from a prison shank, just a piece of metal that had been scraped on a floor, not some custom fighting knife sharpened to a razor edge. The most gruesome was a single cut from a kitchen knife. Gives them a very basic idea of what the hell they are talking about. What the stakes are if they choos to gamble in this arena.

Then I ask for someone with no experience or training with a knife. I take the volunteer aside, hand her the training knife and whisper, "Keep the knife moving, get it in to them any way you can. Cut anything they stick out, if someone grabs your hand switch hands and keep stabbing and slashing. Got it?"

I then turn back to the students and say, "This person now has less than thirty seconds of knife training. Who in here teaches knife defense?"

At this point, with the put up or shut up time, there are no volunteers. I pick somebody.
The first time I did this drill (for those who don't recognize it, it is Tony Blauer's Manson Drill) the volunteer was a sixteen-year old female green belt in Uech-ryu karate with no knife training. The expert (and, honestly, the Uechi guys didn't need to be picked, they did volunteer- they have consistantly been both braver and humbler than most martial artists, in my experience) was a sixth-dan and 20 year veteran police officer. He only got hit twelve times. ( We count the stabs and usually end it at twenty, which is just a few seconds).

In a big diverse group, it quickly becomes clear that almost nothing works against a fast moving, aggressive knife. The guys who have spent years with knives get slaughtered just as fast as people who have never tried it before- faster, if they really believe it works- they practically jump on the blade.

Then we talk about how knives are actually used. I demonstrate some prison shanking techniques and some mexican gang assassination techniques and the one Japanese tanto kata I know and they all have a lot in common- very close, from surprise and using the other hand to freeze the target before the knife come into view. Are those the attacks you train against? If not, too bad, because those are the attacks that happen. This brings up one of the big rules: Knives aren't used for winning fights. Knives are used for killing people.

Then the Reception Line drill. One student is picked out and I joyfully announce that he or she has been elected governor. It is now time for the inaugural ball. You first duty is to shake hands with all the people lining up to congratulate you- contributors, friends, political allies and rivals. You have to be nice, friendly. By the way, your security detail has information someone plans to kill you. Have a nice party.

The governor then faces away and one of the other students gets the knife. All the students are given instructions. Be happy, be friendly, shake hands, hug, then mill around behind the governor. The assassin can attack at any time- while shaking hands, later, after everyone else is done, while the governor is getting a hug...

The students cycle through the governor role. At least once, time permitting, there is no assassination attempt and the whole class gets to take a good hard look at how stilted and weird the body language of someone who is afraid can be... good education.

But in the end, the critique is almost always the same. No one yelled for help. No one ran. No one yelled, "He's got a knife!" No one used the mirrors all around or the weapons lying everywhere (we usually do this at a MA seminar, remember)... in the end, people were trying to come up with martial arts solutions to survival problems. As much as we want to pretend otherwise, that is rarely a good fit.

At this point someone usually gets frustrated (which is fair, they've been there for almost an hour getting told nothing works and they've wasted sometimes years of training- not exactly the message but what many choose to hear) and asks what I would do.

I tell them what has worked for me in the past, and caution them that if five real-life knife defenses seems like a lot it isn't- no one in there would put up with a judo coach who had only had five matches. Then I show them my highest percentage shot (in either scenario, it doesn't matter). Sometimes I get stabbed up to three times, often I don't... then I let it sink in that what worked was fighting minds.

This is frustrating- by only hinting it feels like I'm jerking you around, but the nature of fighting minds instead of bodies is that it quits working if the person has time to think about it. Hopefully, this is a drill I'll do with some of you in the future. Don't want to spoil it by letting you think.

Instinctive, Conscious and Unconscious Fighting

A question I threw out elsewhere and I want to discuss it here. There are three (actually four) discrete ways that people respond to fights. Not all fights are the same and not all violence dynamics are the same and not all people are the same... etc. Violence is an infinite thing but sometimes you can categorize it- and sometimes the categories are even useful.

Martial artists train to develop skill. They train to be skilled fighters. They train to bring clean and efficient skills into a messy environment. Often it doesn't work. Sometimes it does.

In "Angry White Pyjamas" Robert Twigger writes of his year training in the intensive aikido course taught to the Tokyo riot police. Not going to comment on the book, read it yourself and make up your own mind about the book and the author. In one scene, however, he supplied a big clue. He happened to be training when the founder of this particular branch of aikido died. He was able to participate in a mourning 'pub crawl': the highest ranks of this system drinking their way from bar to bar. He got to watch them get into a mass bar fight.

These were some of the highest ranks in the world, extremely skilled practitioners of a system that has constant interaction with officers who test it hands-on. What Twigger saw was these masters rolling on the floor and swinging wild punches.

This is the way that people instinctively fight. This is why "control goes out the window" when a martial arts instructor ramps things up and pushes the students out of the comfort zone. This is why when martial artists go through simulation training they tend to flail and can't make things work. This is why some of my officers, with the best range training in the world, couldn't hit the broad side of a barn the first time they did a ConSim.

When instinct goes head-to-head with training, instinct will usually win unless you have a deep, down to your bones belief that your training is better than your instincts. That's hard, because instincts start bone deep. The two situations where I see training win out is when the training has been cultural as well as technical- in other words where the teacher was a veteran who could say what you will feel, what he had felt and why things worked or didn't. In essence, you borrow experience to create faith. The second is a student who has an almost cult-like faith. Blind faith can give courage and knowledge where healthy scepticism can give opinion and hesitation. It's an ugly truth, but fanatics tend to fight better than thinkers.

Conscious fighting can be good or very bad. Martial artists train for fighting -sort of- but they do it safely. There is no safe way to hurt someone. A handful of people are aware enough that training is not reality and disciplined enough to tell themselves, "This isn't a game, I'm going to have to do it differently" and then do it. It's rare and the balance lines are many and fine. Thinking too much is slow. You will never cognitively be able to analyze and make decisions in time to prevent a flurry of strikes- so how much of the process will be conscious requires balance. Where to focus requires balance, too, because the deadliest mind freezing questions "Who is doing this, why me..." etc. are also conscious.

Unconscious skilled fighting (instinctive fighting is unconscious and unskilled. The aikidoka Twigger mentions had skill but didn't use it, hence brawling) breaks down in two ways. One can be very good or very bad, the other is very good and very rare.

Skilled flinches can be very good or very bad. Someone swings and you act before your brain has caught up. It is blindingly fast, the cornerstone of ambush survival and the product of repetitive training in stimulus/response e.g. attack/counter. It can be really good if you trained a response that worked. Really bad if you trained one that didn't. My favorite example of this is Bryan who was surprised from behind and turned and fired three punches into the threat. The punches were so perfect that they made loud snaps against the threat's jacket and never touched his skin. Had there been a judge present there is no doubt that Bryan used winning technique.

This level of skilled flinches is limited. You simply can't flinch a complicated response. So it serves for the first few seconds of a fight and is critical in the first fraction of a second of an assault... but then you might be left either thinking, which is slow, or standing there getting hit or cut.

The rare good type also works on faith. I do not personally know anyone who got here from training alone. It took extensive experience. It is the ability to say, "My body knows what to do," and step aside and let it. It's not really your body, it's still your brain, but it is getting your conscious mind out of the way and trusting that everything will be okay.

It requires IME proven skill on two levels. If I know that I can handle likely situations, that my physical skills are up to the task I can let go without micro-managing myself. But that's only half. I also need to believe, absolutely that the decisions I make and what I do when the leash comes off will be decisions I can live with. I have to know that just as much as the fighting skills are internalized, part of who I am not just something I do, my ethical base is just as internalized. I need to know and trust that the subconscious decisions will be the same as the conscious ones would be if there was sufficient time.

This allows me to fight without thinking, or even to fight while thinking of something else, like paperwork or transport contingencies.

Short and Simple

The fourth day of training wasn't for the team. Saturday morning I got up and hit the road before first light and made the long drive to Seattle. Still feeling sleep deprived, but I wanted to do this.

Bob had asked me to come up to his dojo and be a guest teacher at a clinic. He said, "I'll do some judo, we'll have some aikido guys there and you get to do the tactics part."

What the hell does that mean? The tactics part? Entries? Team fighting? I asked and he wouldn't answer. Bob is just that laid back: "Whatever you want to do. You're good, everyone will have fun and I'm cooking barbecue."

It's a dojo where he sets up the grill outside and keeps beer in the fridge with the bottled water. It's perfect and I hope that you can understand this because it is powerful and wonderful: whether he ever realizes it consciously or not, Bob doesn't draw a distinction between his dojo and his home or his students and his family. He acts on the mat the way he acts with his best friends. There is no pretention at all. That is rare and special.

I generally like playing with judoka. They know their stuff, they know what they are doing (judo) and know what they aren't doing (self-defense fantasies). This tends to make them better at self defense than people who think they are training for it.

