Monthly Archives: October 2011
He’s not from Austin
Sheriff Chuck Wright opened his news conference by saying, “Our form of justice is not making it,” and he said, “I’m really aggravated.”
He said, “Carry a concealed weapon. That’ll fix it.”
[...]
He encouraged women to walk in groups, and he ended by saying again, “I want you to get a concealed weapons permit. Don’t get Mace. Get a firearm.”
Yeah, there are more gun owners in Austin than you might think… but Austin’s Police Chief, Art Acevedo? You’d never hear him say something like that.
Chief? I’d love you to prove me wrong.
More bitter clingers
As a follow up to the jackass CHL instructor story, Karl sent me this editorial from The Washington Times.
By comparison, Gallup found the number of Democrats willing to come out and admit to having a sidearm jumped 8 points from 32 percent to 40 percent. Since Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the ranks of gun-toting women swelled by 10 points to 43 percent.
[...]
There are now more Democrats with guns than there are liberals who want to take them away.
Mr. Keller is welcome to hold his opinion, no matter how based in ignorance it is. Facts are difficult to argue against, and in the face of them he’s not doing much to help things.
2011-10-31 workout
“Week 2″
- 3 reps – Squat (working max: 240#)
- 2x5x45 (warmup)
- 1x5x95
- 1x5x120
- 1x3x145
- 1x3x170 (work)
- 1x3x195
- 1x5x220
- Asst. #1 – Squat
- 5 x 10 x 95
- Asst. #2 – Leg Curl
- 5 x 10 x 60
- Metcon – jump rope
- 1 Tabata set – all single hop
Today was interesting. If you follow along, I’ve been having mental blockades about squatting for whatever reason. I’ve been trying to overcome it, but it’s been a struggle. Well, today I may have had a breakthrough.
I turned off my brain.
This is something I already know, to just quiet down the brain. Just do it. Squat or squat not. See, I spend so much time trying to deal with my hatred of squatting, my fears, my hangups, whatever they are. Then, I create this big internal dialogue to counter it. All these cues and phrases to psyche myself up, to not suck, whatever. Well, all that’s doing is creating way too much chatter in my head, plus it’s fake. It’s not real psyching up, it’s just trying to lie to myself to counter all the negative thinking. So in the end, it’s really just reinforcing the negative and so things continue to fail.
Today, for various reasons, I didn’t have a chance to talk to myself much about anything. I just had to squat. I put the 170# on and it actually felt good. Strong. I had surprised myself at how good it felt. 195 felt fine too. So I strapped on 220 and sure it felt heavy, but I just kept going. The problem tho was that my brain was going… I was focused on my surprise about how not focusing on anything seemed to be helping, but then of course I was focusing on something, and it was just too much internal dialogue and not enough focus on squatting. But it was a happy feeling, not a “fuck, I suck” feeling. So all good.
So, I just need to get a little less psyched and a little more “zen” about things. Just quiet the brain, empty the head, and move the weight. If I say anything, it should only be small cues to remind myself about something, e.g. “tight” or “chin up” or whatever. Because I either can move the weight, or I can’t. The brain will affect if I can or not, so just take it out of the equation.
Things felt alright then. When I look back at last cycle, my “week 3″ was 1x4x220, so I beat that by 1 rep. I actually think I could have gotten 6 if my brain wasn’t so giddy. So strength is improving, form is improving, and mental game is improving. Peace. Peace. Peace.
As for assistance work, just all good. Keep steady here, and I’ll bump the weights during deload week.
On rope jumping, I started out trying to run in place, but I’d trip up about 2 hops into it. A combo of leg muscle exhaustion and that tendon in my left ankle being jammed out of place. So I stopped after a few flubs, why reinforce bad form, and just did normal two-foot hops. I spun the rope at a fast pace tho.
All in all, I’ll take this as a good day, as hopefully a breakthrough in my mental approach. We’ll see how it leads me into next week, being “week 3″.
Dear parents at the next table…
Dear Parents at the Next Table at Freebirds last night:
This is a restaurant, not track and field. Your child needs to sit in their chair, not run laps around the place. And no, telling your child “You have to ask the Manager if you can run around” is not an acceptable way to quell their running about.
When the child refuses to ask the Manager and instead asks if they can go outside with younger sibling in tow to continue running about… please don’t be surprised if I question your judgment in not just letting your sub-6-year-old children out of your sight, but also in letting the children play in the parking lot.
I will say I was happy to see Dad finally get up to go mind the children, but it took the “older” child coming back into the restaurant and hollering that his sibling went into a store down the strip. I know a way to have prevented this, but if I told you you’d just think I was being an asshole questioning your parenting skills. Well yes… yes I am.
Note as well, this dining establishment does not have busboys; you are expected to clean up after yourself. Yes, that means when your infant makes an unholy mess on the floor, YOU need to clean it up. I expect a 6-9 month old baby to make a mess when they eat because that’s what they do and cannot be expected to know better. But you appear to be a 20-somthing “adult” and I expect you to know better. Apparently I expect too much.
And then you wonder why people don’t like (your) children. Really, it has little to do with the children… it has everything to do with their parents.
