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6.14.17

So I'm mowing the lawn one day and this thought comes into my head:

"The trouble is that liberals are pantywaists, and nobody ever calls a pantywaist when they have a problem they need to solve."

Still trying to find a good place to use it.

(In the meantime I'll just store it here in my secret diary where no one ever looks.)

I still have no idea what I was trying to say with all that malarkey on violence. I think maybe I was trying to investigate the word as a storage place for a mental state. Violence. Everyone knows what the word means. But I want to expand it beyond the action or activity into a spiritual state.

So I have a word that I was trying to attach a concept to. And I'm left with a concept that I'm still trying to attach a word to.

What I came up with was "killer instinct" as a working title, with all kinds of orbiting words like confidence, guts, spunk . . .

Here's another word: Mean.

That seems to work just as well as any foot that I've tried the slipper on.

You know people who are mean. They may not necessarily be big or skilled (but they could be), but they just don't have qualms about hurting people. In fact, mean people often like hurting people. These are the people who will get back at you. You play a prank on them and they will escalate it. They don't care. If you escalate back they escalate more.

Mean.

I used to work with a guy from Nairobi. He was an accomplished, intelligent guy with a good English vocabulary and syntax.

When he was writing.

His e-mails were better crafted and more grammatically correct than most of the native English speakers in the company. But his accent was so thick you could barely understand the man (he could have worked in a call center). The guy who shared an office with him would sometimes interpret for him in meetings. John, I'm just going to call him John, would make a point and everyone would take a second to try to figure out what he was saying, then if they couldn't they'd look at Joseph (I'm going to call his office mate Joseph). Joseph would say "He wonders if we're going to send someone out to monitor the field test."

One of "John's" tricks was to come to a conclusion, then when someone (typically the boss) would dispute that he would object that he was misunderstood and the boss's conclusion was exactly what he was saying.

John: "But if we make more of them they will each cost more money."

Boss: "What? No they won't. The volume discounts will make them cheaper!"

John: "Das waham sein!"

So . . . last post I said that that killer instinct quality—whatever we're naming it—was typically the deciding factor in a fight.

You know that's not always the case. You've seen it go the other way.

Me: Killer instinct always prevails.

You: What? No it doesn't!

Me: Dat's what ahm sayin!

You've seen the video of the big crazed black guy, enraged, his girlfriend in the purple hot pants trying to hold him back. She tears his shirt off trying to hold him. He crosses the street with that walk, you know, that walk? A swagger. And you know what's coming. A skinny white guy is about to get slaughtered.

The big mean guy never lands a strike. The skinny white guy uses his skills to deliver a roundhouse to the head that knocks the mean guy out.

Which is exactly how it should be.

There's nothing more satisfying than a mean guy getting decidedly put in his place.

In a society operating in a stable control loop—call it a Darwinian society—the mean guys, the uncivilized elements, would lose more often than not. Much more often.

As I think about it I wonder if what I was trying to say is the exact opposite of what I actually said.

I kind of came across as saying don't bother building skills or fitness. Be mean. Be violent. That's the way to win.

That's not what I want; that's not what society wants. Violence makes me sick. It's not fun, it's not glamorous, it's not the world we want to live in.

I was more advocating for the good guys to be in a position to win. Whether they are able to tap into that "violence" in their spirit (mean, confidence, guts . . .) or through skills or fitness or overwhelming asymmetric force.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck

(I wish I could take credit for that quote)

So we're discussing what factors determine the outcome when a violent confrontation happens. That's like discussing what to pack for a trip when you're already on the road,

When you get to the point where those elements have to come into play, that's the problem. What needs to happen is a change in society so people don't have a propensity for violence.

Well, I know, that's never going to happen, and even if it were to happen, in the meantime you've got to beat up bad guys. But you know what I mean. When you get to a good guy and a bad guy face to face there have already been several breakdowns that have taken place.

The point that I was making with all that verbiage was there has to be more good guys with power than bad guys with power. A lot more.

That's all.

Actually you probably didn't watch that karate kick knockout video I referenced, because you're not violent. You don't enjoy disgusting things like that.