BTW- You didn't think 'Short and Simple' referred to this entry, did you?

The aikido bothered me and I was finally able to put my finger on what usually bothers me about aikido. A good aikidoka develops, in my opinion, two skills that are awesome in a real fight (caveat- they need to practice in a real fight before they can apply them, but the foundation is there): 1) aikidoka can find the empty space. They practice moving to where the sword or the fist isn't and where it's not going to be. It sounds simple, yet very few martial artists every practice it or think about it. 2) They can be masters at using gifts of momentum when they are presented.

The cool/weird thing about using momentum (with the exception of using it to increase force in a strike) is that it is effortless. The threat halls off and tries to take your head off with a straight punch and you gently touch the moving hand on one side and he fractures his fist against a wall. That's effortless and awesome. I think a lot of what I see and dislike in aikido comes from equating the feeling of effortlessness with effectiveness.

What I saw was a lot of long and complex chains of action. Each link in the chain was effortless, but by the time you had gone through eight links...

One in particular struck me, because it started with a spiral pass parry to a wrist lock that was then reversed, passed and wound up with a bent shoulder lock... and the exact same shoulder lock was right there from the initial spiral parry if you just frigging stepped in instead of focusing on blending so much.

Later, in the course of my piece, we talked about knife defenses. One of the aikido instructors had been a witness to a stabbing some time ago. It was an ambush and pretty well matched my knowledge of knife attacks. Using that real example, did it look like the knife attacks they practiced against in classes? Why not?

It's like practicing defenses against elephant charges. You know anyone who has been charged by an elephant? Why do so many martial artists practice against X when they know that Y happens? Why practice dodging imaginary elephants instead of real cars?

Kris Wilder (goju-ryu karate) was the star of the show. He's been doing something with spine alignment and structure that is pushing both his striking power and his body's ability to withstand blunt trauma to some interesting places. I've seen a lot of these things done in static positions. Kris can do them moving and seems to apply it in his judo as well as his karate (important note- I've seen some 'tai chi secrets' that were basic body alignment skills from judo; the judoka could use them moving, the 'tai chi master' couldn't).

His structural striking embodied the concept of short and simple.

More to work on.

Dialed

It's been a long week. Anybody miss me?

One day of training in a classroom- weapons of mass destruction recognition and familiarity; new protective suits and masks. Still trying to get the hang of the electronic radiation detector. We had the class two years ago from FEMA. Now it's from the Department of Homeland Security... so we sat through much of the same stuff again. Some was new- the instructor this time was a veteran HAZMAT officer and he had experience, which leads to unique insight and good advice.

Then two days on the range. I felt out of practice, tired, hungry and like I hadn't slept well in weeks. Hot, glaring sun. It was the worst shooting I can remember doing... so to feel better I would walk over to the other range where instructors from across the state were getting a refresher course. Instructors. One look at their targets and my pathetic shooting didn't look so bad. The worst target on our team (and we were practicing from the draw, often moving and transitioning from long weapon to handgun) looked better than the best on the instructor's side...

It was still pathetic, though. To our standards at least- to my standards.

Walking and shooting on a boardwalk, changing magazines and firing while moving backwards on the balance beam (not a regulation gymnastics balance beam, wider so that our feet could stay at a good fighting width, and only a sudden eight inch drop if you slipped off).

Shooting silhouettes. Shooting one silhouette with a weapon painted on it that was surrounded by other 'innocent' silhouttes. Down officer drills- running in small teams while other members provided cover fire and perimeter protection to snatch up a limp officer. Deployments from vehicles.

Ended with mixed team entries: lethal and less-lethal weapons coming together through a door in a fast, tight team.

That went well. The first round I was third in the stack, which doesn't mean I entered third, the first three come through as a single body, clearing the door instantly. Entered and saw the 'bad' silhouette with 'hostages' in front and a gap of three inches between them at about five yards. The handgun snapped up, front sight right where it should be and two rounds pinged off the bad guy before the metal silhoutte could fall.

Shittiest shooting I can remember, but when it came to the complicated moving stuff, we were dialed.

Intro

It is the opposite of writer's block. Working on the introduction to the citizen's guide to police use of force, I find myself wanting to say three distinct things. Three solid, powerful reasons that the book needs to be written and, more importantly, needs to be read. Yet the ideas don't blend in an easy way and I'm also unwilling to let any of them go.

The obvious thing to do is to skip the introduction and get to the meat. The obvious on how officers are trained, what they are taught about the use of force continuum and how they are taught to make those decisions will practically write themselves. The deeper chapters on how experience with violence enhances and deepens the training will be easy (and fun and probably therapeutic) to write. Skipping the intro is obvious and I will do it if I need to, but in the past I've used introductions as a sort of mission statement- here's the problem, this is who I am and why I'm writing it, this is why you need to hear it. It not only sets the tone for the reader but I use it to set the tone for my writing.

It's just hard to choose. All of the facts and images will be used, but which should be the first one that the reader sees? Here are the options:

1) Contrasting caribou and wolf with living rooms and grocery stores hits the theme that violence is the natural environment of life. Violence is and from the very richness and abundance of our lives we have the luxury to pretend that it is an aberration. We pretend that it is horrible and wrong, think that it is odd when it happens but we know we are lying to ourselves. This cognitive disconnect drives us to create theories that are little better than fairy tales or whistling in the dark. Worse, when faced with the people who do deal with violence, citizens tend to marginalize them, pretending that the officers and soldiers are somehow broken and unreliable. The equivalent of putting fingers in one's ears and going , "lalalalalala I can't hear you!"

2) Society has largely decided that violence is bad, but isn't quite stupid or suicidal enough to have forgotten a basc truth: force is the ONLY thing that can stop violence. This possibility would talk about the long term effects of other strategies, such as appeasement and denial. Our solution is to create a profession who exist primarily for the application of force for the good of and protection of society. This also creates a cognitive dissonance. In other societies with recognized warrior castes, this wasn't a problem- but where we recognize the need for good force, but still feel that force is inherently bad it separates the protectors of society from the society that they protect- to the point that they don't understand the officers and soldiers.

An aside, and something that I am afraid will drive some people up the wall: I absolutley consider the officer's point of view to be superior to and clearer than the citizen's. All officers have been and are citizens; few citizens have been officers. If someone has lived on both sides of a line, I feel that their conclusions about that line are inherently more valid than someone who has only seen one side.

3) Judging from ignorance- this is one of my personal drives in writing the book so I may be too close, or maybe close to the bone is just what it needs. If a plane crashes, the people who pass judgment are pilots and aircraft engineers. If someone dies on an operating table, doctors hold an inquiry. If someone dies after a use of force (the wording is deliberate, there- sometimes officers kill people, but sometimes people crash cars or their heart gives out or the balloons of meth in their belly pop) reporters, politicians, citizens groups most of whom have never been in a fight; many of whom would have no chance at keeping their temper after just a few minutes of verbal abuse... feel perfectly free to judge.

This might be the key. I don't mind being judged. I am aware that I am an instrument of force for society (possible intro 2) working with dangerous people (possibility 1- see why I am having a hard time writing it? Everything blends) and the people have a right and a responsibility that the force I use is in fact for the good of society. My problem is with ignorant judges. People who don't know the policy, keep confusing a use of force or a shooting with a "fair, clean, fight" or a John Wayne movie. People who get their ideas about either crime or violence from entertainment: TV, books, movies. When force is used, it must be used to professional standards. The people evaluating it must be familiar not only with the professional standards but also the environment.

Partly, I'm even more concerned that the people who need to read this book either will not or have too much ego entrenched in their point of view to listen. But that's just despair. That won't slow me down.

Party

It was a smaller group than in the past. Too many old friends with obligations, plane tickets and scared significant others couldn't make it. More 'friends of friends' than in the past: a newer phenomenon, disquieting yet interesting.

Once a year, in August, under the pretext of a mass birthday party we hold a bash. It's about friends. There are traditions- experimental cooking, the Lobster of Shame, new scotches, home brew, "The Parting Glass", the Baraka book. Some traditions have fallen by the wayside. We don't heal the way we used to, so the six-on-one tackle football has slipped into the past.

We are getting older. The party used to last for three days, from sometime Friday night until late on Sunday. Saturday night we would tell stories, sing and sip scotch until sunrise as the beauties belly danced and some of us drummed or played instruments. This year the last person left at 0130 on Sunday morning.

Good stories, good friends. The friend of a friend thing- at this party I used to be able to look around and realize that almost everyone there had saved my life or sanity at least once. The group was tight in a way that only sharing lots of heartache and/or danger and/or blood can make happen. This year there were people that I barely knew. A short time ago they probably would have been sitting with their backs to a wall with wide eyes twitching looking for exits... but we've mellowed with age. Most of the intense stories we've lived and told and re-told enough and now we tell mostly the funny ones. Some of the ones that weren't so funny at the time, like Curly Creek Falls, have become funny in the retelling. I think the strangers felt comfortable there, and safe. Which is really odd.

