Bullying as Human Behavior

I was asked a while ago to put something together for Bullying.  It's getting a lot of press.  There are a lot of programs, and people seeking more.  I refused.  The simple fact is that the people who want those programs want a magic solution and there have only ever been two things that work in preventing bullying:

1) Not being interesting enough to be targeted in the first place or
2) Being too expensive to victimize

That's it.  Not making friends or telling jokes and definitely not complaining to a teacher, especially in an environment where the teachers can do so little.  Be invisible or make the bully pay.  And no one wants a program that advises little kids to band together and beat the bully up on the way home.

There is a lot of bullshit about why bullies are bullies.  I don't think it's complicated.  Bullies are bullies because it is fun.  The sense of power may be working on some Freudian security issues, but we don't have to look all that deep.  Expressing power is fun.  The perfect judo throw.  Center shot out of a target.  Overhearing people talk about something you've made.  Putting up a bookshelf.  Anything that affects the world is inherently fun.  Including making weak people scream.  We have to learn to get over that (a toddler doesn't automatically know that squeezing kitty is bad and if the kitty makes noises but doesn't use claws, the toddler will continue to squeeze)  and whatever needs are fulfilled, we learn to fulfill them another way.  This is maturity and growth.  But don't assume it is natural.  It is an act of will and rarely an internal act.  We are taught to be kind.

 That's a lead off.  Last month I witnessed a superb act of bullying.  It was targeted, organized and even orchestrated... and not one of the people hurting others for fun realized they were doing classic bullying.  Bullying is not just the strong targeting the weak.  The weak will bully too, if they get the chance.

Can't go into too many details here, so bear with me.
A certain organization had organized an event to talk about a community.  They had done this many times in the past, very successfully and were very well received by people in that community.

Another group of self-appointed advocates for that community demanded to know who at this event were in fact members of that community.

The organizers didn't know.  And you know what?  They couldn't know. HIPPA prevents even asking the question.

The self-appointed advocates (I think I can safely say I'm at least on the fringe of that community and I sure didn't appoint them) started a massive (for this area) e-mail and tweet campaign.  And they got what they want.  The organizers cancelled the event.

Bullying worked.  But it wasn't enough.  That one sign of weakness triggered more vitriol and demands for an apology.  And that's the thing, whether the bully is weak or strong and whether the bullying is done with messages or fists, the purpose is to hear the victim squeal.  To revel in the power of forcing the victim to obey.

And some of the scheduled participants, on their own, held an informal talk anyway.  Because they didn't like being bullied.  And you know what?  They weren't bullied.  None of the ones who stood up.  But the complaints and slurs and bullying redoubled on the ones who had given in.  Bullies hate being defied.

You get the idea.  It's easy to look around and see all the bullying behavior done by people who label themselves 'victims'.  And it works on compassionate people.  It hurts the people who are most inclined to help.  But whatever they say, whether protester or community activist or self-appointed spokesman, it is about reveling in the power to coerce others.

Much harder to look at yourself and see where you do this.  But you probably do.  It's human behavior.  It's also human behavior to grow out of it and find the thrill of power in protecting and helping.  Or so I hope.

Hi Again

Over two weeks.  That's a new record.

Lots to recap.

Upstate NY.  Good time.  The groups were small, and that was cool because it gave me more freedom to play and improvise.  The format was new.  Randy and Dave wanted four-hour chunks.  It flowed well, except I sometimes caught myself referring to an earlier block of training that some of the people hadn't attended.  And I've been teaching this a lot, with what seems like few breaks... so I would occasionally want to gloss over things.  Constant reminder to all instructors: Just because you've said something a thousand times doesn't mean your students have heard it a thousand times.

Randy was a kick.  Genuine, warm, really clever and bitingly sarcastic. Perfect companion for people watching, especially when you feel a little mean about people.  He is also a delicate flower and I had to take his man card away when he asked for a decaf pumpkin spice coffee.

Dave is solid.  Former cop, gun guy, and a thinker.  We had a long drive to talk and listen.  Good man. The students at the Rochester event were a mix.  Some had got into firearms because of age and fragility.  That's a viable option.  And think it through, for those of you who teach the hands on stuff.  At what point is it no longer safe to even practice some of what we do?  The handgun is the big equalizer.  But it takes practice and a good teacher.  It's a tool, not an answer and it shouldn't be an amulet.

I also got to spend some time (not enough) with Scott C.  An old friend (old friend kicks in at about four years, right?) and one of the best men I know.  And like a lot of the best of the best, he can't see it in himself.

Finally met Tim B in person as well.  Another excessively self-effacing good guy.  Turns out we both like the blues...
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Home is good.  I've been being a hermit to the best of my ability.  Petting dogs, fixing the goat fence and working on a second edition of "Violence: A Writer's Guide."  Should kick ass.

Scheduling for next year.  Which, BTW is now officially open.  If you didn't get the announcement e-mail and you wanted it, sorry.  If you're interested in hosting, e-mail is rory@easystreet.net.  january has stuff in Washington DC and Granada Hills CA already.  Return to the UK in February.

Fiorella's Cafe

If I did poetry worth a damn, I would have written some today.
Two long days of training-- twelve and eight hours-- with a very good group of people.  Long talks each evening with Scott and Jason.  Helped break in Brandon's new indoor shooting range.  Not yet open, but the old St. Bernard's range.  It is going to be a fantastic facility, and Brandon has big plans and a boatload of credentials to make something special.

Then, today, on his way out of town Jason dropped me off in the French Quarter.  Showed me around enough that I could keep oriented and he hit the road back home, far away.  (Thanks, J.)  So, a day to walk and explore.  The River Walk.  French Quarter.  French Market.  Beignet's for breakfast.  Jazz in the streets.  And Fiorella's cafe.

Here's the beauty of being a writer:  I can walk in a strange city until I am tired, stop someplace and order food, coffee and a drink, get out my laptop and I'm working.

Today I did my working at Fiorella's Cafe. Kayla in service.  Nice.  Knew everybody.  Talked to people passing by in trucks.  Native but with almost no accent: "My mom was a school teacher and hated the New Orleans accent," she said.  The kind of waitress who is right there if you look up, but leaves you alone when you are writing.  Awesome.  And Yvonne running the bar.  Well done.  Best dirty martini I have had and I have her recipe for a burnt martini...and I don't even usually like martinis that much.  And the fried chicken.  And the red beans and rice. There are some things I love about the deep south.

So, New Orleans.  Nice people, great food.  Going out to listen to some of the music in a few minutes (Smoky Greenwell).  Stupid tourists (one, obviously drunk was doing tarzan yells and challenging women to strip from a balcony-- "He's not from around here," Kayla apologized.  "I can tell," I said.)

The seminar.  Small group of fantastic people.  We got dirty.  We covered a lot of material.  We broke some barriers.  Scott was a fantastic host. I got to see David again (Slovenia and now NO).  Exhausting.  Wonderful.  Amazing how often those two go together.  Lot's of experience in the group.  Lot's of Katrina stories and post-Katrina stories.  Gratifying, in a way, to see the reflexive preparations that people who have been through something like Katrina make.  And sad, because more people should be ready, should be thinking, "Just in case."

It's been over a week since writing on the blog.  A lot of it is because things have been going too well.  The handful of things that might have gone bad have been avoided or de-escalated.  I have little on that score to write about.  Teaching has been going well and I have to guard against complacency there.

Part is business and travel.  Most of October was spent either in frantic activity or exhaustion.  Writing time has been spent on other stuff.  Under K's publishing company, finally put out "Horrible Stories I Told my Children" under a pseudonym.  Didn't want to use my kid's real names.  You understand. Kami did the cover and the internal illustrations.
"Horrible Stories" on Kindle
"Horrible Stories" at SmashWords

Also working on a second edition of "Violence: A Writer's Guide."