I'm not violent. Those videos make me sick. Which is why I did watch it. I am deeply concerned that we live in a world where we are going to be more touched by violence, and I'd like to figure out how to prevent the sociopaths that are comfortable in that world from affecting my family.

It's like the Rush Limbaughs of the world say about left-wing news shows: I watch them so you don't have to.

Second, it occurred to me that I said disparaging things about the black guy in the video that I happened to pick to reference. Sorry, maybe my whiteness caused him to be enraged and violent and be the bad guy.

Since you're reading this you probably didn't notice. If you had noticed that I racististically said a black guy did something bad, you wouldn't have read this far. You would right now be posting to all the left wing kook sites about how your whacked out world view is validated and all is well and you're open minded and I'm a racist and that makes you happy.

Not happy enough to venture into the neighborhood where those fights happen, I'll bet.

If you're all excited about your open mind you could go on YouTube and search street fights, then come up with a percentage for me on how many of those videos star black street fighters. I honestly don't know what that number is.

Who knows? Maybe people in black neighborhoods have more cell phones. Maybe the racists at YouTube delete videos of white street fights.

Bill Cosby (before he was in the news for the wrong reasons) talked to the black community about that very thing. If you want jobs and respect you might try pulling up your pants and not talking like mongoloid idiots.

This is the exact same thing I was talking about. If you don't want people coming to the conclusion that you're a certain way you might consider not being that way.

Irony: If I don't want to be called racist, maybe I should find a video of a white bad guy getting his just desserts. "If." Maybe I like playing wild weasel to get the SAM sites to reveal themselves.

But who determines who is the good guy and who is the bad guy?

Short answer: I do.

Ha hah. That's funny. But, no, seriously . . .

Longer answer: People who intentionally hurt people are bad guys.

A co-worker came into my office one day, I'm just going to call him "Joe." While we were talking I got an e-mail. I glanced at it and told "Joe" it was my lucky day! Someone needed my bank account information so he could deposit a bunch of money for me.

Then I accidentally hit the sequence of keystrokes that permanently deleted the mail and blocked any future mails from that domain. Darn.

As I turned back to "Joe" I said "I hate evil people."

Then "Joe said "Well, aren't we all evil?"

I laughed out loud.

Poor "Joe." He was all caught up in the deep philosophy of flawed human nature and the fluidity of morals. And I laugh at him.

Academic self-loathing works great at 2:00 am in your dorm room when you're having a BS session with your little beret-wearing roommates and putting your cigarettes out in the carpet. But in the real world evil isn't academic. In the real world bad guys have to be beaten down so that good guys aren't.

Oh, here's where the quote I came up with would fit:

"The trouble is that liberals are pantywaists, and no one calls a pantywaist when there's a problem to be solved."

Pontificating about "Well, aren't we all evil?" smacks of Zeno's dichotomy paradox.

Suppose Homer wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.

This requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility.

That's the philosophical description of it. I believe the engineering description is: Bullcrap.

So here's a shorter longer answer: Go screw yourself. You see a couple walking down the street and someone jumps out and punches the woman and knocks her out. If you can't call somebody a bad guy in that scenario, you might be part of the problem.

Now run along and discuss all that in your safe space and leave the grown ups to run things out here.

As some of my imaginary readers know, I sometimes like to make up stories. These are entirely fictitious, just pulled out of my imagination without any reference whatsoever to people that I might work with. If you've ever read them you'd see that it's obvious—no real humans would ever behave in the ways my active imagination makes these fantasy characters do.

---

Frank got it, he really did. When you work on the road you feel a little displaced. Brady Hampton worked for Teknolix, but he didn't have an office—he had a truck. During the time that everyone else spent at work looking forward to going home, Brady spent driving around looking forward to going to a hotel. Brady referred to his wife as a Teknolix widow.

What that meant in Frank's life was that when Brady called it was never a quick conversation.

That morning was a typical call.

"Frank? Brady."

"Hey, Brady, how's it going?"

"Good. Say, I'm calling about the parts for Industrial Specialties. Did those get done?"

Frank reiterated what he'd told Brady in the e-mail the day before, the parts themselves were done but the bolts for them had been delayed on the vendor's end. They would be shipped Monday.

"So, they're going out Monday?" Brady asked.

