Arizona Audit

A full audit of the votes in Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona, has been ordered by the state senate. The Democratic Party has filed a lawsuit to try to get a court to forbid the audit.

UPDATE: Judge orders a halt to the audit until Monday. 

UPDATE: AZ Democratic Party fails to post required million dollar bond. Audit back on. 

Weber III: The Real Locus of Power

Legitimacy may be grounded in several ways, but power is grounded only in one.

How do the politically dominant powers manage to maintain their domination? The question pertains to any kind of domination, hence also to political domination in all its forms, traditional as well as legal and charismatic.  

Organized domination, which calls for continuous administration, requires that human conduct be conditioned to obedience towards those masters who claim to be the bearers of legitimate power. On the other hand, by virtue of this obedience, organized domination requires the control of those material goods which in a given case are necessary for the use of physical violence. 

Weber goes on to note that there are two basic forms of this, one of which is better than the other from the perspective of limiting domination -- and, thus, never practiced by the modern state. 

To maintain a dominion by force, certain material goods are required, just as with an economic organization. All states may be classified according to whether they rest on the principle that the staff of men themselves own the administrative means, or whether the staff is 'separated' from these means of administration. This distinction holds in the same sense in which today we say that the salaried employee and the proletarian in the capitalistic enterprise are 'separated' from the material means of production.... 

These political associations in which the material means of administration are autonomously controlled, wholly or partly, by the dependent administrative staff may be called associations organized in 'estates.' The vassal in the feudal association, for instance, paid out of his own pocket for the administration and judicature of the district  enfeoffed to him. He supplied his own equipment and provisions for war, and his sub­-vassals did likewise. Of course, this had consequences for the lord's position of power, which only rested upon a relation of personal faith and upon the fact that the legitimacy of his possession of the fief and the social honor of the vassal were derived from the overlord.  

However, everywhere, reaching back to the earliest political formations, we also find the lord himself directing the administration. He seeks to take the administration into his own hands by having men personally dependent upon him: slaves, household officials, attendants, personal 'favorites,'... [H]e seeks to create an army which is dependent upon him personally because it is equipped and provisioned out of his granaries, magazines, and armories. In the association of 'estates,' the lord rules with the aid of an autonomous 'aristocracy' and hence shares his domination with it; the lord who personally administers is supported either by members of his household or by plebeians. These are property-less strata having no social honor of their own; materially, they are completely chained to him and are not backed up by any competing power of their own. All forms of patriarchal and patrimonial domination, Sultanist despotism, and bureaucratic states belong to this latter type. The bureaucratic state order is  especially important; in its most rational development, it is precisely characteristic of the modern state. 

The professional army that we employ today dates in an important sense to the Napoleonic wars, in which it proved to be the case that organized national armies with combined-arms capabilities were impossible to resist except through a similar means. For two hundred years we have lived in that world, with the consequence that it enables a modern state that exercises this more direct and aggressive mode of control over the means of physical force.

Yet the failure of this mode has been brewing for a while. The Vietnam War was a prototype, although it was not won (as in the popular imagination) by the Viet Cong's 'man in the black pajamas.' It was won by the professional armies of the People's Army of Vietnam (usually given in the US as the 'NVA'), backed by the arms factories of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Guerrillas allowed a non-state actor to fight an asymmetric war that was generally lost, but expensively so by the winning great power; and thus, competing great powers tended to fund and support such efforts. Terrorism provided an even more extreme version of the same practice of perfidy, in which the guerrilla now took on the guise of an ordinary person in a peacetime environment and used it to wage war not on the state armies but on the citizenry. 

The prototype has given way to the proper type, however, in the conflict in Afghanistan. Both the USSR and now we have lost long-fought wars in Afghanistan that were conducted without major support from an opposing great power. Charlie Wilson's War wasn't why the Mujahedeen won against the Soviets, and no great power has been supplying the Taliban against the United States. Their arms are leftovers from the Soviet arsenal they won the hard way, or they are home-made in Darra Adam Khel and similar villages. Firearms are a mature technology; the knowledge of how to make a rifle or a pistol is widespread and the tools easily available.  

