Check Out Carlsbad CrossFit
If you live in the North San Diego County area make sure you check out Carlsbad CrossFit near El Camino Real and Palomar Airport Road. My good friend and contributor to this site Rick Gonzalez opened it last month and you won’t be disappointed with the treatment you will get at his box.
If you think about the things that you would want in CrossFit trainers: trainers educated in a wide variety of functional areas, trainers passionate about what they are teaching, innovative programming and a commitment to ensuring their members are continually improving – I assure you that you will not regret your decision to train with him.
I don’t pass out recommendations or referrals lightly or without really believing that the referred will be satisfied and this time is no different. In terms of being a professional, Rick’s thirst for knowledge and dedication to learning everything he can about a topic has made him the most prepared person in the room more times than I can count. When it comes to fitness and CrossFit, his passion is clear to everyone he meets and whether you are looking for advice on nutrition, your form during the WOD, or teaching techniques, it wont take you long to realize how much time and effort he has put into preparing to train you.
In addition to improving your performance, many of his trainers are certified as CrossFit Kids instructors and this summer he plans on offering more options for your children as well.
At a minimum, check out his website www.carlsbadcrossfit.com to learn more.
Recently there has been a great deal of criticism and critique about the Transportation Security Administration’s SPOT program, which trains TSA agents in behavioral analysis. If you read the blog posts and comments on the topic, much of which has been courageously posted by anonymous people without any legitimate suggestions for finding terrorists or criminals, you will find that most of it is ridiculous and baseless, but there have been a few concerns raised that do deserve a response to people who want to know more.
Before I address a few of the critiques that I think are valid questions, I’ll just say that I don’t know all of the details about the training that the agents go through and am responding more to the critiques of behavioral analysis as a means to identify threats. But the material on this site and the training that we provide, combined with what I have heard about the training, I’ll say that no one pretends that this is the be-all-end-all way to provide security to the country or does it produce mind-readers. It is simply one piece to identifying those that intend to do harm to us.
Critique #1: Known terrorists have moved through airports and have not been detected by the BDOs (Behavior Detection Officers). read more…
“Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”
- Carl von Clausewitz
Even though Carl von Clausewitz became one of the most influential military strategists in history with his work, On War, even he probably couldn’t have comprehended the complexities of the urban insurgency that our military battles today. His famous quote about the friction of war is a concept that every warrior experiences time and again, and we have found that even the best technological advancements in the world can’t completely lift the fog. As insurgents continue to operate as low-tech as they can, the challenge that Marines or soldiers face only compounds as we need to find more effective ways to find them.
We tell you that the concepts that we teach work, and for those of you that take us at face value, we appreciate that, but let me explain why it works.
Heuristics make Combat Profiling work and the concept is pretty simple and straightforward. Heuristics are just strategies that let us make decisions more quickly and accurately in situations where there is limited time and limited information. Limited time and limited information, sound a little bit like combat? Sound even more like fighting an insurgency? read more…
After spending most of last week at a Security and Counter-Terrorism Conference in New York City and getting the chance to talk to a number of people whose careers revolve around threat detection, I learned that, for people who look at the material on this site with pre-existing knowledge of behavioral analysis, one question gets asked over and over again:
Why these domains and why this terminology?
The 6 Combat Profiling Domains serve two purposes. read more…
Many Marines and soldiers have gotten the call to respond to an IED strike while they were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. This call isn’t always to help out other Americans. Sometimes the call comes to treat and evacuate the casualties from the local military or police forces from those countries that were the victims of an attack.
Interpreter support? Only if you are lucky. This makes triage and identifying the most severe casualties increasingly difficult. A medic can quickly observe visual wounds such as bleeding or broken bones and make a determination of what type of care if required based on what they see, but understanding pain is a different case because you can’t “see” pain. To learn that a person is experiencing pain requires communication between the victim and the responder. If you are operating in a foreign country where people are not speaking in English, your ability to understand what the victim is communicating is going to be limited. read more…
On a normal week I get at least a few hits on the site from people searching for information on “racial profiling.” The last few weeks though have shown a huge increase in the number of visits from people searching for racial profiling. This is of course in response to the news coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing and the resulting outcry to put a stop to racial profiling.
It couldn’t be more fitting that this story has been immediately followed in the news by the start of the trial for Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 unarmed civilians last July in a mission to strike back against multiculturalism and Islam.
This is why we don’t teach racial profiling. read more…
Finding The Enemy In Plain Sight
In his second time giving a talk at a TED Conference, Malcolm Gladwell brings up a point in the speech that mirrors one of the purposes of Combat Profiling. After weaving a story that talks about all of the work and research the government put into building and developing the Norton Bombsight in the Second World War, he reaches his thesis: being able to drop a bomb onto your target is important, but if you can’t find the enemy you want to target, your multi-million dollar bombsight is worthless.
For Marines, you know that the mission of the Marine rifle squad is to “locate, close with, and destroy” the enemy they are facing. And when it comes to “closing with and destroying,” the capability of U.S. Marines is unparalleled in their skill in doing this. The biggest problems our military faces overseas and the problem our police officers face here in the states is in the difficulty of “locating” the enemy. read more…
There are three types of people in the world: good guys, bad guys, and the clueless. The working assumption is that most people in our society are clueless. They are the people driving the speed limit in the left lane on the highway and unaware that there is a line of cars behind them wanting to pass. They are the people walking down the middle of the sidewalk or through the mall with their face buried in their cell phone as they send text messages, unaware that they are walking slowly, swerving and making it difficult for people to get around them. They are the people on the sidewalk who just stop walking to look at something without moving to the side and getting out of everyone else’s way. This is most of the population. Most people are comfortably condition white. This is the baseline.
Good guys and bad guys are a little different. Actually they are a lot different. read more…
Finding Dominant Behavior
As we look at our environment and all of the people surrounding us, we need to be capable of quickly and accurately classifying their behavior into at least one of our 6 primary clusters.
In this video, the punk kid is doing everything he can to posture and hopefully intimidate the guy in the black shirt into submission. Posturing falls into the Dominance Cluster and can be identified by making yourself look larger, taking up more space around you, and demonstrating ownership (or territoriality) over nearby objects.
The kid in this video shows a number of Dominant characteristics: read more…
Recently I got to have a short conversation with Joe Navarro, author of What Every Body Is Saying, which you will find at the top of our recommended reading list. Whenever possible, we want to put you in touch with information direct from the experts in their field to give you unfiltered information and there are a couple things from the conversation that I wanted to pass on to you. read more…