Hoping For Rain

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

When there’s a demonstration planned, Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) finds himself hoping for rain:

I’ve talked with some of the protesters at previous demonstrations that turned to riots. They spout a very consistant and persistant rhetoric but if you talk closer and ask questions about fundamentals of economics or political theory or philosophy it becomes quickly clear that they are repeating words they don’t understand.

(REAL DIALOGUE COMING UP. NO KIDDING)

Protester: “When Thomas Jefferson used Nietzche’s philosophy to create America he would have been apalled at what you are doing here.”

Me: “Jefferson was dead before Nietzche was born. Locke was the primary philosophical influence on the American Revolution.”

Him: “Really? You’re pretty cool. If you weren’t a cop we could hang out.”

Ignorance bothers me a little. Hypocricy bother me more. Local groups have been practicing for some time how to lunge at an officer hoping to provoke a baton strike or an OC spray with cameras waiting; how to frighten or cripple the mounted patrol’s horses with firecrackers or ball bearings. Maybe it’s not hypocricy. Maybe those particular protesters aren’t also animal rights activists. Maybe the ones who block streets at rush hour are actually for the pollution and petroleum industries and are just helping out by freezing people in traffic. Maybe the ones who yell for individual rights and freedoms aren’t the ones keeping people from going home.

It’s about attention, pure and simple. A bunch of kids that for the moment want all eyes turned to them. Want to feel that they stood toe to toe and eye to eye with a monolithic force represented by the police. Want to feel brave and special and important… but do it safely. Protesting in a nation where it is safe to do so and if you play the litigation card right you can make money doing it.

The first time I was out on one of these, my wife watched obsessively on the TV. At one point, as a line of police in riot gear sealed off a street, the protesters started chanting, “This is what a police state looks like!”

According to the kids, my wife was screaming at the TV, “No it isn’t you morons! In a police state they machine gun the lot of you and the ones who limp home each find one family member missing! That’s what a f—ing police state looks like!”

But what would she know about that, a simple Eastern Bloc refugee like her?

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Sticks and Stones

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

You used to hear parents tell their children, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” That’s changed, Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) says:

Now you hear: “Words can cut through you like a knife. Words can hold such venom or poison that they can damage, destroy or kill more effectively than a physical weapon.”

I can’t help but think that this person has never been cut by a knife, or seen anyone destroyed by a physical weapon. Maybe there’s a scale, or maybe more: people assume that the worst they’ve ever been hurt is at the very edge of what humans can feel. So if the worst pain you’ve ever felt is an unkind word, you think it must be worse that the third or fourth or fifth worst pain I’ve ever felt, which was probably lying on my back after a good fall unable to breathe trying pathetically to scream or at least squeek for help. Or maybe running on a broken leg. Or frostbite (no, recovering from frostbite was the worst or second worst).

Maybe it’s just me, but lying on a couch for a few days trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I might be blind in one eye was way worse than being embarassed or insulted or demeaned.

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"We Just Disagree"

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

People who live different lives, Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) notes, see different results from the same things:

Why are college professors generally for relaxed immigration laws and for government aid and cops, in general are against both?

It’s because we see different outcomes. The college professor sees the students who worked hard, took advantage of what was offered and used it to create good and productive lives. Sometimes against great odds and defeating incredibly negative circumstances. They see the good that the programs do.

The cops deal, every day, with the people who took advantage of what was offered to increase their ability to harm or to evade responsibility for their actions.

The programs that allow a young man from Mexico who illegally crossed the border to find a job, get health care for his children, become an asset to his community, pay taxes and have children who go to colleges and make America stronger are exactly the same programs that allow cartels of drug dealers to pack their organizations with relatives from the home country and rule through fear and traditions that were imported right along with them.

The programs that allow a struggling single mother to care for her children and keep them fed and get them to school and give them a chance at a life are the exact same programs that enables teen age boys to have contests on who can father the most illegitimate children before graduating from high school, and do so with absolutely no responsibility or penalties.

This is important. Sometimes the argument arises because the friend has a colleague who really made it in life with a little help paid for by the government… and you have either just delivered or just buried a baby addicted two two drugs and underweight with no functioning parent and that, the birth or the burial, were also paid for by the government.

