Thanks, Paul

Paul Kirchner is the author of "Bowie Knife Fights, Fighters and Fighting Techniques" and "Jim Cirillo's Tales of the Stakeout Squad" and some other books that will probably creep onto my "to read" stack. He sent an e-mail after reading "Meditations on Violence" and "Facing Violence." He wondered why Col. Jeff Cooper wasn't in the bibliography.

The short answer was that I've never read his stuff.

I read. A lot. But there is a huge amount of information out there. There are experts I haven't read. Many of them. People I've never studied with. Months ago, I did a post on possibly working up a course for extreme CQ gun, specifically deploying under attack... and a lot of people gave me leads on work already going on. That was a relief. The late Jim Cirrillo or Southnarc or Mercop are the people who have had to do it and someone in the middle of the problem will tend to understand it far better than someone who has only brushed at the edges.

The list is long, and I make it longer by reading sometimes skeptically. If an author intrigues me, I tend to dig into his bibliography, and sometimes an author's sources do not say what he claims. I like reading on the edge of the field. I know what it feels like to be in certain kinds of problems, have developed a comfort level. I actually learn less from people with similar experiences than I do from researchers or sometimes reporters. If you know human pack behavior, sometimes books about dogs or apes will give a new piece of the puzzle.

Anyway, Paul very graciously sent a copy of "Principles of Personal Defense." It was a short book, I read it while waiting for the coffee to brew. But it was concise, accurate and wonderful. The reading list grows.

Re-Cap and Thoughts

I feel obligated to recap the last three weeks and I'm not sure I can. Partially because parts are a blur, partially because I don't think I could write about all the great people equally and I don't want to hurt feelings to no purpose.

We did do both Plastic Mind and Scenarios in Halifax. Much of that was because Jim Maloney's crew had most of the physical skills down cold. Those guys were solid, physically and combatively. It was nice.

There were some oddities in the scenarios, a phenomenon that I'd read about in Amanda Ripley's "The Unthinkable" that I'd never seen in a scenario before. Can't describe it here because I don't want to give scenarios away- but it was interesting and disconcerting both. Saw some good tactics and hesitancy to commit and all the usual things, which is good. Most people who have trained are to some degree in denial. Scenarios help them get a taste of how much they will change when there is stress and things are moving fast. Just a taste.

Over the last three weeks I've played with at least sixty people and the most ferocious were the ones from the most traditional of the systems, and that got me thinking. It's not about system. I'm not even sure it's really about the individual. If the teacher is a real fighter, like Jimmy, someone who has thoroughly gathered perspective both in competition and countless real encounters, he gets the core.

Traditional or non-traditional, whatever we studied came from somewhere and was adapted for something by someone. If they sucked at what they were designed for, they quietly disappeared. (Now, what they were designed for my not be related in any way to their marketing or what their students or even their senior leadership believes they were designed for.) They all fill a need. Maybe the need is only cameraderie or testing yourself safely. And that's cool.

And a lot of the needs have changed over time. 350 years ago almost anyplace was violent beyond what most modern Americans can really grasp. Might did make right and there was no recourse or justice beyond what your tribe or family would and could provide (until a guy named Sam Colt made it possible for the small and weak and poor to make predation dangerous... my opinion, of course).

So 350 or even just 100 years ago when some of the traditions arose, people trying to kill you and take your stuff were baselines of the environment. As that need faded and the traditions continued, other things became important: hierarchies and ritual. precision becomes more important than effectiveness. All that stuff.

When a real fighter comes up in that system (or comes to the system or someone gets exposed to violence later after learning in a system) they see it entirely differently. If they have the courage to start teaching it for effect (as opposed to not rocking the boat and just making the hierarchy happy) it becomes an entirely different thing. The bones come alive and sometimes the bones are very strong.

Just some thoughts, sitting in the Halifax airport.

Last Leg

I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

It will be a different crowd, and that's always a test.

There will be a few people with no training, some martial artists... but the core will be the students of Jim Maloney. Jim is a fighter and he makes fighters and it will be a blast and a challenge to present the material so that his crew get the maximum out of it without leaving anyone else behind.

OTOH, some of the stuff I usually need to emphasize will be familiar to the students of this Old Dragon.

Nightmare

Logic of Violence does it better, because it is sneaky within the format, but for the quick down and dirty, we can be totally up front. You won't own it the same way, but the information is still valid.

At the Montreal seminar I asked, "Who is your nightmare opponent?" If you are a martial artist, take a few minutes and think about it.

One of the answers: "He'd be about 50% more than I weigh, much stronger with more skill and experience."

Yeah, that would suck, huh? Then add that he gets the first move at the time and place of his choosing. And he may be counting on a previous relationship with you to keep you from acting.

Gentlemen, our worst nightmare is where the average woman starts her day. We've been roughhousing, pushing and hitting each other since childhood and, largely, we've been encouraged. Sometimes overt, often subtle, girls have been punished when they wanted to play like that. So the average man reaches adulthood (even with no formal training) better trained and far more conditioned and experienced than almost any woman.

And men are stronger. We rarely get into contests of direct strength with women without holding back a lot, but when we do the difference is stark. (With the exception of KG and RM, two of my favorite cover officers.)

On top of it all, most women have only learned social strategies to deal with conflict...and social strategies not only fail but backfire when attempted on a predator.

Like I said, in LoV you come to this realization slowly and own it. Here it is quick and dirty. If you are teaching self-defense what you can do within your weight class doesn't mean anything. You need to teach people what works outmatched in strength, skill, experience and ferocity. How to deal when the assault is on before they are aware. And help them work out and overcome much of their social programming.

It can be done. It has been done. But not by staying in your comfort zone perspective.

Responsibility and Blame

I refuse to get into the particulars. Too much Monkey Dancing. Scott's written about it. Some other people I know have written and some are getting sucked into little vicious flame wars where nobody is really listening to anybody else.

I don't like seeing people get hurt. It makes me feel bad. That's probably petty and childish on some level, but for me it trumps politics or dreams or justice or wishful thinking. Maybe I should amend that to good people getting hurt, but you know what? Even when it was absolutely necessary, there's no joy in hurting others. There's a weird and intense kind of joy in taking the risk on being hurt, but that's for another time.