And opened the 2013 calendar.  Contact me if you want to host a seminar.

Fiction

I don't have much of a fantasy life.  Rarely daydream in the traditional sense.  My mental resting state is a half doze where images float across my mind.  Never stories, and I'm not in them.   It's almost like watching clouds change shape.

What fiction I have written so far (and may be publishing, we'll see) has almost all been written because K and her writing group challenged me to do it.

The lack of imagination hasn't always been that way.  Some aspects of early life were rough and fantasy, from fiction to detailed daydreams, were escapes.  And I had all the usual ones: superpowers, swords, spies and saving maidens in various apocalyptic worlds.

When I went to college, the transition from a homestead only one notch removed from a survivalist cell (no electricity or running water, graduating class of six-- and I was sixteen when I graduated) to a state university was intense.  So I can't say college was boring, but it didn't feel complete, either.  Lots of reading, mostly fiction.  SCA.

Always a voracious reader, I first turned away from fiction at Ft. Sam Houston during 91A school.  I was coming off of BCT (Basic Training) and BCT had been intense.  Not earth-shaking.  Basic skills and fitness were fine going in.  The use of time.  From before dawn until late was non-stop movement.  PT (Physical Training), skill development, learning.  Any spare moment was spent reading, studying the SMART manual (can't remember what it stood for) the Common Tasks manual or reading the Bible.  (I'd brought a bible because it was the one book I was sure the Drill Sergeants wouldn't confiscate-- so I have read the Bible cover to cover.  Twice.  Primary reason I'm not a Christian.)

At AIT (Medic school at Ft. Sam) I wondered if I could keep up a BCT level of intensity on my own.  There was a lot of training, PT and studying, but far more free time than in Basic.  So I decided to use the time.  First step was going to the base library and instead of just looking for a fun read, I grabbed a guide book to local plants.  Started practicing tracking again.  Discovered MWR (Don't think we called it that back then but...)

Morale Welfare and Recreation.  I went in and found out that they had a complete lapidary shop.  I'd been taught to cut and polish stones when I was 13 or 14.  Just cabochons, nothing fancy. So I got back into that.  And one of the old guys who volunteered at the place to teach soldiers taught me to cast silver.  I made K's engagement ring there.

Life got as full as I could keep it.  Nonfiction was just as entertaining, but infinitely more satisfying than fiction.  But then something else changed.  About two years into working with the Sheriff's Office, spending more waking hours with bad guys than with my own family, dealing with bad stuff and aftermath, I started to find most fiction not just unsatisfying.  Most was aggravating.  The things that authors seemed fascinated with were not the things that resonated with or bothered me.

Fiction is on my mind.  K wants me to publish some of the things I wrote when a member of her writer's group.  I'll be spending next weekend at the Oregon Science Fiction Convention.

Time for a Ramble

Wake up call at 0330 in Budapest this morning.  Maybe this morning.  I think that would have been 1830 yesterday for this time zone.  Lots of flights, but everything worked like clockwork and it looks like an early flight home... so good.  Tired.  Roughly fourteen hours by train followed by an evening in a hotel before the flights. Three new countries and passed through two more...

Atilla and Armin handled everything.  Each and every detail was handled with care and precision.  Extraordinarily good men.  Very different from each other, but very good men.  And Atilla is doing a seminar somewhere in the UK this weekend.  I'd post the details if he had sent them on.

Thursday night was a low level force class (locks, pain compliance, stuff like that) at the Lower Saxony  Police Academy.  Saturday and Sunday was the scheduled seminar.  Mostly for martial artists, but a quarter (about) of the people who showed were officers (and one I got to meet in person for the first time-- Hi Chris!) and a quarter weren't martial artists or studied only weapons.  And that made it very cool.

Even cooler was the venue that Armin scored-- The headquarters of the Highway Riders MC, Bad Wildungen.  Perfect place for a brawl.

And a perfect juxtaposition-- Thursday night wine and Italian food with one of the senior Academy trainers, an impressive man.  Great talk, great insight.  Monday morning coffee with the president of the motorcycle club and one of his road captains.  Impressive as well, in different ways.  The Prez was an old fighter, now mostly crippled up, did medieval recreation on the side (which the Germans do with an intensity) and, judging by familiar paraphernalia around the house entertained an alternate religious view.  And trained wild birds.

1991, drinking chichu with a reformed cannibal in Ecuador.
2008, drinking scotch with a general heading a foreign intelligence service.
2012, Wine with police trainers and coffee with Bikers.

And every last second of it has been fantastic.

Knee got popped on the trip.  Won't be sure how bad until I can make time to get it checked.  Something else for the 'to do' list.

Meet at Firearms Academy of Seattle tomorrow.  Help them with some research. (Read: "banging stuff out").

Orycon coming up.  Should be fun.

Gigs in upstate NY and New Orleans in November; Orlando first weekend of December.

But, most important, in a few hours home and K.

Cop Night

I love teaching cops.
Teaching martial artists I am aware that most of them, from rank beginners to 'modern combat masters' are getting nothing more than a handful of details to add to their daydreams.  A few (and they are damn few in any given class) will need it-- but they aren't the macho posturers.  The shaved headed guy with the tats generally only has to worry about the situations he creates.  It's the tiny shy woman who really had to work herself up to attend who will be on the radar of the predators. With civilians, THAT is who I teach for.

But teaching cops is special, and it is huge responsibility.  You want to teach self-defense to a bunch of martial athletes and you can teach almost any crap you want.  It will never be tested.  Most training is only one step removed from an amulet.  It makes you safe from violence in the same way and to the same extent as your crucifix keeps vampires away.  It's 100% successful until it gets tested.

When I taught for my agency, I had access to the numbers.  Roughly a third were assaulted in one year, roughly 10% hospitalized.   When we changed the training to our new methods, those numbers dropped by 30%, but that was the baseline.  And that's not "1/3 had Use of Force incidents."  One third were attacked in a given year.

There are three kinds of training: Feel good training, liability reduction training and useful training.

Feel good training ranges from the lecturer who leaves the students feeling pumped and convinced they are 'warriors' to the hands-on training that makes people feel safer but does nothing to make them safer.

Liability reduction training is for the bosses-- they can either go, "Can't blame us, you were trained.  Must be your fault."  Or courses specifically designed to lower liability (like concentrating solely on lower levels of force) regardless of whether the system works.

For useful training, you must know the job and know the people and know your stuff.  I've taken courses from people who were masters at what they could do and had no idea of the policy or law that we worked under.  As such, a third of their stuff was ineffective or impossible to apply and a third would get me brought up on charges.  They didn't know the job.

I've seen instructors try to play 'big man.'  It may work with civilians, it may even work with rookies, but there is no faster way to earn the contempt of a room full of veteran cops than to talk tough.  They know a punk when they see one.  You teach different people in different ways.  Adults vs children; pros vs. interested amateurs.  If they don't listen, you can't reach them and they learn zip.

And you have to know your stuff.  Further, your stuff has to work.  Under pressure.  Outmatched in size and strength.  For the big officers and the small officers.

And there is an element of leadership to training as well.  Consistently, good leaders push the power down.  Every leader you have ever had that you truly respected trusted you.  Told you that you were trusted.  And you were given as much responsibility as you could handle.  Being loud and aggressive and telling people they are wrong may feel like leadership, but from the outside we all recognize that an insecure prick is not a leader.

