Preparing for the worst (Part 2)

Like I said in Part 1, I would not go over the HARDEST thing to prepare for in a disaster type situation.

The hardest thing to prepare for is boredom. Boredom will lead to complacency, which will then compromise security and other means for survival. No matter the war or disaster, there will be a lull. Minutes, hours, days, there is no telling how long it will last. In a safe situation, a book can help pass the time. Group interaction and games are useful, especially if there are kids.

If you're not in a safe area, that lull will usually end suddenly. You cannot be "switched on" all the time. You would go crazy, and your system is not developed to handle it. Furthermore, you won't be able to operate in everyday life.

Imagine walking down a dark alley, in an area that you are unfamiliar with. Most likely, if you are smart, you will be extremely aware of what's going on. You'll be wary of that bum sleeping near the dumpster. You'll look toward every noise. You'll be "ready" to move at the first sign of danger, although it will probably be more of a jump and a high-pitched yell when a rat scurries past. In any case, that's like being "switched on," albeit with no training of what to do in that state. The thing is, you can't be like that constantly, or you will become a nervous wreck. It's best to not always be in those situations.

To-Shin Do teaches the ideas of Condition White (completely relaxed), Condition Yellow (aware that something may be happening), Condition Orange (aware of a threat), and Condition Red (actively dealing with a threat). Condition white is what you are normally in at home or at work, in a place you feel completely safe. Yellow is where you operate when you're unfamiliar with your surroundings, or aware of general potential danger. Orange is when you've identified the specific danger and are prepared to deal with it. Red means it's go time.

You NEED to switch off. Especially if you were just "turned on" for an extended period of time. You can't run red all day. Even in a combat zone, you'll drop to white if there's enough security that you are able to sleep.

And that last point brings us to the most important part of preparedness and self-defense: self-protection. It's not "the best defense is a good offense." It's the idea that, within the realm of your control, you avoid situations that will place you in danger and force you to defend yourself. Sometimes, the long way is just safer. Sometimes that gut instinct is completely right.

For example, I like to listen to my MP3 player when I travel. I have trouble not listening to what's going on around me. I overhear too much some times, so I like to drown it out. When I'm on the train, I'm into my music and my book. Granted, I'm still aware of my surroundings (Condition Yellow). I still glance around, and the music isn't so loud that I can't hear anything else. I'm not good at turning off completely.

However, I occasionally I'll either turn off the music to hear (why leaving the headphones in to make it seem like I'm not), or take the headphones out. One of those times is withing the last block or two leading to my apartment (no matter how much you vary your route, there is only one way to get into your door). The neighborhood's nice, but I don't take chances. I turn music off, take one headphone out, the other tuck into my collar. As I unchain the gate, my body motion is such that I am able to look in the direction that I came. Once the key is in the front door, I look behind me as I open the door, and enter, ensuring it shuts behind me. I'm in Condition Yellow for about a minute. Once I'm inside, it's back to Condition White.

I'm not conducting SLLS (pronounced "sills," it's a combat patrolling technique that stands for "Stop, Look, Listen, and Smell"). I mean switching to a low level of awareness and preparedness. Should something happen, I don't have to go from zero to hero to deal with the situation, and I've gained vital seconds in evaluating my situation.

While I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine, she said "Patrick, not everyone is a bad-ass like you and has combat training." This is true. That doesn't mean that you can't develop and internalize the ideas that would help this. Here's a list of a few books that will at least introduce you to ideas that professionals use to make themselves safe, as well as assist you in thinking of how to prepare:

• The Gift of Fear
• The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life
• Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts and Real World Violence
• Gang Leader for a Day
• Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda
• Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA
• The Zombie Survival Guide
• The Ranger Handbook
• Earth Abides

Feel free to ask me about any of these, or why they made the list.

The three most important things that I can recommend are: do not limit your scope of knowledge, don't let your new found knowledge cripple you, and always carry a small notebook and a pen. On the first point, if something makes you curious, learn about it. I'm reading Packing For Mars. I am not going into space any time soon, but I have learned a lot of interesting thing in planning and consideration. Even if you can't completely use the subject, you can abstract the ideas. Here's are two of my takeaways from that book:

• Not that bravery has been entirely phased out. Those recommended astronaut attributes also include “Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.” If something goes wrong, everyone’s clarity of mind is needed.
• “I don’t know if we…have the mentality—I don’t want to say ‘guts’—to take the kind of risks we did when we [went to the moon] the first time…. And that’s a sad commentary.” After all, no matter how much you plan and how carefully you engineer things, there will always be problems. The safety manager of the eighth Apollo mission once famously pointed out: “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts…. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” On the other hand, as they say, failing to plan is planning to fail.