I don't like seeing people get hurt. No mi gusto.

Should, as the platitude goes, a woman be able to walk naked into a biker bar (no idea why everyone picks on bikers for this) and be safe? Sure. That would be cool. And it will happen when a wounded seal pup can swim through a school of sharks and not get eaten. It would require a change in the nature of sharks.

Rape is a pretty nasty crime. Whether it arises from nature or nurture, by the time someone can commit that crime, they've already gotten past the issues of the victim's rights and humanity and justice and the way the world should be.

All protests, all consciousness-raising aimed at violent criminals centers on the message, "This is wrong."

The criminals already know it's wrong. The issue is that they don't care. You can't fix caring through reason. It's a deeper part of the brain.

I don't want people to get hurt. So I place the responsibility to stay safe on the potential victim. NOT because it is just or because I want the world to be this way. I place it there because, faced with a violent bad guy, the victim is likely the only one there who gives a rat's ass about her safety. The rapist doesn't. If the bad guy knows what he is doing, there won't be any indignant bystanders (and god help the victim if it is a Group Monkey Dance situation) to care and get involved. Even if they would get involved, which might be doubtful.

There are some things that society has, can, and will slowly change over time. Our ethics have advanced so far that we quibble now over hurting feelings when 150 years ago it might not even be a crime to kill someone of a different color. That's good. But on this very day, if something bad were to happen, society can't do anything specific and the bad guy has already decided to be bad. That puts the victim in the role of the only one who will act on her own behalf. Absolute responsibility by default.

And this is totally separate from blame. If a criminal attacks, it is his bad act, his choice. Whether the potential victim took precautions which the threat overcame or took no precautions at all, the blame and punishment should fall entirely on the perpetrator. That's justice.

But even in a world of perfect justice I would still prefer that no one got hurt in the first place. It's a pipe dream and childish, just as much a platitude as walking naked into a biker bar...

But it's still where I'm going to focus my time.

Re-Thinking the Seminars

Lots to write about, lots to think about. One thing at a time.

I'm rethinking the whole seminar format. Some time ago, a friend said I was trying to do too much. I understood, but I had two defenses:

1) It all ties together. If I leave one of the big pieces out, the picture becomes incomplete.

2) It's all intuitive. There's a lot of material but there is almost nothing to remember. Just stuff to feel, things put in different places in your brain.

For those who haven't been to one, a typical one-day seminar flows like this:

• Safety Briefing and teaching philosophy
• Intro to the One-Step drill
• There are a bunch of things that come out in even a short application of the One-Step, but the ideal is for the students to notice them and bring them to light. It usually works.
• Violence Demo, if necessary
• Specific One-Step Lessons
• First Long Talk: The Context of Violence
• Blindfolded Infighting
• Leverage and Leverage Points
• (Sometimes an extra building block class, if requested)
• Second Long Talk: Self-Defense Law
• Power Generation
• Counter-Ambush
• Last Long Talk: Violence Dynamics
• Debrief

That's a lot, but it all integrates and the physical stuff is experiential, not technique driven. The Counter-Ambush is the only thing that comes close to being a technique and it's really about designing your own technique and the training method, straight Operant Conditioning.

The second day in a two day is the one I'm thinking about redoing. I'm thinking about dropping scenarios. Scenarios are a blast and they are important. Judgement and physical skills have to be trained and tested together. Good decisions have to be backed up by good articulation. Scenarios are the place for that.

But doing scenarios well and safely is time consuming and takes a lot of detail work. I'm reluctant to be both the primary threat and the safety officer. I'm equally reluctant to use untrained, inexperienced people in either of those roles. And, self-serving sniveler that I am, I don't heal like I used to. I can take care of myself and the armor is good, but being a bad guy for twenty scenarios in an afternoon (even if most of them are targeted at judgement and don't go to force) is still a lot of kinetic energy to absorb.

In addition, I'm adding new material. The Plastic Mind exercises are cited a lot in the AADs as very useful and the violence dynamics section keeps expanding.

The old Second Day used to go:

• Safety Briefing, Safety check
• One-Step refamiliarization
• Ground Movement series
• Ethics and Application of Pain
• Dynamic Fighting
• Wall Fighting
• Environmental Fighting
• Mass Brawl
• Detailed, specific scenario safety briefing
• Scenario Briefing
• Area Check and Pat Down
• Scenarios (each debriefed on the spot)
• Class Debriefing
• Clean up

Just adding Plastic Mind and removing all of the scenario stuff still nicely fills two eight-hour days. We can even take a short lunch break. (I usually forget to eat and just have any hungry students eat during the lecture parts of Day One and while setting up for scenarios on Day Two.)

So this is what I'm thinking. Four Programs:

• Basics- The Day One by itself or both days above, but without the scenarios and with Plastic Mind.
• Conflict Communications
• Logic of Violence
• Scenarios, basically just offer them as a special training to specific individuals.

Just thinking out loud, here. Any thoughts?

Deep Definitions

A few weeks ago I did a talk for the Iraqi Society of Oregon. One of the men had almost gotten in trouble over words that flared to a fist fight. They asked me to talk about force and self-defense and the cultural differences on conflict between Iraqis and Americans.

It was a good talk, fun, but the need for it was based on cultural differences. Deep ones. And not overt ones, like THEY are okay with violence and WE aren't. It was deeper than that, more basic. Too deep to question. The initial problem that sparked the whole thing centered on what it is to be a man.

In some cultures, maybe, manhood is a clear thing. I don't believe that it is ever clear for the young. You may have a ritual that declares you are in fact a man and yet still live with your parents and act and be treated as a dependent. If manhood was clear, in any culture, there wouldn't be all these weird ways to prove or maintain it.

And so, we have a man from one culture where he is taught and believes that if someone insults you, if you are a man, you must fight or at least be willing to fight. That is what a man does. That is who a man is.

And he is living in a cultural (the Atticus Finch-influenced part of America) where it is common sense and practically written into law that a real man would never lower himself to fighting over mere words.

Not a value judgment here, just had a few things pop up lately where my definitions of deep behaviors may not match those around me.

The second is polite rudeness. I don't want to hit this with cultural identifiers because I don't want people to try to throw a label on my thinking process ("That bastard is anti-anglo!") and quit listening... but it's going to come up.

