Multi-Dimension

I've written a basic intro to risk management before.  You can find it here:
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2008/12/elements-of-risk-management.html

The part I want to focus on is the levels of risk versus levels of frequency.
You can categorize things into High Risk and Low Risk.  For self-defense purposes, High Risk means you are likely to get hurt or killed, Low Risk means those things are unlikely.  You should put more training time into high risk events than low risk events.  You really don't need extensive training in how to protect yourself from a toddler attack.

The next paradigm is frequency.  This may be counterintuitive, but you don't need to train for high frequency things that much.  Reason being that you get a lot of practice.  Driving is almost surely the most dangerous thing you do on a regular basis, but very few people get continuos training (unless they go into special jobs or get told by a judge they need some remedial lessons).  If you actually do something four hours a day, there isn't a lot of gain in training it two hours a week.

The low frequency stuff is where you need good information, good training and a plan.  You should have a plan for how to get your family out of your house in a fire (HR/LF).  You probably don't need a plan or rehearsals on how to drive to the gas station (HR/HF).  Or a plan/rehearsals on how to deal with pet hair in the carpet (LR/HF) or how to deal with a gerbil overpopulation problem (LR/LF).

There are more dimensions, though.  Not sure how they affect risk management, but they are very powerful in how you must train and what you can analyze and learn.

One of the biggest is time compression.  The basics of how Toby and I teach survival are almost identical.  Train awareness, use your brain and body, instincts... the biggest difference is that Toby teaches wilderness survival where many of the dangers require hours or days to kill you.  I teach assault survival, in which the dangers are measured in seconds or fractions thereof.

This is one of the biggest, and I'm not sure I'm willing to write about time yet.  Not ready, because so much of it is hard to explain.  Working through the ConCom manual it is really apparent how much of the communication skills are really counter-assault skills... just brains instead of bodies.  And how much I would never have noticed except for the  combination of High Risk + Compressed Time.

Dealing with conflict as opposed to violence, it can be spread over a long time and much of the nuance can be hidden in the thousands of other acts of communication all around.  The patterns in ConCom are incredibly obvious once you see them, but it took the filter of fast violence to screen out the white noise.

The second dimension is intelligence.  Information.  And that further breaks down into low and high quantity, clarity, breadth and reliability.

If you know a lot about the problem, that is usually better than knowing little or nothing. Quantity.

But you may know a lot of facts about the big picture but not details. E.g. You might know the names and histories of the local gangs and their territories and business; but not be up to speed on the current members.  A problem that a lot of people who leave an active job and go into training run into.  Clarity.

You may know a lot about a piece of a big subject or a lot about a related subject and just miss this subject.  A degree in zoology with a concentration on marine mammals may have big blindspots dealing with reptiles.  Bouncers know what bouncers know, not what cops know...and vise versa.  Same with victims, perps and enforcement.  Breadth.

And reliability.  This one is endemic in the martial arts.  It is possible to know an awful lot of things that aren't true.  It is always hard to measure the reliability of your own beliefs.

A high risk, low frequency event where you have years to plan and prepare is different, both in training and response from one where you have seconds.  Obviously.  And it changes even more when you are well-informed, clueless or deluded.

More to think about here.

Structure, Space and Orientation

Good playtime with KJ yesterday.  He wanted to work infighting defense against elbows, specifically elbow flurries. Ergo, we both had bloody lips and big smiles before we broke for lunch.

Infighting is not like fighting at striking range.  As I use it, it is also different than the other player's concept of infighting.  It's not the range where you can comfortably hit with your elbows.  Infighting, for me, is the range at which our torso's are in contact range.  Maybe a fistwidth between, at times.

And that has huge implications for how you fight and think-- and this is hard for me to write.  Because the range is so close, the speed is high, far too fast even in play to think.  I don't infight mentally with words or pictures, it is almost all by touch, which makes it very hard to write about.

KJ has a lot of skills, but his default is a striker.  And so he envisions incoming attacks as things that must be intercepted before they reach him.  That is how you fight in space.  But at infighting range, that's not necessarily true.  None of those attacks are separate from the body and brain controlling them.  The attacks are physically linked.  And it's not like an octopus, either.  It is bone.  Hand bone to forearm bones to humerus to shoulder girdle to spine (and rib cage) to pelvic girdle to femur to lower leg bones to feet.  All bone, all connected.  And every one of those bones is a lever arm.  And if you displace any of the core bones (spine, rib cage, shoulder girdle--rarely pelvis) you affect what all of the other satellite bones can do.

So if that elbow comes in, I don't have to intercept it.  If I can modify the position of the ribs, the spine or the humerus, I don't have to worry about it...and if I am already in contact with any of those parts, a light push in the right direction will not only be easier, it will be much faster, require less strength/speed and be infinitely more sure than trying to intercept an attack in space.

You have to understand structure and part of this is counterintuitive.  Generally, I want to apply my strong structure to the threat's weak structure.  But infighting, if I apply structure and some power to the threat's strong structure with the right leverage and at the right angle I control his whole body.  If I apply the exact same motion against his weak structure, he simply twists or folds.

We have a couple of games to start developing this skill-- puppetmastering and elbow chi sao.  Structure and leverage are intertwined and damnably important to both offense and defense at this range.

At this range, you and the threat are both working structure, trying to smother or drag potential attacks.  One of the key offensive skills is the ability to find or create pockets of space in which you can strike.  There are some systems of power generation that require zero space, but I'm not that good at them.  Most of mine require about three inches (the one-inch punch requires about three inches too).

Aside-- don't want to get in a long debate.  I can put my top knuckle in contact with the threat (zero space) and hit hard, but the hit comes from the bottom knuckles-- which move about three inches. Zero space hitting means (to me) no visible movement, basically accomplished with skeleton bounce.--Aside ends.

So creating the pockets is critical and, again, has to be something you develop an intuitive feeling for.  Not so much for when you create or find space.  That comes easily.  But defensively, you have to be able to sense when the threat has opened a dangerous space, because something very bad is going to move through there very quickly and into your hurty parts.

And this goes back to manipulating structure.  You can make the space go away. You can try to fill the space (block).  But frequently you can merely tug or push on the shoulder (or neck or whatever you happen to be touching) and change the threat's orientation.  He still has that pocket of space, but it is no longer aimed at you.

You have an orientation.  You are facing a certain way.  So is the threat.  The positional battle in infighting (or any good fighting) is to get to the dead zone, the point where all of your weapons are on line and all of the threats are pointing the wrong way.  Attack from behind or the rear flank, in other words.  But for infighting this isn't just a matter of your motion, but what you can do to the threat's orientation, via his structure.