Barbecued kangaroo, steak and sausages. We had yak, too, but as usual K had provided enough food for a bigger army than we had, so we didn't get to the yak. Ardbeg is still the best scotch ever and Boodle's is still in first place for gin. You can load scotch into a seltzer bottle and carbonate it- that was the culinary experiment for this year. Previous experiments included scotch milk shakes (good); beer milkshakes (good); and making espresso with beer instead of water (bad, really, really bad).

We've been doing this for a long time now- there have been many changes. From comrades-in-arms to couples. For a few years there were many babies and small children. Now teen agers (and one baby!). Rules used to include "No throwing knives or axes after drinking", the rules are unnecessary now, just, "Take care of each other" which is the one lesson we have all learned in life. In a few years or decades, more of us will be walking with canes. Children and then grandchildren will take over the planning and will tell the new stories- and maybe repeat some of the old one, "Blue-White-Blue-White" or "What Friends Are For" or "Suffocation in Dynamited Cave" or "Rick's Bachelor Pary in a Ghost Town and how we Almost had to Fight an Entire Town and Wound up Eating Sardines".

Good times, good friends. Amazing how often those go together,

Ueshiba, Kano and Futagami

Ueshiba was a martial genius. When I want to tease aikidoka I just say, "Aikido is what happens when a really good jujutsuka gets religion." But Ueshiba himself was a martial genius. Don't let the pictures of the little old elf fool you. In his younger days he was a very dangerous man, trained by a very dangerous and vicious man. He was not a theoretician and experienced a significant amount of close quarters combat- he has even described some of the things I think of as "twilight zone stuff", things, such as seeing bullets in flight, that happens on the very edge of human experience.

Kano, on the other hand, was a master instructor. He was a good jujutsuka, but first and foremost he was an educator with a vision. The art that he created, judo, was one of the first effective examples of applying modern (at the time) training methodology and learning theory to a martial art.

Ueshiba did get religion in a big way. He had (alert- my conclusions based on my reading and observation, I'm no expert here) seen that the core of his personal and very effective fighting style (in this instance, 'system' is what you are taught, 'style' is how you as an individual fight) was to misdirect and slip forces. Sword, knife, bullet, punch, tackle... all forces. All things that at high enough skill you can simply choose not to be in front of. When he got religion, he saw that this worked for the world too: conflict only exists if you oppose forces. By misdirecting forces you can win, even destroy an opponent without engaging in a clash. Victory without conflict. Aikido was an expression of what Ueshiba had learned in personal combat aimed towards making a better world.

Kano's art has very similar principles. He had less experience (if any) with personal combat. He had much more experience with how things are learned. Judo was Kano's expression of using martial arts to make a better person.

Our style of jujutsu has a few techniques that look like echoes of aikido- spectacular throws based on locks, stuff like that. But each of them is taught as an assassination. They are things you do as you are walking past an unsuspecting victim. The primary training methodology is based on making a trained warrior reflexively kill when surprised or suddenly 'disadvantaged' (there isn't a good word for it- when a weapon breaks or you are disarmed or, more modern, when you expected your gun to go 'BANG' and it went 'click' the common reaction is to stop and stare at it for a second... and die). Most of the techniques fit this model and are 'rougher' than the assassination techniques.

Working out last night- close and spine control (it can be an immobilization, a takedown or a kill) Close and spine control. Close and spine control. Stan (one of my favorite martial artists and teachers- primarily Small Circle but he has done many other things) noticed that because of flukes of distancing, many students were in a position for one of the aikido-like throws, but no one was going for it.

I approved. There are ways to use the principles of aikido- all good fighters use them, whether they know it or not- but the techniques, especially as echoed in our style, demand perfection. There is no room for mistake in snatching the weapon hand of an armed man out of the air and throwing him. There are some that will say it is not possible. It is possible, but it is hard as hell and there is no room for error. For the style founded by Futagami, who had no interest as far as I know in making a better world or a better person, just a more efficient killer, slop is built in to it. We use the techniques, but we use them from surprise. When the threat is unsurprised or we are recovering from surprise the techniques are "grosser' more respectful of the slop, chaos and mistakes that make up most fights.

152...

Doing some research for the next book and I ran across a reference to Amnesty International's 2006 study on Taser use. The reference claimed that AI had implicated the Taser in 152 deaths in the US. Hmmm... the paper itself was available, so I read it.

Does anybody read these things? Everyone reads the press release that blares the number 152, but who reads the actual paper? That number is not in any way related to the actual causes of death named by the coroners.

AI's definition by itself appears to be fishy. They seem to label any death preceeded by Taser use to be "Taser related" even if the death happened days later or even if a different cause of death was clearly listed. Hey, I was tased a couple of years ago. If I have a heart attack tomorrow will my name show up in Amnesty International's next report?

152... but only 23 actually listed the Taser as even a possible contributory cause of death. One of the actual cases states that the Taser may have contributed to the fatal abnormal heartbeat in addition to the other causes of meth and bleeding out from a cut wrist. Clearly the electrical stun device was the culprit. Sure.

So 152 is down to 23, except really only 7 had the cause of death listed as primarily taser. Seven in five years. In at least one of those the ME recanted, having put Taser down as a cause of death before actually performing the autopsy... but that's not mentioned in the report. Very few of the deaths mentioned in the report have much detail, but what detail there is tells a story. If a plaintiff's attorney in a case says the death was caused by Taser and the medical examiner says it was NOT the cause of death, AI still lists it. What about the case where it took three autopsies to get the result that AI wanted: "In all it took three autopsies to conclude that taser had been a contributory factor in his death."

I've seen this report cited for over a year. I finally read it. I have a hard time believing that anyone else who cites it has actually read it.

There's more there and it points to the gulf between people who want to fix the world from ignorance and those who deal with it. There is a difference between pain and injury. Every mechanical means that approaches the level of pain produced by the Taser risks injury- broken bones and dislocated joints. Compare that to two 1/4" pin pricks (not two inches of penetration, as the report says).

The report says ..."tasers in dart firing mode may be a preferable alternative to deadly force..." May be? WTF? Here, more than anywhere, the agenda might show. Killing with a gun is old hat, comfortable tradition. Hurting with a new device, even if it saves lives (and it saves thousands, I've saved one myself and so I might be biased- everyone has an agenda. Even me.) that is new and scary. This isn't about force or government power or corruption or even rights. Just like the Inquisition, this is about making sure that the status quo is preserved. Though it often gets labeled as 'liberal' AI is conservative in the true sense of the word- terrified of change.

There is more there, some truly awful misunderstandings of force policies and the effects of drugs on behavior and how violence operates in real life. The authors seem to feel that since so many of these deaths involved excited delerium (they always use quotes around "excited delerium" to give the impression that it doesn't really exist) the Taser should not be used on violent, insane, naked, sweaty, blood-spitting people that can throw around five officers. Do they really think that beating them with clubs or putting so much weight of officer on them that they can't move or breathe will be safer? Hasn't anyone compared the numbers between these so-called taser deaths and ICDS (In-Custody Death Syndrome) which, strangely enough, also happens primarily to excited delerium cases?

It comes back to the same question: Did anyone ever critically read this pile of horseshit?

Frustration and Love

Taught a very small class yesterday: two new officers and two instructors from another division who wanted to get a handle on this 'new way'. This is the basic course, eight hours. It is imbedded in just a handful of drills that are free-action (no scripts, no attempt to clone the students into instructors) and also (really appreciated this yesterday) carefully designed to avoid both the dangerous game habits of sparring and the equally dangerous belief that the drill is the fight.

The drill is taught, and they play. If you know how to move, you know something about fighting. They do the drill first with what they bring to the table. Then a short class/demo/practice on generating power in linear strikes; then they return to the drill. Then short range circular strikes and return to the drill. Long range circles. Close range kicking. Leverage points and spine controls. Locks. Everything goes back to the drill, just continuing with their natural movement but with some new ideas, new efficiencies.

A short change as they work an operant conditioning system for ambush survival. The drill changes here, instead of interactive chaos it becomes far less interactive: someone attacks you and they become meat, never given a chance to recover and interact.

Then the ground. How to move a body in three easy principles, which leads to a new drill. Application and limitations of pain. Remind them to apply the skills from before- locks, leverage, spine- in addition to the basic skill of moving another person. Striking from the ground. Strangles and neck breaks. Debrief, clean up and go home.