I was raised to respect lines. "Cutting lines" or even allowing lines to be cut was a big social no-no in grade school. We stand in lines, we wait. The very thought of cutting lines implied not just that you were special but that you thought you were better and more deserving than people who had made the effort to get there first. It was a personal and calculated insult to everyone else in line.

My friends from the old Soviet bloc don't respect lines. When they were kids, it wasn't a good idea. If you waited your turn, there was a good chance that there would be nothing at the end of your wait. We can wait in line because, though we may not like it, we are generally sure that it will pay off. Remove that assurance and our politeness, which just seems common sense, becomes a failing strategy.

I've seen some "polite rudeness" in the last few days. It comes from a very particular social set. In my social caste asking to cut lines is nearly as unthinkable as just doing it. I've sat on planes with people terrified of missing a connection who refused to ask for a little consideration in getting off the plane early. But in the last few days: "Excuse me, may I go ahead? I have this bag of oranges, you see."

The man he was asking had an entire cart... but he was raised very much as I was and had a hard time saying 'No.' Work a couple of years in a jail and you get over that quick.

Thinking about it, I don't think the person was being rude, just as I don't think the Iraqi was or was not being manly. He was following the rules as he saw them.

In the other gentleman's world, maybe politeness is in the form. Asking nicely enough, even if you were asking something far more terrible than just cutting line, doesn't involve any violation of social rules. Ripe territory for villains, if they can do evil with Captain Hooks 'good form'.

Worth It?

Teo asked to play this morning, to work on anything. Dealer's choice.

So I said, "How would you take me out?" From that position, that range, relative body configurations... Teo is an intelligent young man (not really young, anymore. He is a father now and all grown up but in my mind he will always be the kid from ten years ago that we tried to tease into asking a waitress out). He moved to take a better position, guarded against a counter-attack that wasn't coming and used a technique that might, might have rattled me.

I know one of his instructors and I know damn well that Teo knows how to finish a human. We talked.

"But in sparring, no one ever just lets stuff come in and if I did really get aggressive, he'd just get aggressive back."

He put a finger on one of my deep problems with sparring and I want to think it out here. First and foremost, I've always loved sparring (of almost any type, not so much into pitty-pat) but it has been bothering me for awhile.

What has been bothering me is the sheer artificiality of it. On one level, MMA sparring is "as close as you can get to real" and "the only way to pressure test techniques." I see where those arguments are coming from but still...

If anyone squares off, if any threat gives me any indication that something is coming, I can walk away. Or talk it down. Or, if that's not going to work, access a force option that turns the whole situation into something that doesn't resemble a fight in any way.

The serious bad guys don't fight. They take you out. They stack everything in their favor: surprise, position, number and weapons (depending on the goal) and finish it. The last thing they want is a fight. Serious bad guys don't fight, they take you out.

And so do successful good guys.

In order for sparring as a fight simulation to even happen, you have to behave stupidly. You choose not to leave or talk or gather resources. Then you have to allow it to become a very particular and tactically silly kind of fight, where you stick to the same options and parameters the threat has chosen. It's a stupid way. One of the basic tactical rules that not only every tactical operator but even every serious sport competitor knows is: Don't play the other guy's game. Sparring specializes there.

And there are good reasons for it. If you want to test and measure and improve the same skills as the threat, it's one of the best, fastest ways to get better... but where does getting really, really good at the tactics of a bad strategy fit?

Bad guys take you out. From surprise. First hit. With a size and strength advantage or, if they can't manage that and really, really need what you've got, with weapons and numbers. They deliberately choose people who won't or can't fight. There's no value to complicated strategy or feinting.

This is an internal discussion. Not a conclusion. I love sparring, but I do it for what it is, know what it is and I'm very, very clear on what it is NOT. Those aren't the skills I'll need if an old acquaintance from the jail decides to even a score or enhance a rep. Those skills are different, qualitatively different.

And don't go tribal on me, either. Saying sparring is artificial is NOT saying that kata is better or realer or some variant. All the training methods are what they are and no more.

Live training is vital, but training stupid tactics live is not just ingraining stupid tactics. People mistake intensity for truth. The more contact and speed, the more real it feels, the more it feels like truth. Not only does it ingrain stupid, it ingrains it hard.

We need live, hard, contact training. But smart. Working from real distance, from positions of disadvantage, outmatched in size and strength. We need to find a safe but live way to practice taking a threat out instead of fighting. We do practice those skills and I know a lot of you do as well. But every so often a good martial artist or even a good fighter is given a problem of force, survival and decisiveness and instinctively tries to turn it into a contest.

It makes me wonder if the training method does more harm than good. Still pondering.

Long Four Days

This has been fantastic and like many wonderful things that means I'm slightly battered and exhausted. In twelve hours or so, I'll leave London, Ontario for Montreal. Right now there is a large gray cat on my bed and my host's dog just hanging out by the desk.

The host- Chris and Michelle have been fantastic. Very easy to settle down with, great conversation and food and lots of laughing.

The classes. Three separate classes.

The Logic of Violence went through all the material in nine hours. That was faster and more thorough than the original run in Seattle, but I was more directive. Instead of letting the students work out almost everything themselves, I provided a lot more direction. It got to the same place (further, actually, and in less time) but I always fear that anything handed out doesn't resonate as well as something discovered.

The 2-day Ambushes and Thugs covered more material more thoroughly than ever before, but we made a consensus decision that there wouldn't be time for scenarios. A little sad, but there just wasn't time to run the numbers through, not safely and properly, anyway. Day one was in a dojo setting at the Family Karate Center in London, Ontario. That was a good time covering what I consider the basics with a good group. One of the few times people under eighteen have been allowed and none of them seemed terribly traumatized. Some of the parents looked a little perturbed, though.

The second day was held at Chris' shop. Damn. Rolling on concrete, mass brawls and practice fights with claw hammers and compressed air hoses.

The last day was Conflict Communications...and thus ended my weekend.

Sort of. I crashed trying to write this and when I came up for air, I was in Montreal. I'd fully intended to get to the airport early and do a little work, but coming in two hours early with a Canada Air strike in progress was barely time to make the plane. I'm just warning. Ignore that last paragraph.