Probably too technical, but Mick has challenged me to try to put infighting into words.  Working on it.

Writing Advice

My lovely and talented wife is working on a non-fiction book.  It is about becoming a writer.  Not another how-to book, more like pathnotes.  Anyway, she asked me to expand and write down something we were talking about:

The difference between editing a book and herding cats is that cats are way less insecure and neurotic than writers.

Maybe my experience won’t fly here—I’m not a fiction guy.  The books I’ve published and edited are non-fiction.  Intense subject matter, violence and criminals and things, but not stories.  Which means that a lot of the people who write this stuff are subject matter experts first and writers second. Sometimes a distant second.

I noticed a few things editing.

These subject matter experts, the best of the best, would shyly and hesitantly ask if maybe, just maybe, they might have an idea that might make a story that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t hate.  As if I was doing them a favor.  These hard-assed violence professionals turned into shy teenagers asking for a date.

There is a lot of insecurity about writing.  It’s something that you have not just done since grade school, it is something that has always been judged.  Always evaluated.  If you weren’t the one who got the gold star you felt bad and told yourself you weren’t a good writer.  If you did get the gold star, you worried you wouldn’t be that good again.  If your parents told you that you might be a writer someday it seemed like such a huge impossibility…

So they would send me the manuscript, and in every single case, the manuscript was good.  Just because you are insecure and just because you have been judged doesn’t mean you can’t write.  For the most part, most of us have been writing since we were six years old.  Odds are you’re actually pretty good at it.  Writing is just like talking, once you get the insecurities out of the way.

So I got a good manuscript and I would send a little note saying, “Great! Thank you!”  And many of the authors would send me a note saying, “Oh, wait.  That wasn’t the real article.  That was just a rough draft.  Here’s the real article.”

Out of insecurity, in some weird and misguided act of ego-defense, most had sent a draft, not the finished manuscript.  You see, that way, if I rejected it, I wasn’t rejecting their best work.  I wasn’t rejecting them.

And here’s the part that writers need to hear: In every single case the amended article they sent me was worse than the original.  In the draft, they were experts just communicating something they felt passionate about.  It was brilliant and raw.  In the second drafts, they were trying to be writers and it sucked the soul out of each and every piece.

Assuming you have basic writing skill, if you feel passionate about something you will write something raw and powerful.  It will be good.  If you feel nothing about a subject but have basic writing skill (and intelligence), you will write something very clear.  It will be good.

Both are good.  Both are different types of good.

If you try to edit the passionate to make it more clear, you will ruin it. If you try to edit the clarity to make it more passionate, you will ruin it.

Run with the type of good that you have.

Confidence Levels

No experienced instructor is right.
No inexperienced instructor can know when they are wrong.

As instructors, we are sure about many things.  My experience is that as the experience increases, the sense of being sure diminishes.  With only training and without experience, we learn all this stuff and we learn a framework of logic or maybe superstition that ties the stuff together into a structure.  And a structure that massive can't fall.  So we think.

So generally, as knowledge without experience increases, "sureness" also increases.  and a little taste of experience proves one thing right away-- massive structures do fall and the more massive they are the more weight they have to crush you.

Knowledge can come from training, but there are certain forms of understanding that can only come from experience.  But then you have to look at the experience with a certain kind of knowledge to put it in perspective.  That's as far as I've gone in something that may be an infinite spiral.  I don't know where the analysis/learning/understanding process ends, or if it does.  So take nothing I say as a truth.  It works for me, at my level.  That is all.

Case in point, with confidence levels.  All fighters are inherently conservative.  Not in the political sense but in the sense that if you have bet your life on something and it worked, you won't change it without a damn good reason.  Generally, you won't change it until it fails.

So we trust the stuff that has worked.  The words are fuzzy here but the confidence level is high, yet the 'sureness' level is as close to zero as we can keep it.  Trust your 'A' techniques... but count on nothing.  Being sure sometimes makes you blind to the momentum of failure and you keep on a plan that is going south.  Confidence gives initiative, sureness kills adaptability.

But there are two (at least) problems with this.  And this is what I mean by using knowledge to analyze experience.  Training in experimental design and statistical analysis and scientific method changes perspective.

Problem number one-- Small sample size.
No one has a lot of experience in a wide variety of violence.  Not when you count up hours and techniques.  Especially on the counter-ambush side.  300 HIRs in the jail (I quit counting at three hundred and stayed at the job for another ten years) is probably less than five hours of experience. One of the few officers I know with multiple gunfights can measure his experience in seconds.  Maybe a minute.  Maybe.

So as much experience as you have, it really isn't much.
I trust throat spears.  I have used it for real exactly once.  A sample of one means absolutely nothing scientifically or statistically.

The most reliable handstrike I know I've used maybe three times, had used on me once and seen used another handful of times.  Less than a dozen incidents in all.  That's not a big sample either.  100% fight stopper... but in a small sample.

Aside-- And this is where mere training leaves holes.  Take a broken nose.  Trained people trust them, experienced people don't.  I've never once seen it stop a real fight, and I've never seen it fail to stop a friendly sparring match.

Problem one, sample size.

Problem two, adrenaline effects.  Anything you do under an adrenaline dump feels more real than stuff you do in your normal life.  The reason I trust the throat chop?  Because I thought I was going to die and the threat outweighed me by more than 120 pounds and in an instant he was on his knees trying to scream and making no sound.  That sticks with you.

Something that feels real does not make it more real.  That's the knowledge talking.  The old part of my brain says differently.  And that is without getting into the perception and memory distortions that come with high adrenaline.

And one more that's a human thing, not necessarily an experience thing: Inappropriate extrapolation.

Things are what they are and can only be extrapolated so far.  Military operations are not cop operations are not civilian self-defense.  A bouncer throwing a drunk college kid out of a bar is not dealing with the same problem as a small drunk female targeted by the same drunk college kid.
Ring experience doesn't make you SWAT any more than being SWAT makes you an MMA contender.

Knowing and Believing

I separate knowledge and belief.

There are things you don't know.
There are things you can't know.
There is a vanishingly small number of things that any person truly knows.
And there are a large number of things that we 'know' with varying levels of confidence.

Most of the universe is composed of things I don't know.  I don't know what you had for breakfast.  Don't know if there are habitable planets other than earth.  There are huge fields of specialist knowledge that are mysteries to me: computers, for instance.  And even in places where I have formal training, like experimental design or biology or emergency medicine, there are still huge swathes of specialist information that is beyond me.

And there are thing I can't know.  Would I survive an EOTWAWKI scenario?  What will the future hold?  What evil lurks in the heart of William Horace Smedly III, of Smesgboygan Illinois?