There's extra time written into the lesson plan. (aside: that seems like a lot to cover in eight hours but the skills are very simple if you look at them right. Joint locking is the most complicated and takes forty-five minutes to cover all the principles, how locks work, types of locks, experimenting with each type and a drill to start to learn to see the opportunity to apply a lock when the threat presents it. 45 minutes.) During breaks, the students hydrate and the instructors address any issue they think the students need to hear. Some of it is pretty standard- almost all of us go over the OODA loop, types of assaults, fighting the mind versus fighting the body, different reactions to adrenaline and how to read it in the threat, how to control your own.

These were new hires and I got to talk about the job and how much I love it. The nobility of being surrounded by dark and refusing to become dark. The restraint of using force for good in a world that seems to believe that all force is bad (because most have never felt or seen the effects of the small percentage of the population who use force for pleasure or convenience and can only be stopped by force). The unbelievable, supernatural feeling when training, experience and adrenaline intersect and you become a force of nature, something beyond human, doing things effortlessly that are clearly impossible. The thrill of sharing with students that they have entered one of the few careers where this is possible is... almost as good as the battle joy itself.

It's scary, too, because it is a glorious thing that can only be found in dark places. As horrible as violence is, if it were ever erradicated humanity would lose this experience also.

But there was a lot of frustration. It was petty compared to the love of teaching, but still it was there and it gnawed for hours. Why do people need to be taught to see? They have eyes, they have touch. The left hand is four inches from the threat's ear and the right hand is a foot from his ribs, yet they hit with the right hand because they have decide the left is their 'blocking hand'. They see that their knee is right behind the threat's and a slight pop will put him on the ground... the eyes see but the brain doesn't. The fact that the threat is off balance and a concrete wall is right in line with his weak line of stance is obvious and seemingly invisible at the same time.

If people could only see what is right in front of their faces and play with it a little, there is nothing special about fighting. It is seeing (sensing, really: many people, including me ,fight better by touch) and moving. That's all. So simple. So invisible.

Inflow and Outflow

I watch my wife typing away on the computer and marvel at how different we are. Writing is a flow for her, an art, an act of creation. The enthusiasm brightens her already beautiful eyes.

It is almost the opposite for me- a dredging. The soul sometimes need to be cleaned and writing is one way to do it. The clearer her spirit is flowing, the more she needs to write. As mine flows clear and the world around feels like a place of purity, the less I write. The more I absorb.

It won't last, of course. Nature of this life that I have chosen and I do love. It's easy to be noble when life is easy. Easy to be a saint in a monastery. It's far more worthy to be a good man in bad places. It's more fun, too.

That made writing Rhino easy- there was a lot of stuff to dredge. The other projects are more constructive and so I feel less ned to write them. Time for some discipline, I suppose.

The Six W's

Who?
What?
When?
Why?
Where?

And now:
What the hell?

That's the kind of stuff you learn in investigations

Can't really talk about it but damn, people, if you file a report that's fine. But if you want to do a follow-up at least remember the alias you were using when you filed the first report. How hard is that?

Teaching to the 2s

This is one of the inane results of the collision between bureaucracy and training. I first heard the expression "Teaching to the 2s" at the academy. The instructors explained that they had no control over who was hired and that the current process of civil service examinations to fill emergency services jobs left many cadets who were tempermentally, physically and mentally unsuited for the job. That left the academy instructors with the obligation to train them as best they could. This became known as "Teaching to the 2s" designing classes in an attempt to reach the lowest common denominator. Make the classes simple for the stupid ones; non-threatening for the timid ones and never pressure tested for the weak ones.

The fallacy of this is obvious, of course. You can't teach the lowest common denominator. By the time someone is an adult if they have any desire to learn or improve, they have done so and are no longer the lowest common denominator. By trying to reach the people who have no desire to be reached, you lose them. You bore the good students and even the mediocre are shafted because they are taught not what they need, but only what the instructors think the 2s can handle.

Training wasn't about the needs of the job or even the students. It became about liability coverage by showing you taught something. This is where you get the cadets who memorize an eight-step wrist lock which only works on other students and only from one position.

This tendancy was compounded by the way the academy was staffed. The people who teach and design the courses are largely administrators. A mediocre deputy could decide to apply to the academy. If he was selected, he would suddenly be called a captain or lieutenant and could come off like a grizzled veteran to a room full of fresh-faced rookies. Unless you knew the instructor from their previous assignment or agency, you didn't know who or what they really were.

It hasn't changed much in the state and probably won't, but within our agency there has been a big change. Most of the credit goes to Mac (but I want some too!). We were able to convince the agency that there were unused resources: classically trained martial artists with years of teaching experience and hundreds of real fights. We knew how to get it done and we knew how to teach others to do it.

I'd been working on 'principles based training' basically instead of teaching students a dozen wrist locks just teach them what wrist locks are and let them create their own. Same goes for takedowns, striking, spine controls, pain... (as an aside, I can teach pretty much everything there is to know about locking in under an hour- or you can take three or four years of aikido or jujitsu. Your choice). Mac looked at it, added his umpteen million years of experience, combined it with a mind blowing insight and we had Awareness Based Training. (The first of the Big Three).

Principles is still big, but combined with live drills that teach the student to recognize and exploit targets as they become available. To see the principles in action. It's been great in many ways. Our agency has 2's as well, but they pick up something here. They play with it instead of trying to memorize it, and that's a big bonus. The best and the medium learn too, and some learn a lot. They are given permission to experiment and improvise and play at speed.

The courses weren't designed by administrators but by line officers and we have a very real stake in the product: On some dark day these folks, including the 2s, will be my backup. I want the best backup I can create. We knew the job and the problems and how hard it is to take pretty classroom skills and make them work in chaos. It was, and is, a good system.

Baton Training

This one's for Jeff. My first three-day training with Deputy US Marshall Jeff, he made a comment that in order to be useful any combat training must have three elements:

1) It must have a tactical use.
2) It must work under stress.
3) It must work moving as well as standing still.

Point number three has come up a lot lately. I've watched too many instructors teach escapes from grabs without seeming to realize that an assailant doesn't grab you and just stand there- he grabs you to make you move, destroy your balance. The dynamic of a moving escape is different enough that many of the techniques don't work.

Friday we had recertification training in the expandable baton. I noticed a couple of things right away. First off, I'm not particularly big or strong. In the static drills I hit faster (that's a technique thing, most of the officers were swinging with the arm, I was using the finger closing grip from sword work for speed) but several of the big guys were hitting as hard as I was. However, when it came to hitting moving during the scenarios almost everyone had a huge power drop off. I didn't (and my armored bad guy paid for it. Sorry, D.)

Do many martial artists practice hitting while moving? Striking fast and hard while angling forward, back or straight retreating? If not, why not? I've never not practiced that way, so it seems weird when I hear people talking about the difficulty of it. Same for shooting, too. If you have to freeze in place to get a good shot off you turn into a big target.

So that's for Jeff. If you can't do it moving, you can't do it effectively- no matter what 'it' is.

There was another drill, striking with the closed baton. We practiced on kicking shields. The strike was to 'go through', essentially scraping the surface of the shield to set up a recovery strike from the complementary angle. The exact same motion could either be a pain compliance technique (scraping the ribs and sternum to drive someone back) or a "level 5" technique, breaking the clavicle or separating ribs based only on a slight difference in wrist angle. I asked the instructors about it... they recovered nicely but they hadn't really considered it. They were teaching to a lesson plan and hadn't really thought about what they were trying to do to a human body, or how that would change the recovery for the second hit or all that it implied about centerline targeting versus peripheral or...

The last drill was to go into a room with a bag over our heads and a padded baton. We were spun around and then the bag was pulled off and we had to deal with whatever we saw. What I saw was an armored threat in full attack at biting range. To be fair, one of the instructors had given me a special brief beforehand: a personal reminder that it was a baton class and I wasn't to throw, lock, knee, elbow...he tried to make the list comprehensive.

That was a problem. The essence of this drill (probably based on Tony Blauer's Night of the Living Dead drill) was for the armored attacker to give constant pressure, a constant barrage of attack. It predicates on a combination of good armor and a soft padded weapon so that the weapon can't stop the threat. But I've trained myself for years that if option A doesn't work, you switch to something else without hesitation (thanks, Mac). So I was good- I only kicked once to buy distance and didn't aim at the knee. I was going in for a throw when the instructor stopped it, however. The stick wasn't working and I was getting a little tired. If you can't knock someone down with a stick...

On the plus side only four of the thirteen students remembered to (and were able) to access their radios under the attack. "Did I enunciate clearly?" I asked.

"It was eerie calm. If someone was killing you, we wouldn't be able to tell from your radio voice."

That's cool.

"If You Can't Say Something Nice...

...don't say anything at all."

"I've seen his stuff," I said, "I'm not impressed."
"Really? He's famous! One of the best in the world."
"There are at least two better locally..."