The regular army that Napoleon's era spawned still wins every conflict at the squad level or higher; somehow it cannot win its wars. In Iraq, we won not by winning the gunfights so much as by persuading the enemy; and not persuading him to turn in his guns, but to use them on our side against an enemy had reason to hate even more. 

If the winning mode is shifting from Weber's more concentrated mode to a less-concentrated mode, then nature of the state is primed to shift as well. A new kind of state becomes possible, one in which voluntary associations of ordinary people can hold the land in defiance of concentrated powers and regular armies; and, having exhausted them at last, live as they please. 

Another Sidebar Update

I added James' blog, which I don't think I realized existed until this week. If any other regulars have blogs that aren't listed and you would like them to be, let me know.

Weber II: Justifications of Legitimacy

Weber states that there are three justifications that states use to show that they are the legitimate locus of the sole right to use violence to dominate others.

Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be. When and why do men obey? Upon what inner justifications and upon what external means does this domination rest?

To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination. 

First, the authority of the 'eternal yesterday,' i.e. of the mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is 'traditional' domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore. 

There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership. This is 'charismatic' domination, as exercised by the prophet or­­in the field of politics­­by the elected war lord, the plebiscitarian ruler, the great demagogue, or the political party leader. 

Finally, there is domination by virtue of 'legality,' by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional 'competence' based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern 'servant of the state' and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him.

The United States of America rejects the first mode entirely. Itself a state borne of revolution, the 'eternal yesterday' is unavailable to it as a form of legitimation. Article I, Section IX, Clause 8 of its constitution forbids titles of nobility. The First Amendment forbids a state religion, which in other states serves the function of tying the temporal leadership to the eternal. At this point the Constitution itself is old enough to almost serve as a kind of 'eternal yesterday' legitimation, but only in an illusory way: all politicians refer to it, profess loyalty to it, but none obey it. 

There are no charismatic individuals in American leadership. Some argue that Donald Trump was one during his tenure, but that is over. No one currently in any position of leadership in the United States government has any sort of charisma or charm. Perhaps this is just as well; in fact, the Founders were quite worried about demagogues of the sort mentioned.

That leaves only the third justification, and it is the one that the United States has traditionally relied upon. The rule of law! Laws and, since FDR, rules created by executive 'experts' are supposed to be obeyed because they were crafted in a process itself supposedly legitimate and enforced evenhandedly upon all. 

Crises of legitimacy have occurred before now. FDR himself experienced one because his rules and rule-making bodies kept being rejected by the Supreme Court. This continued until his court-packing scheme, which although it failed had the practical effect of convincing the court to stop bucking his actions. The current Supreme Court, facing a similar court-packing scheme, seems to be avoiding conflict with the President and Congress pre-emptively. However, FDR paid a big price in terms of legitimacy in the eyes of the American people for this and other acts; had it not been for the Second World War uniting Americans behind his administration, that history might read differently. 

In the previous post I mentioned that we have entered a revolutionary moment on two fronts: 

Nevertheless it should be clear just from what has been said that we are in a revolutionary moment. The government is trapped between a segment that is openly contesting its claim to a monopoly on legitimate force -- or to having the legitimacy to police at all -- and a segment that questions whether the government continues to enjoy a more basic and fundamental legitimacy. The government's response to one side is cowering submission; to the other, an attempt to suppress their concerns rather than to address them. 

The BLM/Antifa faction, allied with the left broadly, has won some early rounds. Policing has become much more limited over the last year as the police withdraw into themselves and their precincts. The consequence is a murder rate that has risen to a degree with no modern precedent, in some cities up half again what it was only a year prior. Revolutions have their cost, though, and this one is not borne by the revolutionaries but by ordinary poor people in bad neighborhoods. As such, the revolutionaries can afford to pay such a cost forever; it does not even come onto their books.