"Yep. The bolts came in this morning, but shipping and receiving isn't in on Friday. So they'll go out Monday."

"Okay," Brady said, "So the parts are leaving there on Monday."

Frank reaffirmed that that was the case.

"Well, I guess that's all I needed to know."

"Okay, well, I'll talk to you . . ." Frank started.

"So, Monday, then."

"That's right."

"'Cause Don out at I.S. wanted to install them by next weekend," Brady said.

At this point Frank put his phone on his desk and put it on speaker. He looked around for his Bluetooth headset. "Yeah, they'll be there for sure by the weekend," he said as he turned back to the design on his computer.

Five minutes later Brady had explained that Don was the foreman, but the equipment manager Wade really called the shots, and Brady had seen that dynamic play out in more than one company, but Wade understood the business and Don was better with people and if the parts left on Monday they should be there in plenty of time for the installation, 'cause Industrial Specialties was a good company and we wanted to keep them happy.

"Yeah," Frank agreed, they had been a good customer.

Frank really didn't mind those calls. The thing was that Brady had some good ideas and insights, and the view from the field was vital to the work that got done back at the plant. Brady could talk, Frank would multi-task, and the cosmos stayed in balance.

"So . . . they'll ship out on Monday," Brady clarified.

"Monday," Frank reaffirmed.

"Well, that's all I needed to know," Brady repeated.

Frank didn't try telling Brady okay, bye, he'd talk to him later. He scowled at the way the design software had regenerated the contour on the part on his screen.

"Well . . ." Brady said. Frank wondered if he was about to hear more insights into the personalities of construction foremen. But Brady was done. "I'll let you go, and I'll look for those parts."

"See you."

 

A few minutes later Brandon poked his head in the office. "I'm a jerk," he said.

"What?" Frank asked.

"I heard you on the phone with Brady. He tried calling me first and I sent him to voicemail."

 

Two days later Carson came in Frank's office. He was carrying his phone and it was on speaker. From the phone Frank could hear Brady's voice.

"Brady? Brady, hang on a second," Carson said. "I'm here with Frank, tell him what you were telling me."

"Yeah," Brady said, "So the hardfacing costs us, what? Ten bucks?"

"It's six," Frank said, "But you have to add shipping onto that."

"Well, so let's say, whatever, eight bucks, but we charge a margin, and the dealer does, too. Point is, I wonder if we shouldn't offer the part without it."

"But Brady," Carson interrupted, "You have to remember that it doubles the life of the part." Hardfacing was a super-hard coating that was applied to parts to prevent wear. Not all products had it or needed it, but the Hyper-Median pick was a different configuration and didn't do well without it.

"I know. I know," Brady said, "I'm just saying, I wonder if it wouldn't do to run a test to see if . . ."

Carson put the phone on mute. To Frank he said "None of those parts without hardfacing have lasted at all. I don't think they'll work. What do you think?"

Frank agreed that they didn't do as well in the standard applications.

"So you don't think we need to run a test without hardfacing?"

"I guess I don't really see the point," Frank said.

"Well, I want you to tell Brady that." Carson took the phone off mute.

When Brady finished making his case Carson repeated that in their experience the non-hardfaced parts didn't work. He looked over at Frank.

Frank looked back at him. Oh.

"You know, Brady, the tests that we have run seem pretty conclusive. I don't know what more we'd learn from trying the same thing again."

"Well . . . okay, I just . . . maybe we could just bring up the possibility with Larry tomorrow in the engineering meeting."

Carson agreed that they could do that, and then wrapped up the call.

 

The next day the group assembled for the engineering meeting. Larry was sitting next to Carson at the round table. Frank walked in and took a seat across from Larry. "Do you want me to get Brady Hampton on the conference phone?" he asked.

"Yeah, in a minute. I was just telling Larry about Brady wanting to run some non-hardfaced parts," Carson said.

Frank nodded.

Carson said to Larry "Frank and I both independently told Brady that we didn't think that was a good idea."

Frank said nothing as he dialed Brady's number.

Independently, huh?

You know what always intrigues me? How stupid a lot of smart people are.

You get good grades in high school, you go to journalism school and kill it there, then get a high-paying job for some big shot newspaper . . .

So far so good.