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Activists

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) does not like or respect activists:

At some point in the last thirty years or so what the people labeled ‘activists’ do has changed. If memory serves, the activists used to go into the deep south and sign up voters. They used to form neighborhood watches and clean up litter and graffiti.

It seems that these days, the people who call themselves activists (the protestors and letter-writers and ‘research groups’) whine or scream or block traffic or sue all in the attempt to get someone else (usually the government) to fix what they see as a problem.

In case I’m going too fast here: you see a problem (even if I don’t agree that it’s a problem) and you put your time and sweat and blood and money into fixing it, you have my absolute respect. You see a problem and begin screaming or waving signs or orchestrating protests to force me (or the taxpayers in general) to fix the problem, you have my absolute contempt. Adults fix problems, children whine for adults to fix problems. That’s a basic difference.

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Levels

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) notes that so much misunderstanding comes from refusing to recognize when someone is acting, fighting, or talking from a different level:

This is readily apparent at the confluence of my two worlds. On the one hand I deal every working day with people who believe it is stupid to accept a responsibility you can avoid; that people who feel that working for your livelihood is proof that you are stupid and should be exploited; that using force is natural and right and the only reason everyone doesn’t all the time is fear; that jail is a place to rest and take care of health problems.

These are not exagerations, not even slight exagerations. And these are not the super-predators. These are the attitudes of the day-to-day low level criminals — the addicts and pushers, the guy holding the sign saying “Will work for food” (who will turn you down if you actually offer him a job. Try it.)

This mindset is so alien to the other half of the people I know (the “citizens”) that many refuse to believe that it exists. It makes them uncomfortable when someone they know to have good judgment and wide experience makes a statement like this because it strikes them as impossible or wrong. But the mindset isn’t that alien — it’s adapted to its environment and reinforced in its own subculture.

People get uncomfortable with anything that strays too far from their strata, and they’ll do incredible mental gymnastics to justify and explain behaviors as “bad decisions” because they are more comfortable thinking that there is a connection, that under the right circumstances even “I” could be driven to kill a child and this poor criminal just happened to hit those conditions. This is more comfortable than believing that there are people who will kill a child because her crying might annoy a boyfriend who supplies drugs. Or might just not think of it as an event at all.

So we sit in our air conditioned, genteel, polite world and refuse to believe that there are people who will deliver a savage beating while deliberately planning how they will defend it in court.

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Levels

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) notes that so much misunderstanding comes from refusing to recognize when someone is acting, fighting, or talking from a different level:

This is readily apparent at the confluence of my two worlds. On the one hand I deal every working day with people who believe it is stupid to accept a responsibility you can avoid; that people who feel that working for your livelihood is proof that you are stupid and should be exploited; that using force is natural and right and the only reason everyone doesn’t all the time is fear; that jail is a place to rest and take care of health problems.

These are not exagerations, not even slight exagerations. And these are not the super-predators. These are the attitudes of the day-to-day low level criminals — the addicts and pushers, the guy holding the sign saying “Will work for food” (who will turn you down if you actually offer him a job. Try it.)

This mindset is so alien to the other half of the people I know (the “citizens”) that many refuse to believe that it exists. It makes them uncomfortable when someone they know to have good judgment and wide experience makes a statement like this because it strikes them as impossible or wrong. But the mindset isn’t that alien — it’s adapted to its environment and reinforced in its own subculture.

People get uncomfortable with anything that strays too far from their strata, and they’ll do incredible mental gymnastics to justify and explain behaviors as “bad decisions” because they are more comfortable thinking that there is a connection, that under the right circumstances even “I” could be driven to kill a child and this poor criminal just happened to hit those conditions. This is more comfortable than believing that there are people who will kill a child because her crying might annoy a boyfriend who supplies drugs. Or might just not think of it as an event at all.

So we sit in our air conditioned, genteel, polite world and refuse to believe that there are people who will deliver a savage beating while deliberately planning how they will defend it in court.

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Beating Up Children

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Rory Miller tells an amusing tale about beating up children:

We have a brand-new jail completely empty. The voters passed the levy to build it, but the people who run the county decided not to even allow a vote for the money to run it. Great big empty clean jail that doesn’t smell like criminals.