On the right, the movement is outraged precisely by the failure of the law. The IRS in the Obama administration targeted right-wing TEA Party groups to prevent them from being effective politically. (If you Google this, you will learn that the media is telling you now that this was all 'fake news,' except that the government had to pay settlements for their wrongdoing.) The IRS coverup of this, which involved the 'accidental' destruction of many hard drives containing copies of emails, was never punished. The FBI built its whole investigation around the Clintons around clearing Hillary in time for her to become the Democratic Candidate for President; it then turned on the Republican candidate in a stunning fashion, creating an appearance of hostile foreign intelligence activity that enabled them to spy on his campaign, destroy his first National Security Advisor even though the FBI had cleared him during its investigation, and mire his administration in an illusion of scandal for the first two years. The 'interagency' community then arranged for his impeachment, precisely on the grounds of defying the unelected bureaucracy he had been elected to command. 

In the next election, the FBI bent over backwards to hide Hunter Biden's laptop (hey, another 'accidental' destruction!); the Secret Service seems to have worked to cover up his gun crimes. The powers that be turned a blind eye as a self-confessed conspiracy funded by major corporations in alignment with the Democratic party -- the conspiracy that gave an interview to Time magazine after the fact -- unconstitutionally and illegally changed election laws with an eye towards determining the outcome of the election. State and Federal police agencies refused to treat this as the serious crime of election fraud, and our court system refused to hear these cases: Dr. David Clements, a former District Attorney and a law professor in New Mexico, shows that not one single court had an evidentiary hearing at which evidence could be presented. In the news media, composed of more corporate participants, the 'rejection' by the courts was said to have shown that there was no evidence of fraud; in fact, none was allowed to be offered in any court venue.

At this point the United States' "rule of law" is so corrupted by the attempt to consolidate power that even the United States Postal Service is running a clandestine program to spy on Americans' social media activity. If the reports are accurate, they are engaged in domestic spying precisely targeting constitutionally-protected protest activity. This is the sort of thing that would have been rightly mocked as the fever-dreams of the paranoid drug-addled a few years ago.

Meanwhile the National Guard has been tasked to protect the politicians from the ordinary people (yes, the poor Joes are still there), though the violence targeting the Guard seems to be coming from people on the left affiliated with the anti-police movement.

So there is a general collapse of the rule of law associated with the success of the anti-policing movement; and an abandonment of the principle that the law should rule evenhandedly by those seeking to consolidate power. For these twin reasons, the United States government is on very thin ice on Weber's terms.

There remains a secondary source of submission to authority, however, even where legitimacy fails. That will be the subject of the next entry in this series. 

Weber I: Monopoly on Violence

I think this time I'll break it out by topic, starting with the one I mentioned in the introduction below. 

Weber begins by asking what "politics" is, and -- therefore -- what a "state" is, the state being the field of political activity.

But what is a 'political' association from the sociological point of view? What is a 'state'? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state.

Aristotle would object to this philosophical claim. For Aristotle, politics is the science of the highest human good: how we should order ourselves and our activities in order to maximize human flourishing. He says this right at the beginning of the Politics:

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

Note that this embraces Weber's claim that lots of different "tasks" have been undertaken by various states; it disputes Weber's claim that these represent different "ends." Even the Communists, who brought about more human misery than all the others, claimed that they were acting for the good of humanity and indeed for its highest good as they understood it. 

One could also dispute Weber on a point where Aristotle agrees with him, to whit, that the state is the 'highest' level of such organizing activity. The European Union and the United Nations both imagine a supra-national level of organization. It may or may not be attainable or sustainable, given human nature; or it may not be capable of attaining the 'highest' human flourishing, if such things can only come in more intimate relationships. Nevertheless it is conceivable, at least.

In any event, Weber does not think we should define the state in terms of its end, but rather by its choice of means:  "[O]ne can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force." [Emphasis added.]

Now again, this would not be obvious to the ancients nor to the medievals. Aristotle and Plato worry continuously about the problem of family and clan producing factions within the political sphere that will turn to violence. The medievals tried to use political friendship between families as a way of organizing states, but it was in fact the families that often proved the most powerful -- as reflected in their literature, for example when the blood feud between Gawain's family and Lancelot's lays the groundwork for the destruction of Arthur's kingdom. If you read through the full version of Le Morte Darthur, or the long French cycles like the Prose Lancelot, these blood feuds are constantly pulling apart the feudal relationships on which the state of the day is based. 

