We Finally Sell the Chevy When We Had Another Baby and You Took that Job in Tennessee

Scholars, lobbyists, and policy makers have long argued over the role that guns play in the thoughts and behaviors of young violent offenders. Out of the 835 young offenders interviewed, who are being housed in six different maximum security juvenile detention centers located in four different states (California, New Jersey, Illinois, and Louisiana), the vast majority of the youths reported owning a gun in the days before they were incarcerated. Guns appeared to be a common part of these youth’s daily lives, as most said they routinely carry these weapons when they are outside of their homes. A strong relationship between guns and crime is observed as many youths claimed to have fired their weapons at someone, used it in a robbery, or bought the gun for the expressed purpose of committing a crime. Surprisingly, self-preservation emerged as the primary reason for carrying and using a gun. The data shows that these youths live in a violence-prone World and thus see a very real need to arm themselves as a means of surviving and thriving in this environment. This perceived need to be armed possess a formidable stumbling block for policy makers who seek to reduce gun-related violence on our city streets. A number of recent investigations reflet a growing concern with the prevalence of gun possession among juveniles, though it is important to note that these studies pertain to relatively average rather than to more seriously criminal youth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

A survey found that of 390 high school students in Baltimore, for example, nearly 50 percent of the males had carried a gun to school at least once. Three percent of males in a recent survey of 11,000 eighth- and tenth-grade students in 20 state reported brining handgun to school during the year preceding the survey. Four percent of a nationally representative sample of 11,631 students (21 percent Black males) in grades 9 through 12 reported carrying a gun at least once within the 30 days prior to being surveyed. A survey of 11^th grade students in Seattle found that 11 percent of the males reported owning a handgun; six percent had carried a gun to school sometime in the past. Focusing only on inner-city youth, a multi-state study found that one in three male and one in ten female high school students had carried a gun on the streets. Presumably, these figures, pertaining as they do to relatively standard student populations, would inflate to the extent they reflected the firearm-possession patters of more criminally active youth. Though the prevalence problem is not fairly well grounded empirically, little research has examined juveniles who report robbery and assaultive behavior have higher rates of gun and other weapon possession than do non-violent juveniles. However, without indicting the logic of the guns and crime equation, it is also fair to say that it reflects the worries of actual and potential victims of crime more than their thoughtful analysis of the man roles firearms might play in the lives of youth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

Two percent of the students in one national-level study, for example, had carried a weapon (including, but not limited to, guns) to school for protection at least once during a six-month period. In a second national-level study, one in five high school students reported carrying a weapon (including, but not limited to, guns; also not limited to weapon-carrying in schools) during the past 30 days for protection or use in a fight. The issues of motivation for possessing and carrying of firearms remains open for the present. While clearly not representative of all juvenile offenders, youths of the sort found in the present sample likely are responsible for a very high percentage of the serious crime committed by juveniles and are far more criminal than the most criminal of non-incarcerated youth. Most were apprehended and incarcerated because they committed so many serious crimes that the odds caught up with them. To the extent firearms activity is pervasive among juveniles, it should be so among this population. The issues is whether or not criminal activity represents the motivating factor in gun possession and carrying by youths like these; if not, then it is likely to be the motivating factor among less seriously offending youths. In this light, the motivation issue becomes particularly important for policy makers, especially for those relaying upon gun control and “get tough” legislation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

Possession, Carrying, and Offending—to assess firearm possession, respondents were asked to check, from a list of firearms, those they owned or possessed immediately prior to incarceration. Types of guns included (a) revolvers, (b) automatic or semiautomatic handguns, (c) regular shotguns, (d), awed-off shotguns, and (e) “other.” Automatic and semiautomatic firearms (riles and handguns that automatically place a new round into the firing chamber) were treated in combination because the aim was simply to distinguish rapid-fire from more traditional guns. The carrying of guns was measured in terms of the frequency with which the respondent carried a gun during the year or two prior to incarceration, “outside your home (including in your car).” Routine gun-carrying was operationalized as carrying “all” or “most” of the time (as opposed to “only now and then” or “never”). Crime-related behaviors were measured in terms of whether or not the respondent had ever (a) obtained a gun “specifically to use in committing crimes”; (b) “committed a crime with a gun”; (c) “fired a gun during a crime”; (d) “actually fired a gun at somebody”; or (e) committed armed robbery (“stuck up stores or people”—though not specifically with a gun). Regarding both the gun- and the crime-related activity of the inmate respondents, eighty-three percent possessed a gun of some kind. Handguns were the most commonly owned firearms, followed closely by sawed-off shotguns. Regular shotguns and automatic and semiautomatic rifles, clearly more cumbersome weapons, were less favored. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