There were two personal highlights- one was the long talk with Chris on the drive to the airport. He's a thoroughly good man and gives great advice. And he moves, fights and thinks very, very well.

The second was meeting Steve Pascoe. Years ago, just figuring out this internet thing, I ran across a BBS called Cyberkwoon. It's now defunct, but the archives are still up. Steve was one of the cool people that I hadn't met in person. Now I have, and he can hang with the fun crowd on many levels-- sarcastic, funny, intelligent and brutally skilled.

"Tried by Twelve..."

There is a saying you will hear in the self-defense community: "I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six." If the reference isn't obvious, it means I would rather stand trial, and risk going to prison, than die.

And that's perfectly cool. Given a choice between those two options, prison beats crematorium any day. In my opinion. You can make your own choices.

But almost every time I hear it, it's a platitude. It is not said to clarify a truth. No one ever slaps their head and says, "Shit, I was wrong all along. I always thought dying was better! Thank you Mr. Wise One."

The first time I watched a self-defense class was in 1981. I saw a big, burly guy teaching women that if someone grabbed them in a front hug they could beat on the chest of the bigger, stronger man until he would magically loosen his grip and then they could hammer fist him in the nose and they would be safe. Then I saw the instructor teach that if someone grabbed a woman's wrist she should just chop his throat.

Even as a seventeen-year-old with just a couple of months in judo and some weird hybrid striking art, I knew something was wrong: Low levels of force (that wouldn't work) when high levels were needed? And potentially deadly force to a stimulus that might just be a child reaching for your hand? Ineffective AND inappropriate offended me on two levels.

When someone says "I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six" and they are sincere, it's simply unnecessary. But in almost every instance that I hear it, it is an excuse. The instructor has some idea of how to hurt a person and absolutely no idea of force law. So they say this to convince the people listening that force law is not nearly as important as what they can teach.

In logic or debate, this would be called a 'false sort.' It only has any validity if those are the only two options and they are mutually exclusive. "I'd rather hit myself in the head with a hammer than stab myself in the leg with a screwdriver." Simple fact is, you can do both of those things or neither. Dying might take going to prison off the table, but going to prison certainly doesn't take dying off the table.

The essence of self-defense law isn't that complicated. If your life is on the line, it doesn't hamper you at all. If you want to Monkey Dance or teach somebody a lesson, that's a different story... but you already know those aren't self-defense. Plus, most of self-defense law makes sense. It's not some esoteric weirdness.

If someone refuses to teach it, it is because they don't know it. If they offer the excuse that they are afraid worrying about the law will freeze you I would question, well everything. Their knowledge, first. Their common sense. Their commitment to your survival over their ego...

There are lots of reasons people freeze. In my experience, scary ignorance is far more freezing than informed fear. "I'm going to get sued but I know the ropes" is far less freezing than, "OMG, am I going to get sued? What will that be like? What should I do?"

One of the keys, though, and even good, knowledgeable instructors might miss this, is that knowing force law isn't enough. The students have to practice articulating decisions. Even most cops could use more practice at that.

Fighters All the Way Down...

It's a reference to 'turtles all the way down'.

The first Logic of Violence seminar went well, I think. The feedback has been positive. Turns out ten hours is too short, but that can be tweaked with, to an extent.

Fighting systems come about because when someone is good at fighting, it behooves the other members of his tribe (whether that is a family or a cohort) to imitate and learn. So, in an ideal world, experienced fighters taught other fighters to fights. Whoever the founder was, whether of a classical sword system or a modern low-light handgunning system, he was good at what he did and started teaching other people. Other fighters. Soldiers, cops and civilians can all learn from each other, but their needs aren't the same. So it's not just that fighters tended to teach other fighters but that they taught the same tribe or kind. Soldiers teach soldiers. Cops teach cops. There's some cross-over, but when a civilian learns from a tactical operator, sometimes they feel like they are finally getting the real stuff.

Kasey did a post a while ago about how nonsensical it was to teach or learn building-clearing as a civilian. It is real stuff, and specialized, and something an entry team needs...but not a skill a civilian will have either the resources to perform properly or any legal reason to do.

So when you look at the history of an art, it's a line of fighter/instructors all the way back to the mists of time. (Okay, in the modern era, fighters or wannabes, but you get the idea.)

Anyone see anything missing here? At least in the self-defense context?

Martial and combative training has changed vastly over the last hundred years. It's been slow because the traditions run so deep, IMO, but there has been change. Modern teaching methodology introduced by Kano rocked the world. Sports physiology. The advent of MMA gave some people a good hard shock that what they thought they were doing was not what they were doing. There is more information available and more cross-over from different areas than ever before (I'm still absorbing the applicable combat lessons from a damn book on acting).

Logic of Violence just takes another, very obvious discipline and uses it to look at most self-defense training.

Here's the basics of the class. It might take ConCom or a quick read of "Facing Violence" to make sure we are using the same language, but if you have a little experience with criminals, you can keep up.

• We go over the different types of violence. Heavy emphasis on motivation, since trying to prove you're tough (monkey dancing) has nothing in common with feeding a drug habit (resource predator.)
• A little on the triune brain theory, because it comes up in social violence habits and certain predator's tactics.
• Quick examination of violence-prone places.

Then, for each type of violence, from the predator's point of view:

• Goals: specifically what the predator wants
• Parameters: what the predator doesn't want: To get caught, to get hurt...
• Victim profile. What will we look for to get what we want?
• Where to look: what will be the hunting ground?
• Behaviors: Given the above, what will we look for that says a victim is ripe?
• Access: How will we get close enough to accomplish our goals with the privacy to act?
• Control: What will we do, specifically, to get what we want?
• Attack: If it needs to go physical, keeping in mind the victim profile and that every aspect of the set-up is under your control, how will you attack?

Then we went out and banged the attack patterns the crew came up with. There was some back sliding into martial thinking, some squaring off.

"I was trying to take out a big guy from the front?"

"Why? Get this straight, 120 pound meth-heads need drugs too. This isn't about if you can take him out but about how. You choose when, you choose where. Need a weapon? That's up to you too."