Some of the things can't be known because there are too many variables and some can't be known because the basic premises are also unknown (is there a William H. Smedley in a town I just made up?) And some of the things are unknowable, such as the non-disporovable hypotheses.

The things I truly know are very few, specific and limited.  They are the things I consider fact.  Diamond scratches talc.  For all people and in all times and under all circumstances (so far, but I think any circumstances that would change the mohs scale would also change the substances).  Put one rock in an empty jar and another rock in the same jar, you will have two rocks.  1+1=2.  But I don't count on it with rabbits over time.

The things I know with confidence are the things I have tested or have experience in. Leverage even works on PCP freaks, pain compliance does not.  Strikes and pressure points are unreliable.  Days get longer starting in late December.

But I'm not attached to these.  I'm aware that there is sampling error (OC-pepperspray- is notoriously unreliable in my experience. Never stopped a fight and four times the threat didn't even shut his eyes.  But they didn't call me when stuff worked.)  I am aware that there are outliers.  I've angulated an elbow so that it was about eight inches off the line of true with no effect whatsoever.  The most reliable thing seems to be that the longer you stay in certain environments the weirder the stuff that you see...

Belief is different.  Belief is when you invest in something you don't know or can't know.  Even when you get attached to things that you know with confidence.  (If my best technique fails and I believe it can't fail so I freeze...) The important part is that belief, no matter how strong it is, doesn't convert things to knowledge, much less to 'truth.'

What is being invested?  Ego.  Identity.  When beliefs become tribal markers.  The process and even identifying when you are doing this to yourself is laid out in the ConCom material.

Believing 100%, completely without doubt, doesn't mean you are right.  It isn't even an indicator of likelihood of accuracy.  But people will argue, burn friendships, even fight and kill over who is wrong and who is right.  If you feel sure, if you are very, very sure, that indicates one thing with absolute reliability: the thing you feel sure about is NOT on the list of things you know.

Did anyone have an emotional reaction to 1+2=2?  Even if I say something more complicated, like 7x 8= 42, the emotional reaction doesn't come from the facts. Some of you will feel a little smug at catching the error and I will feel a little embarrassed about making a math error in public and those of you that just skimmed will go back and find the math error and feel a little guilty...

Emotions over how people respond.  No emotion over the math itself.  Or over the mohs scale.  Because there is no emotion associated with knowledge.  But there is powerful emotion associated with belief. And nearly every human seems driven to equate belief with knowledge.

That's the basics.  Two minor points. Unrelated but interesting.
1) In the stuff I know with confidence, having an underlying theory and different corroborations makes it stronger and invests some ego in it.  Days get longer after the Winter Solstice.  Having read and been taught about planetary motion fits it into a cosmology and if that day lengthening were to stop, it would rock my world far more than if a threat resisted a throw applied with perfect physics.

2) Almost every one of the unknowables acts as a very effective Rorschach test.  Your stance on any of the big issues, and how you present your stance tells me almost nothing about the subject.  But it tells me an awful lot about you.

DV

I don't write about domestic violence, because I don't feel I know enough about it.  I know, I know, that doesn't seem to stop most 'experts' in any field... but, flippancy aside, understanding violence is important.  Misinformed people get hurt.  Passing bad information, even if it makes you feel good, victimizes the people who listen.  (My beef with current bullying programs is that by refusing to acknowledge what works and trying to come up with a palatable solution, the programs not only create victims but an environment designed to enable bullying.)

And an aside.  Criminals are exceptionally manipulative.  One of the things that every Corrections Officer must learn is how to determine the real intent of even a simple conversation.  "What does this guy want?"  When  someone is trying to make you afraid, e.g. "Bullying is rampant and the scars will affect you for the rest of your life." And simultaneously says, "You must not respond physically." You have to ask yourself, why does this person want me to be both afraid and passive?  What does this person gain by trying to make me more of a victim?

That's an aside.  DV has come up a couple of times lately, asking where it fits into the Social/Asocial model.

The answer is "many places."

A taxonomy is a classification or naming system.  The same things, like plants, might have many different taxonomies.  The Linnaeus' taxonomy, what most people think of as the latin names, was originally based on details of morphology though much of it has been confirmed by DNA research.

But that's not the only taxonomy for plants.  You can also divide them by ornamental or edible and the ornamentals can be subdivided by tree/shrub or low growing; low growing by annual or perennial; late or early bloomers; and then by color.  This taxonomy may be more useful for someone designing a yard than Linnaeus'.  And an herbalist will have a different division of plants- calmative, purgative...etc.

By my model, DV isn't just one thing.  Like many crimes, you can get to the same actual crime from different motivations.

So, scenario one:

Husband was raised that a wife is the same as a child and beating is an appropriate way to punish. He will indulge in wife beating and they will follow the pattern of a social EBD.  (An extra dimension with this is culture and time.  There are many places and eras where this was a common world view and it wasn't considered abuse.)

Scenario two:

Husband is extremely insecure and acts out when he feels his status is questioned.  Very common primate behavior.  Combines elements of MD with EBD.  If feeling threatened with an audience present will likely escalate.

Scenario #3:

Social going toxic.  Someone unskilled at other types of interaction or who doesn't recognize submission signals may go to violence.

Scenario #4:

Asocial disguised as social:  A sexual predator has chosen a mate for her submissiveness and trained her to be his toy.  I've even known predators who married and had children for the sole purpose of molesting the child without a parent to risk complaints.  Grooming victims, especially as achildren is a really dark thing.

Scenario #5:

The relationship dimension.  The victim was trained as a child that real love involves beating ("Daddy shows he loves me with his belt") and will not be satisfied that a relationship is loving unless there is an element of violence to it.  This is one form of codependency. And a common effect of the grooming process.  Maybe the goal.

All of these scenarios can look very much the same, but they can't be treated the same.  The relationship dimension (and you can add culture as another dimension) can run through all of the scenarios.

Caveat though-- this is only what I've see,  I'm far from an expert on DV issues.  It's derived mostly from listening to men arrested for domestic violence explaining about why their actions weren't wrong. Sometimes it was self-serving, but in a few cases they were just raised to think that this was normal.

Cultural elements are a huge dimension.  Maybe more on that later.

Thursday

I didn't get cut Thursday.  I've known for a couple of weeks now, since just before I left for Germany.

The original injury was in Europe last October.  A kid got frisky (sometimes, when I feel old, all students are 'the kids') and I heard something when we went down.  Got position, control. Then realized I couldn't use my right leg to stand up.