It struck me right then- I've gotten very, very critical of martial arts and martial artists. Sometimes on the blog, but more often when people ask me for advice on picking a school or an instructor. Some of the things I've said, and the circumstances:

A famous Taiwanese internal arts master brought in for a seminar actually turned my stomach away from the Chinese and internal arts for years: "He's a complete fraud. His physical skills were amazing, but how he was explaining them and what he was teaching his students was pure bullshit. He's actively making his students worse so that he can look better."

At a recent seminar one of the guest instructors was someone who I knew briefly years ago. The students were eating it up but I honestly consider him one of the worst martial artists that I have ever met... and that's completely aside from his tendancy to hit on every woman who walks through his doors.

A local, famous Indonesian stylist- actually a very good instructor, but the first time I met him he showed a basic technique, something common to judo, jujutsu, WWII combatives (hell it's in Bruce Tegner books)... and all of his students, two of whom had nearly thirty years in martial arts, were flabbergasted. "That's amazing! Show us that again! I've never seen anything like it!" It left me with the belief that he was a good martial artist with a knack for getting students who had only had terrible instruction before, leading to his cult-like status.

A friend asked about a mutual acquaintance and I demurred until asked directly, then answered: "We've had some interactions in the past. Just as an experiment try to verify a single one of his claims that doesn't trace back to his publicity machine. One of the international medals he claims, well, that event wasn't held on the year he 'won' it."

After watching a jujitsu instructor teach a knife disarm in which he cut his own throat in every repetition (if the weapon had been real) I couldn't say anything, just stare with a sick look on my face. He then taught an escape from a wrist lock that was exactly the wrong way to move. No surprise, it worked on his students and no one else. I blurted: "How many years does it take to brainwash a student so that will work?" (I really shouldn't have said it outloud. I did not make friends that day.)

"Why don't you believe in kyusho? You've used it!"
"I've used targeting. Some places hurt worse than others. But when one of the top names uses you for a demo dummy and he fakes so bad that up close it's like something from a bad highschool drama class but the audience buys it, it's hard to accept on faith. Then you do the math and if the theory is right, it's impossible to survive a good massage. Targeting is fine, but his explanations don't work."

There are more. That's a lot of bile.
I think it's time to work on finding and acknowledging the positive.
Sure.

Experience

Intense play acting is not the same as intense experience. I'm not sure why. Maybe the fear isn't quite the same without the safety net. Maybe because it is the details- a crushed, graying finger or a clear picture of a specific rock as you fall- that stick in your head, and no one ever gets them quite right in training or film or whatever. Maybe your hindbrain knows it's not real and refuses to process it the same way. Maybe...

In training, simulations are good-great, even- but they don't increase survivor rates quite as much as veterans. People still freeze the first time it is real. IME.

But I don't want to talk about that. Experience changes people, whereas intense playacting just clarifies who they already were. Maybe... Oooh could the difference be as simple as that playacting is always a choice and real experience almost never is? That feels closer to the truth.

I see this in fiction. Fiction is generally hard for me to read. It rarely "feels" right. Even an author who has trained with shooting schools and talked to cops doesn't get the feel right. In non-fiction, when they convince themselves that their training and research is as good as reality it often strikes a pretension, defensive and sometimes laughable chord. But sad, too. And sometimes dangerous when inexperienced people believe.

The ones that read right, the ones who speak to me, write from experience and it is almost more a matter of getting things out of their system than sharing. One I like is Drew Rinella. A student of mine in the past, and of Mac's. A paramedic who has volunteered with FEMA (most notably Katrina relief).

Drew writes: "Here are the poems you requested. Each tells a story that doesn't need to be told anymore." They needed to be told at the time. Here are two. Both are (c) Drew Rinella. His other works can be seen at:

http://blog.myspace.com/fibrillate


Lilies from Peru
Tell me, little guy, that in your single spin
around the axis of this earth,
You felt more than a cold hospital bed.
Tell me that you saw the sun and felt its heat.
Tell me that you tasted everything in reach.
Tell me that your chest filled with a summer breeze.
That you pet a kitten. Smelled the rain.
Tell me things are better off this way.
I don't know why God called you home so soon.
I don't know you.
But I hope you like alstromeries.
Hide your eyes, little guy, and I'll hide Easter eggs
on four corners of your grave.
No peeking; no cheating.
Hide your eyes, little guy,
and I will hide the tears in mine.
Upon your headstone: lilies from Peru.
-----
Soap
Soap
Does a good job
Of washing you away
Soap
Is my ritual
Eleven times a day
The body is so cold
The body is so cold
The body is so cold

Doing Too Much

Another thought from the seminar:

Watching two young men work a drill in a combative seminar, they were sparring- playing with distance and defense and deception. The drill itself was supposed to be about explosive response to a sudden attack. It only took a few seconds to explain, at least for those purposes, but it got me thinking:

Why is sparring so different from fighting? And why is that so hard to grasp?

Part of the answer is easy to put into words, but it leads to some torturous paths: Sparring is a balancing act. You want to win and simultaneously prevent your opponent from winning. You want to hit and not be hit. It leads to a strategic balance, a sort of math between offense and defense. 50% of your energy and attention goes to offense and 50% goes to defense. An aggressive fighter may balance out more like 70/30. A sly counter-puncher may be 10/90. An experienced martial artist may test an opponent's aggression and then shift his own balance of offense and defense to match or exploit.

Fighting, real fighting, is not a balancing act. The defense in an ambush is inherent in the terrain and the time and the inattention of the victim. The resulting attack is 100% offense- maximum speed, surprise, power and repetition. Martial artists who train for the strategy of the balance between offense and defense are unprepared for this onslaught. They tend to freeze.

They have convinced themselves that their training is preparation for a fight and this situation is clearly a fight and their brain spins back over years of training and finds nothing it can relate to- the speed is wrong, the position is wrong, the pain and debilitation are unlike anything from training, the preparation is non-existant...

Everything in a real fight, everything in life for that matter, is a variable. People try to control variables. This is where it gets convoluted. The four classes of variables- the four factors in a fight- are YOU, the THREAT, the ENVIRONMENT and LUCK. In martial arts, people try to remove the variables of luck and the environment entirely. The training floor is always the same, obstacles are limited or non-existant. You know when and if you will be sparring and what you will be wearing. You warm up and stretch out (your core temperature is part of the environment, don't forget, as well as alcohol level, blood sugar, weariness and mood).

So in a real fight, 50% of the territory (luck and environment) are new territory for the martial artist.

The variables between you and the threat are also controlled in sparring. You know if weapons will be involved or multiple opponents. You know what defines a win and what your opponent is allowed to do.

Many of the big variables left- (strategy, timing...) are internal, imaginary and overly complicated compared to their equivalents in real life. This is a big danger, too: when a martial artist does try to incorporate luck and environment in their own training they often try to make it more complicated than it is (watch a striker try to teach grappling sometime) and at the same time try to limit the variables (this is where you get the technique versus technique or the scripted escape). Example: Martial artist teaching escape from grab from behind can get very fussy about where to grab, where to twist, how to bend... yet completely space that when someone grabs you from behind they immediately apply power to lift, yank or push you. They complicate the escape movements and ignore the variable that the attack is dynamic.

So sparring glosses over fifty percent of the variables you need to understand. Of the variables left- you and the threat- it overcomplicates them into a game of balanced offense and defense (and many more things, too: timing, for instance, is one of the most complicated aspects of sparring but in fighting is dead simple: you hit people when you can or when you have to.)

Compared to the predator who has only one thing to think about- taking you out- splitting your mind between offense and defense is doing too much with limited attention.

That's the easy part, and it's nothing new to people who have experienced an ambush... so why is it so hard for people who love to spar to grasp this?

Keywords

This is the lates list of keywords used on search engines that found this blog. The ones that were obviously looking for the blog (such as "chiron + blog") have been left out.