Got to play with some good kids (rookies) last night.  Loved it.  In the rambling conversation with their head instructor afterwards we talked about a lot of these things.  Method of teaching, but responsibility as well.  When your students are going into harm's way, teaching is much more like being a father than a professor.  These are not underlings, but colleagues worthy of respect.  Moreover, someday, on the worst day of your life when you hit the orange button or put out the call, these are the kids that will be coming to save your ass.  You are literally training your own rescue party.  Look down on them at your own risk.

Anyway, I loved the class.  Deeply respected Herbert, one of the head instructors at the academy.  Good night and it brought on some good memories.

The Hungarian Crew

These are the guys I spent last weekend with.

Enjoy.

IMOM

I’m writing this on a train in Eastern Europe between Budapest and Prague.  Don't know when I'll be able to post it. Probably most of you aren’t old enough to really remember the Cold War.  You weren’t raised with an expectation of imminent nuclear apocalypse or inundated with stories of a shadowy underworld of spies and assassins who were just barely keeping the world from the brink.

Budapest and Prague (and Berlin, but that’s not on the itinerary this time) were staples of these stories.  Messages passed in cafes and beer halls; secret signals; beautiful, seductive counter-intelligence agents; desperate knife fights in alleys; a satchel bomb always ticking down to zero…

Both are tourist towns now.  Big, beautiful (but I am coming to find that ‘big city’ and ‘dirty’ seem to always come together).  Cleaner and less depressing (I am told) than they were under Soviet control.  The business of the day is business and people are working, studying and making connections.

It’s still cool to be here.  One of those childhood fantasies (“I want to be a spy when I grow up”) almost fulfilled.  Almost.  No world to save.  Extremely limited numbers of damsels in distress.  Agents and operatives?  Check, but significantly more talking, eating and drinking than fighting happens… and that’s cool.

So, in the International Man of Mystery qualifications category—

Beautiful Eastern-bloc refugee wife.

Keys to apartments in Boston and Athens.

Metro tickets in the wallet for two coastal cities.

Passport stamps that sometimes get me detained.

Cover story?  “I’m a writer, just in the country to do a little research…”

And, most important of all, some very, very cool friends in some very interesting positions.

RGI Review

I've been letting things settle, thinking things through.  The three day "Ethical Protector" class from RGI was good.  Important.  As far as I know, no one else is doing this.  Jack and his crew are aiming their program at rookies.  Not everyone there was-- actually most weren't-- but this is stuff that lays a foundation for a career free from burn-out.  And that's huge.

Pick any war and most values we shared with our enemies.  Courage, sacrifice, dedication.  There is always a code of honor in some form.  Given that, can there be good guys?  Bad guys?

There is a poster I have seen on line-- I don't have the rights to it so I won't post it-- of American soldiers in Afghanistan taking fire while Afghani villagers hide behind them.  The caption says "Bad guys use human shields.  Good guys are human shields."  That simple.

Are there good reasons to fight?  To go to war?  Yes, but there are bad reasons as well.  RGI has laid out what constitutes good and bad, and it is surprisingly objective.

Most of the instructors are former marines.  A couple, including Jack, were instrumental in the development of the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP).  But it's not a physical class.  There are a few physical techniques that are simple.  More confidence building, I think than practical.  And two workouts that are killer if you want to push (running, squats with a human body, body drags and the like in soft sand...)  But much of it was ethics, communication and stories.

One of the thoughts behind "Campfire Tales From Hell" was that there is an important piece missing from modern martial training.  Not just martial arts, but police academy and BCT.  And that is sitting around the fire, listening to stories from the old vets.  They know things that can't be really taught, but sometimes in a story, you can understand.  Hearing someone you admire talk about fear and pushing through means more than reading a clinical description of the Survival Stress Response.  There are subtleties and sometimes just some weird crap (intent literally changing someone else's behavior, for instance) that can be hard to process if you think it is new and unique.

So that was one of the beautiful things about the program.  The method.  Exhaustion, education, skills, stories.  For every sit down class there was a stand-up physical class to give a break.  The physical started with uber-basics.  How to stand, how to move and maintain orientation on a potential threat.

The lessons were about ethics, respect and communication.  Communication with the emotionally disturbed was taught by a Registered Nurse.  General communication was taught be a retired NYPD officer who spent a lot of years in anti-crime.  That man could talk.

The ethics part is unique, though.  Powerful.
I've always been one of the good guys.  There is a huge amount of psychic armor in that.  But it is sometimes risky and dangerous.  Not in the 'running towards danger' sense (although clearly that) but also in the, "I would rather quit this job than follow that order-- do I have the skills to take care of my family if I walk away?" sense.  That gets harder if you have doubts that your idea of 'good' is any better than the person giving you the order.  In retrospect, my instincts were dead-on.  But now I have the words to explain why.

And that is the reverse of one of Jack's observations.  Being the good guys, with an ability to explain beyond doubt why you were the good guys is powerful armor against PTSD.  And if you fail to live up to that standard, you know what you did wrong and what you must become and how you must atone in order to regain your balance.  As such, it is less a matter of teaching ethics than of clarifying them.

There are some language issues here.  In "Facing Violence" I used a model taught long ago at the police academy: Beliefs-Values-Morals-Ethics.
Beliefs are the things you hold to be true.
Values are your subjective preference in true things.
Morals are the squishy general feeling of right and wrong derived from your values.
Ethics are your attempts to codify (rules and laws) your morals.

In the RGI lexicon, ethics means something different.  Morals are right and wrong.  Ethics are morals in action.  If you know something is wrong, you are moral.  If you have the balls to do something about it, you are ethical.

Both work for me.

Last thing-- There were a few areas where the training lost me.  And it was just me, monitoring the other students it was some of the most powerful aspects for them.

Some of the stories were convincers, and I walked in already convinced that ethics has always been a part of my jobs and life.  There is a qualitative difference going into a fight as a good guy versus a bad guy.  So I drifted on those.

And pure exertion as a team-builder doesn't work for me anymore.  Twenty years ago, yeah.  Now it's just pain with strangers.  Not the first time, won't be the last.  Danger still works for team building.

I can quibble.  Is the ethical underpinning innate or taught? My opinion likely differs from Jack's crew, but it matters very little.  I think ConCom is better for that part... blah blah blah.

But this is important stuff.

Common Morality

One of the tenets of Conflict Communications is "Work from the common ground."

If you and I disagree and we only talk about points of difference, we entrench.  The differences become not just opinions but identity tags.  The search for the truth gets completely lost in the contest to prove who is right.  It is damn near impossibly to change someone's mind by arguing.  But sometimes you can do it by agreeing.

We all have common ground.  We all eat and think.  You're here, so I can safely assume that you read.  I have never seen someone so alien or a criminal so depraved that we didn't share some common beliefs, some common values.  And, consistently, if I spoke from those common values I could usually (not always, nothing works every time) get compliance, even active cooperation.

In hostage survival classes, they will teach you to 'personalize' yourself.  the idea is if the bad guys know you have a name and a family, it will make it harder for them, emotionally, to kill you.  In the ConCom model, the underlying principle is clearer:

In order for most people to use high-order violence, they must 'other' the victim first.  They must create a string of rationalizations and tell a narrative where the victim is not a 'real' person.  We butcher cattle, swat mosquitos, but tend to fight and struggle (inefficiently) with people.  If the potential killer is in contact with the potential victim, he will drive the communication to the points of difference; "I fuckin' hate cops!"
And your job is to not be othered.  To push the conversation towards everything you have in common, "This is just a uniform.  It's a job so I can provide for my family. (Especially if you see a ring on his finger) What I really like is to go fishing (if you see a hat or bumper sticker with a trout) spend some time alone (if you sense he is a loner, otherwise 'with my buddies') and have a beer (if you smell alcohol on his breath.)"
Get the idea?  That's how personalizing works and why, if you just follow the formula instead of reading the situation, it can backfire.