Finished the class.  Hid the limp.  If you walk consciously enough you can move and even demo on an unstable knee.  Had to teach a full seminar the next two days.  The leg utterly collapsed once during the seminar.  I was sure it was ligament damage because there wasn't much pain, just a weird, weak, watery sensation.  Strangely, it felt better after the collapse.  Even stronger.

Made it home, made a doctor's appointment.  A little delayed because of seminars, especially New Orleans. (A place I will always think of with the word yum-- thanks, Scott).  During this time it collapsed again.  Sideways this time.  The doctor needed to refer me to a specialist, but scheduled an MRI. MRI showed severe tears of the ACL and LCL. Someone said that walking on my own, much less hiding the limp, was unusual.

Months delay before I finally saw the specialist, and it got reinjured again.  Stupid, just stepping off a curb it collapsed to the front/inside angle.  Since the injury it had now collapsed straight back, to each side and to the left/front.  I started pushing to see the specialist right away.

And the doc was upset because I had delayed so long.  And really upset at my lifestyle.  He added a torn meniscus to the diagnosis and we scheduled surgery for the 20th of June.  It was grim.  He explained that ligaments rarely heal on their own after this kind of delay.  He also said that the damage was bad enough that some things were off the table.  He couldn't use tissue from my own body-- there simply wasn't enough to repair the damage.  The replacement ligaments would come from a cadaver.  And the damage was to extensive to do arthroscopic surgery.  This would be the old-school, wide-open slash.  He said no weight at all for 8 weeks, no serious physical activity for 18 months except for PT.

So just before the Europe trip we had the final pre-surgery consult.  And the knee was so much better Doc thought it was better not to do the surgery.

With a little help from friends.  Dana sent me a book on TCM that was helpful.  Wes sent some shuang jin xu gu wan.  Randy gave excellent advice on what exercises I could do.  Ana of Hag Gefluster made some Beinwel salve. Thanks.

Long term, this is likely just delaying the inevitable.  But it's a big relief, for now.  Things are far too busy to take eight weeks off, much less eighteen months.

Thanks, friends.  And mutant healing genes.

MI

For my thousand and first (1001) post, I'm going off tangent.  Religion and politics.

Had an epiphany.  Want to share it, but really not sure I want to draw this much fire.  Background: I don’t get religion.  I see it all around me, I’ve read and studied, but on a deep level, I don’t get the ‘why.’ Whatever need drives people to believe that there is a plan is just absent in my psyche.  Whether I imagine a world with or without gods, neither feels different to me.

I have a couple of friends who can be described as born-again atheists.  They are just as fundamentalist, loud and angry as the most vitriolic born-again Christian or Muslim convert.  I have several friends who self-describe as secular humanists.  Most are areligious, a few antireligious.

The epiphany. Listening in on the debate over GMO labeling, it occurred to me that this was a religion demanding that their food be labeled “Not Halal” or “Not Kosher.”  It wasn’t a scientific or health concern. There hasn’t been an unmodified food crop since we figured out cross-pollination and selective breeding; and there is no such thing as an inorganic cucumber.  And to actually revert to pre-industrial farming practices and plants as they occur in the wild would mean mass starvation, which isn’t healthy. The labels are merely the stamp of approval of a large, powerful, growing and evangelical religion.

So I started looking a little closer.  Is there a doctrine that flies in the face of science? Sure.  Lots.  Some that flies in the face of simple observation.  The horrible book I just read goes out of the way to praise the egalitarian and peaceful natures of simple foraging peoples. But in the case studies he mentions, if you look at the numbers their murder rate is astronomical.  Only two murders in a population seems small.  But in a population of 2000?  That’s twenty times the murder rate in the US.  One of the ‘peaceful’ groups had more executions per capita than Texas could dream… not counting the babies left to freeze to death, especially girls.

Egalitarian? When a population has almost no material possession, it’s kind of disingenuous to marvel about equality of those possessions.  And when there are only two jobs (hunting and gathering) and which one you will get is decided entirely by gender with no exceptions… but, hey.  You can pretend to call it equality.  I believe apartheid, separate but equal, is the modern term.

But the doctrine requires you to portray these societies as having the values that the doctrine espouses—egalitarianism, peacefulness, sexual freedom (even if the writer notes that cheating wives are sometimes murdered he marvels at the sexual freedom) and living at one with nature (author states that survival is easy even in the harshest conditions if one has the skills, then says that being cast out of the tribe is a death sentence due to starvation). 

There are even prophets of the apocalypse. The world will end if we don’t follow the dogma.

The world will end.  From Rachelle Carson’s “Silent Spring” to global warming, how many apocalypses (what is the plural of apocalypse?) do you remember?

We laugh at the Mayan calendar and the 5/5/2005 prophecies.  Nuts sitting in bunkers.  But how many times has the end of the world been declared by the secular? Hmmmm. Just the ones that I remember:

·      Ice age in the ‘70’s

·      Hole in the ozone layer (remember that all animals are supposed to be blind by now)

·      Acid rain

·      No possibility that any oil would be left by 2020 at the latest

·      Mass starvation unless ZPG was achieved world-wide by 1990 at the latest

·      Nuclear holocaust statistically unavoidable

·      Y2K computer bug

·      SARS, avian flu and nile virus

·      And, of course, the killer bees

Note-- I'm not debating what's real and what isn't.  I'm marveling that so many  people who reject the idea of a vengeful god seem to have a need to create one.  But they call it nature and insist the dogma is science.  Like some cults we could mention.  What fascinates me is that the pattern echoes even in the details.

The interesting thing about this, is that the prophets preach that the solution is in the doctrine.  Case in point is that what we needed to do in the seventies to stave off the ice age (quit driving cars so much, quit putting hydrocarbons in the atmosphere) is the exact same thing the current prophets say we need to do to prevent global warming.

And there is even an inquisition for those who commit heresy. A news commentator had to recant for saying that there was doubt about global warming.  The word ‘recant’ was actually used. The Oregon State Meteorologist (who appeared to be of the opinion that the temperature was rising but the cause was probably complex) feared for his job.

Here’s the deal.  In science there is always doubt.  If doubt is not allowed, it’s not science.  It’s effectively religion.

Which leads to my born-again atheist friends.  They demand proof of the existence of god before they will believe.  Two problems with that.  The first is that ‘proof’ outside of syllogism (a system of logic) and mathematics does not exist.  The scientific method, by its very nature, is incapable of proof, but damned efficient at disproving.  They are demanding something that, if they were rational, they must know can’t exist and they do not demand for any of their other beliefs.  The second is that god is a 'non-disprovable hypothesis.'  If you imagine a creature that can change the universe, including time, perception, cognition, physics and even the law of causality… there’s no way you can test for (disprove, remember) a thing that can change your test, your results or your interpretation.  Science doesn’t attempt to disprove the undisprovable. Waste of time and irrational.