Fifty-five of the inmates carried funs routinely prior to incarceration. Nearly half of the sample had committed armed robbery. Though only 40 percent have ever procured a gun specifically for a crime, 55 percent had fire a gun during a crime. Seventy-six percent of the respondents had actually fired a gun at someone. The popular fear concerning victimization by armed juveniles is not wholly unfounded, though the findings that only four in ten respondents had procured a gun specifically for use in crime and that three in four respondents had fired at someone point to multiple needs and uses for guns among the respondents. Relationship of guns to violence crime—although an immediate task was to gain some sense of patterns of violent criminality by respondents who reported having possessed firearms, it is important to note that problem of causal direction regarding the gun-crime relationship. It may well be that predators seek out guns or certain types of guns; it may as easily be that persons with guns or certain types of gun are more likely to rob or kill. The former possibility is, of course, a relative truism given that the crimes examined in this study are directly firearm related. As expected, current respondents involved in violence were indeed significantly more likely than those who were not to own every kind of gun of interest here and to carry firearms routinely, though it is noteworthy that reasonably high percentages of those who did not engage in crimes of violence owned and carried firearms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

Involvement in crime was particularly associated with possession of handguns and sawed-off shotguns, less so with possession of regular shotguns and automatic semiautomatic rifles. Ownership of any given type of firearm and the routine carrying of a gun are both significantly and strongly related to violent activity. These findings suggest that, at least for the type of juvenile confined in a maximum security reformatory, it is like that gun possession leads to violent crime as it is that violent crime promotes gun possession. More likely still, the finding point less to a causal possibility than to an environment characterized by both firearms and crime. Firearms are carried for numerous reasons; they are also useful in the commission of crimes, most of which would be attempted even if firearms were not available. Possession and carrying of guns are more strongly linked to generally having fired at someone than to having engaged in the predatory offenses. Why do juveniles carry or use firearms in the commissions of crimes? In many cases guns are a tool of the trade in robberies, for instance, because they permit robbery of more lucrative targets; other point to guns as highly intimidating and, thus, more facilitative of robbery. Injury to victims is inversely related to the use of a gun as the robber’s weapon. Much of gun use in predatory crimes is motivated by the felon’s perceived need to protect oneself from the potentially aggressive victim. Much regarding choice and use of weapons by criminals likely depends upon whether or not the offenders are “professionals” or “career” offenders. The motivations for firearm use in crimes by juveniles—not yet “career” offenders—have yet to be identified. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

When it comes to committing crimes, 45 percent of inmates believed that possessing a weapon decreased the odds that the victim would reduce the offender, and 42 percent reasoned that people do not “mess with” someone with a weapon. Important though it seemed to be for the type of juvenile studied here, intimidation with a weapon took a back seat to self-protection in the decision to arm oneself to commit a crime. The two reasons considered most important by the offenders in question related to the offender’s sense of risk of harm associated with the crim. Eighty percent considered it very important to be ready to defend oneself in a crime, and 58 percent expressed concern that a victim might be armed. In a related vein, 49 percent thought a weapon might facilitate an escape from a crime scene. The perception of risk to the offender in a crime situation likely is not groundless. A juvenile in the process of deciding to commit a crime contemplates a range of risks and benefits. The benefits consist of financial or other gains. The costs include the possibility of being caught and imprisoned as well as being shot (or otherwise injured) in the course of the crime either by the victim, a bystander, or the police. The probability of encountering a victim who possesses a firearm is by no means trivial. Many private citizens claim to own guns for self-defense. Indeed, 36 percent of the respondents in this study reported having decided at least “a few times” not to commit a crime because they believed the potential victim was armed. Seventy percent of the respondents reported having been “scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed crime victim.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