Someone got the really cool idea of letting the Boy Scouts hold an over-nighter there. Even cooler, someone decided to have a group of deputies give brief little classes on what Law Enforcement does… but only the cool stuff: K9, night vision, special weapons…

I was asked to do the DT (defensive tactics) portion. Six twenty-minute classes for 40-50 Boy Scouts.
[...]
I arrived at the site and something was wrong. Sounds of shrieking and laughing and running penetrated the concrete block walls of the jail. I met the lieutenant inside. He said, “There was a slight miscommunication. Remember I said Boy Scouts and Eagle Scouts, mostly fourteen to eighteen? It turns out they’re Bobcats, Cub Scouts and Webelos. Ages are mostly six to nine. You OK with that?” Hmmmm.
[...]
“At ease!” I yelled, “No shoes on the mats!” They seemed startled, but scrambled to get their shoes off. Half hour to kick off time. If I left them alone, they’d wreck the place.

“All right, gentleman. We’re stuck here for a half hour. You wanna screw around or you want to learn something?”

“Learn something!” they shrieked. Shrieking seemed the basic mode of communication. So I got the entire group of them, as well as a couple of dads and others that drifted in playing at a sparring flow drill. By the end of half an hour they were working on blindfolded infighting. Not bad. One learning moment: A kid asked me if I worked there and I said I did. He asked what I did and I said, “Mostly, I beat people up for a living.”

The kid started running around to all his friends, “This guy has the coolest job! He beats people up all day!” Some of the parents looked disapproving.

There was a brief ceremony before things kicked off where the Sheriff administered the oath of office and swore in the kids as junior deputies. I remember my oath of office pretty well, but I seemed to have forgotten the parts about doing my homework and listening to my parents.

Then the classes. First a talk about how fighting isn’t like on TV and cops have to fight one of two ways, either putting handcuffs on someone without injuring them or fighting for their life. Then, if they were well-behaved (and only one group of the very youngest didn’t seem up to it) the sparring flow drill. Then back to talking: “Okay, gentleman, the next part is all about PAIN. Who wants to learn about pain?’

“Yeahhh!!!!!” While the parents, especially the moms, cringed in the background.

Some pressure points, maybe elbow locks. “I don’t want to hear about anybody using these on their little brothers or sisters or keeping everybody awake all night practicing. To make extra sure, I’m going to show your parents the pressure points I’m not showing you, including the one that will give you a headache for three days.”

“Show us the headache one!”
“No.”
“I won’t use it, I promise.”
“No.”
“Can you make people go to sleep like the Vulcan neck pinch?”
“Yes.”
“Show us that.”
“No. I don’t even know you.”

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Solving the environment instead of the person

Friday, February 27th, 2009

By now I’m quite used to Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan) complaining that real-world phenomena often aren’t normally distributed. I was a bit surprised to find Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) making the same point, that the bell curve isn’t universal:

According to the research done by Dennis Culhane, it turns out the most common length of time for a person to be homeless is one day. The second most common is two days. These short time, one-time homeless account for eighty percent of the homeless. People are people and they are adaptable. If they find themselves homeless and don’t like it they will overcome and get on with their lives.

There were about 10% who come in periodically for a couple of weeks, usually in winter. The last 10% were the chronic homeless. It was this group that make up the people that most of us think of as homeless, whether you think of them as pitiful and severely disabled or alcoholics and grifters.

This means many things. First and foremost, it means the problem is small enough to solve, not just treat.

Philip Mangano, mentioned in the article, has a solution to the problem of chronic homelessness: it would actually save money to give them a nice apartment and provide for all their needs with a dedicated staff of social workers. It would be cheaper than it is to pick up their bills for Emergency Room visits and jail time.

I had a solution, too, but society isn’t ready to let people die. I firmly believe that when a safety net begins to enable, it must be removed from that individual. If the person still continues to behave in a self-destructive way society should have no guilt when they suffer the consequences. But that’s me — I’m aware that I don’t exactly have a standard outlook on problems.

Side thought (and there were many side thoughts from this article) my instinct, when given a problem, is to solve the people (shut down the threat, train the rookie, counsel the errant) to change them in a crisis or help them change themselves… others, including Mangano, solve the environment.