This new religion even has the concept of original sin.  That is why the primitive people must be presented as having the virtues of this religion—because they aren’t tainted with original sin.

What is the original sin? A sense of guilt over things you have never done.  I’ve heard it called ‘liberal guilt’ and even heard it defended as a moral compass and incentive.  Hmmm. Just like Christianity’s original sin.  The idea that we should feel bad to be born into this place and time, enjoying the world that our ancestors created when others with different ancestors in different places have different things.  Again, this is chance, outside of any possible control.  The rational attitude would to be decide what to do with these resources, not rail against them.  Certainly not complain, whine and protest from a life of privilege and comfort.

In the book read recently, by someone I would classify as a preacher of this new religion, he describes a woman in a forager society having sex with a man she has refused several times-- for food.  He characterizes this as peaceful problem-solving, though it is something he would immediately recognize as forced prostitution of the weak in his own (original sin) culture.

Second, he describes how more girl babies than boy babies are left out to die, as well as the sick and the old but “…not out of cruelty…”

It’s that peaceful, egalitarian, natural, pre-original sin kind of murder.

Medicinal Purposes

Home.  23 hours after my alarm beeped, after a wake-up and good-byes and a drive, train ride (with one missed connection) I was on my second flight, looking at the sun battling storm clouds over the impossible green of the Cascade foothills.

Then landing, with a bit of rain.  My lovely wife and action-adventure daughter met me at the airport.  Shower and steak.  Sleep.

Then a day of mostly relaxing.  Readjusting. No real jet lag, I just find myself getting mellow and peaceful at odd times.

And today.  K has the day off so we have spent most of it being interrupted.  Early this morning I ate left-over steak and started to eat some cheese that was ... well, let's just say that not all cheeses are supposed to have blue mold.  And finished a truly horrific book.  A friend loaned it and it has been a really hard read.  If I had grass allergies the strawman arguments in the book might have been fatal.  If I applied the author's definitions to his own arguments... sigh.

So K brought me a whiskey.  For medicinal purposes, she said.  I looked at the time and said, "No, thanks."
She said, "Seriously.  It can't hurt and that stuff can't be good for you."
I sighed and said, "The book isn't that bad.  I think I can do the last five pages without alcohol."
She laughed.  "I was talking about the moldy cheese, you idiot."

Trust me.  The moldy cheese wasn't nearly as detrimental to my body as this book would be to a brain. To read it uncritically would be a form of lobotomy.  To read it critically was merely pain.  But I'll take the moldy cheese any day.

Oh, and as for the missed train connection?  If you're on a German train and it leaves three minutes early, you're on the wrong train.

Trust in Information

News flash: Germans know how to make sausage.  Oh, and the Rhine is flooded.

Busy week.  Lots of travel (flight to Germany plus travels within plus a 500+ km motorcycle tour of the flooded rhine).  Cool places (three different OMC hangouts, plus a police academy, plus a couple of medieval towns). Lots of classes.  Ambushes and Thugs at the Highway Riders Bad-Wildungeng HQ; Conflict Communications at the Lower Saxony Police Academy last night; private lessons start in one hour.

I always hate teaching ConCom to foreign audiences.  The language is nuanced and you can only tell if the translator is good if you don't need one.  Need to get some native speakers up to speed to teach in other countries (are you listening Andraz, Atilla, Thomas and Ferran?)  They liked it and most seemed to understand and Thomas is a good translator who understands the material-- but when things are this important anything less than perfection scares me a little.

Two of the academy social science instructors attended.  A German police academy is a full university leading to a bachelor's degree.  The students spend three years.  Part of their curriculum includes "social science" which seems to be a mix of psychology and sociology.

One of the social science instructors approached me after the class. "It was amazing. They listened to you.  They were alert and taking notes!" She makes a frantic scribbling gesture with her hands,"When we teach" she mimics a yawn. "But we are teaching science.  We have all of science to back us up and you have only personal experience and yet they believe you."

(Note, she was not saying the class was amazing.)

There is a lot in here, and it is important.
First, what passes as science in the social sciences is deplorable.  Really bad.  Remember that experimental design in psychology is what I studied...and even then at their top level at that time accepted practices would have been decried in a hard science.  I saw one rejection letter from the Journal of the APA that stated that their policy was never to publish a study that contradicted a previously published, peer-reviewed study.  Evidently peer review was more important than fact.

That aside, most officers don't trust social scientists and that's without having backgrounds in what constitutes science.  It is because so much of what they've been told by social scientists is wrong.  It fails.  In my experience social scientists are very in tune and correct about some things.  They know the way that relatively rich, educated, genteel, polite, educated undergraduates think.  They know how other extremely educated, privileged academics think.  And living in one of the most intellectually inbred worlds possible, they believe they know how all people think.  Anthropologists are the exception.  Many get their hands dirty.

The things the academics teach-- why they believe that the privileged people they know might turn to crime-- fails for the cops who are dealing with a certain demographic.

Point one: Distrust will arise when concepts comes from bad science.
Point two: Distrust will arise when concepts come from irrelevant science.

When theories are presented as theories, with no touchstone to reality, they don't sit well in your head.  I use Maslow, but point out that as a theory there are holes.  Big holes.  But as a model it is useful.  And I tie that model not to my experience but to the experience of everyone in the class.

Point three: Trust is increased with instructor humility. "The theory has holes."
Point four: Trust is increased when you can tie the concept to the student's direct, personal experience.

Though there are theories underlying Conflict Communications, the theories don't matter.  The entire course was back engineered.  What worked?  Why did it work?  No idea? Then think it through.  What did the things that work have in common? Oh, that reminds me of a theory from college, let me look it up...  It worked.  It worked before it was ever a system.  And it would continue to work as a model even if the underlying theories proved false.  The only difference would be not knowing why it worked...and there is no guarantee that we know the real 'why' now. So:

Point five: The appearance of science increases trust, even if it doesn't increase effectiveness or truth. This trust affect is purely psychological
Point six: Something that works increases trust.

I've dealt with the same bad stuff that these recruits will and these officers have.  We have a related background.  I bring stuff to them from their world, not from an imaginary world of theory and statistical analysis.  Someone pointed out recently that psychologists are about 40% accurate in predicting violence.  I don't know where he got the statistic or over what time frame or with what data.  But I will say that if cops were only 40% accurate the profession would be extinct.  The tools I show them are ones I have bet my life on.  No academic can say that.

Point seven: Trust increases if the concepts come from the same world and use the same language where the skills must be applied.
Point eight: Trust increases when people you trust rely on the concepts when the stakes are high.