Then Trump says "Comey better hope there were no recordings."

And you prove that for all your education you're dumber than a box of rocks. People are running around saying that Trump disclosed that there are recording devices all over the White House.

What? No, he didn't!

Crap falls out of Trump's mouth. The man is a fifth grader (apologies to the average fifth grader). He says crap. He tries to be funny. The only person dumber than the person who says that ridiculous crap is the person who tries to assign any meaning at all to it.

Trump never called for gun owners to assassinate Hillary. He never cleverly asked Russia to hack her e-mails. He opened his mouth and crap fell out.

The man is a child. His mind is putting a lot more energy into scoping out the skirts in the White House than to crafting coded messages. He is a child.

Listen, I get it. People who work for high-powered media organizations are highly accomplished. They got where they are by hard work and planning and thinking and strategizing. It is outside of their frame of reference to not do that.

Trust me. Trust me, not them. I am a loser. I don't think, I can't think, when I try to think I mess things ups. Trust me to give you insight into how the disorganized mind functions.

Accomplished people have absolutely no way to understand Trump. It's not their fault, they just aren't wired that way. You can't pick up CB chatter with an FM radio.

The trouble is, when smart people say things people accept it as fact. Then every future fact has to be based on that made up "fact."

Somebody comes up with a SWAG. Maybe they believe it, or maybe they're just throwing it out for examination—a thought experiment. But people accept is as established science and all future research and science has to fall in line with that. Ptolemy's epicycles. Global Warming/Cooling/Climate change. The idea that Hillary might be a female.

The best example is archeology. You will never hear more unadulterated bull-puckey than from an archaeological dig.

Again, maybe the guy really believes the nonsense that he's spouting, or maybe he's just saying "I have no idea, let's just throw out every theory we can think of and examine them."

I remember a program where they invented an entire religion that never existed based on a skull they found. The guy was talking about how it was obviously a wealthy villager because of his teeth, and he was obviously ritually killed because of his wealth as a sacrifice to a god that he had no basis at all for believing the society believed in. Just writing fiction as he went along.

Hey, who are we to say he's wrong? If I find a penny on the sidewalk you can't prove it's wasn't put there by a three-headed falcon who used it to mark the landing path for his entourage of falcon Guardians of the Galaxy who were supposed to follow him to the city to find a lost McGuffin.

I was just listening to an (excellent, by the way) audio book about a lost city in Honduras. In one sentence the guy cautions against speculating, then he immediately launches into this ridiculous speculation with absolutely no basis at all. Some carving looked like it might be a vulture, and the vulture might be a symbol of man's soul making a transition to a spiritual plane represented by the vulture, that, oh by the way, they probably worshipped as the centerpiece of their religion.

The carvings on a pot were of someone bound for sacrifice, or maybe for a funeral, or maybe it was a half-man half monkey deity. Really? They honestly said that. Or maybe it was a recipe for armadillo jam. Maybe it was quetzacoatl for "Please do not put trash in this urinal."

And they found containers that were broken, which obviously were ritually broken as a means of releasing the evil spirits from them.

I am not making this up.

Then we get to petroglyphs. Oh, geez. This carving represents the cycle of life from conception to ascension and this line is obviously a whatsamagiggit for the whojumuwhatsit, proving that they worshiped turtles and were transgendered.

You know what happened there. Some cave mom was at her wits' end with her kids. The brachiosaurus bone fidget spinner was broken and the old man was out hunting mastodons. "Here, take this piece of quartz and go carve pictures on that sandstone. Just get out of my hair, for crying out loud!"

I'm guessing daddy caveman was torqued when he got home. "Who carved on this wall?!"

"Really?! You try keeping track of a bunch of savages without even a written language much less a school system, and I'll go out hunting with your buddies! Pedicures aren't even going to get invented for another two thousand years!"

That's what happened there.

But that open interpretation deal works for me. Last month I rented a cabin at a campground. It had some hieroglyphic on the door, looked like maybe a dog with red circle around it and line through it. Who knows what it could mean? As I settled my dog into the cabin I acknowledged that I'm not educated enough to figure it out.

You know. That whole part under the Leany on Life header.

This is the part I can't help myself and I try to make sense of the world. I try to name concepts and tie them together.