What is the fascination with durien, breaking necks, drugs & whores and testicals?

durien
fatigue makes cowards of us all
meth whores
how to write use-of-force policy
tyche
model mugging not realistic bullshit
the moral is the physical as three is to one napoleon
pictures of uechi ryu world cup 2007
stoicism emotion
surprise family scat
kris wilder
beliefs, morals and values
wrestler beating up kid
heroin whores
dojo of portland
crunchy finger joints
statistics is bullshit
knife with chiron
animal morals ethics
oregon coast camp on the beach
ooda loops domination
hand-me-down symbol pictures
what is a good inexpensive bivy
peacock tastes like
we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men
luck on cicero
worksite dump truck flips
ooda loop, defense
compensation issues and bell* curves*
secret words of chiron
how to rope jump off cliff
gross motor movements flinch response
meth prostitute
the moral is the physical is as three is to one, napoleon
what is last training to know all different type of martial arts
way behind on bookkeeping
testicals
chiron jews
risk taking as in chance
fear makes cowards of us all vince lombardi
fatigue makes cowards of us
fear makes cowards of us all
pretend to be rich
statistically explain how true is the assertion that my course of study is a bastard member of itsf
half truth
penn and teller bullshit episode walk on coals
rebar bend throat
simple explanation of the difference between morals, values, & ethics
kime in judo
can civilians use handcuffs
why does tv land suck now?
is it moral or ethical to tell someone where they can and can't li
evil knievel pain is temporary, bones heal
gd's on moral ethics and values
definition of morals,ethics and values
who said fatigue makes cowards of us all
mindset of a soldier
motivation motto for the day
barry mcconnell
controlling adrenaline cascade
the moral is the physical as three is to one
pictures of fat toothless meth head whores
the matrix chapter list
duty to act
original quote pain is temporary, bones heal, chicks dig scars
boil lip meth
sticks and stones /the dreamers
what's the best technique to punch hard
hostage to fortune
sex picture or photo six foot amazon
morals and ethics
i am good at failiing
the truth about paramedics
rope rookie
definition value beliefs
types of teaching thinking
effects of beating on children
spear kata
the grinch
we few, we merry few
harmless lie vs. the horrible truth
people predicting voices in head
what is an ltr
testicals go numb
elbow used as blunt object in head injury
excuses that we use as humans
defending against gunshots meditation
political orientation of scientists global warming
kevin dinkheller
testical impact damage
bad smell from obese people
the moral is the physical is as three to one
ten pound brick of chocolate
how to break a neck
yanagi ryu
have you ever raped
ooda loop and hick's law
negative space tree drawing
fatigue makes cowards all
brad horner scuba
andy michaelis
japanese word for pounce
a lie is the truth if someone believes it
treating bleeding knuckles from boxing
big testicals
kris wilder book
the moral is to the physical as three is to one
good beliefs, behaviors and values
0230 hrs
oozing pus smell rotting
hairy chested blogspot
grinch for halloween
many faces many microbes
evilness test
reasons versus excuses
words of great philosophers
spiritual opposition to childhood innoculations
we just disagree wrote
videos show
the moral is to the physical as three to one

Love Letters From Prison

People have imaginary dark sides. They think or imagine things, often terribly cruel and vicious, and are ashamed. They rarely talk about these thoughts and imagine, since no one talks about them, they must be unique. They believe that if others knew what they really thought, could see the "true self", friends would be horrified and turn away.
(Especially common in adolescent males, in my experience.)

It's not true. That you imagine shooting every slow person in a crowded store or immolating tailgaters or dismembering loud children is mild stuff. It is fantasy. The simple fact is that everyone can imagine it, but only a very few can or will actually do it. These fantasies are not your true self.

It works the other way, too. One of the early mild shocks in this job was reading mail that inmates would send to their loved ones. They would ask for help with spelling sometimes. I was amazed, because the letters had the depth and imagery and poetry of the love letters that I had sent to K from Basic Training and AIT. Not having read love letters from people other than myself and those sent to me, I'd thought mine were uniquely deep, soul touching and true.

Now I read almost the same words and surely the same sentiments scrawled in pencil and sent from jail.

Sentimental poetry from people who showed the physicality of their love with fists, boots, cigarette lighters and electric cord. Over the years I've read incestuous rapist wax raphsodic (misspelled cliche) to their victims; listened and read tales and dreams of love from people who have prostituted their own children for crack. Compared the written words to the threats over the phone ('You are my angel in a darkness, baby' versus "Bitch, you put money on my books tomorrow or I'l fucking cut your whore face off!").

It's the same. Dark sides. Light sides. Not quite as dark or as light as we pretend. And what we do is the difference. Not how we speak of love, but how we show it. Not what we imagine going violent for, but what we are willing to fight to protect.

Teaching in the Glowy Stage

It's a special challenge to teach something when you are at the stage where it is all new and shiny. It's partly technical- there are few things that I really understood until long after they had lost the brand-new shine. You can teach what you know, but to teach well you need to understand. That's not the same.

(Aside- I have occassionally taught subjects that I barely knew, but only when I knew the students very, very well. There is a deep difference between teaching a subject and teaching a student. More on that later, perhaps.)

The real challenge, though, is controlling your enthusiasm. When you gain an insight or learn a new and wonderful thing you want to share. That's normal and fair enough, but far too often you find yourself sharing your enthusiasm when you think you are sharing the subject. Of the three possible ways to focus teaching, this is the worst. Teaching to the student is good. Teaching to the subject matter also; but when you are teaching your own enthusiasm, the lesson has become about the teacher- and you are the one thing that absolutely will not be there when the student needs the skill.

Enthusiasm is good, it is a source of friendship and passion- but it is also an attachment, artificial unless the students find it for themselves.

It's rarely necessary to express enthusiasm. If you are passionate you will work to understand, and the depth will show without any help.

More Mental Than Physical...

I say often that fighting is more mental than physical, especially survival fighting and ambush survival. There is a deep trap there and it needs to be addressed:

Someone will read those words and decide: "Therefore reading and thinking about fighting is just as good as, hell better than, physical training." It is not, and that thought is the same thought that keeps people studying the same things over and over again, the thought that leads to the kool-aide drinking certainty that this (weapon, style, teacher, solution) is it. It is all staying inside the comfort zone. I know there are armchair quarterbacks and lounge generals and things like that in other endeavors, but in martial arts, especially in it's relationship to violence, it seems that the majority act as if thinking were doing. You don't get people who read art books believing they can forge a Rembrandt or that they could front for Aerosmith from watching MTV... sometimes it feels like only in martial arts do you get people who believe that they have learned enough from watching Jackie Chan to defend themselves, have read enough books on ancient swordsmanship that they could kill.

Awareness, initiative and permission (the Big Three) are all mental aspects, not physical, yet knowing is not doing.

I can describe how senses can be overwhelmed and how things can become a blur until you can parrot the descriptions back to your students... but you will have no idea what I mean until you feel it. Of all the people who have read descriptions or even seen documentaries, not once have I seen a person recognize a rattlesnake's warning for the first time. Almost all had an intense surge of adrenaline at the sound, but few knew why- and no one who has ever heard the sound in an unexpected place forgets it. You can read and read about predator dynamics, but until you have been triangulated by threats, the difference between an ambush set up and three people walking in different directions is small, unnoticeable. You can visualize precursors and fights, but until you have seen and felt and smelled one, the visualization is just fantasy, a day dream. For your first ten for that matter, you won't remember them clearly. Your second hundred you will lose faith that they are predictable enought to visualize.

Initiative is a mental decision, but a physical action. Sitting in your comfortable chair in your climate-controlled room, your greatest danger some pixels on a screen it is very easy to decide what you will do if and when... actually doing it is completely unrelated. The only way to learn to act decisively is to practice acting decisively. Quickly, powerfully and without hesitation. It is a mental skill, and the things which interfere with it are mental problems, but the expression of it is purely physical.

Permission- you can try all you want, but you can't intellectualize your own glitches. What you think you can do (or can't) often has no bearing on your real limits when the time comes. Your fantasy self rescues maidens in distress... in real life, when you hear a scream, do you run towards it, run away, or look around to see what others are doing? These are limits you can only find by going into the dark places where they will be tested. If you don't like what you learn there, they can only be changed by returning and trying again.

The culminating moment from the seminar, for me:

After class, I ask each of the students the one thing they will remember. One kid said, "Until I saw the video of the officer dying, I didn't believe it could happen to me. That I could freeze." He always thought that knowing what to do automatically meant he would and could do it. Watching someone die who also, probably, believed this opened his eyes.

The ability to make decisions is not the same as the ability to execute decisions. One pair of eyes, ever so slightly, opened.

Returned

Lots to catch up on and lots to write about. It's been over a week and in that time there was one tactical call-out; I planned and taught a seminar; taught a DT class; interviewed potential new members for both the tactical team and the Crisis Negotiation Team; designed questions for the interviews; started reading Epictetus' Discourses; had good talks with family and friends, (including the erstwhile Friday Student- always good insight); a friend was shot (not related to the tactical call-out and why is this not at the top of the list?)... all on top of usual duties and investigations.

Other than vegetating before falling asleep, this feels like the first time I have sat down in about ten days. It feels good. Tactical call-outs are always bad events, interviewing recruits is always very stressful for them and you feel a little cruel doing it (and part of the interview process for these posts is to ramp stress up, because that is a critical factor in what they are volunteering to do)... and there is certainly no good way to find out that a friend is in the hospital, shot on a SWAT operation.

Yet it feels good. I feel useful and necessary in a very real way, something I miss when the office starts to crowd in.

It also gives me more to think about and thus, to write...

Videos

Went over the videos we will be using for the seminar with Kevin today. He hadn't seen them before and I didn't really realize it.