The social scientist was a good, intelligent person who cared about these recruits.  But she had the same trust issues accepting data from a thug jail guard than they did accepting information from an academic. And for valid reasons.  My insights did not come from her world and might not work in her world.  I don't have the symbols of authority and trust in her world that I do in mine.  And as much as I've bet my life, I've never bet my tenure on a wild theory and, in her world, tenure seems more real.

Two more points, to make an even ten:
Point nine: Knowing the limits of your concept increases trust. To say something always works brands you as a liar or a fool.
Point ten: Trust is reciprocal.  I tell the students that I trust them to do the right thing, to make the decisions, to decide when the model will fail and do something else.  People trust people who trust them.

Have to do a CCA

And, since I am, might as well play a little catch-up.

Coming up:
May 31 1900-2100 I'll be doing a reading from "Violence: A Writer's Guide" (Second edition, 66% more fun) for the Bards and Brews event at:  Primrose &Tumbleweeds 248 E Main St. Hillsboro, OR.  I'll be reading from VAWG and maybe from "Horrible Stories I told my Children"


June 1-2 Seminars in Silverdale, WA.  Conflict Communications + Introduction to Violence.
More information and sign-ups are here.

After that, I'll be in Germany June 8-16 +/1two days or so.  One of the seminars is closed.  The information for the public one is here:
http://www.kampfkunst-fritzlar.de/

Then Surgery.  Yay.

Writing front, the second edition of VAWG is out (with an introduction by Steve Perry!!), available in e-books and paperback.

The sixth compilation of the blog posts is also out, with a cover by my beautiful and talented wife:

Only in e-book form.  Amazon here.  Other formats on SmashWords.

The video, "Logic of Violence" is also out.  I really struggled with this material.  I learn better by reading and playing than by watching and I've been slamming my head over how to present the material. LoV works great in a class room, where a group of martial artists work everything out for themselves.  But reading lacks the interactivity.
Put it this way-- every single self defense instructor tells you the same things about not being a target.  Tells you places to avoid and stupid things NOT to do.  It comes as received wisdom and is really easy to ignore.  In the LoV class the students recreate that advice because they make a list of who they would be looking for to victimize and where they would look and how they would isolate...  Instead of just words they know it becomes concepts they understand.  And no matter how skillfully I wrote it, the self-discovery power would be absent.
So David Silver, YMAA's resident video genius said, "Why don't we just film one of the classes?"
And this is it.  The information is crucial if you want to systematically build, expand or refine your personal self-defense program.

And, for the hell of it, I've done a couple of interviews recently:
http://www.martial-secrets.com/2013/05/03/rory-miller-the-insanity-of-hope/
http://www.martial-secrets.com/2013/05/17/rory-miller-mazlow-and-criminals/
http://atemicast.blogspot.com/2013/05/part-one-of-interview-with-rory-miller.html
http://atemicast.blogspot.com/2013/05/part-ii-of-rory-miller-interview.html

Radio interview coming up on KALW in San Francisco tentatively July 8.
And just got asked about a guest appearance on a cable show.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Had a fifteen minute conversation with Edwin.  Which always leaves me 1) wishing I had taken notes and 2) fairly certain that I didn't understand most of it.
I'm entirely cool with having a wide circle of friends who are much smarter than I am.  It makes me work harder and it's comforting in a weird way.  Sometimes I have an over-developed sense of responsibility and it is good to know that there are better people taking the load.

It was the kind of conversation that started with affordances (which I still don't feel I grasp the nuances of-- it's not exactly the same as the gifts I tell people to exploit in a fight) and touched on Aristotle's "Metaphysics" and the orient aspect of Boyd's OODA loop and Mac's contention that observation affects physical reality and...

I like a human sized world with human-sized problems.  But I know the universe is both very large and very tiny and that my human perceptions and needs and desires are completely unimportant.  The universe is what it is, not what I want it to be and there is no rule that says the universe needs to make sense-- and certainly no rule that gives me the right to define what sense is.  But it does make sense, so far, and it's actually kind of odd (and maybe a little suspicious) how consistent the universe is.  But that's a long talk for narghila and scotch.

In the conversation with Edwin-- you can look at things at the human sized level and see stuff.  Good stuff and important stuff.  Then you get the metaphorical microscope out and you see entirely different things.  And here's the weird part: Not everything you see is microscope size.  Some of it opens up back to human sized applications.

Affordances: Do you learn to see them?  Or do you learn to NOT see alternatives?  Does a child learn that a chair is for sitting in?  Or does the child unlearn all the other cool things that can be done with a chair?  Is seeing possibility a passive or an active function?  Can it be both?  Is that why I find rolling relaxing instead of exhausting?

Do you see more when you let stuff in or when you actively look?  And does seeing more inhibit interpreting? And is interpreting an act of seeing possibilities or an act of discounting potential so that only a limited number of possibilities are clarified?

Can you train both possibilities?  Is it possible that I am trying to train people for passive observation but active interpretation and exploitation?  And unknown to me, the students may be reversing the active and inactive parts?  None of which make either of us wrong, mind you.  Or right, either.

It's a big rabbit hole, and there isn't a bottom.

So a thanks to the people who can get me thinking like this-- Edwin, Marc, Kai, Mac, Maija, Erik.
Thanks, damn you.

Time and Distance

This could be CofV 12.4, but it is really it's own thing and critical to everything.  Not just self-defense, but every last damn thing.  One internet warrior years ago said, quite pretentiously, "When one can control space and time, one is unbeatable."  Or words to that effect.

Well, duh.

Distance is not the same as space.  Understanding distance is just one dimension of three dimensional space.  Understanding space makes most physical skills into a type of geometry study, and usually the geometry of a physical problem is easy.

Aside-- Solutions are easy.  Injuring a person is easy.  Moving, if you are reasonably athletic, is easy.  Reading and manipulating the dynamics of two moving bodies is not so easy, but it is almost exactly what all creatures were evolved to do, so it isn't exactly hard, either.  The physical part has never been the hard part of self-defense.  Knowing when to act, trusting your judgment, giving yourself permission to do what needs to be done and doing all this from a position of physical and mental disadvantage while surprised-- that's the hard part.  And the part most teachers shy away from because (I believe) they don't know what to say.

The only thing easier than the physical part is the intellectual understanding of the physical part.  And that is sometimes a trap.  Knowing the words is not the same as knowing the music.  Knowing something with your head alone is almost useless when it comes time to apply those skills with your body under stress.  But people often believe that knowing is the same as understanding, and that the ability to talk about things or answer questions is in some way correlated with the ability to do those things.  It is not.  -- Aside ends.