In the process, it becomes clear why assaults are so rare (there have to be hundreds of incidents of car burglary or 'aggressive panhandling' for every committed assault) but also why they are so effective.

Once we've run the list and banged from the threat's point of view, we keep the list on the board and run through it from the potential victim's perspective. What needs to happen to bypass the situation at each level or step?

Prevention is good. Understanding the time line is powerful, but experienced self-defense teachers were at a loss on the attacks. Fighters teaching fighters how to deal with fighters is one thing. Fighters all the way down. But fighters (most self-defense and martial instructors are fighters on some level) teaching victims (the whole victim profile: young, drunk, insecure woman? Or out-of-town businessman, drunk and out of shape trying to unlock his rental car? Or...) how to deal with predators (people who use distraction and ambush and overwhelming force to not just injure but to overwhelm the OOODA loop)... that's a challenge.

Yet, it's obvious. For all of violence being the soul of chaos, there is a logic to it. And applying the tools of disaster planning makes sense. Fighters (soldiers, cops, bouncers) get into fights. The types of violence a fighter will be exposed to are limited and predictable.

Victims get victimized, and that can be a wider range of behavior. High consequences. Fighters teaching self-defence could stand to take a look at it from the yes of both a victim and a predator.

Before I Forget...

Details. This is for posterity.

First some background on the Plastic Mind Drills. If you want a more detailed description, check out the "Drills" manual available on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle (link is over on the right).

Mind controls the body. It actually works both ways, the body influences the mind as well, but changes in thought change a lot of things, some deeply. The Plastic Mind exercises are a progression that show, first, how emotion, even artificial emotion completely changes the way that you fight. Second, that iconic images (think the Animal Styles of Kung-fu) change movement in an integrated way and that almost all of the integrated ways are effective, yet different.

In the third step in the progression, the students create in a matter of minutes four complete, integrated martial arts. The arts are each unique, coherent (you can tell the difference at a glance, usually) and in many cases, the student fights better in this mode after thirty seconds of thought than they do in their primary martial art even with years of training. Get this, it's not some miracle or magic bullet, it is merely a way to show that thought can influence motion and that integrated thought (everything connected and arising from a single concept) makes for efficient motion.

Because it works on some pretty primitive brain levels, I've always known that there was a possibility for a student to get into it pretty deeply, potentially to match the trance-states of some of the animistic practices. Last weekend, it happened.

Subject: male, mid thirties, former kumite competitor for the national karate team.

What I observed: He was doing the drill with a slightly stronger but less-skilled opponent. I noticed the subject was breathing oddly, exhaling with a sharp rhythm. He was not looking at his opponent. Subject was on his knees, knees wide and feet together with his opponent face up. Subject had one hand on the opponent's upper chest, the other on his abdomen at about bladder level. Subjects back was extremely arched, like a seal.

Despite the apparent weakness of that position, his (slightly stronger) opponent was unable to move and starting to panic (white showing around the eyes, struggling ineffectually, unable to remember or follow the steps of the drill.) I ordered them to freeze. No response from subject. Repeated order. No response. No response until I shook him hard. He appeared dazed and uncertain of what happened. He had been fighting as the alchemical element 'fire' and had no memory of the incident other than a need "To spread wide and get higher." He had tears on his cheek during the debriefing.

Things to note:

• No response to verbals; physical contact required
• No memory of events
• Extremely effective results from what appeared to be an extremely weak position

And two other things:

1. It affected the subject pretty profoundly and he kept trying to tie everything else covered that weekend and other extraneous events to that one aspect of the one drill.
2. I had to really fight a very strong urge to make a joke or belittle what happened. I wanted to give him a nickname. I wanted to say how ridiculous he looked while he was completely dominating his opponent. It seemed to trigger some kind of deep defense mechanism in me. If I ridicule, it might not happen again, perhaps?

No conclusions here. I'm just not keeping a private log right now and I wanted the observations recorded while they were still fresh.

FWIW, I've considered two more levels to this drill, Masks and Personas, but I'm not sure who is ready. Definitely not for public consumption yet.

Children of Blood and Brain

I've got at least four things I need to write about, but first...

Athens and Bruno and his crew have been a blast. Good people and good fighters, mostly from an MMA background-- and these guys love to wrestle. Enough of them working high-risk professions that we have a common language even though we didn't, for the most part, have a common language.

But it has been four hard days-- if I wasn't training I was hiking around Athens or being stuffed with fantastic food. Asleep late, up early. It has been great, but it will be good to wing it on home. Really missing my K.

The ideas I need to write about (placed here for reference so I don't forget later):

1) One of the students went into full trance in the Plastic Mind exercise. Some interesting observations and ties in well with some mystical practices.

2) "I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six" and specifically why it is a nonsensical platitude.

3) Turning into a fortune cookie.

4) "Is there a curriculum for this?"

Okay, now to the thought about children of blood and brain.

If you don't have children, you at least have been a child. Almost all biology and all of mammalian history has been about children. Your children are more like you than a stranger's child. In any given population, some traits work better than others. Those with the good traits have more children and slowly, ever so slowly, the species drifts to look more like the successful ones.

(Nota bene: One of the things people screw up is trying to bring the teleological fallacy into this, assuming a plan or assigning personal values to a natural process. Sure, being smart and strong and fast are good things, from our point of view. But if you are smart and strong and fast and opt to have only two children and your neighbor is a vile, lazy slug but has fathered fourteen illegitimate children, nature is valuing what he has, not what you have, not what you might think nature should value. And this process never stops.)

So we have children of our blood and we are children of someone else's blood.

But we also have ideas and we teach. The ideas are children of our brain, or rather a form of what the old naturalists called the 'germ' (like sperm and ova or pollen or seed). Spreading the germ transforms all of your students and many of your friends into your children. Progeny, rather.

There are a lot of parallels between ideas and genes, or children and students. Some ideas die out, others thrive. Some spawn a huge number of variations and create a complex web, others are monolithic and simple. The ideas that survive aren't necessarily the best by our human standards (of course we all believe that our ideas are the best or we would change them. Really sure we would. Sigh). And ideas, and those who hold them, will battle for survival.

A powerful idea can create millions of children, for good or bad. Shakespeare's words have spawned immense creativity. Or go back sixty years to find a demagogue who started a war and slaughtered millions.

