Blackbeard Island

This is a small book with some thirty photographs, some beautiful, some grim. The book especially remembers and memorializes two Aiken, SC, law enforcement officers who were shot to death while doing their duty. The two died, a decade ago, from bullets to their heads. Their abrupt, unexpected deaths (and other like deaths) have placed the temper of police and policing on a short fuse.

A second theme is to analyze the post-mortems on George Floyd, to see what evidence they offer for his cause of death. There is little concrete evidence in these post-mortems for an officer-inflicted cause of death. The postmortems reveal potential causes of death, all non-traumatic, such as established heart disease, and ingested Fentanyl and other drugs. George Floyd's specific cause of death, while easy to speculate upon, is not so easy to assign. It is written that philosophy is the tool one uses to debunk myth, to demystify myth to arrive at a better truth. Here is some philosophy.

A third theme examines how we raise our children. The book addresses the mal effects the phenomena known as Adverse Childhood Events have on the developing child. These events are known to harm children both emotionally and physically. The mechanism of injury from such abuse is being studied and is thought by some investigators to be the inhibition of brain growth, particularly in the filling in of specific zones of gray matter.
Blackbeard Island is an island of low sand and maritime forest. Accessible only by boat, it is a federal wildlife refuge on the mid-Georgia coast. Its acreage is a third of Manhattan's; its permanent population is zero. Larger, harder Manhattan has close to two million residents.