Remember back when the guy getting beat up on United Airlines was a thing?

Back then I posted something about . . . I can't even remember and it's not worth looking up. But I said something about you were going to see everyone all of a sudden remembering they were wronged by United Airlines.

And it happened. You watched it. The most bizarre was when that woman claimed United Airlines forced her to pee in a cup.

Oh, bullcrap.

This is what I was talking about, as long as the window is open people are scrambling to get through. Right now is the time to fleece the airlines, 'cause they're scared of the bad publicity.

So there is a "This is Not That" deal here. If a company is negligent they should be held accountable. But because it's such an important concept, it makes targets of companies. I know a guy who is a very successful homebuilder. The town gossip told me he was being sued for sexual harassment. Well, that didn't sound like the guy I knew.

It turns out he was being sued for sexual harassment. But he didn't do it. He had a gold-digging secretary working for him who thought she should share in some of his money.

That story is a good vehicle for examining the concept. It's a target for abuse or hijacking because it's a big deal. If someone really is sexually harassing people they should get their ding dong whacked off. But if he's not guilty, the false accusation hurts future victims and the accuser is the horrible person. The very accusation ruins lives, but the lives of the guilty should be ruined. You remember, dear imaginary reader, my quintessential representation of this. It's the guy kneeling over a bloody body holding a knife. Well, obviously, he just stabbed the guy. But he claims he came upon the guy stabbed and was trying to help. Well, of course that's exactly what he would say if he had just stabbed the guy.

Both explanations fit the observed scene.

What is the truth? That's the difference. Is it a powerful businessman taking advantage of a lowly secretary? Or is the businessman getting scammed because he's a target for being rich and successful?

I'm still flapping my gums about the exact same thing, but I put in a break to give you a breather; to fool you into thinking that we've moved on to a fresh, new, exciting topic.

You know, like the one-page chapters in a James Patterson book.

Speaking of Patterson . . .

So some guy locally here named Patterson just killed a girl he dated a couple of times. She was running from him and got a ride with someone trying to help. The psycho rammed the car, killed her, killed her child, shot a couple of other kids, including those of the good Samaritan, and then killed himself.

Oh. Warning to my imaginary readers. Keep your imaginary kids away for that last part.

Horrible thing. Sad. Tragic. Just a waste.

Why couldn't he have just switched the order and killed himself first?

Horrific.

Wow. You just wish someone could have killed the guy before he took out actual humans with actual worth. See? It's an emotional issue. Remember what I said about emotional issues like that? (You never said there was going to be a test!)

Because it's very important and highly charged, it becomes a target for hijacking.

The radio host talking about story brought up the domestic abuse hotline. Told everyone to take advantage of the resources to prevent that in the future.

Where do I sign up for that detail? I'd love to be one of the guys who goes out and hammers on domestic abusers until they quit bleeding. See? Emotional.

So it got me to thinking. It's a great thing that the resources are there, there should be more, I wish there were enough to have prevented that tragedy (if you know about the story you know about that angle—that someone did raise a warning and nothing happened).

But I was thinking about that hotline and my twisted version of how it would work. Because a man abusing a woman is such a horrible thing—charged issue—it opens things up for abuse. So if you've got some crazy chick, and there are some crazy chicks, they could use that resource to ruin some guy's life for nothing.

Side bar: same topic but this breaks up the boring rhythm (he says to the imaginary reader who has slogged through this far).

Remember the guy who snatched up a girl from the park and a passerby saw him taking her into a motel room and called 911?

I wanted the guy killed immediately. I wanted the cops to break down the door and kill him "trying to escape."

As it turns out, so did his fiancé. See, she's the one who called him and told him to pick up her daughter and take her to the motel, and she's the one who paid the "passerby" to call 911 and get the cops over there.

I guess in the country she's from that would have saved her telling the guy she didn't want to get married 'cause the cops would have just taken him out.

You can't make this stuff up.

So let's not do it my way.

Which still leaves us with a society full of really crappy wastes of skin.

It's a variation of the Race to the Courthouse tactic.

Okay, on to what comes next, as my faithful imaginary readers know.

When you take a charged topic, and you hoax it, what do you do? You undermine the credibility of the authentic article. You've cried wolf.