I see another pattern here, and I see it in teaching and parenting both. Some people raise their children to be good children. To know their place as children: "You'll always be my baby." It makes them manageable and a comfort, and sometimes it seems a very healthy, safe and pleasant way to grow up. But teaching a child to be a good child is very different than teaching them to be a good adult. "You won't be a little kid forever. You need to learn how to handle this."

Teaching the way I do makes sense to me. In the last two days I've been called LSD ("That Elements drill changed our minds, for Kostas it was just like beer but for Thanasis and me it was like LSD.") Lucifer ("Not in the bad way, like the devil. He also brought the light.") And a contagion (I'm pretty sure that was a mistranslation and he meant "affected," not "infected" but it was funny anyway.) I think it is hitting some people hard because in this context they are used to being taught like children-- doing what they're told, cautioned not to break anything...and careful not to get their feet wet.

A Good Question

It's almost 1 AM here. For some reason, the TV turned itself on at midnight. I'm feeling entirely too refreshed for four hours of sleep after 30+ awake. If you have no sleep cycle and regularly go for long periods without sleep, take a nap, and do it again...there is no real difference between jet lag and the normal state of exhaustion.

The signing went well. Just under forty people, including a few who drifted by, heard parts of the talk and stayed until the end. Then good talks and food at the nearby McMenamin's pub with a few friends.

One of the attendants asked a good question. It's one of those questions that has real depth into some of the underlying issues. The hypothetical: You're traveling out of country, taking pictures. You find yourself triangulated by three people who want your camera and money. What do you do? How do you prepare?

The rote answer is that you give it to them. Which is fine, I don't have a problem with that answer... but it's important that you understand why that is the reflex answer for most instructors, NOT what most people actually do, and the dynamics that underlie the answers that exist, the options that are seen, and the answer that is chosen.

I see six potential responses: To acquiesce, to run, to bargain, to struggle, to fight or to destroy.

1) Acquiesce is what most instructors would advocate, and in many situations it would be the safest thing. In much of the world, violent crimes are investigated more thoroughly than non-violent crimes. Killing tourists drives away tourists. Because the set-up described has all the ear marks of resource predation, it is probably safe to give up the goods... but every situation is different, every place is different.

There is an ego cost to acquiescing as well, and that ego cost drives many of the other options. Being mugged is just resources, on one level, but there is a dominance aspect. Many people, especially young men will feel like they should fight or they aren't men at all.

2) Running- If you're quick, not over-burdened, not cut off (and sometimes even if you are) and there is a safe place nearby (lights and people, generally) a sudden sprint can be a good option. The key is that sudden part. The bad guys expect a little hesitation as you decide if there is enough risk to keep you submissive. They might even expect backing away (and so it is likely, if they are experienced that there will be one behind you)... but taking off like a jack-rabbit with no hesitation usually buys a second of surprise. You might even be able to go through the people cutting you off. Few people do this, but it is on the table.

3) Bargaining is not about stuff. It is about ego. "Okay, I can't fight all three of you, so let me just give the camera and my cash. I need my passport..." This is one of the methods used so that it feels like you have some power in the situation. The power is actually an illusion, but some will let you keep a token if the threats are feeling generous. Not because you had a chance if it came to a fight. There is a similar dynamic in some sex crimes where the victim draws a line, sometimes a non-sensical line (actual example, a woman terribly assaulted and abused but she refused to 'talk dirty') to maintain some dignity.

It can work, or, if you either are disrespectful or the threats are NOT feeling generous, they can throw in a beating to teach you a lesson.

4) Struggling. This happens, for some reason. A bad guy grabs a woman's purse or a tourist's camera and the victim holds on to it, refusing to give it up, but also refusing to do any damage to the attacker-- They death grip on the camera strap but don't bite or punch or kick. Maybe it's instinct. Maybe it works sometimes, it's possible it could draw enough attention to make the bad guy run (witnesses are bad.) But in most cases, it just forces the bad guy or guys to use violence. The snatch becomes a beating. I'm not sure (pretty confident, but not sure) that this is another ego thing, your limbic system trying to prevent you from the "I shoulda done sumthin" blues of merely acquiescing.

5) Fighting. This is the overly-confident alpha male approach and what every teenager fantasizing (and, I suspect, many martial arts and self-defense aficionados) think they will or should do. Make 'em pay. Give 'em a good fight. Stand up, be a man. Sometimes it even works. You hit one or two of them or you get lucky, or you don't go down easy and they may decide the price is too high and scurry away, which will nicely reinforce the tough guy image. It's rare, though. Most three-on-ones, they just beat you down. With weapons (this is cultural, a lot of places in a mugging, the weapon is implied, not shown. It may not be there.) there is almost no chance.

6) Destroy. This goes back to flipping the switch and qualitative differences. Very few people just run. That's what makes the tactic so effective. Even fewer can just explode into violence. Destroying is not the same as fighting. You explode while the threats are expecting you to think, vacillate or agree. You do fast, extreme violence. It is not fighting. You don't defend yourself in anyway, confidant that your attacks will give them no time to react.

It can work. If it is not a simple mugging over stuff but, say, a group taking a hostage for later filming of a beheading, it is one of the few things (along with running) that has any chance at all. At the minimum, with this level of aggression and mindset, you will force the threats to make a choice: they can run or they can kill you then and there. You allow nothing else to work.

It's an alien mindset and there are more people who believe they could do it if necessary than actually can. Many, probably, that will think this is just like #5, fighting, only harder and more serious. It is nothing like fighting. It is slaughtering. And if you go there, you will kill or cripple someone... For a camera.

This is why the question was hard to answer completely in a short session. It's also an example of why prescriptive answers set students up for failure. If I tell him, "Just give up the camera, you'll be okay" that might be the right answer, 70% of the time. But if he is sure it is the right answer, he quits looking for all the little clues that this one is different.

I (or any other instructor) won't be there if he needs to make the decision. We won't see what he sees. He need to show what to look for, not tell what to do.

The Busy Season Begins

The signing at Powell's in Beaverton tomorrow (my very first) is at 1900.  Hope to see some of you there.  We'll see if my voice still gets squeaky when I read in public.