The videos themselves are the best examples I could find of the different types of assault. One shows a "Monkey Dance" two men posturing and it comes to blows. One shows a "Group Monkey Dance" where a crowd turns on an outsider who tried to stop a fight. Two of the videos show predatory assaults. One I chose as a great example of the difference in adrenaline responses to attack between men and women. It also shows how easy it is to miss critical detail in the midst of fast action. Another shows a random GMD, again, where what is happening is not clear until after it happens. The last shows a little of what fear can do to your mind.

Two in particular stand out. They have a visceral impact on the people who view them.

The predator video, when I showed it the first time to a room full of officers evoked horror and disgust. I still don't see why. It is horrible- but it is also nothing special. It is a crackhead mugging a fifteen year old girl for her purse. It is brutal, but nothing special. It is simply a predator getting what he wants in the safest and most efficient way. I still don't understand why this bothers officers, especially corrections officers, so much: these are the people that surround them every day. True, we don't see the victims, usually. But we know how the predators attack and we know that when and if one decides to take us out it will follow this pattern- fast and brutal, close range and from surprise.

Watching Kevin, it affected him also, it made him angry. But I know the video is missing the sounds and the smells. I wonder if some of the common freezing reaction to violence might be based on some primitive sense of smell. Why else do people who watch TV speak so confidently of what they would do if and when...and so often freeze like rabbits in the moment? Smell. Sure.

The last video is from the dashboard camera of Deputy Kyle Dinkheller as he is murdered. (Thanks and a plug for http://www.lineofduty.com/ for giving me permission to use this video in my classes). It is chilling in a way that a masterful suspense movie is chilling. There is no gore in the grainy film... but you know what is going on and feel the reality of it.

As a lesson, the key is the 'adrenaline loop' as Deputy Dinkheller begins doing the same thing over and over again when it is clearly not working and will inevitably lead to his death. In the safety of the classroom it is so easy to see what must be done, to look into the future, to make the appropriate and justified decision. And that's the big lesson here- because even if your forebrain knows what to do the hindbrain might be in charge. The hindbrain may only know two things 1)Death is in the air and 2)What you are doing right now hasn't killed you yet.

Given those two facts, the hindbrain is reluctant to change until perhaps, it is too late.

This should be a very interesting class.

Breaking

Asher writes about how to teach. I was re-reading this:

http://www.guruhandbook.com/?p=83#comments

And thought about times where I've broken. It was always limited- I've never experienced a feeling that my entire identity or entire world view were shattered... at least not in a bad way. That is largely due, I think, to the fact that I've never been 'sure' of anything. The world I understand is only my best explanation so far. Who I am is only what I have done and felt in the situations I have experienced. Neither has ever felt definitive.

There have been times, though, when things or people I loved turned out not to be what I thought. When futures I had dreamed and planned for spiraled to destruction.

One was judo in specific and martial arts in general. I had believed in a warrior mythos, a modern chivalry. That anyone who persevered through training that intense must be cleaner, more ethical, better than those who didn't or couldn't stand the impact and sweat. When I found that some of the very best at this thing that I loved could be human, even less than normally human in some ways, it was a tremendous loss of faith.

I recovered and continued to train by loving what was there. This is the key, why my recovery in these times is usually swift, why I rarely agonize: there was nothing to mourn. There was no loss. The thing that was shattered had never been a true thing. The choice was between wallowing over a shattered illusion or simply loving the real thing that was left. That was any easy choice, really no choice at all.

Strangely, the real thing that is left is always simpler than the thing that was shattered.

Blast From the Past

Reading, "All God's Children" where the author investigates some fairly well-known local murders done by "street families". It's weird, because I know almost every one of the main players in the book. The kid (leader) responsible for the first series of murders was my dorm worker when I was a rookie. Two of the others were largely responsible for me figuring out the dynamics behind the type of violence I call the "Group Monkey Dance". One of the others was discussed constantly at the weekly mental health team meetings. One asked if it would be appropriate to stay in contact from prison (the answer is 'no' FWIW).

The author didn't see the killers the way that I did. Experience, probably, or sampling error. Or the fact that what I learned about their lives and personalities came when they weren't trying to explain themselves to a reporter. Maybe on the street and in a pack they were as she describes them, menacing, tall, strong. Not the scrawny, scared, little kids I remember.

It triggered something, and I went back through some old writings and found this:

"Yesterday- we all have a vision of a vicious killer who can callously beat someone to death. Ever since yesterday, my image will be of a skinny, pale, whiny young man, begging to be put in Protective Custody so "the real criminals in here don't take my food."
Today- a friend and fellow officer who is working at a different facility was stabbed in the face with a pencil. He'll be okay. Still...
Tomorrow- about twenty years ago, Deputy Irv Burkett was shot in the back of the head while attempting to stop an escape. I never met Irv. He trained some of the people that trained me. His funeral is tomorrow. As Van will ask, what are the lessons? That things are never really over, even twenty years later. That things don't look like your fantasies. That it is always a surprise. That everything effects many people over many years, maybe."

Don't mistake understanding for sympathy. That I see them as humans and related well with them does not mean that they were good people or that their punishment should be less harsh. It is what it is. In a society where there is a mutual agreement to believe each other's lies and the strong write rules to exploit the weak, a group can slip into fantasy where they are dark wizards and can torture and kill others who are just as caught up in the fantasy- and can kill outsiders, too, all the while staying in the fantasy.

The same person, removed from that environment where fantasy is supported and excused can become a crying baby.

The Manson-wannabe with dark, cultish authority on the street can be a laughable pretender, afraid of everything behind bars.

Don't mistake understanding for sympathy! Once released, they will gravitate back to this environment where they felt this power and they will become the same things again, only smarter and less likely to be caught.

How strange, though, that the first time I read a book where I know everyone it's about two strings of torture-murders.

Making Notes

In less than two weeks I'll be doing a seminar with Kevin Jackson and Scott Finney. The seminar is Kevin's brainchild: an in-your-face introduction to the difference between sparring and fighting for your life. The difference between training for a belt promotion and training for ambush survival.

It's what I do and something that Kevin understands in a way that many martial artists never really do. They learn the words, but not the music. I don't know Scott but Kevin likes him, and that's enough for me. It will be the first time the three of us teach together. Mac would have been in on it but he's out of town on vacation. that will be a big loss for the students. Mac is special- a combination of skill and experience and irreverance that is phenomenal.

When the plans were first made, I passed some preliminary notes to Kevin. He smiled and said nice things (he always says nice things, he's one of the most positive, high-energy individuals I've ever met... and he can cut you five times in under a second from the draw. I love that.) Last week the fliers came out. They're impressive- and they promise a huge amount of stuff in a short time. From the pre-fight interview to after action debriefing; adrenaline control; multiple opponents and weapons.

Today is closing the gaps, bringing the notes (the plan) and the flyer (the promise) together in a tight package. Time-checking the presentations and videos. Composing handouts. Planning the notes on the dry-erase board. Bullet pointing the most important details to emphasize. Making sure everything is covered.

It's fun. Teaching a new program to new people with new partners is always a blast. July 21st. If you can't make it, I'll let you know how it went here.

Unified Fields

This is a fine line, and it could be dangerous if misapplied: many things, on a certain level, are the same. I talk and write incessantly that Martial Arts is not fighting, is not self-defense. That pitched combat is different than a raid and ambushing is different than surviving an ambush. They are different on levels that run so deep that training for one, thinking in the way that is appropriate for one can get you killed in some of the others.

Yet they are all the same.

Threats aren't like normal people- because something worked on you or your partner in the comfort of a clean dojo does not mean that it will work on an enreaged 300-pound biker or a PCP freak.

Yet people are people. Even more, people are animals and the same techniques and awareness that will allow you to manage a pack of dogs will help immeasurably in controlling a jail.

All different and yet all the same.

There is a logic to skilled sparring. I know what you want, how you need to win and within a few seconds I will have a general idea of how you plan to win. Within a few more seconds I will know what you are afraid of, what you think of me and how easily you shift from one strategy to another.

This is basic, and every good martial artist does it within his or her own specialty. For a good fighter, it is very much about understanding the opponenet: what he wants, what his abilities are, what he won't do...

Yet you can take a good fighter out of his regular fighting environment, give him a problem, and all of these skills go out the window. It becomes about me. Why is he doing this to me? Why does he hate me? Me... If I do or say X, what will he think of me.

It's still the same thing. This problem: Who is he? What does he want? What is he willing to do to get it? What will he avoid? You are human enough to make some very good guesses. Only then, just like in sparring- where am I in relation to this, where do I need to be? What do I do and how will he react to that? How do I want him to react? Most important, possibly, in any conflict is the simple question: "What is my goal here?"

These things are very universal (also universal is the rule that if the plan isn't working, change plans quickly).

When you look for the universals, there are skills and insights and strategies that transfer.

A Grinch for All Seasons

As a kid, the Fourth of July is all about picnics and fireworks. Halloween is about costumes and candy and staying up late. Christmas about presents. Thanksgiving about food and relatives you haven't seen in a long time...