You have lawyers (pardon my language) who claim to be on the lookout for the consumer. But they're not. They are using their law degree to buy a lifestyle their mediocre intelligence doesn't warrant. Their lies and misrepresentations actually hurt the people they are claiming to advocate for. Landlords are so gun shy about these scams that renters have an increasingly hard time getting into places.

The rape hoax. It hurts rape victims

Sidebar redux

So lawyers aren't in it to help people, they are in it to get rich.

Don't they incidentally help people? Isn't that how Capitalism works?

How is that different than Mitt Romney helping people by giving them jobs when the he set out to do was make money?

I have some ideas, but I'll spare you them for now.

You can thank me later.

First, who cares what a sports team thinks about politics?

So Steve Kerr doesn't want to go to the White House. Fine, stay home, just don't bore us with your views on politics.

. . . says the guy who is boring you with his views on politics . . .

Hey, you're the one sitting there in my imagination reading this slop.

And Greg Popovich. He has to tell us every time there's a microphone in his face how much he hates Trump. We don't care, we're asking about your team and your sport. Greg feels like a pall or a cloud is hanging over America. That's actually a pretty good description. It's kind of the way I feel myself.

But there's a reason Popovich is coaching some lowly NBA basketball team and not raking in the wealth and fame from writing an insightful political blog.

He's missing the entire point.

The point is that Trump is not the problem. Trump is the solution.

Trump is the invasion of white blood cells that happened in response to a disease.

You've got a fever, you've got inflammation, I know, that's miserable, it sucks. Maybe you shouldn't have done the stupid thing that got you infected.

Wow, Frank has a lot of topics to cover today.

Right? It's not all the same boring deal just broken up in sections.

This is that deal I'm always talking about where the democrats are wringing their hands over being called evil. Oh, they don't care that they are evil, but how dare you call them that! Same thing as the criminal blaming the cop because he's in prison.

Okay, so you hate Trump. That's fine, but you got Trump for a reason. You picked the road, that's where the road leads.

What you want is to choose the road then choose a different city than the road goes to. You see this manifest in a hundred different ways.

"Don't judge me!"

Oh . . . so you want to do something that casts you in a bad light, but then you want me to ignore what I know when I make assessments. Okay.

No. I get to come to logical conclusions. Maybe you'd be better off by behaving in a way that supports the conclusion you want.

Whining about Trump is the same thing as whining about bad publicity about a murderer. This is another one you see all the time.

"Don't call my son a monster!" You mean the one who [fill in the blank for the heinous crime that got him on the news]?

This is the age-old dilemma. Do you want it fast or do you want it good?

Someone says something that requires a smart-aleck retort, but it's time sensitive. In a couple of seconds nothing you say will be funny.

But if you rush it you'll say something stupid and it won't be funny anyway.

Ugh! So I've got all these notes, but I'm trying to work them out before I post them, but I'll never get them all put together so they make sense.

These are the issues you struggle with when you run a high quality blog like this. I've created a reputation I can't live up to!

Oh, geez, I slay me.

I started this when that "comedian" with the bloody severed head was still a thing, before that whackjob shot up the Congressmen practicing baseball. But it's a timeless topic. Any time you happen in here there will be something going on that makes the discussion relevant. Sadly.

Kathy Whatsergrffiname was aghast that anyone could have seen a bloody severed head as violent. She said that she's not violent and had never done anything violent.

I don't believe she's violent. Most people are not. This post has nothing to do with whatsername and the severed head. That was just a segue into the topic.

What we're talking about is anti-social behavior. It's interesting because it's foreign to most of us. We simply are not wired that way.

Think about the knockout "game" videos. Those worthless wastes of skin are not humans. What violence entails is crossing outside the confines of humanity, those boundaries where you care about how another human being feels. That's the first level of understanding it. Bad guys live in a different world than we do. They are missing the conscience chip.

I'm reading a book that claims one in 25 people are clinically sociopathic, meaning they do not have a conscience. I'd like to say I can't believe that's true, but the more experience I have with people the more inclined I am to believe it.

I feel blessed that those ratios don't hold for people in my circle of acquaintances. But in the world at large I might be persuaded that it's that high.