Once you start expanding your knowledge, you will learn a few things. First, you really know nothing. Second, that there are some really useful things to learn. Last, there are a lot of things that can kill you. If you dwell too much on this, it will cripple your ability to act. You will live life in fear of the next step, because you fear that it will kill you. That's as good as being dead. Don't run recklessly into life, but understand the danger and mitigate them. I know electricity is dangerous, so I make sure to trip the breaker, and test the circuit before installing a new light switch. If anything, remember the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear from the book Dune:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

On the last point, I ALWAYS carry a small notebook. It's great when you get some random idea that you can jot it down quickly, so it's not lost to the ether. That website you saw, that problem that came up, that thing you need to buy; all things that the notebook can preserve for you until they are solved. Cross out tasks and info when you are done with them. When the notebook fills, get a new one, go through the old one, and transfer anything you still want. Similarly, use that Amazon wishlist. Come across a book that might be interesting in the future? Put it on the wishlist, and you'll get to it some day.

Preparing for the worst (Part 1)

Every student learns the magic number 3. Whether you’re an F-15 fighter pilot or a single mom, in a car accident or taking a walk in the park, the number 3 will keep you alive. The Rule of 3 states that you cannot survive:

• 3 SECONDS WITHOUT SPIRIT AND HOPE
• 3 MINUTES WITHOUT AIR
• 3 HOURS WITHOUT SHELTER IN EXTREME CONDITIONS 3 DAYS WITHOUT WATER
• 3 WEEKS WITHOUT FOOD
• 3 MONTHS WITHOUT COMPANIONSHIP OR LOVE
  -The Survivors Club

Now that that "Hurricane" Irene has passed, I think it's time to talk about preparing for bad situations. I got a bunch of questions during that time, so I figure it would be good to put that info out there for everyone. I don't know about most of you, but I've been preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse* for quite some time now. Most of you probably aren't ready for something on that level.

At all.

In fact, most of you probably aren't ready for anything that alters your day-to-day routine or removes certain normally used structure from your lives.

The best survivors understand that normal is just a fleeting state of mind. Indeed normalcy may seem steady and constant, but it’s really just the intermission between the chaos and messiness of life. Survivors accept that life probably won’t ever return to the way it used to be. So they let go, adapt, and embrace the “new normal.”
-The Survivors Club

The first thing to remember is that you CANNOT plan for every eventuality. It's impossible, and trying to do so will leave you unable to do anything, because you'll have too much to deal with. I recommend that you become familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. For a disaster, you need the bottom 2, self-esteem, and problem solving & creativity. We'll get back to this in a moment.

The next step is to build up your level of preparedness from small problems to large. Don't try to plan for a hurricane if you can't tighten the screws on a chair. Amazingly, you'll find that all the things needed for a light emergency are also useful in big one. My first idea for preparing for small problems is to get:

• A hammer
• A Screwdriver and/or a Leatherman
• A flashlight (get more than one, and put one in your car) and spare batteries
• A small, battery powered AM/FM radio.
• First aid materials. At a minimum, be able to deal with small cuts, large wounds, and pain. Tampons can plug small bullet wounds.

For non-prolonged problems and disasters, those items will tide you over until help or emergency services can be obtained.

The next step is to prepare for prolonged problems and disasters. Take the things that you can't do yourself and try to mitigate the effects of what happens when they are gone.

• Can you make electricity? That's what the flashlight is for (maybe you need a generator).
• Have a cow to slaughter? Might want to get a few days worth of food. Technically, if there is a chance of power loss, refrigeration will be lost, so get food that doesn't need it, and requires little to no preparation. A fridge can keep stuff cool for a day after losing power, but only if you don't open it.
• Do you have a well? Get a gallon of water per-day per-person to tide you over. I recommend gallon bottles, and use that to fill a smaller container, rather than but a bunch of bottles, which drives up the cost, or the giant 3-gallon bottles which become hard to move.

Next, prepare for the specific disaster, especially if you know it is coming. You don't need to be an expert, but you need to understand what dangers are there, especially if you know what disaster is coming. For example:

• Wind related? Beware of flying debris and branches that will break windows.
• Water related? Flooding. Evacuate to high ground early.
• Earthquake? Get under a table (Avoid the doorway).
• Fire. You can go the fire-extinguisher route for a kitchen fire , but you're probably better off just getting out of there for forest blazes. Also, regularly clear brush around your house.