War is the key work of the Apocalypse: war on a scale undreamed of by mortal man; war between vast angelic powers of light and darkness; war by the dragon and the deceived World powers upon the saints; war by the same World powers against the Lamb; war by the dragon upon the Church; war in many phases and forms, until the end when the Lamb overcomes, and they also overcome who are with Him, “called chosen and faithful” (Rev. 17.14). The World is now drawing nearer to “the time of the end,” characterized by the deception depicted in the Apocalypse a being World-wide—when there will be deception both of nations and individuals, on such a vast scale that the deceiver will practically have the whole Earth under his control. Before this climax is reached, there will be preliminary stage of the deceiver’s workings, marked by the widespread deception of individuals both within and outside of the professing Church—beyond the ordinary condition of deception in which the unregenerate World is lying. To understand why the deceiver will be able to produce this World-wide deception which will permit the supernatural power to carry out their will and drive nations and men into active rebellion against God, we need clearly to grasp what the Scripture say about the World in its fallen state. If Satan is described in the Apocalypse as the deceiver of the whole Earth, he has been so from the beginning. “The whole World lieth in the evil one” (1 John 5.19), said the apostle to whom was given the Revelation, describing the World as already lying deep in darkness through the deception of the evil one and blindly led by him though vast evil spirit hosts under his control. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

Outside the set observances, which become instinctive, which cost little, which have the value of art, one might be free to be, but not bound to exhibit oneself. There were far more “personalities” in the ages of manners. However, so-called free, or intelligent society imposes a constant tax on all the powers. There is no guide here. To please, even to conform to what is expected, one must constantly draw on a private natural genius, meant for one’s own pleasure or for the intimacies of love. Exhaustion, a sense of spentness and deflation, follows in many people the unconventional supper, the longueurs of the free-and-easy weekend. You can go wrong at any point, and by going wrong drag up a host of agonies: here too much is involved. Manners were a protection; they also stabilized one. How much more gladly would one observe ritual than be put through a series of daunting hoops. It has so far been assumed that the involvement rulings governing conduct within a particular situation remain constant for the duration of the situation and that, therefore, the over-all tendency to tightness or looseness within the situation is something that can be neatly assessed, at least in theory. However, as had already been suggested, when we look beyond a social situation to the social occasion of which it is a part, important cycles of change are found in involvement rulings, especially, apparently, when the occasion is formal or tightly defined. Thus, an occasion may begin with a period of muttering and milling, move on to the formal official proceedings, and then terminate in another loosely defined period, exhibiting in this way a standard type of involvement. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

Correspondingly, the occasion may start with a multifocused situation, move on to official proceedings which exhaust the situation, and terminate in a multifocused arrangement once again. A situation, then, may be the scene of a routine cycle of changes regarding approved tighteness or looseness, with the result that picture at any one point in time is likely to provide a misleading view of the whole. Given the general level of tightness (or looseness) established in the situation, and the orderly changes prescribed in this regard, it is worth noting that the normative stability found in the situation may be due to the presence of guardians who informally or formally have the special job of keeping “order.” Thus, we read of the silentiarius, the Roman slave whose job it was to regulate the noise level maintained by other slaves. In our day, chaperones, referees, nursey-school teachers, judges, police, ward attendants, and ushers are among those who perform this function. Let us see what we see, record what we find, and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures—in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf our boat and ourselves would change in the moment we entered. By going there, we would bring a new factor to the Gulf. Let us consider that factor and not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality. If it exists at all it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes. “Let us go,” we said, “into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eelgrass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is if relative importance. And that is not terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bring up tones of shrimps, rapidly destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That is not very important in the World. And six thousand miles away the great bombs are falling on London and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is. It is, therefore possible to differentiate and refine the meaning of loneliness, to expand and illustrate its nature and relevance in human experience. There is value to being open to significant dimension of experience in which comprehension and compassion mingle; intellect, emotion, and spirit are integrated; and intuition, spontaneity, and self-exploration are seen as components of unified experience. Discovery and creation are reflections of a serious search into human ventures, processes, and experience. The fear of self-discovery is a strong component in avoiding loneliness and solitude. Once this courageous step is taken, however, there is no turning back. Loneliness…the word usually brings with it an air of apartness, as ne removed from throbbing, pulsing day-to-day places. How can I tell you? Today in spite of all one’s need to love and be loved, many prefer moments of relief…alone. They may be soft and pliable clay, but, every has their own dreams. There is an individual inside of each and everyone of us that no one knows, so deep, so buried that it only comes out in peaceful moments, alone. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