Range Observations
Let’s try “Range Observations” as a title for these things. And since there’ll be a bunch of them, how to delinate them? Well, I’ll figure it out.
I spent the morning at KR Training helping with Defensive Pistol Skills 2. But, I left after that. The plan was to be there all day helping with all 3 classes but I was able to leave early because 1. some students dropped at the last minute so headcount was down 2. we had some additional helpers show up that I didn’t originally expect to see, so 3. that made the ratios a little better and things able to be handled so… I was able to come home early and tend to other important family matters. So, thank you to Karl, John, Tom, Brian, and Steve for letting me bail early.
Anyways….
So what did I see in DPS2?
First, I’m still pleased as punch to see a few more women showing up for more advanced training, especially gunfighting-type training. Saw some come in for the Force-on-Force scenarios as well, which is great!
Second, to all the students in class? Of course, practice the things we taught in class, like malfunction clearing, reloads, scanning, use of cover/concealment… all that good stuff. But more than that? Continue to work on your fundamentals: trigger control, sight alignment (and remembering to USE the sights, don’t just throw the gun out there and spray and pray), presentation, all that good and fundamental stuff. Slow down, work to get good hits. Remember: unacceptable hits are just that: unacceptable. I’d rather you be a half second slower and get acceptable hits, because in the long run you’ll be faster.
The fundamentals will always be where it’s at. Work on the new stuff, it’s important, but always focus on the fundamentals and devote time to constant improvement of those.
And don’t forget…. SCAN! SCAN! SCAN!
The Mind of a Police Dog
Sasha never ceases to amaze me. She’s an incredibly smart dog and certainly picks up on many things we feeble humans miss.
One thing about her that gets me is her sniffer. She’s got quite a nose, which is apparently fairly standard for the Kuvasz breed. They’ve been used for tracking… and yeah, I’ve wondered how well we could develop this. Of course, I tend to think about that when it comes to game tracking… easier to find that hog or deer that got shot and ran off into the thick brush at sundown. 
But one thing a Kuvasz is not acceptable for is police work, because they’re just of a different temperament and not really suited for what that work requires.
So when I came across this article about The Mind of a Police Dog, it was fascinating… and shattered some widely held notions about police dogs and their ability to sniff things out.
Several studies and tests have shown that drug-sniffing dogs, scent hounds, and even explosive-detecting dogs are not nearly as accurate as they have been portrayed in court. A recent Chicago Tribunesurvey of traffic stops by suburban police departments from 2007 to 2009, for example, found that searches turned up contraband in just 44 percent of the cases where police dogs alerted to the presence of narcotics.
[...]
[Researchers] asked 18 professional dog handlers and their mutts to complete two sets of four brief searches. …. What the handlers were not told was that two of the targets contained decoy scents, in the form of unwrapped, hidden sausages, to encourage the dogs’ interest in a false location. Moreover, none of the search areas contained the scents of either drugs or explosives. Any “detections” made by the teams thus had to be false. ….
The results? Dog/handler teams correctly completed a search with no alerts in just 21 of the 144 walk-throughs. The other 123 searches produced an astounding 225 alerts, every one of them false. Even more interesting, the search points designed to trick the handlers (marked by the red slips of paper) were about twice as likely to trigger false alerts as the search points designed to trick the dogs (by luring them with sausages).
[...]
The dogs who failed Lit’s scent tests did not lose their sense of smell. But in the process of domesticating dogs, we have bred into them a trait that tends to trump most others: a desire to please us—and toward that end, an ability to read us and a tendency to rely on us to help them solve their problems. Any training program that does not take this tendency into account will produce dogs who frequently issue false alerts.
Interesting, but not necessarily surprising once you think about it.
So much of the training work we do with Sasha is ultimately based upon that want to please us. As well, there’s so much involved in reading us. The relaxation techniques we use with her? It’s all her cuing off us. We are alpha, we are leader, we are the ones in control, and so… it’s all cues from us.
It just has a lot of grander implications, say for criminal matters. Read the full article; it’s food for thought.
Why can’t he be a jackass?
Apparently there’s a CHL instructor here in Texas that doesn’t want everyone’s business:
“If you are a socialist liberal and or voted for the current campaigner in chief, please do not take this class. You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as under the law.”
The ad continues, going on to say,”If you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class with no shame; I am Crockett Keller, thank you and God bless America.”
Of course, a lot of people have their panties in a bunch over this.
What I’m wanting to understand is… why is this a problem?
Why can’t this man conduct himself as he wishes? Why can’t this man conduct his business as he wishes?
He’s not hurting anyone, he’s not depriving anyone of anything. There are lots of CHL Instructors in Texas (I’m one), so take your business elsewhere. That’s one of those wonderful little things we like to call “freedom” in this country. He’s free to act as he wishes, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. You’re free to not associate with him if you don’t like him and what he’s doing.
The thing is folks, if someone wishes to behave like a jackass, why should we stop them? They will reap what they sow; karma is real; how ever you want to look at it. You know the saying… “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt”? Well… when they open their mouth, at least then we know who the fools are and can (re)act accordingly.