Weber will talk at some length about the medievals and feudalism, but he is especially interested in "the modern state." Now by "modern" philosophers generally mean "the 18th Century," and to some degree the things that followed from that: thus, the American and French Revolutions, Kant and Hegel, and the consequences of Marx and Marxism, Nietzsche and Romanticism, and the fascists and Nazis as well. We are living at or just past the end of the modern period, and most of the states extant today remain modern states -- perhaps, it must be said, states that are also at or just past the end of their time. 

So, speaking of the claim that the modern state makes, Weber gives it thus:

'Every state is founded on force,' said Trotsky at Brest­-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of 'state' would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as 'anarchy,' in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state­­ - nobody says that - ­­but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions­­ - beginning with the sib­ - ­have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. 

The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence. Hence, 'politics' for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

Notice that the current protests against police are a kind of double attack on the state on these terms. Groups like Antifa and BLM violate the laws, storming businesses or public transit (just last week, the Metro in DC was invaded by hundreds of BLM-aligned protesters who jumped the turnstiles and took over a train), invading people's space, clash with the police, use physical force. They claim they are doing so legitimately, and the state because of its injustice is illegitimate in resisting them. Likewise, in claiming that the police must be defunded and abolished, they claim that the state has no right to use physical violence at all -- not only no legitimate monopoly, but no legitimacy to use force to police its laws whatsoever. 

As I said in the introduction, the claim the state (n.b., not Weber, but the modern state) is making is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of the Declaration of Independence that the people may abolish the state if it becomes destructive to the end of protecting their rights. Actually, the Declaration is also against Weber's own claim that the state has no proper end: it holds that all states do have a proper end, specifically, the protection of the natural rights that human beings are endowed with by their Creator. If any state becomes destructive of that end, then the people have the right (and eventually the duty, the Declaration goes on to say) to alter or abolish the state. 

Therefore, if that principle is true, the state cannot ever have a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. 

Well, unless...

I propose that the citizen is an officer of the state.  More, if the American Declaration of Independence is morally correct, citizenship is the office in which the sovereign power resides. The sovereign power is originally all the power, some of which is delegated to the formal government. Even after delegation, however, the sovereign retains the power to determine when the rest of the government may exercise the powers delegated to it by the sovereign....

The citizen is the officer the Declaration of Independence is thinking of when they speak of the “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” any government that becomes destructive to the defense of their rights. The citizens, and only the citizens, have the right to make that awesome decision. No foreign power may dissolve the United States Constitution, and no elected nor appointed executive officer, nor a Congressperson, nor a judge nor Justice of any kind. The citizens alone have that sovereign right. They may delegate it to a constitutional convention, called by their other delegates in the legislatures. They may instead take up arms and do it themselves, as Washington and his generation abolished British rule. But whether they do it the one way or the other, no one may do it against their will nor without their consent.

That mechanism of treating citizens as a part of -- as the sovereign officers of -- the state ends up harmonizing Weber's description of the modern state with Hobbes' prescriptive idea that human beings desperately need a state to hold back the dangers of the world. If that is right, the 2nd Amendment's reliance on the militia of citizens as the last and best defense of 'a free state' makes a lot of sense.

Nevertheless it should be clear just from what has been said that we are in a revolutionary moment. The government is trapped between a segment that is openly contesting its claim to a monopoly on legitimate force -- or to having the legitimacy to police at all -- and a segment that questions whether the government continues to enjoy a more basic and fundamental legitimacy. The government's response to one side is cowering submission; to the other, an attempt to suppress their concerns rather than to address them. 

In the next segment, we will look at Weber's ideas about how state legitimacy is grounded, and why the United States' legitimacy is therefore in grave peril. 

You'll Get Further with a Kind Word and a 2x4....

...than with a kind word alone.

Max Weber: "Politics as Vocation"

For our next philosophical piece, you will be happy to know that I have selected a much shorter work that is almost contemporary. Max Weber's "Politics as Vocation" won't take very long to get through, but it will underline some real problems in our current politics. 

Now, Weber wasn't a bad guy. Per the first link to the SEP:

Weber’s political project also discloses his entrenched preoccupation with the willful resuscitation of certain character traits in modern society. [He was concerned about] great transformations that were undermining the social conditions necessary to support classical liberal values and bourgeois institutions, thereby compelling liberalism to search for a fundamental reorientation.... Weber’s own way was to address the problem of classical liberal characterology that was, in his view, being progressively undermined by the indiscriminate bureaucratization of modern society.