There is a lot here, I've got pages on it in an unpublished manuscript.  But looking strictly at it from a threat assessment point of view:

Distance is time.  The farther away a threat is, the more time it will take to reach you.

The critical distance is inside reach.  The person can hit you solidly without any weight shift at that range.  Unless the threat telegraphs badly, the strike will land before you can react.  You will get hit.

Two corollaries: 1) Bad guys become skilled at getting to this distance without putting you on alert.  The more aware you are of unnatural distancing and the more you show your preparation, the less likely you are to be targeted. A little boundary setting doesn't hurt. 2) If the threat attacks with a flurry, the information (each strike is a data point) will come in too fast for you to close your OODA loop and you will freeze.  The solution is to bypass the OODA loop through operant conditioning.  You spike the attack instead of responding.

Just outside the critical distance, the threat has to shift weight to reach you.  This creates an unavoidable telegraph that can give you time if you are quick and ready.

Note-- both critical distance and outside critical distance can be altered by weight shift.  If the weight is balanced or on the back leg, the lead hand/lead foot have the longest range.  However if the weight is on the front foot, the rear leg has a much longer range.  There are some people quick enough with kicks  to get surprise with them.  Also, weight shifts can be disguised by movements or gestures.  The pretending to turn away to coil a strike is one obvious example.

The next level of distance requires a step to make contact.

Just be aware that a skilled drop step can hit without telegraphing from roughly six inches beyond single step distance.  Drop step is a good tool.

All changes with weapons and barriers of course,  but reading distance is a skill you can develop.  Actually, if you have any striking sparring experience at all, you should have this down cold.  The test is whether you ignore completely strikes that are out of range anyway.  If you still block things that were never going to reach you, go back to basics.

So when is a threat a threat?  When he can reach you.  You have the big drunk guy in full monkey dance screaming threats, you are in no danger.  Until he gets to the critical distance line.  Then you will have to make a decision.  You have the PCP freak sweating, spitting blood and hyperventilating?  If you can appear calm and keep from triggering more adrenaline in him, there is a chance he will run out of steam, and your ability to stay calm involves trusting your reading of distance.  And if a stranger in a lonely place is trying to get inside your critical range?  Yeah.

CofV 12.4: Distinguishing Social and Asocial

There might be one more in this series, might have to write about time and distance.

What follows combines with everything before, but especially with the other elements in 12.0-12.3.
12- Identifying Danger
12.1- Adrenaline Signs
12.2- You
12.3- Terrain
In some ways this all comes close to the Intent-Means-Opportunity triangle.  An immediate threat has to have all three.  Most of the time, you are the resource, the source of intent.  the threat is his or her own means and the terrain and your behaviors supply the opportunity.  But that's kind of simplistic.

Social and asocial are done for different reasons and so they have different requirements, from the bad guy's point of view.  The primary difference is that in most cases, social violence requires an audience.  For asocial violence the audience magically turns into witnesses. Some of the types of social, like the bonding GMD, are social within the group but asocial between the group and victim.  And some, maybe most, bad guys will try to get social benefits from asocial crimes (bragging about a mugging, for instance) or vice versa (going through the other guy's pockets after winning a Monkey Dance.)

So that's the big one.  Presence of others: generally social.  Absence of witnesses: generally asocial. Presence of a bonded group and you are alone: bad day for you.
Exception: certain types of predatory acts do use the crowds as camouflage. But by their nature, they can't be extended scenarios.

Second, the behaviors are different.  Social behaviors, even if they are going to violence, are normal.  We perceive them as normal because they stay on a script that we all know.  One of the things that makes predators so effective is that:
1) We are wired to assume and expect the scripts (corollary: when someone is clearly going off script most victims don't recognize it)
2) Many, especially the socially skilled and especially sexual predators, mask their predatory tactics in the social scripts.  For instance, there is a natural progression in romance where a couple meet, enjoy each other and gradually want to spend longer times in more privacy.  Which is also exactly what a process predator wants.  Predators learn to accelerate the natural process.

For our purposes, I'll call the social behaviors (including the social violence behaviors) 'normal.'  People don't consciously recognize normal, and without that recognition, abnormal (predatory) behavior is often missed, dismissed or excused. Missed- not seen at all.  Dismissed- seen, but ignored as unimportant. Excused- acknowledged as odd but doesn't count because there is probably a perfectly good reason.  So victims either don't see or ignore the warning signs.

Aside- One of the secret deeper reasons that I teach SD law as an articulation class instead of a decision making class is that if the person can explain things to a jury, they can also explain why they need to act to themselves in the critical seconds.  That helps some people slip the leash.

So you have to know normal consciously before you can recognize abnormal.

Basics are proxemics, facing and stance, hands and structure, and group behavior.

Normal proxemics varies widely across different cultures.  In North America and most of the places in Europe that I've visited, the comfortable distance for a stranger to stand is about a half pace beyond arms reach.  You will get a creepy feeling if people stand too close and you will elicit a creepy feeling if you approach inside the bubble.  It's an easy experiment to do.  This distance changes with intimacy.  Acquaintances are slightly closer, friends closer than that and intimates very close.  And there is a very particular range+eye contact that you will see with cons who have done prison time together-- standing very close but looking past each other's shoulder.

This bubble is not round.  It's best to feel this rather than read it, but that creepy feeling isn't engendered by a stranger approaching from the side until he is much closer.  Well within striking range.  It is even closer behind.  This is why we can handle stadium seating and sitting together on buses, but tables are a certain width.

The normal approach is to stand in front of you at the edge of the bubble.  An experienced predator will, while acting friendly and social, generally approach from the flank to be in striking range. (Not addressing ambushes from the rear, only the stuff you can see coming.) So, normal is from the front, out of range.  Anything else should put you on alert.  But remember this is very different in different cultures.  If you try to insist on your bubble in Arabia or South America do not expect to make friends or be accepted.  There are profound tactical reasons for maintaining a certain distance but sometimes the strategic reasons trump the tactical.  And remember, you are looking at signs of abnormality for danger, and normal/abnormal is measured from the threat's conditioning, not yours.  Someone from a close culture who maintains distance may read as sensible to you, but he might well do it because of mental illness or excessive aggression.

Facing and stance.  The normal monkey dance fighting stance is one of the stupidest possible ways to stand for fighting.  The combatants tend to be up on their toes, bouncing, arms akimbo and with feet and hips perpendicular (side to side) to the threat. And usually tense with muscles bulging.  Slow, stupid, no base and with targets exposed.  It is an attempt to look big, like a cat puffing out its fur.  Understand that even well trained martial artists also tend to do this if they get their ego involved.  It's an emotional reaction and is the default if you respond emotionally.  It is profoundly inefficient.