In the peaceful moments, one is free, free of pressure or panic. Deep, vibrant warm, calm, enveloping a beauty that is trampled in the madness of here and now. Aloft, without vanity or smugness are tears of joy. Only then will one feel the peace and depth of one’s real self. The days are filled with struggle for survival, the nights often tense, full of the day’s anxieties. Who you are, you will secretly begin to know. Living in the shadow of fear and mockery from tyrannical parents, pushed about with more mockery in daily life, one escapes reality by fantasies filled with gentleness and love, something one may never find enough of in the real World. Perhaps it is the hungry need to be alone, somewhere, if only for a peaceful moment. There is a necessity in man to understand the four chief functions of the human machine—thinking, feeling, moving, instinctive—and to try to observe the differences in quality of their manifestation in each of the three states of consciousness. All four functions can manifest themselves in sleep, but their manifestations are desultory and unreliable; they cannot be used in any way, they just go by themselves. In the state of relative consciousness or waking-state, the can, to a certain extent, serve for our orientation. Their results can be compared, verified, straightened out, and although they may create many illusions, still in our ordinary state we have nothing else and must make of them what we can. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

If we knew the quantity of wrong observations, wrong theories, wrong deductions and conclusions made in this state, we should cease to believe ourselves altogether. However, men do not realize how deceptive their observations and their theories can be, and they continue to believe in them. It is this that keeps man from observing the rare moments when their functions manifest themselves in connection with glimpses of the third state of consciousness or self-consciousness. Observing of functions is long work. It is necessary to find many examples of each. In studying, we begin to see that we cannot study everything on the same level, that we cannot observe ourselves impartially. Unavoidably we see that some functions are right and other undesirable from the point of view of our aim. And we must have an aim, otherwise no study can have any result. If we realize that we are asleep, the aim is to awaken; if we realize that we are machines, the aim is to cease to be machines. If we want to be more conscious, we must study what prevents us from remembering ourselves. So we have to introduce a certain valuation of functions from the point of view of whether they are useful or harmful for self-remembering. If you make a serious effort to observe functions for yourself, you will realize one thing. You will realize that ordinarily, whatever you do, whatever you think, whatever you feel, you do not remember yourself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

At the same time you will find that, you can increase your capacity for self-remembering. You will begin to remember yourself more often, and more deeply; you will begin to remember yourself in connection with more ideas, such as the idea of consciousness, the idea of work, and the idea of self-study. This question is: how are we to remember ourselves, how are we to make ourselves more aware? If you think seriously about negative emotions, you will find that they are the chief factors which prevent us from remembering ourselves. So the one thing cannot go without the other. You cannot struggle with negative emotions without remembering yourself more, and you cannot remember yourself more without struggling with negative emotions. As we look more into the realm of politics, there are other things to consider about life. Two political parties are trying to choose their position on the liberal-conservative ideological spectrum. First challenger takes a stand; then the incumbent responds. Suppose the voters range uniformly over the spectrum. For concreteness, number the political positions from 0 to 100, where 0 represents radical left and 100 represents arch-conservative. If the challenger chooses a position such as 48, slightly more liberal than the middle of the rod, the incumbent will take a position between that and the middle—say 49. Then voters with preferences of 48 and under will vote for the challenger; all others, making up just over 51 percent of the population, will vote for the incumbent. The incumbent will win. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

If the challenger takes a position above 50, then the incumbent will locate between that and 50. Again this will get one more than half the votes. By the principle of looking ahead and reasoning backward, the challenger can figure out that his best bet is to locate right in the middle. As with highways, the position in the middle of the road is called the median. When voters’ preferences are not necessarily uniform, the challenger locates at the position where fifty percent of the voters are located to the left and fifty percent are to the right. This median is not necessarily the average position. The median position is determined by where there are an equal number of voices on each side, while the average gives weight to how far the voices are away. At the median location, the forces pulling for more conservative or more liberal positions have equal numbers. The best the incumbent can do is imitate the challenger. The two parties take identical stands, so each gets fifty percent of the votes if issues are the only thing that counts. The losers in this process are the voters, who get an echo rather than a choice. In practice, the parties do not take identical hard positions, but each fudges its stand around the middle group. This phenomenon was first recognized by Columbia University economist Harold Hotelling in 1929. He pointed out similar examples in economic and social affairs: “Our cities become uneconomically large and the business districts within them are too concentrated. Methodist and Presbyterian churches are too much alike; cider is too homogeneous.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

Would the excess homogeneity persist if there were three parties? Suppose they take turns to choose and revise their positions, and have no ideological baggage to tie them down. A party located on the outside will edge close to its neighbor to chip away some of its support. This will squeeze the party in the middle to such an extent that when its turn comes, it will want to jump to the outside and acquire a whole new and larger base of voters. This process will then continue, and there will be no equilibrium. In practice, parties have enough ideological baggage, and voters have enough party loyalty, to prevent such paid switches. In other cases, locations will not be fixed. Consider three people all waiting for a taxi in Manhattan. The one at the most uptown position will catch the first taxi going downtown, and the one located farthest downtown will catch the first uptown cab. The one in the middle is squeezed out. If the middle person is not willing to wait, one will move to one of the outside positions. Until the taxi arrives, there may not be an equilibrium; no individual is content to remain squeezed in the middle. Here we have yet another, and quite different, failure of an uncoordinated decision process; it may not have a determinate outcome at all. In such a situation, society has to find a different and coordinated way of reaching a stable outcome. Everywhere, too, there is a continuing info-war between the cult of secrecy and citizens groups fighting for even wider access. These battles cross party lines and are often so complex that they confuse the participants themselves. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