Weber's opening in this work is to define politics in terms of the state, which he describes as a territory-linked institution that has successfully claimed a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. I emphasize describes because I almost always encounter this in contemporary philosophers as if it were a prescription. Weber was not arguing that a good state ought to claim such a monopoly, nor (like Hobbes) that it would be to the common good to have a state that did; he was merely discussing what the modern state does, states that included Soviet Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany. 

As we will see, Weber is actually quite concerned about the necessary relationships of domination that occur when the modern state succeeds at claiming to be the only legitimate user of force. Note that the whole idea is in direct contradiction to the principle of the Declaration of Independence that the People should be free to 'alter or abolish' a state that ceases to defend their core liberties: if the state is solely capable of using force legitimacy, no revolutionary politics can be legitimate. 

Weber is clear from the beginning that he's talking about 'successful claims,' rather than actual legitimacy; and also he is clear about how dubious these claims actually are. You'll find it worth your time, I think. The whole thing is only 30 pages, and though it was originally in German, the translation provided is smooth. 

UN: Lockdowns Killed 228,000 Children in S Asia

This is just in six nations: Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. 

BREXIT Recovery

Trade relations between the EU and UK did not suffer long. This is promising for any future decisions to depart from the EU, or similar super-national entity. 

A Free Life

Apparently a verdict has been reached in the trial of current moment, and will be announced shortly. I just want to take this quiet moment to reflect on how pleasant it is to live in a place where no mobs will riot regardless of the verdict, and any police strikes will go unnoticed because there are no police up here anyway. 

Conan was right about civilization. 

Corruption and Cars

A very slickly produced video, edited in a style to appeal to Millennial and younger viewers, nevertheless makes a fairly plausible case that a lot of corruption was involved in turning American cities into car-centric areas.

It may surprise you to learn that cars, in the four years immediately after World War I, killed more Americans than World War I. It's not going to surprise you at all to learn that the Feds stepped in to stop local governments from banning cars from cities, and instead imposed a new model Federal law designed by a 'safety commission' whose membership was almost entirely car manufacturing corporations. Nor will it surprise you that GM and others bought up all the streetcar firms serving American cities, so they could destroy them. You'll probably be surprised they were convicted for doing it, but not by the consequences they faced.

So give the kids your ear for a few minutes, 'cause they've got a point or two this time. 

Voter Integrity Project: Georgia Report

The public report redacts a lot of the actual data, because it contains specific details about voter registrations that could be used to harass people. They identified six illegal tranches of votes, of which their resources only permitted them to examine three. Even with those limitations, they identified more than enough illegal votes in just the three tranches in Georgia to overcome the margin of victory.

Note that this is different from the 'chain of custody' issue in Georgia, which 355,000 ballots appear to be lacking. These are specific ballots identified as illegal. 

Hiking

 

It’s getting pretty and warm. 

Paul Revere's Ride

Last night was the anniversary of Paul Revere's famous ride, which called the Minutemen to order to resist gun seizures by the British government. The above link provides both the famous poem, and some historical corrections to it. 

60 Minutes vs. the Oath Keepers

Last night, 60 Minutes ran an investigative piece into the Oath Keepers, the right-wing militia that is currently burning American cities and who opened fire on the Minnesota National Guard this weekend... er, wait, no, that was someone else. Oddly there seem to be no investigative reports into that group, whomever it may be. The Oath Keepers did, however, attend the 6 January protest in an unarmed fashion; and some of them did trespass in the Capitol, which they ought not to have done. 

Heads Up, Collaborators

Apparently mathematicians are police running dogs.

Now, it's my understanding that the argument against the police includes an argument that they are disproportionately targeting black Americans and other communities. If you want them to fix that, don't they need some mathematical input? 

If it's not true, wouldn't it be helpful to have the myth dispelled by trained mathematicians? It's a narrative that is doing a lot of damage to our country right now. We should surely either fix it if it's true, or dispel it if it's not. 