This is just a piece.  I think ConCom has taken a huge step in creating a functional taxonomy of conflict.  Found the underlying essence.

And I think RGI, in their ethical protector course may have pegged the underlying common ground for all morality.

More later.  I'm tired and have lots to do on my first full day home.

Big Question

Just finished the Bujinkan Camp.

Good times, good people.  Largely due to Jack Hoban.  Some of you have heard about my first exposure to the Takumatsuden arts...

"My black belt," he actually hitched his thumb in it and sneered, "Is in Ninpo.  What you civilians call ninjitsu."  Followed by an epic rolling session where the 'unbeatable ninja master' submitted at least forty-five times in less than thirty minutes.  Epic is the wrong word.  "Pathetic" would be giving this young shidoshi-ho more credit than he deserved...

Anyway, suffice it to say my initial exposures to modern ninjitsu were not positive.  But I have since met some good people- Mariusz and Earl and several of Dale's students in SF are damn good people.  I like Don (although some day we are going to have a serious talk about the view from the outside).

But Jack Hoban is something special.  Former Marine.  Disciple of Robert Humphey, who may have cracked the code on natural ethics.  Good (maybe great) man and a good (maybe great) martial artist.  I like the way Jack plays and I love the way he thinks.

Today I heard his theory on PTSD and PTSD treatment.  It works for me, but in the conversation leading up to it there was a gem of a question.  Not about PTSD but about people who are robust against extreme stress in general.  The answer, almost universally, is love.

You can become addicted to the danger.  Addicted to the feeling of reality and importance when you do big, dangerous and impossible things.  But that is only unbalancing if that is all you do.  As long as you come back to the world and put equal weight into loving something or someone who is good, you'll be okay.

So here's the big question:

Of those of you who have spent four hours or more this week training to hurt someone who is bad... did you spend at least four hours being nice to the people you love?

Think about it.

The Paralysis of Hope

The myth of Pandora's box always confused me.  It made no sense.  After all, Hope was in the box filled with all of the evils and ailments of men-- famine, disease, death, jealousy, anger-- and in order to get the benefit of Hope, it was kept in the box, not let out to infect the world.

Even as a kid, I thought that didn't make sense.  Why Hope included in a list of evils?  If the evils could only affect the world by being released, how could Hope help anyone by being caged?  Dumb.

But maybe not.

As long as I'm cataloging some dark thoughts...

In a drawn-out violent episode, the threat wants to keep the victim from effectively fighting.  In a true blitz, that's not much of a problem.  Close distance, distract, flurry attack.  The victim tends to freeze.  In a longer, drawn out, ugly scenario (think secondary crime scene and all that implies) an unconscious victim doesn't supply the necessary 'fun'  but a conscious victim might well fight.  And so the threat has to get control of the brain.

Not always, and don't take anything I'm writing here as absolute.  I'm trying to set up a specific type of event to examine here..

Teja described it best (and I think we captured her little talk in the "Logic of Violence" DVD coming out soon.)  The threat does a mix of savagery and niceness, making the victim think her only hope is in being nice and keeping the threat nice...and so the victim doesn't fight.

Her hope keeps her from fighting.

And it makes me wonder how many people over the millennia died without fighting when they desperately needed to fight.  How many waited for rescue or prayed for intervention, and let themselves die?  And how many prevailed when they realized there was no hope and fought with everything they had?

Were the Greeks saying that hope is the one evil you must lock up in order to fight the others?

Punishment and Justice and Vengeance

The thing with a road trip is the very long, late night conversations.  Sometimes my control slips or my guard comes down or whatever happens and I see things in a different way, with more emotion than I usually do. More empathy. That's neither good nor bad, just different.

Anyway, M was talking about victims who want vengeance.  Who didn't seem to realize that the vengeance they wanted was wrong, that a bullet to the head was quicker that...

And I got it, in a weird way.

Justice is a hard thing to define.  It's like fairness.  There is one group that says that a fair basketball game is one with objective refs where all the rules are applied to all the players equally.  I'm cool with that.  That's the ideal, and subject to human error, but I like that.

There is another group, and one that seems to be growing, that seems to believe that a fair basketball game is one that ends in a tie.  An uneven score is prima facie evidence that the game is unfair and it is the responsibility of the refs to apply the rules in any way necessary to keep the scores even.

I'm not cool with that.  Not with the power dynamic, nor with where it has to end.

But both are valid definitions for fair. (I'm assuming you all understand the difference between truth and validity.)

Justice seems tied up with fair.  Actions bringing commensurate responses.  An ideal, but try to adjust it much past the 1:1 math of "an eye for an eye" or "blood for blood" of the old vendettas and it gets very ambiguous very quickly.

So we wind up with a justice system and an ideal of punishment that has more to do with the feelings of society than with altering behavior (punishment in the behavioral sense) or any recognizable definition of justice.

And I'm cool with that.  Some can stomach the idea of state executions, some can't.  When the majority can't, those are the rules we follow.  Because the mores, the way things are done, are more important to a society than any particular piece of justice.  Far less cool with it when I'm too close to the problem... but when I can be objective I get it and even when it was hard to be objective that was the job, and I did the job.

My personal belief is to scrap the entire idea of justice and treat crime as a public health issue.  One chance to modify behavior.  If that fails, remove the individual.  Years ago, I read a story  (My memory is fuzzy but I think it was H Beam Piper and it was SF) where the judge said something like, "I'm not ordering your execution because of what you did.  I'm ordering your execution because you have shown you are willing to do what you did."  That resonated.  Some bacteria are good for you, some kill.  As a public health issue, why treat a person who kills any differently than a bacteria?

But the vengeance thing.
Normally I'm with M.  Rapist?  Shoot him in the head.  Quick.  Efficient. Cheap. And never, ever will he victimize anyone else.  And that's enough.  For me.

But, combination of sleep deprivation and the company, I got a whiff of the logic of vengeance and punishment.  Not real logic.  The math actually doesn't work unless there is an afterlife or reincarnation.  But I have heard evil men bragging, and reminiscing about how their victims begged.

The drive (remember this is sleep deprivation talking) is to bring things full circle, to closure.  And that will never feel complete until the perpetrator felt what the victim felt.  Until the victimizers learn the lessons of the victims.

Inspired by Kasey

Violence Dynamics seminar is winding down here in Minnesota.  Hitting the road again in a few hours.  Good and bad.  The debrief on this one will be informative, to say the least.

Kasey got a whole day to teach yesterday—eight hours of strangles, chokes and neck cranks.  Cool to be in a jurisdiction that doesn’t automatically assume that any force to the neck is deadly force.  He’s a good teacher.  Good movement, good relevance, good communication.  And, most valuable to me, he gets me thinking… (right this second, as Marc teaches, Kasey is condensing the violence classifications from “Facing Violence” into a few sentences for the one person who wasn’t here for the whole week.)

But, as always, the blog is about me.  And ideas.  And thoughts.  Kasey triggered a cascade yesterday.  The thought process goes like this:

Kasey says, “I’m a judo guy, and you can do this technique like a judo guy or an aikido guy or even a kung-fu guy.  It will all look a little different but it will still work.”

And that triggers the idea of a plastic mind exercise where you work a single technique, but in the mindsets of different martial arts.  Just to feel and explore the flavor.  Each repetition or series will feel and work slightly differently.

Hence- Plastic Mind Drill X: “Do it Like a (name martial art here)”

Earlier in the day, and playing with the officers Thursday, I was doing light sparring with one or both hands in pockets or with my coffee cup.  Believe it or not, I don’t do this because I’m an arrogant prick or to show off. I do it for me.  It forces me to think differently.  It forces me to be more efficient.  With your hands in your pockets you must learn to glide strikes with your elbows and shoulders and it really improves your tai sabaki.  It also brings it to the next level where the glides unbalance as well and, with practice, gives you a taste of using some subtle anatomical weapons with momentum.