For example, demand for openness get tangled when they conflict with publicly acknowledged needs for safety or security. After a terrorist bomb exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 passengers and crew on December 21, 1988, the press revealed that authorities had been forewarned. An outraged World demanded to know why the public at large had not been warned at the same time. Much of the anger toward the terrorists was siphoned off and directed at the authorities instead. This anger soon led to an investigation by subcommittee of the U.S.A. House of Representatives. The subcommittee made public a long list of security bulletins previously issued to airlines by the Federal Aviation Administration. In turn, this breach of secrecy angered the Secretary of Transportation, who charged tht the subcommittee’s action “could jeopardize lives by disclosing security methods.” Congress woman Cardiss collings, the subcommittee chairperson, stood by her guns, however, and labeled the Secretary’s blast “misleading.” In fact, she said, publicly, disclosing the FAA’s bulletins showed up dangerous flaws in the entire warning system and thereby served the public. However, it was also clear that, with U.S.A. airlines alone receiving some three hundred bomb threats a year, publicizing every terrorist threat could paralyze air travel—and give terrorist the power to upset the system at any moment for the price of a phone call. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

Soon the executive branch, the legislature, the airlines, the regulatory agencies, the police, and others were all joined in a still-continuing free-for-all over control of this information. In December 1989, just a year after the Lockerbie tragedy, Northwest Airlines received a bomb threat against its Paris-to-Detroit Flight 51. Aware of the outrage the year before, Northwest decided it would have to inform passengers ticketed on the flight. It intended to tell them at the gate before boarding. However, after a Swedish newspaper broke the story, Northwest began systematically notifying passengers by telephone in advance and agree to help them make alternate arrangements if they wishes. (Not all did, and the flight was made safely.) However, demands for more open information also clash with the demands for privacy. Many are surprised to know, that when it comes to infectious diseases and viruses, many who demand privacy are willing to break that vow and allow open information. Still more cross-interests arise from the existing morass of laws governing such things as copyright, patents, trade secrets, commercial secrecy, insider trading, and the like—all part of the fast-emerging info-agenda of politics. As the super-symbolic economy continues to expand, an information ethic may emerge appropriate to advanced economies. Today that coherent ethic is missing and political decisions are made in a bewildering moral vacuum. There are few riles that do not contradict other rules. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

Many parts of the World still lack the most elementary freedom of information, and face cultural repression, brutal press censorship, and governments paranoid about secrecy. In the high-tech democracies, by contrast, where freedom of expression is moderately protected, info-politics had begun to move to a higher, more subtle level. We are, however, only at the beginning of info-politics in the technologically advances societies. So far we have been struggling with easy questions. Here is another scenario of the international technorivalry that we have been discussing the past few days. A variant of the Ordinary Expectation scenario had played out for a number of years now. And after year of continuing turbulence, the net result is this: Japanese economic power has grown, with other East Asian economies beginning to close the gap. Their greater investment in long-range civilian R&D, with a focus since the late 1980 on engineering molecular systems, has enabled them to take the lead on the path to nanotechnology. European economic integration and German unification, combined with the pressure of economic and technological competition from the United States of America and Japan, have turned Europe inward some extent. Although cultural ties with the United States of America keep U.S.-European relations on basically warm basis, hostility between Europe and Japan—already marked in the 1980s—has grown. Europe had long enjoyed great strength in chemistry and basic science, and in the 1980s had led the United States of America in organizing efforts on molecular electronics. This had placed them in a strong position with respect to nanotechnology, behind Japan but ahead of the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