Then hopping a plane to Athens (Greece, not Georgia) the next morning.

Back for a breather and then Seattle, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax.  You have no idea how much mowing and yard work this is getting me out of.

It's not up on the webpage yet (see the link off to the side) but Toronto has confirmed that they have a space for three separate classes, so Logic of Violence Friday June 10th; the two day Ambushes and Thugs seminar over the weekend of June 11-12; and Conflict Communications Monday the 13th.  That should be severe information overload for anyone who makes all three.  Montreal is working on the possibility of ConCom as well.

More Thoughts From Saturday

Two people playing and talking- large male, small female:

Woman: You're intimidating.  I feel like I can't do anything.

Man: Not true.  You're a much better martial artist than me.  You have more moves, you move better and you're crisper.

Woman: But if you decided to take me out, there's nothing I could do...

Man (dumps her quickly, double leg takedown): Decision stick.

So, first thought:  Gender, size and skill aside, making decisions will always overcome weighing options.  The decision stick is faster than the decision tree.  Moving beats thinking about moving.  Later, the woman described the man as "implacable" which ties in with something E and I were talking about last night.  Skill levels, strength, speed and size are all quantitative differences.  The more you have, the more the odds shift in you favor.

Making decisions is a qualitative difference from weighing options.  Moving and thinking are qualitative differences.  So are fighting and hunting (or social and asocial violence, if you're just catching up on the language.)  Skilled fighters and skilled killers are not at different levels of skill, they aren't even playing the same game.

That was the first thought, not really new, but this is something I keep trying to say in new ways because it seems that this thought brings up a lot of resistance and ego-defense.

The second thought is about gender, and this is something we will hit heavily in the "Logic of Violence" seminar.  There are a limited number of very specific types of violence.  Many of the most dangerous are predatory.  When the people in the class do their self analysis most fit male martial artists (who don't go clubbing, get drunk, go regularly to unfamiliar cultures or have old enemies) are not at risk for much.  What they are at risk for, especially if they do go to places of drunken revelry, is largely social: low stakes and easy to avoid.

The women, on the other hand, are at risk for more things, a wider variety of things and the types of violence with the highest stakes.  No one is going to pick a former bouncer and Muay Thai fighter with a shaved head out of the crowd and decide to lure him to a secluded place for an act of sexual violence and murder.  Victims are chosen for safety.

People forget that their world is not the world.  Men teaching self-defense, even with a lot of real-life experience, sometimes forget how limited their experience is.  If you have thrown a hundred people out of bars, 100% of your experience is with drunk young men challenging with a dominance display.  It is easy to come to believe that your 100% must at least relate to 90% of the world's experience. Surely...

Gender.  Women are attacked differently and for different reasons than men.  They are even intimidated differently.  The average women can be knocked flat with a single blow from a fairly athletic men.  Women know this.  Athletic men teaching self-defense tend, it seems, to forget.  When a guy gets knocked down, we don't like it, but it has happened before-- playing football or rough-housing as kids.

When a woman gets knocked down it is often new, a blatant expression of power she can't match and with an emotional element men rarely grasp.  You knock me down, I'm a guy.  This is now a contest.  The message is, "This is what I've got.  What have you got?"

You knock down a woman, it is a stark affirmation of something she knows: men are powerful.  The message received is not about a contest.  It is about worth and power and inconsequence.

Are the messages true?  Doesn't matter, because they are often received, true or not.  When you are teaching self-defense to women it is not merely a matter of overcoming a 5-to-1 power deficit and a 3-to-1 size deficit as Teja points out.  It also happens in a sometimes crippling psychological milieu.  You can't ignore that.

In sparring and drills, I watch big people ramp back on strength so that they play skill against skill with the other students.  It's very natural, but it's not true.  There is a piece missing.  That piece has to be brought out occasionally and looked at.

Cold Math: Epipheny

Yesterday in Everett was very good.  John had a great venue, the mix of skills and intensity was wonderful.  Several previous attendees and some new blood.  Sore muscles, rug burns... some of the best things in life.

With a few exceptions, I stayed away from the dark stuff.  Yesterday was about fun and movement and efficiency.  We played at mass brawls and (almost) everyone learned and extrapolated the lesson of the baby drill.  Score!  And I saw something I have been trying to put into words for a long time.

It is some pretty cold math.

People, generally, are very inefficient fighters.  Contestants regularly go two-minute rounds in any full-contact combat sport you care to name yet, hospitalizations are rare.  Deaths are very rare,  and these are skilled fighters in excellent condition.

On the other hand, people can be extremely efficient killers.  The longest stage in butchering an 800 pound steer or 200 pound hog is watching it bleed out.  There is no ritual when you butcher meat.  You don't take time to bow in, you don't get angry.  There is no fight.

People can apply this skill and mindset to other people.  Some can, anyway.  It becomes very efficient.  It doesn't have to be just killing, either. It's a tiny switch in mindset to simply knock down a threat and cuff him while he is still waiting for the fight.  We can do it.  We don't.  We are so conditioned-- biologically, socially and through training-- to fight, to struggle, to turn any face to face struggle with each other into a dominance game with rules we are not even aware of...

(The tempting tangent, here is to go into how completely unprepared skilled fighters are when they meet a casual killer, but that's not the point.)

The one-step drill has to be done slowly to be safe.  I want good power generation, good targeting.  Each moment or action should be a cold assessment of the most efficient option.  I want people to practice or at least think of skills closer to butchering than to fighting.  Each action should be intended to incapacitate the threat or put the threat in a position to incapacitate.  I want them going slowly enough that they can stay (safely) in the cold, killing mindset when all of their instincts are pushing them to fight, to contest.

It's hard to go slow, and always a few people ramp it up.  Usually no one gets hurt and I usually just tell them to slow down, remind them that the drill isn't a fight simulation, it's about learning to see and encourage them to slow down and see...

"...always a few people ramp it up.  Usually no one gets hurt..." That clicked, yesterday.  Finally, and I feel like an idiot for not figuring the words out sooner.