And so, a name to put on something we’ve been doing forever: “Subtle Disadvantage Drills”

So:

“Do it Like X”

“Subtle Disadvantage”

A few more:

Osaekomi (I tend to use more Japanese after hanging with Kasey.  The shared judo background makes for a nice shorthand.)  Osaekomi is pinning.  Pinning and escaping from pinning and preventing pinning are great skill building for one of the hallmark combative skills: Moving a body.

But, one of the key differences between a good grappler and a mediocre grappler (and I will argue, in a real fight, the difference between most people and someone who is really good) is the ability to relax.  To simply relax.  When I did a regular JJ class, we would usually end with rolling, and I would roll with all of the students in sequence until they were too tired to continue.  Not a big deal.  lots of judo, BJJ and a few JJ guys do this.

The reason we can exhaust a class isn’t because of conditioning or some magic skill.  The better you are, the more relaxed you are, the less sugar and oxygen you burn the longer you can last.  And that efficiency in energy conservation, IMO translates into efficiency in technique application.

So what about doing grappling drills and every so often shift the focus from skill building to relaxation practice?  Meditating from the pin.

(I also noticed that a lot of people don’t get the idea of throwing their legs and using the dead weight to pull their own bodies through a turn.  Hard to describe, but useful.  Don’t have a specific drill for it though…)

Acting practice.  We try to make the approaches and set-ups as real as possible.  We want the students to recognize a predatory approach.  Especially how predators try to act like non-predators.  Conversely, in some situations (especially sexual violence with a medium or long build-up phase) the intended victim is going to have to make an approach and then execute a plan…and is likely to fail if she cannot disguise her intentions.  Practicing acting with any build-up just makes sense.  On multiple levels.  “It doesn’t take a good actor to spot a bad actor.”

Elbow chisao- done this more often as a demo than a drill, but why not?  Play with the basic sensitivity of sticky hands and work in the leverage and momentum skills of working the back of the elbow.

Lots of themes, here, and this is just thinking out loud.  Relax.  See opportunities.  Integrate everything.  Transition from your slow thinking mind to your faster, older brain.  Training is not conditioning and what happens when you can improvise under pressure seems to be a different effect.

Beliefs Empowering Evil

Just wrapped up an on-line writer's course.

Near the end, I got a question:


 "...what is your opinion of Ben Bova’s recommendation to authors that their works not contain villains? He states, in his Tips for writers: "In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil. Fiction mirrors life. Or, more accurately, fiction serves as a lens to focus what we know of life and bring its realities into sharper, clearer understanding for us. There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them."

My first reaction was frankly emotional:

Sorry.  I had a guy in custody who cut open a two-year-old baby's belly with a tin can lid and raped the wound.  Mr. Bova is talking about his world, not mine.

I don't mind emotion sometimes, but it's not that useful.  So:

I think I was unfair in my first answer to this question.  Let me try it another way. No one believes that they are evil.  Not Stalin, not Hitler, not Pol Pot, and not some bastard who rapes babies.  Every last one of them has a justification.  My emotional reaction to Bova's
statement was this-- just because some  rapist justifies his actions to himself, that in no way causes me, and shouldn't cause anybody, to buy into his bullshit.  Justifications are not real and the story you tell yourself doesn't make actions good and when people pretend that raping a baby is... "only people with problems, struggling to solve them" they have no idea how encouraging and useful rapists find those words. It does far more to encourage crime than the author can possibly know.

So, let's take an example and, given the audience, the example is writing fiction.  I assume that you do it because you love it, that it makes you feel alive.  It may be the most important thing in your life.

What if 99.9% of the world decided it was wrong?  No-- it was evil. You are, after all, lying.  Telling and selling lies that doom impressionable young readers into believing that there are really heroes and true love and soulmates!  You need to be stopped!

Would you give up writing?

That is how some of the process predators (the ones who commit the crime for the pleasure of committing-- serial killers, serial rapists, conmen, certain assaulters) see their crimes.  The best thing in the world and the benighted, ignorant masses in pure prejudice are trying to put a stop to it.

Others just don't care or grasp that other people have rights or feelings.  One rapist/murderer told me that as a man, I should understand.  He always asked first and he only raped the ones who said 'no.'  Where did they get the idea that a mere woman had the right to say no to him?

A pedophile who didn't understand the difference between his shoes and his daughter.  He could do what he wanted.  That's what 'his' _means_. He thought we (society, the courts...) were completely unjust not to understand that.

There was a high-profile disappearance a while back.  Not sure how much I can share, but her father had been molesting her for a long time.  When the neighbor asked for a turn, daddy said, "I don't share my meat."  Exact quote.  So the neighbor later abducted, raped and murdered her.

One of the most violent felons I dealt with told me, "I just do what everybody wants to do. The rest of you just don't have the guts." The highest-end predators honestly think that they are better, stronger and smarter than the rest of the world.  And they prove it to themselves by doing things others won't do.  It's fallen into disfavor, thankfully, but remember the push to increase children's self-esteem a few years ago?  The highest self-esteem scores are consistently found in violent criminals and if you raise that esteem, you raise the violence.

In each case, these guys will have a story where they are either the good guys or the victims.  All respect to Mr. Bova, it's just a story and it's bullshit and it empowers them when we buy into the myth.

Silly Season

"Here we are again," K said as she took the familiar turn off to the airport.  At least it's not a red-eye this time.  Two weeks home.  Very nice.  I'll be home for a day or two at a time until late October.

Busy is good.

The political silly season is on, and it is a showcase for tribal, monkey-brained limbic-system thinking.  Very little neocortex activity is involved.  If their side says it, it is evil and reprehensible; if our side says the exact same thing it is wise or the only option or...

This has been hard.  I predicted a while ago that as the two major parties in the U.S. become even more similar, the rhetoric would have to get more heated.  If there are no substantial differences you must emphasize the cosmetic ones to keep the tribal lines clear, after all.

I have a lot of very intelligent friends who I both admire and disagree with.  If I ever agree with you on everything, the world doesn't need us both.  But this election season has been ugly.

I've seen very intelligent, compassionate people indulge in something that they themselves would call bigoted hate-speech if the nouns were simply changed.  Hate speech is not defined by the target, but by the manner.

I have read a best-selling author and a good man say that anyone not on his side (not the people who disagree with him, any individual who is not a member of his party) is 'stupid' and 'allergic to truth'.

One, possibly more insightful, did not want to discuss a subject because she did not want any facts shaking her beliefs.

And I have seen fine men of integrity spread lies...and no matter how much they want to believe the things they say are true, they weren't even subtle lies.

So here's some advice from the Conflict Communication model. It might be easier to grasp if you've taken the whole class.
If your monkey/tribal brain is working your human/thinking brain is not.
If you are feeling emotion, you are not thinking.  That part of your brain is turned off.
If it is about who did or said it and not what was said, you are in your tribal brain.
If you label anyone, it is a tactic to put that person  in another tribe specifically so that you don't have to listen to the content.

And one piece of advice not out of ConCom: People who disagree with you are rarely stupid.  If you cannot effectively, compassionately and convincingly argue the other side's point of view, you are the one in your tribal brain.  You are the stupid one.

Stay in the debate, but use your brain.

Hard to Systematize

Working on outlining/writing two projects now.
One is the Big Book of Everything, my personal notebook on everything that I think works and matters for self protection.  The stuff I trust and the teaching methods that I believe work best.
The other is "Awareness" coming off of the recent post.

Both are kicking my ass.