Violent people, or criminals in general, whether violent or not, don't care if they hurt people. That's difficult to wrap your head around.

The second element is that violent people don't care as much as we do about getting hurt—or they don't believe in the possibility as much as we do.

You're not violent, I'm not violent. Even people who hold bloody severed heads as a joke are not violent, apparently. But we certainly have violent elements in society. The trouble is that we, the portion of society that is not violent, have to try to solve that problem. We want to live in a society without violence, yet there are violent people in society? How do you deal with that?

One way that we do it is with guard dogs. We have to enlist good guys who are comfortable in that arena to combat the bad guys who are comfortable in that arena. That's the thin blue line.

And what we try to do is give the cops a marked advantage so they don't have to be violent. It's a little bit of a paradox. The more firepower you have, the less "violent" you have to be.

The average guy who wears a blue uniform to work is not a street thug or a brawler. He's going to go to his kid's little league game after work the same as you are.

So we give cops tools so they mix it up as little as possible with people who are comfortable with violence. Rather than getting in there and breaking joints and windpipes they outnumber the bad guy three to one. stand back, fire a tazer and slap on the handcuffs.

A minimum of violence.

Years ago local deranged lunatic Dell Schanze (he was wealthy enough at the time to classify as "eccentric") got into a confrontation with a bunch of tough guys who were unhappy about him speeding through their neighborhood. He ended up in front a judge because he pulled a gun on them.

He told the judge that by pulling the gun he stopped anyone from getting hurt.

Actually, that makes an awful lot of sense. (That awkward moment when your common-sense doctrine is being preached by a crazy man)

In a fight everyone gets bloody. If you avoid the fight with a preponderance of force, no one gets hurt.

(They just get sued)

So when the cops are armed heavily enough that it's not a contest, you avoid the violence. From there we branch off into how to control the situation where you have a very powerful police force.

I honestly have no idea what I was setting out to say when I started this. I think it might have been to draw a contrast between civilized society and people who are comfortable with violence. And to make the observation that sadly we are going to have to learn to become more comfortable with it in the future the way society is going.

Last month I went to a handgun training course. At the beginning of the training they asked "Why are you taking this course?"

It's interesting; I hadn't really thought about it in depth.

I found myself answering that I didn't particularly feel in danger, but I thought it was important that more good guys had guns than bad guys.

(Add that to the large and growing list of brilliant Frank Leany quotes.)

And that's it. The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun. You saw that this week in Alexandra, Va. You can argue it's not true, you might even believe it. You can also expect to get a unicorn for your birthday. But until you figure out a way to have a world without bad guys in it, believing anything different is pure fantasy.

As long as there are bad guys in the world, people are going to die. Society's job is to make sure it's the bad guys that die, not the good guys.

A punk walks into a convenience store with a gun. He has decided that someone is going to die; he has created a situation where someone is going to die.

In my view I would much rather it be the punk than the father behind the counter trying to feed his family.

The math is brutal, but it's real. Once the situation has moved into the zone where a person is going to die, the best scenario is that the punk dies. No apologies for stating that.

You can't credibly claim to love flowers if you don't hate weeds.
  - Frank Leany

I was going to sort through this and make it make sense. But you don't care. I certainly don't.

This is a compilation of stuff I posted on Quora (Dudemol) in response to questions like "What one technique can I learn in an hour to make me invincible in a street fight?"

Or something like that . . .

There are 12 things that determine the outcome of a fight between two unarmed combatants

• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Killer instinct
• Size and strength
• Trained Skills
• Luck

I should find a better way to phrase “killer instinct,” but I think you know what I mean. Some people are just willing to hurt other people and don’t freak out when they’re in the crap.

Other terms for "killer instinct:" Courage, spunk, heart, guts, confidence (maybe?) . . .

Propensity for violence.

It’s whatever the person has who will stand up for himself, even in the face of odds that seem insurmountable. Imagine the big scary guy in the bar who is bullying people. It’s whatever you have that would make you mouth off to him.

Hey, I never said it was intelligence.

It's like Yogi Berra said: "Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical."

This is the pivotal element of physical confrontation between human beings: It’s all psychological. Some people have the ability to tangle with a human being, knowing that they will be hurt and knowing they will be hurting another human being. Some people even love it. Others can’t cross that line.