As for DPS well… one can argue that being a DPS-certified Instructor, he reflects upon all CHL Instructors and DPS and the Texas CHL program. As the article notes, DPS is going to look into this. DPS has every right, authority, and responsibility to maintain the CHL program, and if revoking his instructor license is deemed proper, then so be it. Mr. Keller can still run his private business as he sees fit, but the state doesn’t have to associate nor condone it.
I don’t share Mr. Keller’s line of reasoning; I understand where he’s coming from, but I do not agree with him. Note, there are NRA/TSRA A-rated Democrats. As well, someone hell-bent on killing you isn’t going to seek a CHL. However, if we truly believe in freedom then yes, you need to let the man conduct himself as he is. He’s not hurting anyone, depriving anyone, abridging anyone (except perhaps himself). All he has is what some might call an unpopular opinion, and he’s willing to stand up for his beliefs. You “Freedom of Speech” lovers must remember that 1A is about protecting unpopular speech. As Evelyn Hall said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Do you believe in freedom? Or don’t you?
2011-10-28 workout
Exhausted!
“Week 2″
- 3 reps – Bench Press (working max: 205#)
- 2x5x45 (warmup)
- 1x5x85
- 1x5x105
- 1x3x125
- 1x3x145 (work)
- 1x3x165
- 1x9x185
- Asst. #1 – Bench Press
- 5 x 10 x 115
- Asst. #2 – 1 arm dumbbell rows
- 5 x 10 x 45
- Metcon – jump rope
- 1 Tabata set – all single hop… sorta
Today was cool. Bench press felt very good, all up until the last set. I’ve been trying to refine my form, especially using the cue “tight” to keep my entire body tight from the floor/feet up through my whole body. I was doing fairly well all throughout until the last work set when things went to pot. I was probably focused more on moving the weight for many reps, which is OK in that case, but I would find myself lowering the weight and the body got loose, I’d start to press and remember to tighten up, which would maybe have the foot drive but the torso would be loose, then I’d tighten the torso and the legs would loosen so I’d tighten that again and then the butt would come off the bench… just all over. Not good for form.
Nevertheless, cranked out 9 reps with 185, which is alright. Last bench workout was 1x12x175 and “week 3″ last cycle was 1x6x190. So, I’m doing just fine and should kick it out of the park next bench session @ 195#. 200+ here I am.
I forced myself into strict form on the assistance bench, and especially noted that I wasn’t going to full lock-out… I’d go like 98% because I was focused on powering through the reps at a fairly rapid and explosive pace, so I was clipping the lockout. Fixed that. I’ll stick with 115 for next week and go 120 on deload week.
Rows went alright, but I felt like I was peeding out faster than last workout. Not sure why. Stick with 45, go 50 deload.
Then on the jump rope. I started out just working on the running in place technique and it actually went pretty well. So after doing that a few times I figured why not just start the set with that and see how far I get. I got through 1 proper reps (in addition to all the other I did just to practice) and felt that was enough because I was starting to trip up too much, so then I did 3 reps of the double-leg hop… and that was all I could muster. I was just truly out of gas. Go fig. I do like the running in place tho… it’s FAR more intense work. I’m just going to keep this up for a while… do a few to kinda warm up the CNS to the movement, then just kick into the set and do the run in place as much as I can and once the coordination falters finish out the set with double-leg hops but moving the rope at the same pace.
All in all, not a bad workout. Some good, some bad. But progress in general.
Why I carry on both sides
Via Unc, a discussion of carrying a folding knife on the weak-hand side.
He lists very good reasons for carrying that way, but I say why limit yourself to one side or the other?
Carry both.
I carry two Spyderco Delicas, one clipped inside of each front pants pocket. They are set up in the same way, tip-up carry, clip on the same side. Not sure how to describe which side and orientation the clip has, so here’s a picture:
Of course, the only picture I have doesn’t show the clips but…they are on the other side of the body, with the clip fastened to the bottom end…. so when closed, the blade tip and clip “screws” meet. Allows tip-up carry. You can figure it out.
And then, one into each pocket.
What this allows is access to a blade by either hand, either side. And to work the knife is consistent for each hand. So if the right hand gets the knife on the right side, it’s a simple motion to open the knife. If the right hand reaches for the left knife, the orientation remains the same and opens the same. The left hand only requires a small rotation of the knife in the hand, but it’s the same rotation regardless of knife.
This way, I have no limits. Any hand, any side, any blade.
For those that carry only one knife on one side (either side), what if you can’t get to that side when you need your knife? What will you do?
You can also argue the “2 is 1, 1 is none” angle. Of course, I have 3 if you count the Leatherman.
To me, these are useful everyday tools. Heck, I used my Leatherman Wave’s wire cutters a few days ago to trim a couple stray branches off our barbados cherry bushes where they were overhanging into the sidewalk. I use the Delica’s every day for things like opening letters. I know some say if it’s a knife for fighting you shouldn’t use it, keep it clean, sharp, ready. I say, I can clean and sharpen my knife, and every time I take the knife out to use it to open a letter that’s another repetition at drawing and opening to keep me in practice.
To carry two comes from Insights Training Center and their Defensive Folding Knife class.