The hardest thing about writing "Meditations on Violence" was trying to find a logical order.  Violence is big, probably as big as communication.  And it is complicated.  And every little detail affects many things. In a way, it is four dimensional.  You have to start somewhere and build up to levels of understanding, but each thing you learn changes you understanding of the things you thought you already had.

For Awareness, my gut is to break it into the Four Factors:
You
The Threat(s)
The Environment
Luck

Can't start with 'You' though because until people understand and trust the way I analyze it can be very off-putting to have some unknown schmoe say in a book, "Y'all probably don't know yourself that well or have any idea of who you truly are under stress."  Get a little exposure to the method, and the readers will try some of the drills.

So start with the threat, right?
So violence motivations and how goals and parameters drive the crime. (And that's another issue in that I don't want to repeat stuff I've put in other books, since I hate reading that...but I also don't want readers to feel they are being tricked or pressured into buying a second book.  Yeah.  My integrity issues.) Logic of Violence stuff.
And within that we'll talk about drugs.  All the drugs?  Or general types, stimulants and depressants and hallucinogens?  What phase of the cycle?  Early withdrawals, late withdrawals, high as a kite and steady?  How to tell and what it indicates and how to use the information...
Individual and group dynamics...

And you have to know what to look for (observe) know what it means (orient) and what you can and can't do with the information (decide/options).

So motivations are a part of it, as are thought processes.  As are physicality, from weapons to positioning to reading feet.

And all of this is interactive.  The Threat is continuously interacting with the environment and on some level with you and in many situations with other people-- confederates or bystanders or witnesses.

You and the environment are just as complicated.

The information isn't that hard.  Organizing it is.

A Dragon Falls

Just heard that Joe Lewis died.
He was fun.  Great mind.  Great timing. Power and speed in a nearly perfect package (and I met him well after his prime.)  Analytical mind, and a blast to hang with.

He's left a good legacy.  Taught some fine, tough people.
Fought cancer longer than the doctors thought he could.

Don't know what else to say.  The old Dragons are passing.

Principles and Details

There are divisions to this.

Principles are the big things.  Principles are the things (usually physics) that make other things work.  Principles apply to everything.

‘Maximize leverage’ is a principle.  Poor leverage will make locks fail and takedowns fail and significantly weaken strikes.  Good leverage (and good leverage for strikes includes using a stick) makes everything better.  It’s just physics.

Range is a principle—you can’t hit something you can’t reach.  But teaching range poorly (e.g. this is good range for hand strikes but too close for kicks and  that is good range for kicks but too far away for hands) is an easily-inherited lack of understanding and creativity. Jack Dempsey proved you can knock someone out with a jab from well out of punching range.  There are kicks that work very effectively at clinch range.  There are power generation systems that require no more distance than what you can get with your fingers touching the threat, and there are ways to use some of those on the ground.

There are more principles, but not that many (at least that I’ve identified).  Simple, universal.  Like many things, there is a big gap between knowing them and understanding them.  I’m coming too believe that it is easy to know something and at some level you can teach just from knowledge.  But the stuff you apply instinctively under stress is only the stuff that you understand.

Thought during the drive yesterday.  Things must have either eased off or tightened up, since I’m thinking about writing almost constantly.  Details. I know there is enough material in details for a book, but I doubt that I’m consciously aware of a tenth.

Details are the little things.  Not big universals like principles.  More specific, maybe more limited, but the tricks we all do to make things work.

Like the ulnar rotation.  You smack into a bicep or under the jaw with the flat of your forearm and then rotate and dig the ulna into the target.  Or the sawing action.  No idea why pushing directly against certain points won’t work but when you saw your forearm it moves much bigger people.

And some little details make things fail.  When (as many do) you apply a wristlock with some of your fingers actually on the joint, you are in your own way.  You support the joint, just like a splint.

And some things I’m not sure are details, maybe a nuances: You should be able to tell the orientation of your blade by the feel of the handle.  If you can’t see or feel where the elbow joint is, the little finger will tell you where to put pressure.  Stuff like that.

Something to let stew for awhile.

Product

David S has been pushing me to say something nice about the "Facing Violence" video.  He directed it, and I think he does a lot of YMAA's video marketing, too.

But I'm feeling nostalgic and kind of want to do a life recap.  Like everything on the blog, this is for me.  It might read like a CCA (Crass Commercial Announcement) so feel free to skip it.

My first published works were articles to Black Belt Magazine (on jujutsu striking, I was starting to get tired of JJ being characterized as a pure grappling art with the advent of GJJ) and American Survival Guide (an article on some nifty rappelling and climbing tricks with limited equipment).  That was about 1997 and almost as soon as I sent them in I got promoted to sergeant.  Which turns your life around.  I dabbled, but didn't think about publishing again for ten years.

Meditations on Violence
Coming off of an ugly year, I started writing.  About the same time, Kris Wilder invited me to teach at a seminar.  I hadn't been in a room with pure, shiny martial artists for a long time... and it seemed that none of them had a clue to what I was talking about. Fights are different than assaults?  Adrenaline?  Environment?  Aftermath?  You mean some of this stuff is illegal?  And some won't work?
So I started writing things down, partially to explain, partially to get some stuff out of my head.  'Meditations' is a core dump.  Sort of a psychic vomit.  And originally intended as something for my senior students when I got older.

I sent it to Kris, of course, since he was a friend and a big reason the book was written. He sent it to the publisher.

Facing Violence
MoV was a core dump, Facing Violence is a plan.  MoV addressed what too many martial artists didn't know.  FV was my list of what they need to know.  It grew out of a class at the very last Martial University (that seminar that Kris used to host) before I went to Iraq.  Thought about it for a couple of years and wrote the first draft in less than a month.  It organized information, particularly the categories of violence, in a way that I'm really proud of.

Force Decision
I wrote this entirely in Baghdad and Sulaymaniyah.  And I'd decided not to publish it.  There are huge battles in perception going on right now.  One of the ones I've been closest to is how some people hate and fear the police...and how many police expect that they will simply be punished for doing their job no matter how well they do it.  That there is no level of gentleness, even all the way up to letting criminals run free plus constant ass-kissing that won't leave some of our citizens calling us thugs and Nazis.  It was frustrating.  K is the product of a 'worker's paradise' and damn well knows what 'police state' really means.  I was in Baghdad, trying to teach leadership to a generation that had learned that any glimmer of initiative was answered with summary execution.  I wanted to write something so that the people who cared could have the facts.  But I know perfectly well that the people deepest in the controversy don't give a damn about the facts.  They want to be vindicated and the other side to be evil.  Reason is not welcome here.

And I really, really didn't want to step into the middle of that.  Not because of fear (since, realistically, the scariest thing in my world right now are live TV interviews) but because there is no gain in trying.
But Tiff read the book and disagreed.  And so have a few other people.  I'm not hopeful, not yet.  Maybe.

Campfire Tales from Hell
A certain person was getting in trouble with some extreme medical bills, and a group of us decided to do something more permanent than donations.  I volunteered to edit and some very cool people shared stories.  And it was a blast.  And, for all the horror stories I had heard about editing ("What's the difference between herding cats and editing an anthology?  Cats aren't neurotic and insecure.") it was painless and fun.  And the book is awesome.  Smashwords link.

The E-Books
Smashwords
Amazon Author Page

The Blog Compilations
Currently five of them, they cover all the blog posts from 2005-2009.  I didn't feel I had the right to the comments, so comments are excluded, but I also wanted to add value, so there is a little extra information in all of them.

Drills
I wanted to experiment with the e-book platform and I wanted a writing challenge.  Every year, K does Nanowrimo, the National Novel Writer's Month.  Essentially a challenge to complete a full book in 30 days.  Sounded cool.  I asked for suggestions on the Blog and Maija suggested a book of drills.  Done.  And fun.  YMAA plans on doing an illustrated print version in 2013, with some new chapters.