The United States of America remains an enormously productive economy, but the cumulative effects of an educational system that neglects learning and corporations that emphasize quarterly results have made themselves felt. After decades of emphasizing the short term, people now find themselves living in the long term they had neglected. The reactions to U.S.A. relative economic decline has not been investment and renewal, but rhetoric and hostility directed toward “foreigners,” particularly the Japanese. It is thus an isolated and somewhat defensive Japan that builds the first molecular manipulator and recognizes its long-term potential. The technology is developed in a government-funded research laboratory with cooperation from major Japanese corporations. As the result of increasing tensions, foreign researchers—those still welcome in Japan—were not invited to participate in this particular effort. A series of committee meetings formalizes a tacit decision made earlier in choosing researchers, and the specifics of this new development are treated as propriety. Impressive results are announced, stirring pride in Japanese research, but the specifics of the methods involved are kept quiet. This scarcely delays the diffusion of the basic technology. After the first demonstration, even the most myopic funding agencies support the projects with the same goal. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

A European project had already been started in a French laboratory: it soon succeeds in building an assembler based on somewhat different principles. European researchers follow the Japanese precedent by keeping the details of their techniques as a loosely held secret, in the name of European competitiveness. The United States of America follows suit a year later in an effort funded by the Department of Defense. Public life goes on much as before, dominated by the antics of entertainers and politicians, and by tales of the fate of the environment or the Social Security system in a fantasy-future of extrapolated twentieth-century technology. However, more and more, in policy circles and in the media, there is serious discussion of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing—what they mean and what to do about them. In Japan, second-generation assemblers have begun to turn out small quantities of increasingly sophisticated molecular devices. These are prototypes of commercially useful products: sensors, molecular electronic devices, and scientific instruments; some are immediately useful even at a price of a hundred dollars per molecule. There are plans on drawing boards for molecular assemblers that could make these devices at prices of less than one trillionth of a dollar. There are long-term plans (viewed with hope and anticipation) for full-fledged molecular manufacturing able to make almost anything at low cost from common materials. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

This is exciting. It promises to at last free Japan from its decades-old dependence on foreign trade, foreign food, foreign raw materials, and foreign politics. By making spaceflight inexpensive and routine, it promises to open the universe to a people cooped up on a crowded archipelago. Investment soars. Europe leads America but lags behind Japan and looks on Japanese progress with hostility. Europeans, too, share dreams of a powerful technology, and begin a face for the lead. The United States of America trails, but its huge resources and software expertise help it pick up speed as it joins the face. Other efforts also begin, and though they advance steadily, they cannot keep pace with the great power blocs. On all sides, the obvious military potential of molecular manufacturing fires military interest, then research and development in both publicly announced and secret programs. Strategists play nanotechnology war games in their minds, in their journals, and on their computers. They come away shaken. The more the look, the more strategies they find that would enable a technologically superior power to make a safe, preemptive move—lethal or nonlethal—against all its opponents. Defense seem possible in principle, but not in time. Yet it become obvious that molecular manufacturing can provide defenses against lesser technologies. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

Even the great, mythical leak-proof missile shield looks practical when the defenders have vastly superior technology and a thousandfold cost advantage building military equipment. No great power seems particularly hostile. By then, all have formally or informally been in a peaceful alliance for many years. Yet there are still memories of war, and the bonds of alliance and military cooperation are weakened by the lack of a common enemy and the growth of economic rivalry. Ans so squabbles over trade in obsolescing twentieth-century technologies poison cooperation in developing and managing the fresh technologies of the twenty-first century. There are a thousand reasons to pursue military research and development in these technologies, and nationalistic economic competition helps keep that work secret on a nationalistic basis. Military planners must concern themselves not so much with intentions and with capabilities. And so technology developed in an atmosphere of commercial rivalry and secrecy matures in an atmosphere of military rivalry and secrecy. Advanced nanotechnologies arrive in the World not as advances in medicine, or in environmental restoration, or as a basis for new wealth, but as military systems developed in the midst of an accelerating multilateral arms race, with the quiet goal of preemptive use. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

Negotiations and development run neck and neck, and then…Never forget that to form this country, hundreds of thousands of men (and now women) fought battles, and died in long, shallow trenches on the battlefield where they stayed until wives or orphans of the veterans raised enough money to have the remains exhumed and brought home. Needless to say, after several years in rich soil, unembalmed, buried without much more than a hat over their faces, there was not much left to send. That is why people are so offended when Americans disrespect the National Anthem, burn the flag, or break the law. This is not just a country of immigrants. It is a great country where millions of men and women have given their lives in the name of God, for your freedom, and so that you have the privilege of enjoying capitalism. All societies make mistakes, but let us not forget the good people who have pressed on so you can live in a free country. Instead of disrespecting Americana, find honorable ways to pursue your cause. During the revolution, some men were found still clutching their muskets with five or more bullets driven into their brains. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24