Sidebar Update

It's been a long time since I changed anything there, but I did add sections to the recent commentaries on Parmenides and the Laws. Hopefully I didn't screw any of the links up, but if I did please let me know. 

I don't know if I will take up reading through another work soon or not. I hadn't intended to do Parmenides, but it came up in discussion. 

Therapy Gives You Issues

Over half of liberal white women have 'a mental health issue' according to a recent study. Well, young ones.

White women, ages 18-29, who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals at a rate of 56.3%, as compared to 28.4% in moderates and 27.3% in conservatives.

But of course, because the therapeutic mindset teaches them that it's normal to be traumatized and in need of treatment. This living in eternal therapy is, according to the one lady, human flourishing, happiness, eudaimonia!

Therapy seems to have absorbed not just our language but our idea of the good life; its framework of fulfillment and reciprocity, compassion and care, increasingly drives our vision for society. Writing this piece, I thought especially of the Greek concept of eudaimonia, or human flourishing. Some might call it blessedness. In any case, it seems worth talking about.

Embracing this mindset encourages one to describe one's experience in therapeutic terms; that's what your friends do, and your yoga instructor, your spiritual advisor, and the lady down the street who sells you candles and tarot readings. Naturally your therapist will go along with your desire to be diagnosed, since after all you're paying her hourly and will continue to do so if she provides you with a good reason to come back every week. 

The question is how many of these issues would manifest themselves as serious concerns in the absence of so much therapy and so much focus on 'trauma' and 'healing' and all that. I suppose the more serious mental health issues are mostly genetic or otherwise biological in nature, and probably there are a certain number of those that manifest regardless of cultural issues. More, if you have toxins like lead in the environment above a certain level.

UPDATE: Beyond the problem -- if it is a problem -- of having a large part of the population that thinks of itself as mentally ill (and the rest of us as undiagnosed mental patients-to-be, just as soon as they can arrange to rope us into therapy), there's a philosophical threat to civilization from this approach too. I saw one of these therapy-minded women suggesting recently that the United States, having been able to completely reorder itself for COVID, should be able to similarly reorder itself in order to address the historical traumas it caused to Native Americans, etc. 

First of all, that's a terrible model. Arguably the COVID response is the most destructive thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War, having devastated much of the economy and reordered it to the benefit of megacorporations like Amazon at the expense of small business. Politically, it saw the outright abrogation of basic liberties, to include freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and free exercise of religion. The lesson we should take from the COVID response should be to defang government at the state and Federal level so that it can never do anything like that again.

But notice how the mindset that the proper business of adults is to 'heal their childhood trauma' drives us into the arms of those who want America to do nothing but meditate in shame on the evils of its ancestry. Here, as everywhere, the best answer is the opposite. The best thing to do with death is to ride off from it; the only thing to do with a tough history is to try to do better by people in the future, but you have to keep moving. The therapeutic mindset is unhealthy for the otherwise healthy individual, but its normalization as a philosophical model is deadly for a nation. 

A Professionally-Handled Pursuit

So, having expressed ideas that are critical of police and current training, it's fair to note a well-handled pursuit and arrest down in Forsyth County, Georgia. This is the county where I grew up, though it is nothing like it was when I was a boy:  it has more than ten times the population it did in the 1970s. As a consequence of becoming a rich suburb of Atlanta, it has a large and well-funded Sheriff's department. 

Here they apprehend a fleeing Dodge Charger with out of state plates, which proved to be full of armed felons from Chicago. Note not only the well-handled pursuit and takedown, but the manner in which they did not open fire in spite of having reasons to do so (e.g., the opaque windows preventing them from seeing into the vehicle, and its repeated attempts to escape them even after they had rammed it into a ditch). 

I don't know any of the deputies still serving on the force, although I grew up knowing quite a few because of my father's work with the Volunteer Fire Department. These young fellows responded well to provocation and excitement, and handled the matter with clear professionalism. 

American Spaghetti

This is from an album I missed until this week, which inspired a 2007 film that I also missed. (I was probably either in the Philippines or Iraq, depending on when it was released that year.) The album is clearly inspired by the work of Ennio Morricone, and has some good moments as well as some cheesy ones, much like Morricone himself. A worthy tribute.