Also, as much as the Zombie Survival Guide may seem like a joke, it is actually a very informative book on disaster preparedness and survival, even if you ignore the zombie part.

Another small point is to think of what you need to do in order to be mobile. Occasionally, a disaster will force you to move. Figure out what you will definitely need, what you can actually move, and what may be available on the other end. Don't bring 8 gallons of water if you're moving to somewhere with running water. That's partially why I advocated gallon bottles, and not the huge 3 gallon ones. Also, you probably use sensible footwear (not Army shoes and golf shoes, Andrea).

Lastly, mitigate the chances of problems should a disaster arise. If you have a family, at least make sure basic ideas of the plans are understood. If there is potential for danger, you should at least be aware of it so your brain isn't completely shocked should something go wrong. For example, you know what I do every time I get on a plane? Locate the nearest exit, and listen to the damn flight attendant. You may think they are there for just drinks and peanuts, but they actually do a lot:

When you board a plane, you’re probably accustomed to some friendly banter from the flight attendants. They welcome you, ask where you’re from, and make idle talk about the weather. It may seem like empty chatter, and you may wonder how they can stand saying “Hi, how are you?” to three hundred travelers. But this is serious business. They’re not just being friendly; they’re profiling you. For starters, they’re checking to see whether you’re fit for flying or whether you’re under the influence. They’re also looking for suspicious behavior including clues of terrorist activity. One of their other main objectives is to identify ABPs. In the parlance of flight safety, that means “able-bodied passenger.” In an emergency, ABPs are the ones they call upon for help. Flight attendants are trained to identify ABPs as they board and to keep track of where they are on the plane. ABPs are typically solo travelers. They’re alert, healthy, and physically fit. They’re often wearing clothing that suggests some kind of military, law enforcement, or firefighter training. They’re likely to be in the top 10 percent on John Leach’s 10–80–10 scale.

She’s crunched the numbers on who gets out alive and who doesn’t. When I ask her the bottom line—who survives?—her answer is blunt: “Young, slender men.” Agility and strength make the biggest difference when you’re trying to wriggle through airplane wreckage or slip through a twenty-inch-wide emergency exit.

For instance, most passengers believe you can survive an hour without an oxygen mask after a plane decompresses at high altitude. In fact, you’ve got only a few seconds. They also believe you’ve got thirty minutes to flee a burning plane. In reality, as you’re about to see, you’ve got only ninety seconds... That’s all. Ninety. Any longer and a fire could burn through the aluminum skin of the plane and the cabin temperature will soar to more than two thousand degrees. Soon after, a flashover fire will consume everything. In just ninety seconds, the cabin turns into an inferno. That’s less than the time it probably took to read this page.

You should never drink a beer or a martini before getting on a plane. You should never pop a sleeping pill before flying. You shouldn’t nap or listen to your iPod when you’re rolling down the runway. And you definitely shouldn’t wait for the thud of landing to wake up.
-The Survivors Club

In Part 2, there will be more on situational awareness, and I'll discuss one of the hardest things to be prepared for.

*Just as a quick disclaimer, you can look at the idea of "Zombie Apocalypse" to mean some type of catastrophic, world-altering disaster, in which most infrastructure breaks down. It's easier to think of a "zombie," than it is to imagine that your fellow human has entered a state of survival such that they would be willing to kill you without remorse.

The Obvious Answer

It's been a while since I've written. I've been pretty busy.

Busy doing what?

Not blogging.

And that leads us into this post.

We've probably all heard the joke "Why did the chicken cross the road, " and it's answer "To get to the other side." However, most of us don't understand why that joke is actually funny. In fact, to most of us, it's not. And it's great that people try to make up funny endings to it, but that's really missing the point.

"To get to the other side." We know this. It's inherent in the idea of crossing the road, but it doesn't answer why. This joke is designed to poke fun at those answers that don't actually answer the question proposed. The answer is in no way false, but it demonstrates no knowledge of motivation or cause for the action. Ponder this example:

• "Why did he kill the guy?" "He wanted him dead."
• "Why aren't we making a profit?" "Our income is less than our expenses."
• "Why is this here." "I put it there."