Talking the Through
With a little pressure from Tim Boelhert, I finally got this one done.  It's essentially a write-up of the course I designed and taught for the Mental Health Team at my old agency.  Good reviews.  The people in the trenches seem to like it.

Working With a Translator
Actually an article I'd been toying with for awhile.  Wanted to see how it went.  Lessons from the best of the best, and some of the worst interpreters.

And now, for David, the video:

Facing Violence
I don't watch videos.  For whatever reason, with books non-fiction engages me and fiction annoys but with video, it's the opposite.  I like shoot-em-ups and westerns and noir and some comedy and... but the best directed, cast, narrated non-fiction bores the absolute crap out of me.  And, personally, I think that any sort of combatives is much easier to learn by touch than by sight.

So, hmmmmm.  I think it's good.  I'm not an actor.  Alain was being kind when he said I'm not a polished speaker.  I said some bad words. Never really got the knack of looking at the camera like it was a person.  But the information is solid and there are some things that were easier to show than to explain in a book.  Everything else aside, if you are interested in self-defense the example of "Articulation Wars" is incredibly important.  The story you tell will compete with the threat's and it is another form of battle you must practice.

Upcoming Stuff

Book- Scaling Force, a collaboration with Lawrence Kane should be coming out in a month or so.  It includes the best stuff I've written on presence and verbal skills.  And interacting with Lawrence got me to put somethings in words that were important.  You know, the stuff that everyone knows but you don't realize it until it's phrased just right?

Book- Drills, an expansion of the e-book early next year.

Book- Working slowly on the Conflict Communications Manual revision.

E-Book- It will be under a pseudonym (since I'm not thrilled about broadcasting the actual names of my children) but I've been collecting some of the horrible stories I used to tell my kids.  At one point, they believed we got them from the Kid Pound.  And the time I convinced them my mother-in-law was a cannibal.  Stuff like that.

Videos- Two for next year release are in the can.  Or in post.  Or whatever magic David does after we've packed up our toys and gone home.

Logic of Violence: It's been killing me to figure out how to write this as a book. David suggested we just film a class.  It's a lot of talking, and I'm afraid it might be boring, but the information and the process are both cool.  Get a room full of smart people and have them solve the problems a crook solves.  On their own, they create and understand a raft of common street-crime tactics.  It's cool.

Joint Locks: No idea what this will actually be titled.  It will be about an hour and will cover everything you need to know about locks.  For instructors, I want you to look at the method for breaking down the information.  For everyone else, pay attention and do the drill.  IMO locks, like a lot of things in MA are simply taught wrong.  They aren't complicated, they aren't hard.  But most martial arts who specialize in locks can train for years and still not be able to apply them.  I was able to get officer to improvise locks under stress consistently with 90 minutes or less of training.  It's not hard.

Voices

We used to do a drill for new members of the mental health team.  One of our best psych counselors had collected what "the voices" told various schizophrenics and created two scripts.  One was anger and rage and paranoia:  "Kill them. They're laughing at you.  Hide what you feel kill them all. Taste blood. Shit!. Control. Hide it."  The other was self abasement: "You are a worm.  Die.  Kill yourself.  Make the world better and bite off your tongue."

Those aren't the actual scripts (though I have them in a file).  The actual scripts were much better, more intense.  The exercise was to have two people whispering scripts in your ear-- while you went through a job interview.  It gave the new officer an idea of what some of our charges needed to deal with, how hard it could be to concentrate on the 'real' world. 'Real' is in quotes because the voices are real, too.  Not something imagined but something heard, very like a stranger or a demon whispering in your ear.

We also noticed that some people adapted quickly.  They got good at it.  For most people distraction was obvious as eyes darted towards the voices or they flinched.  For a very few the voices could be ignored, the flinches suppressed.  You still heard them but didn't give it away.  You could get through the job interview and show very little.

It gave us a lot of respect for high-functioning schizophrenics.

This morning I was interviewed on TV for the first time.  Sorboni Banerjee of Fox 25 in Boston is friends of a student of Bill Giovannucci's and found out I was in town.  I was nervous, normal for a first time at almost anything, but the crew was good, very smooth and practiced.  They knew how to deal with rookies.

But I learned something about an interviewer's job.  It's a lot like being a paid schizophrenic.  The entire time, while paying full attention to me, Sorboni had an earphone and was getting constant updates.  "Speed up, slow down. Ninety seconds to go. Next point."  Not a blip she was hearing voices.  And watching monitors. And seeing a teleprompter.  The whole time carrying on a normal conversation.

But not really.  She wasn't just carrying.  She was driving and directing.  A slight turn of her head would get a reaction from me and keep things where they needed to be for the camera.  She would change her rate, tone, pitch or volume knowing I would have a tendency to match.  It's a technique I used on EDPs all the time (Emotionally Disturbed Persons).

Incredible multi-tasking.  Strategic direction of a social interaction with a naive subject in a stressful (relatively and I have no idea why this was so much more stressful than my last fight.  Which is bullshit.  I know.  The last one was last of what? Hundreds. This was a first.) milieu.

Very impressive.

Awareness Details

I don't think I've broken this out as its own piece before, and doubt if I have the space to go into details.  To follow along, you'll need a basic understanding of Violence Dynamics, which is just a fancy way of saying you know about different kinds of bad guys and how they attack.

This is a quick overview of what I mean (and what I teach) when I say, "Be aware of your surroundings."

1) The uber fundamental: You probably don't think about the same things a criminal thinks about or value what he values.  But you can.  And once you understand the criminal's goals and values, the threat becomes far more predictable.
        1A)  The criminal has more experience dealing with citizens than citizens have dealing with criminals.
        1B) If you try to deal with a criminal the way you would deal with a civilian, you will probably fail.
        1C) If the criminal is sophisticated, your standard (social) tactics will be used against you.

2) There are criminals with different needs.  They choose different targets and attack in different ways.  The goal drives almost every aspect of the attack.

3) Potential for danger
        3A) Personal.  What is your personal threat profile? How does it change over time and circumstances?  A fit martial athlete is largely only going to be targeted for a Monkey Dance-- until the day he is injured and/or drunk.  The elderly are targeted by resource predators more than process.  Women are targeted for many different types of violence.  What would a predator or an insecure monkey want from you?
        3B) Dangerous Dynamics.  Most violence is predictable.  If you are in or create a dangerous dynamic, physical skills are not the answer.  In an abusive relationship?  The relationship has to change, probably end.  It is very, very rare for a person to be targeted by bad people unless he did something wrong or stupid.  No, I'm dancing around this. Straight out, the number one prevention for probably 90% of non-drug related murders is to not sleep with somebody else's mate.  And the prevention for most drug-related murders is to stay away from drugs and the people who use them.
        3C) Reading Terrain.  The places where bad stuff happens has certain qualities.  They are different--very different-- between social violence and asocial, but all predictable.  For social, groups of young men, alcohol... for asocial resource-rich (ATMs or out of town businessmen or collections of drunk college girls or...) with isolation and an escape route are good starts.  You can learn, quickly and easily, to see this.

4) Presence of Danger.  For social, this is largely the ability to recognize the script.  For asocial, the absence of normal social cues.  Big ones for this are proxemics (there are natural and unnatural distances to stand); Orientation (how often do people asking you questions stand at your flank?); and foot placement (normal social interactions will have the power line perpendicular to you.)  Signs that a weapon is involved (hand placement, clothing, tells, unequal armswing when walking....). And whether there is an audience (social).
           For both social and asocial, the ability to recognize the signs of adrenalization, and how to tell how experienced the threat is with adrenalized states (from adrenaline-controlling 'self-calming' behavior to the blank-eyed relaxation from someone who's skin has just paled.)