That’s what makes a fighter. Period.

There are a couple of things at play here. First, society conditions us not to hurt fellow humans, even when that person is a useless punk who wants to hurt us. Second, and carrying more weight, for some reason we have a sense that if we fight back we make the bad guy fight harder. Not having those psychological burdens is “killer instinct.”

Adrenaline dump is part of it, just plain pants-filling fear is part of it, and lack of confidence is part of it. Being trained can mitigate those.

The warriors on the island of Crete are said to have had a philosophy about bravery: "The art of the hero wasn’t about being brave; it was about being so competent that bravery wasn’t an issue." It’s easy to debate academically from the comfort of our mobile device screens, but I would have to add this caveat: That competence has to include mixing it up with an opponent. The only people who are psychologically capable of fighting are those who have fought.

Interestingly, there are those who study martial arts precisely because they don’t have that un-nameable quality. Some kid is getting bullied at school. so he signs up at a McDojo so he can defend himself. Building skills does build confidence, but having skills is not the same thing as having . . . Factor X, whatever that is.

Most people can learn it, but probably not within an hour. Others can’t after years of martial arts training. That element that I’m not able to attach a name to can be learned, but I don’t think it can be taught.

And you can probably cross into that state of mind if someone you love is threatened or you are enraged enough. But more likely in the face of a conflict you’ll melt into a quivering puddle.

Preparation in techniques helps, if you have that killer instinct. Fitness helps, if you have that killer instinct. It’s mostly useless if you don’t. (‘Killer instinct’ is a charged term, used here to mean 'the ability to not freak out while you’re trying to hurt someone who is trying to hurt you.' Maybe confidence is a better term, understanding that the right combination of arrogance and ignorance can look like confidence (which, in this case, is just as useful).)

Part of the idea behind martial arts is that it requires discipline, and the common street thug doesn’t have the discipline to follow through with that accomplishment. So in a trained martial artist, in general, you should have a better human being—meaning, one who isn’t inclined to fight, but who is trained to. And, theoretically, that would mean that in a fight the good guy wins the confrontation.

That would be true if skills were the first nine things on the list, but they are not.

Killer instinct is.

Or being comfortable with violence or whatever you choose to call it.

I have no idea who Kathy Griffin or Griffith or whatever is. And I don't feel like my life is any more empty for that.

So her 15 minutes came in the form of holding a bloody severed Donald Trump head. She said she had no idea that anyone could possibly have seen that as violent.

Right?

As a faithful imaginary reader of this blog you know what's coming next. She did a bad thing. That puts her in the lower half of the . . . whatever I named my dumb matrix. So her choice now is: Did I knowingly do something bad, or can I claim stupidity?

She chose stupidity. ("Incompetent" on the graphic above)

Which isn't all that stupid, actually. What she wanted to do was to secure her bonafides as a hater of Donald Trump, a good career move given her target audience (imbeciles, 14-82 demographic). And they completely understood that she had to offer a bogus apology. This is going to be a huge bump in her career. Hey, now I've even heard of her.

Makes me think maybe I ought to look up her comedy. She's got to be pretty funny if she delivers lines like "I had NO earthly idea someone might find a severed bloody head of a US President in bad taste!"

Two more things. Her lawyer was getting all worked up and righteously indignant. "As an American citizen she has every right to express herself with whatever art she wants!"

Art? I guess it only makes sense that the lawyer of a comedian would try her hand at comedy.

But the funny thing is, she has a God-given American right to offer up the severed bloody head of an American President. But anyone who has an opinion about what she did is way out of bounds. That's how these people think. When they disagree with you, it's Freedom of Speech. When you disagree with them, that's oppression.

Thing two: You would have never heard a whisper of outrage if I weren't a woman.

I . . . it's just . . . really? I guess I should just let her comedy stand on its own.

What's that? Yeah, this is quite a pile of cartoons. Tt's been awhile since I posted them and some are ancient history.

I put a .pdf file here of a lead sheet for a song that I did. I just stuck it there so I'll have a link to it.

That's the beauty of being unknown. The most private place I can hide stuff is on my public blog.