A funny thing I like to do, is give this obvious answer when someone asks me a question, but ONLY if I can immediately follow it up with the actual answer. Otherwise, it's just mean spirited and ignorant, and silence would have been a more appropriate answer.

I was reminded about this during a discussion with my sensei about "Mushin no shin" or "Mind without mind." At some point in your martial arts training, if you're serious about training, this idea will present itself. From Wikipedia:

Mushin is achieved when a person's mind is free from thoughts of anger, fear, or ego during combat or everyday life. There is an absence of discursive thought and judgment, so the person is totally free to act and react towards an opponent without hesitation and without disturbance from such thoughts. At this point, a person relies not on what they think should be the next move, but what is their trained natural reaction or what is felt intuitively. It is not a state of relaxed, near-sleepfulness, however. The mind could be said to be working at a very high speed, but with no intentions, plans or direction. In analogy a clear mind is compared to a still pond, which is able to clearly reflect the moon and trees. But just as waves in the pond will distort the picture of reality, so will the thoughts we hold onto disrupt the true perception of reality.

However, at the same time, you're probably going to ask someone the question, "How will I know when I've attained mushin?"

And some jerk will give you the obvious answer, "If you're thinking about it, you probably don't have it."

Guess what.

They don't have it either.

Why are You Panicking?

"Hitchhiker, grab your towel and don't panic!"
-The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Before "Hurricane" Irene hit NYC, people seemed to lose their minds. Two days before the hurricane happened to be my grocery day. I saw people in BJ's with 2 full carts of food. It was like they were preparing for the end of the world. If the disaster is bad enough to warrant that much stuff, you may want to just avoid the disaster entirely (like those areas that were evacuated).

The question is, what made people panic like that? What caused people to hoard batteries and flashlights like we were going to be plunged into 10 years of darkness? Why did people who feared the idea of losing power also purchase lots of meat, especially if they would not have any refrigeration?

How people react is affected by what information they are presented with, and the manner in which the information is presented. In the case of the hurricane, the information was presented like NYC was going to crumble. It also didn't help that the media piggybacked it with the "earthquake" from earlier in the week.

A example of this presentation issue can be seen elsewhere. In The Survivor's Club, the author looked at airline flights, and why people seemed to see air travel as dangerous.

He started out by asking: Why do people perceive the danger to be so great? Barnett studied the front page of The New York Times and found the answer. Page-one coverage of airplane accidents was sixty times greater than reporting on HIV/AIDS; fifteen hundred times greater than auto hazards; and six thousand times greater than cancer, the second leading killer in America after heart disease.

What are my chances of dying on my next flight? In the aviation safety field, it’s known as Q: death risk per randomly chosen flight. Analyzing all the data from the last ten years, here’s Barnett’s bottom line: When you get on your next domestic flight, your chance of being killed—your Q—is one in sixty million. That means you could fly every day for the next 164,000 years before you would perish in a crash.

Even if you somehow ended up in a plane crash—a remarkably unlikely if—your chances of dying are still unbelievably small. Believe it or not, the survival rate in plane crashes is 95.7 percent. Yes, 95.7. More precisely, the National Transportation Safety Board analyzed all the airplane accidents between 1983 and 2000. Some 53,487 people were involved in those incidents, and 51,207 survived. Hence, the survival rate of 95.7.

The front page appears to tell us what is important, and we've started looking at the 24-hour news cycle as our way of staying "informed." The problem is, we rarely do any evaluation on our own, taking everything at face value. This is worsened by the fact that the papers and news channels present their information in order to catch viewers and hold them. Information presentation is a competition, and the real losers are people who don't do independent research or look to multiple sources.

What is the goal of training?

Standing around thinking to myself about some idea on martial arts, I've came up with the hypothesis that the goal of training is to be able to consistently mitigate and/or reproduce the effects of luck in a confrontation. Those two terms seem contradictory, but let me explain, since it's really a matter of perspective.

Put two untrained individuals in a fight and let them slug it out. Most likely, you will see wild swings, some weak kicks, probably some biting, and most likely it will end with one person too tired/hurt to continue, or a luck hit that ends the fight. Targeting will probably be terrible: punches that hit the chest, hooking punches that go to far and make the forearm hit, etc. In this case, the luck is your opponent not being able to continue or you landing the strike that ends the fight.