Last night my lovely wife mentioned that I was a Grinch for all holidays. I know the show of the holidays are important to her and I remember the fun of childhood, but as I get older, things have other meanings and I have other ways of showing my feelings.

New Years day- just a date.

Valentines- Every day is and should be Valentines. This is one that I try to make special for K because she likes the show- but she makes every day special.

St. Patrick's Day- I was raised as a rabid Irish nationalist, without necessarily having any information. Just a family tradition. Since I don't enjoy crowds, it's now just a day to have a glass of Jamesons on the deck.

Somewhere in here, maybe on the equinox, maybe not, there will be one day that feels like spring, a day of no rain and fresh wind and new green- and that day is holy beyond anything that can be put on a calendar.

Easter- I'm a little old and done with reproduction to get into a pagan fertility festival, but I still feel a responsibility to have rockin' good sex on Easter.

Mother's Day- Should be every day, but again it is about the show for the mothers who want it.

Memorial Day- A quiet one for me, where I spend some time remembering our dead, the ones who died for all of us. Read some of the accounts, and try to appreciate a price paid that I can never fully understand.

Father's Day- Being a father is a blast. Having Fathers day is kind of like throwing a party to celebrate throwing a party. It makes no sense to me.

Independence Day- This is the day for the annual reading of the Constitution and the amendments. We forget what a great and daring experiment the Constitution was and what the people who signed it risked and often lost. We are the beneficiaries of great wisdom, great sacrifice and it was truly the dawn of a new world... even our whining is based on principles that were inconceivable before 1776.

ABBB- The August Babies Birthday Bash. A pure celebration of friendship, with old and new stories; songs; belly dancing; a dancing lobster; fine scotch and a pile of meat.

Some day around the equinox in September there will be another sacred day- clear and cold and windy. On that day, if I can, I will walk until I see something magic, and there is always a danger that I won't return, because Autumn is my wandering time.

Halloween is the time to honor my dead. It is a time for memories and light mourning, usually alone and outside.

Thanksgiving- The original Plymouth colony suffered fifty percent mortality in their first winter. It is the time to give thanks for being among the living, for remembering and treasuring the unique events of the past year that will affect your future.

Pearl Harbor Day- An inside joke, but one of my most important holidays, "A day that will live in infamy..."

Yule- On the darkest night you take stock of your stores and, if all is well, celebrate that you and yours will live through the rest of the winter. It is time for remembering the last year and planning the next; for making sure that you are right with the gods/spirits or ethics that you wish in your life. There are many ways of taking stock.

Looking Good While Failing

I'm too close to this to really write about it in a straightforward manner. The knowledge comes from things that are confidential. Yet this is really important, something that is daily eroding... what? Civilization? The American Dream? My faith in government and my fellow man?

Maybe process over product is just business as usual for the world at large and it only offends me.

Have you ever wondered how criminal defense attorneys can do what they do? Their job is to make sure that as many rapists, murderers, burglars and drug dealers walk the street as possible. I've wondered and I've asked them. The reply is almost universal- they serve a machine called justice and they are the lone guardians to prevent the evil power of the state from arbitrarily crushing the little guy. Their job is not to defend the accused, but to force the authorities to behave properly and prove the allegations. They are, in a deeper way, defending the system. Some even try to sound noble about it.

I don't have a problem with that. In essence, I am a tool of the state specially authorized to use force to maintain order and prevent predation. That's a lot of potential power and it is good and necessary for there to be checks, balances and critical eyes on how I use that power.

But what if that argument went to absurdity? What if a murderer/rapist with his semen on the victim, her blood on his clothes and pieces of his skin under the victim's fingernails would walk if there was a misspelled word in a report? What if the prosecution were only allowed to testify with impersonal facts and the defense could bring in emotions, the effect of a conviction on an elderly mother and personally attack unrelated aspects of the prosecution's character: "Officer, you've arrested seventeen rapists. Do you have a problem with rape? Is this some kind of personal vendetta?"

What if the judge were required (or just chose to) give equal weight to all arguments whether they were based on fact or emotion? Even if they were blatant lies (but only from the defense side, because of the great responsibility of keeping in check the power of authority).

There is a section of our society where this is happening. (READ WELL- THIS IS NOT HAPPENING IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM. THAT WAS JUST THE CLOSEST ANALOGY I COULD FIND THAT WOULD BE FAMILIAR) I just got a taste of the statistics and it looks like a 96% rate of finding for the defendant, some of whom have done outrageous things.

That's unacceptable and it's disfunctional. Worse is the reaction to it.

I'm a tactical guy. I can't survive a 96% failure rate. When what you are doing isn't working, you need to change something. Anything else is insanity. You either change what you are doing or you change the environment. Using the court analogy, if you can't change the way you present cases, you change the way cases are decided. Change the way judges are chosen, something.

Scary? Messing with any institution is scary. In the anaolgy, though, it means that 96% of predators would be out on the hunt. The word that this is the situation encourages more to give the dark side a try. The guys being good see no penalty for being bad and feel worthless, marginalized and taken advantage of.

The response in real life is to do the same thing as always, just 'better'. "We lost that one on a misspelled word, so let's use that spell check next time, people!" The failures are looking better and better all the time. But they're still failures.

I'm not sure what to do about this. People are getting hurt because a system has lost sight of what it was originally designed to do- protect people. All the players in the system have their turf, they are entrenched in a system with a huge amount of legal precedent. One side is perhaps the biggest political player there is... they will defend their role, as they see it, mightily.

And all the while, people are getting hurt.

Announcement

Just to make it official (for whatever reason I posted it on Uechi and BudoSeek last week): Last week I signed the contract with YMAA publishers. Barring disaster, the book will be out next year.

Happy Independence, Day.

To celebrate, read the Constitution.

Themes

Thinking out loud about what I'm doing here. The blog started as a way to get some stuff out of my system. To take some dark stuff out of my head and let other people poke at it for awhile. It hasn't been able to be all dark stuff, though, because my life is beautiful and fun and that needs to be shared as well.

Sometimes you have to look at yourself from outside and one way to do that is to read old journals, diaries and blogs. Not for the words or what seemed important at the time. Look for the things that pop up again and again. Those are the themes that are important to you over time.

CRIMINALS- is a big theme here. Not crime so much- I rarely deal with crime scenes or criminal investigations- but how criminals think, how they see themselves, how they do what they do both physically/tactically and emotionally/cognitively.

VIOLENCE- goes hand in hand with criminals and it plays off of another theme, martial arts. Violence fascinates me because it is such a huge part of our culture and our identity and yet so few people know anything about it.

COP STUFF- This ties in, too. Like violence, everyone thinks that they know something about it, but generally their sources have been nothing but entertainment. When this comes up it is almost always because someone publicly (often on the news) made a statement that is brain dead in the reality of the job. For some reason I feel compelled to explain because, if this was the world of TV cop-dramas, fiction and Dr. Phil, the statement might work. Too many people feel that this world is 'pretty much like' TV. They would never say that and deny it on direct question... but it shows in who they listen to and what they choose to believe.

MARTIAL ARTS- It started with Judo over twenty-five years ago and it has been an obsession, and an addiction for almost all of that time. For the last fifteen years, it's been interacting with violence and leaving me wondering- what is martial arts? What does it try to be? What does that mean? Is it about the student in the class or the same student in an ambush? Or is it about the instructor and the revenues? Or the lineage? How much do the skills apply to violence? The tactics? The mindset(s)? The world view?

TEACHING- and this feeds off of MA: is there a better way to teach violence? What to keep and discard from a MA curriculum (and the always very real possibility that if I discard something it is not because of its failures but maybe because I don't understand it yet). How do you get things into someone else's head? The amazing things you learn in the process of teaching.

FUNNY STORIES- I can't put them all here. Many cool things happen almost every day. Hmmm, a clue. Humor is on the board but a low value item for Rory.

TRUE LOVE- I could put much more here than I do. This isn't a low priority as much as I am a selfish and private creature. With both love and friends my life often feels like a work of juvenile fiction. It's that good. Move along citizens, nothing to see here.

HOW DIFFERENT...These are some of the things I puzzle over the most. I'm aware that I don't think like everyone else. My lovely wife says, "You need to understand, Rory was raised by coyotes." A deputy I worked with for a long time used to tell rookies, "Sarge is what happens when you raise a kid without television." How much is experience? How much a probable Asberger's Syndrome? When I see the world one way and the rest of the world doesn't, who is right? (Me, of course. Duh.) Can I explain precisely where the differences arose and what they mean? Would it help if I did?

Is there more? Could be, there are many things I'm interested in: herbal medicine, emergency medicine, small farming, history, hiking, climbing, diving, caving, paragliding, writing, fatherhood, animals... on and on.

Any big themes I've missed here, things so obvious that I can't see them?