Almost all normal (social) interactions will have that foot position.  Social violence will have the crappy posture and foot position but will violate the bubble from the front.

A predator will blade up.  He will have his power in line with his target (you).  One of the elements that people miss, ignore or dismiss is that he may keep his shoulders and hips square with his feet bladed.  feet are important, not the rest.  The other thing is that if the threat approaches from the flank and faces the same direction as you it feels friendly (facing the same direction mirrors your body language) and the feet are naturally positioned for the power to be in line with the target.

Inexperienced predators may not know this.  Early crimes it is common for the threat to have no more experience than you do.  (He will get mentored later, or learn by trial and error).  So you may be mugged by someone giving all the signals of social violence (up on toes, shitty stance, loud) but with a gun.  Is a gun part of normal Monkey Dance behavior?  No it is not.  Therefor this is abnormal therefor probably predatory.  And this situation is very touchy.  Resource predation plus a fragile ego and a firearm is a recipe for disaster.  If the threat feels endangered or disrespected he will erupt.

That's feet.  Next hands. If there is a weapon, that tells you two things.  First, this is a potentially very bad day and second, he wanted you to see it for a reason.  If you live in a weapon culture, you know the rules of social violence (dueling) in that culture better than I do.  In my culture, monkey dances don't involve guns or knives.  If a weapon is involved it is either a predator or someone who was recently humiliated in a Monkey Dance trying to get his manhood back.

Aside-- Do what you need to do to survive, but never humiliate any one.  It never serves any purpose other than to stroke your own ego.

If a hand is out of sight, it could be good or bad.  No one keeps a straight arm with a hand hidden behind a thigh.  No one just rests his hand on his back hip under his jacket. But a lot of people stand with their hands in their back pockets and a flat hand like that means they feel no threat.  (This is a stacking point here: unusual body positioning plus signs of adrenaline?  Big red flag.  An alert individual showing extremely relaxed body language in a clearly dangerous situation?  Big red flag.)

Precursor moves.  Most people, for whatever reason don't just hit.  They pull back first.  They think it feels more powerful.  This chambering or loading is often disguised as turning away or glancing around-- and that last sweeping glance of the area is a final witness check just before things go down.

Groups and places.  If there are only two people at a bus stop and they are strangers, they keep distance.  All guys know the urinal rules.  There is a pattern to where people stand and which direction they face as  an elevator fills.  People that know each other stand together and talk.  If they see you, go quiet and split up, that's likely bad.

So with groups you look for coordinated movement, any separation that makes you the apex of a triangle or any static positioning that makes you walk between two people.  In pack behavior you look for groups (usually young men) moving purposefully or trying to intimidate/get a reaction from others.

All of this could be expanded, but these are the basics.

Qualified

There are no experts here.

To recap the last post and the comments on the last post- A “High level conversations” isn’t a matter of knowledge or experience, not in this field.  Knowledge and experience never hurt of course.  Not ‘never.’  If the experience is overblown or misremembered or poorly extrapolated it can go bad.  If the knowledge is of myth, folklore and received wisdom without a reality check the conversation could be very high-falutin’, but the information passed could be deadly.

Here’s the deal.  Extreme violence happens at the edge of what humans were evolved to handle.  Much of it happens in contradiction to our early conditioning about reality.  And it happens in a stew of stress hormones that affect perception, cognition and memory. 

My experience is that very few people experience enough serious violence that the lessons learned there replace social expectations.  Even fewer experience enough to get a handle on the sensory and perception distortion.  Only a percentage of those have the discipline, desire and/or job requirement to evaluate those distortions and compare them with the actual events (I will go on record as thankful for the hundreds of reports I had to write, though I hated them at the time).

And of those few, the number that have experienced more than one very small piece of this big puzzle are vanishingly small.  Soldiers learn part of it (different parts at different intensities depending on MOS and era); cops learn a different part; bouncers another part; targets for sexual assault a much different part.  As do the night clerk at the local Stop-n-Rob or any of the actors in a domestic violence cycle.  And cross a border or change the decade and many of the rules and social conventions of violence change.

So one of the students at the Oakland seminar asked if he was qualified to teach.  The sentiment was an echo of Pax in the comments on the last post.

I don’t know what qualified means. The best handgun instructor I ever had has shot exactly one man.  In the back.  It wasn’t a gunfight.  It wasn’t the way wannabe’s fantasize.  A bad man needed to be shot to save the life of a third party and my instructor did it in the safest, smartest way.

I can think of three (at least) of the top handgun instructors in the country who have never shot anyone.  Does that make them unqualified?  And some of their students have used the training and survived.  How much does that mean, really?

My jujutsu instructor, as far as I know, never went toe-to-toe with a PCP freak.  But he gave me the confidence to do it and the skills to be successful.  But one of the things Dave said, when I hit green belt and started questioning whether this stuff would really work: “I don’t know if jujutsu will work.  But I know you.  You’re a fighter and you’re adaptable.  You’ll make it work.”

And out of left field—my wife sometimes teaches belly dance and she’s used those concepts to vastly improve my understanding of body mechanics and increase my striking power.  Movement is movement and movement experts of any kind can help you.

So are you qualified?  Depends. Can you make people better?

One of my FB friends was assigned to do an essay on why he was a self-protection expert.  It was essentially a self-esteem building exercise, and he did a good job… but I would encourage every SD instructor to write a little private essay on why they are not experts.  To get a start on the very long list of things that they do not know.  It’s not only humbling, but it gives you a place to start when  you need to learn.

So, I don’t know qualified, but I can pick out unqualified in a heartbeat.

If you are there for your ego instead of the student’s improvement, walk away.

If you don’t know the basic context of modern self-defense (how attacks happen, SD law and the legal process, etc.) you aren’t ready to teach yet.  And if you haven’t, on your own, recognized the need and started researching this stuff, you aren’t responsible enough to teach yet.

If you think trying to teach martial artists to fight is the same as trying to teach a victim profile not to be targeted, you aren’t teaching what you think you are teaching.

If you need to be top dog, you might be teaching people to win but you are conditioning them to lose.  You are creating victims.

If you think SD is primarily a physical skill, you don’t understand the basics.

If you think your experience, whatever it is, qualifies you to talk authoritatively about things outside your experience, it’s a red flag.

If your techniques require a martial athlete in top condition to work, they’re inappropriate for self-defense.  And probably really inefficient.

The trouble with this list, of course, for those of you wondering about your qualifications is that they are much harder to see from inside your skin.  You have to develop a group of honorable enemies.