Let's focus on the strike. Wild swings can be very ineffective. Punch someone in the pectoral and you're not going to get much of a reaction out of them, unless you know koshijutsu and understand where to hit (this is one of my favorite ways of screwing with my friends). Similar for strikes to the skull, especially if you hit with the wrong part of your hand. However, a properly aligned strike to a proper part of the jaw can cause a knockout, and one to the nose can incapicitate.

So you take the wild swinger and train them in some form of punching, like boxing. By teaching them how to strike and where to hit, you increase their chances of reproducing that hit that will damage their opponent. They train to the point where they can reproduce the technique on command. Now, as MMA has shown us, there's no guarantee to the hit knocking the person out every time. However, if when the person started, it was a 1 in 50 chance, training has reduced that to maybe a 1 in 5 chance. So, that's the reproduction of luck.

From a defender standpoint, you are attempting to mitigate their luck. If someone is punching you, you are attempting to lower their chance of hurting you.

However, this is really just a reproduction of luck all over again. Assume the attacker has some level of skill, and throws a punch. If our untrained defender happens to get out of the way, that was luck. If the attacker knows what they are doing, the defender will eventually be beaten up, yet somewhere in there, the defender will be lucky enough to avoid some punches, and maybe get a lucky, fight-ending punch in there.

Training is to reproduce this. Instead of getting hit 50 times in a fight, training to reproduce a valid defense may reduce this to 5, with the hopes of it being zero (although that may just be another level of luck). In fact, good training should give the defender the ability to have some control over the fight such that they do not find themselves in range of so many punches to begin with.

Stick to the plan

Maybe it's the fact that I was in the Army. Maybe it's the fact that I hate things going wrong. Whatever it is, I like plans. Just the basic idea of having some insight into what we are doing.

Now, I'm not a planning freak. I learned long ago that you really can't plan everything out perfectly. This is especially true when it comes to dating. Rarely will you pull off a perfectly planned date, without needing to adapt some things.

However, I do like the idea of having some starting and reference points. You know, "Meet here, at this time." At least then, when stuff falls apart, no one is swinging in the breeze.

Strangely, even this can be too much for some. Nothing like walking into a bar where you are supposed to meet, getting a beer, and 10 minutes later, right after you text that you are at the location, you get a text telling you that they decided to meet somewhere else.

An eye for fighting

"Shall I tell you the difference between you and I? Level. It's like the story of the monkey trying to capture the moon. No matter how he struggles, it's just the moon's reflection on the water he sees. So he only sinks into the water. Time after time, he sinks. Your fangs will never reach me."

Ok, so this post is going to get a little nerdy, and reference some anime/manga (like the above quote from Bleach). This past Sunday, I attended a seminar that included Jujitsu and Kali. The Jujitsu stuff was pretty straight forward for me, due to previous training. However, there was something about the Kali instruction, as well as my own training.

It reminded me of an episode of Naruto. Long story short, one of the characters has the ability to see and copy or dissect someone else's techniques. The problem in this episode is that he runs into an opponent whose taijutsu (unarmed techniques) is so much better and faster, that even though he can see the technique, there is no way for him to physically counter, because his body's not fast enough.

Now, when you first start training in just about anything, you're pretty much going through so much sensory overload, that even the simplest maneuvers are hard to completely grasp. I mean, you have to deal with your feet, hands, and balance, and your opponents feet, hands, and balance, and the intricacies of where both exist in space and time at any given moment of the technique. During this phase, it's funny to watch white belts.

However, as you get better, you can see the techniques a lot easier, and you can duplicate them fairly easily. There's a lot less "brain" involved. You feet will do what they have to do, and you can naturally position all of the other parts.

While I was at the seminar, Datu Rich Acosta (7th degree Black Belt), demonstrated a number of techniques with the Escrima, but then showed how they directly translated to unarmed fighting. The thing is, he was EXTREMELY fast when it came to the unarmed parts. I definitely couldn't fully catch is hand movements when I saw the techniques. Even as I was able to catch on what was happening, the next thing becomes actually knowing how to react to it. For something that fast, you can't "think". Training will attempt to mitigate the need to figure out what's happening, by using all of your sensory inputs, especially touch, to know what is coming next.

The second issue, though, is disparity in skill.

Now, there's a series of disparities between myself and Leo, who is my current instructor. I started training around 14 years ago, but due to the military, there was a long period where I didn't advance in my training. Meanwhile, Leo has been training for the past 25 years or so. I can completely see what he does, but my ability to stop it (and some of my ability to completely replicate it) isn't there. Interestingly enough, it creates a moving bar for my standard of achievement.