Here's the deal, and herein is the cold math:  If you are ramping it up, if you are putting energy into a system designed to hurt people and no one is getting hurt, the energy is being dissipated, wasted in some way.  In other words, if you are training to injure people (which is the essence of martial arts) and you practice with speed and power in sparring and no one gets hurt you are being inefficient.  There is no way to put ten times the energy (effort, power, speed) into the system (sparring) and get the same results (no injuries) unless you also drop the efficiency by a full factor.

It is completely subconscious, for most people.  I caught myself tensing up punching someone I didn't want to hurt a while ago.  A subconscious inefficiency I hadn't felt in years... and also the first time I'd fought within my own tribe in years.

This post will bring up all kinds of resistance.  We all do things that feel stronger that makes us less efficient, but we all deny it.  You only really have to look at the threat displays versus the pre-assault indicators to see it in others, though.  All the 'big, red, loud' pattern of a threat display makes for a vulnerable, exposed, weak and telegraphing fighter... but we are programmed to feel and sometimes see stupid rage as strength.

Thanks to the crew who showed up yesterday, I think I finally found the words.

Finally!

After three autovetter failures the fourth installment in the blog series is up on Smashwords. Kami did an outstanding job on the cover.

"Facing Violence" appears to be doing well, as near as you can tell from its Amazon ranking which has stayed under 10k for eleven days and counting.

Combative Poetry

Lots of things coming together that feel important.  Some from the book, some from talking to E, some old mysteries.

I think more and more that 'art' in combative or martial arts is probably the right word.  It is and must be a creative, spontaneous process.  The logical part of the brain, the one that tries to remember what you were taught or what you 'should' do is too slow.  But so is the creative part, if it is bounded.  If you come up with an idea but reject it because the idea isn't good enough, that is also too slow to work.  Probably slower than relying on memory and certainly closer to a freeze.

With my family I sometimes do extemporaneous rhyme.  Usually at the Fessic level (Princess Bride reference), just trying to think up every word that rhymes with one that catches my attention and maybe keep them in a sentence.  It's not a sonnet by any means, but it is poetry-without-thought.  Reciting poetry takes a hesitation, and you must have the right poetry memorized for the occasion. Spontaneously composing good poetry is hard... and it rarely is or sounds spontaneous.  It takes time.

You can get better at it, but the key is practicing spontaneity, not studying poetry.

Am I the only one that sees the correlation here with survival fighting?

Kids do poetry naturally.  Show them rhyme and alliteration and rhythm and they will have fun.  They will play with words and make up songs.  (When my daughter was five years old and very angry at the entire adult world she made up a lovely and disturbing ballad called, "I Ran Away From Home and Got Raised by Some Cougars." No adults survived the whole song.)  They don't start losing talent until someone tells them there is such a thing and that there are good and bad rhymes and that (and this is subtle but it is always there) they will be judged.  That's when kids quit making up their own songs.  That's when they tell themselves that they aren't fill-in-the-blank.  Talented.  Smart. Creative.

This ties in so hugely with the 'Permission' aspect of self-defense.

Some, a very few, don't care what other people think.  It's very hard to truly fall into that camp without being an ass. (Damn, I went judgmental.)  A slightly larger number realize that no one can judge us unless we let them.  You can tell me that you think something I did was incorrect, but if it worked your judgment doesn't mean a lot to me.

Training for spontaneity isn't hard.  And you will come up with things that are better than anything you were taught, since they will come from who you are.  And it can be faster than responding from any other complex part of your brain.

We go around and around about what can really be taught.  Appropriate and graded ruthlessness.  The instinct to attack when under attack.  Unfreezing.  The will to recover and fight when you are pretty much finished. Taking pain and even injury as a data point, ignoring the emotional element... and spontaneity.

Realistically, I know that most high-end operators are identified in selection, not forged in training.  Some of these abilities I have seen trained and most grow to some extent over time, but always by being in the company of a group who showed the traits.

But, in martial arts, there may be a problem with the student population.  Kids lose their creativity when they realize they will be judged.  It's a defense mechanism.  But it is one of many possible defense mechanisms.

Another is to memorize well and seek out a group where the standards are clear.  To work hard at conforming to what the teacher wants.  To be an obedient student.

I think that will work better at a recital than playing the dozens.

A contrast- where these kinds of thinking lead:

In "Meditations on Violence" I wrote: "... if you are scheduled to fight a world champion heavyweight boxer on Thursday, you shoot him on Tuesday."

As opposed to, "If I had a fight to the death next week I would practice my forms every day."

Yes and No People

I'm in the middle of reading a fascinating book.  Full review when I finish.

In one section, the author states that there are 'Yes' people and there are 'No" people, and that 'Yes' people are rewarded by the adventures they have and 'No' people are rewarded by the security they bring into their lives.

So much in that little statement.  He writes that there are many more 'No' people, and you see this soooo much: people who have always wanted to write a book but never got around to it, people who go to the same vacation spot every year, people who hate a job and stick with it.  It's natural, organisms tend toward homeostasis.  "The over-grazed pasture here is my ancestral homeland, we will not leave for those green hills..."

There are always a few who take challenges, a few 'Yes' people, and they drag civilization along behind them, otherwise our species would have died an embarrassing, boring, entropy death long ago.  And there are always 'No' people who specialize in trying to rein in and control the 'Yes' people.

Looking at my writing and things I sound, martially, like a 'No' person.  Everything is presented as a tool to come home safe, to keep my homeostasis.  But it is a big element of the 'Yes' part of my life as well.  I intend to go into unsafe places.  That's not "No' person behavior.   I need the tools to come home.

So here's the thing we maybe all need to think about with our martial arts training.

Why do we do it?

Do we do it so we can then take risks with better chances?

Or do we train so that we get that feeling, but then never actually take the risks.  Does MA help us (me, you) become a more effective 'Yes' person?  Or just give us a beard we can hide behind and pretend to be explorers while never actually taking the risks?

And that's just in application.  In training, do we give over our agency to someone with a title so we don't have to think for ourselves?  Avoid training with strangers or new ideas to maintain our level of comfort?  Accept that our instructor's superior years of training in some way requires us to act and think like dutiful children instead of men and women?

Or do we brawl and challenge and play?  Look for things so different that they will shift everything we thought we knew?  Try to find those edges of fear and exhaustion where the world changes?

In the end, is your training about being comfortable?  Or being incredible?