5) Analysis of Danger.  Kind of touched on above, but telling a social from an asocial situation and a resource predator (where giving up your purse will work) from a process predator (where it profoundly will not work.)

6) Analysis of Opportunity.  Globally seeing what you can do about your identified problem-- from bringing social pressure to bear (from getting the audience to intervene to creating witnesses) to learning to use the environment offensively to...anything.

Just some thoughts.  This would be easy to expand on for a long time.
  

No Good Answers

Good talks with Jake Steinmann yesterday.  About teaching students versus subjects; learning versus experimenting; why the easy things are hard and the hard easy sometimes.  We also talked about his experiment with knife defense.  He has more to do-- turns out people are not nearly as keen on banging out stuff when there is considerable pain and impact involved-- but the preliminary results are in.  There aren't good answers.

That shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody.  It's all percentage points.  Taking the Monkey Dance bullshit off the table, no one is going to pick you as a victim if they think you will win.  The bad guy gets position, surprise.  The bad guy prefers to have the edge in size and strength (not always-- skinny, short meth addicts need drugs too).  And if there is a weapon, the bad guy will have it in play. You won't, because why the hell would he pick you if you did?  The world is full of marks.

Knife-in-play blitzes (what most martial artists envision when they think of defending against an active attack) don't happen that much in my experience-- but they are a formidable tactical problem.  The crazy guy attacking a crowd doesn't happen that often either.   Outside of certain populations, neither does shanking-- but that is where I concentrate my training time.  And I think I have the best available answer for it.

But I'm not gonna delude myself for a second into believing it's a good answer.

Self-defense is a thin list of things that might give you a chance.  But just a chance.  If there was something reliable, criminals would change their tactics.

Take that back-- there is something reliable.  And that is victim behavior.  There are exceptions (and our entire goal as SD instructors is to turn our students into those exceptions) but those exceptions are rare.  Almost all victims freeze under a flurry and their hands go up to protect their faces.  Most people yanked try to pull away instead of step in.  Most men (even very well-trained ones) try to instinctively use the body mechanics of a Monkey Dance fight, with the shitty base and poor body mechanics and wide open centerline that comes with that.  On some level almost all humans when they perceive themselves to be under attack by another human, try to communicate.  What fighting they do is (subconsciously) intended to send a message, not to eliminate a threat.

It's not conscious, but criminals know this stuff and they count on it.  And it works.

But that's an aside.

Close range knife assault.  Caught in a riot. Being a civilian on the receiving end of an active shooter scenario.  There is stuff you can do for all of them, but there is nothing with a guaranteed outcome and sometimes the best possible outcome (the shooter only got one person--that's how you knew-- and you got him) still leaves two grievously wounded or dead people and a messy aftermath.

No good answers.  Whatever you have, if you are sure about it, you are wrong.  Don't get comfortable.

Paraphrased and From Memory

Darin Yee:
People misunderstand the five animals.  All arts have all five, but they pretend to ignore some or emphasize them differently.  The Dragon is structure and breathing, all of the stuff that is really subtle but has a big effect.  The Crane is about flow and continuous movement.  The Snake is about speed and flexibility.  The Leopard is stealth and cunning.  The Tiger is power.
That's it.  You need all five of these to fight.  At some level you need cunning and power, speed and flow and the subtle things.  Every workable system has them all.

Van Canna:
It's the people.  I worked at my job for a long time but never made friends like I have through martial arts.  When things get bad and the end gets close, what do you have, really?  Nothing but friends.

George Mattson:
Tell Kimmi (for some reason he always calls her Kimmi instead of Kami) she has to be here next year.  People are still talking about the belly-dance class for martial artists workshop she taught.  You're okay, Rory, but Kami is really something special.  Get her here next year.

Greg Postal:
You've been busting my balls, my turn to call you on your bullshit.  It wasn't chance.  Conscious or not everyone involved made that decision.  EVERY good leader thought they were a better XO (Executive Officer) than they were a leader.  People wind up in the position other people need them to be in.

Kami, Robb Buckland, Clyde Bagley and about a dozen other people in different times and contexts:
I missed you.

Absolutely mutual.

I'll Sleep Later

It's not insomnia.  Because I'm not tired.  Last night it was just too hot to sleep.  Today, though drowsy in the afternoon, I don't feel tired at all.  Energized.

Rob once said that being sleep deprived was just the natural state of operators.  The odd hours, the shift work, the obsession with the perimeter (however you define the perimeter) always half-awake listening for the pager... you don't sleep much or often or well.  Your body finds a new steady state, a homeostasis of functional sleep deprivation.

I'll make myself sleep soon.  Another big day tomorrow.  But for now I feel like riding the wave, running out the energy.  Writing (since all the people I would consider brawling with are already asleep, snoring softly).

Good day today.  I don't study karate.  As far as I know there isn't a Uechi instructor within 200 miles of my base.  I can make a long list of all the things I don't have in common with this group, martially... and yet I love being here.  Tried to put it in words today.  Good people, a big family,  many brilliant (research physicians, counselors, scientists, investigators) many talented (champions, athletes, martial pioneers) many dedicated (people who have studied, for the purpose of comparing, similar systems from Okinawa and China).  But deep down, I think I love them because at the very base so many people here are thugs.  Sorry if that sounds like a harsh word.  'Thug' is what I used to insist on when anyone seemed to be romanticizing violence: "I don't do this for noble purposes, I do this for money."

It was never really true, Marc would call me on the 'lie to children.'  It was never about the paycheck and I always committed to doing the right thing-- but that's something you can say from the experienced end of it.  For a beginner to rationalize it... let's just say that there appears to be no limit to the evil a person can do if they feel they are righteous.

This group though, more than almost any I have encountered, know what they are doing.  They know the cost of it.  The old dragons here have put people down and avoided being put down.  Street time, bar time and jail time... they've done it, and survived and hung together.

And so I feel good here.  Watching George as the master strategist he is (you see the effects, but never what he does).  Hanging with Bear, who knows his dark side.  Joking and drinking with Robb (though we haven't had to avoid police in a couple of years-- I think he's getting old).  Getting my brain analyzed by Greg and my motion by Bill.  Watching R slay her demons with every stroke of her bo. And the new generation of talent...

It's all good.  Time to force some sleep.

The Next Five Days

Last night: Red-eye flight to Boston.  Couldn't sleep on the plane, as usual.

Today: Jeff picked me up at the airport, despite the delay (the one checked bag went missing then reappeared) then wander the Boston waterfront, trying to stay awake.  Beautiful hikes, humid and sweaty until the rain broke and then very nice.  Too slagged to meet with the gang (the 'Handlers') slept a bit, through calls and texts.

Tomorrow: Film.  Fill-in scenes and re-shoots for "Logic of Violence" and shoot (working title) "Everything There is to Know About Joint Locks." Original plan was to shoot "Drills" but David agreed it was a little ambitious to try to knock anything definitive out in one day.  Re-think, plan, script and shoot that in the spring.  It will be good times with good people, including my ECBT (East Coast Brain Trust).

Friday: Meet up with Harry and get to Plymouth in time to teach two classes at George Mattson's Summerfest.  Then two more Saturday and whatever on Sunday.  A good time to play with good people.  There will be some of the Old Dragons there-- George, of course but also Jimmy and Bill and Van and probably Art and... names you may not know and if you are a martial artist, that is a shame.

Good skill building followed, if the pattern holds, by good talks and maybe a wee dram of fine scotch.  Just found a new one, Ledaig, at one of my favorite stores, Federal Wine and Spirits.

Then a week of hanging with friends, hiking, writing...