More side thoughts — criminals also follow this distribution. Violent crime is committed by a relatively small percentage of criminals, and they do far more than we ever get them for. Solve the problem or solve the person?

The article applies this to police misconduct — the vast majority of officers do an excellent professional job, a small percentage are asses. The whole idea of the standard response to negative media attention (more sensitivity training) is based on the bell curve assumption. Mass training always is trying to shift the curve a little bit to the ‘saint’ side. The trouble is that when you have a distribution that runs closer to 30% saint; 25% hero; 20% good guy; 15% civil servant; 7% lazy bastard; and 3% asshole the training insults 75% of your people and the 10% you’re trying to reach either don’t care or won’t act. Again, when the real problem is this small, you can solve it. I prefer firing, but our agency has a tendancy to put the worst officers in positions away from the public, which sometimes involves a promotion. Solving the environment instead of the person.

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Sunday Dinner

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Fixing Sunday dinner is a lot more work when you don’t just pick up the ingredients at the grocery store:

Don’t know if you are old enough to remember, but the world was supposed to end in the seventies. Maybe the eighties, but there was absolutely no chance that we would make it to 2000 before there was a nuclear attack and/or a complete economic collapse and/or a complete ecological disaster.

My parents believed this and in 1976 they moved us to eighty acres in the desert to raise our own food and live as self-sufficiently as possible.

We raised chickens, lots of chickens, and they were “free range”, which means the smart ones found out early that if they slept in the coop racoons would kill them all. The chickens ran wild and lived in trees.

When mom decided it was time to butcher some chickens, dad and I (or just me, if he was working) would get our .22 rifles and cull the herd. Mom would tell us which roosters were off limits and if there were any hens she wanted culled, and we went hunting. Only head shots allowed.

The head on a chicken is a little bigger than a quarter, and the suckers move. We got very, very good at fast accurate shots.

Which brings us to Sunday Dinner. Sunday Dinner was the scrawniest, fastest, luckiest rooster in the world. Mom wanted him dead, because we were getting a suspiciously large number of scrawny fast hatchlings. We tried every butchering day for almost two years. The first time I shot him and saw blood and he ran. I tracked him and didn’t find him for hours, when he came home, hiding behind my sister.

After that, if he saw rifles, he ran for the hills and didn’t come back for the rest of the day. One time, I left the rifle and tried a handgun, got real close and … missed. Damnit.

Sunday Dinner’s last day, he’d taken off as soon as the butchering started. We were almost done and I saw him running through a path between two cotton woods trees at 75 yards. I snapped off a shot and he started doing the dead chicken dance. Chickens with their heads cut off do run. They also jump and do backflips. Sunday Dinner was spinning end over end, jumping, running and dead.

I carried him to mom for the scalding and gutting part of the day. She said, “Rory, look at this.” There were two bullet holes in his comb, healed. One in the wattles at his neck. There was a chip out of his top and lower beak from two different bullets and healed graze at the back of his neck and a healed hole in the side of his neck in front of the spine. He lived a relatively long and healthy life with seven bullet hits to his head and neck. The eighth killed him.

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Brown Belt Syndrome

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

In describing Boyd’s OODA loop — combative decision making — Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) describes brown belt syndrome:

There’s a thing called Hick’s Law which states that the more options you have, the longer it takes to choose one. Makes sense. I call this the Brown Belt syndrome. It’s what happens when you have too many cool ways to win and you get your ass kicked while you are weighing options.

Posted in Martial Arts, Rory Miller, War | No Comments »

We don’t search for the smart ones

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Rory Miller was on a search for a missing trail runner:

I tried to encourage the younger members of the team: “It hasn’t been that cold and it’s only been two days. If the guy had the most basic survival gear or any common sense, we’ll find him alive.”

These 14-18 year old kids had more search experience than me. They gave me pitying looks and one said, “Sarge, if he had any common sense he wouldn’t have tried to go cross-country at twilight. We don’t search for the smart ones.”

Later, one of the searchers confided that he wanted to quit, “I’ve been looking at all the people we’ve saved in the last two years and I don’t want any of them breeding. I don’t think saving stupid people is good for society.” Harsh.

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